Once again, the road to the NATCA presidency runs through Cleveland.
Pat Forrey, who has spent his entire 23-year controller career at Cleveland Center, helped spearhead the union’s massive reclassification effort in the early 1990s and served the Great Lakes Region as executive vice president for two terms, is now headed to Washington, D.C., to lead NATCA for the next three years.
“Three of NATCA’s presidents have come from New York, and two from Cleveland,” Forrey said. “The connection there is that both cities are tremendous union strongholds, so maybe the union mindset is ingrained from being raised in this type of environment.”
Forrey added that he feels “honored that the membership thought enough of me and my platform to choose me over a very successful and popular incumbent. I now have an awesome responsibility to maintain and improve the livelihood of each member of this union and to safeguard all of our professions as a whole. This is a very humbling charge, and something I will never lose sight of.”
Nine of the 12 seats on the NATCA National Executive Board will be filled by new faces, led by Forrey and Paul Rinaldi from Washington Dulles Tower, who won 63 percent of the vote in his three-person race for the seat vacated by Executive Vice President Ruth Marlin. Returning to the board will be Alaskan Regional Vice President Ricky Thompson, Eastern RVP Phil Barbarello and Southwest RVP Darrell Meachum. Thompson and Meachum ran unopposed in this election. New Central Region RVP Howard Blankenship, from Kansas City Center, and new New England RVP Mike Robicheau, from Boston Center, also ran unopposed.
Winning new terms in their contested RVP races were: Bryan Zilonis, Great Lakes Region, a former Chicago Center facility representative; Scott Farrow, Northwest Mountain Region, from Salt Lake TRACON; Victor Santore, Southern Region, from Atlanta Center; Hamid Ghaffari, Western Pacific Region, a former Los Angeles Center facility representative; and Michael MacDonald, Region X, who has served as alternate VP of Region X.
Rinaldi said the task for Forrey and himself will be to grow the union and bring it to the next level from where the John Carr-Ruth Marlin administration is leaving off. “Living and working in Washington, D.C., I am really looking forward to coming to the office every day. I’m excited about the new NEB. The board is full of young, fresh talent that gives our union a different look and perspective.”
Traveling to 115 facilities in 100 days, Rinaldi said the mood of the workforce is the same everywhere. “They're anxious. They don’t know what the agency will do with the imposed work rules. They’re ready to unite and work for their work environment and profession. I think we’ve been fighting hard so far but we need to fight smarter.”
Ghaffari shared similar sentiments from the Western Pacific Region after winning his race with 56 percent of the vote. “I began this campaign with a team and I finished it with even an bigger team. Teamwork and unity are what makes us strong whether we are working traffic at a busy sector or whether we are dealing with the FAA.”
The National Election Committee counted 7,212 ballots in the election. Of those, 2,860 were cast electronically, utilizing a new system that NEC Chairman George Lloyd said was a decade in the making. “It took about four years in order to streamline the NATCA Constitution to allow us to do electronic voting. And then we found the right vendor, one that knew what they were doing.”
The election process, Lloyd said, went remarkably smooth. “For us to count more than 7,000 ballots and be done by 3 p.m. in the afternoon (on July 31) was a monumental feat from where we were when I started on this committee in 1997.”
