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Glen Kelly selected as new manager for Mid-Ohio Valley Regional Airport

File Photo Glen Kelly has accepted the job of manager of the Mid-Ohio Valley Regional Airport.

WILLIAMSTOWN — A retired Army colonel with aviation, government and military experience in West Virginia and around the world has been chosen as the next director of the Mid-Ohio Valley Regional Airport.

Glen Kelly, who has been serving as director of Washington County Emergency Services after nearly four years as assistant and interim city manager in Morgantown, will work alongside current airport Manager Jeff McDougle in the next couple of months before taking over the job around the start of November.

“I’m very excited to see where I can help,” Kelly said. “I’m a West Virginia guy. This is a great area. That’s one of the reasons we kept a house here.”

Kelly purchased a house in Williamstown in the early 1990s, moved his family there in 2001 and kept it as his military career took him to Colorado, West Virginia, Germany, Iraq, Djibouti and more.

According to his resume, he commanded the first U.S. base in Romania in 2003, overseeing feeding, housing, airport operations and more for more than 6,200 personnel at the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq that year.

From December 2003 to November 2004, he served as commander of Camp Dawson in Kingwood, W.Va., and went on to command the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force of the NATO Response Force.

In between stints as a U.S. Department of Defense contractor and program manager/integrator for the government’s Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization in Iraq and Europe, he spent 20 months as director of the Morgantown Municipal Airport. He continued to work with the airport when he returned as assistant city manager in 2013.

“He has extensive aviation experience” in the civil and military arena, said Bill Richardson, president of the Wood County Airport Authority, which made the selection. “And he’s also a pilot of course.”

Kelly said he knows McDougle through the West Virginia Airport Managers Association and hopes to “grow on the success he’s had.” He looks forward to working with McDougle during the transition period.

“Every airport has their own methodology, procedures and processes,” Kelly said. “Every airport is different because of the terrain, because of the runway.”

Kelly said the airport’s first and foremost job is to take care of its primary customers — the pilots of the aircraft using the facility, without whom nothing else happens. But he noted the airport is “a key piece of infrastructure” for economic development, especially when combined with the area’s access to water, railroads and highways.

“I look forward to the opportunity to hopefully help economic development in Wood County and West Virginia,” Kelly said.

He hopes to do more with the airport’s commerce park and look into the possibility of developing a foreign trade zone.

McDougle said the airport authority received 23 applications for the manager’s position. According to Richardson, McDougle culled those resumes down to a dozen, then an authority subcommittee narrowed the list to four people to be interviewed.

“We were very pleased with the number and quality of the candidates that applied for the position,” Richardson said.

Interviews were conducted Aug. 10 and 11, with the offer made to and accepted by Kelly on Tuesday, McDougle said.

There was no meeting held to vote on the selection.

Richardson said authority members discussed whether one was needed but did not seek a formal opinion.

“We may still do it at a regular meeting,” he said.

Kelly’s annual salary will be $58,000, an increase of $3,000 over McDougle’s.

Washington County, meanwhile, has begun the search for a new emergency services director.

“It’s advertised as of 9:45 this (Thursday) morning,” county Commissioner David White said.

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