A lie is a lie, and the lie doesn’t have to be spoken aloud to be a lie. A lie can be the deliberate withholding of important information in order to serve the liar’s cause.
In the case of the current situation we have involving Twin Transit, the Lewis Mountain Highway Transit, the recent campaign to expand transit service to the unserved county areas and the future of the grant-funded service to East Lewis County, the identities of the liar or liars are not clear.
What is clear is that all of us who live in Lewis County have been misled and duped by what has not been said. Right now, my trust in the management of Twin Transit and Doug Hayden, the person who runs the LMHT, is at zero.
Back in the 1970s, I worked for five long years to put the transit measure on the ballot. The citizens committee I led worked as hard as I did. We developed carpools to get people to meetings, and I visited all the relevant local agencies and civic organizations to tell people why Centralia and Chehalis needed a reliable public transit service.
With a boost from the people needing to push for a senior center, those of us in the trenches convinced the county to put the measure on the ballot. The measure passed, and Twin Transit was born and has been running since about 1976.
The information I presented was factual, and when challenged, I presented the underlying information to support my facts. People were free to check my information and ask questions, and they did both.
Jump forward to 2017 now. I sat next to Doug Hayden early in 2017 when he pled with the Twin Transit management and the board to help him save his service. I saw the tears well up in his eyes, and I vowed to do what I could to help. Months later, Hayden sat behind me at the meeting with the county when the small communities to be served by transit voted to put the extended transit area on the ballot.
When the vote passed that day, I said to Hayden something like, “Now the hard work begins.” He smiled at me and said nothing about hard work. Rather, I had the impression that he wasn’t worried at all. The future of his bus service was at stake, and he wasn’t worried? Strange, I thought.
At some point a few months before the election, I was asked if I would make a couple of radio ads supporting the countywide transit measure. I did that, all the while believing my efforts were possibly helping save the LMHT from extinction. I also promoted the expansion of the transportation area whenever the opportunity arose, still believing my efforts could save the LMHT.
On Nov. 29, I read The Chronicle and discovered I had been used to support a lie: The LMHT did not need the vote to pass in order to survive. Since reading the article in The Chronicle, I trust none of the parties involved, especially Twin Transit management, LMHT management and the board member representing the county. None of those people had said a word to me about the change in LMHT’s status, and no clarification was printed in The Chronicle.
Jean Fairgrieve
Chehalis
