By Jose Navarro, MBA
When Mario Orso took over as CEO of the San Diego Association of Governments in June 2024, he inherited an agency in genuine crisis: a toll-collection scandal on the SR-125 corridor that regional auditors still can’t fully explain, a board locked in a years-long fight over transit versus highway spending, and a predecessor who’d resigned amid the fallout. Two years in, the agency Orso runs looks calmer on the surface. Underneath, the pattern of how that calm was achieved deserves more scrutiny than it’s gotten.
The math of the transition
Orso’s hire came with a $385,000 starting salary on a three-year contract, plus a 2.5% management benefit, $12,500 in deferred compensation, and fully covered medical benefits — a modest discount from his predecessor Hasan Ikhrata’s $433,000. SANDAG oversees a $1.3 billion annual budget and roughly 400 employees serving a region of 3.3 million residents, so a CEO salary in that range isn’t unreasonable on its face. What’s harder to square is what happened to the leadership layer beneath him.
Within about six weeks of taking office, Orso eliminated the deputy CEO position and fired Ray Major, SANDAG’s longtime chief economist and deputy CEO, saying the roles no longer aligned with the agency’s “operational needs or strategic direction.” Former interim CEO Coleen Clementson, who had stepped in after Ikhrata’s resignation, left soon after Orso arrived. Former Chief Financial Officer Andre Douzdjian also departed. None of the departed executives filed legal claims against the agency — except Major, whose age-discrimination claim SANDAG settled for just under $143,000, three months of his prior salary plus an additional $50,000, rather than go through what he described the agency as fearing would be “expensive, time-consuming and politically messy litigation.”
Consolidation, defended as necessary.
SANDAG board chair Lesa Heebner, the Solana Beach mayor, has publicly backed Orso’s approach without reservation. “I trust him completely,” she told a reporter, framing the leadership turnover as a deliberate control measure: “When you’re coming into an organization that has been somewhat troubled, you keep everything close to you, and everybody reports to you until you can get a complete handle on everything that’s going on in the organization.” That’s a defensible management philosophy in the abstract. It also means that within roughly a year, SANDAG’s CEO had removed every senior executive who might have offered an independent check on their own read of the agency’s finances and priorities — during precisely the period when the toll-scandal investigation and years of accumulated dysfunction most needed independent eyes, not a single point of control.
What independent oversight actually caught
The SR-125 toll scandal itself illustrates why that distinction matters. SANDAG’s own auditor found she couldn’t determine why agency executives failed to alert the board when they first learned the toll-collection system was improperly charging drivers — a failure that occurred under the prior leadership structure, but one that only came to light because an independent auditor kept pursuing the question after executives didn’t volunteer the answer. A board-and-CEO structure where every senior voice reports through one office is, by design, less likely to surface that kind of internal failure on its own initiative.
The pattern beyond SANDAG
This isn’t unique to one agency. SANDAG has scaled back its own most ambitious transit ambitions — including the Purple Line — citing financing gaps, even while the agency still plans more than $25 billion in highway spending through 2050. Meanwhile, MTS, whose board authority SANDAG shares, is separately staring down a $500 million shortfall over the next four years. Two connected regional transportation agencies, both managing structural financing gaps, both having recently consolidated decision-making at the top rather than expanding independent oversight during a period when independent oversight would help residents understand exactly how the numbers got this way.
What accountability should look like going forward?
None of this requires assuming Orso has mismanaged anything — a new CEO cleaning house after a scandal-plagued predecessor is common practice, and Heebner’s endorsement reflects real confidence from the board that hired him. But San Diego residents whose transit and highway futures depend on SANDAG’s $1.3 billion in annual decisions deserve more than trust in one executive’s judgment. They deserve a board structure that maintains independent financial oversight — through an empowered chief economist role, a genuinely independent CFO function, or a strengthened auditor’s office — regardless of how much confidence the board currently has in its CEO. Confidence in a person is not a substitute for structure that outlasts them.
Why the timing raises the stakes
That distinction matters more right now than it would in a quiet year. SANDAG’s replacement CFO, Dawn Vettese, is still relatively new to the role, and the toll-scandal investigation remains open with no clear public timeline for resolution. Layer in MTS’s own $500 million shortfall, a linked agency operating under the same regional transportation umbrella, and San Diego County residents are looking at two major transportation bodies simultaneously managing large financial questions with thinner independent oversight structures than either had two years ago. A board that trusts its CEO completely is not the same as a board that has verified, through structures rather than personal confidence, that the agency’s numbers are sound.
Jose Navarro, MBA, is a financial controller and public affairs analyst based in San Diego with more than two decades of experience in public finance, nonprofit management, and government contract compliance.