This comes from the latest "express line"
38 years: David Pfeiffer, Operator
35 years: J Edward Robinson, Rail Supervisor; Michael Schuermyer, Rail Controller
21 years: Stan Strauss, Technical Support Specialist
7 years: Bernie Bottomly, Executive Director Affairs
Trimet elites wrote nothing about all the people that have retired after spending 21-38 years, but look at this nonsense they wrote about Bottomly
Bernie Bottomly likes TriMet so much, he took a job here twice.
During his first stint, from 1993 to 2002, he served as the agency’s legislative director, working in Salem on transportation policy issues and funding. The second time around, from 2014 until now, he has acted as Executive Director of Public Affairs, a role that oversees several departments, including Communications & Marketing, Customer Experience and Government Affairs.
Between those two positions, Bernie worked first as a director at Pacific Power, handling community services in Oregon, Washington and California, then as vice president of government affairs and economic development for the Portland Business Alliance.
This month, Bernie is retiring. Before he goes, he shared with us why he left and came back, what happened in the interim, the change and challenges our agency and region have faced and what he’s most proud of during his agency tenure.
TriMet Parts One and Two
Before joining TriMet, Bernie was a district administrator for U.S. Congressman Les AuCoin for nearly a decade, overseeing transportation as well as natural resources and economic development policy. After AuCoin ran for Senate and lost to Bob Packwood, Bernie decided he was done working directly for an elected official.
“I started feeling around,” he says. “Dick Feeney was head of government affairs at TriMet at the time and he wanted me to come work for TriMet. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do, but when I told Feeney I wanted to take more time to think it over, he told me, ‘You’d better get your ass over here and interview if you want a job.’ With an invitation like that, how could I say no?”
TriMet was a natural fit for him, Bernie says: “I had worked on transportation issues for the congressman, including on the Blue Line, and I had grown up in Portland, taking the bus to school and to the library as a kid. I came to TriMet as a lobbyist and spent the first round working in Salem, lobbying for light rail funding and other things, like the little triangle on the back of bus that tells drivers they have to yield for the bus.”
When Dick Feeney retired, Fred Hansen became the General Manager and brought in Olivia Clark, a lobbyist Fred knew well from his time as the Director of the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. So Bernie left for Pacific Power. He enjoyed working with rural communities while he was with the utility, but an interest in returning to urban issues eventually led him to the Portland Business Alliance. During his time there he didn’t lose touch with TriMet. He helped TriMet get business support for ending Fareless Square and free rail and building the Orange Line. While he was at the Alliance Neil McFarlane became General Manager, Olivia retired and Neil was looking for someone to take her place. “Olivia had developed a broader portfolio than just the government piece: she had communications, marketing and customer service. Neil was looking for someone with that background and a strong relationship with the business community. He asked me to come back.” Bernie says. “I said no, until he promised me that I would never have to go to Salem to lobby – then I said ok!”
Bernie’s new role at TriMet was significantly different from his previous one: “I went from being a lobbyist in Salem who didn’t manage anyone to managing a group of 50 or more employees,” he says. “The first time, I was almost exclusively focused on funding for the agency. The second time meant being part of leadership team. You’re thinking not just about your division but the agency as whole: How do we grow and improve performance across all sectors?” The jobs in between helped prepare him for that. “At Pacific Power, I managed a good-sized group,” he says. “At the Business Alliance, I was interacting with the City of Portland. That’s an important relationship for TriMet, given our footprint in the city.”
Ch-ch-changes
The agency Bernie returned to was very different from the one he left: “The biggest change was its growth, size- and maturity-wise. TriMet—and the region—grew a lot in the time I was away,” he says.
TriMet operated about 560 buses and 30 light rail vehicles when Bernie started. Today the agency has almost 700 buses and 143 light rail vehicles, plus commuter rail. over that time the agency had also built the Green and Yellow MAX lines and had started construction on the Orange Line. Staffing and training had ramped up substantially. And, of course, technology had changed. “A mom-and-pop organization might be overstating the case, but TriMet had a lot of systems, processes and procedures that were developed inhouse. How to do things relied on institutional memory,” he says. As older employees retired and new employees arrived, “The agency got to the point where it had to be a lot more bureaucratic. We’d gone to a 24-hour, 365-day system.”
Olivia Clark and TriMet Government Affairs Manager Aaron Deas pushed a payroll tax increase through the legislature in 2009. But the increase couldn’t be adopted by the board without support from the Portland area business community. Neil, Aaron, Tom Markgraf (who Bernie hired), Alan Lehto, Kerry Ayres-Palanuk and Tom Mills—went out in the community to generate excitement about expanding transit and describe how additional funding would enhance service. Their work was so successful that TriMet was able to implement the tax increase without business community opposition in 2016. The tax is being phased in over ten years, and by 2026 will generate an additional $50m per year in resources.
In 2017, Bernie says. “Aaron did incredible work to support HB2017, the biggest transit support package ever passed in Salem. That meant an infusion of $50 million to capital improvements. We’re still in the process of growing the system from that resource. Once COVID is over and employment resumes, the size of the system will continue to grow.”
Goals and accomplishments
Bernie names agency-wide initiatives, and the work his colleagues have done to make them happen, as points of pride. These include implementing the payroll tax increase and the Hop program, dramatically improving customer service and customer communications, and funding and launching the Division Transit Project, the agency’s first bus rapid transit project. Maintaining a good relationship with Federal Transit Administration is also noteworthy, he says: “We may be the only transit agency in the country to have consistently done projects on time and on budget. Even during times when the overall picture for transit may not be good at the federal level, TriMet enjoys a good standing because of our careful stewardship of federal dollars,” he says. FTA approval of the Division Transit Project and support for the Red Line improvements are two examples of how the agency and the region benefit from that reputation and past performance.
The agency’s focus on equity, however, is what he’s most proud of.
“TriMet has taken on equity in a way that very few transit systems and government entities in the country have, and we have amazing results to show for it,” he says. “It’s not always obvious: we don’t always do a good job of tooting our own horn, but I think employees should be incredibly proud of the work the agency has done in this arena.”
At the leadership level, “We have one of the most diverse leadership teams for an agency of our size in the country,” he says. “That’s doubly impressive considering we don’t exist in a very diverse community. Doug has done an amazing job of recruiting folks from around the country—he has diversified the leadership team. It’s never as quick as you hope it will be, but in government time, it’s been lightning fast.”
In terms of looking at the equity of TriMet policies such as fare enforcement and policing: “Three times now, we have hired an outside expert to analyze data about who gets fare citations and why, and all three times, the results have indicated that there is no systemic bias, although it has pointed to areas of concern,” he says. “We have worked to address those concerns by decriminalizing fare evasion and changing the way we do fare enforcement. Partly informed by the Black Lives Matter movement, we have completed a top-to-bottom review of security, and looked for ways to provide security on our system in a way that makes everyone feel safe and welcome, including those who have experienced inequity in policing.” It hasn’t been an easy process. “When you go out and ask the community what they think, you may not always like the answers they give you; they might demand a response that may be difficult to implement,” he says. “I’m proud of the fact that John Gardner, Marla Blagg and their teams have had the guts to go out and have those conversations, get the results and develop strategies that reduces the need for a police presence.”
When he thinks about equity, there’s a particular moment during his career that stands out to him. While he was working on the Westside light rail project, TriMet decided to bring in low-floor LRV cars. Up to that point, LRVs had high floors and weren’t ADA-compliant. Riders in mobility devices had to go through a complex process just to board the train. “We’d built lifts on platforms that looked like Dumpsters. Riders had to signal the operator and the operator had to position the train exactly where that lift was. It was incredibly slow, awkward and dehumanizing for the person in the wheelchair; people would be looking at them, thinking ‘You’re making us late.’ The lifts broke a lot. It was not a good situation,” Bernie says.
“We brought in low-floor cars, the first in North America, which were very expensive and risky, but we decided it was the right thing to do. Shortly after that, I was on a train near Pioneer Square when a man who was quadriplegic rolled himself onto the train and parked himself with no muss or fuss. The look of joy and triumph on his face was something I will never forget. He had the freedom to move.”
Challenges, then and now
When Bernie first returned to the agency, implementing the payroll tax and finding room for new vehicles and staff to operate them was the biggest challenge. Now it’s weathering the COVID period. “I think we’re going to be in pretty good shape,” he says. “We had the first federal stimulus package which allowed us to continue to operate without layoffs and provide service to essential workers. The second package will carry us through the time when vaccines become available. Hopefully the economy and ridership will start to bounce back before those funds run out.”
Additional challenges include finishing construction and opening the Division Transit Project and bringing articulated buses back to the city. “That will be challenge to Customer Service, Communications and Maintenance,” he says.
TriMet’s evolution to a non-diesel platform will be an ongoing challenge as well, he says: “Climate change became a second-tier issue during the pandemic, but once the pandemic is over, it will come back in a big way. We’ve got a good plan; we’ve got federal grants to bring electric buses online, but we’ve struggled a bit with the technology, so we may want to look at additional strategies. How do we navigate our way to a diesel-free future without impacting customer service or breaking the bank?”
Longer term, he says, we all need to think about how we want our region to look in the decades to come, so that we don’t turn into a car-dependent cities like Los Angeles or Phoenix.
“It’s a job not just for TriMet but for the region,” he says. “We want to have the benefits of walkable neighborhoods. Light rail has helped us realize that dream; we need to revisit that vision. Some people who helped realize it are retiring or dying. There are a lot of new people in the region, young people, who weren’t part of that discussion. Things we take for granted, like the walking paths along the Willamette River or the light rail system or walkable neighborhoods didn’t just happen. It took decades of work to plan and nurture these strategies to success.”
Secrets of our success
When Bernie reviews his time here, the agency’s projects are only part of the narrative. The other part is its people. “I look at staff folks who have grown up and been promoted, who have expanded roles and responsibilities or even moved to other agencies,” he says, citing TriMet’s former Senior Manager of Customer Experience, Inessa Vitko, now Chief Operations Officer at C-TRAN; Lauren Parker, former Manager of Marketing and Outreach now Product Marketing Manager at Uber, Jon Bell, Senior Manager of Customer Information, Tom Mills, Director of Mobility, Planning and Policy, and our Manager of Mobility & Location-Based Services, Bibiana McHugh, who was part of his group for a time and who he describes as international leader in IT.
He has a good feeling about his replacement, JC Vannatta, as well: “He’ll do great,” Bernie says. “He’s in one of the toughest jobs in the agency already: being on top of media stuff. It’s always there and it’s always a crisis. He has shown his ability to manage through crisis, keep a cool head and keep folks focused.”
“I’m a short-term pessimist, which keeps me motivated and on my toes, but I’m also a long-term optimist, which keeps me sane. I think JC has that same quality, which will help him to keep thinking about the future and how we can do better. That’s worth gold. That’s what has made TriMet one of the premier transit agencies in the country.”
As he prepares to leave, TriMet’s standing, and its value to the community, may be his top takeaway.
“We’re in the top 10 when you measure by volume of ridership and service. We’re a bigger deal to our community than most transit agencies outside of New York, Boston and Chicago—I don’t know if TriMetians always remember that,” he says. “I hope that people who work at TriMet, when they get frustrated, and we all do, that they take a breath and think, ‘This is one of the best transit agencies in the country; one of the most progressive, most equitable, most financially sound.’ We lead in so many areas. And we should all have a sense of pride and satisfaction in being a part of that.”
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