CHARLOTTE, N.C. — All eyes are on Charlotte transit leaders as they sort out several issues within CATS. This comes after learning of derailments not properly disclosed to local leaders, past due inspections and several concerns about safety.
City leaders laid out an action plan to get operations back in order during the Transportation, Planning and Development committee meeting Monday.
"This thing is a cancer right and you have to retreat the cancer before it spreads," city council member Malcolm Graham said. "I think you can say it's spreading already because it is not just the derailments, it’s the maintenance, it's all of the other things we are dealing with."
Interim CATS CEO Brent Cagle brought to light another issue.
"There have been times when CATS has been operating the ROCC [Rail Operation Control Center] with one rail operator at a time... that is certainly not an ideal situation," Cagle said, citing staffing shortages.
Cagle said the issue was reported to him by a rail operations manager. However, it was also reported anonymously to the NCDOT SSO which led to an unannounced inspection Friday night where that was the case.
A CATS spokesperson sent an email to Charlotte City council saying in part:
"As part of the oversight responsibilities for CATS North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) State Safety Oversight (SSO) periodically conduct announced and unannounced inspections. NCDOT SSO conducted an unannounced inspection on Friday, March 31, 2023 related to the staffing of the ROCC and we have attached those findings.
While CATS has started to address the staffing issues in the ROCC prior to the NCDOT SSO inspection, their inspection noted two things which CATS took immediate action on April 1, 2023. One item found was CATS has continued to schedule one controller in the ROCC when two were unavailable, and the other was the workload for the third shift controllers was too great and needed to be better distributed.
CATS has revised the ROCC schedule to ensure that two rail controllers are scheduled during revenue service. A plan has been put in place to hold Gold Line Service if staffing issues result in only one rail controller on duty. In addition, the Gold Line service schedule will be reviewed to see if schedule adjustments can be made to ease the workload in the ROCC until additional staff is hired.
Mr. Cagle and the rail division has been working with HR to provide additional compensation for salaried employees when they are asked to work additional hours. CATS is also looking at minor service reductions on the Gold Line to lessen the workload of the ROCC, when necessary. CATS will also be submitting the ROCC weekly staffing schedule to NCDOT SSO for their review."
Cagle said they are implementing mandatory overtime to make up for the shortage.
"We are going to be compensating controllers for that and we will be getting more aggressive... we'll find more aggressive ways to recruit new controllers," Cagle said.
Meanwhile, the Federal Transit Administration is doing a review of the May 2022 rail derailment. Cagle said they will be looking at maintenance records, the state of repairs but also staffing and safety-related issues of the agency.
There will be a pause on the search for a new CEO until operations are back in order.
"It seemed to me to make sense to let Mr. Cagle who has been doing a great job since he started in December, handle working it out… and when things are more stable we can tell a better story to a candidate for a job," Ed Driggs, city council member and committee chair, said.
Communication failures are also noted as an issue in the memo because the rail derailment and other issues were not properly reported to local leaders. It was later discovered former CEO John Lewis did send a text to City Manager Marcus Jones at the time but it was missed.
"I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over the fact that he missed it," Graham said. "I'm losing sleep that it wasn’t reported in any other way than a text."
The agency will also be working with a third-party company to improve the work culture, customer service and leadership.
"You have an interim CEO there who is looking at everything," Graham said. "You have employees who are willing to step forward to report things that they for whatever reason historically would not have reported… maybe because of cultural silence. So that's a demonstration that the walls are coming down."
The committee proposed several actions to address the current issues. It notes the long-term plan is to "recruit more people, deploy more resources and implement new policies so that the system will be on par with the best transportation utilities in the country in the future."
Officials said as they map out a plan on how to move forward, they have no intentions of suspending the multi-billion dollar transit plan due to ongoing maintenance issues surrounding CATS.
The city's $13.5 billion transportation plan would help build the silver line which relies on a one-cent sales tax referendum. It also requires approval of the Republican-led general assembly in Raleigh.
Contact Tradesha Woodard at twoodard1@wcnc.com and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Contact Jesse Pierre at jpierrepet@wcnc.com or follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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