A longtime senior executive at Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport/Adams Field said he was fired in December after the Little Rock airport's top official told him to hire a white candidate for an open position even though he scored a Black candidate as more qualified.
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"The next day I was terminated for what Bryan said was "differences in management styles," former operations director Charles E. Jones said in an email to two members of the Little Rock Municipal Airport Commission, referring to Bryan Malinowski, the airport's executive director. "This is not the first time I have made Bryan mad by hiring someone he didn't want."
The email, obtained through an open-records request by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, surfaced three days after the Little Rock Municipal Airport Commission spent nearly three hours meeting privately during its regular monthly meeting Tuesday.
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The session prompted the seven-member commission to vote publicly to instruct the airport's outside counsel to "review our hiring and associated [human resource] policies to ensure that all policies and procedures have been followed in the last quarter and they would alert us if they need to make any changes to that," in the words of commission member Stacy Hurst. "Our counsel, we would ask that if they see any conflict, they would alert us to that as well."
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The initial reason given for the executive session, the first item on the agenda, was "to discuss personnel matters." Pressed after the meeting for a more specific reason for the closed session -- as required by the state's open-meetings statute -- the airport's outside counsel Carolyn Witherspoon responded that the executive session was held for a disciplinary matter.