Catoe’s year starts strong but plummets with major problems

He had finished 2008 without any workers or pedestrians getting killed, reversing a deadly trend. Then Metro won accolades for funneling a record 1.5 million trips through the transit system for President Obama’s inauguration. In May, he was named the American Public Transportation Association’s manager of the year.

But in June, two trains crashed, killing nine people and injuring dozens more.

“Lightning struck here in Washington on our system.” Catoe told The Examiner. “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 has 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 last month injured three employees and caused millions in damage.

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, Catoe said the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority may need to take emergency 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.

The agency has been slammed for how it has responded to the trouble. Top leaders blocked a safety oversight committee from inspecting live train tracks and 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.

T. Dana Kauffman, a former board member, said the recent firings were telling as Catoe canned handpicked staff members, some of whom are his friends.

T. Dana Kauffman, a former board member, said the recent firings were telling as Catoe canned handpicked staff members, some of whom are his friends.

However, Jackie Jeter, president of Metro’s largest union, said that wouldn’t fix the problems.

“When you remove half of your executive leadership team, you will have chaos,” she said. “The individual issues that WMATA faces go deeper than a surface wound. Removing a senior manager does not create a better work environment, a change of culture and practices.”

Some riders have called 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. Her office has not returned requests for comment since the executive shake-up.

So far he has 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 this fall, even boosting his $375,000 compensation package with a $27,000 retirement plan and $6,000 wellness fund.

“This is not a baseball team, where you can throw out the manager to ‘shake things up’ and it doesn’t really matter,” board member Christopher Zimmerman said in a Greater Greater Washington blog chat. “It is not clear that we would ever attract someone as good or better by firing him.”

Catoe shied away from pinpointing what he could have done better in the past, and he said he had more to offer the agency in the future.

“On a Monday, you always look back and think about what you could have done on a Friday,” he said. “I need to spend all my energy looking forward.”

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