Kathy Shealy cherishes 45 years with Rome Transit
♦ The transit director is looking forward to driving the system into the future.
When Kathy Shealy was growing up in West Rome in the 1960s with a mother who never drove a car, she’d often hop on a bus at the corner of Burnett Ferry Road and Shorter Avenue.
“I loved riding the bus,” the Rome
Transit Department director said Wednesday. “We walked a lot, too. But just about every Saturday we’d take the bus downtown while my dad was working.”
The grandmother of five, maiden name Brewer, was recognized recently by the City of Rome for her 45 years of employment with RTD.
Although she originally dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, she quickly realized that wasn’t the best field for her since it would be too difficult to euthanize animals.
The next best thing would be to work in an office, she said. So she took shorthand and typing classes at Coosa Valley Technical School — now Georgia Northwestern — and was hired as a secretary at RTD at age 19 in 1974.
“Never in my wildest dreams back then did I ever think I’d one day be transit director,” she said.
But she did go back to school in 1990 for a business administration degree from Shorter College to enable her to move up.
“I was a secretary for a long time and then became an administrative assistant and eventually assistant transit director,” she said.
In 2002, Shealy was appointed as transit director.
She said the two toughest things about running RTD is finding good bus drivers and dealing with all the government red tape and regulations.
“Sometimes it’s hard to get employees that are totally dedicated like they used to be,” she said.
The starting pay of $13.75 for drivers, she said, makes it tough to compete with the higher wages offered by the school systems.
But her passion for the place as a whole has been with her since she first stepped through the RTD doors more than four decades ago. “I’m just passionate about the people that we transport,” Shealy said. “I’m passionate about the citizens who don’t have any other means of transportation or maybe have a disability and can’t
drive and otherwise wouldn’t be able to get where they want to go.”
Shealy and her coworkers have even pitched in to the pay the fare of passengers who are short on funds and trying to get to life-saving medical treatments.
She’s seen a lot of changes over the years. The 12 Main Line routes are now down to five and buses that once ran every 15 minutes have an hour-long lag today. But she’s excited to stick around to see what’s next for Rome Transit.
“It’s different not having the Tripper Service anymore, but I really think we’re going to transform transit into something that will benefit Rome for years to come,” she said.
Shealy is hopeful the agency can return to more frequent service and even provide services to the colleges.
“I think we can get some new riders who can ride it downtown like I used to as a kid,” she said. “There’s a lot to figure out in the coming year, but it’s an exciting time to be working for Rome Transit and I’m grateful I can still do this job.”