Port Authority to hire chief strategy officer

Port Authority is looking to add another piece to its top- level management team: a chief strategy officer to oversee long-term financial needs.

CEO Katharine Eagan Kelleman said Thursday the need for an additional officer is an outgrowth of the longrange planning process for future service, called NexTransit. As part of that process, she said, the agency realized it doesn’t have anyone responsible for gauging financial implications for long-range projects.

“It’s an expansion of what our chief financial officer has been doing,” Ms.

Kelleman said. “It’s really a teasing out of those duties to have someone focus on things far out in the future.”

The authority is advertising for the new position, called the chief strategy officer, in hopes of hiring someone as soon as June but no later than September. The job will pay $180,000.

Under NexTransit, the agency is proposing a series of changes over the next 25 years that includes big-ticket items such as extensions of the light rail system with wings to Bellevue and Ross and potential busway extensions. Planners will be developing the financial parameters for the future plans throughout the summer, and the new officer could be part of that process.

Ms. Kelleman said the move is not a demotion for Pete Schenk, the agency’s chief financial officer, whose role is more of a controller handling day-to-day and short-term financial issues, such as the annual budget and government subsidies.

“This will allow him to focus on what he and his team do very well,” she said.

The chief strategy officer is the latest in a series of top-level managers Ms. Kelleman has hired since she came to the authority in January 2018, including people in charge of longrange planning and technology. The agency also is looking at how it will replace Phillip St. Pierre, the former manager of service planning and scheduling, who left in early February for a similar position in Jacksonville, Fla. Mr. St. Pierre came to Pittsburgh in 2019 after working with Ms. Kelleman in Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority in Tampa, Fla.

Ms. Kelleman said the agency is reviewing whether to modify the duties in that job before it advertises for a replacement.