A wrangle among Ontario residents broke out this week, growing increasingly vitriolic by the workweek’s end over the Ontario Airport’s expenditure of more than $130,000 to send nine of its officials, consultants and staff to conference in Madrid.
The debate over the matter grew more pointed as no one at airport, the airport authority or the City of Ontario, which is a party to the joint powers airport authority that oversees and manages the airport evinced awareness of the trip or the conference or was able or willing to enunciate the reason for the officials’ participation in it and what necessitated having so many individuals take part.
Ontario International Airport Authority Board President Alan Wapner, together with the authority’s executive director, Atif Elkadi; Greg Devereaux, a consultant to the authority with regard to real estate issues; the authority’s director of customer experience, Tiffany Sanders; the authority’s senior vice president of revenue management, Elsa Grey; the authority’s director of government relations, Martha Preciado; the authority’s director of advertising & partnerships, Scott Jacobson; the authority’s senior vice president of finance, Celeste Heinonen and the authority’s chief information officer, Chuck Miwa flew to Madrid to attend the Passenger Terminal Expo 2025 held on April 8, 9 and 10. The conference featured more than 400 speakers involved in the aviation industry, including airport administrators, airline executives, regulators, consultants and associated businesses holding forth about and sharing their knowledge covering trends and issues relating to passenger terminals, including accessibility and assisted travel, facilities management, transport connections, airport design, planning and development, automation, autonomy and robotics, aviation security technology, passenger processing, retail, food and beverage concessions, customer service, digital identity and wallets in travel, future airports, increasing airport capacity and flexibility on the ground and in the air, the extension of technovation through artificial intelligence and digital transformation to baggage systems.
The conference, incorporating discussions, question and answer sessions Q&As and encouraging “a free exchange of innovative ideas and solutions,” was billed as being geared to board members, CEOs, managers, and their teams.
Though the ground covered at the conference had relevance to Ontario International Airport, given the ubiquity of videoing and videoconferencing, some Ontario residents reasoned that videos of the presentation could have been requisitioned for review or, in the alternative, a single individual or perhaps two employees from the Ontario International Airport Authority could have been dispatched to the conference with video equipment to capture the presentations with the most relevance to Ontario Airport so they could be captured permanently in a digitized format and shared at will with anyone at Ontario Airport whose function would benefit by the knowledge to be so gleaned. This, they said, would have spared the airport substantial expense, which is a major consideration given that Ontario International’s operational expenses are already greater than virtually all other airports in the country and substantially greater than a large number of the airports it is in competition with in getting airlines to fly into and out of Ontario. The airport’s cost of operation is passed through to the airlines it hosts. Since costs are a major consideration to many of the smaller airlines that Ontario International is courting, the expenditure to send nine airport officials to a conference in Europe was lambasted as “ill-advised” and “poorly timed” and unnecessary” and “wasteful” and “counterproductive.”
A report, unconfirmed by the Sentinel at press time, was that Wapner’s wife had accompanied him to Madrid, and that her air fare, accommodations and meals were defrayed by disbursements from Wapner’s political war chest. Some Ontario residents, ones who assumed that Wapner’s wife was indeed at the conference with Wapner, openly suggested that the trip, made at taxpayer/airport expense, was merely a junket, and that Devereaux, Elkadi, Sanders, Grey, Preciado, Jacobson, Heinonen and Miwa had been included to give Wapner, who is also an Ontario City Councilman, cover for his misuse of authority and taxpayer funds for his own personal benefit.
Others questioned how it was that the airport could have Elkadi, Sanders, Grey, Preciado, Jacobson and Heinonen – more than half of the airport’s executive suite – not only not present in at Ontario International Airport headquarters but out of the country at the same time.
The imbroglio over the trip was not entirely one-sided, and there were those who adamantly defended Wapner as well as Devereaux, Elkadi, Sanders, Grey, Preciado, Jacobson, Heinonen and Miwa for so thoroughly involving themselves in the minutiae of airport operations such as fliers’ terminal experiences in their various roles with regard to the airport.
Moreover, it was said, those being critical of Wapner, Devereaux, Elkadi, Sanders, Grey, Preciado, Jacobson, Heinonen and Miwa for jetting off to Madrid and assuming that it was a pleasure excursion were coming at the matter from a too-limited frame of reference. In this way, it was suggested, there might well be more to the matter than meets the eye and Wapner, Devereaux, Elkadi, Sanders, Grey, Preciado, Jacobson, Heinonen and Miwa might have been awork this week seeking to bring down multiple birds with one stone.
“There’s plenty of airlines based in Madrid,” one Ontario resident with a favorable impression of Wapner pointed out in questioning why the Sentinel was looking into issues surrounding Wapner’s, Devereaux’s, Elkadi’s, Sanders’, Grey’s, Preciado’s, Jacobson’s, Heinonen’s and Miwa’s trip to Spain. “How do you know they are not making a full court press to get Iberia into Ontario International? It would make perfect sense that all nine of them are there for that reason. You can publish an article that says they’re on some kind of a pleasure cruise and wasting money but your newspaper is going to come off as pretty lame when the airport opens its international gate up for a Spanish airline, which I tell you now will probably be Iberia.”
Among Spanish Airlines is Iberia, the country’s largest commercial carrier, as well as smaller and charter operators, including Evelop, Wamos Air, Swiftair, Privilege Style, Gestair and Cygnus.
Having been suitably chastised for paying attention to what was being said about the inadvisability of the trip but tongues yet wagging in many quarters of Ontario, the Sentinel redoubled its efforts to get from either Ontario city officials or those senior airport staff members left behind to mind the airport and its operations while the nine were gone an official statement with regard to what the trip to Madrid’s purpose was. The Sentinel also inquired as what specific elements of the convention’s focus were considered most important to and relevant to operations at Ontario International Airport. The Sentinel asked for a statement as to how the taxpayers in Ontario were being or will be benefited by the nine taking part in this trip. Also explored was why there was a need for nine people to participate in the conference and how the air fare and accommodations for those attending the conference were being defrayed.
The Sentinel inquired as to how the participation of the nine in the conference in Madrid will have a salutary impact on public affairs in Ontario. Lastly, the Sentinel sought to determine whether the mission of the nine attending the Madrid conference extended to, perhaps, convincing executives with a Spanish Airline to offer flights into and out of Ontario International Airport.
Officials at the airport and the airport authority, perhaps because Wapner, Devereaux, Elkadi, Sanders, Grey, Preciado, Jacobson, Heinonen and Miwa were not around, were unable or unwilling to field the questions.
When the Sentinel caught up with Ontario Mayor Paul Leon, he said he was not aware that Wapner, whom he had attended a city council meeting with on April 1 and with whom is due to attend the next council meeting on April 15, or the others were in Spain at an aeronautics/airline terminal-related conference.
“The airport’s Alan Wapner’s world, not mine,” Leon said. “Alan and Jim [Bowman, also an Ontario City Councilman] are on the board and the three of us [Leon and the remaining members of the city council -Debra Dorst-Porada and Daisy Macias] don’t have anything to do with the airport. They never tell us. The [airport] board runs the airport and we do not get involved in how they managed themselves. We never ask.”
Smarting from the stern remonstrance it had received from the Wapner defender who had suggested any criticism of Wapner for attending the Madrid conference was misplaced because he was likely to be pursuing some other worthwhile goal on behalf of the airport authority while in Spain, such as recruiting Iberia as a resident airline at Ontario International, the Sentinel postulated to an individual engaged in aeronautics that perhaps Ontario would sometimes claim the coup of having Iberia as a local carrier.
It was then pointed out to the Sentinel that British Airways owns Iberia Airlines, and any discussions or negotiations with regard to Iberia flying into and out of Ontario would take place in London rather than Madrid. The merger between British Airways and Iberia took place more than 14 years ago, in January 2011, Both Britsh Airways and Iberia are part of the International Airlines Group, which also includes Aer Lingus, Vueling, and LEVEL.