After Mayor Andre Dickens last month promised to give a raise to the new leader of Atlanta’s airport, the specifics of that raise have become clear.
The city has offered the next general manager of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Ricky Smith, a $475,000 salary. That’s according to Smith’s signed offer letter obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through an open records request.
The role’s current pay, $306,000, is already higher than the mayor’s own salary, but city officials have said for years that the job’s pay hasn’t been enough to recruit and retain top talent.
With this new offer, the salary of the leader of the world’s busiest airport won’t top the market amongst the country’s other major airports. But it will set the pay scale closer to the middle than the bottom.
The salary will also be a raise for Smith, who makes nearly $366,000 in Maryland.
The announcement that the longtime executive director of the Maryland Aviation Administration would come to Atlanta was made earlier this week after an eight-month search in which “pay was an issue,” Dickens previously confirmed.
The raise will need to be approved by the Atlanta City Council, but several members have previously expressed interest in doing so.
According to local news reports, Tampa’s airport CEO last year made more than $1.1 million, Dallas-Fort Worth’s pay is around $825,000, Minneapolis-St. Paul’s is nearly $500,000 and Pittsburgh’s is around $600,000 plus a bonus.
While some airport authorities offer bonus incentives, municipalities like Atlanta often don’t offer such contracts, and U.S. city-run airport leaders’ pay often lags. Chicago’s aviation commissioner has a salary around $292,000, and Denver International Airport’s CEO made about $350,000 in 2022, Axios Denver reported.
Dickens told the AJC in a past editorial board meeting that, while the city wasn’t entertaining salaries in the $750,000 to $1 million range, they knew they needed some sort of increase.
“Once we set the price high enough, they started coming,” Dickens said of the recruiting process.
Their strategy, he explained, was to get to a dollar amount that “even if it meant they didn’t make a big pay bump from where they were … because (of) the opportunity to work at the world’s busiest, they’ll come.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated with additional information on other airport leaders' pay.
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