Chair Jennings has expressed a couple of times in recent meetings that the board hears the concerns of the public and regards them as important input for the betterment of SacRT.

I appreciate that sentiment, and that it was expressed.  Active hearing and straightforward responses foster trust in both directions.

I am privileged to have had many productive discussions and meetings with staff members from planning to operations to security, and I can attest that some staff do indeed listen actively and respond with relevant comments.

But, today in my public comment I need to turn that a bit on its head.  Here are the things that very much make me feel not heard and not regarded, and render me feeling somewhat disengaged:

• When the GM uses a good portion of the time during the GM report to proffer a defensive stance against things that were said by the public during the meeting.  That kind of cross-talk shows, in my opinion, a keen lack of active listening and consideration of the public comments.  I ask, rather, that all staff and board take time to consider what the public is saying before jumping in and on.

• Not hearing from staff or board any acknowledgement about things that clearly are going wrong.  Instead, I feel a culture of constant smoothing-over and defending, above all else.  As someone seeking transparency, I ask that SacRT adopts a culture of freely admitting mistakes and missteps.  That goes far to foster trust.  SacRT is a complex engineering, fiscal, and political organism, and I would expect problems on a grand scale due to the complexities.  So, it just feels disingenuous to not hear acknowledgement of missteps from staff and board.

• Deficit of clear expectations related to public concerns/recommendations.  I recommend logging as good a detailed record as possible when the public brings a suggestion.  And then, PROACTIVE follow up from staff as to the following:
  • Would sacRT actually ever consider implementing this?  I would rather hear, “That will never be done.”, than to wait indefinitely and unsure.  Give me straightforward guidance.
  • If the issue will be tackled, what is an estimated timeframe to begin?
  • Keep public stakeholders informed, proactively.  Treat the public members who brought the idea as a member of the implementation team.

** UPDATE **

I delivered this post above as as public comment in the July 28, 2025 SacRT Board Meeting – I leveraged the ‘public comments on items not on the agenda’. Interestingly, I was subjected to practically instantaneous cross-talk from 3 board members during the period when directors had time to comment; directed at me (I know this since they used my name), which shows that they pretty much disregarding all together my first bullet point. The responses from board were unilaterally defensive, and the Brown Act was used as a shield of blah, blah how they cannot act on items not on the agenda – A completely irrelevant observation in the respect of what I was saying. The defensive nature of the responses, ostensibly meant to bolster support for the poor GM whom I was asking for behavioral change, disregarded my second bullet point. Instead, now the board was jumping on the bandwagon of defensive cross-talk.

Equally interesting were two presentations given by staff: Lisa Hinz and Blanca Araujo. Both presentations were very well thought out and delivered, but I found that the issue called out in my bullet point #2 was certainly evident in both presentations. While it was nice to see that by nature of the presentations, what I called out in bullet point #3 was actually being honored in a way, there were glaring omissions of fact that made the stories look more glossy than they actually were. I should have added a fourth point: Dispense with marketing-campaign-style presentations in favor of more comprehensive histories of events and lessons learned. The presentation (agenda item #4.1) is embedded in the following meeting documentation:

Agenda & Presentations: July 28, 2025 SacRT Board Meeting

Having said that, I give the staff Kudos for taking quick action on problems uncovered during a July 11, 2025 joint field trip of staff and MAC members for a light rail ride-along which began in Sac Valley station. Those issues are called out in the presentation, and action has been taken to begin to solve them.

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