DOT Chief Dreams Big, Needs Workers

Joseph Giulietti has lots of money to put electric buses on the road — but he’s struggling to find enough people to drive them. 

That encapsulates a broader challenge Giulietti, commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Transportation (DOT), is taking on these days, a short-term problem mixed in with loads of long-term opportunity.

The problem is that he’s losing workers. Lots of them. Fast.

Because of a change in state government’s pension rules, workers throughout the system are retiring by the end of June. Giulietti is anticipating that he’ll need to hire between 600 to 800 workers, from bus drivers and snow-plow steerers to bridge inspectors, paving testers, and supervisors responsible for making sure crews are on the road and federal grant paperwork is in.

“People with 30 to 40 years of service are walking out the door,” bringing decades of institutional knowledge with them, the commissioner remarked during an interview Tuesday on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program. ​“I’m signing a lot of retirement letters every day.”

If you ride the bus, you’ll notice ads for drivers. The ads include the acronym ​“CDL” — standing for commercial driver’s license. You need one to drive a bus or snow plow. That makes it harder for Giulietti’s DOT to fill the newly open slots, because most people don’t have one.

So the DOT is looking at paying for trainees to get that license, the way Maine does. It is also learning from a new problem Maine encountered: Soon after receiving their state-subsidized licenses, some trainees were then leaving their new posts for CDL-mandated private-sector jobs that pay better. So Connecticut is looking to add a clawback to the offer, requiring trainees to pay back portions of the training cost if they leave within, say, five years

You may notice something else about the bus soon — it may be electrified. The state just announced it’s receiving $11.4 million from the feds toward the $25.7 million cost of adding 22 new electric buses to its fleet on top of the 12 already on the road. Giulietti said the state expects to replace all 800 of its buses with electric models over the next decade.

That’s just one example of the wide-ranging transit upgrades in store thanks to a windfall of cash heading our way. The recently passed federal infrastructure law will boost the DOT’s budget 38 percent, Giulietti said — and that doesn’t count another billion dollars available for local transportation projects, along with $66 billion more pouring into Northeast Corridor rail projects.

To that end, the state will work with Amtrak and Metro-North to cut the two-hour ride to New York by 10 minutes in the near future, and by 25 minutes within a decade. (Read more about that here.) That will require a range of efforts from track improvements to tech upgrades to regulatory changes and, perhaps, a tunnel under the current tracks in Bridgeport — the kind of work transportation officials like Giulletti could only dream of during the previous decades of government transportation austerity.

“It’s a game changer,” Giulietti said of all the new federal money.

Bus riders will also see new solar-powered shelters with up-to-the-minute arrival information, and stepped-up in conjunction with the Department of Housing to link occupants of new housing to mass transit, the commissioner said.

Giulietti, who is 69, has spent a half-century preparing for this moment, after first learning about mass transit infrastructure growing up in New Haven’s Hill neighborhood, at the intersection of Sea, Greenwich, and the Boulevard.

He used to take the city bus to Notre Dame High School. He got to know the drivers — who invited him to ride the full line to learn all the stops. (Sometimes they bought him an ice cream at the end.)

He started learning about the rails while studying to become a teacher at Southern Connecticut State. His program was cut part-way through his undergraduate career because of a glut of teachers in the market. Meanwhile, he scored a summer job as a conductor and ticket collector on the New Haven Line.

Giulietti progressed after graduation to a series of jobs in Connecticut, New York, and Florida, learning how to keep the trains running on the ground, then running a system and adapting to new technology. After serving as executive director of the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority, he returned north to serve as president of Metro North Railroad before taking the helm at the state DOT.

New Haven officials — who had fought with the DOT for decades over car-centered policy and the future of Union Station — welcomed the appointment of a hometown boy with deep transit roots. They haven’t been disappointed: The DOT switched gears and hammered out a long-sought agreement with New Haven over the future development of Union Station, with both sides now on the same page of boosting bus connections and adding retail. The deal was signed Dec. 21. (Click here to read as well about the DOT’s embrace of the reopening of a pedestrian and cyclist-friendly stretch of Columbus Avenue near the station.)

Meanwhile, Giulietti has tapped his nationwide contacts in states of varying blue-purple-red hues to cofound a Commuter Rail Coalition to lobby the federal government for increased support for trains, an effort that has already paid off.