'Throwback' CEO isn't quite retired

"At some point, you got to step aside," Wells Fargo analyst Jonathan G. Reeder told Aqua America CEO Nicholas DeBenedictis at the company's May 6 shareholder meeting, after the company's final delay naming a a successor to 23-year CEO Nick DeBenedictis, who, at 69, is older than each of his board members (including retired CEOs of other Philly companies). DeBenedictis said the search took longer because so many utility experts applied for his job.

Last week the company named the new boss -- and it was the guy in the next office: Aqua tapped executive vice president Christopher Franklin, a longtime DeBenedictis protege. Like DeBenedictis, Franklin worked in government and Chamber of Commerce jobs before joining Aqua.

"You had said you were going external, and now you filled it internal?" shareholder Robert Costello, head of Costello Asset Management, Huntingdon Valley, asked in the investor call after the news. "We were looking at internal and external candidates," DeBenedictis said. "Sorry for any misunderstanding you may have had."

Franklin told investors he'll make just "minor tweaks" at Aqua. He also plans to reach out to "folks who own our shares and follow our stock."

It may be late to reach Ryan Connors, utilities analyst at Boenning & Scattergood in West Conshohocken and previously for Janney Capital Markets in Philadelphia: Connors had covered Aqua closely since 2006 but dropped coverage after DeBenedictis pushed back against Connors' cautious reports last year.

"All CEOs want the 'buy' rating. But what made Nick unique is he wasn't afraid to use his position to actively push for more positive coverage," Connors told me. "He was a throwback. He came up in a different era and never adjusted to the new world, where that's no longer appropriate."

In a statement, DeBenedictis told me he counted 10 analysts still covering Aqua - "six buys and four neutrals." He declined to comment on any particular analyst's beef with his style.

DeBenedictis pushed back at the press, too. In 2011, DeBenedictis accused then-Inquirer editorial writer Paul Davies of "setting out to sabotage" the Convention Center, whose board DeBenedictis chaired, with an opinion piece decrying the center's failure to fix labor-management issues. "We should all be rooting for the home team," journalists, too, DeBenedictis wrote.

Davies, now an assistant professor at the University of Delaware, says he felt DeBenedictis' reaction "played a role" in his replacement by the paper's then-bosses. (At the time, Mark Block, a spokesman for the newspaper's owners, "respectfully" denied a connection. Davies told me that a meeting between the editorial board and Convention Center leaders was cancelled, at the center's initative, after he was removed.)

DeBenedictis told me the center's later improvement of its labor issues (since he stepped down as chairman) shows his optimism was well-placed. He still says "to publicly debate the future success" of the center made it tougher to attract conventions.

Will Aqua shares rally or lag with its longtime boss retired? Too soon to say: DeBenedictis remains Aqua's board chairman. This summer, he'll also be a senior adviser, "to ensure a smooth transition." (See also my column in Monday's Philadelphia Inquirer).