Showing posts with label Pam Biondi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pam Biondi. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

UnsuckDCMetro's post on poor management of D.C.'s Metro system and its parallels to our part of South Florida are hard to miss. Accountability is MIA.

On Monday, UnsuckDCMetro blog had the latest in a series of amazing (and sometimes downright scary) stories about the poor government management, oversight and public outreach being done by WMATA, i.e the Washington Metro, the Washington, DC-based multi-jurisdictional agency that manages and operates the Metro train system that links Washington, D.C. to suburban Virgina and Maryland. http://www.wmata.com/

It's a story that was first picked up by WTOP Radio in Washington, the All-News station, and then picked-up in turn and linked to on The Drudge Report.

http://www.wtop.com/
Listen live at: http://www.wtop.com/?sid=599366&nid=162
The one and only Drudge Report: http://www.drudgereport.com/

It lays out for all to see the sort of incredibly irresponsible behavior and CYA attitude of both
both its employees and management and the sort of nonchalance that has plagued WMATA for years, part of the reason, undoubtedly, that UnsuckDCMetro came into existence.

When you're a transportation agency that has recently seen people die, needlessly, it would seem to me that half-assed doesn't really cut it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Metro

My comments continue after the post:

Monday, January 3, 2011
How 'bout some iPotties Instead?

There was a lot of Metro news over the holidays.

Metro started random bag screening, they paid a communications firm $1.2 million to help market themselves through "guerrilla marketing," they managed to get the government to give them $150 million with no apparent additional oversight, and they doled out cash and iPads to executives on the finance team.

Read the rest of the amazing post at:
http://unsuckdcmetro.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-bout-some-ipotties-instead.html

Having taken the
Metro into downtown D.C. for work for almost 15 years from my home on Capitol Hill, then Tenleytown and finally Arlington County for 13 years, this story is NOT exactly Breaking News, per se, to most observant transit riders standing at underground train stations.
In fact, I think I can pretty well guess where the worst offenses took place.

UnsuckDC Metro http://unsuckdcmetro.blogspot.com/, the insightful and observant blog that this story originally appeared in before being picked-up nationally, ran an amazing
story on Dec. 16th that is scary as hell, and will ring familiar to anyone living in South Florida who is observant in the ways that government works -or doesn't.

For those of you living in South Florida who have been following my thoughts in this space for four years, tell me that the actions described in the above post don't sound
EXACTLY like the sort of obtuse thinking coming out of Hallandale Beach City Hall for years under the Joy Cooper and Mike Good/Mark Antonio regime, where their primary goal has always been to obfuscate, and to look at everything BUT the real problem here -genuine lack of accountability and ZERO punishment for continual, unsatisfactory performance:

Thursday, December 16, 2010
Mystery Worker Removed Barrier at Tenleytown

So much for taking some time off for the holidays.

On Nov. 16, several Metro riders were greeted with a scary sight at Tenleytown.

As they climbed what appeared to be a run of the mill broken escalator, they arrived near the top to see a gaping hole where some steps were missing because the escalator was under repair.

Read the rest of this jaw-dropping story at:
http://unsuckdcmetro.blogspot.com/2010/12/mystery-worker-removed-barrier-at.html

If you read that post, too, it's hard not to think about all the many
, many longstanding issues and problems around HB that have NEVER been 'fixed' or resolved to anyone's satisfaction, least of all, ours, even while city tax money continues to flow out to sleep-walking contractors and city employees, but where are the tangible results?
Where's the accountability?

More proof of THAT lack of accountability to the hard-working citizens of this community comes via an email that soon will be going to two of Tallahassee's newest residents, Rick Scott and Pam Biondi, the new Florida governor and attorney general, both of whom I voted for.

In the weeks and months ahead, t
hey are going to know EXACTLY what has been going on for YEARS in Hallandale Beach, Florida.