I know this is the holiday season and everyone is supposed to be holly and even jolly, but I?ve been steaming for the past week over something that happened with the Maryland Transit Administration.
At the end of last month, I had a good meeting with some of the key players at the MTA. We talked about the challenges each of us face in doing what we do and discussed how to make things better for the commuting public. It was candid, it was informative and it was even friendly. There was a true commonality of mission to improve the service and the communications around the MTA. But that seemed to have changed last week.
I?ve decided to write an open letter to incoming Secretary of Transportation John Porcari.
Dear Mr. Porcari:
I was fortunate enough to have a meeting a month or so ago with several key individuals at the MTA, including a deputy director and a deputy administrator. We had a very productive chat about how we can best work together to make things better for the riding public. We even agreed to streamline some of the processes in the name of productivity when it came to customer-related complaints and issues. It was definitely a new day.
Imagine my surprise then when I got an e-mail from Holly Henderson, the director of Public Information at MTA, who has been on leave for the past two months. She said that there are policies and procedures that must be followed, that she was in charge and wouldn?t stand for modifying them for any reason. She said: “Per MTA policy, the only MTA employees allowed to speak with reporters are those persons in my office (public information officers). If you called an MTA employee in the MARC office or customer service office, for example, directly, they would not return your call. They are not even supposed to return your call to tell you that they cannot talk to you. My office is more than happy to continue dialogue with you and provide you with the necessary information you are looking for to write your articles in a timely fashion.”
The problem was that I had never received any response to questions posed to her office. Interestingly, she denies ever having heard from me, though somehow her staff did and that?s how the big meeting was set up in the first place. But the really troubling thing is that her e-mail and an equally lengthy follow-up to my initial response never once mentioned the customers of the MTA, the passengers who are the reason the agency exists.
Mr. Porcari, you need people on your staff who put the passengers first and who will do whatever it takes to make things happen. The MTA needs people with a can-do attitude.
I look forward to sitting down with you and learning about your vision for fixing what ails Maryland?s transit system and how it can be made bigger and better.
Questions, comments, random musings? Write to [email protected].
