The executive director of the taxpayer funded organization responsible for providing roadway, bicycle, pedestrian, safety, and transit improvements across Pima County has come under fire for poor leadership, culminating in a call for his immediate termination by one member of the Pima County Board of Supervisors.
On Tuesday, Supervisor Matt Heinz made a motion to request the firing of Farhad Moghimi, the longtime day-to-day manager of the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) and the Pima Association of Governments (PAG). The motion called for Supervisor Rex Scott, who represents Pima County on the nine-member RTA board, to push for Moghimi’s removal.
“Transportation investment in our region is too important to be guided by leadership that is not committed to a more open and transparent process,” Heinz tweeted, adding that Moghimi “must do” due to what Heinz called the executive director’s “mismanagement of the RTA and continued obfuscation.”
Most Pima County residents have never heard of PAG, a powerful taxpayer-funded metropolitan planning organization comprised of Pima County and the various municipalities and tribes located with the county. One of its responsibilities is the RTA which oversees the 20-year, $2.1 billion RTA Plan approved by voters in 2006 through a one-half cent countywide sales tax.
Heinz’s motion failed to pass but Chairwoman Sharon Bronson has also expressed some concerns about PAG and RTA. After the meeting, Heinz explained his call for firing Moghimi, who has run the two organizations for nearly a decade without a comprehensive performance review in more than five years.
The origin for Heinz’s position stems an expected “significant funding shortfall” which threatens the completion of projects already approved to be built by June 2026 under the 2006 RTA plan.
There are a lot of explanations being put forth to justify the shortfall, Heinz noted, including the Great Recession shortly after the RTA Plan was approved, the recent COVID-19 pandemic, and the fact funding areas have not experienced the anticipated levels of growth. Those reasons “make sense,” Heinz admitted, but he pointed to several other reasons for the shortfall “that demonstrate poor leadership.”
Among those reasons are underestimating project costs, overestimating revenues, adjusting for the recession years after it happened, never adjusting for inflation, allowing scope changes to early projects and using regional dollars for those expansions without voter approval, he noted.
Heinz also suggested Moghimi may not be sharing the most timely nor most accurate data with the RTA Board or with the transportation professionals who serve on various RTA committees because it could “point to a record of poor decisionmaking at the top” of the RTA.
I am aware of several examples of this, including in the supporting materials provided for this item today. Literally RTA staff funding shortfall estimates were inflated by 30% from information available to the public on Aug 25th, to a memo only sent to the RTA Board on Aug 26th.
— Dr. Matt Heinz (@mattheinzmd) September 6, 2022
He also noted another possible reason why the RTA Board and the public would not be provided up-to-date information – that it is part of a scheme to manufacture support for extending the RTA past its 2026 end.
The RTA Board established a citizens’ advisory committee in 2018 to assist in developing another RTA plan of projects, referred to as RTA Next. That proposed 20-year extension would be funded by continuing the current RTA sales tax; the tax extension and RTA Next plan would need to be approved by Pima County voters.
To be clear, I am not opposed to RTA Next happening, I just don’t like the way facts, data, and processes seem to be invented on the fly — including the timeline for how we are supposed to get ready for RTA Next without knowing for sure what our actual shortfall is.
— Dr. Matt Heinz (@mattheinzmd) September 6, 2022
In addition to Pima County, the RTA Board includes representatives from the Arizona State Transportation Board, Marana, Oro Valley, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, Sahuarita, South Tucson, the Tohono O’odham Nation, and Tucson.
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