- (female announcer) Production funding for Behind the Headlines is made possible in part by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

- The interim CEO of MATA, tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I am Eric Barnes with the Daily Memphian.

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by Bacarra Mauldin.

She's the interim CEO of MATA.

Thank you very much for being here again.

- Thank you for having me.

- So we'll talk through, we'll get kind of a status update on where MATA is right now, where it's going, how it got here.

But I do wanna start with the question I think so many people have is what in the world happened that, I think just one many numbers stand out, but I think the former board chair wrote in a column for the Daily Memphian, guest column, that, you know, MATA receives $32 million from local sources for operating, but spent $84 million last year.

There's just been a kind of epic set of problems that have been building over a long time that finally come to a head.

How do you describe what's gone wrong?

- Well, let's talk about the MATA of yesterday.

You know, the funding issues that MATA has had they didn't start on February 1st when I started as the interim CEO.

MATA has been plagued by underfunding for many years, and there are many reasons for that.

Now, while the local investment was around $32 million, give or take a dollar or two.

- Sure.

- There are also other sources that provide funding to get it up to the level of our full operating budget.

We receive federal funding as well as some funding from the state as well, a little bit from the county.

And the lion's share of the funding is from the City of Memphis.

And so, as you know, I think you would agree with me that the cost of gas pre-pandemic is not what it was post pandemic.

- Sure.

- Same thing for, you know, supplies, tools, all of that.

And so the cost of doing business has continued to escalate, while the funding has remained relatively flat.

So it's just like, on a personal level, if you still make, you know, minimum wage, but the cost, your rent goes up every year, the cost of groceries goes up every year, you're gonna find yourself at a deficit.

And that's really the primary thing that has plagued MATA over the years.

And I think we finally have gotten to the point where we just can't kick the can down the road any farther.

- Okay and we'll dig more into that, but let's get this sort of status update.

I mean, back a couple months ago, it looked like half the staff of MATA was gonna be laid off.

The trolleys have stopped operating, the Main Street trolley, which is the only one that was operating.

- Correct.

- At some point there was talk that half the bus routes would stopped.

Where is the, what is the daily operational situation right now in terms of transit?

- Well, thankfully the proposed cuts that we had, they've been paused.

That gives us a little bit more time to come up with a more comprehensive plan to work with Mayor Young, as well as the City Council to come up with some funding solutions.

We have a new board that we're rolling on, you know, we had our second board meeting with the new board on yesterday.

And so we are working now to try to avoid doing that.

We're focusing on getting the agency stable financially, as well as determining what the long-term future of MATA is from a service perspective.

- So right now, all the bus routes are being serviced?

- All of the bus routes are being serviced.

- And no one was laid off?

- No one was laid off.

- Okay.

The trolley, though, is stopped.

Let's start that.

It's one of the more prominent and actually one of the more most frequently ridden and revenue producing per a report that came out, an outside report that came out.

What's the status of the Main Street trolley?

- So the Main Street trolleys are suspended right now.

Now that is not a permanent thing.

We had to suspend it for safety reasons.

We had a brake failure.

TDOT has been involved.

TDOT required that we install a backup braking system on all of our trolleys.

Because of our financial constraints, we felt like it was not really prudent at that time to sort of borrow from Peter to pay Paul, if you will, to get this braking system put on.

So instead we put pause, we hit pause.

We're working with TDOT to investigate the true cause of the braking failure.

And we're working with TDOT to get backup brakes installed.

- Any, last time the trolleys had to be stopped because of failures, it was many years before they started again.

Even just the Main Street one, the Riverfront Loop has not restarted, and the Main Street, Madison Avenue line hasn't restarted.

What's the estimate on when Main Street trolleys will be running again?

- I'm gonna be honest with you, when we suspended the service, we felt like it was just going to be a temporary suspension.

Our TDOT knows how important trolleys are to the Memphis economy, and we actually are working diligently to try to have them back by next summer.

- Oh, so but that long though.

So is six, as much as six months, eight months, given where we are right now.

- Well, the Federal Transit Administration requires a 180-day notice of intent to restart the trolley service.

And so we're working with our new board and TDOT.

Hopefully, we will be able to at least give that notice to TDOT and FTA very soon.

- There was a sense, I mean, if not a reality that MATA was about run out of money when all this sort of came to a head in the last couple of months.

Are vendor, I mean, are people are being paid?

Let's just walk through key things here.

Employees are being paid.

- Yes.

- Are vendors being paid?

- Yes, vendors are being paid, and we are actively involved in renegotiating contracts.

Our board meeting on yesterday actually was evidence of that.

There were a couple of contracts that were on the agenda that were approved that were the result of staff renegotiating those contracts to better terms that, one, saved money and the payables were in a timeframe that will allow MATA to stay current and in good standing.

- There was a report by an outside firm, Transpro.

The draft report is on the Daily Memphian site.

It may be on the MATA site as well.

People can search for Transpro.

It's a 120-page report.

It's pretty epically difficult to read if you care about transit.

I mean, it talks about, you know, 80% of MATA's customers utilize just 12 routes.

Forty-four percent, bus ridership has declined eighty-two percent since 1991, which speaks to this being a long term problem.

Issues with the prior board kind of rubber stamping decisions, not having proper oversight, and some fogginess about the whole financial, where all the money has gone.

Are, when you see that Transpro report, where do you, how do you respond to it?

- The Transpro report really didn't tell us anything new.

- Was all that in the public record then?

- All of that was in the public record.

These are the issues that I had highlighted over the last several months since taking over on the first.

Again, when I took over on the first, MATA was running about 50 buses.

I went in knowing that we needed to do as much as we could as quickly as we could, to get more buses on the road.

And so within weeks, I was able to call in my national contacts, from transit agencies across the country, talking to them about our issue.

We were able to get eight brand new diesel buses in within one month of taking over as the interim CEO.

Then in-- - And those are on the road?

- And those are on the road now.

Going even further, two months later, we were able to work with some industry partners.

We were able to bring in, we got 27 buses transferred to us from the Tucson Agency.

Those were things that we started under this administration.

- Yeah.

- We initially put five of those vehicles on the road due to our financial constraints.

We, I'm now proud to say that we now have a total of 66 buses on the road, because now we have 17 of those Tucson buses on the road, and they're fully outfitted.

And we have three more that we're gonna be bringing online very soon.

- And you're right to remind folks, you just, you took the interim job in just in the spring.

You've been at MATA a couple years before that, as what chief of staff?

- Chief of staff.

- Deputy?

- Yes.

- So since '21, '22?

- Yeah, since '21.

- So just a couple years.

So I want to make sure and emphasize that, that really, I mean, you're, my questions for you are, yeah, how did it happen?

But I don't mean to lay that all at your feet in some way.

So please, I don't want you or other people to take it that way.

But also you're the person, you're the interim CEO who's gotta fix this.

- Absolutely.

- Right?

And so when you look at it, how did, back to that question, how did MATA get here, to this place where so many buses weren't operating, where there were so many problems where, you know, there just, there was kind of this inertia of change?

What caused that?

- Well, it's really hard to just lay it at just one specific thing that was the catalyst for it.

I would absolutely say that when you have limited funding, and again, the cost of business continues to rise, you know, difficult choices have to be made.

And I think a little bit of that, you know, some of the fleet replacement got sacrificed along the way.

And so those are the things that we have worked diligently to try to fix that.

And so once I had full visibility of our finances, because remember, on my second day as interim, we actually brought in J.S.

Held because there was no CFO actually at the time.

- J.S.

Held is a person or a firm?

- J.S.

Held is a firm.

- Okay.

- It's a national financial firm that we brought in to actually rebuild our finances and help me understand exactly what happened, going back to the underfunding story.

And so they helped me understand that.

And once I got full visibility on it, that's really when I started to shine a light on what was going on.

Because you can't fix a problem unless you understand it.

And that's one of the things that we really, we really prided ourselves in putting it out in the public space so that people truly understand that there was a funding issue there.

- Did prior to you taking over, was the board, the prior board, again, the board has been fully replaced by Mayor Young and the Council.

- Yes.

- Was the prior board not getting complete financials that showed this set of problems?

- Well, it's always been evident that there were funding issues.

That's something that's not new.

I mean, you can go back, I have a news article from 2016 where former CEO, Ron Garrison, was before the Council and before the board, talking about funding issues.

So funding issues have been a recurrent thing and the need to put more funding in the system is not new.

In fact, Transit Vision, which is a part of Memphis 3.0, talks about the need to put more funding in the system, and it actually talks about the incremental investment that needs to happen.

And that's all a part of the Transit Vision, but it was never funded.

- And that's part of what comes out in the Transit Pro is, you know, or not Transit Pro, excuse me, the Transpro report.

And I was looking at the draft report, so just to be clear.

But that, you know, some of the big, the big visionary things like Transpro, which was the strategic plan, the notion of a bus rapid corridor down Poplar that we talked about on the show with your predecessor, maybe back to Ron Garrison.

There was other rapid transit corridors that were gonna involve a lot of investment, but that investment never came.

The funding for those never came.

And meanwhile, the day in day out operation of trolleys, of the regular bus routes, of maintenance was declining and declining.

And so how, I mean, is it your vision going forward to say, hey, some of these long-term new routes, rapid trans-, all that, that's just gotta be tabled.

And this is the recommendation of Transpro.

And just get back to basics of basic bread and butter service.

- Well, let me set the record straight.

- Okay, yeah.

- The investment did come for the innovation corridor.

It came from the Federal Transit Administration.

Congressman Cohen has been one of our just staunchest cheerleaders and has really been very, very instrumental in getting the federal investment to help us with those.

So again, as the funding remains flat on the local level, but you have this infusion of federal investment, that's where the disconnect comes in.

Now, I will say that the Bus Rapid Transit project at this point has not been tabled because as I see it, mobility, we need to create a mobility ecosystem.

And a part of that ecosystem, involves various modes of transit that all come together to make the whole mobility system.

So what I would say is that the BRT is actually the core of the mobility system that we're trying to create.

We wanna be able to go out and have our customers catch a bus with 10-minute headways, which are the times between buses.

Well, that's the level of service that we're trying to create with the bus rapid transit corridor.

- And so yeah, that's fair.

But I think, if I'm not mistaken, you can correct me.

With Transpro, part of what the problem is, there will be say, federal money for capital improvements that would put all that place, but not the operating money.

And that's the kind of trap or the cycle that MATA has been generally too often caught in of funding for big picture things, but not the day in, day out maintenance, repairs, and replacement and that balancing act.

How do you fix that?

- Well, there's simply going to have to be more investment into transit.

You have to, you can only get out of it what you put into it.

The citizens have spoken loudly that they want a better transit system, that they want to be able to catch a bus within 10 minutes.

They wanna know that they can depend on that.

I know what that feels like.

I've actually been a bus rider, a bus dependent rider, in fact.

And so I get it.

But there's gotta be more investment in the system in order for that to happen.

And again, I'm not just saying that for the City of Memphis, City of Memphis, Shelby County, State of Tennessee, we're working with all of our funding partners to try to see what we can do to put more investment into MATA.

- If there is, let's, I mean, I think it's unlikely.

It seems unlikely that significant more money is gonna come to MATA from local sources.

I mean, if you look just, I mean that's just an observation.

I don't know that that's true.

It's just they just did a huge tax increase to balance the budget.

There are big demands across the city's budget and across the county's budget.

And the county's never been a particularly large funder, correct me if I'm wrong, of mass transit.

People talk about wanting mass transit, both those who ride of course.

Those who want to ride.

And those may even, you know, employers or people who believe in, you know, the value of this.

So if there is no significant new money locally, does that then mean cuts to service?

I mean there something has to give if there isn't that new investment that you're calling for.

And again, it just seems really unlikely that at any time soon that's gonna come.

- Well, a couple of things.

We wanna make sure that we are being the absolute best stewards of the funding that we have.

We are looking for opportunities to optimize our service to serve the community better.

And so that once we are able to effectively do that, then I think that the case will go a long way for more investment.

It may not be groundbreaking, but every dollar counts, every little bit helps.

And so we're optimizing what we're doing right now.

We're working for greater administrative accountability to ensure that we're being better stewards of the money that we have and we're listening to our riders.

- Yeah, and I imagine, 10 minutes left in show here just for everyone.

I imagine many people listening and I'm sure certainly, you know, Council and the mayor's office want, they really, I mean, they don't wanna put another dollar in unless they have that accountability.

So you talked about J.S.

Held, the firm that's coming outside.

I mean, what are the financial reporting and transparency and accountability that you're putting in place to rebuild that trust?

Because again, I think, right, this is me editorializing, but it seems like even if there was a pot of money in the city coffers to give to MATA, they would not be real eager to give it until, and I'm not putting this on you that you caused it, but how do you go forward and fix that and build that trust and accountability and transparency to the public Council, mayor's office, et cetera?

- Consistent reporting.

We have consistently reported our financials.

They're on our website.

And so having that information be out and available to the public, that's number one.

Number two, there are internal controls that we've put into place.

We are bringing on additional staff, such as a internal auditor that was not a part of our team before.

That's a corrective action that we are working on with federal government right now.

One of their recommendations, we're doing that.

And really the role of the internal auditor is that quality assurance person that makes sure that we're following the exact processes that we should be to the letter.

It's kind of a internal, just auditing everything that we do.

Not only finances, but processes.

That's just one way.

And so we're communicating more, we're breaking down the internal silos, we're having more accountability, more reporting.

We work very closely with the City of Memphis.

We're doing more reporting with them as well.

- Yeah.

- And so those are all things that we work on to try to earn the public's trust.

- Well, there, part of the Transpro report, it benchmarked MATA against other peer cities, Charlotte, I think Little Rock and Tucson.

Low marks in terms of efficiency, in terms of cost and spending and so on, on the bus service, on the trolley service.

Although it did point out that the trolley was probably the highest revenue per ride in the whole system.

But one area where it gave MATA high marks in efficiency is the on demand service and on demand is MATA Plus.

And the Groove service, which people have seen, it's kind of an Uber almost service.

You'll see the minivans green and black, I think they are around town.

Is there, I mean, and also the stats in there are really striking, and this has been reported before, but just to see it at this really critical point.

So many of the routes in MATA, I mean it is a handful of riders.

And I don't mean to diminish the importance that the buses have to their lives.

I think what some 75% or 80% of MATA's customer utilize, I'm sorry, 75% rely, I'm sorry, 93%, too many numbers in front of me.

Ninety-three percent of riders of MATA are totally dependent on MATA, and 50% are reliant totally on MATA to get to work.

So it's critically important.

But some of those underutilized bus routes, can those be replaced by Groove, by some kind of on demand service that could be more cost effective?

- Well, I think that on demand is a tool, it's not the complete solution.

Again, going back to that mobility system that I was beginning to describe, the BRT is at the core, but in the outer peripheral, what we envision is they're on demand zones, kind of an expansion of what we already do.

We also have Ready by MATA, which is also on demand service.

And my vision is that we would have those on demand zones in areas surrounding the core city center.

And so those on demand zones would feed into fixed route service that would be more concise, tighter, more efficient, shorter headways as well, that ultimately feed into the BRT lines when they come on that have the shortest frequency.

- BRT at this point, do you have an estimate of when that could be completed?

- That could be completed, it could be as soon as '27, but as late as '33.

It really just depends.

- So again, in the interim, there's gotta be a solution.

- And in the interim, we are continuing to look into expanding the on demand offerings, as well as bringing more buses online, making our routes more efficient.

And so those are the things that we're looking at.

- Route, I think I already asked this, but just to circle back, are route cuts on the table?

- Everything is on the table.

- Okay.

One thing that was in the Transpro report was the, a lot of space, office space, too much office space and outdated maintenance space, maybe too much.

What's the plan with the, and it's a huge cost associated with that and the inefficiency of it.

What's the plan there?

- Well, the, we are currently in the process of building a operations and maintenance facility.

That's one of the large capital projects actually going back to the Transpro report that they recommended that we stay on course with that.

And so, and we are, so we are looking to break ground on that probably in the next year.

And then we will be moving forward with that.

In terms of the office space, we have the office space in the administrative area because there was a large flood at our current facility.

And so part of that building is unusable, and that's what prompted the move of the administrative headquarters.

We are working with our board and with legal counsel to see what options exist.

So we are looking, again, everything is on the table and so we're looking at any and all options we can to be more efficient and fiscally responsible.

- So many questions.

We have like a few minutes left here.

Do you look back, are you disappointed in anyone?

In any, I mean, is there people in this moment want to lay some of this blame at someone's feet.

Do you lay blame at someone's feet?

- No, I don't.

I'm squarely focused on what we need to do to move the system ahead.

Like I shared briefly, I was transit dependent.

I was a young mother with a young daughter that got up at and caught the bus at 5 AM to get my daughter to daycare to go to my secretarial job.

And I ran that back and repeat every day.

I didn't really care about the budget of the transit authority, I didn't really care about the fiscal, I just needed that bus to show up.

And there are thousands of people right here in Memphis that need the bus to show up.

And that's where my focus is.

- We maybe touched on this earlier, where are you with open driver and operator and maintenance positions and hiring?

- Yes, I announced at our board meeting, that we are going to do some limited hiring to ensure that we can shore up the ranks for the equipment that we have.

Like I mentioned, we're up to 66 buses, so that's gonna require a few more operators to make sure that we can keep those out efficiently.

So we are gonna open it back up.

And so if anyone is out there that's looking for a position, we'd love to have them.

- In the, and again, the report was done in August, October timeframe, so that I'm looking at.

MATA needs 175 operators.

At that time, it had about 156.

Is that number about the same?

- That number is about the same.

But that higher number is, if we were fully, you know, outfitted with the 74 buses, really we would need 74 buses to truly effectively run the service level that we operate right now.

- And can you tell me, it was like 66, give or take?

- Yes, 66.

- And every bus, you know, when you buy a bus, let's go back to this, a bus is a half a million dollars or something?

- No.

- I mean, where, what is a bus?

I remember that talking to Ron Garrison and that number's probably wildly outdated.

- It is, a diesel bus is about $800,000 and an electric bus is about a million dollars.

And then you're talking about another million dollars in charging infrastructure.

So there, it's not cheap.

But at the same time, that's why we're trying to leverage the federal investment that we have so that that makes the local investment go a lot further in buying those capital assets.

- How long, I mean, well how long is a bus supposed to be in service?

A diesel bus?

How long are the MATA buses, how long have they been in service?

- 500,000 miles, 12 years, 500,000 miles.

A lot of our buses go beyond that.

Sometimes we have rebuilds.

We're, our team is doing the things to extend the life to the greatest extent possible.

So really I tip my hat to them because they really work hard to do that.

- With less than a minute left, the key metrics, you know, we'll love to have you back on the show in six months and do a status update.

- Absolutely.

- People care about this a lot.

Whether they're a rider or not, they're a taxpayer.

They just want transit to work, I think by and large.

- Right.

- The key metrics, the one, two, or three key metrics that you want to point to six months from now to say, hey, we're making progress.

- Wanna point to our on time performance.

I'm fully expecting to see an uptick.

It was in the 50s when I started.

It's now in the 60s.

And trying to get even more towards the 70s and we won't celebrate at 70, but we'll absolutely acknowledge the accomplishment and put even more things in place to try to make sure we get to that next benchmark.

- All right, we'll leave it there.

Again, thank you very much for being here.

I appreciate it very much.

- Thank you.

- Thanks for coming.

Some people in the firing line that you are in.

Some people would not wanna do this.

You've tried a couple times, and we finally got it worked out.

So I really do appreciate you being here and asking these questions and being available.

The Transpro report is, it's on the MATA site, I think.

- It's not on the MATA site.

- It's on the Daily Memphian site.

If you search for Transpro MATA report, you'll get more detail on the recommendations and the kind of information there.

That is all the time we have this week though.

Thank you very much for joining us.

If you missed any of the conversation, you can get the full conversation at wkno.org, or you can go to the Daily Memphian, YouTube.

You can also download the show as a podcast.

Recent shows include Marie Feagins, Doug McGowen, Paul Young, we've got CJ Davis coming up in the next few weeks.

Thanks very much, and we'll see you next week.

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