Dear Editor,
What if somebody had enough pull in Washington to get our
Congress to exempt them from obeying the law?
Dear Editor,
What if somebody had enough pull in Washington to get our Congress to exempt them from obeying the law? In other words, our law applies to everybody else, but not to someone in particular power with the law givers. Well, the Valley Transportation Agency and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group got exactly this discriminatory treatment under the new highway bill, Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (“TEALU”).
VTA was designated the worst-run transit agency in the Nation in a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study of all U.S. transit agencies, and then last year VTA was indicted by our Santa Clara County Grand Jury for gross fiscal irresponsibility and governance flaws. So how do our leaders respond? They include a clause in TEALU that exempts VTA from the nation’s very lax transit agency efficiency standards.
Our leaders reward waste and inefficiency – with our tax dollars!
This is the moral equivalent of housing a serial rapist in a girls dormitory. It’s like parents telling their children who get failing grades in school that they’re doing great. What good is law to society if it is not uniformly applied and enforced?
Federal efficiency standards are a joke to begin with, but all substance in the law evaporates when our leaders themselves forsake it.
If this train wreck we call transport policy is not derailed soon by the voters, then America is headed for the same fate as befell the USSR. Caveat Viator!
Joe Thompson, Gilroy
