Metro Execs Threaten Service Cuts, Then Hike Their Own Pay
By: Barbara Hollingsworth
Examiner Columnist
December 30, 2008
As its financial situation worsens, the Washington Area Metropolitan Transit Authority is threatening major service cuts and perhaps even some layoffs. But one steadily growing budget item seems particularly impervious to belt-tightening - employee compensation, particularly in the executive suite.
Metro’s Approved Fiscal 2009 Annual Budget includes large pay hikes for salaried management employees, as well as hourly workers such as bus drivers, rail operators and maintenance workers. But the numbers take on added significance when compared to previous years.
For example, in the section entitled “Multi-Year Operating Cost Comparison,” we see that salaries for Metro managers in the Bus Services section have more than doubled since 2006. Next year, Metro’s top bus executives expect to be paid twice what they made just three years ago, and this when almost every economic indicator is steadily heading south.
Here are the figures from Metro’s own website:
2006 $13.3 million
2007 $15.6 million
2008 $23.1 million
2009 $29.5 million
The same upward trend can also be seen in the proposed total compensation for Metrobus’ hourly wage earners, although their proposed pay increase is not nearly as steep as for the denizens of the executive suite:
2006 $155.2 million
2007 $161.1 million
2008 $200 million
2009 $213.9 million
It’s nearly the same story in Metro’s Rail Operations, where despite a minor blip this year, total management compensation in the proposed 2009 budget continues its steady upward climb:
2006 $43.6 million
2007 $46 million
2008 $44.6 million
2009 $50.8 million
Metrorail operators and station managers have also been riding the same gravy train, as their compensation continues to grow as well:
2006 $180 million
2007 $196.2 million
2008 $202.4 million
2009 $211.5 million
Because of the proposed 2009 pay hikes, Metro employees may yet take home fatter paychecks even if General Manager John Catoe orders a five percent “cut.” And the current hiring freeze just means more overtime for already well-paid employees, as demonstrated by recent history.
In 2007, an exclusive Examiner series highlighted the excessive overtime payments that pushed more than a hundred bus and rail operators into six-figure territory – almost double the median income of the Washington, D.C. area.
Too many generous pay hikes over the past three years have pushed the base pay of Metro managers and unionized bus drivers, supervisors, train operators, and other employees significantly higher than it would otherwise be had the raises been tied to some rational measure such as the rate of inflation.
And the higher pay levels also push up the cost of Metro employees’ future pension benefits. Any way you look at it, it’s a sweet deal for Metro employees.
Meanwhile, Metro’s “customers” have to contend with broken escalators, defective subway cars, increasing crime and decreasing system reliability even as they continue to pay the higher fares and parking fees imposed on them last year when most Metro employees were getting yet another raise.
But isn’t this the same kind of pay-yourself-first-no-matter-what mentality that nailed Detroit and Wall Street?
Barbara Hollingsworth is The Washington Examiner’s local opinion editor.
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