At a civic luncheon not long ago, it fell to the host to introduce featured speaker Robert Belcaster. Belcaster is the downtown real estate developer who, having given no previous signs of serious mental disturbance, agreed last February to leave a comfortable retirement to run the Chicago Transit Authority.
The host explained-and it was hard to tell if his irritation was real or feigned-that he had struck out trying to get biographical material on Belcaster. Noting that Gen. Douglas MacArthur never wore a battle helmet during World War I and that Bill Veeck, the baseball entrepreneur, never wore neckties, he proclaimed: ”And now there is Bob Belcaster, who says he never gives out resumes. Since I can`t say much about him, I`ll just give him to you instead. Robert Belcaster.”
It was an awkward moment but not surprising. The truth is Belcaster is not a resume kind of guy. He has had one occupation most of his working life- begetting office buildings and making gobs of money. He has not had to apply for work since getting out of the Army in 1962. And for all his considerable polish, the cashmere topcoats and Sulka ties, he projects an unpretentious, West Side Italian, street-corner demeanor that would consider resumes an affectation more suited to stodgy, academic types.
If Belcaster had a Ph.D. in anything, it would be in seven-card stud, Heineken`s and golf. Beyond that, giving his host a resume would have taken up precious time, and since midwinter, Belcaster has been operating the CTA by the seat of his pants. His luncheon speech, in fact, had been scrawled in the cab on the way over. Looking contrite, seeming less like Douglas MacArthur than Beetle Bailey, Belcaster faced the audience and shook his head. ”Heading the CTA,” he muttered gravely into the microphone, ”is about as tough as the first World War.”
He must have struck a chord. There was a murmur of sympathetic understanding from the audience. Where the CTA is concerned, all Chicagoans are bloodied, footsore, gas-choked veterans of the trenches, replete with war stories. Not many people would envy him leading the charge.
Yet after escaping with limbs and faculties intact from a world of big-time risk, the kind of risk associated with borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars to build buildings that may never rent, that is exactly where Belcaster finds himself-back in the line of fire, trying to undo one of the biggest transportation messes since the Lusitania.
”My wife says I flunked retirement,” he confided a few weeks ago.
The CTA is a shambles. Years of waste, mismanagement, political intrigue and fiscal famine have made it the Moby Dick of public agencies, huge, intractable, ready to dive beneath seas of red ink at any time and cut the city off, Ahab-like, at the knees.
Operationally, the transit system is arthritic. Fiscally, it is anemic. Physically, it is old. Its work force, at least until recently, was poorly motivated, its executives inefficient. And the people whose ridership the system depends on are more and more wont to revile it-often unjustly but sometimes for very good reason.
Just getting a handle on the agency is hard. The CTA employs 13,200 people, some 63 percent of whom are directly involved in operating or maintaining equipment. Its 2,170 buses make more than 123,000 trips per week, serving 132 routes and 12,900 bus stops. Its 1,222 rapid-transit cars, deployed over six routes, utilize 143 stations and 250 miles of track. All told, 1.8 million passengers ride the system each weekday, for an annual total of more than 568 million trips.
It is Belcaster`s task to turn this crippled colossus around. If he needed any reminder that the karma is against him, it came only weeks after he took the helm of the troubled agency, when the now-infamous Chicago River flood struck the city. The river water that gushed into the basements of Loop buildings also began seeping into the CTA`s downtown subway tunnels, forcing their closure. If Belcaster`s problems weren`t already big enough, now he had to direct the emergency rerouting of trains onto an alternative track grid not meant to handle so much volume.
To make matters worse, the CTA`s nerve center on the 7th floor of the Merchandise Mart was itself a major victim of the flood. Surging water in the building`s subbasements caused a cutoff of plumbing and heating. For several days, Belcaster and his staff worked 20-hour days in their offices wearing overcoats and using portable toilets installed in the carpeted halls.
Nobody said it was going to be easy.
It is curious that in a time when American business management is bitterly condemned for letting the nation`s economic supremacy slip away, there is a countervailing assumption that certain master businessmen have the secret formula for pulling the country out of its misery. This paradoxical logic has given Texas billionaire Ross Perot great momentum in his bid for the presidency and accounts for the apotheosis of Chrysler boss Lee Iacocca.
The drafting of Robert Belcaster to run the CTA by the Daley administration is a product of this line of reasoning. Because Belcaster was a successful executive in one area, commercial real estate, it was supposed that he would bring sound business principles and a winning attitude to an organization considered out of control. Richard Daley had campaigned for the mayoralty on a promise that he would ask business leaders to help him get certain key city agencies on a solid business footing, and while the jury is still out on the idea, there is talk that Daley might try to put even more departments under the thumb of Belcaster types.
The obvious knock against entrusting a civic enterprise to someone from the world of commerce is that, at the outset at least, such a person would know very little about the subject at hand, in this case, mass transit. Knowledge is not always the ticket, however. A succession of public transportation professionals, representing worlds of expertise, have been unable to turn the CTA around. Belcaster`s immediate predecessor, Alfred Savage, came here from Buffalo in May of 1990 with impeccable transportation bona fides. By the time he left 20 months later, the CTA was worse off than ever, forced to make service cuts totaling $7 million and raise fares by 20 percent to balance its budget.
Some of Savage`s problems were beyond his control. The recession eroded the sales-tax revenue upon which the CTA depends. But critics say he failed to pare down the ponderous bureaucracy he inherited and that he seemed unable to deal with details, preferring the so-called ”big picture.” Moreover, he seemed to be politically dysfunctional. He reportedly ran afoul of his one-time booster, Mayor Daley, by refusing to hire someone Daley touted for a senior position at the CTA, then rubbed salt in the wound by allegedly informing Daley at a meeting of shocked staffers, ”Mr. Mayor, not yesterday, not today and not tomorrow.”
Belcaster has no problem in that regard. He has been around City Hall long enough to know how the game is played in this town. But while he has some knowledge of things mechanical-he trained as an engineer in college and has spent much of his adult life stalking construction sites-he is hardly a transportation maven. His previous knowledge of the CTA consisted of riding the system occasionally between his office and his Lincoln Park home.
”I have no qualifications for this job,” he admits frankly. Nevertheless, just as it is preferable to be lucky than good, it is better to be a quick study than have an encyclopedic mind. The first thing Belcaster did upon assuming command in early February was to closet himself with his new CTA colleagues to bring himself up to speed. Within days, he was talking transitspeak with the best of them-infusing it with his native tongue, corporatespeak, in which people ”buy into” programs and ”get on the same page.”
The very next thing Belcaster did reflected his businessman`s heart. He undertook to revamp the agency`s organizational chart, which, one suspects, was patterned after the former Soviet Union`s flow chart for getting consumer goods from the factory to store shelves.
Like St. George facing the dragon and lacking home-court advantage, Belcaster had an intimidating task: to mitigate a bureaucracy that was embedded tighter than a fishhook in a cheek. Many a good and noble soul has bitten the dust trying to get bureaucracies to listen to sweet reason. But unlike Savage, who, many believe, was co-opted by the system, Belcaster cannot not afford to fail. Last year`s highly unpopular fare-hike/service-cut episode has placed the whole agency under glass.
For aficionados of such things, the CTA bureacracy was a thing to behold. Underneath the executive director were eight deputy executive directors, all reporting to the top. ”The reality was even worse than that,” Belcaster says. ”There were actually 25 people reporting to the executive director.
”Under each of those people was a vertical chain of command that ended with the people in charge of a bus barn or transit station. At that level, there would be actually two people, one in charge of operations and the other in charge of maintenance. You would think the two functions would go hand-in- glove, since both involve getting buses and trains into service, but in fact these guys never talked to each other. The only way for them to talk or prioritize their workload was to go up the vertical ladder to the top boss and then down again.”
At budget time, the confusion reached its zenith. With everyone working in the dark, the results were redundant purchasing, gaps in purchasing and a general lack of coordination-a situation exacerbated a hundredfold by the agency`s chronic inability to anticipate its revenue flow because of the vagaries of tax proceeds, legislative appropriations and ridership.
The uncertainties and hierarchical chaos eventually fostered an underground supply system, similar to that found in the armed services.
”People were playing games to get what they needed,” Belcaster says. For example, it is necessary periodically to purchase vehicles for transit supervisors, the field workers who monitor various intersections to ensure that bus routes are being serviced on time.
”Let`s say you buy 90 two-door Chevy Blazers for these people. Ordinarily, with a one-year warranty on parts and labor, you would not buy replacement parts for those vehicles at the time of purchase. You`d need them eventually, but not right away. But there is this paranoia, the idea that I may not be able to get the money for these parts two years down the road, so I better get them now. So a storehouse of Chevy Blazer parts is ordered just as insurance. Now, let`s say two years later the contract is rebid and the low bidder is Bronco. You buy a fleet of Broncos, and all those Blazer parts become obsolete.”
Having eight equally powerful deputy executive directors took its toll in other ways as well. Every time the CTA leadership has changed in the recent past-and the revolving door has produced four top executives in three years, seven since 1980-it has induced a major upheaval up and down the chain as the deputies jockey for position to assure themselves a share of the new pie. ”So each change at the top level has caused the organization to polarize,”
Belcaster says. ”The buses still hit the street, the trains still run, but the focus keeps getting away from the customer and into internal politicking. It has been very destructive to this company.”
The folly of the CTA organizational structure was not news. Previous administrators had tried in vain to deal with it, and a desperate CTA board, chaired by former City Comptroller Clark Burrus, had gone so far as to commission a study by the consulting firm of Booz, Allen & Hamilton Inc. prior to Belcaster`s appointment. The board received the Booz Allen report Feb. 12, just days after Belcaster took over.
The report identified a number of problem areas, including duplication of staff, excessive layers of management and fragmented accountability, which, it said, contributed to a number of evils including exorbitant staff costs, top- heavy decision-making and a tendency toward fingerpointing to avoid blame.
Aware that the CTA`s overriding task was not pinpointing these problems-they were, after all, about as inconspicuous as a motorman`s glove in a punch bowl-but altering them, Booz Allen cited a number of reasons why change has been historically difficult at the agency. Among them were ”inbreeding,” a minimal flow of new ideas from outside the organization; ”instability,” a turnover in top management that leads middle managers to feel that ”this, too, will pass”; and misplaced incentives that fail to promote effectiveness and efficiency.
Translation: The CTA was a clumsy, self-indulgent organization with no reason to change.
Within days of receiving the report, Belcaster moved to slay the dragon. He cut the number of deputies down to three and renamed them ”vice presidents.” He himself assumed the new title of ”president”-”to promote the idea that we are more like a business corporation,” he says.
Operations and maintenance were combined into one department, called service delivery, to be headed by longtime CTA executive Alonzo ”Lonnie”
Hill, who started with the organization years ago as a bus driver and worked his way up.
To facilitate faster, on-the-scene decision-making, a new scheme was brainstormed by top CTA brass. Each of the agency`s nine bus barns and 11 rail terminals are to be controlled by a new category of supervisor called a general manager. These general managers are to be responsible for all matters within their jurisdiction, including operations and maintenance, personnel issues and labor disputes. Each bus or train within that jurisdiction will carry the general manager`s name, picture and phone number so that riders will at last feel that there is someone to call with a complaint. ”The idea is to increase accountability and decentralize the process of decision-making,”
says Hill, who has had to hustle to get the general-manager system off the ground by summer.
”This is how you dismantle bureaucracy,” Belcaster says. ”Each of these general managers will be performing a job that was formerly performed by four people in the Merchandise Mart.”
General managers will also have another function. They will be expected to play a proactive role in their communities, participating in such affairs as local school councils and town meetings, in order to give the CTA a human face. This involvement will also take the form of an outreach program, in which the CTA will conduct regular meetings with citizens to hear their public-transportation concerns.
The personalization of the CTA is a very important component of Belcaster`s vision, for he professes to be intent on fostering a sense that the passenger is No. 1. He insists on calling Chicagoans the CTA`s
”stockholders.”
”The biggest thing about our new flow chart is that we`ve inverted things,” he says. ”It is the customer who is on top now. We are trying to reshape the attitude of our employees to reflect this priority. For a long time, it has been felt that people`s jobs here are to drive buses and trains around the city, not to serve customers. The customer, for all intents and purposes, hasn`t existed. We`re out to change that, and it has to start from within.
”We`re not quite ready yet,” he confesses. ”The corporate culture hasn`t changed enough. We still have to get our employees to buy into the idea of better service.”
To this end, Belcaster is negotiating with his friend, Ronald Gidwitz, who chairs the city colleges system, to develop training courses in customer service for CTA supervisory personnel. Beyond that, on-site seminars at bus barns and rail terminals for drivers and motormen are under consideration.
Another tactic to create a sense of esprit de corps among CTA workers is a series of employee focus groups to be held later this year. Such groups will enable rank-and-file employees to have input on how to improve service, according to Constance Mortell, whom Belcaster hired last March to handle internal communications at the agency. Belcaster met her while both of them were doing consulting work for Cook County Board President Richard Phelan in early 1991.
”By discussing our mission, we think we can foster a sense of team spirit and pride of ownership among our employees,” says Mortell, who also will direct the general managers` community outreach program.
But all of these measures, upbeat as they are, beg larger and cloudier issues facing the CTA. And it is on these issues that Belcaster`s success or failure will rest.
