good public policy vs. legalistic nonsense
There’s an odd claim in the Chronicle this morning:
“Metro does not have the right to study or evaluate Richmond,” Seger said, “because in 2003 the voters of Houston decided it would be on Westpark.”
First of all, while there is a City of Houston charter provision (see this pdf, section 21) that the city may not “grant any permission, consent, or authorization” required by METRO to “in connection with the construction, maintenance, or operation” of a rail system without voter approval, that provision says nothing about studying. And there is no other provision that requires METRO to hold a public vote for anything other than issuing bonds.
More importantly, the voters did not “decide it would be on Westpark.” The voters approved a system plan that included a line from the Wheeler Station to the Hillcroft Transit Center called the “Westpark” line. We call the current light rail line the “Main Street Line” even though only a third of it is on Main Street. A line following Richmond through Neartown and Greenway Plaza and then Westpark out to Hillcroft would be roughly half on Westpark.
And we already know that the Westpark line can’t be entirely on Westpark since Westpark ends at Kirby, 2 miles from Wheeler Station. There are various alternatives between Kirby and Main. The ballot didn’t say “Westpark and Richmond Line,” but it also didn’t say “Westpark and 59 line” or “Westpark and That Narrow Centerpoint Right-of-Way along the South Side of the 59 Freeway Trench Line.”
More importantly, there’s a matter of good public policy. Studying a rail line takes money and time. An agency like METRO that requires public approval for its projects has two choices: either they do a detailed study before the referendum — wasting money and time if the voters decide they don’t want the overall plan — or they produce a general plan, seek approval, and then develop each line in detail. METRO did a little of both in 2003, doing studies on the Southeast, North, and Uptown lines and proposing only general corridors for the Harrisburg, Inner Katy, Westpark, and Sunnyside lines. They were clear about that before the election — no specific alignments had been chosen for the lines that had not been studied.
The Federal Transit Administration’s funding
process requires that agencies evaluate multiple alternatives:
To specifically qualify for Section 5309 New Starts funding, candidate projects must have resulted from an alternatives analysis study (also known as major investment study or multimodal corridor analysis) which evaluates several modal and alignment options for addressing mobility needs in a given corridor.
In others word, METRO not only does not have a legal obligation not to study an alignment, they are in fact required to study options other than Westpark. And that’s good public policy. Should we spend our money on a line when there may be a better alternative a few blocks away?
To me, that’s the bottom line. We can argue legalities and nomenclature all we like. But in the end the most important thing is that we spend the limited transit dollars that we have where they will bring the most benefits. The way to figure that out is to study the options.
The discussion continues in our forums.