BATTING

PROVIDENCE — Robert D. Batting, the first of Governor Carcieri’s appointees to the state transit authority board, twice its chairman and the bête noire of many transit advocates and authority staff members, has resigned.

Batting, whose resignation was effective Aug. 13, denounced the management at the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority, which he had fought with almost since his arrival on the board in 2003.

Batting, a retired businessman, said Tuesday night that he confronted at the authority “a situation where management continues along a route where I didn’t want any part of it.” He said the problems included misleading behavior by the management. “I’m better off on the outside,” Batting said, where he said he intends to seek change at RIPTA.

Batting had bombarded RIPTA officials with demands for financial data, but repeatedly expressed frustration at the results. He said recently that it took him three months of struggle to extract what he considered an adequate set of financial statistics from RIPTA administrators.

“It’s not just incompetence,” Batting said, “it’s out and out deception.”

Alfred J. Moscola, RIPTA’s general manager, denied Batting’s allegations. “It’s not true,” he said. “We were always honest with him. We answered the questions as well as we could.

“I don’t think he understood transit the way I know it,” said Moscola, who had a long and successful career at the New York City Transit Authority before coming to Rhode Island in 2000.

Governor Carcieri issued a statement thanking Batting and complimenting him for offering “new ideas to make RIPTA more efficient and relevant to new users.” Like Batting, Carcieri criticized RIPTA’s management, saying it has resisted Batting’s “willingness to address our public-transportation issues.”

For their part, many RIPTA staff members have privately made it clear for years that they looked on Batting as a threat to them, the agency and the future of public transportation in the state. Transit advocates outside the agency have also questioned whether he really wanted RIPTA to flourish, or just to contain its budget.

“I’m not sad to see him leave, and I don’t think anybody at RIPTA is either,” said board member William Kennedy, a regular opponent of Batting’s who has accused him of being “a bottom-line guy” who does not care about the low-income working people, elderly, poor and disabled who depend on the agency’s bus system for transportation.

In addition to RIPTA’s administrators, Batting criticized The Journal for not, in his view, publishing enough about what he considered key problems involving RIPTA’s management, notably what he considered unrealistic or misleading information about the agency’s finances, particularly its revenues.

Along with his frustration with RIPTA’s management, Batting suffered significant setbacks on the board even after an influx of Carcieri appointees earlier this year. Those appointees appeared so late in Republican Carcieri’s administration because his previous nominees were blocked by the Democrat-controlled state Senate.

Batting had already been chairman once, in 2003 and 2004. He had acknowledged at his confirmation hearing that he had never ridden a RIPTA bus, and once on the board pushed for budget-balancing that the agency staff said would have meant major service cuts and layoffs.

When they gained control of the board this April, Carcieri’s appointees summarily ousted the then-chairman, Thomas Deller, and installed Batting in his place.

But the Carcieri appointees didn’t give Batting the votes he needed to reach some longtime goals. A recent example was the board’s July approval, over his objections, of a major project, the agency’s $38.7-million plan to build a maintenance and administration facility on Elmwood Avenue for its RIde vans that provide transportation to the elderly and disabled. Batting had opposed the project for years, arguing that it wasn’t needed and would be too expensive to operate. But construction money was approved by both state and federal governments and RIPTA had already spent $4.9 million on the project. In the end, it passed over Batting’s objections, with only Batting and board member John Rupp abstaining.

Batting also lost in an attempt to give Moscola only a short, six-month contract extension past the end of this year. Officials familiar with the situation have said that would have amounted to a suggestion to Moscola to move on. Kennedy said he thinks Moscola would have quit.

Instead, Batting was first blocked with a tie vote, and then forced to accept a one-year extension for Moscola as a compromise, Batting confirmed.

By leaving the RIPTA board, Batting will also escape having to deal with an enormous financial challenge that could cause major bus service cuts this winter.

With the fiscal year less than two months old, the agency’s $101-million budget is already an estimated $12 million in the red, largely because of higher costs for diesel fuel for its buses. It isn’t clear how that gap could be filled without reducing service or finding new revenue.

blandis@projo.com