The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority laid off 83 of its staff and eliminated 96 vacant positions on Thursday in the first and largest round of cuts planned in the coming months. Metro will eventually eliminate 220 positions, the largest worforce cut in the agency’s history.
The downsizing is expected to save the authority $22 million a year, spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said. All of the cuts, she said, come from the about 2,000-strong administrative staff and do not affect operational jobs such as bus and train drivers or transit police.
Of the 179 jobs cut on Thursday, 60 of them came from the agency’s construction department as Metro gradually abandons its role in building. The remaining 41 layoffs will come from that department “over the next few months as projects are wrapped up,” Farbstein said.
The cuts were effective immediately.
“There was training for the supervisors who had to deliver the bad news,” she said. “It’s been very, very difficult for the supervisors [and] it’s been very, very difficult for the staff that had to hear that news.”
The move is an outgrowth of a review by Gayland Moffat Consulting that Metro’s leadership commissioned to help fix a $116 million deficit in its operating budget for fiscal year 2008. The firm recommended shrinking Metro’s staff, after which General Manager John Catoe instructed department heads to find positions to cut. The report also suggested that Metro cut its $70 million annual spending on overtime.
Metro board member Dana Kauffman, who also sits on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, called the construction department layoffs “a painful recognition of reality.”
“Metro is getting out of the construction business,” he said.
In terms of the cuts across all the administrative positions, Kauffman said: “When the day is done and you look at the material that comes before the [Metro] board, you’ll see 15 or so names used over and over and over again. It’s not hard to get the picture that if these 15 people are the ones doing the work, why am I paying the salaries of all those other folks?”
