Last week, a contrite Ronald Taylor explained to the children of Bartlett Tabor that he could not bring their father back, right before he was handed a 12-month prison sentence for negligent homicide. In September 2008, while driving an empty Metrobus back to the garage at Friendship Heights for his break, Taylor blew through a traffic signal that had been red for at least 17 seconds while exceeding the speed limit by nearly 17 miles per hour. He plowed into a taxicab, killing Tabor and seriously Tabor’s wife and the cabbie.
To the extent possible, justice has been done. Taylor pleaded guilty and was sentenced — he will serve an additional 18 months because his conviction violates his parole on an earlier, unrelated conviction. Metro paid Tabor’s family an undisclosed financial settlement. What remains, however, is the incredible fact that after Metro promptly fired Tabor from his job as a bus driver, it was forced by a labor arbitrator to reinstate him in May 2010, with a year and a half of back pay, on the grounds that it had not followed proper procedure in terminating him.
Not only was Taylor reinstated as a Metro employee, but his union, Amalgamated Transit Local 689, tried doggedly to force the transit agency to put him back behind the wheel of a bus. Taylor at least had the sense not to insist on this, instead agreeing to take a position as station manager, which he lost only this April after pleading guilty to the homicide charge.
At the time of the bizarre ruling to reinstate Taylor — in which arbitrators disregarded an eyewitness account of the accident — transit union boss Jackie Jeter stated that Metro lacked the authority to fire Taylor, and that “if they wanted Mr. Taylor to remain terminated, they should have put on a stronger case.”
The facts have now been accepted as proven by a criminal court. For all the preoccupation with “procedure,” it is now clear beyond reasonable doubt that Metro’s employee arbitration procedure is corrupt and potentially dangerous to the public. It kept someone on the transit agency’s payroll for three and a half years after he carelessly killed a man with a bus. That is grounds enough for arbitration to be revisited.
