Atlanta Magazine recently interviewed the new CEO of MARTA, and a couple of things caught my attention. Primarily:
Most recently, (Jeffrey) Parker was vice president at infrastructure and design firm HNTB Corp.’s Atlanta office, where he ran the company’s Georgia practice. His base salary with MARTA is $350,000.
$350,000?? For running MARTA? AKA installing some wi-fi hotspots on trains, putting up some signage to report bad behavior, but otherwise doing jack shit towards the grander spectrum of, y’know, expanding, or growing the network?
I don’t discount the grandiose accomplishments of former CEO Keith Parker, as it must have been true yeoman’s work getting MARTA’s books into the black. But as far as Jeffrey Parker is concerned, a massive undertaking has already been taken off of his plate. He’s not going to have to start in the red, because Keith had already brought the entire agency out of it already. But at the same time, that means the microscope will be even more magnified, because Jeffrey won’t have the cushion of “well, I need to stabilize financially” to fall back onto when he inevitably does absolutely nothing, for years, and banks $350,000 per, along the way.
This bothers me more than the story of Kasim Reed blowing $500,000+ of taxpayer funds on his way out the door on crony bonuses (including five figure prizes for an ugly sweater karaoke contest). I mean, most everyone already knew Reed was incompetent and a stooge of a mayor in the first place, so flagrantly blowing taxpayer money isn’t really that big of a surprise. For the matter, most everyone already knows MARTA is a joke of a transit authority, but at least I didn’t, know that the CEO was making fucking $350,000 a year.
Surely there are doctors who don’t make that much money a year, and they literally save peoples’ lives on a daily basis. What the fuck does a MARTA CEO do in comparison? Operate the agency that gives those doctors among others the means to get to work in alternative fashion so they can take home a little bit of side coin on the Clean Air Campaign?
That’s bullshit. His salary should be half of that, at the very most. More, only on performance based bonuses, or achievements, for actually making a difference to the company as a whole. There’s no way a stooge like a MARTA CEO should be getting paid almost like a professional athlete, especially when the world is full of way more valuable individuals who make way less money on a regular basis.
The rest of the interview is pretty fluff and bullshit, but the final question is pretty telling of Jeffrey Parker’s plan to do nothing:
Looking into the crystal ball a little bit, how do you think MARTA of 2025 or 2030 will be different? Will parking lots be obsolete? Any other significant changes?
By that time, we’re going to have new rail cars, which will be tremendous not only to the people who ride in them, but they’ll have better reliability and a lower cost to maintain.
New train cars . . . but no mention of actual new routes or areas in which MARTA will operate. But the most telling thing is Jeffrey Parker’s attitude towards cars, the things that a successful MARTA expansion would have an impact in potentially reducing:
I don’t know about you, but I still plan on probably owning a car in 2025
In other words, this is his way of saying “I don’t plan on intentionally accomplishing shit for the next seven years, so I’m most definitely going to still need my Lexus in 2025.”
I mean it’s not really a surprise that a MARTA CEO is going to be a lazy corporate stooge, but it’s not often that they’re so candid about how incompetent they’re actually planning to be.
It’s just disgusting that he’ll be making $350k a year while doing it, unfortunately.
