Sometimes, when the right thing is also the most difficult thing to do, it’s best to give people some time and hope they arrive at hard but correct conclusion.
With that in mind, it’s been seven days since an arbitrator awarded Turkia Mullin over $700,000 because the Wayne County Airport Authority failed to offer sufficient cause for her termination. In that time, Airport Authority directors Suzanne Hall and Mary Zuckerman have not done right thing and resigned from that board. They need to do so, sooner rather than later.
Hall and Zuckerman are the only remaining airport board members that voted to fire Mullin in October 2011. Two other directors, Samuel Nouhan and Michael Jackson, voted against terminating Mullin’s employment. The remaining three members of the seven-member body were appointed following the Mullin disaster.
Under the terms of Mullin’s contract, the board was required to justify her dismissal by citing a specific cause laid out in airport's employment agreement with Mullin. If they didn’t, she was entitled to be paid for the remainder of her contract. Last Thursday, we learned that bill came to more than $700,000.
As odious as we may find this payout, Mullin is entitled to every last red cent. She signed a contract and the Airport Authority broke it. That was obvious the day she was fired.
Don’t misunderstand this as a defense of Turkia Mullin. As head of economic development for Wayne County, she presided over the obvious-from-the-start boondoggle that was the failed Pinnacle Race Course venture. She served two masters, the taxpayers who paid her county salary, and the public contractors who paid her a $70,000 "bonus" through the EDGE Opportunities non-profit. There exists no justification for her $200,000 severance payment from Wayne County, an employer she left voluntarily for a better job with the airport.
None of which changes the fact that the airport violated her contract to escape a messy political situation. Blaming Mullin for the $700,000 hole currently in the airport’s bank account is misguided. The real villains are the Airport Authority members who recklessly fired her without first establishing sufficient cause. They could have flushed $700,000 down a toilet in a North Terminal men’s room for all that it matters.
I was at the Airport Authority meeting on October 31, 2011 when they canned Mullin. It was astounding to watch someone like Turkia Mullin could be almost instantly transformed from villain to victim by such bureaucratic bungling.
After all, every criticism of Mullin’s time at Wayne County listed above was known or could have been known to the Airport Authority before they hired Mullin a few months earlier. They didn’t fire her because she had dubious ethics. They fired her because, once exposed, Mullin’s dubious ethics became a liability.
Knowing her contract required cause for dismissal, the Airport Authority barely feigned effort to gin up cause. It was Hall who offered up a resolution for dismissal that cited a clause of Mullin’s contract as cause, but she couldn’t be bothered to explain to Mullin, the rest of the board, or the general public how exactly Mullin violated that clause. Take a look at this exchange between Hall and Sam Nouhan on that fateful day.
Nouhan: “In further clarification, could you identify for purposes of your proposed resolution, which aspect or particular component of 7Fi your resolution pertains to?”Hall: “My resolution pertains to the entire section.”Nouhan: “So you’re basing your resolution to discharge based on each and every element?”Hall: “My resolution is based on that section, and that’s all I’m going to say.”
What fresh hell is that?
A cynical person might think the board, knowing that politics demanded they dump Mullin, fired her in such a deliberately ham-fisted way to ensure she could get paid after the public stopped paying attention.
But cynicism about our political process is corrosive to our democracy. Absent verifiable evidence of a long con, we should conclude that the Airport Authority acted in good faith when they acted so recklessly.
Such recklessness must have consequences. If transportation and logistics is to be as critical to our regional economic future as the experts claim, them we can ill-afford to have Metro and Willow Run Airports runs by people this stupid.
That’s why Hall and Zuckerman should resign from the Airport Authority. Frankly, they should be banished from public service completely.
Zuckerman was a key lieutenant of Mike Duggan at the DMC. If Duggan does become Detroit’s next mayor, he simply can’t be allowed to bring Zuckerman with him to city hall. Hall, a government lifer, also needs to find some private sector activities to fill her day. Even if that means learning the phrase “would you want whipped cream on this mocha?”
Perhaps there was a time when the public treasury could afford to carry middling political cronies, but those days (if they ever existed) are long gone. This city and this region are sitting on the precipice. Our fate will largely be determined by our willingness to cast the likes of Hall and Zuckerman into the wilderness.
As Oliver Cromwell told the Rump Parliament: You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately ... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!
