news story / By Ryan Burns

Where’s the Airport Manager?

2½ months into Jacquelyn Hulsey’s paid leave and no one’s talking

(Dec. 22, 2011)  Humboldt County Airport Manager Jacquelyn Hulsey has been on administrative leave since early October — with taxpayers supplying her $6,146-per-month salary — and no one with the county will say why she was sidelined or when, if ever, she’s expected to return.

Public Works Director Tom Mattson will say only that Hulsey remains on leave and that he and his deputy directors have taken over her responsibilities, with help from Emily Jacobs, program coordinator at the county’s aviation division.

Jacquelyn Hulsey’s Facebook photo

GALLERY >

While the county remains silent, people who worked with Hulsey say her management style was characterized by obfuscation, lies and intimidation. Fortuna resident Ryan Tieck said that when he was an airport service worker at the Arcata-Eureka Airport — from January 2008 through June 2009 — Hulsey repeatedly ordered him to clean up a room where a boiler had been removed, leaving a powdery white substance behind.

“I told Jackie [Hulsey] personally, ‘This is asbestos,’” Tieck recalled. “She literally told me, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Go clean it up.’” The first time Tieck spent more than a few minutes in the room he got a nosebleed, he said. Yet Hulsey continued to order him and other workers to deal with the powder, he said. When he asked his supervisors if they would file a complaint, “They said, ‘Well, I don’t want to make her [Hulsey] mad.’ That’s how they ran the place.”

Finally, Tieck reported the mystery substance to his union, which contacted county officials, and an inspector was sent in. “After we found out it was confirmed to be asbestos, I had a panic attack and I cried in my union’s office,” Tieck said. “I sat there and sobbed because she’d done this to me so many times. She just told me I didn’t know what I was talking about.”

Tieck resigned in 2009. Public Works Director Mattson said the area has been sealed up and the county has agreed to pay for periodic health exams for Tieck and others who came into contact with the asbestos.”They have yet to contact me,” Tieck said.

In recent years, Hulsey’s job performance has been criticized publicly as well, especially following a miscommunication she had with an airport service worker on the night of March 1, 2009, when a small airplane crashed into the ocean off the coast of Trinidad. This miscommunication delayed search-and-rescue efforts for more than 12 hours, and while debris from the plane eventually washed ashore, the bodies of the two men who’d been on board were never recovered (“The Plane That Wasn’t There,” Dec. 17, 2009).

Why would the county pay Hulsey more than $15,000 (and counting) to stay home? Calls and emails to Hulsey herself were not returned. Hoping her employment contract might supply some answers, the Journal called County Personnel Director Dan Fulks, who said there was just one problem with that question: “She actually doesn’t have an employment contract.”

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