- December 20, 2024
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When Rick Piccolo arrived on the west coast of Florida 30 years ago as a fresh-faced 43-year-old, Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport was something of a mess.
As a rising star in the world of airport administration, though, he’d had plenty of experience in cleaning things up. Now entering his final seven months as president and CEO of SRQ, Piccolo looks back on a 53-year career entirely devoted to airport operations — starting in 1970 as a janitor at Buffalo Niagara International Airport.
It has been a career that took Piccolo from the janitor’s closet to the airfield operations and maintenance to labor union boss to upper management, matriculating up the ladder at four airports and culminating in a three-decade stint that he initially expected was just another stop along the way.
He will leave behind an airport that is solvent — with $25 million in restricted reserves — and is growing in both commercial airlines operations, industrial and private aviation activities around the airfield and commercial planned development on more than 100 acres it owns in its Southwestern quadrant of the property.
Three decades ago, though, SRQ was mired in debt and losing passengers in no small part because of its proximity to Tampa International Airport to the north and Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers to the south. It was also regularly embroiled in controversy, Piccolo says, as the eight-member board of directors was elected by citizen voters, four from Sarasota County and four from Manatee County, each serving four-year terms with half of them up for election every two years.
Airport oversight was, to say the least, politically motivated rather than business oriented.
“The Sarasota airport had a terrible reputation in our industry, and the reason for that at the time was the board was one of only two boards in the country directly elected by the populace,” Piccolo says. “Every two years the airport director was spending time fending off criticism from its own board, regardless of performance.”
While working as assistant director of operations at St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport, the opportunity to come to SRQ as the top executive was appealing. Although he considered it a long shot, he applied anyway, but not without warning from his contemporaries.
“Airport directors were saying, ‘You don't want to go there. You’ll last three or four years. You’ll be aggravated as hell, and they have a terrible reputation,’” Piccolo says.
Some other words of wisdom came under the banner of nothing to lose.
“I got some advice from a colleague in West Palm who had been in the business a long time who said, ‘Everybody knows it's a zoo down there. If you fail, it's not going to hurt your career.’”
When Piccolo arrived, SRQ was $115 million in debt and was losing passengers and flights. The debt stemmed from investment in the current terminal, under the expectation of growing to 3 million passengers annually by 1995. It had built the current passenger terminal in anticipation of that growth. Yet the airport never reached more than half that number.
"It was beautiful, and it still is," Piccolo says.
But with no taxing authority to make up the difference, It was an onerous beginning.
“I had to lay off some people, cut expenses, etc., and we started working our way back from there,” Piccolo says.
Working the way back began with voter approval of a public referendum in both counties that changed the composition of the Sarasota Manatee Airport Authority board from elected representatives to governor appointees.
“The governor appointed big business people and they started to look at things from a business standpoint, and all I had to do was make the financial and business case for whatever we were doing,” Piccolo says. “I wasn't fighting with the board. They understood the balance sheet. Pretty soon we started recovering faster. Eventually we wiped out our debt.
The strategy included greater diversification of the airport’s revenue stream with a greater emphasis on leasing commercial property around the airfield. Meanwhile, regional growth made Sarasota more convenient for travelers rather than driving to Tampa or Fort Myers in heavy traffic to catch flights.
“We only had about $200,000 a year of revenue that was not related to anything happening with aviation,” Piccolo says. “Today, we do $3.5 million a year of non-aviation revenue.”
That will continue to grow when aircraft manufacturers Elixer and PIlatus complete facilities and begin operations, in addition to fixed-based operator Sheltair Aviation and more. Prior to Piccolo’s arrival, there were no “T-hangars” for private aircraft lease. Now there are 163. The primary runway was only 7,000 feet long and has since been lengthened to 9,500 feet to accommodate all commercial airliners.
In addition, thousands of feet of taxiway were added to the north and east sides of the airfield, part of the millions in infrastructure investment needed to grow the aviation ecosystem that now contributes to the airport’s $3.2 billion economic impact on the Sarasota region, according to the latest Florida Aviation Economic Impact Study.
From scrubbing toilets to managing a team of 186, Piccolo has performed nearly every job in airport operations.
“It was a good education. I'm very happy that I got to work just about every job there is from a maintenance standpoint,” Piccolo says.
Raised in a family of modest means, he took the janitor’s job in Buffalo out of high school to pay his own way through community college, earning $4,800 per year. He eventually decided to leave school, staying on the job until he found something better.
He found that something looking out the windows of the terminal during a Buffalo winner.
“There were all these big snow plows out there plowing snow on the ramp and it looked like more fun,” he says. “I applied for an opening out there after that winter, and in the spring I got promoted to what they called a field person at that time, basically airfield maintenance guy.”
A few months later, he received his draft notice, and at a surprise party hosted by friends before reporting to boot camp he met Sally — now his wife of 50 years.
After a two-year hitch in the Army during the Vietnam war — he was never deployed — he returned to his airport job as law at the time required employers to rehire drafted veterans whether there were openings or not.
Not only was a job waiting for him — even though there were no openings at the time — so was Sally.
“We got married and I went back to work,” Piccolo says. “She was working at the University of Buffalo, and after a year or so of me working at the airport, she said, ‘You have too much talent to be driving a truck.’ She wanted me to go back to school, and one day, she came home with a completed application for the University of Buffalo, and she said, ‘Sign here.’”
The GI Bill paid his tuition. It took five-and-half years to graduate, going to school at night, working full-time during the day and, along the way, having three children.
Along the way, he was elected president of the local Longshoreman’s Union — at age 25. His opportunity to move into management came while attending a retirement party for an airport executive.
“I had negotiated two labor agreements by this time, so I was known in the management levels,” Piccolo says. “At the party, the head of the authority that ran the seaport, two airports and the mass transit approached me and said, ‘I heard you got your degree. Would you like to get into management?’ I said, ‘‘That's why I went to school.’”
The first rung up the executive ladder was a six-month stint as a foreman at the seaport. Next he returned to the airport as assistant to the airport manager, where he became the resident troubleshooter while learning all aspects of airport management.
His trek South began when his in-laws moved to St Petersburg and wanted Rick, Sally and the kids to move as well. On a whim, he sent his resume to Tampa International Airport, thinking nothing would come of it.
Something did come of it: in 1984, he was named assistant director of operations there. By 1988 he was hired as assistant airport director at St. Pete-Clearwater.
On Dec. 1, 1995, he landed the job at SRQ that he would keep for 30 years and found the home where he will remain in retirement.
“We'll live here in Sarasota. I'll to go see the grandkids more in Texas and hopefully improve my golf game,” Piccolo says. “I'll stay on six months as an advisor — I don't expect they’ll need a lot of advice — and I have an LLC that if I feel like doing some consulting work or something after that, I can pick and choose what I want.
“But it really was the time, and I was ready for it.”
This article originally appeared on sister site YourObserver.com.
