SMART General Manager Farhad Mansourian will retire from his post in August after 10 years running the passenger rail agency and decades of government service in Sonoma and Marin counties.
Mansourian announced his retirement to the SMART Board of Directors at its Wednesday afternoon meeting, saying he will step way when his current contract ends in August for family reasons. Mansourian said he wanted to focus on being a grandfather and husband, he told directors.
“He knew when his contract was up and he was trying to decide what he wanted to do,” SMART Chair and Sonoma County Supervisor David Rabbitt said in an interview. Rabbitt had a heads up on the announcement, while the rest of the board learned during the meeting, he said.
With Mansourian at the helm, SMART went from a voter-approved concept along a little used rail corridor to a modern passenger train system operating on 45 miles of rebuilt track between Larkspur and Santa Rosa. Mansourian, a former head of public works in Marin County, was brought on to build the system, roping in federal and state money to supplement a tax-supported project that has cost about $653 million to date.
“Getting this train rolling would be the accomplishment of a lifetime,” said Barbara Pahre, the board’s vice chair, praising Mansourian’s tenure during the board meeting. “And by my math I think you did it in about six years from when you came on board to when that first train rolled.”
Mansourian has been the public face of an agency that has marked highs and lows since service launched in August 2017, carrying more than 700,000 total passengers in each of the first two years of service while still struggling to fill many trains, especially on the weekend.
The agency suffered a massive blow of public confidence at the ballot box in March 2020, when voters rejected SMART’s bid — and Mansourian’s personal appeal — for an early extension of the quarter-cent sales tax that supports operations.
Mansourian’s leadership, too, could be polarizing, split between camps of ardent supporters who saw his often unilateral command as an asset for a nascent transit system and staunch critics who said the agency lacked transparency and was not meeting promises made to voters who approved the system in 2008.
While some SMART board members were vocal Mansourian supporters, others were tight-lipped about his future service after the defeat last year of Measure I. Some of his critics, including longtime SMART foes, openly called for his removal. But the board praise was universal in public comments on Wednesday.
“There is no SMART if there is no Farhad,“ said Santa Rosa mayor Chris Rogers.
SMART serves 12 stations, with plans to reach Windsor by sometime next year. Amid the pandemic, its gold-and-green diesel fueled cars have operated on a limited weekday schedule, without weekend service, though the board has discussed restoring service as COVID-19 vaccinations continue and the economy begins to pick back up.
Longterm plans call for extension of service to Healdsburg and eventually to Cloverdale, the northern terminus of the 70-mile line that one day is meant to include a parallel bike and pedestrian path. About a third of that pathway is built. In total, those rail extensions and path projects are slated to cost more than $440 million.
Working out of SMART’s Petaluma headquarters, Mansourian has for years topped the list of Sonoma County’s highest paid public officials. His salary last year netted him $319,595 in base pay, up from $246,000 base pay when he was hired in 2011.
Previously, he served for nine years as the public works director in Marin County, where he began his career as a junior civil engineer after graduating from Sacramento State, where he left with degrees in civil engineering and political science.
This breaking story will be updated.
You can reach Staff Writer Andrew Graham at 707-526-8667 or andrew.graham@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @AndrewGraham88
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