Patty Wahto, manager at Juneau International Airport for the past 11 years and deputy manager for 15 years before that, is planning to depart next spring.
“I’m retiring and while I may do something else I have definitely not even thought any further than just taking my foot off the gas pedal,” she said in an interview Monday.
Retirement is something Wahto said she’s considered for years, but “there was always a change-up and things going on, either projects or staffing, and I never felt like it was the right time.”
“After talking to a few people, they said ‘Well, is it ever going to be the right time? You’ll never retire if you keep thinking that way,’” she said.
Wahto announced she is departing “no earlier than April 30,” Juneau Mayor Beth Weldon announced during the Assembly’s annual retreat Saturday, which took place in the airport’s main conference room. The mayor said one other longtime top administrative employee is expected to depart with Wahto and the position of deputy manager is currently vacant, creating a leadership void that will need to be among the Assembly’s priorities during the coming months.
The airport board is scheduled to meet Thursday evening and the manager’s report contains a barrage of new and ongoing items reflecting the scope of the job. They range from a vending permit dispute for a coffee stand to staffing shortages (notably among security and project workers) to regulatory issues involving the proposed second Juneau-Douglas crossing that could be placed near one end of the airport’s runways.
Such to-do lists reflect the airport’s growth in size, technology and role as a regional transportation hub since she started working there, Wahto said.
“There’s been a lot more operations, a lot more things going on, a lot more people,” she said. “I’ve watched the economic growth of the airport, which has been pointed out even through a lot of the documents that we’ve done like the master plan and economic studies that have been done. But more than that, I mean what people see on the outside — the changes in the number of aircraft coming in, (and) we’ve had a lot of facilities that were always in the works to be changed and to update.”
Wahto, originally hired to work at the airport in 1998 under her maiden name of deLaBruere, said that was a transitional time for the facility due to federal environmental impact reviews of project updates that took nine years.
“Once we finally got through that…it opened the floodgates for a lot of the projects and a lot of the federal grant money,” she said. “So the timing was such that when I was coming onboard a lot of that stuff just kind of opened the doors.”
Federal regulations — especially from the Federal Aviation Administration — still loom large over most of the airport’s operations, including seemingly small things such as whether a coffee stand is in compliance, Wahto has noted previously when discussing that particular issue. Much of that bureaucracy obviously exists at all commercial U.S. airports, but she said managing Juneau’s airport is different than one in Peoria, Illinois, which a new manager will need to keep in mind.
“While you may know that you have to talk with the FAA and the Department of Homeland Security and all these agencies, until you’ve been at another airport and know the specialties that they have — whether it’s the wildlife that they have to deal with, or the snow removal that they have to deal with, or a particular thing which is specific to the FAA’s Alaska Region — you don’t know until you get there how specialized some things can be,” she said.
When asked what she considers to be the biggest changes at Juneau’s airport since she become its manager, the first thing Wahto named was navigational aids. She said they might not be that visible to passengers, but make an immense difference in reducing flight cancellations at an airport where inclement weather often adds risks to what’s already a challenging airport for pilots to land at.
“Some of this I was kind of in on the early stuff, some of it I was in the middle of it and some of it I’m still finalizing,” she said. “I think it’s been some of the approach navigational aids, I’ve been here since they started working on MALSRs (Medium Intensity Approach Lighting System), the lighting approach system. It was going from jets that weren’t making it in to jets with very low minimums to get in. That was huge to get that approach lighting system in. And I might say, we finally got congressional language in as of this year to finish up that lighting system to lower minimums even further than that.”
Wahto also mentioned the prototypical Juneau Airport Wind System (JAWS) system which, according to the project website, uses “five anemometer sites and three wind profiler sites (to) supply data…Each site is found at a strategically located position to capture critical information on the northerly and southeasterly wind regimes from surface level to 6,000 feet.”
”I can’t imagine that with a lot of the weather we have now how many aircraft would not be making it in today without that approach system,” she said.
Wahto said she doesn’t know yet if her post-retirement plans will involve laying low in Juneau, finding something new in town to keep busy or taking advantage of the airport to go see other places.
“I just know I want to take some time,” she said. “I’ll probably do something else. I’m not the kind that is just going to sit down and sit around, so I’ll probably be moving and doing something around here. I just don’t know what yet.”
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
