Metro customers and Washington-region taxpayers learned some unpleasant facts about the transit system management last year when The Washington Examiner published a searchable spreadsheet database of the names, salary, overtime and other compensation data for all full-time Metro employees. The data was obtained under Metro’s self-serving substitute for the Freedom of Information Act.
Among the results of the Examiner posting was shining much-needed light on rampant personnel abuses. These included Metro employees using excessive overtime to boost their annual salaries to more than $100,000 and to swell their already overly generous pensions. Excessive overtime was subsequently implicated in at least one of the string of fatal accidents that has plagued the transit system in recent years. Several Metro employees called the newsroom to praise the newspaper for making the database public and for helping to expose long-standing abuses.
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The Examiner recently requested an updated version of the database. Since more than a year had passed, we wondered if there had been any changes. For example, does Metro now have fewer employees taking excessive overtime? Are there still legions of Metro workers making $100,000 or more annually? Are Metro’s management ranks as bloated as before? What’s been done about pension abuses? How do Metro salaries compare with those of public employees doing similar jobs in other cities? Do annual and sick-leave benefits cost more in Metro than in other transit systems, public and private?
Considering Metro’s recent massive fare increase, these are questions to which riders and taxpayers have a right to hear credible answers from independent analysts.
But having suffered the public exposure of serious personnel abuses in 2007, Metro managers now are clearly determined to prevent new revelations in 2008. They are employing a defensive tactic coined in the Watergate era as the “modified limited hangout.”
They updated the data but excised employee names. They also refused to put the data in a spreadsheet, insisting instead on the all-but-analytically useless Portable Document Format, thereby discouraging independent analyses. Metro officials thus pose as if they are cooperating, while actually throwing up serious new roadblocks to the public’s right to know. When challenged on these decisions, Metro’s Sara Wilson, assistant general manager for corporate strategy and communications, advised that “there is an appeals process.” Of course, a bureaucratic maze of appeals simply creates additional roadblocks. And encourages even more people to wonder what’s really behind those roadblocks.
