SEPTA board chair Pat Deon reflects on how he navigated shoe-throwing customers and Harrisburg deal-making over his 24-year career

In his 24 years as chairman of the SEPTA board, Pat Deon hated long public meetings.

But Deon, an old-school Pennsylvania power broker more comfortable in the hidden places where deals get made, couldn’t escape his last one without ceremony as he retired from the job last Thursday.

The departing chief collected praise and gifts, then plowed through a regular voting session, where a dozen or so people lined up to comment on a bus-network revamp and possible service cuts. Elapsed time: more than an hour.

To the consternation of good-government types who wanted open debate, Deon would usually whip through a fat board agenda in 30 minutes with little discussion — direct and to the point.

Though Deon is praised for helping stabilize SEPTA over the years, he leaves as the agency confronts those issues anew. It is looking at a $240 million deficit, with the state’s share of transit funding diminished.

Deon, 65, served on the SEPTA board for nearly half the agency’s existence, counting four years before taking over as its head in 1999. He helped steer the sixth-largest transit system in the U.S. for a generation, and despite his departure from SEPTA, he’ll have a say in how Pennsylvanians travel: Deon is keeping his spot on the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission.

A commercial real estate developer who started as a beer distributor, Deon is credited with putting SEPTA on a sounder financial footing. He used political clout honed as a major GOP fundraiser and collector of IOUs in Harrisburg to broker deals among lawmakers and governors of both parties that increased and stabilized state funding for public transit.

With then-Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat, Deon in 2007 helped negotiate a law requiring the Pennsylvania Turnpike to give $450 million every year to PennDot for highway projects and public transit operating support.

Then in 2013, he was instrumental in getting a law called Act 89 passed under Republican Gov. Tom Corbett. It earmarked all the turnpike money for transit for a decade and raised the gas tax for other transportation needs.

Then-Transportation Secretary Barry Schoch recalled one tense Friday negotiating session when GOP legislative leaders proposed phasing in the plan. Forget it, Deon said, and walked out.

“He said, ‘I’d rather you don’t vote for it at all,’” Schoch said in an interview. “His point was they weren’t going to come back and vote for this again later.” It was a strategically dropped bomb that Schoch said he feared might wreck the deal, but it worked. An agreement was reached after the weekend for one up-or-down vote. “It wouldn’t have happened without him.”

Deon also has taken heat for procurement of the Key Card fare system, which had a glitchy rollout and doubled in cost because of required fixes and service. Critics also slam the project to extend rail service to King of Prussia, suspended last year after millions had been spent on design and planning, when the federal government declined to provide more money.

On Thursday, as Deon chaired his final meeting of the SEPTA board, the transit agency gave him a lasting gift: — naming the Regional Rail engine Locomotive 901 “Pasquale T. Deon Sr.”

“It will forever bear your name,” board vice chairman Kenneth Lawrence said, handing Deon a framed photo of the honor. “May it always run on time.”

Deon recently sat down for an interview with The Inquirer to reflect on his tenure, selling public transit to Harrisburg, customer complaints, and public safety. Answers were lightly edited for clarity.

I realized that we can’t go to Harrisburg without having a good story. Because if we’re going up there saying, we need money, we need to say why we need money. We need to be proving that we’re well-run and we’re not burning money for the state because it was viewed as a black hole. You know, like everything else in Philadelphia when you go to Harrisburg.

We really did have a deal. And [Gov. Josh Shapiro and Democratic legislative leaders from SEPTA’s service area] were arguing over stuff independent of the issue. So whatever deal [Shapiro] was making on education or vouchers, they [Democrats] were having a whole internal fight.

Democracy? We vote for the AG, too, you know. It’s not like we’re going to an office that isn’t elected. We just couldn’t get the responses that we needed for our police. [The DA’s office says it prosecutes almost all of the charges SEPTA police bring.]

I believe you protect your drivers; you protect your employees.

The worst day since I’ve been at SEPTA was when the bus driver got killed. I went to the hospital for five or six hours. It was just gut-wrenching. I’m not sure in a sane world you could ever have predicted that or you can completely fix it, but we did the driver assault bill right after that.

She’s coming in and saying that’s one of our priorities, [like] cleaning up the Kensington. We’ve probably redone [Somerset] station three times since I’ve been there. You can only do so much. I don’t think the city has had the resources or vision to take care of it. Until now. I think Cherelle is going to focus on that. [Riders] need to feel safe when [they] go onto our platform, or go onto our bus. You don’t need to be harassed going to work. You don’t need to be feeling unsafe anywhere in our system. In reality, it looks worse than it is [statistically]. But that doesn’t matter. It matters what you think when you’re coming on our system, and [that] you want to ride it.

What we didn’t want to do was have politics in the boardroom, [for] board members to be treating it as a platform for whatever else that they’re doing. There’s never been an issue with that. It’s very collegial. I’m not saying we don’t disagree, we don’t have varying points of view. Most of the work is done at the committee meeting[s]. Usually it gets resolved there or afterward. So, say, I get a call from [a] Chester County [board member] that this route or bus service proposal isn’t working. They say, ‘I’m not comfortable with it.’ Then I would say until you’re comfortable, and your county is comfortable with it, we’re going to pull it off the agenda.

We get some great ones. We get guys that come up there, and they’ve memorized complete routes, with who lives on the route. ‘Fifth and Market, and that’s where [former Mayor] Michael Nutter lives.’ And they go right down the route.

I enjoyed when they challenged us because it makes you better.

When someone has an issue, we send staff to go meet with them after the meeting and make sure they come out with a resolution. They may or may not be happy, but they get an answer. We don’t ignore any of that. If you’re willing to get up, get dressed, come to our meeting, sit through whatever it is, you deserve to say anything you want in that two minutes you get up there. And if we can resolve the problem, I believe that we should do it right there. That person deserves an explanation. They’re paying us, they ride the system.

I remember once there were two senior centers with two bus stops. One was on this corner and one was on that corner — and the road sloped down. These guys were mad because if we changed it to one bus stop, they’d have to walk uphill. And these other guys are mad that they’re going downhill. It was in [former Council President] Darrell Clarke’s district. We ended up giving them a van they could leave there to take people to the stop. I don’t think the van lasted more than a week.

When I got there, at one meeting they were throwing their shoes at the board. People in wheelchairs were protesting because our CCT service [paratransit for people with disabilities] was so bad. It was our number-one complaint at the time. I kept the shoes in my office as a reminder.