Incoming DART CEO remains under investigation for prior job

The DART board's chairman has remained silent following our reporting about DART's incoming CEO being named in a criminal investigation in Jacksonville, Florida. We've also learned the Jacksonville Transportation Authority, where he's the head, is halting its much-touted autonomous shuttle service January 1st. Fox 4's Lori Brown in Dallas with the story. Lori. Despite leaving what's being called a transportation nightmare in Jacksonville, No DART board member who voted for Nat Ford's hiring has made a move to reconsider it. So he is set to take the reins here in Dallas in less than two weeks. We were assured over and over again by the leadership at JTA that everything's fine. We just need to trust them that it's all going to be great. You know, Jacksonville is going to be the city of the future. With a criminal investigation subpoena requesting text messages and emails between incoming DART CEO Nat Ford, his wife, and a consultant, I asked Jacksonville City Councilman Rory Diamond for his insights about public transportation under Ford's leadership. This is a nightmare for the city of Jacksonville, just to do the normal things the city is supposed to do. Diamond says one poor decision at Jacksonville Transportation Authority, or JTA, was to start an autonomous shuttle service called Navya. The city of Jacksonville just not qualified to run this thing, and it was going to be hugely expensive, $400 million for an agency whose annual budget is like $140 million. So huge amount of expense, untested technology, very unclear why we would be doing this at all. Now JTA says Navya operations will come to a halt December 31st. All of a sudden this year they tell us there are tens of millions of dollars in debt that they can't pay their bills. And two weeks ago we ended up, the authority fired over 100 people, some of them bus drivers who'd been there for a very long time. Diamond is a former federal prosecutor. He says the subpoenas seem to reveal that the Florida Attorney General is investigating potential conflicts of interest involving JTA contracts. If you look at the subpoenas, they're very detailed. Among the items requested, contracts related to wellness massages, as well as those for murals. Investigators also want to see which JTA employees or board members received tuition reimbursements. Were there internal conflicts of interest? Are people's wives or friends getting special treatment and then there's the public transportation ridership reports for our autonomous system um the JTA was reporting a ridership number but that included a whole bunch of Jacksonville city employees and JTA employees who were paid to ride the system and so they were counting that as a ride and that's obviously not real while Diamond says it's unclear if any laws were broken by Nat Ford at JTA, one thing is clear: we're 40 million dollars in the hole, we just had to do a city loan essentially for $30 million. We're not going to be able to do certain street repairs or certain new parks because we've got to pay the bills of the JTA. Only one DART board member responded to my request for comment. Doug Herbichek told me in a statement, many red flags were uncovered during this broken process and not just in Jacksonville. The investigation in Florida raises even more questions. Nat Ford has not responded to my request for comment.