Last week, the Chronicle‘s Rad Sallee reported that METRO has extended the contract of CEO Frank “Procurement Disaster” Wilson:
The Metropolitan Transit Authority board approved a two-year contract extension Thursday for president and CEO Frank Wilson, which would keep him in Houston through May 2012, to build the next five transit lines.
[snip]
“We recognize that we’ve got a lot of work to do, and we want to keep it on schedule,” Wolff said. “We want to have the same CEO here to do it, and he wants to be here.”
[snip]
The board resolution described Wilson’s performance as “exemplary” and said that during his tenure, Metro has increased ridership, purchased fuel at bargain prices, revised fares and adopted a “smart card” payment system.
Overall METRO paid rider revenues continue to decline, a fact that Tom Bazan documents monthly by sharing the results of his public information requests to METRO.
As far as Frank Wilson wanting to be here — let’s just hope he doesn’t negotiate himself an even more lucrative job with METRO contractors, as he (allegedly) did with contractors while he was head of New Jersey’s NJDOT, according to this damning report (pdf) that the Chronicle didn’t think was terribly important back when Lucas Wall covered the METRO beat and Wilson was hired in Houston.
UPDATE: Laurence Simon posts on the Smart Card system.
