Metro CEO receives bump in pay to almost $370,000
It would be a wasteful way to spend his salary, but Metro CEO Tom Lambert can afford to take 5,684 bus trips each week, starting in 2022.
Metropolitan Transit Authority board members on Thursday approved an increase of Lambert’s annual salary to $369,495 — a 7 percent raise in pay.
“Tom Lambert has been an outstanding CEO,” chairwoman Carrin Patman said, noting Metro has been named the top transit agency in the nation twice since Lambert assumed the top job permanently in 2014. “He is overdue for an increase.”
Lambert last received a raise in pay in 2019, when under his 2017 contract his annual salary was set to increase 3 percent each year. In the past two-plus years, Metro officials said overall staff salaries have increased 9 percent, which they said justified Lambert’s recent bump.
“We are increasing his salary less than what he has fought to get for the
employees,” board member Jim Robinson said.
The increase means Lambert is making nearly $95,000 more than what he earned when he replaced George Greanias as CEO of Metro. It also places him among the highest-paid transit officials in the country, between the $400,000 that Stephanie Wiggins, head of the Los Angeles Metropolitan
Transportation Authority, is paid and the $350,000 that Chicago Transit Authority president Dorval Carter recently received, according to published reports.
Lambert has steered Metro through some of its largest expansions and changes, with the agency on the brink of its biggest building boom ever. In the past eight
years, Metro has completed three new light rail segments, redesigned its bus network, expanded park and ride options and opened the region’s first bus rapid transit line.
Transit use, however, cratered during the pandemic and is only slowly returning.