Why I Work for RTD: Kevin Diviness

Kevin Diviness
Director of Quality Assurance, Capital Programs (25 years)

“I am retiring from RTD in March. I live near Elizabeth on the Front Range side. We're going to move full time to our place up in Breckenridge. I’ll be outdoors, skiing in the winter, hiking in the summer. That will be my new lifestyle. That's where we want to settle, at least for the next 15, 20 years.

“That house is part of my story of how I came to be here. My wife and I have always loved Colorado. We took our honeymoon in Crested Butte. In 1999, we rented a place in Blue River, which is just outside of Breckenridge, and really liked it. We found a log cabin with a view of the backside of Keystone, and we ended up purchasing it from the architect in February of 2000, almost 26 years ago.

“I was working in Dallas with Rick Clarke. He was a consultant, and I remember him saying, I'm going to go to Colorado. There's a new project. I told him, Rick, if you hear anything, you know my wife and I have a place in Colorado, and we like it there. Just let me know if anything comes up. And then I was told to look at RTD’s website. They were going to be posting for a quality manager, and that was my job in Dallas – I was the quality assurance manager for DART’s version of capital programs. When I saw this position come open, I applied for it.

“I am a husband and father. My wife and I have been married for 35 years. Our kids are all grown and in the area. One of them lives in Longmont, and two of them live in the Greeley area. My wife is the kitchen manager for the elementary school in our local school system. She will retire in May. We're both looking forward to doing that together and doing new things that we haven't had time for.

“I was in the military. I served in the Texas and Wyoming National Guard earlier in my RTD career. RTD has always been very supportive of the veterans and the people who were still in the reserve. I got deployed twice. I got called up for four months in 2003, and then I missed all of 2004 for Operation Iraqi Freedom. And the support I got from RTD – leaving here, going away, and then people staying in contact with me when I was gone and coming back and trying to reintegrate – was just great. Not all companies are like that.

“RTD has a large veteran population. On Veterans Day, seeing the honor guard come out, that's a shared experience that for those of us who have been in the military, it brings back memories. I'm glad we do that.

“There's a certain discipline in the military, a way you go about solving problems.
There are no Rambos. You have to work as a unit to identify what the objective is and then figure out what's plan A, what's Plan B, what's plan C, because planning often fails. You always have another way to continue, because there's no excuse for not meeting your objective in the military. And that’s kind of like what we do here. I think that's why veterans fit in so well in an organization like RTD, where we're all trying to achieve objectives together and things go wrong. There are snowstorms that happen, and roads that get closed, and bridges that get crashed into. Things happen out there, and we have to figure out how to solve them.

“Having worked on so many projects, you know that the infrastructure you're building is going to be there long after you're gone. And 40, 50 years from now, long after I've left the planet, people are going to be riding the services that I was a part of.

“We make lives better through connections, right? The grand openings are going to always be my best memories, because that's when it stops being a project and starts being a connection. You see actual passengers getting on the trains for the first time. Every time we've had one of these grand openings, I've always volunteered to be an ambassador.

“We are multimodal. We try very hard to meet a diverse set of needs that aren’t always in unison. They sometimes conflict, and we have to do what we think is best for the agency, for the people who are going to be using the service.

“I'm a guy who keeps commitments. If you ask me to do something, I will do my best to help you. If I ever tell you I'm going to do something, you don't have to lose any more sleep over it. It's going to get done.”