Metro is facing a labor shortage for a position that is critical to keeping its stations open and its trains running on time: mechanics for its aging rail system.
“We have a large number of vacancies with mechanics,” Metro General Manager John Catoe told board members this month when questioned about the agency’s sliding statistics for on-time rail performance.
“People are retiring, people are moving on — we just don’t have the capacity.”
Metro has 50 open mechanic positions and is budgeted to add another 30 spots in May to help deal with the influx of new railcars scheduled to arrive in the spring, officials said.
But finding people to fill the positions, which often require special certifications and a high level of specialization, is a constant challenge for an agency that employs more than 1,400 mechanics, said Andrea Burnside, Metro’s assistant general manager for workforce services.
“In the past, we have recruited from the military to fill some of these technical positions,” Burnside said. “Right now with the war, that’s kind of drying up the pool.”
Metro’s 5 percent vacancy rate for mechanics positions is about standard in the industry, Metro human resources supervisor Steve Godbey said, and the agency is aggressively recruiting.
“In the last 365 days, we’ve hired 93 mechanics off of the street,” Godbey said. “And we have approximately 60 mechanics in training in various degrees — we have a two-year technical skills program that allows us to train them in-house.”
Still, the agency has 70 mechanics who are eligible to retire now and 140 who are eligible to leave early under reduced pension, Godbey said, so the agency soon could find itself with a more severe shortage.
Metro is scheduled to introduce a new two-computer “career center” in its downtown headquarters next week — an initiative the agency hopes will boost the number of job applicants for all of its open positions, a spokeswoman said.
Fixing the rails
» Mechanics currently employed: 1,365
» Open mechanic positions: 50
» Open mechanic positions to be added in May: 30
» Mechanics eligible to retire: 210
» Mechanics in training: 60
