Tri-Rail director resigning after fallout from Brightline train station defects

Tri-Rail director Steven Abrams announced his resignation Friday, weeks after disclosing construction defects at Brightline’s Miami station that left the Tri-Rail trains unable to use the new tax-funded depot.

“It is clear to me I have lost the confidence of this board,” Abrams said during Friday’s meeting of the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority, the government entity that oversees Tri-Rail. The commuter line has stations in Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties, funded through a mix of taxes from the federal, state and local levels.

Tri-Rail under fire after not revealing ‘serious’ defect with Miami station

Abrams, a lawyer and former Boca Raton mayor, was chair of the SFRTA board before securing the agency’s top job in 2018, entering the position without transportation or railroad experience. He drew the ire of some board members in December when he revealed that Tri-Rail’s trains would not fit in the station Brightline built downtown — and that Tri-Rail has known about the problem since April.

Brightline executives accused Tri-Rail of dragging its feet on a decision on whether to modify exit and entrance steps that could eliminate the parts of the trains that would hit the platforms. Patrick Goddard, president of Brightline, told board members the company was willing to rip up parts of the platform to fix the faulty horizontal protrusions but that it would be quicker for Tri-Rail to modify the train steps.

“If that’s not an acceptable solution, we will do the destructive work necessary,” he said. “Tell us what you want to do.”

Abrams said the issues were more complicated and required extensive analysis and planning that’s underway. On Friday, he presented a timetable for modifying the steps that wouldn’t start the manufacturing work until the end of August. Tri-Rail spokesperson Victor Garcia said the agency couldn’t say how much time would be needed to construct and install the new steps.

“It’s easy for Brightline to say what the fix is,” Abrams said. “We have to know, using our professional consultants, what their recommendation is. It took us a length of time to even understand what the problem was.”

His resignation from a post paying about $240,000 a year came at the end of a meeting with what he described as an “agenda from hell.” The SFRTA board took up multiple items involving fixes Tri-Rail needed, including delayed repairs on trains, fixing holes on pedestrian bridges partially closed for safety reasons, and engineering and software contracts tied to Tri-Rail’s finally delivering service into Brightline’s Miami Central station years after the original start date of 2017.

In an interview after the meeting, Abrams said he decided to resign in the final 15 minutes of the three-and-a-half-hour meeting. “It was very spontaneous,” he said.

Abrams’ top critic on the board, Miami-Dade Commissioner Raquel Regalado, had called for him to resign and made no secret of her interest in the board firing him if he didn’t. There was no motion for that at Friday’s meeting, which included an item related to Abrams’ yearly employee evaluation. When that item came up, Abrams announced he wanted to leave and would negotiate a separation agreement with board leadership.

“These issues have been building to a boiling point now for almost two months,” he said.

Abrams plans to remain as head of Tri-Rail while the board makes a decision on his successor. “I love this agency,” said Abrams, who was a Palm Beach County commissioner when he was appointed to the SFRTA board in 2010. “I’m certainly not going to leave it in any kind of a lurch.”

In his remarks to board members, Abrams described Tri-Rail as a financial mess when he took over, followed by cost-cutting, workforce reduction and other moves to improve finances. “I feel that I have made changes in this organization from where it started when I began,” he said. “I took on a lot of neglected issues.”

His resignation followed complaints by board members of learning too late about Tri-Rail’s problems, including the Brightline station issues. Regalado was the most critical, saying she couldn’t trust what she heard from the agency.

“I do not have confidence in the representations that are made to this board,” said Regalado, who received campaign contributions from Brightline during her 2020 campaign for county commission. “Each time we get a story. It’s like I’m dealing with my adolescent children.”

The meeting did not seem to clarify the main issue hovering over Tri-Rail: when will the public get to ride the agency’s trains in and out of downtown Miami and use a station that Miami and Miami-Dade spent $43 million to build? The station was supposed to open in 2017, with delays first attributed to Brightline not having ready the track safety equipment — known as Positive Train Control — to allow Tri-Rail trains to run.

That issue was solved last year, but a new issue was surfacing. In April, Brightline notified Tri-Rail of construction defects at the new platform at its existing Miami Central station. That ended up being one of several issues Tri-Rail and Brightline haven’t resolved.

When news of the platform problems became public in December, Tri-Rail engineering firm Railroad Consultant also said the bridges linking ground-level train tracks to the new station weren’t built to the needed weight specifications for Tri-Rail’s double-decker commuter trains.

That could be solved by both sides agreeing to the same weight standards. The Florida Department of Transportation is analyzing whether Brightline’s weight standards, based on high-speed rail rules in California, will work with Tri-Rail trains.

Tri-Rail also has to upgrade some safety software to mesh with the kind Brightline employs, and then train its operators to use it. That’s expected to be finished this summer, Goddard told board members.

While Brightline initially said modified steps could address the platform issues, Goddard told the SFRTA board Friday one portion of the defect — vertical protrusions — must be fixed with construction work at the station. He said that work has started and will be completed in 90 days.

That would leave horizontal protrusions as the remaining problem. Goddard suggested a step modification could be finished quickly, but Abrams said Tri-Rail doesn’t have the luxury of just focusing on the Brightline station. It also has to be sure the stair modification doesn’t cause problems in any of Tri-Rail’s other 18 stations.

“You don’t know until you test it,” he said.

Delayed for years, Tri-Rail’s Miami station has a new problem: The trains won’t fit