RTD General Manager Cal Marsella, who has led the agency’s expansion of light rail and bus service over the past 14 years, will leave his post July 31 to join a private transportation company.
“It is with mixed emotions that I make this announcement,” Marsella, 58, told a hastily assembled news conference at Regional Transportation District headquarters this morning. “It’s been a long and wonderful run.”
He is joining MV Transportation, a Fairfield, Calif.-based provider of bus services to communities.
Marsella will open a Denver office of the company and head a newly established rail division with the aim of winning commuter-rail and light-rail operating contracts.
After he leaves the Denver transit agency, Marsella will not be able to work on any business with RTD for one year. MV Transportation has a contract now with RTD for van service, said agency spokesman Scott Reed. When Marsella joins MV, the company can keep its contract but Marsella cannot work on that contract or do any other MV work with RTD for a year, Reed said.
Under Marsella’s tenure as RTD chief, the agency added the Southwest, Southeast and Central Platte Valley light rail lines.
Success with that expansion led RTD to ask area voters to back FasTracks, which calls for six more trains and the extension of three existing light-rail lines.
Since voters approved a 0.4 percent sales tax in 2004 to build FasTracks, the project’s finances have gone off track, with the price tag rising and the tax base to build it shrinking when compared with earlier forecasts.
Currently, RTD says it is short $2.2 billion to build FasTracks by 2017 as originally planned.
To stay on that schedule, the RTD board is considering taking another ballot measure to voters this fall, asking them to double the FasTracks tax.
That decision is expected in July or August, said Lee Kemp, chairman of RTD’s board of directors.
Kemp said directors shortly will convene a committee to look for Marsella’s successor and they hope to have that person in place within six months.
Marsella acknowledged that FasTracks is “the most ambitious construction program in the country” among transit agencies, but said he was not leaving RTD with a leadership vacuum as it works to solve the project’s financial difficulties.
“Good organizations are deep enough where vacuums are not created,” he said. “There are probably eight people capable of stepping up. This board brings capability and depth.”
“Cal Marsella was the catalyst who brought our entire region together around the transportation ideas that became FasTracks. For that we should all be grateful, and we wish Cal well in his future endeavors,” said Mayor John Hickenlooper in a statement. “We also now turn our attention to supporting the RTD board in its search for new leadership at a critical time for FasTracks and its future. We will do everything we can to support the program and ensure not one step is missed.”
Several RTD board members said they suspected Marsella was being courted for better-paying jobs, but they were surprised by the timing of his departure.
“It was a bit of a surprise to me,” said director Bruce Daly. “I wish he had hung on a bit longer but it was his decision.”
Marsella makes more than $300,000 a year as RTD’s chief and he’s come in for criticism from some for having too rich a pay and benefit package.
Marsella said the employment contract for his new job is better than his RTD package, but he did not provide details.
Daly said he would have preferred to see Marsella stay at least long enough to see through RTD’s efforts to secure a critical $1 billion federal grant for FasTracks.
RTD hopes to get that federal money as core funding for the East Corridor train from Union Station to Denver International Airport and for the Gold Line train to Arvada/Wheat Ridge. The agency hopes the federal funds will mesh with another billion dollars in private financing to key a public-private partnership’s effort to build the two commuter-rail lines and other FasTracks elements.
RTD director Wally Pulliam said he read Marsella’s “body language” recently and believed the RTD leader was considering leaving the agency. He met with Marsella last week to try to persuade him to stay until the federal funding and public-private partnership on the Gold and East lines were set, Pulliam said.
At the statehouse, news of Marsella’s departure was greeted with mixed reactions.
Rep. Joe Rice, D-Littleton, said when he was Glendale’s mayor he worked closely with Marsella and their relationship continued when Rice became a lawmaker.
“He’s tremendously responsive. He works with all sides. Even when you disagree with him he still sits and talks to you,” Rice said.
“RTD and the metro area would be in a world of hurt if not for Cal’s service. It’s a real loss. He’s built an incredibly strong organization and an ethic in the metro area that transit is important, it’s beneficial to economic development, to land use, to the environment.
“Clearly things will go on, but I’m concerned.”
Rep. Frank McNulty, R-Highlands Ranch, touched on the agency’s recent budget troubles.
“Hopefully the board will see fit to pick a new executive director that will work well with the legislature, keep their priorities in line with funding, have realistic funding expectations and the numbers will match the revenues. Hopefully the new director will lead us in a responsible direction regarding mass transit.”
RTD director Bill McMullen said the general manager’s job at the agency should be attractive to many around the country.
“I expect we will see the cream of the crop apply for this position,” McMullen said. “We are a very desirable place to come, have a successful career and ride on these coattails.”
