The former executive director of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (AUS) has allegedly violated the City of Austin’s conflict of interest policy, according to reports from Austin-based media outlets.
Jacqueline Yaft announced her resignation last month as head of Central Texas’ main air gateway after nearly four years.
Austin ABC affiliate KVUE reported that the investigation revealed Yaft failed to disclose a conflict of interest in relation to an aviation contract.
According to KVUE, the city auditor fielded a claim in late 2021 that a party in the agreement was a previous employer of Yaft’s.
The report stated that the auditor’s office had determined Yaft was involved in the approval process of four separate invoices from the company, a consulting firm that’s an Aviation Department vendor.
“Yaft had a conflict of interest when she approved these invoices because of the money she made from this contractor before she was a city employee,” investigators wrote in the report, according to Austin CBS affiliate KEYE. “She also violated City Code when she failed to disclose her conflict in writing to her supervisor.”
Austin Journal reported that Yaft joined AUS in the summer of 2019, approximately six months before the COVID-19 pandemic took root.
Her resignation was a part of a slew of changes at city hall announced by interim City Manager Jesus Garza, who succeeded the terminated Spencer Cronk earlier this year, the publication reported.
According to KEYE, an attorney representing Yaft criticized the report.
“[It] unfairly characterizes and taints the totality of Ms. Yaft’s service to the city,” the legal counsel said, the station reported. “The city should be thanking Ms. Yaft who served the city extraordinarily well in launching the modernization of the airport, in operating AUS throughout the COVID-19 pandemic with a 30% vacancy rate and in increasing the airport’s air service advancing the airport to a large hub serving close to 22 million passengers.”
Yaft’s LinkedIn profile described her as having “20-plus years of experience in mid and large hub airports.”