TITUSVILLE, Fla. — Piles of paperwork, holes in the ceiling and old equipment left out to rust has created a mess at the Titusville-Cocoa Airport Authority.
The airport board's CEO is now looking at what's being done to clean up the facilities department after claims of mismanagement and racial harassment.
The man hired to help fix the situation is off the job, too, after saying it’s just too much.
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The facilities manager told the board his time with the airport authority was like peeling back the layers of an onion: The more you peel back, the more problems seem to come out.
He also said it was going to take some serious planning, hard work and funding to fix those issues.
The facilities manager shared snapshots with the board as he detailed the reasons for his resignation after just eight weeks on the job.
“We do believe there are some issues,” said Titusville-Cocoa Airport Authority CEO Michael Powell. “We brought in an expert that hopefully was going to help us with asset inventory, asset management and cleanup. Our facilities department has had the same location for 45 years and there's a lot of junk that gets accumulated.”
Powell said some of the equipment sitting in the fleet shop yard should have been sent to public auction but instead sat exposed for years.
He also noted that most of the heavy equipment and miscellaneous items in the fleet weren't properly identified.
Powell pointed out problems including rusted out supports for the roof at the main Fleet Maintenance.
He noted other facilities issues, too, that the airport authority's CEO said are being addressed now.
“Up at Arthur Dunn and Merritt Island Airport, we already have a contractor that we have an agreement with that's supposed to start work at any time,” Powell said.
It may be harder to address the internal tension described by the outgoing facilities manager, who investigated a complaint of racial harassment last month, a topic addressed at a board meeting Thursday by a representative of the South Brevard NAACP.
“I said to them, it's my opinion that the integrity and organizational culture is seriously at risk,” said Bennie Jackson, with South Brevard NAACP.
“It was an internal personnel issue that has been handled and we followed our policy and direction from legal counsel,” Powell said.
The employee was not terminated, and some employee development courses have been lined up even as the airport authority seeks a new facilities manager.
The representative from the South Brevard NAACP will be taking what he learned to his own board for further review.
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