Last Friday, Tri-Rail’s Board hired a replacement for outgoing Executive Director, Steven Abrams. Unlike Mr. Abrams, Diane Hernandez Del Calvo and Teresa Moore, the new Executive Director, David Dech, has years of railroad experience with both freight and passenger systems and experience managing complex rail projects.
When standing for questions from the Board, Mr. Dech stated that with a project like Miami Central, you must assume things will go wrong and you need to be ready with multiple contingency plans when they do.
Mr. Dech also stated that to address budget issues, he would first look internally to ensure that Tri-Rail was spending the taxpayer’s dollars efficiently.
Mr. Dech’s comments were in stark contrast to how the current “Leadership Team” at Tri-Rail consisting of Abrams, Diane Hernandez Del Calvo and Teresa Moore runs Tri-Rail. At every step of the way with the five years and counting delayed service expansion to downtown, Tri-Rail’s “Leadership Team” was caught off guard with no solutions to both major and minor issues that have arisen.
The “Leadership Team” only seems too content to spend unnecessarily like, hiring two additional attorneys for an agency that shouldn’t even have an in-house Counsel and, delaying projects like road crossing work and train overhauls, resulting in increased costs and reduced reliability for the taxpayers and riders.
At May’s Board meeting, Hernandez Del Calvo who runs the Finance Department couldn’t even tell the Board how much money it would cost to run the new Miami Central service.The Board has taken the first step in replacing Abrams but, for Dech to be successful, the Board needs to remove the cancer that is Hernandez Del Calvo and Moore.
If Tri-Rail’s Board doesn’t step up and do the right thing, hopefully, Mr. Dech will quickly see through Del Calvo and Moore and set these two aside where they can do no further harm. Then maybe others inside the agency or those who have left the agency can let him know where the skeletons are buried. I assume there will be quite a few of them for Mr. Dech to discover.
