After two years, the DC Council will likely fill DC’s second seat on the Metro Board of Directors

Two years into her second term, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has seen a number of longtime administration officials leave District government. Chief of Police Peter Newsham, State Superintendent for Education Hansuel Kang, City Administrator Rashad M. Young, and most recently District Department of Transportation (DDOT) Director Jeff Marootian and Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey DeWitt have all departed their posts.

While interim appointees have taken the helm of city agencies, Marootian’s departure leaves the District without a voice at the Washington Area Metropolitan Transit Authority (WMATA). Luckily, there’s a candidate who has been waiting in the wings.

Two years ago, Mayor Bowser nominated her Deputy Mayor for Operations and Infrastructure, Lucinda Babers, to fill an open seat on the WMATA Board of Directors. But the Council didn’t take action until last month. Why?

How did the seat become vacant?

In June of 2019, former Ward 2 Councilmember and WMATA board chair Jack Evans resigned from the board under a cloud of controversy. Two months later, the aforementioned controversy also brought down Corbett Price, a former hospital executive picked by the mayor to fill DC’s other principal seat on the transit board. At the time, Director Marootian and Tom Bulger, President of Government Relations Inc, stepped up to fill the vacancies as alternate directors until the Council could confirm two new principal members.

A day after Price’s resignation, Mayor Bowser announced that she would be nominating her Deputy Mayor Babers to replace Price. In October of that year, the Washington Post’s Fenit Nirappil wrote that Council Chairman Phil Mendelson “has been frosty to that pick,” adding that the chair wanted the mayor to appoint someone with, “more experience using Metro and a background in urban transit systems.”

Mendelson moved instead to nominate the Council’s appointee to the board, choosing Stephanie Gidigbi, Director of Policy and Partnerships at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Healthy People, Thriving Communities Program, to fill Evans’s seat on the board. Gidigbi was confirmed and became a voting member of the board in December 2019.

For a year, Gidigbi served alongside Marootian. Then in January of this year, the former DDOT director was tapped by then President-elect Joe Biden to join the incoming administration. This opened up yet another vacancy on the board, reducing the District’s representation down to just one principal member and one alternate member.

What is the Metro Board of Directors, anyway?

The Metro Board of Directors serves an important role in keeping the region’s transit system running. The board, “determines agency policy and provides oversight for the funding, operation, and expansion of transit facilities,” for the jurisdictions served by Metro, according to the agency’s site. The board consists of eight principal, or voting, members and eight alternate, non-voting members, with the District, Maryland, Virginia, and the federal government all getting two principals and two alternates.

Unlike the District, where appointments to the board must be approved by the Council, Maryland and Virginia’s board representatives are appointed by the Washington Suburban Transit Commission and Northern Virginia Transportation Commission respectively.

The US Secretary of Transportation is responsible for appointing members on behalf of the federal government. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan and Mayor Bowser make offer nominations for board positions. Members do not receive compensation for their services.

It is the board of directors that approves Metro’s budget, and in a year where the fate of transit has been in limbo, DC hasn’t had a full team at the table in comparison to its regional counterparts.

What’s changed in the last two years?

So why is Babers’ nomination going forward now? On-the-job experience and the need for someone in District government on the board, says Chairman Mendelson. In an interview, he argued that Babers being on the board was needed now because, “the Metro Board very much implicates the pocketbook of District.” In the eyes of the chairman, Deputy Mayor Babers has gained “much more experience” in the year and a half since being originally nominated by Mayor Bowser.

One unique objection that Mendelson put forward at the time was that the District would be best served by someone who actually used public transit. “I spoke with Lucinda about this several weeks ago,” he said, “she reminded me that she is a frequent user of public transportation.”

He did not provide a timeline on confirming the deputy mayor to the Metro board post, but Chairman Mendelson told me that while he wanted a swift confirmation process, he also wanted to hear from the community. “I want to move quickly, but I also want to ensure that there’s an opportunity for public comment,” adding he did not believe that Babers’ nomination was controversial. The chairman also intends to renominate Bulger, who has served since 2011.

What does this mean for transit in DC?

While it’s unclear if Babers will be confirmed before the Metro Board votes on the agency’s FY 2022 budget, the District’s chief of transportation and infrastructure policy will have a closer connection to the city’s chief transit operator. Should she be confirmed, Babers will have doubled the number of women members on the Metro Board, and bring the total number of African Americans serving to three.

Despite having a ridership that is mostly people of color, the board’s membership today is overwhelmingly white and male. In 2016, there were four women, including two African American women, and five African American members in total. Similarly, despite having a significant number of riders who are Latino, just one member, Canek Aguirre, identifies as such.

There currently are three other vacancies on the board – the federal government’s second principal seat and Maryland and the District’s second alternate members. Each vacancy provides an opportunity to bring greater diversity to Metro, and also continue to ensure that the entire region has an equal voice in transit decisions for the Greater Washington region.