The board of the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency voted Friday to renew Grace Gallucci’s contract as CEO through the end of 2025.
Board members met in a closed-door session Friday morning before approving the extension during the board’s regular public meeting. The contract includes an option to renew for an additional year.
The move comes 11 months after the board received an anonymous letter, drafted by a group including former employees, that detailed complaints about Gallucci’s leadership and the work environment at NOACA. The board hired the law firm Buckingham Doolittle to investigate the contents of the letter.
“The majority of the allegations from the anonymous letter were unsubstantiated by the attorney who handled the investigation,” NOACA President Jeff Brandon told Signal Cleveland before Friday’s meeting.
Signal Cleveland has not received or reviewed Buckingham Doolittle’s report.
The new contract will include performance measurements “to try to deal with some of the perceived issues of low morale and high employee turnover rate,” he said. In early November, the board’s executive committee recommended a contract extension.
“I’m just pleased to be able to serve the public,” Gallucci, who has led NOACA since 2012, said after the meeting. “I always strive for improvement of myself and my organization and I will continue to reach for the highest levels of excellence.”
Six former NOACA employees who signed off on the letter previously detailed complaints to Signal Cleveland about turnover, morale and Gallucci’s travel to Chicago to teach a graduate school course at Northwestern University.
At the time, Gallucci said that she takes vacation days when she teaches at Northwestern and that she works and is still reachable even when out of the office.
Though NOACA is not a household name, the agency wields influence over transportation planning in the Greater Cleveland area. The agency directs around $50 million each year for roads, bridges, bikeways and other projects. A large, bipartisan contingent of elected officials sit on the agency’s board.
The board’s decision on Friday caps off more than a year of delays and uncertainty about the future of NOACA’s leadership. Last year, before the letter was sent, Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne questioned the board’s plan to extend Gallucci’s contract for three years. He asked the board to complete a written performance evaluation first.
Ronayne is slated to become NOACA board president in the new year. He said he’d like to work on employee morale strengthening the agency’s human resources arm. He also floated the idea of setting up a personnel committee.
“The old adage, ‘Culture eats strategy for lunch’ applies here,” he said. “We need strategy, but we’ve got to right-course the culture.”
Gallucci’s contract is not yet finalized. The resolution passed by the board on Friday said that compensation would be based on a performance evaluation.