Your Opinion: Mayor criticized for missing transit hearings

Dear Editor:

Ohhhhh, the mayor said he hoped to attend public meetings last week addressing the threat to eliminate public transit for three midday hours, leaving the elderly, the disabled and other transit riders unable to get to or from medical appointments, jobs, grocery stores, and with no other way to contribute to the city's economy, all to save a whopping $55,000 of the city's $1.68 million shortfall. 

Sadly, he managed to miss both opportunities to do so, just as he also failed to attend an actual SRO City Council meeting the last time cuts to Jefftran were threatened. Neither has he responded to my emails making useful suggestions, such as providing an actual marketing director for Jefftran. 

The mayor was quoted in the News Tribune as saying that he wished to find out more about the threatened cut and "how that cut came about." If he doesn't already know, I would like to know how his not knowing came about.  "Transit is a big part of people's daily lives that don't have transportation, and I look forward to the hearings to find out if there's [sic] ways that we can improve transit," he said insincerely in the News Tribune article. "My overall goal is to increase ridership however we can."Â 

Sure could have fooled me. It's a good thing the feds look out for us and require public hearings before cutting transit. I don't want News Tribune readers to get the mistaken idea that the mayor cares one iota for either the people who depend on transit or those who use transit out of a concern for the environment and to avoid contributing to traffic and parking congestion.  Those of us who do care at least succeeded in seeing that our other unworthy opponent, Second Ward Council Representative of the Elite Shawn Schulte, won his re-election bid only by the skin of his teeth. 

I so eagerly await the end of the mayor's term.