At a time when executive compensation is dominating the headlines, RTD board members this week rejected general manager Cal Marsella’s request to defer a salary increase and performance bonus due him.
Marsella’s base salary at the Regional Transportation District was $290,286 last year. His contract calls for an annual salary increase based on a review of compensation packages paid to leaders of transit agencies in five comparable cities.
Based on that review, Marsella was eligible for a 4.87 percent salary increase, totaling $14,137, at the start of this year.
He also was eligible to earn a bonus of 12.5 percent — worth $36,286 this year — after meeting 2008 performance measures.
Tuesday, a committee of RTD’s board rejected Marsella’s request to defer, until next year, the salary increase and performance bonus.
RTD director Noel Busck said the group decided to pay the salary increase and bonus this year “because we wanted to be transparent.”
“We have a contract with Mr. Marsella just like we have a union contract,” Busck said, adding that deferring the increase and bonus “would not help the budget substantially.”
Marsella’s benefits also include a pension credit equal to 2 1/2 years of service for each year worked, retroactive to 1995. And he can roll over unused vacation and sick time each year — the current total is about 2,000 hours — and cash them out when he leaves RTD.
Some say Marsella’s compensation package is excessive at a time when the agency — facing a budget shortfall — has frozen salaries for other managers and is proposing to link possible raises for unionized bus and rail operators and mechanics to a restoration of sales-tax-revenue growth.
Agency officials predict sales-tax revenues will be down 4.4 percent from 2008.
“Why are government-sponsored entities allowed to enter into contracts with chief executives that offer bonuses for job performance using taxpayer money?” said Sen. Lois Tochtrop, D-Thornton. “Maybe the General Assembly needs to look into this.”
Tochtrop requested and received from RTD a detailed accounting of Marsella’s compensation package.
Marsella, 58, who has headed RTD since 1995, defends his contract. Under his leadership, the agency has twice been named “transit agency of the year” by a national transit group and, until now, has delivered light-rail lines on time and on budget.
Marsella said he has been recruited for chief executive positions at other top transit agencies that pay similar compensation or more and “I’ve chosen to stay.”
“This is a market-based determination,” he said of his RTD package.
Former RTD board member and chairman Jack McCroskey, a long-time Marsella critic, sees it differently.
“This is a matrix of greed and duplicity,” said McCroskey, who has used public comment periods at RTD board meetings to criticize Marsella’s compensation and urge RTD directors to review its terms.
