Julie Timm Weighs In on the Future of the Puget Sound Region.
SoundTransit's CEO talks to me about her experience moving from Richmond, VA to the Puget Sound region, paying drivers a more-than-fair wage, and the challenges of building anything new.
Our tour of the Pacific Northwest continues. Below is a lightly edited for clarity and length interview with Julie Timm, who’s taken on the responsibility of leading Sound Transit, one of Puget Sound’s many, interwoven transit systems. As of July 2023, ST operates three distinct services that connect seamlessly with partner agencies across the region—Seattle at its core:
The Link Light Rail (if you’ve traveled from SEA/TAC to Seattle proper, this is the service you’ve taken)
Sounder Commuter Rail (if you’ve taken the train from Seattle to Tacoma, this is likely the service you’ve taken)
Sound Transit Express (if you’ve taken a double-decker bus around the region (including King, Snohomish, and Pierce Counties, this is the service you’ve taken)
Sound Transit looks to the future by creating new service based on reliability and access and enhancing existing service to provide regional equity and dignity to all riders and potential riders. This new service continues to open and ridership continues to flourish; the future of Sound Transit looks bright and with Julie Timm as CEO, fresh eyes will only help this growing metropolis, whose mobility needs are only becoming more and more complicated.
I’m with Julie Timm, CEO and leader of Sound Transit, the regional transit authority for the King County Metro Area. I would love for you to introduce yourself, and tell me how you got where you are!
Sure, but can I change one thing you said already? Something I had to learn when I came out here. Yes, I’m the CEO of Sound Transit, but not of the King County/Seattle region but of the Pacific Northwest, the Central Puget Sound region. We are way bigger than King County and we have significant partners in Snohomish County to the North and Pierce County to the South and I think that gets lost on people who are not from this region. Everyone thinks of Seattle as the center of Washington and it's not.
I appreciate that correction.
I had to learn that myself six months ago.
So: tell me about your journey to CEO.
So, it's a long story about how I got into transit in the first place. I was the CEO of the Greater Richmond Transit Company in Richmond, Virginia (GRTC). I started there in August 2019, and within a few months, the world changed. So I got to be the CEO of a transit company operating through COVID, through the social unrest and the BLM protests, and all the things that happened since 2020.
I have a lot of ambition to change the world and a mission-driven, service-driven personality and I found that as the CEO operating a transit company under COVID, I could make a huge difference for my staff and for my operators. I could protect them. I could really elevate the needs that they had as essential workers serving essential workers in the bus operating environment.
I found that I could really support my riders by going zero-fare for a long time. Richmond is still zero-fare. That was based not only on the needs of the staff, to have the social distance from riders, but later it became an economic vision of how to maintain operations. You might hear some contrary points. There are pluses and minuses to the zero-fare conversation, but in Richmond, it worked. It doesn’t work everywhere, but in Richmond, it worked.
I got a call in late April of last year that said, “Are you going to apply for the job in Seattle?” I said no. I knew Peter Rogoff but my family is in Virginia and I had a lot of projects and programs and initiatives: expansion, frequency, a transit center downtown, and more shelters I was putting in throughout the system. I had a whole bunch of initiatives that were only barely seeds thrown on the ground at that point. And there were a lot of promises I had made to the staff and the community. I’m like “No, I’m not done here.”
But they asked, "Will you just consider it?" And I did some research and I thought about my position in Virginia and I thought about the position in Seattle. And I looked and saw that Seattle is, as you may know, the largest expansion of light rail, of the system in the nation. It's a very ambitious program. And it's doubling, and then it’s going to double again. And they have a service and a mission that in some respects is leading the nation in how we serve and connect people. And then I went and looked at the mission. it’s that we’re connecting more people to more places sustainably and equitably.
It hit me. All the things I'm trying to do in Richmond, serving people, serving the community, helping lift people out of poverty, connecting the families, keeping their homes, keeping their jobs, elevating their jobs, elevating their education, elevating…just keeping their children for goodness sake. I could possibly do that on steroids here because of what was happening. Because of the programs, the initiatives, all eyes of the country being on what we’re doing here; the social / environment really being very progressive in uplifting staff, lifting communities, and connecting people. I thought maybe that’s where I belong. And well, let me try. Let me see. I’ll go and I’ll interview and I’ll just be completely me and if it’s not a fit it’s not a fit, and I’m happy here in Richmond. And here I am in Seattle.
It's a great story. You know, it goes to show a lot of younger folks and folks in the early to the middle part of their careers feel like they have to change their personality, they have to fit in, they have to tell the employer what they want to hear; you have to do it your way and you’ll find the right fit eventually. So it’s sort of a great lesson learned. I am also, well, wholly myself (for better or worse!) Exasperated Infrastructures is very on-brand. It's not an act. It's not an online thing. I’m exasperated in real life by everything all the time too.
A lot of people don’t have that privilege. It's something that I also love about here. Sound Transit has missions, and we have a program to deliver, too, but we’re working to change the workplace environment, the culture, and how people are allowed to be authentic as they approach their work and their mission in life. It is a privilege to be able to have that.
I love the mountains and the water. Eventually, someone will get me to come out permanently. But the one thing I notice when I ride transit throughout the city, I have friends who live in Wallingford and down in South Seattle, so getting back and forth is a pain by car and easy by transit. One of the things that I notice is that King County Metro and Sound Transit and Seattle DOT seem to have a working relationship that works.
Unlike where I live in New York. The Port Authority, the MTA, and NJ TRANSIT do not necessarily get along in terms of fare reciprocity or making transfers easy. Getting around the city is a chore for folks. I’m curious if you could comment on that. Where do you think that may have come from and where do you see the kind of relationship between the agencies going in the future?
I’ve been here six months or so. I couldn’t really give you a history of how that came to be but I am thrilled it’s here. It was one of the items when I was interviewing that really started to seal the deal for me. It's not just the three you mentioned. We have Sound Transit, King County Metro, which actually operates our service—we’re that interrelated. While we're doing more and more operations, they operate our light rail service. Our express service, our bus ST Express, is operated by King County Metro and Community Transit up in Snohomish where we cross the borders to the north, and Pierce Transit where we cross the borders to the south. We also have connectivity to WashDOT and its various systems.
And when you cross the water there’s Kitsap. We have strong partnerships and we meet regularly, at the staff level and executive level, to talk about how we're working together and how we're making sure that our policies, to the extent that we can, are complementary and build on each other. That we’re not in conflict with each other.
And I love that to the passenger, it’s seamless and invisible if you have an employer-paid fare pass. It becomes a little more challenging when you have to put money on your own fare card because you don't know when you're tapping on or off a bus or system what charges those are racking up. It can be a little more challenging and I think we have some work to do on our fares, but as long as you are in most of the urbanized areas transit is very frequent, it’s very easy, and it's very accessible. I can also sing the tune that’s a counterpoint to how we can do better, but overall, I think that sometimes people don't realize that it really is a good system here. We can improve. There’s always room for improvement. But it's a really good system.
One of the things that strike me is the talent and staff who have the ability to make all these projects happen and focus on the coordination and all the technical ability and also the human element, they go and work for the public agencies. They work for the government agencies.
They often do not do this in New York City and I think the main elephant in the room is that the jobs pay well out in Seattle, and they do not in New York.
I can’t speak to New York but I can tell you that yes…everyone knows my salary! It was reported on the front page of the Seattle Times. My point is, and I don't normally like to talk about salary, but my salary in Richmond and my salary here, while the numbers are very different when you add in the cost of living difference, it's the same salary. I think most people would be surprised by that. The cost of living out here is very, very high.
I don’t know the correlation between Seattle and New York so I can't speak on that but I will say, yes the salaries are higher but so is the cost of living. And you need the salaries to just be able to pay your rent.
I will say that for a similar job at the MTA and Sound Transit, the salary is 60-80% different. I’ll talk to my friends at New York City Transit or at DOT who work at the transit and the ranges are somewhere between $53,000 and $85,000 for someone with a Master’s Degree and 12 years experience. I can’t live in New York City at $85,000 as a 35-year-old. People like me have to go into the private sector even though our real passion might be working for the public sector, being directly in implementation, in planning.
It’s something that I looked at in Richmond as one of the last things I would try to do before I left. I promised the staff during COVID, as everyone across the country was suffering from the lack of fare revenue, we were having the CARES, the CRRSA the ARPA money coming in to help support.
COVID allowed us a moment to reset. And what you’re talking about with the salaries, in Richmond, when I got there in 2019, the starting bus operator was making less than $15/hr. And one of the first things I did was go into negotiations with the union and get that up to over $15/hr. And I celebrated! I was so proud we were elevating the workforce. And then COVID hit. and I started really looking across the industry and across Virginia and what they were making and realized that I'm not sure that I was proud of that anymore.
Our operators were out on the street in unknown conditions. And we’ve learned a lot about COVID in the past three years, so what I’m going to say now is based on what we thought in March 2020, which is different from what we think now. But literally March of 2020, we didn’t know we were sending people out to die. We didn’t know. We were still learning. And yet, if we didn’t provide that service then people would lose their homes, they’d lose their children. They wouldn’t be able to feed their children. I mean the essential workforce required that service. Balancing was at the top of almost every CEO's mind across the country in transit.
As time progressed and as we were looking at a financial crisis many people were saying, “We’re having salary freezes, salary cuts, layoffs, and I started wondering if that was the right path.”
Our services were being cut because riders were not there or because operators were out sick. The money wasn't there to operate services and so there was some contraction of services, which means that some of the money that was coming in that would pay operators salaries was kind of sitting there. I was like, “What if we went ahead and just started raising the salaries?” We gave bonuses, we gave appreciation pay, we gave incentive pay to help people come out. I gave out millions of dollars in that sort of pay to our essential workforce for the service.
And people came back to say, “Julie, is that sustainable?” And I said, “Who says?” They said, “When we have to put service back, we’ll have to go to our municipal partners and ask them for more money or the state or the federals to be able to put the service back because our money is going to the operators’ salaries.”
I’m like, “Look at what they’ve done. Look at what they are doing!” They are the backbone of the essential workforce pipeline, getting people to and from jobs, and if we’re saying that the only way we can operate that service is by lowering their salaries or by keeping their salaries low, what does that really mean? If you really think about that. It started to leave a really bad taste in my mouth.
I said, “No. I’m going to increase the salaries and when we put service back we’re going to have to account for the fact that we’re going to pay people right and then build on top of that as we put it back in.” And that will become sustainable.
So that was my model there.
It's great to hear.
That was me in Richmond. The issues here are a little different because we don’t do much of our own operations—that’s King County Metro. That’s their job to do. My job is to build and transform Seattle.
But we have to think differently in a service. I am very fiscally conservative. So for me to sit here and say, give our operators more money and then make the taxpayers pay more, sounds very progressive, liberal thinking. But if you look at the benefits, the money we’re giving essential workers, the money that we're giving the folks that are actually using our service, that economic benefit helped to build wealth in communities that were in poverty and helped lift them out of poverty. That means that we have fewer expenditures on our other critical services in government. We have less need for emergency room services. We have less need for some of the other support services because people are building their wealth and the economic benefit builds on that foundation. Changing the mindset in how we’re generating wealth to actually reduce the cost of service. It’s a different frame of thinking. And I don’t know if I’m right or wrong, but I am leaning into this.
I think about this all the time. Instead of trying to cut the pie up into the right pieces why not grow the pie? No one says that the pie has to be statically the same size right?
It's great to hear and I’m hoping other leaders follow the example of what you’ve done in Richmond, and hopefully in Seattle now too, and realize that without operators that are paid a fair, living wage, there is no service. And without service, there’s no reliability. And then there’s no ridership. If you want ridership, you have to provide service! You have to provide the opportunity. Fifteen- to twenty-minute headways aren’t going to cut it. People will just drive or take an Uber or Lyft.
Exactly. And then if you’re building a system around cars—I have a car. I’m not one of these “anti-car” people—
Me neither.
—but, if we can reduce the need to rely on cars, we can reduce the cost of building and maintaining that infrastructure, which is again an economic savings, an environmental savings. It’s a different mindset.
With that said, I also think that as transit agencies, we need to find new and creative ways to not rely on taxpayers to foot that bill 100%. A lot of our communities are growing and benefiting based on the Amazons and the Googles and the Microsofts. Seattle is an example. And when you look at Amazon, you see that they do have a social mission. They have been putting money back into the community, back into affordable housing, supporting transit, and making that a value so that when they expand to other parts of the country it’s in places that are sustainable with transit.
When corporate America also steps into those values, that's when we have a partnership that makes this work, so the burden on taxpayers is balanced.
I think people don't necessarily realize that some of the main investors in Japan transit, besides the national government and the prefectures, are Honda and Toyota; the car companies are major shareholders in JR.
Exactly, you get the point.
My idea is, “Ok, Ford, you want to build a new plant? You also have to invest in transit. These partnerships are possible if we have the guts to pursue them.
It is interesting. My brother is much more conservative than I am in so many ways. We have a lot of debates about this. And I do believe that corporate America needs to step more into this. At the same time, I don’t think it should be mandated. And that’s where the balance is. What do I believe someone should do because of my values, do I have the right to then force that value on someone else?
There are plenty of ways to incentivize by pulling the right levers in the right system. I think this goes back to the large tent of the mobility community. Everyone should be fostering partnerships here. Not dividing transit, cars, and bikes. It's all one system. We have to do slow. We have to do safe. We have to do reliable. We have to do dignified. That’s it.
Exactly. The past year, when I've been talking on some of the national circuits, there have been conversations about how transit’s job isn't to build housing. Transit’s job isn't to build bike lanes. Transit needs to stay in its lane and operate transit and build transit.
I am very fiscally conservative. So for me to sit here and say, give our operators more money and then make the taxpayers pay more, sounds very progressive, liberal thinking. But if you look at the benefits, the money we’re giving essential workers, the money that we're giving the folks that are actually using our service, that economic benefit helped to build wealth in communities that were in poverty and helped lift them out of poverty.
And I've been saying, I'm not so sure I agree with that. We need to not stay in our lane. These things are integrated, comprehensive services. And they work better when we work together and we think outside of our box. And we don’t stay in our lane.
One of the things that I loved about Sound Transit is the work you do around TOD. There’s LGBTQ+-centered housing and there’s senior housing specifically around the new stations that are built in Northgate and above with the land Sound Transit owns.
If transit stays in its lane and we just build transit, when we have urbanization and gentrification, and the cost of living in urban areas gets pushed further and further out, our costs increase as we have to expand service to connect these people with their destinations. We can actually help as we’re developing and as we have surplus property after we build something and it goes into TOD. It goes into affordable housing and we’re able to do that community development around transit. As opposed to transit development to communities.
Again, it's socially responsible. It’s environmentally responsible and it is fiscally responsible because it means that we’re not spending the money reaching out to people. We're spending the money keeping the resources connected with the multimodal services in a very sustainable way. So we have to get out of our lane to think that way.
I feel like we share a lot of philosophical points here. I’m a relatively progressive person as well. I’ve worked in transit and bike and ped advocacy for a long time. And the thesis behind the newsletter, at the end of the day, is that we don’t know how to spend a trillion dollars. We are not accurately defining our problems. We are not communicating up and down across the different jurisdictions and so we’re spending a trillion dollars…but on what? Tell me why? It feels like we’re jumping right past the problem and to the solution.
Do you agree with this?
Yes and no. I did talk about this a lot more when I was at GRTC than here at Sound Transit because, at Sound Transit, we do have a defined program. We have a program that's defined, that we’re moving into for the next couple of decades. These are generational projects. We have very clear, very sustainable programs and we can spend the money that we’re asking for to do it right.
The challenge that I had, I think to your point, was that when I was in Richmond, we were a smaller company. We didn’t have those plans in place because we were always trying to figure out how do we prepare to have shovel-ready projects. We knew that we wanted to, but we needed more help planning them. We needed more help engineering them so that we have those shovel-ready projects to dig.
Now we’re in a situation where people are funding projects that aren’t fully developed yet. But the smaller agencies need support to get those visions planned and engineered so they can spend the money.
The trillion dollars worth of projects is absolutely there. My concern is that it will be consumed by the MTAs and the WMATAs and the Sound Transits before some of the smaller companies have a chance to get their programs to a point where they can spend that money. Because we’re looking for groundbreakings and ribbon cuttings now to prove the need, versus saying look, we have the need here but we also have the need in the future. And this needs not be a one-time infusion, this needs to be an ongoing, sustainable progression of mobility enhancements across the nation.
It’s a chicken-and-egg scenario in a lot of ways. We just don’t have the capacity inside a lot of the smaller agencies to do this work.
I did a little analysis here. This is not a massive leap in analytical capability. But every project that’s ever been submitted for consideration, in total project cost, and not accounting for inflation here, is somewhere between two and three hundred billion dollars. That’s every project that every agency can think of that could be funded by discretionary.
And I worry that we haven't given the proper thought to what we can do because we haven't given the space to actually have these conversations at the local, MPO, state, and Federal levels. And we’re having conversations about our prerogatives. How do we share the language about defining the problems from building a sidewalk in Lakeville, IN all the way up to building a new spur of Sound Transit into West Seattle? It's a shared language we just haven’t developed yet in this country and because of our federalism, we have to.
There’s some truth to that, but when you state those numbers, it sounds like what you’re saying is that’s the dollar value of the submitted projects.
Correct.
That's where I would challenge you a little bit: do you know how many projects never get submitted because they’re not ready to be submitted? They’re still good projects. And they’re still valuable. But maybe they don’t meet certain criteria to be eligible or they don’t have the staff to get them to the level where they’re ready or they just don’t have the staff capacity at all to even think about submitting.
At GRTC, when we were looking at our BRT projects and the expansion of BRT service, the TPO, had to do some analysis with the Department of Rail and Public Transit in Virginia. They looked at what it would cost to really build out a BRT system and make sure that the complementary and necessary pedestrian infrastructure was there as well. Because it doesn't make sense to build bus service and put a bus stop in a grassy swale, which we do all the time.
The cost of that was staggering. It was way out of reach of what Richmond or GRTC could even dream of at the time I entered GRTC in 2019. And so the planning to get there was going to be years and decades. If there was a way to help pull those projects forward more, that would be great.
But the other thing was that sometimes those projects are good ideas, but they're not ready for implementation for five or ten years. Because the community itself is not ready. The projection is that we’ll need it in ten years. But do we need to build it now for ten years from now? Or do we need to preserve the corridors now, so that we can build them in ten years without the impacts of building in a built-out environment?
So I hear what you’re saying that what was submitted was less than a trillion, but I would say that my gut tells me there’s way more than a trillion dollars of need out there. It’s just not being submitted for multiple reasons.
That’s the best pushback I’ve ever gotten on that statistic and that’s great. My response to that is: let’s have those conversations. Let’s bring these things up. Let's talk about our problems in a way that we can actually find trends instead of guessing at solutions or building what a lot of DOTs know how to do is highway capacity expansions, which is where the money tends to go because it's what we know how to do. For every transit planner at a DOT, there are 25 highway planners and engineers.
I hear you. You’re speaking my language.
Recent reports from Eric Goldwyn, Alon Levy, and Elif Ensari about transit costs, I think they’re probably spot on, with shades of difference of course based on region and context. You can’t really use New York as an example; it’s such a white elephant. You know MTA just dominates in terms of its budgeting…
…and I’m thankful for that. It takes the spotlight off of Sound Transit.
I’d love to talk about Sound Transit’s expansion and the future of Sound Transit.
There’s a “lively debate” about where the new stations are going to go and where the new services are going to go. The two different choices provide two very different journeys for folks.
Yes, they do.
And so I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about how those alternatives were selected and the challenges of community impact there.
Well I’ll start now by saying that nothing has been chosen. The board has selected a preferred alternative but we are still in the environmental process. There’s still a record decision and there’s still a way to go before we get to “this is what we are building.”
But, yes, selecting the preferred alternative does certainly signal that that’s the way we’ll likely end up going. It doesn’t mean it is. It just means that’s the direction based on the information we have today. Just a little point of clarification. I just had to put that in. I’ve been doing NEPA and environmental for way too long not to.
I love the Twitter world and hate the Twitter world. It’s both a blessing and a curse, the Twitterverse.
I have the conversations in the boardroom. I have conversations with staff. I have conversations with the community when I’m out on tours with them, hearing and listening, and looking. And I see what’s posted on Twitter. And there’s only so much information you can get across in a tweet. In a thread of tweets.
And so the debate about this on Twitter is fundamentally flawed because there’s not enough information to really get across context.
I’m not shy about telling my personal opinion about these things. There are very clear sensitivities around why we’re doing the reënvisioning of the International District Station area, which is the Chinatown International District. So sometimes you’ll see it as IDS, International District Station. Sometimes you’ll see it as Chinatown International District.
And the debate I believe you are referencing is whether or not we build a new station in the CID or we build stations on either side of the CID. The North/South station CID concept vs the 4th Avenue. Is that the Twitter controversy you are talking about?
All of that comes from the fact that originally the plan was to build not on 4th Avenue, what is now next to Amtrak/North Sounders Station, but to build on 5th Avenue. Which is the other side of our Union Station and immediately adjacent to our current International District Station. At the very gate of the Chinatown International District. Literally the iconic gate, right there.
And that proposal, which was originally proposed in the voter referendum, as it was planned and designed, would require building takes and construction impacts, years worth of them, in a community that for decades and generations has been—I hate to use this word but I think it’s accurate—abused by the system in many, many ways.
And especially with the effects of COVID and the BLM protests, and the ability of the community to maintain business continuity and the housing availability to those who have lived there for so long—the social concern, the equity concern of that impact is incredibly real.
That’s what drove, and it was driven before I got here, driven before six months ago, the reevaluation of the plan. We cannot have those impacts on that community at this time. It just is inequitable and unstainable.
That’s where I came into the picture.
Our team went out. They looked at the 4th Street option and they talked to the community. “What other options are there?” My team is incredibly dedicated and incredibly bright. They turned over every boulder, they turned over every rock, and they turned over a lot of pebbles to get to creative solutions of what would work and wouldn’t work. The North of and South of CID, which I hope we rename because they’re really not that, came out as a solution that has a lot of elegance to it.
But it does have a lot of impact as well. And I don't think the Twitterworld really captures the impact of 4th Avenue and the impacts of North and South. They just have a lot of passion about which one we should do. And it would probably take me a good twenty minutes to go into the details of why each of them is good and why each of them has some significant challenges. And as a professional, and personally, I believe both of those things are true.
They are good alternatives. The question then becomes which is the best moving forward. And we have to make value judgments. And right now, the North and the South CID appear to be the ones that are on the table, and the board has selected as their preferred, which has a lot of value that I think some urbanists are missing.
The 4th street station is an elegant, and shallower, concept. As a planner myself, I can see the vision to some, about if we put it on 4th, right adjacent to the Sounder and the Amtrak, adjacent so you have to go through Union Station to get to the other side. And that the adjacency to the CID. And there’s a lot of vision there.
And there’s a lot of vision that is unfeasible, impractical, and not engineerable and that cannot be constructed, based on the soil and based on the conditions. And the cost of it would require us another $800 million as a conservative estimate to go that route. And that is a very real concern. And, on top of that, the connectivity would require some transfers to happen above ground. It’s not a direct connection. The wayfinding pathway is not superior. It’s not bad, but it’s not a superior connection.
So you start looking at some of the other solutions. The one that Dow Constantine [Ed. King County’s Executive] has been leaning into, the North CID, which has some very elegant proposals around what could develop in that region in the future if you’re forward-looking. The connectivity between the new station and the existing station could be entirely underground and we could create better connectivity, possibly by adding moving walkways to help ease that transfer.
There is a reverse commute in some ways for some folks coming from the east because it is a little bit further. That’s true. I don’t want to dismiss that. But here’s also some better connectivity for some folks. I could talk to you for twenty minutes on the pros and cons of why 4th Avenue is a beautiful concept and how the North CID and South CID alternative is also beautiful concept and how both sides, who are saying either one will be the bane of future generations, are also not quite correct.
I hate to use winners and losers because it is the wrong turn of phrase because everyone wins when we have more transit service.
A lot of transportation and transit thinking is counterintuitive, right? You’ve really got to dig into it and think critically and broadly. And Twitter is not a great platform for that, but neither is a public meeting. I’m not sure what the answer is. I'm not sure what the answer to any of this is. At some point you’ve got to sort of put your head down and look to the future from underneath your brim a little bit and think about how great the future could be when this is all said and done.
I wish we had more time to have these conversations without losing time and increasing costs. But every day we wait is higher costs to construct, a higher tax burden on our public, and one more day that we don't have that service in place. So yes, we should pause. We should consider. But we also then at some point, we need to act. And you can't act with perfect information because if you wait for perfect information, nothing will ever get built.
Phil Knight has his ten points of manifesto basically about when he started Nike. The third one, I memorized this because I'm a dork, is “Perfect product over perfect process.” Does that apply here?
You get to make these decisions based on the power of your role.
Well actually, I don't. People forget that. I’m not making these decisions. The staff, we work through the analysis. We bring forward recommendations. The board makes the decision.
The board is elected. We have an 18-member board from across the region. They are elected officials. They make the decision. And the staff does everything in our power to give them the best information, pros and cons, so that they can make that decision. And we do have very strong professional expertise that is so in the weeds.
Anyone who would like to have the conversations, we’re open to them. Our team has been working tirelessly for months.
So some of the comments that people have been making. “Well, this was made in a back room.” “It was done through backroom deals.” “It was done this way.” They’re completely and absolutely false.
Just because they weren’t personally in every single one of those rooms… It just goes to show you too that no matter how successful, how public-facing, or how good you are at this work, you always answer to someone. Especially in the field where we work. We work for the public. All of our work is done in the public sphere so you answer to the board, and the board ultimately answers to the voters. And the voters answer to whom?
So, Julie, this has been illuminating and by far the most different conversation that I’ve had. And that’s good because we got into some topics that I’ve really never talked about. You’ve turned me around on some things. We got some good information going but that’s what I'm looking for. I’m not looking to have my priors confirmed. I’m looking to grow and learn. And I’m hoping my audience feels the same way.
I appreciate that. Thank you so much. You know I have so many soap boxes and I really want to thank you for allowing me to get on a couple of them. It's been fun.
Living in Richmond for the past 3 decades, I can vouch: the GRTC system has been a black eye on the city's landscape for nearly the entire time. That has recently changed a great deal. Things are tremendously better now.
Very good small-world coincidence, and another very good piece, Sam!