Down The Sewer Pipe – Politically Speaking

  Other things that can be a government but really are not one are “Government Corporations”.  In Oregon this means TRI-MET or the “TRI County Metropolitan Transportation Corporation”.  Created by the Oregon legislature to provide public transportation in Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties.The Oregon state legislature, property tax, user paid fares and bonds provide the funding.  TRI-MET has its own elected officers, police, maintenance, and bureaucratic offices and officials.

City and county governments cannot make or change policy, set schedules, or demand fixes to equipment but they can and do put police officers on the trains to provide safety.  However, this only happens when the mayors of the cities become inundated with their citizen hounding them to fix safety issues that TRI-MET refuses to fix.

The private citizen has almost no way to contact the elected representatives directly and it is the decided observance of some that the TRI-MET administration really does not care about the people that ride their busses and trains.  Case in point; if someone calls in to report a ticket vending machine out of order the repair takes thirty days.  Thirty days to get someone in a truck onto the street to fix the thing. Call in more than once and one is told that they are “so very busy”.  Doing just what no one seems to know but there are only about one hundred vending machines and a check up of them takes five minutes or less.  Do the math and we have eight hours to check al the ticket machines add in traffic and one gets sixteen hours.  Sixteen hours is equal to two days of work and fixit people work forty-hour weeks.  Thirty days to fix a machine is absurd and not being to rattle someone’s cage to make things happen better or effect a change is maddening.

While TRI-MET usually pleads poverty especially if ticket enforcement is requested remember that they receive about forty million just in property taxes from single-family homes.  While they do employee a lot of people it is highly unlikely that their payroll is forty million dollars a year.

Yet they are a government that does not have to meet any of the traffic laws of the state or the accountability laws that all other governments in the state are required to meet. Additionally TRI-MET is a monopoly of public transportation because the state legislature saw fit to stifle competition.

It is to be noted that as currently operated TRI-MET busses and trains are not:

1. Fast.
2. Dependable.
3. Convenient.
4. Safe.

The conclusion is that if one is going to have public transportation there has to be a better way than this. Allow for rather public infusion of information and opinions instead of making all of the decisions extra meeting and expecting the public meetings to be a rubber stamp.

Sherman