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Kevin Riordan: 'Mad Men,' starring the DRPA

New episodes of Mad Men are enlivening Sunday nights, offering fans (like me) a glimpse of a way of doing business that's as retro as black-and-white TV.

New episodes of Mad Men are enlivening Sunday nights, offering fans (like me) a glimpse of a way of doing business that's as retro as black-and-white TV.

Or maybe not.

Consider the Delaware River Port Authority, which operates four bridges, a commuter railroad and an executive suite where the culture is old-school enough to fit the hit AMC show.

The high-rise salaries, posh perks and toll-free lifestyle long enjoyed by senior DRPA staff certainly have a definite old-fashioned flavor. But even without all the martinis and Marlboros of Mad Men, the scene leaves a lousy aftertaste.

Hello? You guys in suits and you gals in heels up there in that crazy-colored One Port Center tower on the Camden Waterfront?

It's 2010, not 1964.

Revise the script. Or toss it out.

Free E-ZPasses and bloated paychecks and mega motor vehicle allowances don't merely look bad in bad times. They simply are bad - and particularly damaging for public confidence in an agency we trust to keep our region moving at a cost we can afford.

Media coverage, not much of it positive, and attention from Gov. Christie, who's likewise less than pleased, seem to have inspired reforms. More are on the way, and this is good news.

Including for the authority; I don't doubt plenty of DRPA employees have jobs far more demanding than they might appear to a columnist. I accept that some of these jobs require talent that doesn't come cheap.

But you guys and gals in the tower need to remember that unemployment down here - among those of us whose E-ZPasses suck bucks out of our checking accounts - is near 10 percent. Many of those fortunate enough to have jobs face pay cuts, benefit reductions and furloughs.

All this is changing the way we live. So the way you do things up there - which, to be fair, has improved in recent years - needs to change, too.

It's worth pausing here to recall the origins of this particular Philly-Jersey brawl.

It started roiling the surface of the bistate, bipartisan, highly political, high cash-flow fishbowl that is the DRPA a couple of weeks ago, but has been marinating in the depths far longer.

Board member John J. "Doc" Dougherty had concerns about, shall we say, employment. He wanted DRPA to hire the brother of a fellow union official, but it didn't happen.

What happened instead are calls for reform (by Doc, no less, as well as others), demands for resignations and requests for investigations, along with parliamentary paralysis and some macho maneuverings. Lots of leaks to the media, too (gotta love those).

Although entertaining, this soap opera obscures a few facts.

Most rank-and-file DRPA employees haven't gotten a raise in a year (for senior staff, it's been two years). Some employee benefits have been trimmed or eliminated, too, and the authority's annual budget increases have been modest in recent years.

This doesn't attract much attention when the DRPA pays - to choose just one example - its chief of public safety an astonishing $180,081 a year.

The DRPA's own consultant found the pay scale too high by $50,000. But until recently the authority's insular (to say the least) culture accommodated, perhaps even fostered, this sort of disconnect from the world the rest of us inhabit.

Tower people, please note: Down here there aren't many workers with jobs paying 50 grand more than the norm.

Look, I believe the DRPA does a decent job. I believe its employees are generally decent and hardworking.

But you folks in the tower need to pay attention to reality. You've done it before, as when implementation of a pending bridge toll increase (to $5 from $4) was delayed until next July.

Business-as-used-to-be-usual doesn't play anymore in an era of Hi-Def.

Every mistake is not only visible but magnified.

So it's a new day, economically, technology-wise and otherwise.

Time for old shows to be canceled.