Midafternoon is a busy time at the River Cities Travel Center, the convergence point of Central Arkansas Transit Authority bus routes ferrying passengers between downtown Little Rock and their various destinations.
Amid the hubbub at the bus hub, Jarod Varner stands out in the crowd. He’s the only guy in the depot wearing a suit. Not too many executives opt for public transportation. He’s under no obligation to ride the bus, either. But it suits his style, personally and professionally.
“I ride transit as often as I can,” Varner said. “What I get to do is interact with people. I don’t necessarily tell them who I am, I just try to strike up conversations, get a feel for what we’re doing well, what we could improve upon.”
The director has that air about him of someone whose deeds are genuine, whose words are direct and accountable.
He was about to ride the bus again, the same No. 10 line he picks up at McCain Mall in North Little Rock when he commutes to work. As he walks toward the No. 10, his way is impeded by a noxious cloud of diesel exhaust from the bus idling next to it.
“That’s one of the ones that’s going to be replaced,” he says. The offending bus’s day of reckoning will be Aug. 11, when Varner will preside over a ceremony introducing 15 new buses into the fleet — sleek vehicles that will burn compressed natural gas instead of diesel and will provide riders Wi-Fi.
At that same event, the Central Arkansas Transit Authority, or CATA for short — or, shorter still, CAT — will assume its new name, Rock Region Metro. This burst of newness is meant to be the overture to MOVE Central Arkansas, a strategic plan for improvements to the area’s transit system including new routes, longer hours of service and a rapid-transit line, all designed to improve service and make public transit a more viable and appealing option to those for whom it is not a necessity. Varner has been heading up the plan’s development for more than a year.
In 2013, CATA’s board of directors chose Varner, who was all of 32 at the time, to lead them into this era. It may have helped that two years earlier Mass Transit magazine had named him one of its “Top 40 under 40,” an accolade that implies an up-and-comer, a go-getter, someone who is passionate about public transit.
And that he is. Transit consumes up to 60 hours of his week. But the one topic that will trump transit every time is family. He married his high school sweetheart, Paige; the couple have three happy, healthy kids. Since moving here from Texas, the family have settled into their home, schools and church.
He’s educated, successful, has a wealth of friends and a rich spiritual life. Aside from those long work weeks, his life seems like something from a more wholesome, bygone time. In an era when so many of his generation have struggled to get past “Go” in the game of life, he has arrived, maybe even ahead of schedule.
Life, much like a bus route, is a point-to-point process, with one stop leading to the next. The difference is, with life, there is no map, at least not one we mortals are privy to. You can only see the route in retrospect — “counting your blessings,” it’s called — and Varner has done the work.
“There are critical junctures in our lives where you can head one way or another,” he says. “I can go back and track those.
“It’s a matter of stepping through the right doors when they are opened for you. I think if you work as hard as you can, opportunities present themselves.”
Going all the way back to his childhood in the Dallas exurb of Greenville, there have been key people, Varner says, stationed at just the right times and places in his life to hold open important doors.
First was his mother. Julie Gary got a job at the Dairy Dart, a locally owned fast-food stand, when Varner was a boy. She often worked second jobs, too. When he was a young boy, the family’s economic reality may have escaped him, but her work ethic left a permanent impression.
“She always worked extremely hard and prided herself in doing her job the right way,” Varner said. “She was a tremendous model of selflessness and dedication when it came to providing a service to her employer.”
Then there was the friend, when Jarod was about 12, who convinced him to give church a try; he might like it. When the friend moved away, he had no one to go with, but the exposure took.
There were the people who ran the local YMCA who let him do chores for his membership dues. “I practically lived at the Y,” he said.
When Jarod was 8 or 9, a couple of coaches from the local youth baseball league came by the Y, in need of players. Jarod, who’d been playing since he was 5, caught their attention.
“He was a very shy kid,” coach Don Grisham recalled. “You couldn’t get him to say ‘boo.’” But his goodness — his honesty, his sincerity — broadcast like a beacon.
“His mother loved him dearly,” Grisham said, but her time and money were often stretched thin. Grisham and his fellow coaches took him under their wing. Varner said it was like God brought these good men along to see him through his early adolescence.
“And then a few years later he met a girl,” Grisham said.
As the Rev. Jim Tenery remembers it, Jarod was first baseman on his high school team. Tenery’s daughter, Paige, played first base for the girls’ softball team. One day, some of Jarod’s teammates were razzing the girls. Instead of joining in, Jarod stuck up for the girls. This act of chivalry in the face of locker-room peer pressure impressed Paige.
It took a bit more to win over his future in-laws, Tenery recalled, but he and his wife, Jane, soon came to see something in the earnest, hardworking young man.
“He became a part of this family before he was a part of this family,” Tenery said.
NEXT STOP, SEARCY
Falling in love with a minister’s daughter carried with it the significant bonus of making the church a permanent, prominent fixture in his life.
With the Tenerys’ help guiding him through the financial aid process, Jarod was able to join Paige at Harding University, a private Christian college in Searcy that places an emphasis on personal conduct and a melding of academics and a Christian worldview.
“It provided me with a very strong foundation,” Varner said. Going to Harding also meant he and Paige got to know the Little Rock area.
The couple married after graduation, and Jarod pursued his master’s degree in public administration at the University of North Texas in Denton. Serving an internship was a degree requirement. As it happened, Denton County was forming a transportation authority. “I was the third employee hired,” Varner said. “What that allowed me to do was to learn a whole lot very quickly.”
He came to see how important public transportation is to a community and to the individuals who depend on it. He found the same satisfaction in serving others that he’d observed in his mother.
“I’ve always wanted to do big things,” Varner said. “I wanted to do big things and make a contribution and be as productive as possible.” Transit proved to be the perfect vehicle.
Varner spent eight years at the Denton County Transit Authority, working his way up to vice president of transit operations. Other job opportunities came along, offering more money and more impressive titles. But he always felt he still had more to gain and more to give at Denton. Finally, when a search firm approached him about the executive director job at CATA, it was like this was the door they’d been waiting to open — a leadership position, and in a city he and Paige already knew and liked.
And if he wanted to do something big, the timing couldn’t have been better.
Varner faced a steep learning curve when he came on board at CATA, getting to know the agency and the greater community, particularly its political, corporate and civic leaders. “The people in the area have been extremely welcoming — even though I’m a Texan,” Varner said.
Being the face and voice of his agency was new for him, but he has acquitted himself well, said CATA board member Lawrence Finn. Finn is gratified that, as with Varner’s coaches and in-laws, his early impressions have been validated.
“His maturity and knowledge of transit are beyond his chronological years,” Finn said.
TRAVELS AT TWO SPEEDS
Varner’s newfound range in his people skills has been of particular importance in developing the MOVE Central Arkansas plan, which has been constructed from hard data and input from all those community leaders, as well as the insights from the folks he has been chatting with on the way to work.
“Varner’s been like the quarterback on this,” Finn said. One of his most valuable talents has been collecting information and opinions from all these different sectors, distilling it and presenting it to the rest of the staff.
“The purpose of Move Central Arkansas is to develop a completely new vision for transit in central Arkansas,” Varner said. More than an agency wish list, the plan proposes changes specific to the soon-to-be Rock Region Metro service area believed to be vital if the area is going to keep up with national trends.
The push for cities to invest in public transportation is welling up on two large generational fronts, Varner said. First, there are the baby boomers, determined to retain their independence into old age. Even more of a force is the ascension of the millennials, for whom America’s car culture is not nearly as ingrained, demanding convenient, economical variety in their transportation options — buses, trolleys, bike lanes.
The “hot” cities of the next few decades, the cities that will be able to recruit and retain the top talent of this generation, will be the ones that offer these kinds of options, Varner said.
Along with green appeal, the new, natural gas buses are equipped with a GPS system that allows riders to get real-time updates on where buses are on their routes. The MOVE Central Arkansas plan also calls for longer hours of service, more frequent stops (a biggie in terms of customer satisfaction), and a dedicated, rapid-transit bus line from downtown to the university/medical center and areas farther west in Little Rock.
“The board of directors for CATA wants to be aggressive and they want to show people [that], with more of an investment in transit, we can do great things,” Varner said.
They have the plan to push the region forward over the next decade or so. Now the task shifts to selling it to the region. It looks like those 60-hour weeks aren’t over yet.
At this stage, Varner’s life travels at two speeds. At work he is focused on pushing the area’s transit system forward on the fast track to the future. At home, he’d just as soon stand still.
“I’m not the kind of guy who plays golf all day Saturday,” he said.
Baseball, either.
These days all his free time is spent being a family man. He coaches daughter Allie’s soccer team and his son Jack’s T-ball team, gratified to be able to pay it forward. One-year-old Morgan isn’t walking yet, and he admits he’s in no hurry for her to learn. He wants to make the most of this moment in time, for their sakes and his.
“You’re getting too big,” he likes to tell them. “I’m going to have to put a rock on your head to keep you from growing.”
Considering how much time he has spent the past year or so plotting the future of Rock Region Metro, it seems almost incongruous that Varner says he doesn’t plan too far ahead when it comes to the family. No, strike that. It’s perfectly consistent.
You can’t plan life like you can a bus route. You have to take each turn as it comes, let intellect and faith steer you, and eventually the plan will reveal itself, if only in the rearview mirror.