“You are the only person who has ever asked me about Waco,” TransLink CEO Kevin Desmond calls out loudly with an incredulous tone.
He has just burst through doors to the lobby of TransLink headquarters and re-encountered a reporter who has lingered after an interview.
“No one has asked me about that. No one.”
Desmond was born in that Texas city, which many remember for being the site of a 1993 standoff between Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and a religious sect.
He has no personal connection to the place, however, having left there as an 18-month-old infant. He considers himself a New Yorker because he grew up in New York and that’s where his formative years were.
Desmond’s father, Robert, was a lawyer who went to law school as part of a U.S. Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program that required him to serve a turn in the U.S. air force in Texas.
Once that stint ended, Robert moved the family to Pelham Manor, a leafy suburb north of the Bronx in New York.
Desmond's eldest of two adult children, Alyson, turns 30 in early April, and he considers the prospect of being old enough to have a 30-something daughter “frightening beyond all belief.”
Asked his age, he feigns offence – “That’s none of your frickin’ business!” – before allowing that his 59th birthday is coming up in May.
“Fifty-nine is the new 29, that’s absolutely what I believe,” he said.
Indeed, Desmond exudes a youthful presence. He speaks quickly and can move as fast as he talks. After ducking out of a board meeting to take part in a photo shoot at Sapperton station, he sprinted the few hundred metres back to TransLink headquarters to rejoin his meeting.
He has been at the helm of TransLink for a little more than a year and has steered the 6,700-employee company through a period of relative stability.
Desmond arrived following a stretch of governance upheaval that included three CEOs within a year, a failed result in a referendum that asked Metro Vancouverites to opt to pay an extra 0.5% in sales tax toward transit improvements, and a long-delayed launch of the transit authority’s Compass card electronic-payment system.
Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson praised Desmond for being a guy who gets things done.
“His passion for public transportation – and deep understanding of the nuts and bolts – enable him to rally a great staff team and lift TransLink’s performance and accountability,” Robertson said.
Desmond’s dedication to customer service was honed starting with jobs in the New York City mayor’s office in the 1980s.
One former post was assistant commissioner of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission. This was long before either smartphones or the prevalence of ride-sharing services, and Desmond had a close-up look at the schisms that can develop between established taxi companies and the free agents who operated what were known in the day as “gypsy cabs” – unlicensed vehicles that could not do street hails in Manhattan but were willing to take fares to outer boroughs.
Now an unabashed fan of ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, Desmond believes that the future of transportation will bring co-operation between operators of various modes of travel.
He also envisions better payment integration for those who use buses, trains, ferries, bike-share programs, car-share ventures and ride-hailing services.
“The challenge is how do you merge a tax-supported, subsidized public entity with profit-making entitites? How do you convince the public – taxpayers – to increase the subsidy for trips to help benefit a profit-making company’s bottom line, and how do you convince shareholders of a profit-making company to reduce, potentially, their revenue to help public transit?”
Despite not having easy answers to those questions, it is clear that Desmond spends time thinking about future possibilities.
He was excited when City of North Vancouver Mayor Darrell Mussatto proposed that a future transit project should be a tunnel between downtown Vancouver and the North Shore.
“I told him that I was happy that he threw that trial balloon out,” Desmond told Business in Vancouver during an interview in a small boardroom adjacent to his office. “It got people and the media talking about what’s next.”
He swivelled in his chair and faced a large map of Vancouver’s transit system.
“Where is the time and place to be thinking big?” he asked before jabbing the map with a finger.
“The Evergreen Line has a little stub line built in right here with the anticipation of going, maybe eventually, into Port Coquitlam. When do we talk about extending the Canada Line further south into Richmond and, maybe, into even Delta? When do we talk about the further development of rapid transit in Surrey?”
Reflecting about possibilities has been something Desmond has done throughout his life.
After he completed his bachelor of arts degree at Maine’s Colby College in 1980, he and his new bride, Cyndi, did not immediately locate in Desmond’s beloved New York City.
Instead, the couple moved to Colorado for a few years.
“We weren’t ski bums,” he said. “We just enjoyed being in the mountains and seeing the four seasons.”
He did not know what he wanted to do with his life. The time gave him the opportunity to consider options.
Finally, the two decided it was “time to get serious,” Desmond said. He completed a master’s degree in public administration at New York University while his wife trained as a nurse.
Their move to Tacoma, Washington, in 1996 was a “culture shock,” as they had been living in the Bronx – but it was a calculated move.
Desmond took a cut in pay to become vice-president of operations and development at Tacoma’s Pierce Transit.
Alyson was nine years old at the time and her younger brother, Andrew, was seven. Both Desmond and his wife wanted to move west for lifestyle reasons.
Eight years later, he moved a few miles north and became general manager of King County Metro Transit in Seattle.
A dozen years in that post prepared him to move a bit farther north, become TransLink CEO and start to call New Westminster home.
As quintessential urbanites, the Desmonds live in a condominium. Desmond owns a car but walks to work.
When he finds spare time, he loves to cross-country ski, cycle, kayak, hike and go camping.
“That’s why I love the Pacific Northwest and southwest B.C.,” he said. “That’s why we moved here.” •
