Industry Forum

Refendum or not, it’s a long ride from the project kickoff meeting to ribbon-cutting day, and not everyone makes the complete trip. If you have a record of delivering on your promises prior to becoming a rail project sponsor, chances are you will get a chance to continue showing that you and your agency can be trusted on this new endeavor even though it is going to be unlike anything you have done before. Conversely, if your bus riders or the public has a perception that a promise was broken before, you can bet you are going to hear about it over and over. So the first advice is, do your best to rehabilitate any outstanding trust issues before going forward. In these days of limited, and sometimes shrinking, revenues, bus riders are going to be wary of you taking on a big project. They will want to know what is in it for them. Keep your existing customers on your team.

The bus riders aren’t the only ones who want to know what is in it for them. The benefits of the rail project have to be clear, reasonable and they must make sense to those who may not realize any of the immediate benefits. It doesn’t matter if you have the trustworthiness of Walter Cronkite or Oprah if the project is solving a problem that doesn’t seem to exist.

Be quick to inform and slow to promise results you cannot control. Qualify those early cost estimates and opening day pledges. Good faith efforts to establish both during the planning process are essential, but you must always, always, always point out that the project is in the planning stage and as more detail becomes known, things may change. Every cost estimate and every opening day pledge you make will be duly recorded and will be read back to you at an inconvenient moment, trust me. So be ready to re-state your earlier words when things change.

And they will change. You should share those changes, not “own them”. Frequent and open communication about the project’s status is critical. Communication must be consistent across all groups. Convey the same information to your board, the riders, the media and the federal agencies who might be involved. If there is an unanticipated problem, get to work solving it (that’s what you were hired to do) but don’t neglect to tell everyone that there IS a problem but you are working on the solution. Then make a pot of tea, get everyone around the table and keep going until you get to the ribbon-cutting.