Carolyn Feibel follows up on the matter of Metro not posting committee meeting notices online.
To clarify one point: Metro board committees always meet right before the regular board meetings, on the same day. Those meeting times and agendas are posted on the agency Web site. But committees also often meet on other days, usually the week before the main board meeting.
CEO Frank Wilson explained that except for the morning before the monthly board meeting, the ad hoc committees do not meet at regular times. He said committee members often change or cancel the agreed-upon time, sometimes at the last minute, if a conflict comes up with their work lives.
“It has been a huge challenge for us to get those things scheduled,” he added.
Wilson said that posting the times of all the committee meetings could cause a member of the public to show up at Metro headquarters, only to find out a meeting had been moved or canceled.
“We want to be open at all times, but at the same time we don’t want to inconvenience you or the public,” he said.
There are a number of responses to this. One is that a Web site, by its nature, is a good place to update meeting times instantly. The other option is for committee members to settle on fixed meeting times and commit to those, as they do over at Houston City Council.
Wolff told me that he would discuss different options with the board this month.
But spokeswoman Raequel Roberts gave me a different response, which has been echoed on the agency’s blog. That response is simpler: Metro is not legally bound to give public notification, since the committees do not involve a quorum of the board. Technically this is correct since each committee only has three members and a quorum would be five.
That said, Metro may want to open these up to the public as a matter of policy. The agency has long been dogged by a reputation for secrecy; Wolff contends that any reticence has developed defensively, after years of being under fierce attack by anti-rail political foes, notably former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Sugar Land Republican.
Let’s not overthink this, OK? If you really want to be open about committee meetings, you can set regular hours for them, so that there’s a default time and place for them to be. You can use various forms of modern technology – Twitter, text messages sent to those who sign up for them, likely other gewgaws that I can’t think of offhand – that can deliver last-minute notices about changes or cancellations to those who want to know about them. In short, where there’s a will, there’s a way. But first you have to have the will. Tom DeLay isn’t here any more, we’ve already built one line and are working on three more now, public sentiment is a lot more pro-transit than it used to be, and so on. It’s time to quit cowering, and to recognize that in the end, doing right by the public will be your best defense against whatever the attacks the next DeLay will throw at you.