Donald Riley:
The public-sector pro at RGRTA’s wheel

Listen to this article

It’s a nice place, don’t you think?” asks Donald Riley, gesturing at the modest expanse of the Rochester-Genesee Regional Transportation Authority’s East Main Street headquarters.
Actually, the place–a low-rising, red-brick edifice–exudes the functional anonymity of a government office. Neutral, sure. Nice could be a stretch.
But that might be what Riley likes about it.
Named CEO of the authority two months ago, Riley, 50, has spent most of his adult life in government. He was appointed Greece supervisor in his early 20s and held the post for 17 years, winning eight successive elections.
Save for a brief stint teaching fifth grade in a parochial school and some time spent as a Greece employee, it was his only job until he quit at midterm in 1989 to take a job in private industry.
Virtually unsullied by major controversy as an elected official, Riley returned to public life in a hail of negative press as Rochester Mayor William Johnson Jr., a Democrat, and the city’s RGRTA commissioners objected to his appointment, calling it a case of rank GOP political patronage.
Riley, seeming bemused by the fuss, noted that the objections more centered on the circumstances surrounding the appointment than on him or his capabilities, and that his personal interactions with Johnson always had been friendly.
In part, the mini-furor could be written off to the unusual amount of scrutiny focused on the transportation authority at the time.
In August, shortly after the agency’s previous head announced his impending retirement, it became public that the Regional Transit Service Inc.–the city’s bus company–had let a coin-processing firm lose track of $1 million over a three-year period. It is, many believe, the largest loss of public money in Monroe County’s history.
Under the circumstances, any appointee could be expected to be put under a microscope.
Riley makes it clear he has been working hard to prove his critics wrong. Since starting the job, he says, he has made special efforts to reach out to the city commissioners who objected to his appointment, and in fact has worked smoothly with them.
“Don Riley is a heck of a nice guy,” says Miriam Shapiro, a Democrat and the most publicly outspoken of three Rochester commissioners. “Nobody doesn’t like him.”
At the same time, she still chafes at what she sees as inappropriate political strong-arming by Republican County Executive John Doyle to get Riley in the job.
Still, Shapiro gives Riley a reasonable chance of succeeding against stiff odds. He has proven adept at public relations, she notes, an improvement over the previous administration.
Since assuming the post, Riley has paraded some 60 CEOs and public officials through the RGRTA headquarters, efforts Shapiro praises as part of what is needed to turn the troubled mass-transit agency around.
However, on what she regards as the key issue–whether Riley can pull in enough dedicated state funding to keep the buses rolling in Rochester–the jury is still out, Shapiro pointedly notes.
Riley, citing a $4.5 million structural deficit on top of the missing $1 million, acknowledges that his ability to pull in state and federal funding will be a key measure of his success.
Meanwhile, he announced two weeks ago that the agency plans to sue its accounting firm, Arthur Andersen LLP, claiming that the firm was negligent in not informing RGRTA commissioners of the RTS cash problems.
Riley also is actively following the FBI’s and Monroe County district attorney’s investigations of Continental Coin Processors Inc., the Buffalo-based company that lost the RTS cash. He is also trying to interest state Attorney General Dennis Vacco in pursuing the matter.
Continental Coin is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. The RTS shortage surfaced publicly only after the firm filed for protection from creditors in July.
Riley says he has instructed Joseph Yanni, RGRTA chief financial officer and chairman of Continental Coin’s creditors committee, to pursue recovery aggressively in the courts.
“We want the $1 million back,” he told reporters at a news conference announcing the impending lawsuit and other measures.
Yanni is not hopeful. Continental Coin has virtually no assets, he says. His hope is to persuade the court to force a liquidation, so the authority can recover at least a few cents on the dollar.
Meanwhile, Riley has instituted new controls over dealing with fare-box cash that he and Yanni believe will prevent a repeat of the recent debacle.
Riley also announced internal reorganizations that will put the authority’s previously semiautonomous finance, human- resources and public-information departments directly under his supervision.
A month on the job is hardly time enough to evaluate his performance, Riley acknowledges. However, he also allows that straightening out the fare-box mess he inherited will be a mere prelude to the more formidable job of overhauling Rochester’s antiquated mass-transit system.
Along with its other problems the system faces declining ridership, while its $1.25 fare is among the highest in the country.
Riley pledges to hold the line at $1.25. And, despite the daunting obstacles the enterprise faces, he is optimistic of its ultimate success.
The RTS deficit is a consequence of declines in county mortgage-tax receipts, suffered as home sales and values fell from 1980s highs, Riley says. So every transportation agency in the state is in the same fix. New federal money can and will be found to help bail the system out, Riley believes.
In a sense it must be found, since the $1.25 fare covers only 40 percent of a bus ride’s cost.
If the fare increases, Riley says, the cost of riding a bus will approach and perhaps equal that of owning a car, and the system will lose even more riders.
But, he acknowledges, money alone will not cure the system’s shortcomings.
An outdated route structure that makes it difficult for much of the most likely market–the working poor–to use the system could be a more serious long-term problem than the missing $1 million.
In confronting such difficulties, Riley intends to follow a path laid out by RGRTA’s governing board.
The first step is to hire a consultant to study the market and figure out how routes might be redesigned and ridership boosted. Riley is evaluating possible candidates.
In advance of such a study, he already has some ideas of his own. Could RTS, for example, buy vehicles smaller than 40-passenger buses? Such vehicles might work to serve routes that otherwise would be too expensive.
Creative marketing and advertising also might work unexpected wonders on the system’s ridership figures, Riley enthuses.
Most such ideas already have been advanced by William Nojay, chairman of the RGRTA board and, like Riley, a recent appointee hand-picked by Doyle.
Nojay was named to the voluntary post by Doyle in June, a month before the agency’s picture was clouded by the $1 million scandal. He says his charge from the Monroe County Executive was to address the system’s deep, structural shortcomings.
A burning question for commissioners in the post-scandal environment, Nojay says, was whether to replace outgoing director John Garrity with a transportation professional or to look for a transportation outsider who knows the community and possesses strong administrative skills.
Nojay ultimately opted for an outsider on the theory that virtually every metropolitan area in the country faces similar mass-transit problems that no transportation professional has yet begun to solve.
After a nationwide search that attracted a number of professionals, Riley moved to the top of Nojay’s short list.
As Greece supervisor, he says, Riley had demonstrated ability in public-sector administration. As executive director for Mark IV Construction Co. Inc., he had gotten some private-sector leavening. And he knows the community.
Shapiro’s qualms centered largely on Riley’s lack of public-transit experience. She is somewhat assured by his efforts to mount “a steep learning curve” since starting on the job.
And the Greece supervisor’s post is arguably a strong resume item, she concedes.
Riley presided over the town during a period of explosive growth when its population grew from 75,000 to nearly 100,000 in less than two decades; he directed a massive infrastructure buildup that saw the suburb transformed into a small city.
A native of the Rochester suburb, Riley is the son of politically active Republicans.
His father, John “Rip” Riley, served on the Greece board and was elected to the first Monroe County Legislature in 1966. When he died in 1967, Riley’s mother, Dorothy, served the balance of his term. She later ran for and won several terms herself.
While interested in “normal” youthful pursuits like sports, Riley says, he also grew up politically aware, staying up late on presidential election nights to monitor the results.
In 1969, he graduated from St. John Fisher College with a B.A. in history with no special intention of following his parents’ political trajectory.
Like many young men at the time, he was waiting to see how he would fare in the draft, and was marking time at a parochial-school teaching job.
His number did not come up at selective service, and Greece Supervisor Fred Eckert, whom Riley had met while working on his mother’s campaigns, tapped him for a town job.
Eckert left the job after he was elected to the state Senate, naming Riley to serve the balance of his term. In 1972, Riley ran for and won the post, a performance he repeated until his own midterm retirement more than a decade later.
In 1985, Riley found himself briefly at odds with Eckert when both sought the GOP nomination for the congressional seat being vacated by retiring Genesee County Republican Barber Conable.
Riley withdrew after it became apparent that Eckert, who at the time was serving as ambassador to Fiji, had the greater political clout.
After a single term in Congress, Eckert lost the seat to Louise Slaughter, a Fairport Democrat who since has handily defeated a string of Republican challengers.
Riley, whose backslapping political style and persona are closer to Slaughter’s close-to-the-constituency image, still maintains that his party made a mistake in choosing Eckert over himself. Had he been nominated, the seat still would belong to the GOP, he believes.
Riley says his retirement as Greece supervisor four years later was in no way a reaction to his thwarted congressional ambitions. It simply was time to quit.
“Staying longer wouldn’t have been good for me or the town,” he says.
Besides, Riley adds, he needed some private-sector experience. Public life was all he knew.
The job he took for developer Anthony DiMarzo in fact traded heavily on his public experience. Much of it involved helping to clear the way for Mark IV projects with town officials, work that Riley says proved enlightening because it put him in touch with lower-echelon zoning and planning workers, giving him an engine-room view of local governments.
Why did he decide to leave Mark IV after seven years to return to a public-sector job? It again was time, Riley says.
When Doyle asked him to consider the appointment, he accepted with little hesitation “because I realized I missed public life.”
Critics have suggested that another motivation could be the boost the $85,000 authority job will give to Riley’s state pension. He left the Greece supervisor’s post making less than $70,000. The RGRTA job could add $10,000 or more a year to his state retirement check.
Riley bridles at the suggestion, angrily denying that he needs the money.
And cognizant that in taking the job he entered a political minefield, he is still confident that he is up to the task.
The $1 million loss, he told reporters recently, could not have come at “a more daunting time.”
Still, he added, “we’re moving to take (RGRTA) into the ’90s.”

DONALD RILEY
Position: CEO, Rochester-Genesee Regional Transportation Authority
Age: 50
Education: B.A., history, St. John Fisher College
Children: Two sons, one daughter and one stepson
Quote: “This organization has incredible potential to provide service to those dependent on it to get to work just to get from one place to another.”