Three assistant general managers.
Two chiefs of police.
Two chief safety officers.
A chief operating officer, a chief administrative officer, and the head of information technology. The director of human resources, the senior manager of the civil rights division and the agency’s top auditor.
At least a dozen Regional Transportation District senior managers have left the organization since 2021, according to public announcements and internal documents reviewed by CPR News. Some were long-time staffers with decades of service, while others lasted only two or three years.
Some of the former managers say there’s one main reason so many have left: the leadership of RTD’s CEO, Debra Johnson.
One, a former chief of police, was fired earlier this year for a list of policy violations and is now suing the agency. But many other senior leaders left on their own accord or signed settlement agreements that ended disputes between them and RTD and resulted in their departure — and usually came with a hefty payout.
CPR News obtained copies of six settlement agreements between RTD and former senior leaders between 2021 and 2024 via an open records request. Collectively, RTD paid out more than $700,000 among five former employees. A sixth who signed a settlement agreement did not get a payout.
“The fact that so many people with a lot of experience and institutional knowledge have left the organization is very unfortunate,” Pauletta Tonilas, who worked at RTD’s communications department for about 15 years over two stints, told CPR News. “A mass exodus is always a concern, and I think that it shows that there's a lot of challenges.”
Tonilas was the agency’s assistant general manager for communications when she signed a separation agreement in January 2022 and received a $147,608 payment. The agency has “more challenges now than it’s ever had,” she said, adding that she’s dealt with the same reliability issues that have plagued light rail riders in recent months.
She declined to comment further.
- RTD board votes to extend CEO Debra Johnson’s contract to 2027
- New RTD board members say they want more accountability, transparency, and riders
- RTD’s former chief of police sues agency, alleging racial discrimination
- Q&A: RTD’s CEO on why she fired her chief of police and ongoing turmoil within the department
Johnson took over as CEO in November 2020. The board approved a nearly 5 percent raise for her last week, taking her salary to $421,878. On Tuesday, it will vote on whether or not to give her an 18-month contract extension through May 2027.
“Certainly, there are opportunities to improve, but I think we've seen a very strong performance by our general manager and CEO,” board chair Erik Davidson said at a recent meeting about her raise. He has not responded to a request by CPR News for comment.
CPR News spoke separately with four former RTD senior managers and granted them anonymity so they could speak freely. They all largely corroborated each other’s experiences with Johnson, and all described Johnson as a micro-manager who despises the Denver metro region and privately insults members of her own staff, the board of directors and other community leaders. Many of the former managers also said she has failed to chart a course for the state’s largest transit agency.
“Something needs to be done,” one former senior staffer said. “We all love that agency and hate what she’s done to it.”
In an interview, Johnson confirmed the settlement agreements and largely disputed the allegations put forward by her former subordinates.
“I'm dismayed,” she said. “I am sort of taken aback by these comments. I really am just at a loss in reference to some of these statements that have been shared with you that I allegedly said. Going forward, I am just trying to do the best that I can.”
High hopes, then an “abusive relationship.”
RTD was in dire straits before Johnson took the helm four years ago.
Even before the pandemic, the agency was dealing with a budget crunch after it sprinted to open six rail lines in the 2010s and 2020. Then, COVID chased about half of its riders away. By the fall of 2020, federal aid was keeping RTD afloat. But the longer-term financial outlook was gloomy.
RTD’s board of directors hired Johnson, an outsider, to fix those problems. She was the agency’s first external hire as a permanent new CEO since the 1990s, and RTD was her first permanent CEO job.
Some former senior managers had concerns at the time with Johnson’s history of jumping from city to city throughout her career, which she has spent mostly in Southern California and the Bay Area, with a four-year stint in Washington, D.C. One cited mixed reviews of Johnson they had heard from industry contacts.
Some of Johnson’s former colleagues, though, gave positive quotes about her to The Denver Post in 2020. Several former RTD senior managers said they were happy to see Johnson take the reins. She is the first woman, and first Black woman, to lead the agency.
“We were excited as a whole to work with her and move the agency forward,” said one former senior manager in an interview.
But that quickly changed, they say, after Johnson took over. Where former general managers would ask their staff for their opinions and expertise, Johnson would dismiss the ideas and suggestions of her subordinates.
When contentious issues came up in senior leadership meetings, she would sometimes leave the room and instruct department heads to figure it out for themselves. One source said a meeting with some senior managers, which Johnson said she was not scheduled to be in, nearly came to blows.
Several former officials said Johnson also had a habit of taking credit for the work of others while deflecting blame when a project went south.
“I was so broken down by this leadership style,” said one former senior manager who described routinely feeling physically ill before meeting with Johnson. “There was never anything to look forward to. I would classify it as an abusive relationship.”
Another former senior leader called Johnson’s management style one of “fear, sarcasm and ridicule.” A third said Johnson was the “worst [supervisor] of my life” and said the culture Johnson created between senior leaders was “horrible.”
“She did not cultivate a team at all. The leadership team was openly hostile to one another,” the person said. “She created a culture where you threw other people under the bus to save your own skin with her.”
Johnson disputed these characterizations, saying she routinely praises her employees, takes responsibility for problems, and that she treats people with “dignity and respect.”
“I have never tried to demean people,” she said. “I am a strong leader; I will admit that in reference to how I approach different things. But I want to cultivate a high-performing team and I will give people the benefit of the doubt.”
A disjointed team, with an “uninspiring” vision from the top.
Some former senior managers said Johnson put in long hours but would spend too much time and energy on minutiae like the grammar and style of their memos and reports and not enough developing a clear vision and direction for RTD’s future.
“I have no idea what her vision is for the organization at all,” one former senior leader said.
An organizational assessment Johnson commissioned earlier this year, which was based on interviews with hundreds of employees and internal documents, corroborates some of the problems on the senior leadership team that were described to CPR News. It found that Johnson did “not have confidence” in all the senior leaders and described them as “disjointed and focused on firefighting rather than strategy.”
That assessment, which was conducted by a third-party consultant, does not put responsibility on Johnson. Rather, she is described as “dynamic, strategic, transparent,” among other positive traits. It also recommended RTD create more senior positions, like deputy CEO, for which the agency is now hiring.
The assessment also found that employees are unclear about the agency’s future direction and find its emphasis on maintenance of bus and train service “uninspiring.” The assessment recommended that the agency “[a]rticulate a clear, compelling, and inspiring vision for RTD’s future.”
In a July 2024 “Dialogue With Debra” company-wide meeting, Johnson said she simply didn’t have time to do everything she needed to.
"I am the strategic officer,” she said, according to a recording obtained by CPR News. “But what's happening is that I'm being pulled in so many directions, I'm being more operational and tactical instead of providing the strategic direction for the organization."
RTD’s former chief operating officer, who oversaw bus and rail service, left the organization in early 2024. He signed a settlement agreement and received a $200,673 payout.
Johnson said she commissioned the assessment to better understand RTD’s challenges, not deflect blame onto her staff. The new deputy CEO will allow her to spend more time developing plans for RTD’s future, she said.
“It's not about me looking good,” she said. “... This is not about Debra Johnson. This is about putting RTD on a trajectory to be the best agency it could possibly be.”
Some former managers expected some turnover, but not this much.
Several former senior staffers said they expected some turnover among senior leaders when Johnson took over, which is common within the private sector after a new CEO takes charge. Leadership shuffles are also not unheard of at public transit agencies in such circumstances, according to a 2003 federally sponsored review.
But the former senior managers said the number of departures and the sustained length of the exodus at RTD were unusual. A review of an organization chart from July 2020, just a few months before Johnson took over, shows most people at the top of RTD have since left the agency. At least two senior staffers hired by Johnson have left, too: one was fired, and one signed a settlement.
One explained the turnover partially as Johnson purging subordinates who weren’t 100 percent loyal to her.
Doug Tisdale, an outgoing board member and former board chair, said he believes that a CEO has the authority to choose their own staff. “A new broom sweeps clean,” he said in an interview.
“I am not particularly happy with the amount of turnover,” he added. “But I can't say that I'm particularly surprised by it.”
Johnson said separation agreements allow people to “walk away with their heads held high” while also protecting the organization. She also said she did not push out managers who were not loyal.
“I believe in respect, not loyalty,” she said. “I would want somebody to do what's best for the benefit of the organization, not for Debra Johnson.”
Johnson said she makes changes to her team to put the right people “in the right place at the right time.”
“Certainly there'll be a time when I, as Debra Johnson, won't be the right leader here for RTD,” she said.
A lack of respect for the board, the governor and Denver.
Johnson routinely made clear that she does not have warm feelings for Denver and the area, former senior managers say.
“I've heard her say she doesn't like Denver, Denver doesn't like her,” one said. “Her heart is not in Denver or with that agency and you can feel it.”
Several said Johnson also complained in internal meetings about Colorado Department of Transportation Executive Director Shoshana Lew, whom one former staffer said Johnson called a “political hack,” and Gov. Jared Polis, who has taken a keen interest in RTD’s affairs because he sees public transit as a lynchpin for the state’s climate, transportation and housing goals. “She would talk about them as if they were just complete idiots,” another said.
A CDOT spokesperson declined to comment and the governor’s office has not yet provided one.
Several former senior managers said they heard Johnson routinely insult members of her own staff. One said they heard from people in the industry that Johnson would bad mouth Denver and RTD “as if she was working with a bunch of buffoons.”
Many of the former senior managers said Johnson would deride RTD’s board of directors with “high school locker room” insults in internal meetings and in more private settings, including referring to the white women on the board as the “Karen Harem” and Tisdale as a “crazy rich white guy.”
“If the reported remark was in fact made, I'm very sorry to hear that,” Tisdale said. “I have never used and would never use pejorative terms to describe our general manager and CEO. As to the quote itself, I will confess to being a white guy. I leave others to assess the truth or accuracy of the balance of the quote.”
Several of the senior managers also heard Johnson call Director JoyAnn Ruscha derogatory names and accuse her of faking a disability for attention.
“Hearing that is unfortunate,” said Ruscha, who is hearing impaired and uses a live transcription service during board meetings. “If that's true, I'm deeply disappointed because that ableist language and that behavior is not appropriate to be coming from anyone — much less a CEO.”
Johnson denied ever insulting Lew, Polis, her staff, or board members behind closed doors. She did confirm, however, that living in Denver has been a challenge.
“I like an environment where there's a greater sense of culture,” Johnson said. “I'm a foodie, and things along those lines. So that's what I've said, and I've been constant in that regard.”
She doesn’t like the cold either, she said. But, she added, she’s managed to make it four years already.
“If it was so horrendous, and I have to be loyal to my soul first, chances are that I wouldn't be here if it sucked that badly,” she said.
Johnson has had wins, but rail service issues have former leaders “heartbroken.”
Johnson has made significant progress on one of the biggest problems the agency faced when she took over: its budget. RTD’s finances have stabilized significantly under Johnson, partially because it has refinanced debt and saved itself hundreds of millions of dollars. RTD’s political leaders and advocates also succeeded in convincing voters to forever lift Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights revenue restrictions.
Johnson has also made other welcome reforms, including ending the practice of forcing drivers to work overtime, which was contributing to high turnover among front-line workers in the late 2010s, and raising pay for bus and train operators, mechanics and other key workers.
Johnson also promised to improve the quality of RTD’s services. “Five years from now, our customers will rank RTD as a leader in service delivery,” she said in a video presentation made as part of her application in 2020.
By RTD’s own measures, however, many key services are operating worse now than they were early in Johnson’s tenure. One April 2021 report, for instance, shows that light rail and local buses’ on-time performance was 95 percent and 86 percent, respectively. But in September 2024, light rail had slid to 64 percent and local on-time bus service fell to 79 percent.
A huge reason for the light rail system’s recent reliability issues is surprise track repair and replacements that require 10 mph “slow zones.”
Several former senior managers said Johnson was briefed early in her tenure that serious maintenance problems needed to be fixed, but that she did not prioritize them.
Those maintenance problems became unignorable within a few years though after RTD in 2022 reported disintegrating tracks in downtown Denver to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. The regulator ordered RTD to beef up its light rail maintenance program, which has led to more detailed inspections, more thorough and lengthy repairs, and the 10 mph slow zones.
Johnson has said the light rail system’s growing age makes disruptive repairs inevitable — and has noted that RTD delayed maintenance projects under previous leaders, too.
She has also criticized the agency’s FasTracks program that built many rail lines but left RTD financially overextended, and has brushed off concerns over the light rail disruptions by saying that “everybody has their undies in a bunch.”
In an interview, Johnson again disputed her former staff’s version of events and said there “has been a multitude of different issues.”
“I do not play around as it relates to service delivery and safety,” she said. “That is for certain.”
Johnson said her team has made “great strides” in making light rail repairs in recent months and anticipates service quality will improve.
“Five years isn’t up yet,” she said.
Several incoming board members say they will be looking for service improvements — and want more transparency and accountability from RTD’s leadership team. While the new board won’t vote on Johnson’s contract extension, they will collectively be her boss when seven new directors are sworn in this coming January. Legislators also say they intend to bring another RTD reform bill next year.
Seeing the light rail system’s fall has been difficult for some former senior staffers who saw RTD build it.
“[I’m] heartbroken,” one person said. “The organization's not living up to the commitments that it’s made to the community.”
