In the aftermath of Jay Walder’s resignation, nearly everyone — except the TWU — seems to think that the MTA is losing a solid and effective leader. The Daily News praised him as the most effective civic leader in New York State right now and ran down his accomplishments while The Post said he did “reasonably well” over the last few years while dealing with uncertain finances and obstructionist politicians.
With Walder on the way out, the question then becomes one of succession. Who’s next? It’s unclear who the candidates will be, but it doesn’t sound as though Gov. Andrew Cuomo will have an easy time finding a successor. As the News said, “Executives who have full managerial, financial and political skills are few and far between.” The Post meanwhile called upon Cuomo to find an “equally talented replacement.” Between the capital budget and the TWU negotiations, the MTA has a lot on its plate this fall. Cuomo should make sure his candidate is more than just a political crony as the next MTA CEO will set the tone for a much of the next decade if he or she doesn’t stick around all that long.
44 comments
It’s going to be really hard finding a guy to replace him. I mean the next chairman/CEO would have to be worker friendly, and would have to be in agreement with the Unions that support MTA New York employees (TWU local 100 had issues with Jay Walder) Hopefully, MTA New York will get a leader suitable to lead in the right direction. He/She will be in a lot of pressure too.
He/She
got my money on a “She.” Think we know who.
Would love to know who you think. Contact me or via email: secondavesagas at gmail.com. No need to reveal you who are.
there really aren’t that many folks who fit your and the following criteria
http://www.wtsinternational.or.....px?id=7030
😉
well, this isn’t (nope) the person i’m thinking of but its public info …so who knows??????
Elizabeth Moore
http://www.nysun.com/new-york/.....oon/53994/
Perhaps her: http://youtu.be/zrJxVQw0McE
(link courtesy of Train Dude via Subchat.org)
she’s a transportation professional????
Best bet is to give it again to Helena Williams, as an “interim” or “acting” position, for as long as she’s willing to do it. Because no one in their right mind would permanently subject themselves to the perils of this job for a mere $300k/year.
Why would Walder’s replacement HAVE to be in agreement with the TWU?
It would seem to me that in Cuomo’s eyes, they would HAVE to be willing to put 3 zeros on the table while simultaneously making them feel thankful that their medical and pension contributions won’t be increasing.
I’d even go so far as to say that Walder’s replacement is going to take an even harder line with the TWU. Based on Cuomo’s relationships with the state’s unions, he’s not going to go easy on the TWU come the fall.
And then it will go to another round of binding arbitration. And usually the city’s agreements with its unions are of much more influence in that process than the state’s. So watch what Bloomberg does. Note that in the last round the arbitration decision was quite close to the city union patterns. That wasn’t coincidence.
From what I’ve seen (feel free to disagree with me if you will) The TWU and other unions are known for making MTA New York Chairmen/CEOs look really bad, and place most of the blame on them. All of the hardships the MTA New York as a whole wasn’t totally Jay Walder’s fault. I think that he was under constant pressure from the deficit the agencies of MTA NY were facing to making fellow employees happy, and to provide service still while making cost-cutting service reductions.
Is it fair to say that all of the MTA’s problems are not a matter of current policy but were from way back in the day when the City forced the transit agency to have a low fare regardless of its needs (or am I confusing this with pre-consolidation)?
I think that’s too simple. After all the overtime issues at Metro-North and LIRR can’t have anything to do with the city government. You have to pick a specific problem to trace its origin.
That is so true. Once the city took the helm all innovation ended .
All the money from the takeover of the Tri borough bridge and tunnel authority (Mta bridges) was just squandered on the status quo.
Work rule changes are more important than 0/0/0. Common sense changes such as OPTO, bus integration and other shop floor issues and worker flexibility needs to be put center stage.
I think Cuomo pushed Walder out. The technology upgrades he was putting in place was paving the way to permanent operational changes.
Cuomo just wants to look tough to fight the liberal NY image that doomed his father’s presidential run.
Walder’s technology changes were going to allow for the MTA to reduce more and more jobs overtime. Cuomo is bankrolled by the unions. He is acting tough now but to make real change it must be structural . The state workers took it on the chin but they preserved the status quo on other fronts.
Bring back the Bluebirds! I agree on the innovation part. Badly as it was run, the BMT had some amazing modern articulated subway designs running before the city took over and cancelled them, leaving us with a legacy of overweight boxes in our subways. It’s almost tragic how caveman-like even our new trains are compared to other agencies in the world and even the U.S. The R160 is a 1940s railcar with some fancy technology bolted on. The first BART cars from the late 60’s are damn near more advanced. The designs of other subway systems blow it away in both aesthetics and efficiency. A 60-foot subway car weighing 85,000 is overweight.
The BART cars also cost about 2-3 times as much as the R160s.
Though they were quite worth it, I think. The earliest A and B cars have lasted 40+ years, and will go at least another 5-6 more. Not only that, despite being a “measly” 56,000 lbs of aluminum (which makes the MTA-described “most advanced subway car in the world R160 look like an obese disaster), they have held up quite well. And despite not having the passenger loads our subway cars do, they travel at much higher speeds in quite long routes, so they do take a beating. Also consider that every pound costs more. Every pound is another pound maintained, scrapped, another pound to put wear and tear on our already flimsy subway infrastructure; adds maintenance costs. The incredibly heavy R160’s, for all their technology (that still crashes quite often), add a lot of wear and tear to our infrastructure and create more noise. So I say the initial investment is worth it for a more advanced design.
So is Cumomo going to appoint someone qualified to run the MTA, or is he going to continue hs tradition of appointing top campaign donors to high level jobs? If we look back at history, we’ve had plenty of MTA chairmen with less knowledge of the subway than a 5 year old. We’ve had a newspaper publisher. And a CIA agent.
Political appointee. No need to please anyone but his appointer. The appointee has his own income (real estate/wall street/corporate america/etc), how else would he have made all the campaign contributions?
Well let’s look at the specifics:
Richard Ravitch – wealthy real estate developer, was quite surprised when Gov. Carey offered him the MTA job. But he was the one who saw everything was on the verge of collapse, had the necessary fixes documented, prioritized, figured out funding, got the legislature and governor to agree. Pretty much everything that has gone right on the subways, buses, and railroads in the past 30 years you can trace back to him.
E. Virgil Conway – headed a bank that went under. But during his tenure a lot of real administrative efficiencies were instituted. Example: centralizing all the real estate functions. This makes sense since it is an area of specialty that doesn’t vary much between Westchester, Manhattan and Nassau. Also during his time the various expansion projects now underway were started (as planning studies); but we also know the financing for these was somewhat gimmicky, and we await a solution. And during his tenure both the state and city cut back support for transit; I doubt he could have changed that if he wanted too.
Peter Kalikow: Real Estate developer. I can’t point to a specific accomplishment, but since there were good economic times for much of his term, things continued to improve.
Dale Hemminger: I think he was Real Estate too, but I’m not sure. Governor Spitzer emphasized Lee Sander, Exec. Director, so Hemminger kept a low profile. But that team’s tenure was so short I don’t think a judgement can really be made.
It’s not such a negative record. As to the “Transit Experts”:
Robert Kiley: Had the best record of anyone. Built on Ravitch’s capital plan, but also his appointee David Gunn reorganized the Transit Authority to implement real managers who could be held accountable (not that they always are, but that’s another issue). But my impression (from the outside) was that Kiley concentrated on the big picture and handling the politicians and left the more technical operational stuff closer to the actual service on (and below) the ground. I think it’s worth noting that when Gunn took over Amtrak, and had to do the political stuff himself, things didn’t go as well for him.
Peter Stengl: Had a nice run at Metro-North. Didn’t last all that long as MTA head in tough economic times. His only noteworthy deed was to force all the agencies to adopt “service names” starting with MTA instead of their own identity. (Note the real, legal, names you find in contracts are still NYCTA, SIRTOA, MSBA, MNCR, TBTA etc.) Some people think that is a big plus. I’m not one of them.
Jay Walder: make up your own mind. I’m not one of his big fans, but given his short tenure there isn’t much that is truly his doing. But the Business Services Center implementation is mostly his, and I am quite pessimistic about that.
So I don’t think you can easily draw conclusions. I think the MTA head’s job is to be very big picture and work with the governor and the legislature to get that implemented (meaning finding the money). To do that skills at stroking politicians are vital. And to have the trust of the Governor is vital. The political appointees have this. No matter how much you know about transit operations, if the Governor and the Legislature ignore you, you can’t get anything major done. All the operational stuff should be done at a lower level, much closer to the riders.
I should state I wrote that off the top of my head so I might have missed someone.
I don’t know very much about the MTA heads before Ravitch, but the impression I’ve gotten is that they were purely political guys, and keeping the fare down was the only priority. As it was before the MTA was created. Which eventually put the system into freefall.
We need a person with vision and experience improving efficiency. Every single unit needs a top to bottom review to see how they can be improved
Almost all of these people, at least between Ravitch and Walder, let problems fester. How much of that is specifically their fault is up for debate though.
It might be nice if the governor himself stood up and took some heat for changing work rules at the MTA, or at least giving the chairman and/or board more discretion to do so. In the end, the MTA is a state-chartered agency, and the state can do a lot to restructure it. NYC is impotent to effect change, and the MTA is partly unwilling and partly unable to make changes internally.
With Walders resignation Cuomo now owns all the MTA flak.
The man wants to run for President in 2016. What reason on Earth does he have to take risks?
He’s obviously up for taking risks. Gay marriage? But if he’s going to take the kind of risks needed to run for President, he will be compelled to run to the right anyway. How about a good union busting? :-O
Gay marriage: popular with the base and with primary voters, will be supported by a majority of the voters by 2016.
Union busting: unpopular with the base and primary voters, toxic for caucuses, is supported by a majority of the voters.
Well, I agree with that analysis, but the second of those issues is going to impair his effectiveness more after he wins the electoral vote than it will before. There are vast swaths of people who vote Dem who don’t care one iota about unions.
The catch might be the Midwest, and even there he can try to be magnanimous towards private unions while taking only the NY public sector ones for a ride.
To be more precise: the idea of union busting is usually popular, but the practice is nasty and unpopular. Scott Walker’s current approval rate is 37%; if Wisconsin’s recall provisions did not have a limit of at least one year between the original election and the recall vote, he’d have been out of office already.
Well, in all fairness, union busting is probably a harsh term for what Cuomo would do. My wording, my fault.
What he’d be doing is is ignoring the unions’ wishes. Scott Walker is actually trying to punish/impoverish union workers, while Andrew Cuomo is more interested in getting some concessions that are mostly fairly manageable and reasonable – unfortunately he’ll probably have to circumvent the negotiating process to get them.
Not to mention no higher taxes on the “job creators” or filthy rich corporations. For some reasons the U.S. seems to be in love with the idea of giving all our money to those who have most of it these days.
You know, policies that are stupid in Arizona aren’t necessary stupid in New York. New York tends to have higher taxes than other states, so it’s not necessarily in New York’s interest to raise them further when it could drive more companies out. States with below-average taxes, OTOH, probably can raise them without suffering any economic harm – to a point. Likewise, the feds can raise them, at least as long as they don’t raise them so much that the work leaves the country. Of course, much of the work that could leave the country already did thanks to the supply-side policies that started under Reagan, so this is probably a minor concern for the time being as far as fiscal policy goes.
My main issue honestly is the whole “shared sacrifice” thing that for some reason only involves cutting services for the poor and middle class but no higher personal taxes on the super rich. Now politics aside, I do hope Cuomo mans up and signs the NYC cab reform bill, signs the transit lockbox bill, and appoints someone really, really, really good to run the MTA. We need a leader. Preferably one who can deal with the legions of stupids who turn every weekend service change and construction project into a kindergarten class of whiny children.
Gay marriage wasn’t really a risk – he campaigned on it, had the votes, and it went in lockstep according to plan. It was a potentially divisive policy choice, sure, but you can’t avoid making a policy choice one way or the other. Union busting is incredibly risky – it demands an unpredictable degree of widespread public sacrifice, and there’s a good chance you could get thirty days into a paralyzing transit strike and still be forced to capitulate.
I suspect Cuomo will appoint someone to talk a big game, push negotiations into a strike of a few days, then substantially concede all major points while scoring something he can call a victory with minor Taylor Law penalties for the TWU. Pretty much the same thing as happened in 2005.
Even if it’s not a political risk in NYS, it represents an electoral risk later if he does run for President. In the Democratic Party, it often takes a nervous minority of insiders to derail a popular initiative (cf., universal healthcare).
Work rules can’t be changed willy-nilly. State law (Taylor Law)requires that stuff be negotiated – it’s part of the trade off for making strikes illegal. I don’t claim to be an expert in this, mostly what I know is from reading the Chief-Leader. But the Taylor Law isn’t just about penalizing strikes – it sets up a binding process to settle disputes, a process that is supposed to be fair. It says specifically in sec 209a-1-e that not continuing an expired agreement until a new one is negotiated is an improper labor practice. So if the union won’t budge (such as on one person trains) it isn’t going to happen.
When the MTA sued to overturn the last arbitration agreement they were effectively saying “we should be exempt from the legal process – if it comes out in our favor the union must obey, if we don’t like the results, they don’t count”. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the union got very very hostile over this.
Which is why I think that there won’t be a new contract for a couple of years.
Yeah. Which is probably why there will be no reform on that front without the state legislature taking some action.
This makes Cuomo responsible for the budget and for long term capital projects at the MTA, as he has to appoint someone capable of pushing a good agenda. Cuomo hadn’t expressed much interest in the MTA, now this forces his hand.
He should appoint someone tasked with dissolving the MTA as we know and going another route.
And what would that route be? And you can’t say “PRIVATIZE IT AND MAGIC WILL HAPPEN!” because that doesn’t work.