With Julie Timm’s departure as Sound Transit CEO, the Board today announced that they will be considering Goran Sparrman to serve in an interim capacity. The Board will hold a special meeting this Thursday, January 11th. From the press release:

“Goran is well-respected for his skill and knowledge in transportation and infrastructure projects,” said Sound Transit Vice Chair and Snohomish County Executive Dave Somers. “He’s a trusted regional leader who would bring a steady hand to an agency with which he is already familiar.”

“In my years of experience working with Sound Transit, I know the staff to be dedicated professionals committed to building and operating the transit system our region deserves,” Sparrman said. “I’m looking forward to collaborating with them as we build on the successes that are coming this year and look for solutions for the challenges that lie ahead.”

Sparrman is well known and has been around the block in local transportation circles. He is currently a VP at HNTB and previously worked both for Seattle and Bellevue in their respective transportation departments. Most notably, he directed BDOT during the Bellevue city council’s tussle with Sound Transit over East Link alignment planning.

Sparrman has a civil engineering background and is a licensed PE, which could bode well for an agency that has struggled from recent construction and engineering challenges.

21 Replies to “Sound Transit Board considers Goran Sparrman for interim CEO”

  1. An interesting choice. From his LinkedIn:

    1974-1979: MSc in Civil Engineering and Urban Planning from Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden)
    1979(?)-198(?): “city traffic engineer for the cities of Sacramento and Portland”
    1987-1999: Director of Bureau of Traffic Management (Portland)
    1999-2011: Director of Transportation (Bellevue)
    2011-2013: Deputy Director (Seattle DOT)
    2013-2014: Interim Director (SDOT)
    2014-2017: VP of Parsons (PNW Region)
    2018-2018: Interim Director (SDOT)
    2018-Present: VP of HNTB (PNW Region)

    Many folks here want someone with experience managing a transit agency, but it seems to me that experience running actual DOTs with limited capital budgets might actually be what ST needs right now.

    1. Note HNTB is the engineering firm that helped design the light rail plans and also the sr 99 tunnel. Combined with his degree probably the most engineered background/focused ceo sound transit has had, though I’m not sure if that is necessarily better for leading a transit agency

      1. Yes, and I have often wondered if it is HNTB’s engineers/architects driving ST’s overwrought designs, or if they’re simply doing ST’s bidding.

        I think he’d do probably do better long-term as Megaproject Czar (if given the option), than as CEO of the entire agency.

      2. We’ve often said that ST needs somebody with engineering experience. This is an opportunity to see how that goes. And it may indicate that ST, after choosing non-engineers for so long, is now listening to those pleas or at least trying something different.

        The next question will be, will it continue this trend for the final CEO or is this a one-off? Is it trying out Sparrman as a potential final CEO? The fact that it went outside ST for an interim person suggests to me that (A) ST thinks he might make a good final; (B) he thinks he might get the final, otherwise why leave his current job for a few months and then have to look again? (C) ST can’t find anybody suitable within the agency to promote for the interim. The latter is the most surprising, and potentially troubling.

    2. I would say the one thing SDOT is terrible at is managing large, complex, multi-agency, multi-year projects. Executing efficiently on a large number of small projects (i.e. spot improvements) is what SDOT is good at and what ST should be delegating to county & municipal agencies. Running SDOT is very much not what ST needs – the only public agency in the PNW that has experience running projects at the relevant scale is WSDOT. His political experience may help ST navigate key planning decisions, but he appears to have zero relevant experience to help the Construction or Operations pillars of ST (which may be fine, if those respective executive teams are competent and pull in talent & expertise from outside the region)

  2. I think that the most important short-term objective is to get ST2 open and to rein in unreasonable maintenance schedules and capital budgets. He seems better suited for that than Timm or Rogoff was.

    Of course, long-term ST needs a seasoned rail operations leader at the helm. But this is a short-term situation.

    1. *Reducing scope* is the name of the game after getting ST2 open and making it a useable service (even if it will only be up to service levels on day 365 or what have you)

      The expert panel said this. They didn’t give explicit examples but it was pretty evident that a big part of addressing ST3 is addressing scope. If you replace West Seattle link, Everett link, Tacoma dome link, and Issaquah-Kirkland link, and DSTT2 with affordable and more realistic transit options that prioritize utilizing pre-existing infrastructure (be it on road BRT, commuter rail like Sounder south, using the already existing DSTT for Ballard link, transit lanes on the CKC, etc) then your already making large strides toward addressing cost.

      It would take a miracle to happen with how the board is structured and where their priorities are but if it can happen it would steer the agency in a very positive direction. I’m not confident it would initially be favorable with voters but it would be more financially sound

      ST2 certainly stretched Sound Transit pretty thin but ST3 will be a whole different order if the board doesn’t listen and implement a response to the advice given to them the past year

  3. Bellevue’s transportation planning is abysmal, so I am skeptical of this choice. I guess if Sound Transit was looking for someone with experience implementing pro-car transportation policy, they found him.

    1. It would not be appropriate to judge Sparrman’s qualifications for the role based on your perceptions of Bellevue’s transportation planning. The city is still characteristically suburban, so you’re not going to see BDOT implementing road diets, bus lanes, and queue jumps in the same way SDOT has been.

      I know many Bellevue transportation and planning staff who served under Sparrman – they are all thorough urbanists who are very pro-transit. Sparrman himself has both engineering and management experience, which is what ST needs now.

  4. My 2 cents are that this should not be a one persons job. Expanding vs maintaining the system asks for a different set of skills. Where maintenance is only gearing up compared to how big it will be in the future the expansion part is getting certainly more complex.
    I think where Julie Timm seemed to do a decent job for maintenance she struggled more with the (political) expansion part of the job.

    1. There are senior executives under the CEO who own each of those core roles – Planning, Construction, Operations – plus key support functions (CFO, CHO, etc.). But there needs to be one personal at the top of the hierarchy that can coordinate between those executives.

  5. Goran is a good person. He’s had a positive record at Bellevue and SDOT. His consulting experience isn’t the dominant aspect of his qualifications. It merely augments his public sector record, which I think is positive. It’s always good for public sector leaders to have some private sector experience. Not because government agencies should be run like businesses, but because ST is basically a large scale public-private partnership and it’s good to have insight on how those pieces fit together.

    1. I know nothing of Mr Sparrman’s personal record, but I agree entirely with your observation that having some private sector experience is very useful for public servants.

  6. Does the ST CEO have any real power? It seems like it’s always the Board, or some other powerful person or business, who makes the decisions, or tells ST what to do.

    2. The CEO/staff’s role is also to prepare Board decisions. The board members have so little time for what the role requires, that the ST staff can have a huge role in preparing decisions.

    3. The ST ceo has a lot more power technically compared to say SDOT director versus the mayor. I mean for example the ST ceo is the one showing the alternatives to the board and could just opt not to study.

      But practically speaking if the CEO just keeps saying yes to the board it’s not really using it’s power.

      Reminds me of

      > Nor had they been willing to admit to the board that there were problems at all. The head of the Link project complained that if the board would just say no, they wouldn’t have these cost problems. Earl was taken aback. “And I said, ‘What does that mean, if the board would just say no?’ And he said, ‘Well they keep saying yes.’ And I said, ‘Has anybody told them they can’t afford it?’ And he said, ‘Well no.’ … Every time the board would add scope to the project, staff needed to say either we can afford it or we can’t afford it. And they weren’t doing that” (Earl interview).

      https://www.historylink.org/File/20989

  7. Sparrman is probably a good choice for interim CEO at this particular point in time. Given his role leading marketing efforts at HNTB, he can easily leave for a year and then return. It’s a very common revolving door in transportation engineering, with which Sparrman is very familiar. Both Sound Transit and HNTB will benefit.

    In the long term, Sound Transit desperately needs to implement the TAG recommendations to hire three executives with national experience in rail transit construction programs, reporting to the CEO. Sparrman’s biggest goal should be to get that done.

    A big part of the CEO’s role is to manage the politics and protect the new deputies so they can do their jobs. The permanent CEO does not necessarily need to be a civil engineer. They could even be a politician. What’s important is that it be someone who can build a better and more proactive relationship with the Board members, and especially with the state legislature and old and new governor. Most large transit agencies get far more support from their state governments than Sound Transit does. That should be a long-term goal for Sound Transit and will take some work to get there. Sparrman is probably not the right person for the permanent job, and I think he and the Board should all be aware of that.

    1. Voted in at 3:30 pm today.

      Everything as expected, I joined in the webinar for just the brief last minutes.

      Main thing he emphasized was around being transparent and also was asked about whether he’d implement the TAG recommendations.

      Contract term is for one year from “contract term from January 13, 2024 through January 12, 2025.”

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