Paul TenHaken Is Helping Transform the City's Public Transit System

En español | Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has a war room. Tucked away on an unfinished floor of a municipal building, a group of city workers gathered there for nine months, hatching a plan to transform the city's public bus system.

About 28 percent of riders are 55 and older, yet many of the city's older residents lack easy access to a bus. Or if they do, they have trouble managing wait times of up to 30 minutes on frigid Midwestern days. Overall ridership is low, and the 12 bus routes would reach only about two-thirds of the sprawling 75-square-mile city.

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So the city's new mayor, Paul TenHaken, elected in 2018, oversaw the formation of a group called the Core Team, with 14 city workers of various backgrounds tasked with developing solutions. TenHaken, a 42-year-old technology executive and Republican, ran in part on a platform to apply the tools of tech innovation to city government. He was inspired by his participation in a summit in New York City led by the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, which had tapped him for a yearlong leadership and city management program. Sioux Falls was one of the smallest cities in the program, but TenHaken saw that as an asset: “It's a little easier to turn the battleship of a smaller municipality."

After the summit, TenHaken created a Department of Innovation and Technology, hiring as its leader Jason Reisdorfer, who had previously worked in sales. Reisdorfer got to work on redeveloping the city's transit system. Among the city workers he and TenHaken picked for the Core Team, only one had previous transit expertise. The diverse team included a firefighter, a police officer, a librarian and a health care worker.

"We didn't want to have a bunch of people in the same room who said, ‘This is how we've always done it,’ “ Reisdorfer says.

In addition to working in the war room, team members rode buses. They met with riders, business leaders, hospital staffs, affordable housing developers and university officials. They researched the issue.

TenHaken allowed the team freedom to work on its own. “When a mayor gets involved in any sort of meeting, his or her voice trumps any other discussion in the room,” he says. But his presence was felt. The team communicated using a messaging app, and TenHaken frequently chimed in with uplifting emojis.