Greater Philly Chamber of Commerce names PHL Airport’s Chellie Cameron as its new president

The Chamber of Commerce for Greater Philadelphia on Thursday named Rochelle “Chellie” Cameron, the CEO of the Philadelphia International Airport and Northeast Philadelphia Airport, as its new president and chief executive.

She’s the first female head of the chamber since its founding in 1801.

Cameron, 53, will take over the chamber’s top job from Rob Wonderling, a former Republican state senator and software executive, who had warned of the threat to economic growth from the city’s progressive wing. Wonderling has headed the group since 2009 and told the group in 2019 that he would not seek a new term.

“Business is vital to the city, in terms of creating jobs and making an economic impact,” Cameron said in an interview.

Her mandate from members is to continue the Recharge & Recover Philadelphia initiative and to cut wage taxes and the Business Income & Receipts Tax (BIRT), which imposes levies on both profits and sales, forcing firms to pay even when they suffer losses.

The chamber believes the city’s tax system is broken, and cutting taxes over 10 to 15 years could pay for the cuts.

”Lowering taxes lowers the barrier to entry to new business,” said Bill Hankowsky, a chamber executive board member and former CEO of Liberty Property Trust, which built Comcast Corp.’s Center City towers. “Make Philadelphia a more attractive place to work [and] the city’s wage tax base growth will come from growing the business base.”

Cameron said: “We’re working with the mayor, with City Council. This is our moment.”

The chamber has also formed a united front with other business groups, including the African American, Asian American and IBA-LGBTQ chambers. All are asking for tax cuts.

Cameron said the coalition “was the brainchild of Will Carter,” the chamber’s head of local government advocacy. “We believe it’s the only multi-chamber working group of its kind in the country.”

Cameron will leave her city post on June 24 and take over the chamber on July 11. Keith Brune, the airport’s chief operating officer, will become acting CEO of the airports, Mayor Jim Kenney announced Thursday. Korn Ferry executive search firm is under contract to find a replacement after Brune retires at the end of 2023.

Cameron became the airports’ CEO in 2016. Nearly 21,000 people worked at the city’s two main airports before the pandemic, and about 1,000 were city employees.

Now the airports have 17,017 badged employees, and about 600 are city employees.

Cameron grew up in Ligonier, Pa., a small town east of Pittsburgh. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1990, funded in part by an ROTC Air Force scholarship.

Before moving to Philadelphia, she spent 13 years with the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority and served for seven years as an active-duty officer in the Air Force and one year as an Air Force civilian employee. Cameron served on bases in Alabama and overseas in Turkey in budgeting, business support and logistics.

“I loved helping to run a base, dealing with supply-chain issues,” she said.

After earning an MBA, she took her first airport job at Washington’s Dulles International Airport in the finance department. “I had a boss there, Keith Meurlin, who mentored me. And he used to say, ‘It’s all about the passengers.’ He and I both had a military mind-set — whether you’re mopping floors or keeping the books, you’re part of a mission.”

She always wanted to return to Pennsylvania.

“I fell in love with this place. It’s gritty, real and people tell you what they think,” she said. She and her husband bought a home in Girard Estates in South Philadelphia, where they still live.

Cameron joined PHL in 2011, serving first as deputy director of aviation, finance, and administration, and then as chief operating officer. When she became CEO, among her goals was to “transform the customer experience,” a term that encompassed “my employees, other stakeholders at the airport, and the passengers.”

“My background is finance, it’s numbers, and so this was a new part of thinking about airport management,” said Cameron.

She took on a new role as the travel industry struggled with the financial fallout from the pandemic. A leading trade group for America’s airports elected Cameron to be one of its top advocates to Congress and the Biden administration.

Cameron helped secure $17 billion in additional relief for commercial airports nationwide, PHL among them.

“Ultimately, we think airports are important enough to communities to be able to justify that expenditure of dollars,” she said at the time.

It costs nearly $1 million a day to operate the airport. PHL received $116 million under the CARES Act relief package that Congress passed, the equivalent of about 3½ months of operating costs. The nation’s airports altogether received $10 billion in CARES Act grants.

During her leadership, PHL notched record passenger volume in 2019, with just over 33 million passengers going through the airport.

Since then, Cameron has overseen the airport’s recovery from the pandemic shutdowns, which started in spring 2020 and dealt a severe blow to the travel industry.

Passenger traffic is up to 75% of 2019 levels, Cameron told City Council last month during budget hearings. Traffic was only 50% of 2019 levels in spring 2021.

Under Cameron, PHL started an ambitious cargo services expansion program that will develop more than one million square feet of cargo buildings in the coming years. Officials have said the completed project could generate $1 billion in annual economic impact.

“I see 22,000 construction jobs and 6,000 permanent jobs over the next five to 10 years” coming out of the cargo project, she said.

The airport cargo project got the attention of the Chamber of Commerce, which began its search in November and narrowed down the field of 500 candidates to just 10, including Cameron.

“She has a strategic mind-set,” said Sue Jacobson, the chamber’s board chair who formed the search committee for a new CEO. “She’s a known and respected entity in the region and by the federal government. That was our ‘aha’ moment.”

Other business leaders said they look forward to working with Cameron.

“We as a city should emphasize the importance of investing in diverse businesses and that includes taking an in-depth look at the effects of policies, such as tax reform and contracting requirements,” said Regina Hairston, president and CEO of the African American Chamber of Commerce of PA, NJ & DE.

According to a 2020 report by the Economy League, the region saw a 40% attrition rate among Black-owned business — which equates to a loss of 1,135 firms, $993 million in regional revenue, 12,735 jobs, and $345 million in wages.

Specifically, Hairston said, the city needs tax reform that “provides relief from burdens on small-business growth, especially Black and brown businesses, which were disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.”