(The following article by Jere Downs was posted on the Philadelphia Inquirer’s website on August 17.)
PHILADELPHIA — Ever since SEPTA announced in April that it would slash rail and bus service and raise fares to balance its budget, passengers have angrily complained they’ve had little say in decisions that will make their commuting lives more difficult.
They apparently haven’t heard of the SEPTA Citizens Advisory Committee. But who has?
Created in 1981 by the Pennsylvania legislature to give the transit-riding masses a voice with SEPTA management, the panel – what is left of it – has rarely uttered a public word in the last decade.
Instead of a full complement of 29 members, representing Philadelphia and the four suburban counties, there are now 22. The six-year terms of seven of them expired long ago, but they still show up for meetings and collect their due: free monthly TrailPasses worth $163 each.
By the end of this year, the terms of another six will run out. Unless Mayor Street and the commissioners of Montgomery, Chester, Delaware and Bucks Counties appoint new faces, the committee will have only nine legal members. Philadelphia riders, who would be hardest hit by service cutbacks, would be represented by five members instead of the prescribed 18.
That worries Dennis Winters, a transit activist and the Citizens Advisory Committee’s secretary. Two weeks ago, he reported the shrinkage in letters to state lawmakers, Street and the SEPTA board. He has yet to receive any response.
“No one really cares about this committee,” he said. “I got on it to serve riders… . I feel like I’ve got nothing to show for it.”
For the last two years, committee chairman Robert Szwajkos has hounded the Mayor’s Office to fill the city’s empty seats.
“When you write, when you call, when you are in their face every day and you get no response… . I feel like George Washington with a depleted army at Valley Forge,” he said.
On Friday, Barbara Grant, the mayor’s spokeswoman, told an Inquirer reporter that Street is committed to filling the city vacancies “within 30 days.”
“We’ve just had trouble… finding the right match,” she said.
Told of the promise, Szwajkos replied, “That is great news… if [Street] fills the slots.”
Of the 11 suburban seats, 10 are occupied – three of them by men whose terms expired when the first Bush was president. Two of the illegal representatives are from Delaware County, where Robert Lovejoy, a spokesman for the county council, said last week that officials “would investigate the matter.”
In its bylaws, the Citizens Advisory Committee is charged with keeping tabs on the “quality of SEPTA service, including reliability and frequency, cleanliness” and reviewing fares, policies and financing.
With their free TrailPasses, members – drawn from the riding rank and file – are expected to travel the rails and buses as watchdogs.
For a while, they did.
In 1985, when service cuts and fare hikes were threatened, the committee held its own public hearings. Jerry Silverman, a Center City math teacher and former committee chairman, wrote opinion columns on SEPTA matters in area newspapers. News releases regularly announced the panel’s positions on matters ranging from SEPTA’s perennial money woes to the conversion of trolley routes to bus lines.
“SEPTA would never have an epiphany when we complained to them,” Silverman said of his tenure. “But the squeaky wheel gets the oil. We had power to communicate with riders and be their voice, and we used it.”
In the mid-1980s, when SEPTA management declined to install benches on Center City rail platforms, members took photographs of riders sitting with their legs dangling in the right of way. Soon after, SEPTA put benches at Market East and Suburban Station.
Of the current committee, Silverman said, “They just have to take the power they are entitled to. The group now sounds like a kaffee klatsch.”
SEPTA management has no complaint with the committee in its present form.
“They have provided over a period of time very valuable consultation and advice,” SEPTA spokesman Richard Maloney said. “They study our programs and projects very carefully. They provide excellent, sophisticated consumer advice.”
That advice has not necessarily been focused on SEPTA’s current crisis – on the $41 million budget hole, the cutbacks in state funding or the system’s declining ridership. Two committee members attended one budget hearing in May. But so far this year, the group’s major initiative has been a study of rail-station signage, which was found to be antiquated at some stops and absent at others. The report was submitted to agency management in February.
“We’ve heard nothing since. It goes into a deep dark hole and that’s it,” said M. Scott Magargee, a Tredyffrin lawyer whose term as a Chester County representative expired in 1991 but who has continued attending the meetings.
Next month, Magargee plans to quit. “I have concluded,” he said, “that my usefulness is now over.”
Belknap Freeman is a Delaware County appointee who was supposed to bow out in 1990 but, like Magargee, still participates. An 85-year-old retired Amtrak engineer from Rosemont, he prides himself on his ability to alert SEPTA to technical problems, particularly safety issues on the Regional Rail system. H.L. Lin Bongaardt, a Glen Mills transit consultant, was appointed to represent Delaware County riders in 1985. His term expired in 1991.
“I’m not supposed to be there anymore,” he said. But “I don’t intend on stepping down. I don’t know if Delaware County would appoint someone in my place.”
Unless the Montgomery County commissioners name a replacement for chairman Szwajkos, whose term expires in December, he says that he too will hang around. He maintains that the committee can still be an effective voice for transit riders, not “in a public display of complaining and letters to the editor – but in establishing confidence with the management and SEPTA board.”
“At the appropriate times,” he added, “we may go public.”