The John C. Tune Airport saw March fuel sales decrease 17.5 percent compared to March 2012 figures, according to recently released Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority statistics.

A key cause for the dip involved the West Nashville facility losing a major client (actually, the owner of a jet) to another airport.

According to MNAA officials, the fluctuation is normal and can be attributed to various factors such as weather patterns and variations in flight schedules.

Opened in 1986, John C. Tune Airport has an employee payroll of $3.1 million. MNAA officials say the facility’s annual economic impact is $10.8 million.

(Editor’s note: Post Managing Editor William Williams wrote this blog late Wednesday after normal business hours and, as such, could not contact CCA officials given the timing. This morning, CCA asked for a chance to respond to the post. The blog post has since been modified to reflect the information CCA provided.) 

Alex Friedmann continues his scrutiny of Corrections Corp. of America.

Friedmann, president of Nashville-based Private Corrections Institute and a former inmate at a CCA-run facility, on Wednesday issued a press release in which he criticizes the company for tweeting an op/ed about a Temple University study that claims financial savings through prison privatization while failing to note industry members helped fund the study.

According to Friedmann, CCA did not mention in its tweet that the Temple Center for Competitive Government study was funded by the private corrections industry and by private prison firms. (Note: A quick glance of the study shows no reference to funding.) CCA cited the Temple study in its 2013 investor presentation, Friedmann said.

A Temple press release (read here) clearly discloses the funding for the piece, which is classified as a working paper.

CCA said its tweet referenced an op/ed published in The Oklahoman, not the Temple paper itself. 

When contacted via phone, Friedmann (pictured) said ID-ing the funding source in a release is not the same as noting it in the study itself. Regardless, he argues, CCA's handling of the matter was not ideal.

In the release, Friedmann — arguably CCA’s most dogged watchdog and a staunch supporter of open records access — quotes Charles Scott, the former director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Ethics.

“An academic paper presents itself as providing objective knowledge. If that paper and research are funded by a for-profit business, then it is an ethical obligation of the authors to reveal that source of funding,” Scott is quoted.

(The Post was not aware until today, however, that the VU center recently held a two-day forum that included a panel on which Friedmann sat to criticize contractor-operated prisons.)

Dr. Simon Hakim, one of the study’s authors, countered Friedmann's view by noting the following in an emailed response:

“We are always completely transparent about funding. This is the normal course of action for working papers. When it’s formally published, we will yet again disclose the funding. Anyone who contacts us, we tell about the funding. In fact, just yesterday Mr. Friedmann called our public relations office, and they shared with him again that, as the press release clearly indicates, the study received outside funding. 

“My colleague and co-author, Dr. Erwin Blackstone, and I each have over 40 years of experience in academia. We feel strongly that our work has been and will continue to be handled transparently and ethically. To be abundantly clear, we are adding the press release disclosure language to the end of our executive summary in the paper itself.”

You may recall that last March, the Securities and Exchange Commission ruled in favor of CCA, and against Friedmann, on the company’s request to exclude a shareholder resolution (filed by Friedmann, of course) regarding its planned REIT conversion from its proxy materials in advance of the company’s annual meeting in May. (Read more here.)

Had the SEC sided with Friedmann, the resolution would have required CCA’s board of directors to issue a report to stockholders addressing issues related to REIT conversion.

Friedmann, a CCA stockholder, may have failed in that effort but he remains determined in his scrutiny of CCA.

Read Friedmann's full release here.

Chem-Dry recently surveyed its American franchise owners and found, with 211 responding, that the average revenue per franchise was $111,184 in 2012, up $11,938 (12 percent) from the figures of the Nashville-based company's 2011 survey. Read more here.

Brentwood-based Comdata Corp. has contracted with Brown Trucking Co. to provide fleet payment solutions. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Brown Trucking, a subsidiary of Brown Integrated Logistics, has more than 1,000 trucks and is headquartered in Lithonia, Georgia. Read more here.

Local telephone-based customer service provider Sitel is adding 150 agents and support staff in Oak Ridge to support new business and growth opportunities with current clients.

As part of the hirings, the West End-based company will host an onsite job fair on Wednesday, May 22, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the company's Oak Ridge facility, located at 1089 Commerce Park Drive.

The Oak Ridge site will increase a current line of business for a client that provides financial services, the company said in a release. The newly hired Oak Ridge associates will provide customer support, with an opportunity for a select few to be trained to become licensed property and casualty insurance agents. 

Timothy Wengler (pictured), who works for Corrections Corp. of America as the warden of the privately run Idaho Correctional Center, has submitted his resignation roughly one month after the Nashville-based company acknowledged that his employees falsified thousands of hours of staffing records during much of 2012. CCA, which has a contract to run the Kuna, Idaho-based prison, said Wengler's last day will be May 31. Read more here.

Comedic giant Robin Williams will be among the cast of Boulevard, parts of which will be filmed in Nashville, the Nashville Business Journal reports. Officials say the movie could spur about $1.2 million worth of spending in Tennessee. Read more here.

The Nashville International Airport (BNA) saw its passenger traffic increase 3.2 percent from the first quarter of this year compared to Q1 2012, the Metro Nashville Airport Authority announced Thursday.

By comparison, passenger traffic in North American airports collectively rose 0.8 percent from Q1 2012 to Q1 2013.

For April, BNA accommodated about 865,000 passengers. It recorded about 819,600 passengers in April 2012. The jump is an increase of 5.54 percent.