(The following article by Virginia Groark was posted on the Chicago Tribune website on June 11.)
CHICAGO — Metra Chairman Jeffrey Ladd, who once suggested the punishment for a driver who caused a fatal train accident in 1994 should be a trip to Singapore for caning, is known as a confrontational taskmaster. The trait helped him build a first-class commuter railroad.
But some feel it also may have led to his undoing.
Ladd announced Friday that he is stepping down from the board of Metra, an agency he has chaired since its inception in 1984. He said he wants to spend more time in his law practice and with his grandchildren.
But at least two elected officials said they believe he knew he had ruffled too many feathers to retain the chairmanship in the board’s summer election.
“I think he realized that the votes were there to elect a replacement, and he did what he felt was best for him,” said Cook County Commissioner Tony Peraica, who has criticized Ladd for running an agency that awards contracts to a club of insiders. Ladd has denied that.
During Ladd’s tenure, Metra bought new train cars, upgraded its poorly maintained bridges and infrastructure, started service to Antioch and extended rail lines and increased capacity.
Last year, the agency transported an average of 150,000 people a day along a 500-plus-mile system in a six-county area. Ladd has said the domain is about the size of Connecticut.
Insiders had speculated for months that Ladd’s time at Metra may be ending because suburban Cook County commissioners wanted someone from their own county. Ladd is from McHenry County.
As the seven-member board looks at its ranks to pick a new chairman, many agree it’s time to shed the abrasiveness that has marked Ladd’s tenure.
Though his leadership style helped create a more efficient system, several officials said it’s important for the new chairman to work well with other people, especially as the area’s transit boards plan to go to Springfield next year to ask lawmakers for more money.
“What we need now is someone who can bring people together,” said DuPage County Chairman Robert Schillerstrom. “If we are going to improve our system, we have to have people who can work with the city of Chicago, who can work with the collar counties, who can work with the ring around the collar counties and cross party lines.”
Schillerstrom endorsed the board member he appointed, Carole Doris, for the job, noting she’s a consensus builder. He also said a representative of the collar counties should be chairman.
Doris is interested in the post.
“It’s a role that I know I can undertake,” she said Friday, “and I believe I would serve well for them.”
Board member James Dodge of Orland Park, also a possible successor, said Friday that the board needs to develop a consensus on who should replace Ladd. The election likely won’t happen before August, he said.
Facing a tough job
Ladd, 65, was appointed to the board when Metra was formed in 1984 and elected its chairman, a post that pays $25,000 a year. At the time, the rail lines and infrastructure Metra took over were in such disrepair that longtime agency officials say they could see the tracks through rusted-out holes in the train cars.
Under Ladd’s leadership, Metra updated its equipment and even passed a special fare increase in 1989 dedicated exclusively to capital projects. In 1996, the agency started the North Central line between the Loop and Antioch. Two years later, it secured federal authorization to double the runs on the North Central line and extend the Union Pacific West and the SouthWest lines. All three projects were completed early this year.
Last year, Congress authorized five other projects, including the suburb-to-suburb STAR line. Metra must now find money for those projects.
But Ladd’s tenure has been marked by controversies that pegged him as a hothead.
Most notably, he angered south suburban officials who were pushing for the STAR line to link Joliet to the economically depressed south suburbs. Metra, he said, wasn’t a “social welfare agency.”
Ladd said Friday that a reporter took his remarks out of context.
The reporter “said we need some economic development,” Ladd said. “I said, `This is not a social service agency. We have a requirement imposed by the General Assembly that 50 percent of our operating costs come from the fare box.”
But the statement perpetuated the perception among south suburbanites that they did not get the same treatment as those in the western and northern suburbs. The uproar led to the appointment of three south suburbanites to the Metra board, said Ed Paesel, executive director of the South Suburban Mayors and Managers Association.
Since then, train cars with bathrooms were put on the south suburban and South Side Electric line, the only line that had lacked them. Metra also has included a link for the STAR line from Joliet to the south suburbs in its long-term plans.
“It was a matter of us bringing attention to Mr. Ladd that his attitude at the time to the south suburbs was not appropriate,” Paesel said.
`I have always been direct’
Even Ladd conceded in his Thursday resignation letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert that his leadership style might not always have been popular.
“I have led the board in the only way I know how, with honesty, energy and integrity,” he wrote. “I have always been direct, some may say too direct, but that was because I have always deeply cared about building this agency and serving the riders who depend upon it.”
His “direct” style meant high expectations for staff members, whom he chastised at board meetings when the trains’ on-time performance rate slipped.
His leadership also gave Metra a strong voice when suburban officials were concerned last year that the Chicago Transit Authority might be trying to take money from Metra to solve its budget deficit. Though some expressed their concerns privately about the CTA, Ladd publicly accused the agency of a pattern of “misinformation and certainly a pattern of uncooperative behavior.”
Besides ruffling feathers, his temper got him in trouble with the law. In 1997 he was convicted of disorderly conduct in what prosecutors called a road rage incident. A driver complained that he repeatedly honked his horn and bumped his car into hers near the Crystal Lake commuter train station. Ladd, who said he was suffering a sinus infection and in a hurry to get home, was sentenced to a year of supervision for the misdemeanor charge, fined $250 and ordered to perform 45 hours of community service.
Though Ladd said Metra was not a patronage haven, he acknowledged Friday that his son had worked for the agency for a short time. In 1998, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Glenn Poshard criticized Ladd, a longtime Republican, for sending letters to Metra contractors urging them to donate $1,000 each to the campaign of GOP gubernatorial nominee George Ryan.
Still, many agree that Metra would not be as well-run today without Ladd’s leadership.
“I think we owe Jeff a lot,” Regional Transportation Authority Chairman James Reilly said. “He felt, I guess, it was time to move on, and it’s no secret there had been some pressures from his board to do that. But Metra and the region are better off because Jeff Ladd served a long time as chairman.”