It wasn't the ideal start for the new chief executive officer of Valley Metro Rail and one of his four new bosses. But it wasn't the first time in his 35-year transit career that Simonetta had waded into controversy. In a city where the love of cars runs deep and skeptics watch for Valley Metro's slightest stumble, it may not be the last time.

Simonetta is used to tackling tough assignments. Friends and colleagues who have known him since his first transit job in 1971 as a planning understudy in Pittsburgh say his meeting with Gordon was typical. He is direct, all business, with a charge-up-the-hill intensity. He picked up his style in the Swissvale neighborhood of steel workers in his native Pittsburgh. He tempered it in sometimes-bitter conflicts at transit agencies from Pittsburgh to Denver to Atlanta, picking up industry renown along the way.

For Simonetta, the Valley's light-rail post represents one of the few marks he has yet to make in his career: build a rail system from scratch.

To the job he brings a breadth of knowledge rare in an industry dominated by specialist general managers. Some keep the trains or buses running well but can't manage people. Others are excellent leaders who can't balance budgets. Still others are visionary planners who stumble on details. Or, they know transit but lack the political skills to win over a community.

Through choice, circumstance and battles, Simonetta has notched up skills that convinced Valley leaders he can bring and sell light rail in the land of the car.

There's no question transit is in his blood. He talked about its role in urban development 25 years before it was popular and pushed the industry to adopt standards. He still gets excited when he stands in a rail yard.

By the time he was 28, Simonetta had already been a general manager of a transit system, in Harrisburg, Penn. Then, in Denver, he kept a fleet of 625 buses humming in a growing system.

But in 1979, Simonetta was itching to be a general manager again, and his boss wasn't about to leave. A headhunter called and told him that to make a name in transit, he needed a "turnaround." He had to fix a failing system. Simonetta parachuted into the cauldron that was Ann Arbor, Mich.

The interview panel cataloged problems as long as a string of traffic lights on a Phoenix boulevard, from out-of-control deficits to stagnant ridership.

The chief complaint was that the bus drivers' union had strangled the system. The union controlled supervisors, and with only two fixed routes with schedules, drivers had "free rein," as Simonetta saw it. "We'd find drivers in the cornfields smoking dope and having sex."

Simonetta's effort to end the abuse led to one of Ann Arbor's longest bus strikes, a 40-day showdown in which militant drivers burned their uniforms.

They also burned Simonetta in effigy and he was "crushed," he said, because he started thinking, "What would Uncle Joe say about it?" His uncle, Joe Payne, had been a union shop steward in a steel mill where many in the family had worked, including Rick.

Simonetta had smoothly negotiated labor contracts in Denver. But in Ann Arbor, he learned to stick to his guns, to stare down confrontation for the benefit of the system. In the process, he grew a thick hide.

Simonetta turned to his uncle for advice, going deer hunting and soul-searching with him in the Allegheny Mountains. It recalled his boyhood, when talk of past strikes and union beefs shared a place at the family dinner table with his mother's marinara.

Payne advised him to respect the bus drivers because they were trying to feed their families. But Simonetta concluded they were killing the bus system. He resolved to break the strike.

He made peace with himself when some bus drivers showed up at his home at 3 a.m. one night and dumped mounds of trash on his lawn, while his wife, Bonnie, and two daughters, then 7 and 9, looked on. After that, the union lost support in liberal Ann Arbor, the radicals eventually quit and the strike petered out.

In Columbus, Ohio, the Transport Workers Union was waiting for him. The union president told him on the day they met to count on a strike in two years.

Drivers at the Central Ohio Transit Authority, or COTA, had a history of strikes, and now drivers had a symbol to attack. Later they warned publicly that Simonetta would need to park a firetruck in front of his house because it was going to burn to the ground.

By then, Simonetta had built community support for COTA. He knew the challenge in Columbus was to win back the trust of the public. Taxpayers questioned sagging service and a healthy surplus, and concluded a transit tax didn't need renewing.

He learned that the success of transit depends as much on community perception as on how well the buses run or employees get along. It could make the difference in whether he won more funding or trimmed service. He not only had to be a pro, but also had to look and sound like one.

Simonetta joined the Rotary Club and other civic groups for the first time. His love for golf came in handy. He joined a country club and got to know CEOs and newspaper publishers. His penchant for monogrammed shirts, sharp suits and cuff links played well.

"Early in our careers, we were always putting on our cheapest suits. Not Rick. He would always dress up sharp," said William Millar, president of the American Public Transportation Association, an industry-lobbying group.

"Buddy-buddy with the employees, that he was not. He was a businessman. He was very tough about the things he knew was right. He wouldn't give in," said Glenna Watson, who worked at COTA for 21 years and succeeded Simonetta.

Simonetta knew that recession-wracked COTA couldn't afford automatic cost-of-living increases. He wanted to abolish them and hire part-time drivers, both do-or-die principles for bus drivers.

Simonetta arranged carpools to get many of the stranded 90,000 passengers to work. Traffic kept moving. The papers reported that COTA was saving money during the strike.

"Man, talk about a bad scene," said Simonetta, recalling the hired security force and replacement bus drivers that assembled at the maintenance yard. "The garage doors open and out walk these storm troopers with helmets, sticks and riot shields in a wedge in front of the buses. It was something you didn't want to do, but it ended the strike."

He went on to run COTA until 1994.The nine-year stint would be the longest in his career. Labor strife eased, and the public backed the system, passed a new transit tax and accepted fare increases. The money improved service and paid for new facilities.

Headhunters came knocking again, and Simonetta vied to run Atlanta's bus and heavy-rail system, which was bracing for the 1996 Summer Olympics.

Although he had no heavy-rail experience, he beat out 110 other applicants and in 1994 took over Atlanta's MARTA, then the seventh-largest U.S. transit network.

The Olympics were widely expected to be a fiasco. Doom-and-gloom stories, many from suburbanites leery of transit, predicted gridlock and athletes missing events.

Simonetta and his staff fanned out to teach people how to ride the system, from paying fares to reading the map. Within days reluctant commuters were teaching tourists. Simonetta says now he "absolutely" plans to do the same thing when Valley Metro Rail launches service in 2008.

He also assembled a massive fleet of loaned buses from around the country, built a rail extension in 18 months instead of 36 and rolled out innovations such as automatic station announcements and natural-gas buses.

Atlanta taught Simonetta how to play on the national stage but under a microscope. Here, winning over the public was key. He learned to be an ambassador, selling transit to the skeptics and getting money from Washington.

The preparations reminded Simonetta of his young adulthood, when he dropped out of college as a sophomore to enlist in the Army Corps of Engineers. He ended up building bunkers during combat in the no-man's land between North Korea and South Korea in 1968.

Afterward, APTA, the industry association, named him the top transit manager in the country. He later became its chairman. APTA also honored him for promoting minority managers.

Earlier that year Simonetta had fired six of his nine top deputies after development around one station was stalling. A fractured transit board took sides as some employees labeled Simonetta a "plantation owner." Simonetta's predecessor, Ken Gregor, said the firings destroyed morale and MARTA's institutional knowledge.

An Atlanta attorney who won a $1.1 million reverse-discrimination lawsuit against MARTA in federal court said racial politics led to Simonetta's eventual departure.

"MARTA is a zoo. It's run by a board of directors who don't know anything. Simonetta was under relentless attack," said Harlan Miller, who convinced a jury that Simonetta conspired to fire White managers to provide political cover for firing Black ones.

"My biggest disappointment was after the Olympics. The legacy was lost. The suburbanites went back to their racial politics, and the board got back into meddling," he recalled.

A start-up company he ran filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and he worked at a top consulting firm. But he had never built a new rail system from the ground up, and with one daughter in the area, the Valley looked a natural fit when headhunters came calling again in 2003.

When he applied for the job, he wore a hairpiece and kept to himself suspicions that the schedule and budget were optimistic. After he arrived in 2004, he shed both illusions. He shaved his head and told locals he had been bald since his 20s and their light-rail plans had to be tweaked.

He took over a small staff of local planners and went into high gear. He changed the schedule to build the line all at once rather than in phases and brought in experienced transit people from around the country to make it happen. He transformed Valley Metro into a full-blown professional transit agency.

"He's a problem-solver, a man of action," said lifelong friend and APTA Vice President Tony Kouneski. "He knows how to size up problems and take them on."

Simonetta enters the twilight of his career by coming full circle. The Pittsburgh kid who grew up on streetcar line and rode trolleys to school, dates and pool halls is poised to bring trolleys to the desert.

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