The board of the San Diego Association of Governments — the region’s lead transportation planning agency — has chosen a replacement for Hassan Ikhrata, the CEO who left under several clouds in December. Mario Orso, a local executive with the state Department of Transportation, takes the SANDAG reins on June 17. With a $385,000 annual salary and a three-year contract, he will oversee an agency with a $1.2 billion budget, more than 400 employees and a deservedly awful reputation. How bad is SANDAG’s reputation? The agency is now the subject of a federal investigation — but it’s not clear over what. That’s because SANDAG has screwed up on so many different fronts.
Orso clearly has the requisite expertise in transportation and planning for the job. But does he have the managerial and communication skills needed to address three key problems facing SANDAG? That’s unclear.
The first involves the scandal in which SANDAG wrongly charged up to 45,000 drivers for a toll road they did not use. Not only did agency officials not take decisive corrective action when learning of this, they took more than a year to tell SANDAG’s board about it. Orso should determine who else besides Ikhrata helped cover up this debacle and show them the door.
The second involves an amoral internal culture that Orso must fix. Two of the many examples: Ikhrata improperly paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in unjustified severance and bonus payments and had no objections at all to employees running up $300,000-plus in improper and questionable bills.
The third involves SANDAG’s abject refusal to publicly explain how it will meet its goals. Ikhrata won board for his $160 billion long-term regional transportation plan that had as its centerpiece a 200-mile network of elevated or tunneled high-speed rail. But he refused to respond to questions about how SANDAG could overcome the obstacles that have thwarted the state’s bullet-train project, beginning with affluent cities’ intense objections to the disruptions caused by rail construction.
Everyone should root for Orso to succeed. Despite all of SANDAG’s follies, its importance to the region is made plain by such projects as the successful extension of the UC San Diego Blue Line trolley. But he will never win public for new taxes to fund SANDAG projects unless he transforms the agency into an organization where officials are held able for grievous mistakes and required to follow basic ethical standards.
