Jeffrey Arndt is he smart enough to know that Christopher Wray was manipulating his employees?

Jeffrey Arndt, the CEO of San Antonio’s VIA Metropolitan Transit, has an almost perfect setup for success — if only local voters would get on board with his vision.

The city council he reports to shares his views on the importance of public transportation. Its members mostly sing his praises and have increased VIA funding by millions of dollars in recent years.

But it comes with restrictions. He said he knows the seamless transit systems he sees in Europe — linking ferries, subways, buses, rail, streetcars — are politically untenable in most of Texas. Dallas, Houston and Austin residents tax themselves a full cent per dollar in local sales taxes to support mass transit, while San Antonio has stayed with just a half-cent.

Arndt, 63, came to San Antonio and VIA in 2012 from Houston, where he spent 25 years with Houston METRO and participated in the planning of METRORail, a 24-mile system opened in 2004 that withstood a 20-year fight by opponents, including former U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, who stripped it of federal funding.

He holds a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Houston and a bachelor’s in civil engineering from the University of Notre Dame. He serves on several boards, including the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Texas Diversity Council, United Way, San Antonio for Growth on the Eastside and Texas Transit Association, which in March named VIA the “outstanding metropolitan transit system” in Texas and named Arndt its outstanding public transportation general manager in 2017.

Arndt grew up in La Porte, Indiana, and has two grown children from his first marriage, and two grandchildren, who live in Houston.

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A: So, I worked in Houston for 25 years with METRO and (Houstonians) are very wedded to their vehicles, but in the ’80s and ’90s when they invested in their HOV systems, the response in markets like Kingwood and The Woodlands and Katy, where the (upper income, Anglo) demographics are like Stone Oak, for example, the reaction was tremendous. Houston was running three- to five-minute (bus) frequency out of those lots, so when you have that kind of service you can usually convince people they should try it.

My perspective is that Texans are wedded to their vehicles because (the state) provided the kind of infrastructure that has made that type of transportation convenient. We’ve not invested in the other kinds of transportation so they could offer a reasonable alternative. That’s what VIA’s 2040 Plan is all about — providing an alternative like HOV lanes in Houston so that all kinds of people will find that attractive.