UPDATE: I spoke with Kyle Mast, the man shown in the video below. Without a doubt, Mr. Mast is having a bad day. To the extent people are contacting him directly to harass or threaten, you’re committing a crime and could be prosecuted. I gave Mr. Mast an opportunity to give his side of the story, and he obliged over the course of two phone calls.
He traveled to the Dick’s on Maple to check out see if there were any good sales. He is adamant that he did not intentionally park in a handicapped spot. He sometimes has a placard to use for his own family members, and is sensitive to the need for easy access for the disabled. When he parked there, he says he saw no markings on the ground or any signs or poles marking that spot as being for the disabled. If he parked in a handicapped spot, it was accidental and not intentional. He didn’t see that it was a disabled spot, and he would typically have apologized had he realized his mistake.
As soon as he got out of his car, Mr. Mast says Marcia Lynn began yelling at him, accusing him, “you can’t park there, you’re illegally parked” and making jokes about how his truck was overcompensating for something else; “big truck, small package” he recalls. Mr. Mast says he was “aggravated” by this taunting, but didn’t respond at all as he went into the store.
Contrary to the Facebook post’s allegations, Mr. Mast claims only to have been inside the store for about 5 minutes, not 30. He adds that, if he had been parked illegally for 30 minutes, why didn’t the woman shooting the video complain inside to the manager. He also says that Marcia Lynn was yelling at other people about parking improperly.
He says that, as he came back out of the store, the taunting resumed until he got into his truck. He was growing angrier because of the heckling, but also because he saw that Marcia Lynn was videotaping. In a fit of rage – he says he was being “hotheaded” – Mr. Mast used a racial slur. He is sorry that he did that, and says, “it just came out”. He says, in retrospect, he didn’t even know or think Marcia Lynn was black, and was just trying to come up with the most hateful word he could muster. He admits that he wasn’t thinking straight, and was very upset because Marcia Lynn wouldn’t leave him alone.
In speaking with Mr. Mast, I detected genuine remorse for what he said and what had happened. He knows what he said was wrong, and that there were many other ways he could have either defused or ignored the situation – just driving forward was one of them. Mr. Mast let his emotions get the better of him, even though he knew he was being recorded.
Here’s a video from local Facebook user “Marcia Lynn”, capturing her encounter with the driver of a wildly conspicuous monster truck in the parking lot of a Dick’s store on Maple Road in Amherst.
So, a pig parker parks his Tonka truck in a handicapped spot for about 30 minutes, and when someone confronts him about it, he tells her to, “get a life” and, just before he drives off, calls her a “nigger”.
Here’s what his real-life Hot Wheels truck looks like:
The Paladino descent into self-parody continues apace, as he opens up yet another front in his relentless war on everyone.
Last week, Gary Orfield, a UCLA professor and head of its Civil Rights Project, complained to the federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights about Paladino’s efforts to dictate to and intimidate Orfield and his group. Orfield is not Paladino’s employee, but the head of an organization that the Buffalo school board retained to investigate complaints of racial discrimination in criterion school admissions. Orfield had strongly urged the board majority, including Paladino, to holf off on committing to any charter plans for the four “failing” schools until his group could finish its work and issue its recommendations.
Orfield’s complaint to the OCR was made public, and apparently threw Paladino into a rage. His skin is far too thin to tolerate any criticism, however mild. So, he fired off an intemperate, now-irrelevant letter to the OCR blasting Orfield. Most of it is just an ad hominem attack against Orfield.
Witness the reaction of a man whose companies rent space to – and profit from – charter schools:
To: Timothy Blanchard Director New York Regional Office Office of Civil Rights,U.S.Department of Education
From: Carl P. Paladino
Date: August 14, 2015
Cc: Everybody
Re: Gary Orfield
Mr. Blanchard, this is in response to an uninformed Buffalo News editorial and Gary Orfield’s letter to you dated February 10, 2015. I am writing as an individual member of the Buffalo Board of Education, (BOE) and I speak only for myself.
Contrary to Orfield’s letter, I am not the Chairman or leader of the BOE, however, I am a member who is incapable of being cowed by an academic elitist who knows nothing about our BOE’s reform intentions and actually seeks to have you admonish me and delay the implementation of our reform agenda. I intend to do what I was elected to do.
Orfield has an MA and PhD in political science. He appears to be a self-absorbed charlatan. He is not a person conducting a study, but rather an activist anti-charter zealot. He is an advocacy researcher, not an unbiased researcher. He is a paid lobbyist who uses Harvard and UCLA after his name because he admires himself much like Jonathan Gruber the MIT professor who wrote Obamacare.
Orfield purportedly was selected by a Buffalo Public Schools (BPS) committee because he was the cheaper of the two people who responded to the RFP. Actually I suspect a much more sinister process took place. Apparently, as has been past practice, no one from the BPS bothered to Google Orfield or look beyond his self-serving and deceitful response to the RFP to see who he really was. Appearances are he is a plant on a mission commissioned by the BOE minority to delay and frustrate the implementation of the reform agenda.
Orfield holds himself out as a “published anti-charter expert and noted speaker.” He ascribes an astonishing fraction of America’s educational failings to America’s obvious lack of “civil rights” in the public schools. He is known as the “segregation professor.” He has been accused of “breathtaking intellectual dishonesty.” He lobbies for busing and stands and speaks extensively against neighborhood schools and charters claiming they create segregation. See attached. He refers to New York schools as Apartheid schools. He supports “social passing-feels that testing is a means to force children out of schools. He has a predisposition to find segregation everywhere, especially in New York. He lacks any discernible objectivity. When considering the requirements of the RFP, he has fraudulently presented himself. Why would the BOE imagine hiring someone who intends to impose his socialist will on the District?
Buffalo’s only civil rights issue comes in the form of the desperate attitude of the BOE minority which consistently plays the race card for lack of any plausible argument against the reform agenda. They were the majority until this year and on their watch the BPS slid into the abyss of total dysfunction. The people of Buffalo voted overwhelmingly for change and reform installing the new majority. Self -empowerment and the ability to control money and jobs is more important to the minority than ending the urban cycle of poverty and giving 34,000 kids a fair opportunity for education no matter what the vehicle, which ironically is the mission of the BOE majority’s reform agenda.
Orfield lacks any objectivity and when considering the requirements of the RFP, he has fraudulently presented himself. We can expect him to include in any report he prepares language that would exclude any Charter School considerations.
Orfield’s letter to you illustrates that he intends to use the Buffalo Public Schools as his Petri dish for his socialistic social re-engineering. He concludes that obviously the BOE majority could not possibly have good intentions for minority children, an insulting and racist remark that illustrates his lack of objectivity. The majority’s reform plan was being prepared when the misguided complaint of the District Parent Coordinating Council (DPCC) was filed with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR.) Knowing what they know today about the majority’s intentions, I expect that the DPCC would agree to withdraw their complaint.
The majority’s plan specifically addresses compliance with the “No Child Left Behind” legislation by using an array of vehicles to create seats in performing schools for implementation in 2015. It is shameful for Orfield to suggest that our children must suffer in underperforming schools for another school year so that he can finish his report sometime in the future.
The BOE majority seeks to correct bad policies administered in the past by the BOE minority when they controlled the majority together with an incompetent Superintendent which resulted in the conditions addressed in the complaint. We have 46 out of 57 schools failing. Our overall proficiencies in Math and English are approximately 10%. There are over 27,000 kids in failing schools who need to be relocated to performing schools. The suburbs and Catholics are closing schools for lack of students. High quality charters want to expand. We filled every seat in the performing schools and we now seek to expand or duplicate them. Is OCR going to delay these good efforts for another year to satisfy Orfield?
Orfield’s fraud in the inception of his contract and belligerency in trying to delay and frustrate the reform intentions of the BOE majority are not tolerable.
I will move to terminate his contract at the next meeting of the BOE.
Fraud? Orfield should sue for defamation – fraud is a crime, and Paladino should prove that up.
Query: the BOE’s minority-as prior-majority presided over not only the “failing” schools, but the “performing” ones, too. There are myriad reasons why the underperforming schools can’t seem to educate or graduate kids, but blaming it all on the BOE minority or the teachers’ union misses the mark.
“Petri dish for his socialistic social re-engineering” what on Earth does that even mean? This stems from Paladino figuring out that Orfield isn’t a Paladino clone anti-SAFE Act tea party activist, and is therefore a socialist. “Self-absorbed charlatan”, “activist anti-Charter zealot”, “sinister process”. Orfield has the nerve to oppose racial segregation, and this apparently sets Paladino into a rage.
Note the very careful, repeated (improper) use of the word “socialist”—Paladino uses “socialist” as an adjective for someone who opposes racial segregation. It bears mentioning, then, that Paladino is rather expressly advocating for illegal racial segregation; integration is “socialist social re-engineering”.
Following up on his intemperate segregationist rant, Paladino reproduces an article written by a xenophobic conservative activist slamming Orfield. He then reproduced a laundry list of things that Orfield has said or written about a variety of topics in order to establish that Orfield is a liberal academic who has the nerve to disagree with positions that Paladino holds. If you’re interested, you can visit a local tea party website and see the whole thing: it is basically a compendium of ad hominem attacks and character assassination by a state official against an academic who dared to raise an objection. Who cares if Orfield didn’t like John Ashcroft? Who cares if Orfield is a Democrat or a liberal? To Paladino, that alone is enough to disqualify anything from anything.
That is the danger of all of this. While it’s arguably ok for private citizen Carl Paladino to hurl his hateful invective at anyone who dares to even mildly disagree with his dogma, Paladino is an elected state official. Not only does he owe the schools a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of all students, but if he decides—as a state official—to issue fatwas and wage jihad against everyone who dares to threaten or thwart his thinly veiled efforts to privatize and profit from schools, Constitutional and civil rights issues suddenly arise.
Perhaps more chilling than Paladino’s own efforts to defame and censor a critic, the Buffalo News’ editorial page gently chides Paladino for his behavior. The News has been a friend to charter schools, so its tsk-tsk tone is to be expected; however, the Buffalo News gets everything right except two: that Paladino sincerely wants to help, and that he can be a force for positive change. There is no evidence of the former, and while he could be a “force for positive change”, he’ll have to start acting like a responsible adult and less like a petulant toddler. The News says that Paladino sets back his own goals if he “self-destructs”. Unfortunately, self-destruction is what Paladino does. No one is as good at it as he.
Let the anti-intellectual insult follies continue, I guess. But it’s 2015 and reversion to what arguably worked in the 1930s isn’t the way forward.
The underlying goal isn’t unique to the Buffalo School District. Throughout New York State, tea party reactionaries have aligned themselves with the state government to bring about a simple equation.
1. De-fund the schools;
2. Cut electives and programs; fire teachers;
3. Break the teachers’ union;
4. Label schools as “low performing”;
5. Create “charter” schools;
6. Segregate better students into charters; exclude troubled, poor, and special education students;
7. Ensure that charters rent space from private landlords;
8. Profit.
That’s more or less what’s being attempted in Buffalo. It’s a district that has more than its share of socioeconomic crises, but instead of helping the most troubled and disadvantaged kids, powerful, monied interests now controlling the district seems to be writing them off. Instead, it’s moving forward with publicly funded private, exclusive charter schools, not all of which are all that high performing, either, thank you very much.
It’s not just Buffalo, by the way. In tony, conservative Clarence, a small but well-funded band of tea party activists have succeeded in de-funding the schools, which in turn led to cutting teachers, programs, electives, and every social worker in the district. Kids suffer so that some of western New York’s wealthiest residents can save pennies on their tax bill. No district, teacher, board, or student is safe from this new American movement to destroy public education.
But what apparently happened Thursday at a hastily organized public Buffalo Board of Education meeting is something new and chilling. Kevin Gibson is the Secretary of the Buffalo Teacher’s Federation, and has every right to be present at a Buffalo school board meeting, and to speak. He began his remarks with, “My name is Kevin Gibson, and I’m a teacher in Buffalo”. Just a few weeks ago, he gave this powerful presentation, blasting one local charter as being just as “low performing” as any other school.
But this Thursday, Gibson never got a chance to speak. It was a public meeting, and a public comment period. But when Gibson got up, this happened. Keep an eye on Larry Quinn, who seemingly has no patience for this job that he ran for and to which he was elected.
That is simply incredible. He wanted to make “one quick point” and ask “one question”, but was able to do neither. Watch Larry Quinn wave his arm majestically, motioning to the police to silence and remove Gibson from this public meeting in front of an elected board of public servants on public property. Watch tea party “liberty” activist Carl Paladino sit there like a lox, and do and say nothing. Carl Paladino, of all people, talks a big game about liberty and freedom and constitutional values, but when confronted with a genuine opportunity – as a publicly elected official – to carry out those values, he balks. Coward.
Carl Paladino, Larry Quinn, and the rest of the school board majority have created a fascist little banana republic for themselves. Rather than righting a dysfunctional ship, they have raised the dysfunction to hitherto-unheard of, comical and undemocratic levels.
Quinn interrupts Gibson and has him confirm that he’s a member of the BTF, and says that “this isn’t a BTF issue” before the police officer removes Gibson from the public meeting. What difference does that make? Gibson is a member of the public who has a stake in the Buffalo School District, and he had every right to speak at a public meeting within the rules. He wasn’t speaking out of turn, and never got a chance to begin his point. His membership in the BTF is irrelevant to his right to address the board during the public comment session of a public meeting.
When given any political power, Carl Paladino and Larry Quinn and their allies on the school board behave like every fascist in history. Shut down debate, use the police to stifle dissent.
If you’re a western New Yorker with a Facebook account, you’ve no doubt seen a minimum of 10 shares of this Gothamist article entitled, “Millennials are Moving to Buffalo & Living Like Kings” In typical Buffalo fashion, a positive article from an out-of-area media outlet sends us all into a frenzy of self-congratulation, smugly pleased that our choices to live in what others consider to be a grey, snowy wasteland are recognized as “not insane”.
Unlike most of these sorts of writer-discovers-Buffalo-Niagara-doesn’t-suck pieces, this one took the time to include a wide variety of voices from different backgrounds and walks of life. Even more surprisingly, it even addressed Buffalo’s systemic segregation, and how the renaissance many of us who “live like kings” perceive to be happening isn’t extending at all to poorer, less white neighborhoods.
“Living Like Kings” is a misnomer, as well. I suppose it depends on the kingdom, but I’m not aware of any proper royalty that’s working on gentrifying a poor neighborhood, buying a cheap fixer-upper and spending months rehabbing it. On the contrary, what the article describes is how some young people and recent college grads can find a quality of life in Buffalo that is easier and cheaper than what they’d find in, say, New York City. The waitress who can clear her $150 rent in one weekend shift of waitressing isn’t living like a Duchess – she’s living in a way that enables her to work, keep a roof over her head, pay her bills, and maybe save a little. She’s living like a human being.
But what the mostly poor, pre-existing residents of neighborhoods undergoing gentrification need goes beyond ironic, hashtagged tchotchke shops and coffee outlets. Not that there’s anything wrong with those, per se, but they exist to fuel the newcomers who sport pockets deep enough to accommodate some disposable income. The vast majority of people who live in the immediate vicinity of Hydraulic Hearth or Resurgence Brewery aren’t the ones ponying up $13 for an individual pizza or $6.50 for a beer. These are destination places – on your bike or in your car you go. Sort of like in the suburbs.
It’s the data points that matter – home prices are going up, wages are going up, and the decades-long annual emptying of Erie County has stabilized. But the central thesis of the article is that young people are re-inventing the American Dream by choosing to gentrify poor, minority neighborhoods. The population data, however, don’t support evidence of a widespread residential rebound for the city of Buffalo. The emptying continues apace.
This is all anecdotal, and at least one person in the article couldn’t help but throw shade at people who have different choices or goals. No, not everyone dreams of a big single-family house and expensive car, but not everyone gets a TV show, a sailboat, and an annual week on Nantucket, either. Not to mention, it’s nothing new for young people and couples with no kids to stay in the city, and the “death of the suburbs” meme ranges from anecdotal to pure fiction.
What we’re talking about is nothing new – upward mobility, wealth, development, gentrification. But this Gothamist article is different because it tackles the flipside of the equation head-on. Turning to the question of segregation and inequality, Gothamist asks what this all means for poor African-Americans in Buffalo:
Not much, Dr. Henry Louis Taylor told me when I visited him at his office at the University at Buffalo. If anything, he said, it makes things worse.
According to his research, Buffalo’s renaissance has sped up the decline of Buffalo’s predominantly African-American East Side neighborhoods. On his computer, he showed me two maps. One traced the location of nearly $3 billion worth of new residential, commercial and medical developments downtown. The other showed African-American population losses and gains in surrounding areas. When the maps are overlaid, they show blacks leaving the East Side neighborhoods next to the concentration of downtown development, and moving to far-flung reaches of the city.
“I’m not convinced that most folks here are anchored by a larger vision of the type of city they want to build. They equate a revitalized city with a bunch of white people doing their thing in it,” Taylor said.
“I’m not anti-growth, but I think the purpose of growth is to build a city that is just and a good place to live and raise a family for everybody that is there,” he added. “And so I think you judge that city by what it does for the least of the members of that society and the extent to which it’s consciously attempting to develop all of these communities. I think Buffalo is trapped in a growth for growth’s sake model, and that model never looks at social consequences.”
This is the first time I’ve read that Buffalo’s re-development is doing palpable, measurable harm to residents of Buffalo’s near East Side. While the promised jobs at the medical campus or SolarCity have the potential to help the city-at-large, there’s not much there to combat the broken families, crushing poverty, hopelessness, and dysfunctional school system – now run by privatizers. It’s important to work to ensure that everyone is lifted up in this putative Buffalo renaissance, and to put things in their proper perspective.
The Gothamist article is worthy of praise because it doesn’t just stop at bespectacled youngsters making a life for themselves or coffee shops or chicken coops or breweries or skating rinks. It addresses the uglier truths and pervasive, persistent issues we face and haven’t adequately addressed. If it helps bring more people to Buffalo to make a life, that’s more economic activity, more tax revenue, and a better chance to help lift up every western New Yorker. There seems to be no real plan or concerted effort to ensure that our renaissance isn’t simultaneously exploiting other Buffalonians.
For some reason, not all of my posts transferred neatly from Artvoice to here. Nevertheless, even though I already wrote that year-end retrospective posts suck, here is my sucky 2014 retrospective.
The NYS Thruway Authority is the worst. It is emblematic of what’s wrong with all NYS Authorities; mired in 50s groupthink, resistant to change, wasteful.
I posted this. It’s still accurate. Today is “elevated”.
Nevertheless, the authority is planning no layoffs or fare hikes – at least not yet – as it pleads for greater funding from Albany. All public transit systems require government subsidies to operate, but it won’t be enough for Albany simply to shovel more money in the NFTA’s direction.
There will also have to be a re-evaluation of what the authority’s mission is and what it should be doing differently to accomplish it.
The News suggests that the NFTA needs to figure out a better way to serve the growing medical campus, adding that,
For 20 years, it has used money meant for capital projects to balance its operating budget.
That money has now dried up. There is less money for maintenance, meaning broken escalators don’t get fixed and old buses aren’t replaced. That further discourages riders from using the system, further pinching the authority’s financial resources.
NFTA Commissioner Kimberly A. Minkel had it exactly right: Unless it’s interrupted, the NFTA is caught in a “death spiral.” The problems will feed on one another until only a skeleton of a transit system remains. That cycle, therefore, must be interrupted, and Albany is the only likely source of intervention.
The News notes that Buffalo’s urban poor rely heavily on the NFTA’s service. This is true, but limiting the NFTA’s scope to just serving people who can’t afford cars is self-defeating. Begging Governor Cuomo for more aid is hardly the solution to a longstanding, systemic “death spiral”.
The News’ editorial essentially rejects the notion that the NFTA could or should fix itself or aim any higher than the faded and tired service it provides to Buffalo’s underclass.
RGRTA had a six-zone, complicated system and the fares were between $1.25 and $3.10. The cost recovery at the time was 28 percent and the on-time performance was 76 percent.
Today it is paying employees more, healthcare costs have gone up and fuel costs more, but despite that, it has become less reliant on taxpayer dollars than it was before.
It’s also grown to 840 employees, more than 400 vehicles, an on-time performance up to 90 percent, it’s eliminated the six-zone system and went to one fare for all rides. In 2008 the fares went from $1.25 to just $1.00 for a ride. And the cost recovery is up to 41 percent.
This strategic shift is something the team has been really focused on, [RGTRA CEO Mark] Aesch says. RGRTA has increased ridership six consecutive years, up to just shy of 18 million folks a year and it has had five straight years of surpluses and will have made $33 million over the last five years.
I don’t know if the NFTA has the brains or will to hire someone as effective as Mr. Aesch, but luckily he wrote a book about his experience. Basically, the RGTRA re-focused its goal from “save money” to “achieve excellence”. In this interview, he explains that the RGTRA board was, in 2004, in the same boat as the NFTA is now, and the board recognized the crisis, a business-oriented board with a clearly defined notion of success, and a willingness to make bold decisions. (Here’s another article about Rochester’s amazing success).
Instead of a survivor mindset, which would result in just cost savings, they pursued excellence.
“Some people would say we’ve cut service. No, we were looking to drive productivity,” he says. “We were strategically trying to become more efficient in our delivery to the community.”
He continues, “They look at other people and they say, ‘We’re going to cut service on some route.’ Well, there are two people riding it.
“You’re going to jeopardize 60,000 people a day over two people that you’re running a bus one way 30 miles for? I’m not sure that’s cutting service, I think that’s silly.” He stresses, “It’s all very strategically driven.”
There were two changes that were critical to this process. One was changing the thinking from customers to passengers and the other was becoming less reliant on tax dollars.
“We wanted to get us to no longer pick up passengers but to pick up customers,” Aesch says. “You can easily get people to just parrot that. ‘Fine, if the boss wants us to call them customers instead of passengers, that’s what we’ll call them.’
“But it’s getting people to culturally think of it differently.”
Specifically, the change in language was key to changing the corporate mindset – a passenger is someone with no choice, Aesch says.
In “Driving Excellence,” he says he tells the story of one of their employees that he had an encounter with. “He essentially said, who cares if we get the buses cleaner, they were riding before, what difference does it make if we make them cleaner?”
A big difference, as it turns out. Bus cleanliness is important to the customer. Even the very poor customers who have no choice.
What changed it at RGRTA was putting together a plan with a vision, strategies, operating tactics and a measurement system so that everybody can follow where the agency is headed.
And in six years Aesch says they haven’t adopted a budget, they adopt a plan.
The plan is the vision statement that he says tells them what they are trying to be “when they grow up.” The plan also outlines the strategies needed to implement to achieve that vision.
The last piece, he says, is aligning the money to realize those operating tactics and then building a measurement system to outline whether they are successful.
“One thing I just love about the plan more than anything, this is very transparent, we put this out in front of everybody so for each one of our four strategies … we say 14 months ahead of time on March 31, 2011, ‘The authority is successful if,’ and there are numbers with each one of these things.
Vision and plan? On Planet Byron Brown? Is this even possible? Is this real life? Aesch went on to rally the troops and hold a pep rally when things started to look up.
“What I said to the employees was, if you felt like you helped this year, to dig us out of this massive hole to succeed, you can come up now and we’re all going to sign the letter submitting the plan to the board for the coming year. “
He explains how they ended the pep rally, with U2’s “Beautiful Day” playing in the background, the high energy and excitement in the garage and employees coming up and signing their plan.
One of the drivers that had challenged policies when Aesch came on board, came up at the rally and said he wasn’t going to sign the letter.
“He’s looking down — tall guy — and I said, ‘That’s OK, Caesar, don’t sign the letter.’” And Aesch says he was thinking at the time, “Don’t bring me down on a day that’s exciting.”
The driver said he couldn’t sign the letter. “I kind of hesitated for a minute thinking if he can’t read or write, that’s not why he’s going to sign?
“He says, ‘I’m not going to sign the letter because I don’t deserve to. I didn’t help, I was in the way, I was an obstacle, but this coming year I will help, I will do the right things, I will advance the organization and next year I’ll be able to sign the letter.’”
I’m pulling so many quotes because I love everything about this whole story about how Rochester’s mass transit system pulled itself out of mediocrity, and wishing to God almighty that the NFTA takes a cue from the people 60 miles to the east.
They recruited RIT to help test everything that the RGTRA uses.
One of the areas they’re working together on is with the vehicle diagnostic testing pre-breakdown so when testing equipment, it will send an automatic signal back to radio control before the bus breaks down, telling them the bus is thinking about breaking down.
And this – the NFTA could, at the very least, do this.
rochesterhomepage.net
And when he talks about technology advancements, Aesch stresses that it’s all about achieving a strategy. Another that they’re in the process of is rolling out signage at stops to let riders know when buses are coming.
“We’re not putting them up because they’re cool,” he says. “About 70 percent of our customers who call our call center are looking for information on timeliness of when the next bus will be. Seventy percent.
“We’re doing this investment to help reduce the number of incoming calls to the call center so that we will be able to address that from an efficiency perspective.” He stresses, “It’s a very specific investment that we’re making.”
When you stop thinking of riders as mere passengers and start thinking of them as customers with a choice to take – or not take – the bus, you improve service and results. The service started partnering with schools and businesses to get subsidized routes.
Talking about their partnership with RIT leads to a discussion of how RIT subsidizes the route and that it’s not the typical “paying for passes” that many educational institutions have with transit properties.
“Businesses would typically say, ‘Well I pay taxes, so run a bus, bring me customers, bring me employees.’ Our reaction to that is, you also pay taxes to have water lines put in but you don’t expect to just get your water for free, you’re clearly going to get a water bill at the end of the month for the water that your company consumes. So if we’re going to extend a bus line to bring you customers to shop at your mall or employees to work at your nursing home or students to go to your college, we will enter in to a business relationship to deliver that to you.”
When providing service to the community, RGRTA questioned whether the responsibility of the agency is to provide a bus to provide service to people who ride it or if it’s to take as little money from the taxpayers to support it.
“After chewing on that for a couple months, we decided the answer was, ‘Yes,’” Aesch says. “What we did is we took and built a measurement system which takes the service side: how many people are on board a bus, and we give it a score. Then we take the cost recovery side: how much does the taxpayer have to put in, and then we give the bus a score.
“Then we add those two together and that tells us the answer to how are we doing and rather than ‘cutting service,’ as so many folks are apt to do, we’re able to go in with a microscope and then a scalpel.”
As he explains, if there are a lot of people on board a bus but very low cost recovery, there is a service obligation to provide that service. Conversely, if there are only a handful of people on board the bus but it has a high cost recovery score because it’s a subsidized route, the taxpayer’s not putting money in.
“What we’re looking for is, where do we have very few people, or nobody, and where is the taxpayer paying and that’s where we get the microscope and the scalpel to find those kinds of trips. We’re looking to balance all the time,” he says.
[Aesch] suggests to other agencies: Build a road map, have a plan and have a measurement system which tells you whether or not you’re being successful in the implementation of your plan. And the last piece he says is to have the courage to make the right decisions.
Aesch will be leaving RGRTA at the end of the year. He really likes what he does and he says he’s really proud of how they do it, but the part that really excites him, that he’s really passionate about, is the public sector management piece.
He says, “It happens to be public transit today, but whether it’s a hospital, a school district or a sewer system, I like being able to take what people traditionally see as stodgy, tired government bureaucracy and turn that into a lean, mean efficient, less-taxpayer-dollars-needed business mindset organization.”
It was, on its face, harmless – no one was attacking or criticizing Paladino, and not all that many people realized it was his house.
So, Paladino sent an email around, entitled “This Westchester House”, featuring a picture – poached from the New York Times – of Andrew Cuomo’s Mount Kisco manse:
Of course, Paladino had to take a political swipe at Cuomo. It’s Carl being Carl®.
