Does it seem strange to anyone else that the person who will have a major impact on the operation of Metro is a former District Department of Transportation head? Again? It wasn't too long ago that Dan Tangherlini left his job as DDOT Director to be Metro's General Manager for little more than a cup of coffee before heeding the call of the District's new mayor. In the short period of time Tangherlini wasn't able to make any significant changes in the way Metro operated although people say he sure had a lot of ideas. What he did do was bring in to key positions a whole lot of employees from the District government. Many of them were overpaid and not fully qualified. Many of them left Metro when Tangherlini left.
Now, Metro is hiring Emeka Moneme, the District's current Director of DDOT, to be its Chief Administrative Officer. Not only did Moneme work for the District, he also was Tangherlini's Chief of Staff and is currently a member of the Board of Directors. This guy has insight into the internal workings of Metro and the District government. Why is that such a plus? Are former District officials the only ones that Metro finds acceptable? Doesn't this give the District an unfair advantage over the other jurisdictions because of the added insight into the way things work on both sides?
Would other jurisdictions do this? Why does the board allow this form of board incest? The only situation that seems similar was the appointment of Peter Benjamin to Metro's Board after serving the agency for 20 or so years in a variety of positions including Chief Financial Officer.
It's bad enough the there are elected officials on Metro's board. I have always felt that too many votes placed by board members who are also watching the polls are made for the wrong reasons. The argument in favor of using elected officials is that these individuals will make sure that they represent their jurisdiction. The problem is when an issue of the wallet comes before the board such as a fare increase these elected officials tend to focus more on the unhappiness of the voters than of the continued solvency of the system. Anything that clouds a board member from making a decision that is in the best interest of the agency is a bad thing and that leads us back to the voters on whom the elected official depends on his or her livelihood.
Which brings us back to the rhetorical question: Does the District have an unfair advantage on the board because of the former city employees now working for Metro or the former Metro employees now working in key positions in the District government?
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Have you seen those television sets on the top of gas pumps? What do you think about them? Are they entertaining or are they just another example of crass commercialism? A recent story by the Associated Press (primarily a news wire that provides stories to newspapers and broadcasting outlets) touts the advantages of these devices. The whole premise of the story is that watching short news and information provides a distraction to high gas prices.
Here's a question: Would you go to a gas station just because you can watch three minutes of "news?" I doubt that these devices are anything more than a vehicle on which to run 30-second commercials over and over. If stations want to attract my business maybe they could hand out glasses or dinner plates with every 8-gallon purchase. Maybe they could return to the day of S&H Green Stamps and those little booklets in which to stick them. Or maybe they could actually have an employee come out with a little squirter bottle to wash my windows or check the oil or the inflation of the tires. Or perhaps the best way to get me to buy gas at one station over the other is to charge about a dollar a gallon less or to provide a shuttle to the closest Metro station.
The thing I found most interesting about this particular story as it ran in the Toledo (Ohio) Blade is that, when mentioning the companies that program the information for these services, they make no mention of the fact that the Associated Press is one of the programmers. When that kind of thing happens it makes one wonder whether the whole point of the story was to simply promote a product and that's not what a wire service should be doing.
Steve Eldridge is a long-time reporter, observer and commentator on the Washington region's transportation issues. You can contact him directly by writing to: Steve@SprawlandCrawl.com. Unless otherwise requested, letters or portions of letters can be used within future columns. Letter writers will be identified by their first name and city/neighborhood.
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