Airport marketing up in the air as Wichita City Council rejects Copp Media contract

The Wichita City Council rejected a media buying contract for Eisenhower National Airport on Tuesday and voted against revisiting the proposal with Copp Media in May, leaving marketing up in the air ahead of the airport’s busiest season.

The council also voted against authorizing a workshop on the ethical parameters of city contracts, which Vice Mayor Mike Hoheisel recommended.

“Sometimes even the spectacle of impropriety can be damaging, even if there’s nothing there,” Hoheisel said after the meeting.

Mayor Brandon Whipple said the council may approve the contract after language is added barring Copp from working for candidates who are running for city offices. Copp has already signed an agreement not to do such work in the future.

Ethical concerns were raised in March about Copp’s past work on behalf of City Council candidates, including a $60,000 media services buy from former council member Cindy Claycomb in 2021, when she was running against Maggie Ballard. Sheila Frye, the wife of District 5 council member Bryan Frye, is Copp’s business manager.

Frye and Becky Tuttle abstained from the contract vote without explicitly saying why. Brandon Johnson and Jeff Blubaugh voted in favor of it. Hoheisel, Ballard and Whipple voted against the contract, which would have needed the support of four members to pass.

The contract would have paid Copp $150 an hour for search engine optimization and social media management on top of a 15% commission for media buying services.

Whipple, Hoheisel and Ballard have expressed interest in using the city’s communications team for media services but Strategic Communications Director Jim Jonas said Tuesday that bringing services in-house would cost at least $275,000 a year and require the hiring of two media specialists.

Wichita has paid Copp Media nearly $2.7 million for their work with the airport since 2013, records show. When their existing contract expired in February, Copp reapplied through the standard RFP process and was selected from a pool of three applicants.

Tuttle, who attended the candidate interviews, told The Eagle in March that she recused herself from the contract vote because of work the firm did for her 2019 campaign.

Hoheisel said there may be options for extending the airport’s existing contract with Copp for 30 to 60 days while the city figures out its next steps.

Signed agreement

Copp President Bonnie Tharp told the council during Tuesday’s meeting that after the contract was first brought up in March, she signed an agreement with city staff saying her company would no longer work for political campaigns while under contract with the city.

Council members told The Eagle that City Manager Robert Layton did not tell them about that agreement before the meeting. It was not discussed during the council’s weekly agenda review meeting.

“This potential solution to those concerns was not given to us until [Tharp] mentioned it and until Bob read it,” Whipple said. “But it was very clear that no one on the council knew that there was a potential fix already, and that’s why we tried to slow it down so that we could have time for that potential fix.”

The language, which Layton read aloud to the council, was not included in the contract that members voted down.

“The contractor agrees, in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety, that during the terms of this agreement and any renewal thereof, it will not accept employment in or engagement for participation in any media campaign for any Wichita City Council member, nor for any campaign for election to the Wichita City Council by any person seeking such an office, be it for any district or mayoral representation,” it read.

“Moving forward, I think that if this language is put into the contract, the council would be comfortable with it,” Whipple said.

Tharp, the Copp president, did not immediately return a phone call Tuesday.

Johnson, who twice motioned to approve the contract, said it’s unfair to penalize Copp for perceived ethical concerns when they followed the competitive bid process and signed an additional agreement not to work with campaigns.

“This company had to sign a paragraph of language that they didn’t have to before the process started. That’s moving the goalposts,” Johnson said during discussion.

“The concern about delaying this again is the impact to our airport and travel right now. We’ve delayed it once already. We are putting ourselves at a disadvantage.”

Airport Director Jesse Romo said with the new terminal at Kansas City International Airport, Wichita needs to be aggressively marketing the airport ahead of the summer flying season, when leisure travel hits its peak.

“We’re seeing increased competition. We’d like to be able to keep up, and this would limit us,” Romo said before the contract was rejected.

He said without a media buying contract, the airport can still do limited marketing on social media.