Contradictions Rule at Twin Transit Special Meeting

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Before opening the public comment portion of Thursday’s special meeting of the Twin Transit Advisory Board, chair Chad Taylor expressed hope that, by the time the meeting concluded, everyone would have their questions answered and understand Twin Transit’s desire for transparency.

Taylor did not get his wish, as board vice-chair Bobby Jackson and Twin Transit General Manager Derrick Wojcik-Damers spent more than two hours giving conflicting or evasive answers to questions about the agency’s failed November ballot initiative and Twin Transit’s role in the spreading of misinformation related to the future of Lewis Mountain Highway Transit.

“There are still a lot of questions that I don’t feel got answered,” Taylor said Friday. “I asked very direct questions and, at times, I wasn’t given direct answers.”

Taylor noted that when he asked if the two men knew LMHT would continue operations if the ballot measure failed, they said no. However, documentation shows they should have known LMHT wasn’t in the trouble they said it was. 

“The answers would be either ‘Yes we knew and didn’t say anything,’ or ‘No we didn’t know.’ And if we had that (second) answer, then I guess what I wanted to hear from the people in charge was ‘No we didn’t know, yes we should have known, I’m sorry, I’ll do better next time.’ ”

Asked more than once by Taylor and members of the public, including a Chronicle reporter, what they knew regarding a 10 percent cap placed on matching requirements for state grants used by LMHT as well as Twin Transit, Wojcik-Damers stated “we did know and we stated repeatedly that there was a cap. At no point was I confused.”

Wojcik-Damers and Jackson, also a Lewis County Commissioner, affirmed Thursday that they also knew the reason LMHT manager Doug Hayden came to a Twin Transit board meeting in Feb. 2017 was to ask  for their help with a WSDOT plan published the previous month that would require recurring grant awards to include an additional 5 percent of local matching dollars every two years. 

The nonprofit paid 10 percent in matching funds for its 2017-2019 grant award of about $650,000. The state legislature inserted a line in the 2017-2019 state transportation funding bill to cap the match requirement for nonprofits at 10 percent. Soon after the bill was signed into law, WSDOT decided to apply the 10 percent cap to all transit agencies across the state, allowing LMHT to continue to afford their match requirement.

Despite Wojcik-Damers’ insistence that he knew about the cap the whole time, he and Jackson promoted their proposed transit expansion by saying the impetus was the upcoming collapse of LMHT.

 

Conflicting Accounts

Much of Tuesday’s meeting was filled with apparently inconsistent statements from Jackson and Wojcik-Damers.

The two men worked together to lead the push for expansion of the Lewis Public Transit Benefit Area to include all of Lewis County, except for Napavine. They criss-crossed the county to meet with community groups and city councils.

“Derrick sold the steak and I sold the sizzle to it, I guess, in one frame of reference,” Jackson said.

Neither man consistently provided the same answers Friday when asked what they knew about the catalyst of the expansion push — the future of LMHT’s grant — and when they knew it.

Both said they never received any information from Hayden or anyone else that led them to believe the nonprofit was no longer in imminent danger of folding. The reason LMHT asked for help and Twin Transit agreed to explore expansion was because WSDOT was going to require more and more matching funds from projects consistently funded by grant dollars.

Then, both appeared to go in the opposite direction stating they had known from the start that the state legislature had capped nonprofit match requirements at 10 percent, the same amount the nonprofit paid for its current two-year grant, in the spring of 2017.

Later, Jackson again flip-flopped saying that had they known information pertaining to the continued operations of LMHT, they would have changed the narrative of their message or stopped the initiative effort altogether.

“We based it off the information we had from (LMHT),” Jackson said. “Mr. Hayden had two opportunities to correct us and did not do it. To assume we knew what his business model was is a bit short sighted, because that’s not our job. Our job is Twin Transit and what we are doing to help provide the services we provide in the community.”

Taylor questioned an inference from Jackson and Wojcik-Damers that Twin Transit had no way of knowing the situation regarding LMHT had changed without Hayden telling them.

Twin Transit and the three Lewis County Commissioners received and responded to a letter from Hayden requesting support for its upcoming grant application, stating “Regardless of outcome of November’s county-wide transit vote, your letter of support for continuation of this service will provide/show local support for stabilized transit service for eastern Lewis County through June 30, 2023.”

Wojcik-Damers said he didn’t see that phrasing as saying LMHT would stay in business regardless of the vote.

“I read it that they were looking for a letter of support for their operations that in case the election didn’t pass they would at least have some funding in place, and they would have to figure out their own future from that,” Wojcik-Damers said. “Maybe I’m being a little dense here, perhaps, but I would think the responsibility is on a private organization … to come back and tell us they’ve changed their plans.”

Earlier in the meeting, Wojcik-Damers gave Taylor a different answer when asked why, if Twin Transit had seen the letter from LMHT, it could say it didn’t know the nonprofit planned to operate past June 30, 2019.

“We figured if the ballot measure did actually pass, (the grant) also helped out because that funding would help bridge the gap as sales tax revenues would ramp up in those areas. Not knowing what was going to happen in the future, it was a good gamble.”

Jackson, having previously said he wished Twin Transit had called Hayden to make sure they were still on the same page, responded with a different tone when Taylor again raised the issue.

“What I’m hearing you say is we had a responsibility to follow up with the business model of another organization,” Jackson said. “That somehow we had a responsibility … That wasn’t up to us. That was up to LMHT to make that clear to us.”

Answers provided by Jackson and Wojcik-Damers varied to the point that Taylor became agitated.

“Nobody has really answered (the question),” Taylor said. “I would be much happier if someone said we screwed up here. Yeah, we had some responsibility here and we should have reached out to them and asked, but we didn’t. ... We either knew or we didn’t. We either should have done something or we shouldn’t (have).”

Jackson later said he thought everyone was getting too far into the weeds with the issue and that ultimately, the elephant in the room was that the measure didn’t pass for reasons unrelated to LMHT.



Wojcik-Damers and Jackson were also asked questions about written materials produced on Twin Transit’s behalf by consulting firm Nelson\Nygaard. The materials are the subject of an open complaint filed with the state Public Disclosure Commission.

The text in question appears underneath the header “WSDOT Grants” and reads: The local match required to operate Lewis Mountain Highway Transit is expected to increase from $32,500 annually to $130,000 annually by the year 2028. … The local match required for operating funds will increase by 5 percent each biennium until it reaches 50 percent.” 

As previously stated, that was not accurate.

Asked whether Twin Transit took responsibility for the inaccuracies, Wojcik-Damers said he read the brochures differently — as saying “the future is not written and that anything can happen.” 

Asked specifically the executive summary of a feasibility study completed by the consultants earlier this year, Wojcik-Damers said “I think what they’re doing is escalating how much it will be as costs go up with gas and labor, and so forth.”

Jackson received the final question of the session. Previously, he and Wojcik-Damers both told The Chronicle that there was no connection between the tax expansion and a new transit center in Centralia. 

A Chronicle reporter asked Thursday why he changed course and drew a connection between the failed ballot initiative and the scope of a proposed transit center in downtown Centralia last week on a local radio show. 

Jackson responded by accusing the reporter of misquoting. He advised the reporter to review the tape.

Jackson’s quote is as follows:

“Some of it (the transit center) was based on whether we passed the transit measure or not,” Jackson said on the Dec. 4 episode of Let’s Talk About It on KELA-AM 1470. “Now the conversation is probably going to be about downsizing a little bit.”

Jackson did not return a request for comment before press time.

 

The Blame Game

Nobody at the meeting Friday, including Hayden, disputed that he could have, if not should have, called attention to the conflicting narratives months ago.

Jackson placed the blame for the whole situation squarely on Hayden’s shoulders.

He also spent about 10 minutes holding his phone to the microphone in order to play two separate recordings of Hayden speaking about LMHT.

First, he played a clip of Hayden speaking at the Feb. 2017 Twin Transit meeting, but declined to elaborate on why he did so when asked by a Chronicle reporter. 

On the recording, Hayden and Rob LaFontaine, then the general manager of Twin Transit, explained the changes proposed by WSDOT grant administrators, how they would affect LMHT, and why LMHT was coming to Twin Transit for help.

The reporter then asked Jackson to confirm that what Hayden said on the recording regarding his situation was true at the time he said it. He deferred to Hayden, who affirmed the timeline. The state legislature did not intervene until more than a month after that meeting.

Jackson later played a recording of Hayden speaking the Public Transit Improvement Conference.

“Those are the only two conversations that Mr. Hayden has had with the county or Twin Transit as pertaining to his situation,” Jackson said after playing the second of two recordings he aired during the meeting. “So I played that because I wanted to be very clear on what exactly was said at those two meetings and at no time was there any indication that anything had changed (regarding the grant).”

However, there was at least one other meeting. Jackson had already brought up a Feb. 2018 meeting with Hayden and Wojcik-Damers that took place at the LMHT facility in Morton. Jackson said Hayden gave the other two a tour and the three discussed whether Hayden would stay with the organization or as an employee of Twin Transit if the ballot measure passed. 

Hayden said in an email Friday that he asked the other two men during that meeting what they were going to be saying about the match cap and that, according to Hayden, the two men said they would take care of it.

Jackson and Wojcik-Damers have previously gone on the record with The Chronicle to state they did not recall such a meeting with Hayden. Wojcik-Damers did not respond to a request for comment before press time.

“What concerns me is we’re still getting conflicted stories,” Taylor said Friday. “When I hear that we only met with Doug twice and then in the same meeting they talk about an additional meeting on top of the two, the contradictions in those types of details when the meeting is specifically about the details — I didn’t think there would be contradiction because they knew that this meeting was set up to specifically be clear and transparent with people.”

Taylor said he did not feel afterward that his mission had been accomplished. Some members of the audience didn’t need to wait until the end to share his feelings.

Jean Fairgrieves, whose years of work in the 1970s helped lead to the founding of Twin Transit, was one of a few residents who participated in radio advertisements for a campaign conducted by a political action committee formed to promote the expansion initiative.

“I knew in my heart that I was trying to help the East County people, because I didn’t want their bus system to go away,” Fairgrieves said when she addressed the board. “Nobody told me anything different. … I was used, as far as I’m concerned, to perpetuate misinformation. At the worst, I would say a lie.”