The Oregonian ran a hard-knuckle story this weekend exposing TriMet scheduling practices that allow overtime-hungry bus operators to work as many as 22 hours in a single day—and also joining concerns about that policy to crash reports and complaints from riders about drivers falling asleep at stoplights.
Everyone’s rightly stirred up about it. But it’s also worth pointing out the hoops TriMet made the reporter, Joe Rose, jump through in order to get the public records that served as the basis for his piece: Thousands of dollars in fees and stonewalling so intense the paper had to get the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office involved. The paper detailed the process in an editorial posted last night.
Over many months, Rose requested records pertaining to a runaway MAX train, and bus and rail operator work schedules. He met roadblocks by the transit agency, which argued the documents did not exist as he’d requested them—that they would need to be created and thus were not public documents available for the asking. So Rose and his editors capitulated and asked for the data as TriMet kept it. And TriMet’s reply was another roadblock: to convert its data into PDF files, forcing a laborious process by Rose and his associates of “cut-and-paste” searching across some 8,000 pages. Oh, and The Oregonian would ultimately pay $500 for the privilege, pushing its total TriMet tab for records to about $2,400.
Significantly, the release of information pertaining to the runaway train required the intervention of the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office. Despite TriMet’s initial confusing reports about whether a Yellow Line MAX train had even crashed—it did, into an abutment, with two passengers on board and withstanding $60,000 in damage owing to a sleeping driver—TriMet was forced to abandon its position of cloaking the event as a personnel matter under investigation. Then-District Attorney Michael Schrunk decided the public had a right to know about it, ordering compliance with The Oregonian‘s request, and noted in his May 3, 2012 report: “This was an extraordinary event with seemingly very little investigation.”
Oregon public records law makes noises about transparency. But with loopholes allowing for “cost recovery” for complicated requests, the rules give agencies an easy and legal way to hold things back by making things more complicated than needed and, thus, too expensive for smaller operations and actual citizens to obtain.
It’s good the daily in town still has the money to chase this kind of document dump and pay a lawyer for a court fight, if it came to that. We’ve had to do it before, too. But not everyone can, and don’t think public officials in this state aren’t well aware of that advantage.
I had a very similar experience several years ago while volunteering with the defunct Transit Riders Union in Portland.
Knowing nothing about accounting or finance or public transportation agencies, I decide I would first begin by auditing several years of TriMet’s published budget. I presented myself as a student studying public transportation policies, and after exchanging several(!) emails with the public records person clarifying over and over again that I simply wanted to look at the printed budgets, I thought this information would be available in digital (pdf) format, but I was told it was not. I was told I had to physically go to TriMet’s office and review this information – thankfully my fake student self was able to visit their offices.
I was able to schedule times (3:30pm to 5pm) to come to their office and review. I also could not photocopy or remove these books without paying a significant fee. I went there at least 15 times and took hand-written notes regarding price fluctuations year to year, and other anomalies. The lady provided me a cubical and the 700+ page individual budgets for fiscal years between 1999-2008. The woman was polite and short in her questions. When I summarized certain unexplainable fluctuations to this lady, she seemed completely disinterested in helping me find answers. She kept telling me that everything I needed to know was in these books.
For comparisons, I looked at the public transportation agency budgets of New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Paris, and Moscow. My experience was completely different in all of these cities, first their budgets were easier to read, even though some were not in English. Second, San Francisco was the only other city where I had to call and track down a person who ended up emailing me the budget. Third, when I reached out to Paris and Chicago’s administrators, they were happy to answer my questions.
Then, come to find out, TriMet ends up publishing all of this information online in digital form the next year. So, I was basically lied to when they said it was not in digital form. Curious, no?
The commentator above says it all.
No need for me to elaborate.