At the Memphis Area Transit Authority (MATA) board of directors meeting August 24, 2015, comments were received from the public in regards to the adoption of the fiscal year 2016 capital budget.
Mr. Bennett Foster, who is with the group called the Memphis Bus Riders Union (MBRU), was among those in the audience who asked to speak and was given the usual three minutes to do so. He said that the documents provided to the public with agenda items and other information did not have the same detail on the budget as did documents in front of board members. He suggested that seeing the budget for the first time at the meeting did not give his group sufficient time to study the budget in order to raise any questions at the board meeting that the MBRU might have. He claimed the MBRU had asked and that MATA had agreed to furnish the group a copy of the budget in advance of the meeting that was underway but did not do so.
Several board members seemed to understand that agreement had been made and asked the MATA administration why it had not been done. Mr. Ronald Garrison, MATA General Manager simply stated, twice, that he made that decision. After a few moments of board members apparent confusion, he told board members they could ask him why. So they did. He said he believed in transparency but that there was no reciprocal transparency from the MBRU. He felt that it was therefore appropriate not to release the budget information to the group earlier.
This writer has no knowledge of the relationship between Garrison and the MBRU or its members. This writer was unaware of a previous commitment by MATA administration to provide the MBRU a copy of the budget in advance. Given the MATA administration did not deny, and the board members did not dispute, the claim that agreement had been made, it is a reasonably conclusion that it had indeed been made.
Garrison said if someone wanted more budget information an open records request could be filed.
It should be obvious that when a public official makes a commitment, he/she should make every effort to follow through. While it is most unfortunate that did not happen in this case, that is not the issue addressed here.
What is the issue here is transparency. Governmental agencies should make all information available to the public as soon as it is available, limited only by the narrowest of reasons permitted by law. In this example, this writer would submit that MATA should have released drafts of the proposed budget as they were developed, and then clearly identified and made public the final proposal when it came into existence. All of the functions, documents, purposes of government agencies is to work as the arm of the people to provide those services for which the entity was created. Hiding a budget or other public record from those same people is not transparency. By hiding it is meant to say not making it publicly available upon its creation.
There are others who would have appreciated the opportunity to review the MATA budget in advance of the meeting at which it was to be adopted, others that have no association with the MBRU.
The idea that an open meetings request meets the transparency criteria is way off base. True transparency would mean such requests would not be necessary because the information would be made public as soon as it was otherwise available.
Transparency is a popular term in comments by government officials. Unfortunately, reality does not come close to the concept those officials are trying to say they support. This is just one of dozens which could be cited every month. The public officials endorsing transparency should make real efforts to get the governmental unit with which they are associated to become truly transparent.
And the public should demand it.
Shelby-Memphis Open Government 