Capital Area Transit System Board Chair Donna Collins-Lewis says she has reached an agreement with CATS CEO Bob Mirabito to extend his contract and that the CATS Finance and Executive Committee will take it up next week.
“If everything looks good and they sign off on it, then it will be put on the full board’s agenda for the meeting on April 21,” says Collins-Lewis, who also sits on the Metro Council.
As for details of the new contract, Collins-Lewis says she isn’t disclosing any until the F&E Committee has had a chance to review the pact and vote on it.
Contract negotiations with Mirabito have been underway since September 2014, when the CATS board signed off on pursuing a long-term contract. Mirabito was hired on an interim basis in May 2013 with an annual salary of $140,000. Mirabito previously has told media outlets he expects the new contract to be for two or three years.
Collins-Lewis says contract negotiations with Mirabito were finalized in recent weeks, during which CATS has been working to move beyond a number of controversies that cropped up earlier this year. In March, Mirabito issued a public apology after he came under fire for comments he made on a local podcast about the racial makeup of the CATS workforce.
A month earlier, Mirabito defended his and the agency’s performance after some union CATS bus drivers picketed outside the main terminal on Florida Boulevard, claiming Mirabito lacked leadership, that buses were unsafe and contract details were unfulfilled.
“We still have a lot of work to do within the agency, there’s no doubt about that,” Collins-Lewis says. “What’s causing us the most heartburn right now is our poor fleet. It’s just so old. I don’t think we’d be having a lot of issues we’re having if we did not have such a bad fleet.”
Collins-Lewis also says CATS is working to improve employee morale with some sensitivity training and team building activities. She says she doesn’t expect the CATS F&E Committee to have any issues with the contract agreement she’s reached with Mirabito when it meets one week from today.
“I don’t see why anybody will have any disagreements with it,” she says, “but you never know.”
—Steve Sanoski
