When Bob Mirabito announced earlier this month he would be stepping down as CEO of the Capital Area Transit System, it took many in the community by surprise. But those who know Mirabito and have been paying attention have seen it coming for a while, writes Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel in her latest column.
“For much of the past year, the outgoing CEO was under fire from critics who accused him, wrongly, of everything from racism to incompetence to sexual harassment. None of the accusations were proven,” Riegel writes. “But Mirabito was abrasive and, by his own admission, cocky, and in a racially divided city you can’t successfully run a public transit system that serves a large, low-income population if you’re a cocky, middle-aged white guy. Sooner or later, it’s going to catch up with you.”
In the case of Mirabito, it finally did. His detractors would argue that his problem wasn’t one of style but of substance, Riegel says.
“They held against him that he had no mass transit experience, which is true,” she writes. “Mirabito was hired almost by accident, at the lowest point in CATS’ troubled history, on an interim basis. A retired IT executive with experience in telecommunications, not bus systems, he’d applied for the position on a whim and wound up getting it after a deal that had been cut to give the job to a particular politically connected applicant fell through.”
But at the time, CATS touted Mirabito’s lack of mass transit experience as a good thing—and it was, says Riegel.
“His fresh, no-nonsense, private sector approach worked well, for at least the first couple of years,” she writes. “In the end, his problem wasn’t so much his lack of mass transit experience as it was his lack of experience in a high-profile public sector job that often put him on a hot seat that burned him one too many times.”
But despite his shortcomings, Riegel says, it’s important to remember Mirabito’s considerable accomplishments.
“In his three years at CATS, he cleaned up and professionalized what was one of the most dysfunctional and corrupt public agencies in the parish,” she writes. “Don’t forget that in his first three months on the job, Mirabito discovered $120,000 in fare box money was missing, and that one of his board members had been using agency funds to pay his personal bills.”
There were also problems with the system’s annual audit and questions from federal authorities about an unauthorized charter bus trip to New Orleans taken by former CATS officials, Riegel notes. Four board members resigned, two under fire, as did the agency’s CFO.
“Mirabito got a handle on the books. He fired top-level executives who weren’t performing—is it any wonder he made enemies—and began communicating frequently and openly with the board and the media,” she writes. “In 2015, CATS got a clean bill of health from its auditors for the first time in years.”
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