WA: Fundamentally a transit town': New STA chief embraces the promise of public transportation

The year was 1986 when the Otterstrom family traveled from their home in Spokane to Vancouver, British Columbia, for the transportation -themed World 's Fair. There, the newly built SkyTrain carted attendees to and fro.

Karl Otterstrom, the newly selected CEO for Spokane Transit Authority, remembers the SkyTrain as one of his first experiences with public transit. It sparked a passion within his younger self that he would carry with him for decades.

Otterstrom holds a bachelor's degree in urban and regional planning from Eastern Washington University and a master's in urban planning from the University of Washington. He has worked with Spokane Transit for more than 15 years, including acting as co-CEO with Brandon Rapez-Beatty since Jan. 1. Before that, Otterstrom held positions with King County Metro and the Federal Transit Administration.

An obvious choice?

Set to officially take office as the CEO Aug. 10, members of the Spokane Transit directors' board tout Otterstrom for his passion for transit. Dan Dunne, Spokane Transit board member and Liberty Lake city councilman, said Otterstrom was selected for the role because of "his knowledge of our community and its history," along with a strong technical skill set.

"His ability to use and build transit in the community is unlike anything I've ever seen," Dunne said.

Board member and Spokane County Commissioner Al French shared a similar sentiment.

"There is a lot of activity going on with STA and in the next 10 -year iteration of our growth it is going to be critical to have strong, sound leadership," French said. "And I am confident Karl is going to provide that."

The process by which Otterstrom was selected for this position has received scrutiny from others involved in the Spokanetransportation scene, though, as he was the only candidate presented by the recommendation team for consideration by the rest of the board.

"Karl is great, but obviously most of us would have liked to see a selection of candidates," board member and Spokane City Councilwoman Kitty Klitzky said.

Dunne said other candidates could not compare to Otterstrom.

"It is my personal belief, if there are no other candidates worthy of consideration, that it would be patronizing to put them forward," Dunne said. "(Otterstrom) is a great candidate and a great leader, and I look forward to wonderful improvements in transit for Spokane."

Despite the controversy, French said the board unanimously voted July 17 to move forward with Otterstrom as the next CEO.

A long-lived love of transit

Otterstrom's interest in transit didn't stop with the Vancouver SkyTrain.

When Spokane Transit workers organized a bus-route-scavenger-hunt for his sixth -grade class, Otterstrom's group won — a sign of early aptitude for figuring out transit, he said.

"I don't think it's just one thing," Otterstrom said about the inspiration he finds in transportation. "There's this innate problem -solving, you know, like you get the challenge to say, 'How do you make this connection work in that way?' "

Offering opportunities for people to connect with the wider community is another of many draws.

"Years ago, we received a letter from an EWU student who lived in the Hillyard area neighborhood and was writing STA saying 'thank you, I'm graduating from Eastern Washington, I could have not done that without the bus, because I couldn't afford to live on campus or in Cheney, I lived at home,' " Otterstrom said.

Then in high school, Otterstrom would travel for orchestra competitions. He remembers his classmates hanging around the hotel or walking down the street during their free time.

"I'd get the phone book and figure out the bus routes, the train schedule, whatever else," he said. "And so we'd go explore the entire city rather than just around the hotel."

In 1995, Otterstrom was a high school student in running start. He remembers seeing an ad for the new Spokane Transit plaza in the paper one Saturday and "voraciously" reading everything he could on it.

"It was just very fascinating how it worked. How it could work, how it could be different," he said. "I wanted to plan for a SkyTrain in town, like they had in Vancouver."

On graduating, his senior quote in the yearbook involved getting a SkyTrain in Spokane.

After graduation, Otterstrom went to Salvador, Brazil for a mission with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. There, he was fascinated by how people got around the city without cars.

"They call it 'English hand driving' where the buses would switch to the left side of the median so that the doors on the right entered to the center platform," he said. "And they had these skywalks that ... go to the neighborhood hills."

Despite his long-standing interest in transit, Otterstrom didn't know what he wanted to do when he returned from his mission. He toyed with the idea of becoming a dentist, since he had worked part time in a clinic for a few years.

"I went to EWU and sat down with an adviser, and he started going through the catalog and I saw a transportation planning class. I signed up for that in addition to other core classes," he said. " After the first class session, I was convinced I wanted to be a transportation planner."

While he was a student at Eastern, Otterstrom would bike 2.5 miles from his home in Spokane to catch a bus six months out of the year.

"I always saw it as, like, a practical thing," he said.

Spokane as a transportation town

Otterstrom said that though Spokane is not "super dense," it is a "great place for transit."

"It is fundamentally a transit town," he said. "Its bones are all structured around historic streetcar routes that if you were to cut into pavement, as we have done with City Line, you'd find old railroad tracks or ties from the streetcars."

The plaid layout of streets in the city also gives people in more distant neighborhoods a way to walk to bus stops, Otterstrom said.

STA is currently exploring the possibility of creating a bus route to connect Spokane to Kootenai County — a subject on which Otterstrom based his master's thesis. More imminently, however, are plans for a rapid transit line stretching along Division, and a new facility dedicated to clean energy buses.

"Long ago in my life, I wrote a personal mission statement and one of those parts of my personal mission was to make the world a better place," Otterstrom said. "And so I feel privileged every day coming to Spokane Transit that I can work on that goal."

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