Remarks of PCAC Executive Director William Henderson
On the Approval of the MTA Capital Program
Before the MTA Board
May 25, 2016
I’m Bill Henderson, Executive Director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA. We want to add our voice to the relief expressed at the approval of the Capital Program. We now need to hold the State and City to their funding commitments to carry out this work.
If you were at this month’s LIRR Committee meeting, or in fact a number of public hearings and meetings over the past several decades, you know that we support Main Line improvements for the LIRR and will be at this evening’s scoping meeting to reiterate this support.
We also call on the State Senate to consider and confirm the City nominees to this Board. These are voices that need to be heard at the Board table.
I also want to make a brief comment on the timely availability of Board Committee materials. For this Board cycle, agenda books were not available to the public on MTA.info until late Friday for the Monday committee meetings. In essence, the public has zero business days of opportunity to review the agendas and materials for each of the committees that met this month.
We recognize that there are many initiatives underway at the MTA and its agencies, but the public unavailability of materials until near or after the close of business on the Friday prior to committee meetings seems to have become normal operating procedure, and we think that this needs to be corrected. After all, you ask public speakers at the beginning of each meeting to address the topics that will be considered in that meeting. We generally seek to do this, but not knowing what will be considered makes complying with this rule difficult for potential public speakers.
Download here: 052516 PCAC MTA Capital Program Approval