DCTC general counsel Dena Reed removed this sign from the hearing room as I spoke with Chair Ron Linton
Q&A from Mayor Gray’s weekly press conference 8/17/2011:
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Ron Linton interview 8/18/2011:
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“We don’t intend to pass anything in the dead of night,” Mayor Vincent Gray said Wednesday at his weekly press conference. Gray’s comments were in response to my question about whether the D.C. Taxicab Commission will be moving forward with industry altering proposals without holding an additional hearing, when the first one was marked by irregularities. “Simply put, not gonna happen, Peter,” Gray said.
Standing alongside the mayor, City Administrator Allen Lew seconded Gray’s comments. “We’ll do that,” both Lew and Gray said regarding holding a fully open hearing on the proposed amendments to chapters 6 and 8 of Title 31, the regulatory code that governs the taxicab industry.
But Ron Linton, the new Taxicab Commission chair, sees things differently. “I see no reason not to proceed [with voting on the changes to chapters 6 and 8],” Linton said Thursday in an extended interview, his first since becoming chair.
Linton was accompanied by his immediate past predecessor, DCTC general counsel Dena Reed, whose recent stint as interim chair resulted in the mistreatment of drivers and the arrest of two reporters (myself and Reason TV’s Jim Epstein).
At the May 11 hearing on the proposed amendments to chapters 6 and 8, then-interim chair Reed posted signs on the DCTC walls that stated in bold, capital letters, “NO TELEVISION CAMERAS. NO VIDEO TAPING. NO AUDIO TAPING.”
Wednesday, Gray said, “If there’s a sign [like that] up, that sign will be taken down.” Thursday, as I spoke with Linton in the DCTC hearing room, Ms. Reed removed a similar sign from the door which read, “Without the express prior approval of the District of Columbia Taxicab Commission there shall be NO television cameras and No video taping of DC Taxicab Commission proceedings.”
Possibly even more troubling than Ms. Reed’s discomfort with the media is her mistreatment of drivers. In May, a dozen taxi leaders attempted to deliver a petition, signed by more than 900 drivers, in opposition to the proposed changes to chapters 6 and 8. Instead of accepting the petitions, DCTC pushed drivers out, locked the door, turned off the lights and called the police. Ms. Reed then referred to the drivers as “a mob.” (In June, Mark Segraves of WTOP/ABC7 experienced similar treatment.)
The petition laid out specific concerns drivers have with the proposed changes to chapters 6 and 8. Yet when I brought up this mass opposition to Linton, he was not only unaware of it, but uninterested, too.
“You can bring in 3,000 signatures,” Linton explained. “That just tells us there’s three thousand people that don’t want to have this adopted. What if you got 6,000 people organized by cab users [to] come in and say we do want it adopted. Are we supposed to make our decision based upon the vote? Because if you do, you don’t have to have hearings.”
While insisting that he didn’t have the authority to call for another hearing on chapters 6 and 8, Linton said that if an interested party submitted such a request, “I have the authority to put it on the agenda… [and] I will encourage the commissioners to grant it, but I can’t tell [you] that they will do it.”
So, despite the mayor and city administrator’s statements to the contrary, Linton feels that the decision on whether to hold an additional hearing should lie in the hands of the very commissioners who didn’t object to the barring of reporters from their meetings in the first place.
Related Stories:
- It’s Time to Inspect D.C.’s Hack Inspectors, June 23, 2011
- DCTC Locks Drivers Out, The Voice of DC Cab Drivers, May 29, 2011
- Transparency DCTC Style: “NO TELEVISION CAMERAS. NO VIDEO TAPING. NO AUDIO TAPING.” May 11, 2011