Airport Experience® News - Leadership 2022

Right: The Chicago Department of Aviation recently finished a 16-year long effort to overhaul its runways at ORD. Now, it has embarked on efforts to expand Terminal 5 and build a new Global Terminal, so its carrier networks can each operate from single facilities.

Jamie Rhee’s path to becoming commissioner of the Chicago Department of Aviation was not a conventional one. She grew up washing tractors and cleaning chicken coops and pigpens on a farm in Geneseo, Illinois, which is closer to the Iowa state border than it is to O’Hare International Airport (ORD) . Leaving farm life behind, Rhee worked her way through law school, then began a career in the public sector, taking on any job or challenge at the city that was thrown her way. Now she’s leading billion-dollar capital investment projects and taking on leadership roles on airport industry boards, attracting supporters with an infectious personality on the way. In recognition of her ongoing efforts, Rhee has been named Director of the Year in the large airports division by Airport Experience News . Finding The Way Rhee has worked for the city of Chicago for nearly 30 years now, but her first foray into urban life didn’t quite work out. She left Geneseo, a town of about 6,500 people, after graduating high school and headed to Chicago. “I left home with $1,000 and a mattress on top of my Subaru,” she says. “I’m the first in my family to actually graduate college, let alone law school. I didn’t really have a sense of what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go. I just kind of thought, ‘The big city – it’s universities, that’s where you go.’ I really quickly learned that probably Chicago wasn’t good for me at 17.” So, she transferred to Michigan State in Lansing, Michigan, where she got her bachelor’s degree. She returned to Chicago,

then backpacked in Europe for a time to experience overseas travel. Shemoved to Japan to study Japanese and teach English. Then she came back to Chicago to attend law school. Rhee, who speaks a half-dozen languages at a passable or better level, got her first job at the airport, working in customer service as an airport information representative. “The requirement was two languages plus English,” she says. “I said, ‘I can do that,’ and I went in and I applied. They interviewed me in different languages, and I got hired in a couple weeks.” She kept that job for five years while attending law school at night. Climbing The Ladder After graduating, Rhee went to work for the city’s planning department for a few years, overseeing all the city’s real estate holdings. She went from there to planning, then back to ORD, where she spent five years overseeing real estate acquisitions as the general counsel overseeing the Modernization program. Rhee left the airport system to work as deputy chief of staff overseeing seven departments for Mayor Richard Daley. Daley then assigned her to help clean up the city’s procurement department. She became director of that division in 2009 and spent 10 years making it easier and more transparent for companies of all sizes and demographics to bid on city projects. Early on, she recognized that the same companies were winning most of the city’s bids. She began wondering if it had to do with a lack of awareness of projects that were available. “People didn’t know the contract was even up, except for the incumbent,” Rhee

Left: Jamie Rhee has been with the city of Chicago for nearly 30 years, working her way up from customer service agent at ORD to commissioner of the Department of Aviation. Photo by Mary Rafferty.

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