Gabe Klein addresses the press this morning inside DDOT’s offices.

The Gabe Klein which many District residents have gotten to know since he took over the job of District Department of Transportation director 22 months ago was on full display this morning, despite the fact that he was about to announce that he’d soon be looking for a new job. Klein was in a jovial mood, smiling as he wondered whether or not he should wear his suit jacket and making jokes about being “the face of Snowmaggeddon.”

“We’re going to be talking about a big streetscape project,” he joked before the cameras started rolling.

It was fitting that Klein’s departure announcement was bathed with an embrace of communication (“better to proactively contact people, rather than answer the hundred phone calls I’ve gotten,” said Klein) and technology (the conference was replete with Twitter jokes and confessions from Klein that his lasting legacy would be that he helped to open up the agency). “It’s all about information,” Klein impressed upon a gathering of several reporters as he announced that he would be stepping down from his position as director of DDOT on January 1. Klein told those the group of reporters that he was informed he would not be retained via a letter he got last night, but said that he “was not terribly surprised” and “had an inkling” that he would not be retained. Klein was not sure if he would be recieving a severance from the city.

While Klein strived to put a positive spin on the news, it won’t stop the area’s transit advocates from mourning the loss of one of the country’s most progressive leaders on transportation, nor should it cloak the disturbing lack of communication between the city’s outgoing administration and the incoming one.

Klein admitted that he hadn’t spoken extensively with Mayor-elect Vince Gray since the agency was working on a project at the 11th Street Bridge — that was three months ago. Klein said that he had bumped into Gray occasionally and exchanged pleasantries, and had conversations with some members of Gray’s transition team in that period. But he also expressed doubts that DDOT would remain the progressive, entrepenurial agency it had been under the Fenty adminstration, thanks in part to the Council’s decision to remove funding from the agency’s Unified Fund as part of an effort to close a $188 million budget gap.

“It really will fundamentally change the way this agency operates, from an enterprise agency to more of a more standardized, traditional government agency, with more central decision making downtown and more administration on [the director’s] level…[which is] probably not a good fit for me going forward,” Klein admitted. He also revealed that he wasn’t even sure whether he would have stayed on if Gray had decided to ask him to do so.