BCBusiness

38 BCBusiness NOVEMBER 2015 service and making transit cool in car-centric Atlanta. Voters in one of the three counties in Atlanta that didn't have transit service voted ear- lier this year to support a one per cent sales tax to get it. And the American Public Trans- portation Association named Parker outstanding public- transit manager of 2015. Vancouverites hearing all this can't help but wonder: is this the glorious future that awaits their favourite public- agency whipping boy, Trans- Link? The Lower Mainland transit authority is, of course, looking for a new CEO after Ian Jarvis was unceremoni- ously removed from the posi- tion a couple of weeks before our ill-fated transit-tax plebi- scite earlier this year. (The hiring process was temporar- ily put on hold in August, at the suggestion of the minister in charge of TransLink, Peter Fassbender.) Will this new leader inspire con'idence, add service, transform the province's relationship with the transit agency it loves to undermine and turn perpet- ual TransLink critic Jordan Bateman of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation into a superfan? Umm, maybe. Depends on whether that new leader has the leeway to make real change, say local experts in public relations. And it depends, says one Atlanta transit-advocacy group, on what else is happening with every other part of the complex transit ecosystem. A leader can't turn an organization around if all the conditions that led to problems before are still in place, says Patti Schom- Moffatt, principal of PSM Ventures Inc., who has spent 35 years working in crisis and reputation man- agement. She's worked with companies or agen- cies with badly dented rep- utations and helped move their image ratings up the scale. But it never happens easily. And it can't happen if only the leader changes. "If nothing changes but the person and the title, and all the other constraints are still in place, I cannot see that person being suc- cessful," says Schom-Mo¥att. "A leader can make a gigantic difference if the mandate is to make a di¥erence and it's no-holds-barred." But if Trans- Link continues to operate with all of its current conditions— revenue frozen at present levels after the province and public have rejected all possi- bilities for new sources; a gov- ernance system where no one appears to be really in charge— the greatest new leader in the world will have a hard time making headway. Schom-Moffatt, public- relations consultant Leslie Boldt and others say that a strong, communications- savvy new leader can make a di¥erence if the only problem the organization has is com- munications—if the company or agency has a decent story to tell but hasn't been success- ful at telling it. "If it really is a leadership issue, they need to show a few wins and they need to communicate those wins, show that they're getting this back on track," says Boldt. (Though doing a quick win like cutting costs, as Parker did in Atlanta, may be more challenging here, since Trans- Link already trimmed almost $100 million from its $1-billion budget in 2014.) Boldt, like many in the transit-advocate camp, believes that accusa- tions of terrible management at TransLink are often unfair. "Its 'inancial management versus other transit authori- ties is not bad and in some cases better." Finally, whether that new CEO has to contend with basic operations and governance problems or mainly com- munications maladroitness, turning around the reputa- tion of a transit agency is a di¥erent challenge. "In other kinds of busi- nesses, you don't have an opportunity for something minor or major to go wrong every day," says Boldt. Trans- Link serves almost a million passengers daily and is vul- nerable to everything from electricity failures to trees falling on tracks to everything that happens in a big public- serving space. On the other hand, as has happened with Keith Parker in Atlanta, outside forces can come together for the good. "I think Keith Parker is terriˆc," says Lee Biola, an Atlanta when ridership and service steadily moved up during the decade following TransLink's creation in 1998. it reached its peak during the 2010 Olympics, when the public happily left cars at home and piled onto the brand- new canada Line–although it helped that the system got $17 million from the games organizers to create an unprecedented level of service while the Olympics were on

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