New WSF leader aims to flip the script with success stories and worker empowerment

Ever since he was two or three years old, Steve Nevey wanted to work on ships. His father was in the British Navy and took Nevey to visit some of the ships he was working on during his childhood in the United Kingdom. When show and tell came around at school, Nevey remembers his peers talking about their pet rabbits and dogs – he was talking about aircraft carriers.

True to his passion, Nevey has spent a lifetime on the water, working for a ferry system in Scotland, major seagoing corporations and the cruise industry before he found himself traveling to Seattle in 2008 with a single suitcase in hand to work with the Holland America Group on a cruise ship. He never left.

“What I really enjoyed the most whenever I was working on ships was just being out without any kind of noise around,” Nevey said. “It's just the ship and the water and you've got a job to do that day, and you do the job and you get the ship where it needs to go.”

Today, Nevey is over a month and a half into his role heading the Washington State Ferry system as assistant secretary, succeeding Patty Rubstello, who announced her resignation as assistant secretary in December after serving in the position since 2021.

“He is really an elite operator, really understands the ins and outs of marine operations and he's a private sector guy, so he also understands customer service, and honestly, we've not had that at the helm of WSF in recent memory,” said 23rd District Rep. Greg Nance, who serves on the House Transportation Committee and is Vice Chair of the Legislature’s Maritime Caucus. “We've been hiring highway department folks climbing the WSDOT ladder and they're really smart and really gifted, but running a marine fleet like WSF is extremely complicated. It's one of the hardest jobs anywhere.”

As Nevey jumps into the role at a moment of high tension. WSF’s aging fleet was been reduced to 21 vessels when 19 are required for full service, and WSDOT reported an 86% on-time performance and a completion of 95.6% of scheduled runs in the second quarter of Fiscal Year 2024 (October through December 2023), leading riders, ferry community leaders and gubernatorial candidates to view the situation as a crisis.

Nevey has a different take. One of his leading strategies jumping into his new role is to flip the narrative and tell a story of a ferry system firmly on its way to recovery. Planning to work from the “bottom up,” Nevey is working to empower ferry crews and inform ferry communities to foster productive feedback.

An informational campaign for ferries

The pressure has been on Nevey from the jump. “Everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face,” he said, echoing the old Mike Tyson quote.

“The thing that keeps me up at night is getting new boats and making sure that program is successful,” he said, “but also laying out a path for the staff and the crew and all of the employees so we can all get on the same page and know which direction we're headed.”

Nevey served as WSF’s director of marine operations, but was surprised at the scrutiny that instantly came with his new leadership role. Even more so, he’s learned that ferry employees and staff are desperate to come out of a pandemic-era slump and return to the standard of service expectations, as they live in ferry communities themselves and feel pressure from riders too.

“The trajectory is good, but obviously things weren't that great not that long ago and so we're clawing our way back out,” WSF public information officer Ian Sterling said. “There's money to build boats… Believe me, we want boats more than anybody I think other than the customers, but it takes time.”

In the meantime, Nevey is on a campaign to loop frustrated riders in on WSF’s short term successes in clearing barriers to advance them to higher positions and the longer-term fixes still in the making, like securing five hybrid-electric ferries.

“I think one of the things I struggle with is the telling our story piece,” Nevey said. “We're getting suggestions and feedback based on things that I don't think are really true (such as pursuing the quickest avenues to secure new boats or hiring entry-level staff.) We're already doing that, we haven't been very good at telling you we're doing that. I think that's why telling our story is the critical first step to correct the record and make sure people understand the good things that are already going on.”

The successes Nevey says are worth noting

“We're not in crisis anymore, we're in recovery, and we can really see that in our numbers,” Nevey said.

Nevey said that in the first four months of this year, WSF has canceled less than 1% of its sailings, as compared to about 2.5% for the same time period in 2023. From January to April this year, WSF completed 99.1% of its scheduled sailings, as compared to 97.8% in the same time frame a year before.

“One sailing being canceled is unacceptable, but we run 50,000 sailings over four months.”

Nevey said he often hears suggestions to hire entry-level crew, but that entry-level hiring isn’t the problem – it’s getting workers the credentials they need to graduate on to much-needed positions like captain, chief mate and chief engineer. That work, he says, is already under way.

Washington State Ferries has already hired nearly 600 fleet personnel in the last few years, despite an international maritime worker shortage, Nevey reported.

Now with a new scholarship program that will be kicking off another round of recruitment by the end of the month, WSF will have three state-sponsored scholarship programs, putting them on course to graduate between 24 and 36 deck officers a year where they had previously only graduated five or six, keeping pace with an estimate of 105 such roles that will be vacated by 2027 as captains reach retirement eligibility. Workers have their tuition paid for and can be paid full-time to ride pilotage and take necessary exams.

“We have two primary challenges, and crewing is one, and vessels are the other, and one is long term and one is shorter term,” Sterling said. “I think we've been pretty successful with the crew. We're going to get out of the crewing situation. And now, it's about vessels, and that's a longer term fix.”

Nevey also assures that the ferry system is already on the fastest route toward securing five new vessels, bucking calls from conservative legislators and gubernatorial candidates Bob Ferguson and Dave Reichert to pursue diesel-powered ferries, if it’s the quickest option.

Legislation passed in 2023 allowing WSF to issue a national request for bids for shipbuilders with an option to sign two contracts to build vessels simultaneously would see two new hybrid-electric vessels hit the water in 2028, followed by another three by 2030. If WSF were to pivot all of a sudden toward diesel-powered ships, their current legislation and funding would be thrown overboard, setting the process back a few years. The earliest Nevey would expect to see a diesel boat in the water is 2030.

“We're on the best path with these electric boats and people need to trust us that this is the best path and we've looked at all options,” Nevey said.

Working from the office, not so much from the water

Feedback from ferry staff and the public is “our north star in every action we take and guides our investments to realize those benefits over time,” Nevey wrote in a letter to the Seattle Times on May 1. He’s showing up to ferry community events, but says the lines are already open for public feedback and such in-person ferry rides might not be the best use of time.

“Ferry riders have great ideas, they have smart suggestions because when you ride a boat, 90 minutes or two hours a day, five days a week, you think a lot about the boat,” Nance said. “I think we can all do a better job listening to each other, including empowering commuter voices and crew voices when we're setting budgets and when we're setting priorities.”

Nevey is occasionally told that he should ride the ferries himself from certain locations for a few days in a row “to know what it’s like,” by riders who believe, he thinks, that such in-person experiences would make him and the ferry system “try a little bit harder.”

“I'm doing everything I can with the resources I have every day,” Nevey said. “And a lot of the people who work for me do take the ferry every day, they do experience the same things that  the riders experience, and our employees give us feedback on the stuff that they're hearing.”

“If we're out (traveling) around the system, that doesn't necessarily mean that we're doing the day job,” Sterling said, but added that Nevey is already attending several ferry community events this month, one being a youth career fair in Eagle Harbor on May 21.

WSF already does outreach with social media platforms and rider alerts and currently has many channels for public feedback, Sterling said. People can participate in Ferry Riders Opinion Group (FROG) surveys, attend the two virtual public meetings WSF hosts a year, email communications and reach out to customer service nearly 24 hours a day.

“We're working on strategies to get feedback from the customers,” Nevey said. “We don't have really robust feedback loops right now.”

Public meetings used to be held in person within ferry communities, but only a handful of people would show up, Nevey said he was told, and the virtual public meetings had presented a better use of time and money as they’ve drawn hundreds to thousands of participants. He said he could see himself doing in-person meetings, such as speaking with groups at a terminal.

Ferry leadership in the past hasn’t been the most outward facing, said Walt Elliott, a Kingston resident and former co-chairman of the state's ferry advisory executive committee. He said it almost seemed like a deliberate iron curtain at times. That’s why Elliott appreciated when former head of ferries David Moseley would frequent visits to ferry communities and have conversations with riders and write his phone number and email up on a blackboard.

“I think the public meeting should be a public dialogue and it should be with each major (ferry community) group,” Elliott said. “If you do all at once, it doesn't work because (their interests are) just too diverse.”

Nance also believes that a reliable route for transparent and accountable leadership would be to elevate the head of ferries to a cabinet-level position, appointed by the Governor; a policy that Nevey thinks is unnecessary, given his direct communication with Gov. Jay Inslee several times a week. Breaking off from WSDOT could also sever WSF from important resources, he said.

A culture change in progress, scaled up

While some of the successes Nevey is championing will require some patience to see through, he says some of his efforts to reshape the WSF workforce from the bottom up are starting to bear fruit.

When Nevey was director of marine operations, overseeing 1,600 of WSF’s 2,000 workers, he worked to empower employees to make decisions themselves that they thought would improve the operating system instead of waiting on a game of phone tag up the management chain.

Nevey published a culture change playbook for the staff and created feedback groups, coupling leadership teams with employees on each route holding many different jobs to gather input.

Now, crew members email Nevey directly with ideas to fix parts of the system, when they never would before, discouraged by the rigidity of a government command and control environment, he said.

“We're in the middle of that shift,” Nevey said. “Feedback I hear is that it's working and people are starting to feel a lot more connected to the company and to each other,” and happy crew make for an inspired workforce and happier customers.

“Coming into this job, I wanted to say, okay, everything I've done in operations, I want to scale that to the whole system, so that's what I'm working on now,” Nevey said.

When Nance takes the ferry, he likes to speak with the crew and hear their inside perspective on the ferry system. He’s noticed that culture flip from the bottom up.

“Over the last several years, I’ve sensed really a tone shift with crew,” Nance said. “We lost a little bit of our zest and we lost a little bit of our edge over the last few years, and one thing I've been really, really excited about with Steve's leadership is there's sort of a sense of pride and purpose, in a very short time period, is really coming back to life with the crew.”

Editor's note: This story was corrected to reflect the amount of vessels needed to run full service. Data for sailing reliability in the first quarter of 2024 was added.

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Washington State Ferries leader wants to change culture, build boats