Last month I attended a public outreach meeting of the FasTracks Citizen Advisory Committee. The committee sat together in a line at the front of the room at a cloth-covered table. After a video, members of the audience came up to a microphone and spoke. The entire meeting was recorded on video. When the video turned off at 8 pm, the meeting ended.
About half of the committee members spoke with the citizens who attended while the cameras were rolling, and a few seemed generally interested in knowing what the public thought. However, half did not ask anything while the cameras rolled and none of them interacted with the public after the cameras turned off. I am glad that I went because of the interaction that I was able to have with my neighbors and my elected officials, but I don't think that meeting achieved its stated purpose.
We have the opportunity to have a citizens advisory committee that is more "citizen". RTD is taking applications for this committee through Roger Sherman. Please send a brief statement of interest, specific qualifications, highlights of related experience and expertise, and a resume (if available) to roger.sherman @ rtd-denver or to Roger Sherman, RTD FasTracks Team, 1625 Broadway, Suite 700, Denver, CO 80202 by November 1.
More details about what the Citizen Advisory Committee does and the factors that lead to their selection are available at the FasTracks website.
Hopefully, we will see more actual citizens on the "citizen advisory committee." There are a lot of concerned citizens who want to make Denver and its surrounding communities a better place to live. And due to the bad economy, a few of them have more time that they used to.
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