The board of directors of the struggling Pittsburgh Regional Transit last week awarded CEO Katharine Kelleman a $55,049 bonus and a 5 percent salary increase, pushing her new total compensation to $382,649, reports the Post-Gazette.
PRT board Chairwoman Jennifer Liptak defended, as she has in the past, the increases by noting that Kelleman has “done a good job under very difficult circumstances.” Per the P-G, Liptak noted, in its words, how the mass-transit agency “is still recovering from ridership losses due to the pandemic and financial problems related to the state not increasing its operating subsidy for transit agencies in more than 10 years.”
Of course, there’s no admission that there’s lots rotten in the state of PRT.
Further notes the PRT board chair, “I’d say this is a pretty big system [2,600 employees], so that salary really isn’t out of line. [The PRT chief] has a lot to deal with. We’re happy to have her.” …
“She has been able to keep us running and I don’t think we should change from that,” Liptak said.
But when the Tribune-Review wanted to know exactly how the PRT CEO’s bonus was determined, Liptak demurred, calling a “personnel matter.”
Not so fast, folks. As the Trib’s Julia Burdelski reported on Monday:
“Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association … said not all information under the category of ‘personnel matters’ ought to be withheld from the public. Nothing prohibits the transit agency from revealing the metrics used to grade its CEO — and Pennsylvania’s Right to Know Law could even compel the agency to provide such information, though officials would not be required to release Kelleman’s performance reviews or scores.
“’Just because something is a personnel matter does not mean it’s inaccessible,’ Melewsky said. ‘It’s not unusual for reporters to hear that sort of generalization.’”
PRT is a public authority. It’s funded by public money. And the exact metrics used to determine her bonus indeed are public information. Period.
Ah, the practice of Orwellian obfuscation in defending higher pay and a bonus for a job performance that struggles to rise to mediocre. Gee, some might even call it a “failure.”
As the Allegheny Institute often has noted, ridership continues to badly lag pre-pandemic numbers (though they might finally begin to rise with mandatory return-to-the office edicts coming down, beginning this spring with PNC).
As the Post-Gazette reported Tuesday, through the end of 2025, daily bus ridership of 94,123 remains down just over 40 percent compared to 2019. Light-rail system numbers were worse with daily ridership of 8,423, down nearly 63 percent from 2019’s peak.
Additionally, and as this think tank’s analysts have repeatedly shown, PRT’s costs in key metrics rival even those of much larger public transit operations in far larger metro areas, including New York City.
And for this, and other failings, the PRT CEO is rewarded? And, really, she met her board’s “goals” for the year? That doesn’t say much for the board.
The optics are bad enough. The reality is worse – a raise is granted and a hefty bonus is awarded for keeping sparsely populated buses and light-rail cars running and the promise of a come-lately (but no-brainer) plan to finally concentrate on transit routes that produce the most passenger counts, apparently, it is reported, in a last-ditch effort to appease state legislators to up PRT’s taxpayer subsidies.
Don’t try this in the private sector. There, the PRT boss would be struggling to keep her situation.
Where bold action is required – think of our Monday call for PRT to contract out its operations to the private sector being one – the public gets more of the same mush that has plagued PRT and its prior Port Authority iteration for more than 60 years.
By the way, Pittsburgh Regional Transit’s published “vision” is to “be our region’s transportation mode of choice by delivering an innovative network that is clean, sustainable and equitable; a network that enables individuals, businesses and economies to thrive.”
It’s stated “mission” is to “advance our region by investing in our communities and connecting people in a safe, equitable and reliable manner.”
Well, if those statements truly are its guiding lights, why is it not advocating in Harrisburg for that money-saving competitive contracting out of some or all of its operations?
Where is its lobbying of the state Legislature, as a matter of worker “equity,” to adopt a Right-to-Work law?
Why hasn’t PRT lobbied for recission of prevailing wage rules that typically inflate government construction contracts by 25 percent or more? Imagine what PRT could do with that extra money.
And, good grief, why hasn’t it fought, and fought tooth and rail, to eliminate transit workers’ cudgel-wielding right to strike and to eliminate a union’s ability to insert operational poison pills into labor contracts that are anathema to not only economic and operational efficiencies but also to PRT stated “vision” and “mission”?
The CEO’s new pay package – that $55,000-plus bonus in particular – awards vanilla, and a cheap extract at that. The PRT board should be ashamed.
And so should Kelleman. If she had any sense of professional decorum, she’d decline the bonus and the pay raise as a matter of principle.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
