An ENTJ woman commits an organisation and lets the authority be inferred backward, which is how any institution with a monthly meeting ever acts inside a nineteen-day window. Her decisions were conceded every time. Her standing to have made them never was, and a procedural objection cannot be refuted — only ended by writing the rule down.
The carrier gave us nineteen days and our board meets on the third of the month, and Signe Larousse signed the guarantee on an afternoon in 2017 without asking anybody.
I was not on the board yet. I heard about it the way everybody in Ordway heard about it, which is that we were getting a second daily to the eastern hub after nine years without one.
What she had done, in nineteen days, was this. She got the carrier’s network planner on the phone, established that the aircraft in question was coming free because of a schedule change three states away, established the size of the minimum revenue guarantee that would move it, went to the three largest employers in this county and got two of them to underwrite half of it in writing, and committed the authority to the other half against a reserve that the board had never designated for that purpose.
Nyla Ahearn, who runs finance here and has since 2011, told me about the afternoon it got signed.
She had gone in to say that the reserve had not been designated for air service.
“I know,” Signe said.
Nyla said the board would have to ratify it.
“They will.”
Nyla said that if they did not, it was Signe’s problem personally, and Signe said she understood that, and Nyla — who has told me this twice and both times the same way — said, “Then what am I supposed to put in the file?”
“Put the term sheet in the file,” Signe said. “And put my email in it saying I directed you.”
The route ran for six years and carried about thirty-one thousand passengers a year at the end. It is the reason two of those employers kept their regional offices here.
Beata Rzepka was the carrier’s network planner then. She told me something at a conference in 2021.
“Your director is the only one in this region who answers the phone with a number.”
I said that was Signe.
“Everybody else answers with a process,” Beata said. “By the time the process finishes I have loaded the schedule.”
The first agenda item at the next board meeting was a discussion of the process by which the guarantee had been executed. It ran fifty minutes. The route did not come up.
Signe came to Whitcomb in 2015 at forty-four, out of a mid-size airport in another state where she had been deputy director. She is a tall, level, unhurried woman. Silences do not get filled and nothing gets softened. She reads a document once and can tell you what is missing from it. She answers a question with the answer, which strikes people as abrupt until it stops doing so, usually inside a year. In eleven years I have never seen her make an argument she had not already tested.
The Whitcomb Regional Airport Authority operates Whitcomb Field outside Ordway — two runways, a nine-gate terminal, about four hundred thousand enplanements, a general aviation side, a cargo apron, and a fire station. The authority is governed by nine board members, four appointed by the county, three by the city, two by an adjacent county.
I was the director here from 1998 to 2014. I have sat on this board since 2016 and chaired it since 2020.
Here is the sentence that has been said about Signe Larousse at this airport for a decade. It is always said reasonably. It has been said by people who like her, including me, in the room where saying it mattered.
Nobody’s questioning the decision. It’s how it got made.
There is a fifteen-year cargo lease on tonight’s agenda. Ovid Sanderlin has moved to table it. I have the gavel.
Norbert Stang, who has been the authority’s counsel since 1993, has a way of settling a question about who may do what.
“There’s nothing in the bylaws either way.”
The Window
Every consequential thing that happens at an airport happens inside a window that is shorter than a board cycle.
A carrier’s network planning group makes its decisions in cycles, and inside those cycles an aircraft comes free, or a competitor announces a pullout, or a slot opens somewhere, and there is a period — usually two to six weeks — during which that airplane can be pointed at your field instead of somebody else’s. After that period the schedule is loaded and the answer is no for eighteen months.
A public board meets monthly, publishes an agenda a week out, and cannot lawfully deliberate outside a noticed meeting.
Those two facts do not fit together and they have never fitted together and there is no airport in this country where they fit together. Every director who has ever landed a route has committed something before the board voted on it. I did it for sixteen years. The instrument is usually a letter, or a term sheet, or a phone call in which a number is said out loud to somebody who then goes and builds a schedule around it.
There is no scandal in that. It is the job. The board’s role is to set the direction and to hold the director to it, and the director’s role is to act inside windows the board cannot meet inside, and every airport in America runs on the second half of that sentence and writes down only the first.
Wynn Osei has driven the runway inspection at six in the morning since 1994 and has a route he does not vary and a thermos he has had longer than that. He told me once why the route never changes.
“You don’t look for something,” he said. “You look at the same thing until it’s different.” The wildlife programme is a man with a pyrotechnic pistol, three border collies, and a spreadsheet of every bird strike since 1988.
I am afraid of flying. I have been the whole time. Two directors, four board chairs and a state aviation commissioner have found this out over twenty-eight years and every one of them has told me it explains something.
Committing
What Signe does is not decisiveness, which is a word for making up your mind quickly.
She commits an organisation.
She takes a course and makes it real by creating facts — signing, spending, hiring, reassigning, telling a carrier a number — and then builds the apparatus that makes the commitment hold. The rate and charges structure she rebuilt in 2018. The incentive programme. The concession model that pays this authority something near two hundred thousand a year more than the old one. The capital plan she reordered so the apron came before the terminal finishes, which is the reason we have a cargo tenant at all.
The second thing supplies the course. She saw, in about her first year, what this field is in twelve years: a cargo and business-aviation field with two commercial gates that work, in a county whose passenger base is not coming back. Everybody agrees with that now. Nobody agreed with it in 2016.
There is a mechanism inside that, and it took nine years and a fourteen-page document to make me look at it.
It works by creating facts and letting the authority be inferred backward.
Recklessness is not what that is, and neither is character. It is the only mechanism by which an institution with a monthly meeting ever does anything inside a nineteen-day window. Every person who has ever run one of these has operated that way.
It works for a person the room has already decided is entitled to it.
Coy Lindgren runs the airport two counties north and operates the same way, and did it last year with a fuel farm, and committed four hundred thousand dollars of his authority’s money on a handshake, and his board gave him a plaque at the state conference. What that same acting-ahead-of-the-vote gets a man running one of these, and how his authority gets inferred backward without anybody troubling to ask, is counted up on the page across from this.
Nine board members. Two are women. In twenty-eight years this authority has had one female director.
Seven Times
Between 2017 and 2024 the board raised the process by which Signe Larousse had done something on seven occasions.
The guarantee in 2017. A consultant engagement in 2018 that came in under the procurement threshold in two pieces. The reordering of the capital plan in 2019, which she did in a submission to the state before bringing the revision to the board. A hiring decision in 2021 where she filled a deputy position from inside without posting. The concession award in 2022. A snow equipment purchase in 2023 off a state contract. An access agreement with the cargo tenant in 2024.
Every one of those is a fair thing to raise. That belongs on the page plainly, because I have gone back through all seven and I would raise at least three of them myself.
The 2018 consultant engagement is the one I would raise hardest. Two pieces, both under the threshold, same firm, same scope of work, six weeks apart. There is a word for that in procurement and she knew the word and did it anyway because the alternative was a ninety-day process for a study that had to be in the state’s hands in sixty.
I would still raise it. I would also, if I am honest about my own sixteen years, have done it.
And in all seven, the substance was conceded. Not once did anybody say the guarantee was wrong, or that the consultant was the wrong consultant, or that the capital plan should have kept the terminal finishes first, or that the deputy was the wrong deputy. In every single instance the words used were some version of the sentence at the top of this piece.
Here is what a person cannot do with that objection. She cannot refute it. There is no evidence that answers you should have brought it to us first, because there is always a body she did not bring it to and always a moment earlier than the moment she chose. The objection is unfalsifiable, and it is individually reasonable, and it accumulates.
By 2023 the file said pattern. Nobody wrote that word. It did not need writing.
Aurelio Paz does planning here and is thirty-one. He asked me at a state conference last year why the board goes after her process.
I said the board has a governance responsibility.
“Sure,” he said. “But at Lindgren’s place they gave him a plaque for the same thing.”
I said every board is different, which is true, and which is the sort of sentence a person says when he does not want to look at something.
Let’s Take That Offline
In 2022, at a public meeting, in front of about thirty people and a reporter, Ovid Sanderlin asked Signe who had given her the authority to execute the concession award.
The answer was that the board had, in 2019, in a resolution delegating concession procurement to the director, and she had it. She said so, correctly, in one sentence.
Ovid said he did not recall that and that in any case the intent had been narrower.
And I said, from the chair, “Let’s take that offline.”
That sentence deserves an exact accounting. It is what a chair says. It is procedurally correct, it protects a public meeting from becoming an argument, and I have used it several hundred times in my life and will use it again.
In that room, at that moment, it was the answer to the question. Ovid asked who had authorised her and I declined to say, in public, that the board had. Everyone in that room heard a chair keeping order. What happened is that the woman who had the authority asserted it, correctly, and the man holding the gavel did not confirm it, and the meeting moved on, and the reporter’s paragraph said the board had questions about the process.
Signe said, “Of course,” and we moved on down the agenda, and the meeting ended at ten past eight.
Afterwards, in the lot, I told her I would get it sorted out with Ovid.
She said that would be helpful.
I asked if she wanted the 2019 resolution circulated to the board.
“You could,” she said. “It won’t do anything. The resolution’s been there the whole time.”
She has never raised it with me since. Not once in four years. I have raised it with myself perhaps two hundred times and always in the same words, which are that it was the correct thing for a chair to say, which it was.
The Facilitator
In 2019, after the third of the seven, the authority engaged a facilitator to work on what the engagement letter called the board–executive relationship.
It cost nineteen thousand dollars. It ran two half-days and a follow-up. It was not a punishment and nobody framed it as one, and Signe participated fully and I have never heard her say a word against it.
The process began, as these do, with a questionnaire: sixteen boxes, letters on a card, a profile, and a facilitated conversation about how different people take in information and reach decisions. The board took it and the director took it and we sat in the terminal conference room with the results in front of us on cards.
The facilitator asked each of us to say what we needed from the others.
Ovid said he needed to be told about things before he read them in the paper.
A county appointee said she needed more time with the packets.
And Signe said, “I need to know which decisions are mine.”
The facilitator wrote something and said that was a great example of a structure need, and asked her to say more about how she experiences uncertainty.
Signe said she did not experience uncertainty about it. She said she needed a list.
The facilitator said we would come back to that, and we did not.
Signe’s card says ENTJ.
What is worth reading is at the very back of the participant packet, behind the profile, which is about drive and structure and reads like a description of a person nobody has met. At the back it says the four letters are a running order compressed: whichever habit does the committing, the one standing behind it, and two more that only arrive if a person goes and fetches them and allows the time. The order, for her, is set down wherever this type gets treated on its own terms, from the sixteen the packet was drawing on.
Leading it is the committing of an organisation — turning a course into facts in the world and then building what makes the facts hold. Behind it, supplying the course, is a picture of what this field is at twelve years, formed early, held against a board that did not share it for six years and now does.
The final pair would have made any of this survivable, and she has neither.
One is the immediate room. She does not read a table while she is sitting at it. She will finish a correct answer and not notice that the answer has cost her something, I have watched her do that perhaps forty times and have never seen her adjust mid-sentence.
The other is a private register for a claim about herself that is not a claim about results. In eleven years she has never said out loud, to me or to anybody I have asked, that the standard applied to her is not the standard applied to Coy Lindgren. She knows it. She is not naive and she is not a martyr. She has no language for it that does not sound to her like an excuse, because every register she owns is about outcomes, and outcomes were never what was in dispute.
The facilitator’s report has two recommendations. The first is that the director invest in relationship-building with individual board members. The second is that the board clarify expectations regarding delegated authority.
We did the first one. There were breakfasts.
The second one sat for six years.
The plain part, since I chaired most of it. If your organisation has no written delegation of authority, that absence is not a neutral fact: it is an open space in which a procedural objection can be raised about you and not about somebody else, indefinitely, without anybody having to say anything they would be embarrassed to write down. Asking for one — and offering to draft it, which costs you two weeks and settles a decade — is an ordinary governance request. And when a disagreement about substance gets moved into a facilitated conversation about relationships, it is fair to ask in writing what the substantive question is and by what date and by whom it will be decided. None of that turns on temperament. The people for it are your counsel, your board chair, and an attorney retained by you and not by them.
The packet’s own methodology page says the instrument is for self-understanding and has no application to governance, evaluation, or role assignment, and that a second sitting a month later puts close to a third of people in a different box.
We used it to work on the board–executive relationship, and the board–executive relationship was a question about who could sign what.
Two Weeks
In 2025, after the seventh, Ovid moved that staff bring the board a policy on delegated authority.
It passed. Signe was directed to draft it.
She brought it back in two weeks. Fourteen pages. Every category of action this authority takes, with a threshold, an approver, a notification requirement, and a reporting cadence. Procurement, leases, incentives, personnel, capital reprogramming, emergency actions. It is the best-drafted governance document this authority has ever adopted and Norbert has said so.
I read it at my kitchen table on a weekend afternoon, twice, and the second time I had a pen out.
It grants the director authority to do, in substance, every one of the seven things.
Not most of them. All seven. The guarantee, the phased consultant engagement, the capital reordering, the internal appointment, the concession award, the state-contract purchase, the access agreement — every one of them is inside the thresholds she drafted, and she drafted them on the basis of what an airport director actually has to be able to do inside a window, which is the same basis on which she had been acting since 2017.
The board adopted it unanimously.
Ovid Sanderlin voted aye. Ovid Sanderlin moved its adoption.
He said, moving it, that this was the kind of clarity the authority had needed for years.
A county appointee asked whether anything in it changed current practice.
Signe said, “It documents current practice.”
Ovid said that was exactly right and that was why he was moving it, and the vote was called.
I sat in that meeting and watched nine people ratify, in one motion, with no discussion, every single act they had spent eight years raising, and go straight to the next item, and not one person in that room — including me, including her — said anything about it.
That is what I keep coming back to. There was never an objection to any of those decisions. There was an unwritten space, and in an unwritten space an objection can always be produced, and it will be produced about some people and not about others, and the moment somebody writes the rule down the objection has nowhere to live and simply stops.
It took her two weeks. Nobody asked her for it for eight years.
The Minutes
I went through the minutes in the winter. Mine and hers.
From 1998 to 2014 I executed, by my own count off the record and my own files, somewhere around sixty actions that would fall outside the thresholds in the policy she drafted. Letters of intent. Two guarantees. A fuel contract. An emergency taxiway repair. A deputy hire from inside without a posting, in 2006, which I did for exactly the reason she did hers in 2021.
The number of times any of it appeared as an agenda item is zero.
I asked Norbert, who was counsel for all of it and is counsel still, whether he remembered anybody raising process on me.
He said no.
I asked whether that struck him as odd.
“It didn’t at the time,” Norbert said, which is the most honest sentence anybody has offered me about any of this.
Not low. Zero. In sixteen years, the board of this authority never once put the process by which I had done something on an agenda, and I was not being protected, and nobody was covering for me. It did not occur to anybody, including me, that there was anything there to put on an agenda.
Care is needed here, because there is a reading of this as a confession and it is not quite that. I was good at that job and the board trusted me and the trust was earned. The point is not that the trust was unearned. The point is that the trust arrived first, as a standing condition, before I had done anything to earn it, and hers has never arrived at all, and a decade of results did not produce it, and a fourteen-page document did.
Tonight
The cargo lease is fifteen years and about nine million dollars of committed revenue and it is inside her delegated authority under the policy.
She brought it to the board anyway, for information, because that is what the notification requirement says and because she does what a document says. She wrote the requirement. She could have written it looser. She did not.
Ovid has moved to table it pending legal review. Norbert has reviewed it. Norbert has said so in writing and the writing is in the packet.
This year took two things apart on me.
The nineteen days in 2017. I have carried that story to two state conferences as a piece of extraordinary air service development — nineteen days, two employers, half the guarantee underwritten before she signed anything — and it works every time and I have never told it another way. What was happening in those nineteen days was a director doing the thing the job structurally requires, faster and better than I ever did it, and the first agenda item that followed it was about the process, and I was not on the board and I read the minutes and thought, at the time, that it was a fair thing for a board to ask.
Then the chair in 2022, and let’s take that offline. I have carried that for four years as procedural correctness, and it was procedurally correct, and I would defend the sentence in isolation to anybody. What it did in that room was decline to confirm an authority that existed, on the record, in a resolution I had voted for, in response to a question from a man who has never once asked me who authorised anything.
What that card left out. There is a brother she stopped speaking to over their mother’s estate and will not discuss; she has kept a private pilot’s licence current since 1994 and has not once flown anybody from this authority anywhere; and she attends the funeral of every employee of this authority, current or retired, across three counties, and has never mentioned doing it, and I only know because Wynn told me.
Her contract runs to 2028. She has not said anything about what happens after, and nobody has asked her, and there is nothing on any agenda about it.
I have the gavel and Ovid’s motion is on the floor and it can go two ways. One of them takes eleven seconds and everybody in that room will experience it as keeping order.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.