Rick Fried’s term as Hawaii Tourism Authority chairman will not be extended.

Gov. David Ige withdrew his nomination Thursday to reappoint the prominent Honolulu attorney.

Fried, who has served on the HTA board of directors since 2012, took over as chairman in July 2015 after the abrupt resignation of then-Chairman Aaron Sala. The HTA is the state agency responsible for Hawaii’s tourism marketing.

Fried needed to be confirmed by the state Senate if we was to get another term as chairman, and it was unclear whether the Senate would support an additional term for him.

Fried said he requested that Ige withdraw his name but would continue at HTA until his term ends later this year.

“I didn’t want the focus to be in any way on personalities or politics,” he said. “I’ve been happy to do it. It was just getting to be a distraction.”

His exit is another shake-up for HTA, which took a $13 million legislative budget cut Tuesday and over the last several months has dealt with the resignations of its second- and third-ranked executives.

At least 11 HTA staff members, the majority in key positions, have left the organization since 2015. The agency has 20 full-time employees and 1o contract workers.

The Senate did support HTA board nominees Ben Rafter, David Arakawa, Micah Alameda and the return of Kyoko Kimura, who previously served on the board. They also voted for existing HTA board members George Kam and Fred Atkins.

HTA’s new board members are slated to start July 1. Fried’s exit could leave the HTA short board members as terms expire this year for Gerald De Mello, Sean Dee, Craig Nakamura, Denise Yamaguchi and Donna Domingo.

Fried’s supporters saw him as a team player who provided legal insight and helped expand HTA’s tennis marketing.

For example, Fried paid $100,000 of his own money Tuesday to the Power Show, a nationally televised tennis event at the Mauna Lani Resort. Fried said he will later seek reimbursement from the state, which could not make the payment in time for the event to proceed.

“The governor appreciates the dedication and hard work by Rick and the other volunteer members of the HTA board, which is overseeing record growth of Hawaii’s tourism economy,” said Ige’s spokeswoman Jodi Leong.

Fried has been at odds with some lawmakers, who have criticized HTA’s transparency and accountability. He fought to counteract proposed legislative cuts to HTA’s annual $108.5 million share of state transient accommodations taxes.

Fried apologized publicly Monday to Ways and Means Committee Chairman state Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz.

“Comments I may have made regarding Sen. Dela Cruz may have been ill-advised. I was asked a question and I responded,” Fried said. “What we really need to be doing is to work together, and that should be the goal. We should not be having problems communicating, and I think that’s critically important.”

Fried was referring to comments that he made in response to a Honolulu Star- Advertiser investigation. The newspaper story, which ran in April, concluded that Dela Cruz had voted to reduce HTA’s funding by more than $40 million after the private company where Dela Cruz works, DTL, had been denied an estimated $3.5 million worth of HTA contracts.

In the article, Fried said, “We felt the other bidders in our view met our requirements in a better way than DTL.”

State Sens. Glenn Wakai, who chairs the Senate Committee on Economic Development, Tourism and Tech­nology, and Laura Thielen did not support Fried for reappointment. Among their concerns was a negative audit from the Office of the State Auditor, which said in February that HTA exhibited “lax oversight (and) deficient internal controls.”

Thielen said HTA needs a new plan to address the state’s current tourism paradigm — one where more visitors are coming but adding less in real dollars, and causing resident satisfaction to plummet to historic lows.

“People in this state are just crying out for different solutions for tourism,” Thielen said. “They aren’t happy with the drive for more visitors and not addressing the impacts.”