A Career In Transit
For 25 years, Rick Levine has toiled to build up his in-plant at the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority.
By Carol Brzozowski
The biggest compliment Rick Levine ever received was being told that if his department were a commercial printing operation, it would be one of the country's top 10 firms, based on output per employee.
Levine heads up Replication and Digitizing Services (RADS) for the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority in Washington D.C. The authority serves a half-million bus riders and 700,000 rail riders daily, requiring the in-plant to provide millions of pieces of printed matter: brochures, maps, bus timetables, forms, flyers, bids, specs, drawings, stationery and more—all printed at a substantially lower cost than outside printers would charge.
Plus, the in-plant provides the value-added service of extracting data from the mainframe system used by bus and train operators to create timetables.
A Long Journey
It's been a long journey for Levine, a Boston native and son of a Washington bureaucrat, whose interest in printing started in junior high school.
"The fact you had to be organized and follow a sequence of steps appealed to me," he says of printing, adding that he believes it to be still largely a journeyman craft in which one learns by doing.
Though he says there were no degrees in print management back when he attended college, he feels the courses he took at Park College, in Parkville, Mo., and the University of Maryland gave him the equivalent of what would now be a print management degree.
Levine worked nearly a decade for the U.S. Catholic Conference, where he did production-oriented print jobs, before moving to WMATA 25 years ago as the head of printing. Once there, he took charge of two reorganized facilities that included a satellite copy center run by Xerox.
The main print shop had two duplicators and an unreliable single-color 29˝ Harris press. Since then, despite the fact that his $3.25 million annual budget has hardly increased over the years, Levine has toiled to build a stronger operation. He is proud that he was able to build up his shop by scrounging surplus property and buying, trading or rebuilding equipment in a slow, steady fashion.
As a result, the in-plant now includes an automated four-color, 40˝ Komori Lithrone perfecter, a four-color, 26˝ Komori Lithrone, a four-color, 23˝ web press, two NexPress Digimasters, as well as other press, prepress and bindery gear.
"Capital money in this area is very hard to get," he says. "Everything I need competes for the same pot of money [with] every bus, rail car, piece of track. Those priorities almost always come first."
At 20 employees, the department is down three from when Levine first started. He's a hands-off manager who motives them by entrusting them to do their job of handling an increased workload of an expanding transit system.
Consider this: in 1981, his operation could blanket the transit system with fewer than 20,000 pieces of a particular printed piece for transit information for an inauguration, for example. Now, that same event will require about 500,000 pieces.
His department also has taken on more atypical tasks, such as printing 75 wall maps showing where every rail car is stored in tunnels and yards during snowstorms. Subcontracting that to the private sector would be very expensive and take longer, Levine points out. Other functions that once belonged to different departments—such as cartography and schedule planning—have also become his in-plant's obligation over the years.
Levine says the in-plant has repurposed its prepress department to support non-traditional areas such as digital documents and animated web information, making the in-plant more valuable to the Transit Authority and to the public.
Levine often must justify why his operation can offer the same quality at a lower cost than a commercial printer—in a political town where someone's relative in the business wants lucrative government contracts. Invariably, his in-plant is supported because it is deliberately understaffed to keep overhead at a minimum while staying competitive.
"We are very proud we have become so efficient with our machinery," he says. "Our equipment and people are geared to do what we need to do to support the Metro transit in Washington."
Levine, a single father of two girls in their 20s, loves the region. He enjoys walking, advocating for environmental issues and volunteering for Habitat for Humanity.
"It's a very dynamic area," he notes. "There is always something going on: museums, art events, concerts, sports events. It's the seat of government across the world."
Fast response to government needs is itself a niche for Levine and his crew as they gear up to print materials for the presidential inauguration.
Levine's biggest challenge mirrors that of commercial printing operations: doing fast turnarounds. His crew delivers: "If somebody says they need something tomorrow, they get it," he insists.
