Lawyer lacks time for transit

Commission role unclear, says Cyrus Reporter

The unelected members of city council’s transit commission are still having trouble finding ways to be useful, but that’s not why Cyrus Reporter is quitting the group, he said Wednesday.

Reporter is one of four people chosen to join councillors on the commission that oversees OC Transpo and Para Transpo in 2011. After two years, he’s getting out because the unpaid job has proved too time-consuming.

“It’s nothing more complicated than just assessing the time commitment,” he said. He’s had time to read the commission reports and show up to most meetings, but that’s not enough for the Fraser Milner Casgrain lawyer and Liberal party insider.

Nevertheless, he said, he and his fellow citizen commissioners — the other three (lawyers Blair Crew and Emily Rahn, and business consultant Justin Ferrabee) are staying on — still haven’t figured out how best to contribute.

“I think the whole issue of the role of the public members and how they can be of most use remains outstanding,” Reporter said.

Since the Citizen first wrote about the citizen commissioners’ frustrations last summer, it seems there’s been a lot of talk. Reporter said he and his fellow commissioners have talked about working on long-term studies of, say, cutting-edge transit technologies, but little has come of it so far.

None of the citizen commissioners has made much of a mark on the commission, though Crew has spoken up more than the others in the last few months.

“In my mind, it’s been a very steep learning curve,” said commission chair Diane Deans. The city set out to find people with expertise in transit operations, policy, finance or administration, but ultimately chose four interested amateurs who’ve had a hard time getting up to speed. “It is my intention to sit down with each of them ... and see if there’s advice they could give us on preparing them, giving them more information, so they can hit the ground running.”

“I feel they have done well,” she said. She’s happy to keep the other three on, she said, with the understanding that they’ll be done around the time of the next city council election in 2014. “Then there will be a whole new recruitment process,” Deans said, in which Crew, Rahn, Ferrabee and Reporter’s successor can reapply if they want to.

Reporter acknowledged the huge “challenge” — he rejected the word “problem” — of diving into something as complicated as OC Transpo and its $440-million budget when you’re a part-time volunteer sharing a table with professional politicians. “It’s a tremendous amount of new information,” he said, acknowledging that it’s likely to be a challenge for anyone who takes up the job.

The city will advertise soon for someone to take over Reporter’s position for the next two years.