(Bloomberg) -- Cash-strapped New Jersey Transit, whose daily service gaffes frustrate thousands of commuters, is awarding higher pay to senior staff as part of what it calls a turnaround strategy.
The raises, totaling $219,500 annually among eight people, are a fraction of NJ Transit’s roughly $1.4 billion yearly cost of salaries and benefits. The bus and rail agency says it acted in June on an audit’s recommendations to streamline its administration and combat a talent drain, with salaries comparable to those of better-paying transit companies.
“NJ Transit implemented an executive reorganization to better align the agency’s organizational structure with its newly adopted strategic vision,” agency spokesman Jim Smith said in an email.
At the same time, New York City commuters’ social media accounts have documented a surge of inconveniences worsened by a series of heat waves: unannounced service changes, faulty air condition and veritable waterfalls and rivers inside at least two trains caught in heavy rain.
Last week, NJ Transit, the nation’s largest statewide bus and rail operator, encouraged Rolling Stones fans to use mass transit for Aug. 1 and 5 Meadowlands concerts -- but to expect two-hour waits going home due to limited train capacity.
The raises were reported earlier by local publications.
Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg, a Democrat from Teaneck, said the crucial talent drain wasn’t among senior staff, but bus and train operators and others who keep the system running. The agency, before handing out raises to administrators, should identify its troubles and meet a deadline for fixes, she said.
“Spell that out clearly to the public who are the 900,000 people a day who are forced to experience so many of these indignities,” said Weinberg, who co-led 18 months of hearings on NJ Transit’s safety and service failures and sponsored reform legislation signed by Governor Phil Murphy.
Murphy, who came to office in January 2018, promised to turn the agency around “if it kills me” after budget cuts by his two-term predecessor, Chris Christie. Murphy has ordered more engineer classes; met a deadline on an emergency train-braking project that had dragged for years; and for fiscal 2020 allotted NJ Transit $458 million from the state budget, the most in at least 17 years.
But Murphy, a retired Goldman Sachs Group Inc. senior director, has used capital-to-operating transfers, a practice that he criticized and one used by administrations from both parties since 1990 to stave off unpopular fare increases. Trains on his watch also have scored record-low reliability and on-time performance.
NJ Transit said the cost of the raises was covered by the elimination of five jobs whose pay totaled $475,000. Most of those positions were created by the Christie administration as a favor to employ political loyalists, though, and became vacant around the time Murphy came to office. Smith said the roles were cut in fiscal 2018, but the agency continued to budget for them.
Murphy has said it will take years to fix NJ Transit, and the agency says it’s making changes based on findings from the audit, released in October.
The salary boosts came after a study of peer positions among mass-transit operators in New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Though some administrators saw increases of as much as 21%, most pay is lower than the survey’s average. The NJ Transit staffers also were required to take on more duties.
“The new structure, which reduced the total number of senior staff positions and saves money, is similar to peer agencies throughout the region,” Smith said.
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