Metro General Manager John Catoe is resigning after months of major problems, including a deadly train crash in June that killed nine people.
Catoe said he would leave in April and that he was not forced to resign. He made the announcement at the board of directors’ regularly scheduled meeting Thursday.
The news comes after a year that saw a long series of problems on the transit system, from delays to equipment failures to a long string of accidental deaths and suicides. Those woes were capped a recent incident in which members of a local oversight committee investigating the tracks were nearly hit by a train.
“Lightning struck here in Washington on our system,” Catoe told The Examiner in December. “We’re not the only ones to have an aging system. … But it happened here. It happened at the time that I was running the system.”
Still, it was just the start of a stormy six months that led to the questioning of his leadership.
Two track workers were killed in separate accidents. A contractor was electrocuted. One woman was killed by a bus, another critically injured.
A rail yard crash in November injured three employees and caused millions in damage.
Last month, members of an oversight committee inspecting Metro’s tracks were almost hit by a train.
The agency also suffered some high-profile embarrassments. Bus operators were arrested on the job and charged with driving without a license and kidnapping a rider. Others were caught texting and even reading a book behind the wheel.
To make matters worse, Metro is considering service cuts, fare increases and other measures to stanch a $40 million budget loss because it overestimated ridership.
“It’s been an incredibly difficult year for the agency and the region,” Catoe said last month.
The agency has been slammed for how it has responded to the trouble. Before December’s inspection, top leaders had blocked the local safety oversight committee from inspecting live train tracks, and it had ignored requests to justify why it put its oldest rail cars in the middle of its trains.
Catoe took nearly six months after the June 22 crash to shake up his own team, ultimately letting go of six of his 16 executives in firings, retirements and reassignments.
Some riders had been calling for Catoe’s ouster, circulating online petitions. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., said the agency needed “more rigorous management” because the agency showed a “pattern of laxity, passivity and lip service” about safety concerns.
Catoe acknowledged last month that some of this year’s problems came from human mistakes, not just technical failures of an aging system. “There were procedures we did not follow correctly,” he said.
Until Thursday, he had survived as head of the 10,000-person agency, with local leaders and advocates largely behind him. The board of directors nearly unanimously renewed the 62-year-old’s contract in the fall, even boosting his $375,000 compensation package with a $27,000 retirement plan and $6,000 wellness fund.
