New transit strategist hired
Port Authority looks to fund long-range plans
It took a little more money to lure him and will take another month to get him to the Pittsburgh area, but Port Authority has hired a new chief strategy officer to find ways to pay for projects that will be in the agency’s long-range plan.
Donny Hamilton Jr., 41, began working for the authority Aug. 2 from his home in Austin, Texas, where he previously served at the Federal Highway Administration as director of finance and administration for the Texas regional office. His salary is $200,004 and he is expected to work remotely through October.
Chief strategy officer is a new position at the agency, but CEO Katharine Eagan Kelleman said it will be important to have someone in charge of financing the agency’s 25-year plan scheduled to be approved by the authority board later this month. Known as NEXTransit, it is the first extended plan in recent memory and calls for bigticket items such as extending the light rail system in two wings to Bellevue and Ross and and extending the Martin Luther King Jr. East Busway from Swissvale first to Braddock and then to East Pittsburgh.
As part of Mr. Hamilton’s hiring, Chief Finance Officer Pete Schenk will remain in charge of the agency’s day-to day finances but his title will change from chief finance officer to controller.
“It’s time for us to move into that next phase,” Ms. Kelleman said in an interview last week. “This is an additional focus, not something we’ve previously done. It’s our next big step in growing up.”
Ms. Kelleman said the agency chose Mr. Hamilton because of his federal background and ability to see how transit relates to other modes of transportation. During
his interview, he suggested ideas and funding sources the agency hadn’t considered before, she said, describing him as “somebody who could think very big picture.”
“We simply can’t be competitive if we don’t have that,” she said.
The agency initially advertised the job at $180,000, but Ms. Kelleman said none of the finalists for the job would have accepted that salary. Port Authority is the 25th-largest transit agency in the country, but Ms. Kelleman said its administrative pay scale lags behind smaller operations across the country.
Ms. Kelleman said this hiring process also presented a new dynamic that has developed as a result of the pandemic: requests to work remotely. Mr. Hamilton started working for the agency last month, but he was given additional time to relocate his family, which includes two children in elementary school.
Mr. Hamilton couldn’t be reached for comment, but his LinkedIn profile shows he has a bachelor’s degree in urban planning from Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University; master’s degrees from University of Nebraska- Lincoln ( community and regional planning) and William Woods University ( business administration). His employment background includes 4 ½ years as a portfolio manager for the federal Department of Transportation’ s Build America Bureau and the past four years overseeing the $4 billion federal highway program in Texas.
He and his wife, Latifa, also co-founded the Taylor Morgan Hamilton Foundation in 2014 to support families who have stillborn children. It is named for their daughter who died a year earlier.