NYSTA’s Zimmerman to Lockheed

The New York State Thruway’s chief administrative officer Michael Zimmerman, 53, is ‘retiring’ from NYSTA after 30 years Oct 31. Zimmerman has been running personnel, purchasing, computing and office services – 250 staff – since 1976. He was also the officer in charge of electronic toll collection (ETC) for the Authority from its beginning in 1990. He said he’s retiring simply because of an early retirement plan that offers a large financial incentive.

The Thruway was a major part of the Inter Agency Group (IAG) consortium for E-ZPass and it pioneered ETC among the partners with Amtech read-only tags on the Thruway. It then went through the IAG trials and swapped those Amtech tags out for the Mark IV read-write technology. The Thruway also stood out with the decision to do system integration in-house, and it was the first to make ETC work with both barrier and ticket systems. Zimmerman says he spent approximately half his time 1990 through 1998 on ETC, the other half on running admin services. He says the ETC effort was “wonderful” but most of the work was handed off to the Thruway’s operations people last year.

Zimmerman says he is “not a technical person” but had “wonderful” technical people to help him. He has a bachelors in political science and is a manager.

He won’t talk about post-Thruway plans, but others say he’ll be going to Lockheed.