No Light Rail in Vancouver!

The Going Rate for Lying

It would be nice to think that Denver Regional Transit District (RTD) General Manager Cal Marsella is feeling pangs of guilt for lying to the public so often about the virtues of rail transit. That would explain why, even though he is one of the highest-paid public officials in Colorado, he just announced that he is quitting that job to take the “opportunity of a lifetime” by going to work for a private company that operates buses (update:and would like to operate trains) for public agencies including (by an amazing coincidence) RTD.

One reason why transit officials like trains is that the top officials of rail transit agencies get paid more than the leaders of agencies that only run buses.

In 1995, RTD paid Marsella $112,000 to run RTD, which was then mostly a bus system. He was picked for the job partly because he and the then-chair of RTD’s board of directors, Jon Caldara, agreed that rail transit was a waste of money.

Within a few years, he had changed his tune, overseeing construction of two new light-rail lines and pumping interest groups for their support for a 2004 measure to raise taxes to build six more.

“RTD always builds its rail lines on budget,” he told people. (In fact, it went nearly 30 percent over its original projected cost on its Southwest light-rail line, and nearly 60 percent over projections for the Southeast line.)

“Our studies found that rail transit is the most cost-effective way of reducing congestion,” he claimed. (In fact, all of RTD’s studies found that highways and bus-rapid transit were far more cost-effective; in most cases, they both cost less and did more to reduce congestion than rails.)

“Rail transit reduces air pollution,” he insisted. (Since Denver’s light-rail trains are mostly powered by coal-fired electric plants, they emit more greenhouse gases, nitrogen oxides, and other pollutants per passenger mile than a typical SUV.)

One person who greatly benefitted from these lies was Cal Marsella. By 2008, RTD’s board had nearly tripled Marsella’s pay to $324,000. For 2009, when many other RTD employees were accepting pay cuts, Marsella magnanimously agreed to accept a 3 percent cut from his schedule pay increase.

Now Denver’s rail dreams have turned to nightmares. The latest projections are that the six new rail lines will cost about 50 percent more than promised in 2004, while the tax revenues needed to pay for them are falling billions of dollars short (and that’s based on the optimistic projection that 2009 revenues will be just 3 percent less than in 2008, even though the revenues for the first couple of months of the year were down 14 percent). RTD doesn’t have enough money to run the trains and buses it has, and is cutting service on many of its routes.

At age 58, it’s a little early for Marsella to retire. Given his poor record as a manager, it is hard for him to persuasively argue that he is being hired away because of his great talents. So is he leaving out of remorse that he persuaded Denver to support such a folly? Is he a rat jumping the sinking ship?

Or is he, like the bureaucrats who run Japan, “descending from heaven” to earn a few more million before he retires as a reward for funneling so much taxpayer money to transit contractors? Whatever the answer, it is hardly a testimonial to the integrity of America’s transit industry.

Reprinted from The Antiplanner