While the Mayor wasn’t too happy with it, the MTA Board voted yesterday in a closed session to approve Jay Walder as MTA head along with his compensation package. Wadler, who is leaving London to move back to New York, negotiated a Golden Parachute provision that enables him to secure more than twice his annual salary if pushed out of the job before his six-year term is up. The Mayor had objected on ground of fiscal policy.
Meanwhile, as Walder prepares to take over an agency with a $12 billion budget and 67,000 employees on Oct. 5, Christian Wolmer, London’s leading transit expert, examines Walder’s time in London. He is full of praise for Walder the financial and technological guru, but some of his sources question whether Walder is fit for leadership of such an expansive and important public authority. “I would love to have Jay implement a project for me, but I would not like to see him run an organization,” an anonymous former colleague of Walder’s said. Walder is qualified as a veteran of transit agencies for the job, but I hope we don’t come to miss Lee Sander and rue the Senate’s ouster of him the hard way.