Abrupt APTA resignation causes public transit stir Presented by Raytheon Intelligence & Space

With help from Jennifer Scholtes, Heather Caygle and Lauren Gardner

IMPLOSION AT APTA: The public transit industry is reeling after news spread on Monday about the abrupt resignation of Michael Melaniphy, the American Public Transportation Association’s president and CEO. The announcement came just a couple weeks after New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced plans to dump APTA (and nix their $400,000 annual payment), laying out their criticisms in a seven-page breakup letter outlining the group’s shortcomings and criticizing the leadership team’s “deep divisions,” snubbing of legacy transit agencies, and expensive executive salaries, among other issues.


From inside the agency: Melaniphy, who’s had APTA’s top job since 2011, has reportedly experienced increasingly fraught relations with the organization’s executive committee over the years. A person knowledgeable about internal dynamics at APTA told POLITICO that Melaniphy had a difficult working relationship with the committee, particularly its chair, Valarie J. McCall. RailwayAge quoted a critic complaining about his “over-the-top showboating at conferences as well as excessive compensation, given APTA is a public-sector organization.” And several people with knowledge of the agency’s goings-on suggested that Melaniphy’s severance will be a number approximating his annual salary — a total that hovers around $900,000, according to the organization’s recent filings with the IRS.

In a statement on Monday night, APTA Vice President Rosemary Sheridan declined to comment on Melaniphy’s severance or his relationship with the executive committee, but she said the criticisms raised by the MTA would not go ignored, and the organization was checking in on its other members. “The APTA Board and APTA staff leadership are very focused on showing the value of APTA membership to all of our members, including MTA. We are listening to our members’ concerns and are taking them very seriously,” she wrote.

As for that damning letter April 8 letter, the concerns laid out by the MTA were wide-ranging, but excerpts offer a sense of APTA’s increasing difficulties balancing the interests of members in the public versus private sectors. The highlights: “To have no voting Executive Committee member from either a legacy property or from a commuter rail carrier is unconscionable. … Other organizations have emerged, providing the same services in a more effective and efficient manner. … Based upon APTA's lack of responsiveness over the past five years in addressing the serious issues outlined above, we have grave concerns that you will address any of them in a meaningful way if your contract is renewed for another five years.”

TODAY’S THE DAY: The National Transportation Safety Board today will release new details about the cause of last year’s Washington Metro L’Enfant Plaza smoke incident, as well as recommendations on how to prevent similar incidents in the future. WAMU’s Martin Di Caro has some early details: The recommendations will go beyond WMATA and also extend to agencies including D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services, the D.C. mayor’s office and the Federal Transit Administration.

Ill-equipped: “Among the recommendations, the NTSB will urge the District to address how its 911 call center unnecessarily delayed the response to the trapped train, sources said," Di Caro writes. "An on-scene emergency response professional also was not trained and failed to adequately integrate Metro personnel into the incident response, sources said. Moreover, the NTSB will reiterate its stance that the FTA is not equipped to handle direct safety oversight of WMATA.”

IT’S TUESDAY: Good morning and thanks for tuning into POLITICO’s Morning Transportation, your daily tipsheet on all things trains, planes, automobiles and ports.

Just a reminder: T-minus five days 'til Mother's Day! Don't be like MT and leave your gift-purchasing or bouquet-ordering until the last minute. (Sorry, Mom!) Send tips: [email protected] or @martinepowers.

“Fishing boats sail past the shore / No singing Mayday any more.” (h/t Maggie Chan)

BUSINESS IS A-BOOMIN’: Airline profits increased more than 300 percent in 2015 — a jump from $7.5 billion for the nation's 25 scheduled passenger carriers in 2014 to $25.6 billion in 2015. As our Jennifer Scholtes writes, “of those airlines' net income last year, $6.8 billion came from fees for baggageand reservation changes. Fees for other items and services — like upgraded seating assignments and food sales — are reported to the department within airlines' overall totals rather than broken out like the other two ancillary fees.” Get more on the stats here — but as Jen points out, “these record profits come as the Justice Department investigates allegations that several major U.S. carriers have been colluding to keep ticket prices high.”

What’s good for the goose: From A4A’s Vaughn Jennings: “Airlines are putting every dollar to work for customers, employees and investors. … Along with enhancing the customer experience and boosting staffing, airlines retired $8 billion of expensive debt in 2015 and returned $10.5 billion to shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends and offered domestic flyers the largest number of seats since the Great Recession.”

Show me the money: The American Association of Airport Executives took the statistics as an opportunity to call on airlines to drop their opposition against increasing the cap on airport passenger facility charges — which has not been increased since 2000 — making the argument that airlines haven’t done their fair share to support investment and growth at the airports that serve their customers. “For far too long, policymakers have ignored the staggering disconnect from the airline industry,” said AAAE President and CEO Todd Hauptli, “which is all-too-happy to collect billions in airline-imposed fees destined for their bottom line but fights with all of its political might to oppose local fees that pay to build airport infrastructure and serve the traveling public.”

PUTTING THOSE TAX DOLLARS TO GOOD USE: POLITICO’s Burgess Everett and Seung Min Kim have an update on the Senate’s progress so far this year, and the not-so-accurate claims that the upper chamber is working harder than ever. Though the Senate lauds the number of bills passed in recent months — the FAST Act and the FAA reauthorization bill among them — Seung Min and Burgess explain that the numbers don’t support this notion that the Senate’s current stop-at-nothing industriousness: “The chamber is on pace to work the fewest days in 60 years, the party continues to insist it won't act on President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nomination, and Republicans' ballyhooed strategy to shepherd all dozen spending bills through the chamber is in serious trouble,” they write. “The level of productivity isn't just about bragging rights: Senate Republicans are staking their push to maintain control of the chamber in November on a message that a do-nothing Senate is a thing of the past. Successfully prosecuting that case could become even more critical if Donald Trump, who many believe will be a drag on the GOP ticket, wins the nomination.”

Now that’s what we call a grind: “But the GOP has opened itself to attack after criticizing Democrats for developing a shortened Monday through Thursday schedule that McConnell has largely preserved. ‘The first thing I need to do is to get the Senate back to normal. That means working more. I don't think we've had any votes on Friday in anybody's memory,’ McConnell said immediately after winning reelection and the Senate majority in November 2014. The Senate still comes in on Monday evening and leaves early Thursday afternoon in a typical week. There’s not been a single Friday vote this year.”

PUTTING THE BRAKES ON RIDERS: The New York Times editorial board is weighing in on the 73-hour trucking rest rule that has sparked concerns about the THUD appropriations process. In an editorial published Monday, the Times called this and other budgetary riders “stealth attacks” and “dangerous amendments aimed at satisfying ideological causes and benefiting special interests.” “The rider bars the administration from reinstating the rule unless it can show that it produced a ‘statistically significant’ improvement in safety and driver health during the brief time it was in place. That is a ridiculously high burden to meet. If the provision becomes law, it will be impossible for the government to issue basic regulations to make sure companies are not putting dangerously tired drivers on the road.”

NOT TO WORRY, SCHUMER SAYS: Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is insistent that the current plans to build new rail tunnels underneath the Hudson River won’t be — wait for it — derailed by political intervention, but infrastructure advocates in New York are wary. POLITICO New York’s Dana Rubinstein has a dispatch from a Monday breakfast where Schumer was asked point-blank whether the so-called Gateway project could get killed off by a single elected official, “such as Gov. [Chris] Christie did a few years ago.”

No butts about it: “My guess is, if you looked inside him, he regrets that decision now, because he got walloped on it,” Schumer said, referring to Christie. “Politically, the person whose butt is most on the line on this is Christie, because if this tunnel isn't built and 300,000, 400,000 New Jerseyans can't get to work, except by ferry waiting on the long lines, this governor or any future governor will have a lot to pay.” (Christie’s flack responded that the previous project is "nothing like" the current one.)

NORTON REMAINS CONCERNED ABOUT CSX DERAILMENT: D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton plans to meet with Federal Railroad Administration officials on Wednesday to talk about the freight derailment and hazardous material spill that occurred in northeast Washington on Sunday morning. “This derailment is a wakeup call that should teach us about preventing future hazmat rail car derailments,” Norton said in a statement, after she visited the site on Monday. “Although this derailment happened in an open-space area of the tracks, I am particularly concerned if such a derailment had occurred in a tunnel, such as the CSX Virginia Avenue tunnel, where construction continues.”

Updates from the derailment site: According to the FRA, crews on Monday successfully re-railed all but one of the derailed cars; the last car will be removed by a truck trailer. Because of 750 gallons of sodium hydroxide leaked into the ground, crews will excavate soil at that site and lay down new tracks. “Customers with freight traveling through the area can expect delays between 8 and 24 hours,” the FRA said.

IT'S NOT OVER 'TIL IT'S OVER … And now, it's over. Six days after the Pennsylvania primary and 1,000 votes short of a win, Art Halvorson finally conceded to House Transportation Chairman Bill Shuster on Monday night.

THE AUTOBAHN (SPEED READ):

— "Cruise Ship From Miami Docks in Havana, Ending Decades-Old Freeze." The New York Times.

— Christopher Elliott, in HuffPo: “There’s no scenario under which blocking Norwegian would make the airline industry more competitive. Not one.”

— "Metro late-night track work puts wide gap between trains." The Washington Post.

— The Case of the Missing Storage Crates: "RFID tags help keep track of inventories across sprawling auto-parts supply chain." The Wall Street Journal.

— "The Plan to 'Textalyze' Distracted Drivers' Phones Is Doomed. Wired.

— In retrospect, maybe “Mobile Detonation Device” was an unfortunate name for an airborne Wi-Fi hotspot. The Daily Dot.

THE COUNTDOWN: DOT appropriations run out in 152 days. The FAA reauthorization expires in 74 days. The 2016 presidential election is in 190 days. Highway and transit policy is up for renewal in 1,614 days.

Follow us on Twitter Kathryn Wolfe @kathrynwolfe



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