Airport Experience® News - Leadership & Culture Issue 2023

2023 MEDIUM AIRPORTS DIRECTOR OF THE YEAR

consultant for Leigh Fisher before jumping to San Francisco International in 2008, where she was finance director. After SFO, she joined Port of Portland as chief financial officer, serving from 2012 to 2018. Finance is still a huge part of Nichol’s day-to-day life, but being in charge of an airport system brings variety. “I get to do everything here, which is just so fun,” she says. “It’s my favorite job ever.” Challenges and Opportunities The Sacramento Airport System is made up of four airports. SMF is the medium-hub commercial service airport, but the system also includes MHR, which is used primarily for cargo traffic; SAC, a general aviation airport; and Franklin Field, which is used for general aviation training activites. Nichol took the helm of the airport system in October 2018. Sixteen months later, Covid-19 upended her plans. The pandemic was one of the biggest challenges of her career, she says. “Covid was hell,” she says succinctly. “My goals were really to not have any layoffs, to be financially sustainable through it and to help our tenants to the extent we could. My staff really came together and came up with creative ways to reduce our costs. And thanks to the three tranches of funding we got from Congress we were able to achieve all of that. We had no layoffs. We continued to be financially sustainable. My staff came up with some creative ways to deal with debt, which only a few other airports did, but that helped,” Nichol continues. “ And by the way, 80% of our savings on debt from those sources benefited our airlines and we helped our tenants. Over the last three years, we’ve done 85 amendments to our tenant agreements to help them. And I’m proud to say we have spent all of our stimulus funds.” Other challenges have come to the fore in the wake of the pandemic, most notably inflation, attracting workers and incorporating technology.

African Roots Nichol grew up in Ethiopia, in an environment far from what she experiences today in the capital city of Sacramento. Her love of aviation began in a community without easy access to the rest of the world. “I grew up in Western Ethiopia, and during half the year, the dirt roads turned to mud, making them impassable,” Nichol recalls. “The only way we could get from the capital out to where I lived was by flying. There were these DC-3 aircraft that the Ethiopian government had bought from the U.S. after World War II, and they can fly and land anywhere and take off anywhere. You take off and you can see all the fields and the little villages from the air - I thought that was amazing.” When her university years rolled around, she initially pursued studying her first love – Africa. “For my BA, my major was history and I focused on African history, then I got a master’s in African studies,” she says, adding that “nobody was interested in hiring me” with those credentials. She returned to university life, pursuing a Master of Public Policy, Transportation Economics at Harvard University and landed a job that allowed her access to air traffic control tower at Boston Logan International Airport. “You can see all the runways - and the confluence of the runways - and I just thought, ‘are you kidding me? This is a job?’ It was just fabulous,” Nichol says. And thus, an aviation professional was created. She joined the Massport team, first as an intern and then as a young professional. “Originally I was in planning, so I was doing a lot of planning and environmental work, especially noise modeling and that kind of stuff,” she says. “Then, at Massport, I went into the group that did a lot of economic analysis and financial analysis, and that’s kind of [what built my] career.” Known industry-wide as a bit of a financial savant, Nichol followed that path in subsequent moves. After Massport, she spent several years as an airport financial

Airport (SMF) as well as Mather Airport (MHR), Sacramento Executive Airport (SAC) and Franklin Field . After guiding the system through the pandemic, Nichol is now embarking on a $1.3 billion capital program called SMForward, and she’s utilizing varied and innovative funding sources to execute that plan. In recognition of her ongoing efforts, Nichol has been named Director of the Year in the medium airports division by Airport Experience News.

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AX NEWS LEADERSHIP ISSUE 2023