Clifford, Santa Cruz
The Santa Cruz METRO Board of Directors, Santa Cruz, CA, has named Alex Clifford its chief executive officer/general manager. He will take over the job in May and will succeed Les White, who is retiring after 18 years in the post.

Clifford has almost 23 years of multimodal transportation experience, encompassing both the policy and administrative sides of the business. Most recently, he was chief executive officer/executive director for Metra commuter rail in ­Chicago. From 2001-2011, he was executive officer of high-speed rail for Los Angeles Metro; during that time, he also served five years as general ­manager of all Metro bus operations in southeastern Los Angeles County. He is a former board member of both the Southern California Regional Rail ­Authority (Metrolink) and the Riverside Transit Agency, and a two-term city councilman in Riverside, CA.

He has served on numerous APTA committees.

Oliphant, Nashville MTA/RTA
Edward W. Oliphant has been named interim chief executive officer of the Nashville Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) and Regional Trans­portation Authority of Middle Tennessee (RTA), effective April 1. He will serve until a new CEO is hired later this year.

Oliphant has served since 2002 as chief financial officer of MTA and RTA. Earlier he was director of finance at Private Business Inc. in ­Brentwood, TN. He is a CPA with more than 30 years of professional experience in accounting and finance.

Last fall, Oliphant received the ­Nashville Business Journal CFO of the Year award in the nonprofit category.

He succeeds Paul ­Ballard, who took the top job in Fort Worth.