Key SEWRPC Meeting Might Be Muted, Dumbed-Down

Federal authorities will be in Milwaukee during the third week of October to conduct an every-four-years review of the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission.

Four years ago, many groups and individuals streamed into the Downtown Transit Center to blast SEWRPC for ineffective outreach and a host of other shortcomings.

The hearing in 2000 was sparsely attended; the 2004 outpouring, triggered by SEWRPC's no-transit/highway-only expansion plan was the catalyst, but also tapped into a deepening reservoir of resentment over the agency's suburban biases and its then-recent move to the relatively less accessible Pewaukee industrial park where it had purchased a headquarters building from one of its frequent contractors, Ruekert-Mielke.

History here.

Preliminary indications are that the format of the upcoming 2008 public session, likely to be held at the Transit Center on Wednesday, Oct. 22nd will he changed to a more vanilla formula.

I believe this is a mistake and not in the public interest. Maybe in SEWRPC's short-term, PR-driven interest, but in the long-run, bad for SEWRPC's image and the credibility of the work it does.

Instead of a hearing with testimony, thus with an audience focused on a single speaker, several listening stations will be located through the room where individual officials will accept statements and answer questions.

With a reauthorization, SEWRPC will continue as a higher-level, federally-designated Metropolitan Planning Organization, or MPO, giving SEWRPC the power to greenlight major highway spending. That is why the review process is handled by the Federal Highway Administration, or FHWA.

After the 2004 hearing, the FHWA reviewers told SEWRPC to improve its outreach to low-income and minority communities, and in 2007, SEWRPC created its Environmental Justice Task Force to advise the agency on matters of concern to these previously discounted communities and interests.

It doesn't appear that SEWRPC got the message, however.

While the task force has been meeting, it was shut out of the 2008 decision by SEWRPC managers to designate a new Executive Director without a job search or public interviews.

SEWRPC continued to disregard minority input, as the 32-member water supply advisory body it appointed in 2005 had but one Hispanic-surnamed minority member.

The agency's most recent Affirmative Action report shows three non-white professional staffers out of a total of 49.

And there still is no starting date established for SEWRPC's production of a housing study for the region, with the last such study being completed in 1975.

Little wonder then, despite the heat generated at the 2004 reauthorization hearing and its creation of the Environmental Justice Task Force, that SEWRPC - - a 100% publicly-funded agency - - is facing two civil rights complaints over these sorts of issues.

But without a formal public hearing, the FWHA reviewers are likely to miss the full picture of the way SEWRPC is perceived among key constituencies in the region.

A formal hearing is not just recommended. It's a necessity, and SEWRPC should be confident enough of its role and output that it would lead the charge for the most open and engaged format possible.