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Metro Messy

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"When he first came to town, I wasn't sure I was going to like him," says Tom Shrout, executive director of the advocacy group Citizens for Modern Transit, citing Salci's characteristically caustic demeanor. "I remember thinking, 'Is he going to make it? Is he going to survive here?'" Three years later, Shrout concedes, "[Salci] has made some huge improvements over there."

Says John Baricevic, former St. Clair County board chairman: "I think Salci is the best director we've ever had."

Metro's 58-year-old CEO today sports the accoutrements of an affluent baby-boomer: a turbo Audi A6, a Missouri Athletic Club membership and homes in Caseyville, Illinois, and Hilton Head, South Carolina. His beginnings were much humbler.

A second-generation Italian, Salci was the eldest child of a working-class couple in the Detroit suburb of Warren, Michigan. His father was a machinist, his mother a homemaker.

Four years of high-school hoops and All-American honors earned Salci a full scholarship to the University of Detroit. Shortly after graduating, he married his college sweetheart and departed for U.S. Army bases in Kentucky and Missouri, where he held down desk jobs during the Vietnam War. Never one to squander a second, Salci then worked full-time for Chrysler Corporation while studying for his master's in business administration.

To hear Salci tell it, his glory days came in the late 1980s and early '90s, globetrotting as a transit executive and pressing the flesh of dignitaries. He hastens to rattle off the dozens of nations he's journeyed to and the five former U.S. presidents he has known -- "three, at least, on a first-name basis."

Salci's St. Louis lifestyle is decidedly more sedate, with his wife Karen's rheumatoid arthritis keeping the couple off the local social circuit. In fact, on the night of their 35th wedding anniversary in March, they celebrated at their Far Oaks Golf Club home with grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup.

If Metro's president does manage to steal away, he heads for a fairway. Along with photos of railcars, prints depicting some of the nation's most illustrious golf courses occupy prominent space in his spacious sixth-floor office at Metro headquarters on Laclede's Landing. Just outside it hangs an unlikely tribute given to Salci by his staff last Christmas: a framed Post-Dispatch editorial labeling him "The Terminator." Staff members superimposed Salci's headshot atop Arnold Schwarzenegger's body.

Salci eschews local newspapers for the Wall Street Journal and Investor's Business Daily. "I'm really not interested in what I'll call the human-interest stuff. You know: the fires and accidents."

As for the occasional media criticism he's received during his tenure, Salci says it doesn't faze him in the slightest. "The only people I really care about that have any influence with me are my ten commissioners who hired me. And I care what Wall Street thinks about me. And I care what my headhunters think about me, in case I've got to go someplace [else]. Other than that, I just don't care."

Salci is used to moving on, having spent a career jumping from one job to the next, taking positions at transit companies in the midst of financial crisis. At least one former Metro commissioner wonders now if the board should have probed more. "In retrospect," the commissioner says, "I don't think any due diligence was done on Larry's past."

In 1975 the 29-year-old Salci left Chrysler to take over Detroit's Southeastern Michigan Transportation Authority (SEMTA) when the agency was developing its downtown People Mover. It's a monorail now considered "the great white elephant of all time in public transportation projects," according to Belleville, Illinois-based consultant Wendell Cox.

Salci was able to secure $600 million in federal funding for the system but abandoned SEMTA before construction began. The monorail subsequently racked up $73 million in cost overruns, and the city of Detroit, citing mismanagement, swiftly dissolved SEMTA.

Why did Salci flee at such a crucial time? His reply is vague: "I didn't want to make the public sector career, mainly because of the politics."

Salci insists he left the monorail project in fine shape, but national transit consultant Tom Rubin of Oakland, California, claims the damage Salci caused was long-lived.

"Over 30 years after SEMTA was formed, the various governments are still trying to figure out how to solve these [People Mover] problems. You can say that [Salci] failed to come up with a stable funding and organizational structure for SEMTA." Then again, Rubin adds, "No one since has really been able to do any better."

After a year in management consulting, Salci became president of the Philadelphia-based Budd Transit Group. Once one of the United States' premier train manufacturers, Budd had just lost a $663 million contract and desperately needed new business. But after three years on the job, Salci still had no new contracts.

"If we don't win a major job in the next fifteen months, our future is in deep question," he told the Associated Press in 1985.

By 1987, the situation remained. Budd gave up train-building, and newspapers nationwide recounted the storied company's demise.

Salci sold the firm's assets to Bombardier Inc. of Montréal, Canada, then became president of the company's Washington-based subsidiary. There he took on special tasks, one of which -- a Texas rail boondoggle -- particularly stands out.

Salci chaired Texas TGV, a French-American consortium that won a controversial 50-year franchise to build a high-speed train between Dallas and Houston by agreeing not to use taxpayer dollars for the project -- a promise that many decried.

"No one in their right mind would finance this kind of project," Southwest Airlines chairman Herbert Kelleher told the Dallas Times Herald in 1990. His prognostication materialized. Texas TGV failed to net $170 million in private funding, which sent Salci lobbying for federal funds. He pleaded with the Federal Railway Administration, then-Vice President Al Gore, and then-Secretary of Transportation Federico Pena. Each time, he left empty-handed.

By the end of 1993, Texas TGV had only $40 million at the ready, and the super-train died. Its downfall was not Texas TGV's fault, Salci says, but a matter of politics.

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