Reporter Larry Lange at the Seattle P-I reports that the Washington State Auditor’s Office is going to conduct, among other things, and audit of Sound Transit to see whether:
- “Whether its publicly disseminated financial information can be understood and is useful.
- The audit also will examine whether its public meetings are convenient for citizens and how “transparent” the agency is.“
Here are a few answers to those questions:
1. Public meetings of the Sound Transit Board are held in the afternoon (4pm) when most people are at work and unable to attend.
Usually the bulk of the people who attend these meetings are:
* paid contractors and consultants who make their living off of Sound Transit’s public funds,
* city representatives that support light rail alignments that bring said tax dollars to their respective cities,
* elected officials whose future candidacies and fundraising abilities depend on appearing to go along & get along with large public agencies such as Sound Transit,
* developers and property owners who would directly benefit from the accompanying land use upzoning (increase in allowed development density) along proposed light rail corridors (see Martin Luther King Way South), and
* a handful of regular citizens and/or agency critics attending in order to speak to the Sound Transit Board.
2. The public is usually instructed that they can only speak about “action items” on the agenda for discussion and direction on by the Sound Transit Board that particular day, by which time, a citizen has little or no impact on the thinking of Board members or the process.
3. Transparency-hmmm. The smallest request for information can result in a redirect to the public information officer, who then requires citizens to ask for information through a public disclosure process which can take weeks or months.
4. Sound Transit routinely cherry picks their result-driven (push) polls & surveys to their desired outcome, and then proclaims broad support for light rail tax packages that is tenuous at best.
5. This is the public agency that hid information (buried so deep in a website) regarding taking the Miller property in Tacoma, that the Washington State Legislature later hastened to create a NEW LAW to protect home and property owners, and REQUIRE Sound Transit to at the very minimum to NOTIFY people by certified letter when they were about to take their property. Does that seem voluntarily transparent?
Does this behavior bleed over into the usefulness or accessibility of the financial information that they provide to the public? Very possibly.
Lange reports that Mindy Chambers, spokesperson for the state Auditor’s Office, says that her office gets more questions about the Seattle-based agency (Sound Transit) “than pretty much anything else.“