New SPC director foresees more active agency
For more than 20 years with the Federal Transit Administration, Vincent Valdes worked with local communities across the country, overseeing their transportation projects from afar but only getting what he called “visceral satisfaction.”
Now, as the new executive director of the 10-county Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission, Mr. Valdes said he looks forward to seizing the opportunity “to come here and bake the cake myself.”
“I wanted to be able to see the fruits of my work,” Mr. Valdes, 61, said Friday. “Why not actually come out and do it myself?”
Mr. Valdes was selected in April as the replacement for Jim Hassinger and began his new job on June 15. Mr. Hassinger retired after 19 years as executive director.
Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, who chairs the commission, said the board hired Mr. Valdes from a deep pool of candidates who responded to a national search. Mr. Valdes, with his extensive federal background, “rose way above the entire pool of candidates,” Mr. Fitzgerald said.
A native of the Bronx, N.Y., Mr. Valdes has a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from Boston University and worked in private industry in California before getting a master’s in urban planning at Columbia University. He wrote his thesis on the development of intelligent transportation systems.
That led to working as an urban planner for Washington before joining the U.S. Department of Transportation and rising to the Federal Transit Administration’s associate administrator in
the Office of Research, Demonstration and Innovation in 2008. Mr. Valdes said the strong foundation community and universities helped to draw him here.
Mr. Valdes and his wife, Lynne, left their four children, ages 21 to 29, in the Washington area to move to Fox Chapel with their two mastiffs. He’s a thin, balding man with a sharp mustache who shows an obvious enthusiasm for dealing with transportation challenges.
Much like Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin, Mr. Valdes often speaks with catchphrases, referring to innovation as “the art of the possible” and offering Serving People through Collaboration as a variation of the SPC acronym.
In Pittsburgh, Mr. Valdes takes over a federally mandated agency that is required to review and prioritize transportation projects in Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Greene, Indiana, Lawrence, Washington and Westmoreland counties and the City of Pittsburgh. The region includes 548 municipalities that range from urban centers such as Pittsburgh to bedroom communities like Cranberry and rural areas like much of Armstrong and Greene counties.
“That is difficult, but that’s the way it is,” he said. “I realize that’s one of the biggest challenges. I need to get out there and meet as many people as I can.”
The key to dealing with such a diverse area, Mr. Valdes said, is recognizing their individual needs and not taking a cookie-cutter approach to all issues.
“I believe there’s more commonality than differences,” he said. “It’s certainly not one-size-fits-all. You can’t be tone-deaf to what the local needs are.”
With the COVID-19 pandemic, touring the region has been difficult. Mr. Valdes said there are some members of his staff he hasn’t met in person yet.
The pandemic also has sent “a short, sharp shock” through society, especially transportation, Mr. Valdes said.
“It does change things,” he said. “I don’t believe we’re even seeing the beginning of what that means for the future yet. But the need for mobility still exists.” If anything, the pandemic is an opportunity to learn, Mr. Valdes said, citing the example of a conversation he had with a person with disabilities. That person always has to coordinate trips to meet daily necessities.
“Now, people who aren’t disabled know what the limitations are that people with disabilities face all the time,” he said.
Mr. Valdes said he sees his agency playing a key role in future-looking projects like a hyperloop and self-driving cars, but expensive technology isn’t the key to improving mobility.
“A lot of people talk about money and technology being the keys to innovation. They, in fact, are not. Innovation is taking what already exists and using it in new ways.”
In recent years, the regional planning agency has seemed to serve more of a technical, behind-thescenes role. Mr. Valdes said that will change, with the agency proposing projects and leading the charge to find funding.
“Funding will be a little harder to come by,” he said. “I want the SPC to be prepared to go hunting for the money. If I have one goal in mind, it’s to make this region destination, the most compelling region in the country.”
Port Authority CEO Katharine Eagan Kelleman said she has worked with Mr. Valdes for more than 10 years, serving with him on a committee of the National Academies of Science that reviews innovative transportation projects for grants. She said she’s was so impressed with his work that when she left Tampa, Fla., in 2018 to come here, she recommended her old agency keep him in mind if they needed a chief innovation officer and was “ecstatic” to learn he was coming here.
“He’s very focused on the customer and meeting their individual needs,” she said. “And he’s way familiar with working with the federal system and finding funding. He’ll be a great asset.”
Mr. Fitzgerald agreed. “He going to be an exciting guy. It’s good to have him here.”