Update On Being Kicked Out Of MTA Roosevelt Island F Train Meeting - Reader Comments and Main Street WIRE Editor Responds

You Tube Video of MTA Chairman Walder Speaking On Transparency At Citizen Budget Committee

Last week's post about the December 9 MTA meeting with Roosevelt Island residents, RIOC and elected officials to seek solutions for Roosevelt Island F Train problems generated two surprising reader comments. To recap what happened:

I am very pissed at being removed earlier this morning by MTA Press Office from meeting on finding temporary solution to alleviating the anticipated overcrowding on the Roosevelt Island F Train service during 2010 Tram outage despite being invited to attend by a Roosevelt Island Operating Corp (RIOC) Director, the Roosevelt Island Residents Association (RIRA) President and with the knowledge of Assembly Member Micah Kellner's office who convened the meeting. I also got soaking wet walking in the poring rain to MTA Headquarters for this meeting which did not help.

MTA press people present removed me and the Main Street WIRE editor from meeting claiming that MTA could not speak openly or frankly about this subject with us in the room.

These reader comments support the MTA's decision to bar press and blogger from meeting:

Did you really think you can just attend a meeting like that? That's a little naive, no? I am very sure that it is not okay to have the press attending meetings like that pretty much everywhere - MTA or not. That has nothing to do with transparency or what not. You will get the press release or meeting notes through official channels later on.

And:

What I like about the Roosevelt Islander is that even when there are posts contra to what he believes or that disagree with him, he still allows them to be posted. Other Blogsites would remove such comments. That's what makes this site enjoyable to read.

BTW, I also scratched my head when I read that it bothered you to be asked to leave that meeting. But, I think you knew that would happen and gave it a shot anyway.

Main Street WIRE editor Dick Lutz responds and I am in complete agreement with him. According to Mr. Lutz:

I find it "amazing" and a "head-scratcher" that citizens of a democracy would be so willing to have a public agency act unobserved by the public, unquestioned, answerable to no one but themselves, while spending tax dollars and making decisions that affect the daily daily lives of those same citizens. Government behind closed doors, unexamined, is an open invitation to corruption, nepotism, and incompetence.

And it does have everything to do with transparency. Getting the "press release or meeting notes through official channels later on" means that the very people who need watchdogging get to decide what is seen and what is hidden. The first of these anonymous posters, if not an MTA employee, is clearly quite willing to accept whatever government decides he should know -- and not know. And we can point to hundreds, if not thousands, of recent examples of what happens when public authorities and government agencies get to hide what they're doing behind press releases and official statements.

Members of the public at large can't attend a meeting like the one held in that crowded conference room at the MTA offices, for reasons of their own time and availability, if nothing else. If the press cannot attend, as in this case, incompetence goes unobserved and unreported, as in this case -- unless the first Mr. Anonymous trusts that an MTA press-release writer will be allowed to report and comment frankly on the work of his fellow MTA employees, and have that mailed out by the MTA.

Dick Lutz

Editor & Publisher, The Main Street WIRE

Of course, I have yet to receive any information from the MTA regarding this meeting despite being promised so while they kicked Mr. Lutz and myself out of the building. Reports of the meeting from residents allowed to remain in attendance and from Assembly Member Kellner were that the MTA does not think there is any Roosevelt Island F train problem requiring a solution. More on that here.

Below is slide from MTA's Power Point Presentation used during the meeting dealing with Roosevelt Island. Click on the image for better reading.


Here is an editorial on subject from the 12/13/09 Main Street WIRE:

The MTA,

Hiding Incompetence

The MTA seems to think that it can hide the agency’s inability to serve the public by keeping reporters out of the meetings where, in response to good ideas, they give stock answers: "We don’t do that," or "It can’t be done," or "It’s against policy."

The transit agency has a lot more ways of saying "no," of course, but would apparently prefer to keep objective listeners out of the meetings where their technical people divert the attention of supplicants from problems and suggested solutions to relatively unimportant matters, while slipping some form of "no" into their responses.

As the story on page 3 reports, MTA personnel would not allow a meeting with Roosevelt Island leaders and officials to go forward on Wednesday morning until two reporters were escorted from the building. Oddly, this ensures that the MTA’s view of things will not be heard, since those attending such a session tend not to be objective in seeing how their ideas were treated, hoping against hope that there’s some crack in the closed-door minds of those charged with rejecting both the pleas for help and the ideas that would make that help possible.

Keeping the press out has the effect of keeping the public out.

The explanation, that "it’s a different dynamic" when the press is present, is another way of saying, "We don’t want you to hear us say ‘no,’ because then you’ll report it for what it is, rather than the smoke-screen with which we surround it.

Unfortunately, Assemblymember Micah Kellner is complicit – an accessory before, during, and after the fact in allowing the MTA to say "no" out of earshot of objective reporters. We can applaud him for responding to this publication’s call for a full-court press by elected officials to get the MTA moving on solutions rather than additional ways of refusing to help. But setting up a meeting in which they duck that responsibility and competent reporting is excluded makes him part of the problem: As long as the MTA can refuse help behind a door closed to the press, the public will not have a clear-headed assessment of what the MTAspeak ("no," etc.) really means.

The MTA’s handling of the press aside, they’ve made it abundantly clear that they have no intention of being helpful in the transportation crisis that will arise when Roosevelt Island’s Tramway is down for six months (let alone the current rush-hour mess). They claim, despite abundant in-the-station evidence that it just isn’t so, that there is "plenty of capacity during the morning rush." There isn’t, as is known by anyone knows who’s had to wait on the platform while unboardable trains go through and more competition for space accumulates on the platform.

So we’re left with a no-can-do agency that won’t supply capacity, gives us elevators that break down more regularly than the trains run, and operates escalators that often run the wrong way but always lecture us repetitively while multiple trains leave us behind in the morning.

Shame on the MTA.

Shame for a bad job, and shame for hiding your meetings from the people.

DL

Copyright 2009 The Main Street WIRE (reprinted with permission)