The Little Rock Municipal Airport Commission wants more time to decide whether it needs to change the way it chooses committee chairmen.

Commission member Tom Schueck last month proposed altering how members of the commission’s finance committee are chosen, in part because its new chairman, Wesley Clark, participated in the majority of commission and committee meetings last year by telephone.

Schueck said the finance committee chairmanship is too important to fall to someone who rarely attends commission meetings in person.He proposed changing the bylaws to give the commission chairman - this year it is Jesse Mason - the same latitude in choosing finance committee members he has in selecting other commission committee members.

After a discussion at the commission’s regular monthly meeting last week to consider two options to address Schueck’s concerns, which were echoed by other commission members, the commission decided to delay action and promised more discussion about the issue at forthcoming meetings.

That doesn’t mean other changes aren’t in the offing.

While Clark, who attended last week’s meeting in person, defended his business travel and argued it brought value to the commission’s deliberations, he conceded running a committee meeting by telephone wouldn’t work well. But he and other commissioners said the problem could be fixed by upgrading the commission’s communications technology.

The commission bylaws require the vice chairman/ treasurer to serve as the finance committee chairman. Clark is the current vice chairman and treasurer. The finance committee’s other two members are the commission chairman and secretary - Mason and Virgil Miller Jr., respectively.

Last year, Clark, a retired four-star general and one-time candidate for the Democratic nomination for U.S. president, was physically present at only one of the commission’s 12 meetings, according to meeting minutes. He participated in 10 meetings by telephone conference. He missed the September meeting altogether.

Clark was one of five members of the seven-member commission who missed one meeting last year. The others were Miller, Jim Dailey, Bob East and Kay Kelley Arnold, whose second fiveyear term expired in December. Former state Rep. Kathy Webb was appointed to replace Arnold, and her first meeting since her appointment was this month.

Mason and Miller were the only other commissioners to participate in a meeting via telephone. Each did it once, according to the minutes.

Both Schueck and Clark elaborated on their positions at last week’s meeting.

“Now when we all accepted positions as members of this [commission], we all knew certain sacrifices were going to have to be made,” Schueck said.

“To be present at meetings is not uncalled for. I think that if you can’t be here, you ought to consider not being here at all rather than miss 11 or 12 meetings or be absent from a physical presence 10 of those 12 times.”

Clark saw no need to apologize for not being physically present at the meetings.

“I do think there is a value in having commission members who travel,” said Clark, who heads an international consulting company bearing his name.

“I think I have probably seen more airports than anybody in Little Rock. I’ve been all over the world. I see these airports. I see how things are. And I think it’s not bad to have someone on the airport commission who actually suffers through the depredations of commercial air travel on a regular basis.”

Clark said he is particularly hamstrung by traveling commercial rather than by private aircraft.

“You can get most any place in America in eight hours - that’s airport time,waiting time, transportation time - from Little Rock, Ark.,” he said. But “you can’t do it when you want to do it.”

Clark, Dailey and Schueck all agreed that part of the problem was the communications technology the commission is using.

“This all came about because people were chairing meetings over the phone,” Schueck said. “It was very clumsy. For those of us that were here, it was very difficult. You had to tell the person on the other end of the phone what exactly was going on, what exactly were we looking at, what we had on the screens.”

Dailey suggested that if anything needed to be changed, it is the technology, at least for now.

“If we are going to live with this as it is, I would hope in this world of technology that there is a better way for us to handle phone call-ins for meetings,” Dailey said. “Right now, they come in in a disruptive fashion. Those are not acceptable ways to handle the conference-type meeting situations. I’m not going to fight over [a number]. I think we need to deal with this technology and get this cleaned up.”

Clark said he had difficulty participating by phone even when not leading a meeting.

“For some reason … if you get dropped and you call back, it’s busy,” he said.

“You can’t get back in. Secondly, you can’t hear other people when you’re on the call. You can hear some voices. You can’t hear everybody when they speak. I don’t know why that is. Maybe it is not hooked up to the microphones. Maybe people aren’t using the microphones. It is very hard to come in without interrupting somebody. You try not to come in because you know somebody is about to say something. It’s embarrassing.”

Schueck said that proved his point.

“The person on the other end cannot participate properly, in your own words, so that leaves only one conclusion: that you ought to be here,” Schueck told Clark.

But Webb said other unexpected events or situations beyond travel could require commission members to serve by phone.

“Last year, I was on another commission and because I was ill, I was grateful I wasable to do a lot of meetings by phone,” she said.

Webb said part of the reason commercial aviation travel is flat or, in some cases, declining, is businesses are forgoing travel in favor of using technology.

Ron Mathieu, the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport/Adams Field executive director, agreed the technology should be upgraded. He typically has to participate in a meeting once or twice a year by phone but uses a separate video-streaming technology to view the meetings “so I can see what’s happening,” in addition to participating by phone.

He pledged that the airport staff will work to upgrade the technology in the forthcoming months.

Arkansas, Pages 7 on 02/24/2014