LAX up close and personal

In preparing a profile of Gina Marie Lindsey, the airport department's new executive director, I encountered a number of managers who were less than thrilled about some of the changes being made. What I hadn't anticipated was an anonymous email that attacked Lindsey and made its way to City Hall. The next thing you know there were newspaper stories implying that she improperly handled two big contracts. The basic allegation: that Lindsey preferred one bidder over another. But once all the players were brought into a City Council hearing to explain the contract process, it was clear that Lindsey had done nothing inappropriate. What's just as clear is how much of a minefield LAX can be. From the June Los Angeles magazine:

Gina Marie Lindsey had vowed never to run another airport after ten tough years at Seattle-Tacoma International, and she certainly wasn’t interested in LAX, ranked by Zagat as the third-worst in the United States. Even one of L.A.’s airport commissioners calls the place a “Third World experience.” More than 24 years have gone by since the airport’s last face-lift: the construction of the Tom Bradley International Terminal and an upper-level departure road. More than 14 years have passed since the first of several ambitious master plans. In that time there have been only lawsuits, environmental impact studies, and lots of finger-pointing. When Lindsey heard the city was looking for someone to operate the airport, she said thanks but no thanks.

Except for one thing: It is LAX, which for all its faults is probably the most famous airport in the world (think of the movie shots of the four-legged Theme Building). Big, visible, and impossibly complicated, Los Angeles International is the airport equivalent of IBM or the Yankees. One night when Lindsey was driving home from work as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., her cell phone rang. It was Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles, and he was hoping she had a few minutes to talk about the job. Little more than a year later, here she is. “My interest in giving it a try is aberrant,” she tells me. “I don’t think it’s logical.”