C ya, C-Tran?
There was an unusually empty chair at Tuesday’s C-Tran board meeting. Arriving after an hourlong executive session, I shuffled into the library’s meeting room and did not see David Madore’s smiling face.
Strange, I thought, considering Madore was the biggest proponent of the boundary expansion conference, and continuing those boundary talks was yet again on the agenda.
Then came the announcement: “Let the record show Mr. Madore left at 5:47 p.m.,” just a dozen minutes into C-Tran’s executive session. Then, as roll call was taken a bit after 6:30, no one offered to excuse Madore’s absence.
Whatever happened or was said in executive session will stay between the men and women in that room under state law. (Other than the fact it led to a $13,000 raise for C-Tran CEO Jeff Hamm.) For all we know the county councilor had to rush out after realizing that the East County Bridge is just three years and one month away, and he had some work to do on that.
Madore, during Board Time on Wednesday, said he just had to be somewhere else.
“I had to actually step out of that meeting because I had commitments here at the county I needed to do instead,” he said. “There wasn’t enough hours in the day.”
He didn’t miss much, as the C-Tran board found ways to complicate a pretty straightforward process — boundary talks, including an elected official from each of the county’s cities, will be wrapped into long-term planning and all the tax and service issues that entails.
Madore had only missed one other meeting this year, in March, and left early in August. But “early” in that case was 8 p.m., not a waste of a car drive. (It’s not a waste if it’s a Tesla, though, is it?)
Was he uninterested in what could be his final meeting with the C-Tran board? Speculate away, I’m not here to do it for you. The new faces of the C-Tran board will meet early in January, and it’s your guess as well as mine whose bodies those faces will belong to.
