_______________Austin Rail Now

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In response to community prodding, going into the recent “high-capacity transit” study process, Project Connect representatives gave seemingly earnest assurances of much greater “transparency” and “openness” in their “study” process. Instead, the Project connect team made their closed-door activities more opaque and insulated from community interaction than ever. See: From community participation then … to community exclusion today

Instead of public participation, it’s been more like public prohibition — exclusion of the community at large from any real role in the process, with Project Connect instead delivering decisions as faits accomplis for public acquiescence rather than an authentic process of involving community members in a bona fide process of actually studying, analyzing, evaluating, and participating in decisions.

To present a semblance of “public input”, Project Connect has staged “open houses” (where individuals are allowed to view posters, maps, and other presentations of official decisions) and so-called “workshops” (where small groups clustered at tables are asked to approve predetermined choices via electronic “clickers”). Authentic community meetings, with discussions and comments from the public in a large-group setting, have been avoided like the threat of an infectious disease.

See:

• Meetings, “open houses”, workshops … and democratic process

• Back to “art galleries”! Project Connect reneges on community meetings

Issues of process and organizational structure can be terribly boring. But Project Connect’s efforts to eliminate or gag bona fide community participation have undoubtedly performed a major role in allowing key insiders to rig the “high-capacity transit” study process, skewing the results and allowing officials to endorse the same basic route structure they wanted in the first place. Supporters of the Central Austin “backbone” corridor (West Campus-Guadalupe-Lamar) have been outraged by the blatant corruption of a purported “study” and its procedures.

See:

• Surprise! Mayor and Project Connect select same routes they wanted in the first place

• Gaudy mendacious suckfish

• City Council to Central Austin: Drop Dead

• TILT! Project Connect’s gerrymandering and data fiddling ignite public skepticism, pushback

• Welcome to Project Dis-connect!

• Lying with Maps

And, unless there’s effective community intervention to change the game, the same kind of thing could happen all over again in this upcoming “Phase 2” of the “study” (which seems more an exercise in adroitly skewing and manipulating the playing field than an actual study).

Some community activists are hopeful that the so-called “Riley amendment” — a provision successfully added to the City Council’s recent endorsement of Project Connect’s “ERC-Highland” route plan — may offer an opportunity to keep the West Campus-Guadalupe-Lamar “backbone” corridor issue alive within the current Project Connect process. Dan Keshet has posted the full text of the amendment on his Austin on Your Feet blog.

While Councilmember Riley probably intended the amendment as a kind of “sweetener” in hopes of wooing some Central Austinites into (perhaps begrudgingly) supporting the Project Connect plan, it is possible to construe it as opening a small crack in the door to possibly more major changes to the plan:

The City Manager is directed to work with Project Connect to identify future funding needs and potential sources to prioritize and continue critical Central Corridor project definition and development activities in the remaining identified sub-corridors, including the Lamar, Mueller, and East Austin sub-corridors, and report back to Council by August 1, 2014.

Further, reads the amendment, “The City Manager is directed to work with Project Connect and CMTA to continue cultivating a relationship with our regional Federal Transit Administration officials to cooperatively prepare for any future high-capacity transit investments in the Lamar sub-corridor.”

While the Riley amendment may indeed be viewed as a small compromise possibly helpful to the momentum to re-focus urban rail planning on the crucial West Campus-Guadalupe-Lamar “backbone” corridor, opening the tiny crack presented by that opportunity within Project Connect’s highly rigged process will remain dauntingly difficult, especially as long as Project Connect continues to insulate itself from real community engagement, managing and muzzling community input in a caricature of authentic “public participation”.

So back to “process”: Free, open, unconstrained community meetings are essential. There needs to be a groundswell of community pushback against the gagging. Project Connect needs to open up the community input process to full and free discussion, and the Austin community needs ongoing opportunities to be heard.

And that doesn’t mean just handing out clickers.