Metro restructures; employees are laid off
From a Metro press release:
METRO announced a restructuring to make basic improvements in the way it does business and shape the organization to stay focused on its mission.
Employees were told that a variety of functions and activities whose value to the authority had diminished over time or become unnecessary would be discontinued. A total of 134 full and part-time positions were identified as non-mission critical.
[snip]
METRO President and CEO Frank Wilson told employees that the authority needed to stop doing things with minimal return. "Thanks to a lot of hard work by employees in this and recent years, METRO is in solid financial shape," he said. "To stay financially healthy and build service for customers, we had to examine our business to get better focused on what matters most."
Wilson said METRO is evolving, as most businesses do, by moving into light rail service last year and commuter rail in the not-to-distant future. As Phase 2 of METRO Solutions is implemented, a new design and construction approach will be used requiring fewer in-house personnel. And new technologies and business strategies are being implemented.
For example, 11 positions were eliminated because METRO has a new electronic means of gathering ridership data and no longer needs employees doing manual counting at bus stops. In addition, in METRO Police we are moving to a strategy of crime-focused policing which targets high priority areas. We have invited a number of part-time officers to fill full time positions and they would be deployed using this new enforcement model. A facet of this new model is to utilize intelligent surveillance cameras in priority areas so that officers and resources can be targeted more effectively.
As always with Metro, we must turn on the poo-poo meter and read between the lines. It isn't hard to guess that Metro has some serious cash-flow issues.
Posted by Anne Linehan @ 09/01/05 11:38 PM | Print | Comments (3)
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