WMATA Board meeting this morning

The WMATA Board will meet this morning. The Finance committee will be discussing a Rosslyn station entrance, at-will employment, the 10¢ fare increase, the capital program, and then the FY2011 budget.

The Customer Service, Operations and Safety Committee will then discuss the artwork and on-time performance; it doesn’t appear they’ll discuss snow or snow-related communication.

You can listen to the meeting here. I’ll also be posting any interesting bits of the meeting on Twitter; follow @ggwash to see the updates.

Below is a summary of the most interesting parts.

Update: There’s a problem with the audio, and people listening on the stream can’t hear. The PR team says they’re working on it.

Update 2: Chris Zimmerman announced that work was being done on the room, and the audio was not configured properly for the Board meeting. They will move next door for the next meeting, but that’s after the budget discussion. I can now hear a little bit by holding my speaker, turned up all the way to maximum, directly against my ear.

The Board approved the new Rosslyn station entrance, which Arlington County is paying for. It includes a bank of 3 elevators, emergency stairs, and a new mezzanine across North Moore Street from the current entrance. They also approved a policy to extend at-will employment to middle managers; previously, only top managers were at-will.

Update 3: The Board is now discussing reliability. Slide 7 of this presentation shows that rail reliability is way down since a year ago, because of manual operation and moving 1000-series cars to the centers of trains. WMATA is working to fix ATO safety problems.

Update 4: Zimmerman pushed hard to try to get answers on last Friday’s derailment, but Catoe and rail operations head Dave Kubicek said they aren’t allowed to say anything about the ongoing investigation, which in the case of last July’s crash is still ongoing and has little sign of ending.

Zimmerman worried that as long as WMATA staff can’t say anything about the causes of the incidents, it impedes the Board’s ability to discuss and recommend changes, or to advocate for increased funding for safety needs. The General Manager can make changes, and they can brief the Board in executive session, but it’s tough for the Board to say, for instance, that Metro needs more money to restore Automatic Train Operation (ATO), if staff can’t confirm that manual operation contributed to the derailment.

Update 5: Going back to the earlier budget discussion, Zimmerman also chided staff for putting in a $40 million item for a jurisdictional subsidy but then leaving it vague. Zimmerman said staff should follow up with a letter to jurisdictions specifically asking for the money. CFO Carol Kissal also said they hope to get that money from a jobs bill, but the Senate version has no support for transit. John Catoe said that originally that item was a transfer from capital, but after the last Board discussion, they modified it.