A conversation with CEO and General Manager Debra A. Johnson: ‘RTD has always been at the forefront’

RTD this week welcomes a new top executive: public transit veteran Debra A. Johnson, who brings leadership honed over multiple decades at some of the largest agencies in the country. Debra joins RTD from Long Beach Transit, for which she served as Deputy CEO for more than six years.

During her last days in Southern California, Debra agreed to sit down with us and answer some questions before beginning her new role in Colorado. The conversation that followed is being presented in four parts, starting today.

You are joining RTD amid a period of change and uncertainty introduced by the pandemic that the agency, the industry and the world have not seen during this lifetime. What from your experience to this point has prepared you for this moment?

Life is about delicious ambiguity – it never goes according to plan. We oftentimes may think that our lives should take a certain path, and then, unbeknownst to us, something else happens. Being in this industry, there’s always things that occur, and we have to have contingency plans in place. That’s why it’s important that one has a continuity of operations plan – you can always have a service disruption, be it a train that is supposed to arrive at a certain time. You can have some kind of instance where you have an emergency, and you have to offload a train. Same thing can happen from the bus vantage point. As we look at where we are, I think flexibility and agility remain to be a constant, and I also pride myself on being open to new ideas of continuous improvement. With that as a backdrop, we always have to plan for something else. And having those contingency plans in place enables us to forge ahead.

Considering where we are with the pandemic, I’ve been in areas in which we’ve been prone to have protests. This occurred when I was working in the Washington, D.C., area, where we would have to coordinate with the Office of Personnel Management when we were going to shut down the government, because we were expecting snow. Having these plans in place basically enables me to leverage those, because what is it we’re going to do if we have to detour buses? How are we going to communicate that out to the customer, so he or she has a better understanding of what they need to do to get home? What are our proactive steps in doing that? With that all as a backdrop, it’s always ensuring you have contingency plans. While we may not know every single instance about what could occur, having those plans in place that can be adaptable to the situation, and basically leveraging the lessons learned, always having a hotwash after you have an event. What can we do to capitalize on this going forward so we can have this framework in place, so we can pick up the playbook and be able to leverage it when we need to?

What have you observed RTD’s reputation to be from a distance? What do you understand the issues and opportunities to be as you step into your new role?

RTD has always been at the forefront. One thing for certain I would say, over the past 20 years, RTD has been in building mode. What I understand it to be now is, let’s ensure we’re delivering service. I think if anything, it’s changing one’s mind to envelop around that, due to the fact that if you’ve always been in building mode, and you’re adding on and adding on and adding on, it’s getting comfortable in the sense of, like, here we have these new routes, here we have these new lines. What are we doing to ensure that we have a comprehensive transportation network that will appear to our customer to be seamless, and how can we internally embrace that, so we have a broader understanding of what it is that we should be doing?

The ultimate objective here, in my opinion, is to deliver service to the vast majority of the public that need to get to activity centers, which include – in another time – higher education facilities and institutions, doctor’s appointments, places of employment and things of the like. But now, even more so, getting those essential workers where they need to go. I think it needs to be a cultural shift in relationship to how RTD views itself internal to the organization, and sort of step back from just the building aspect and have that cohesiveness as it relates to delivering service that people have come to rely upon.

Your career has taken shape at transit agencies in California and Washington, D.C. What has working in these parts of the country taught you, and what lessons and observations will you carry with you to Colorado?

Having started my career in the Bay Area – and, specifically, working at a consulting firm on a major interstate project with the Department of Transportation (Caltrans) there – and going to a public hearing in Berkeley, quite naturally I am familiar with public comment periods going on for three or four hours, especially when I worked in the People’s Republic of San Francisco. I think if anything, it’s listening to individuals. It has taught me that I have two ears and one mouth, and that oftentimes I should listen more than I speak, because you can garner a lot of understanding from doing so.

More specifically, in Washington, D.C., that was really working in a fishbowl. And what I mean by that is the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) was formed by Congress via compact, and had many jurisdictional partners that created said compact – or the authority, I should say. One thing that was interesting in contrast to my experience in California is that no one owned WMATA, and what I meant by that is no one’s a champion, because it was created by the federal government. So the configuration of that board at the time I was there basically was equal – you could not have a jurisdictional veto. So oftentimes, you had to build consensus, and it could look very different than what you started out with. Whatever initiative or program you put forward, it would mesh into something else. But one thing is for certain: that everybody has an opinion, and especially with the District of Columbia being the District of Columbia and having taxation without representation, that stuck in their craw a lot. Oftentimes the needs of Virginia and Maryland were more important, but when one keeps in mind that building that system was predicated upon getting people into the federal city, everything has to come through D.C.

What’s interesting about that is having come from California – where we embrace public involvement to such a high extent, and public engagement – WMATA at the time I was there did not have a public comment period during our board meetings. The only type of public meeting that was held was a budget hearing prior to the adoption of our budget, because that was written into the compact. And so, me being the California girl – and was nicknamed Cali Girl and Bougie Boo and all this other stuff, because I was asking those types of questions – I really had the opportunity to forge ahead and develop, in line with the board, a public comment period. And more so, we did not have any type of method whereby the public could request information. It was really interesting: Some people were like, we don’t have to give them that, because we did not have any laws governing us, because we weren’t a state agency. We fell to the federal government.

One thing that I learned by that is ensuring that we gave people an opportunity to have a voice. So, working in tandem with the board when I was the director of communications there, it was ensuring that we developed an advisory council. There was an application process, it was extensive, and there were representatives from the jurisdiction that then could provide the voice of the customer to the board, to have a clear-cut understanding of what the issues were. Those were lessons in and of itself, by having an extreme level of public involvement. We don’t know what we don’t know. Sometimes we become so insular inside of our organization, making an assumption that, oh, they know that. They know how to do this. Well, no. But what’s paramount is actually getting out into the system, engaging with our customers, going to public meetings, going to where the people are and engaging with them so you can garner a better understanding of what their experience is. Until you understand what that is, you won’t be able to address the needs of your customer.

Debra talks tomorrow about community outreach and connecting with the public. To read that part of the conversation, visit the News Stop.