Rider advisory group urges Metro openness on budget

Metro riders are calling for the transit agency to be more open in how it determines its budget as the board of directors is poised to decide today whether to cut $13.6 million in bus service.

The Riders’ Advisory Council, a group of riders selected by Metro officials to represent the views from each jurisdiction, chided the board for the budget process.

“We are disappointed in the lack of transparency in the decision-making process for these service cuts,” the group wrote in a letter to the board.

The council called the public hearings held earlier this month “needlessly compressed in time and limited to a small range of topics.”

It also said the public was never given a full budget proposal for the year — as had been done in the past. “That has limited the involvement of the public,” said the group’s chairwoman, Diana Zinkl. “I would hope that perhaps we have learned some lessons.”

An independent group, MetroRiders.Org, urged the board to conduct more public hearings throughout the year to get rider input, but it refrained from weighing in on service cuts.

“It’s too late,” the letter said. “All the major policy options were resolved earlier — without public input.”

Riders who spoke at public hearings said they were blindsided by the cuts and the hearings, saying many found out just days before the hearings were held.

Sharon Moore, who monitors the agency’s disability access service for the Equal Rights Center as part of a court-ordered settlement, said she, too, was surprised by the hearings.

“We need to go through this budget line by line,” she told The Examiner. “Why is this process so secret when you are supposed to be a public entity? What are you trying to hide?”

Christopher Zimmerman, a Metro board member representing Arlington County, defended the board.

“The board’s done everything in the open that I can see,” he said.

But he acknowledged he would have liked to present more options to the public beyond the bus cuts, and done so earlier in the process. “It’s not transparency,” he said. “It’s decisiveness.”

Metro Chairman Jim Graham said he was never given a complete budget proposal as the Riders’ Advisory Council noted. “We haven’t had it either. They have precisely what we have,” he said.

But he did acknowledge that the budget process was conducted in an unusual way this year, with jurisdictions suggesting how to close the budget gaps through extra funding and cuts to bus service. That created an imbalance in which Maryland bus routes face nearly half the proposed cuts.