WMATA GM retires, COO resigns hours after Board of Directors meet

Metro General Manager Paul Wiedefeld has retired and agency Chief Operating Officer Joe Leader has resigned “effective immediately,” according to a press release issued by WMATA Board of Directors Chair Paul Smedberg late Monday evening. Wiedefeld had been set to retire in a month and a half after spending seven years at the helm of Metro.

The announcement comes a day after the WMATA Board of Directors revealed that almost half the agency’s train operators weren’t properly certified, some hadn’t been certified fully in three years, and that rail service would suffer while 72 operators were removed from duty for training.

“The Board appreciates Paul’s and Joe’s commitment to WMATA over the last six years,” the release reads. The Board “feel[s] the timing is right for Interim General Manager and CEO Andy Off to lead the organization through this critical transition period.”

Executive Vice President Andy Off had been named Interim GM to take over for Wiedefeld until the agency’s recently announced GM/CEO, Randy Clarke, takes the helm of the agency later this year.

Swift action once elevated to the Board

Sunday’s announcement stated that the Board of Directors heard about the lapsed certifications on Thursday, May 12, after being briefed by the agency’s Chief Safety Officer (CSO), Theresa Impastato. The Board met four days later on Monday at 3 pm in a private “executive session” meeting. and the resignation and retirement announcement was made public about six hours later. The Board’s Monday afternoon meeting wasn’t on the public schedule until late Sunday afternoon.

The “final straw” for the GM and COO came in the fallout of an audit performed by the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission (WMSC) and released in April. The WMSC audit surfaced issues and discrepancies with Metro’s certification processes and highlighted a “waiver” process which allowed employees to continue operating trains after their certifications should have been renewed.

Impastato had begun “to further investigate the issue,” the Board’s release read, after the WMSC delivered the rail operations safety audit to the agency. But the concerns raised by her investigation appear not to have been acted upon internally - only after the Board was briefed, nearly a month and a half after the audit.

The Board briefing on Thursday led to the immediate suspension of 72 operators to fix their certifications. After over a month passed since the audit’s public release, escalation to the Board resulted in the ousting of the GM and COO in four days. Neither were quoted in Metro’s press release as being supportive of or being behind the operator safety stand-down.

“We did not understand…the magnitude of the issue,” said one Metro source familiar with the matter. “The people who knew…either did not have the power or deliberately chose not to take corrective action.”

The safety lapse, and now executive leadership changes, come at a vulnerable time for Metro. The agency is already facing a shaky financial situation due to decreased ridership both from the COVID-19 pandemic as well as reduced rail service since all of the newer 7000-series trains were pulled from service.

The transition opens the agency up to additional knowledge and responsibility transfer concerns as well.The agency needs the new GM to be up to speed when he starts, not having to figure out what all is happening and who reports to whom.

Wiedefeld retiring early

“I have decided to make my retirement effective today,” wrote GM Wiedefeld, after the WMATA Board met in private on Monday. The statement says the early retirement will “provide a more timely transition to Interim General Manager Andy Off.”

Wiedefeld was originally scheduled to step down at the end of June, according to what he and the agency announced back in January. Now, Wiedefeld notes that stepping aside early “is in the best interest of the agency and its workforce.”

Resigning at the same time is the agency’s COO, Joe Leader, who has been at Metro since 2016. Leader came to Metro from New York City Transit where he had served in positions including Senior Vice President of the Department of Subways and Chief of Safety Investigations.

The new Interim GM taking over, Andy Off, isn’t a newcomer to Metro, although he left and rejoined the agency once.

Off joined Metro back in 2012 and worked up from engineering positions to become Senior Vice President for Rail Services in 2015. He left the agency to WSP consultants in 2018, but re-joined in 2020 as a Vice President for Project Implementation and Construction.

Upon returning in 2020, Off helped oversee the transformation of the agency’s Rail Operations Control Center along with now-Vice President and Assistant Chief Safety Officer Jayme Johnson. He currently serves as Executive Vice President of Capital Delivery.

A seven-year tenure at Metro

Wiedefeld came to Metro in 2015 as the system was experiencing multiple critical safety challenges. He joined the agency late in the year after a fatal smoke incident at L’Enfant Plaza in January led to dozens of injuries and a rider’s death. The resulting NTSB investigation uncovered systemic issues with training, emergency coordination, and equipment safety. The safety body tasked Metro with 24 new recommendations for how to improve the system.

The Federal Transit Administration took over safety oversight of Metrorail after the fatality, overseen by then-Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx.

After a Silver Line train derailed outside East Falls Church in 2016, Wiedefeld and his staff briefed the WMATA Board that failure to properly maintain the wooden railties, as well as “incorrectly classified” defects, led to the train’s wheels coming off the track. Wiedefeld went on to try to fire a third of the agency’s track inspectors, although arbitration panels later allowed some of those workers to return.

“Safety trumps service” is a slogan Wiedefeld became known for at Metro. Handouts he provided at a meeting with all Metro managers in 2016 note that “managers are accountable” for the safety of their team, and that “there is no excuse” when it comes to safety: “‘They didn’t tell me’ and ‘We’ve always done it that way’ are excuses that don’t fly any longer at Metro.”

Wiedefeld’s focus on safety led to SafeTrack, a year-long disruptive track program that aimed to do three years of track maintenance in one, as well as Metro’s platform project shutting down 20 stations over the course of four years to rebuild their platforms and upgrade systems at stations.

A system-wide Metrorail shutdown in 2016 was his idea, as well. A power cable fire the previous day prompted Wiedefeld to hold a 4:30pm press conference announcing the system shutdown for the next day to allow employees to inspect all cables and check for abnormalities.

Wiedefeld has overseen Metro’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the past few years. Seventeen stations were closed early-on during the pandemic as a cost-saving measure, and train service has continued to at sub-standard levels, due to suppressed ridership as well as the grounding of the 7000-series trains.

Wiedefeld “voluntarily” allowed the 7000-series suspension to continue in December, 2021 after an agency safety consultant brought forward some new information as to why they shouldn’t be restored. “We are going to redirect our efforts towards identifying and tackling the root cause of the derailment,” he said.

What began under Wiedefeld’s tenure as a tense relationship with Metro’s largest union, Local 689, evolved into a more mature working relationship. Metro outsourced a bus operating facility in 2018 to the ire of 689 and its then-president Jackie Jeter. But the two parties were able to agree on a new collective bargaining agreement in 2019 which helped to end a bus operator strike by bringing the outsourced facility in-house, and provided wage and benefit increases.

The historical focus on safety makes not only the Board’s decision to push Wiedefeld and Leader out, but also the fact that Impastato had to share her certification safety concerns with the Board directly rather than with or through Wiedefeld, more remarkable. But “we just can’t have any more ambiguity about whether we are doing this safety thing,” one Metro source said, stating that “Wiedefeld has destroyed his own legacy with this one action” [failing to act on lapsed certifications].

Disclosure: GGWash Board of Directors chair Tracy Hadden Loh is also on Metro’s board. In keeping with our editorial policy, board members maintain no oversight of editorial decision-making.