Where is the bus headed now? If somebody had asked me this question last December, I would have replied with dread, “Who knows?”
Now, however, after a lot of hard work by a lot of dedicated people and the hiring of a new Twin Transit system manager, Joe Clark, the clouds once hovering over Twin Transit have lifted to reveal a promise of a bright future and new possibilities for our community’s transit system.
Getting our local transit system headed in a good direction has been a community effort in which people of all walks of life have participated. Chronicle reporter Will Rubin, for example, with his well-researched and well-written articles, provided facts that helped the decision makers.
Members of the public registered their opinions through letters to our local newspaper, and people who had never before paid much attention to our bus system took notice of Twin Transit’s struggle after the November election.
Of all the people involved in changing the picture of our Twin Transit’s fate, however, I credit Advisory Board Chairman Chad Taylor for being the major force behind the turnaround. Chad is the person who cared enough about our transit system to call a special fact-finding meeting last December to separate truth from rumor, reorganized the advisory board, and led the board through the arduous process of hiring our new Twin Transit system manager.
I was present at the special meeting Chad called on Dec. 13, and I witnessed Chad’s struggle to draw out nuggets of truth from the three men — Derrick Wojcik-Damers, Bobby Jackson and Doug Hayden — who were engaged the whole time not in revealing the truth but, rather, in playing the blame game to distract from the truth. After sitting through two hours of this, Chad concluded the meeting, possibly realizing there would be no meaningful truth surfacing that day.
Later, after the first of the year, Damers resigned as Twin Transit’s general manager, Bobby Jackson resigned from the advisory board, and Chad was left with the task of facilitating the reorganization of the board and leading the process of hiring a new transit manager.
Chad and the other two members of the advisory board, Rebecca Staebler and Gary Stamper, probably sacrificed sleep and a lot of personal and business time, but they got the job done and apparently done well. Their choice for systems manager of Twin Transit, Clark, comes highly qualified and with all the skills that will lead Twin Transit into a bright future.
As a longtime bus rider and supporter of our transit system, I want to thank everyone involved in the process of helping to clean up the mess of mismanagement and reversing a bad situation for Twin Transit.
I especially thank board Chairman Taylor and board members Staebler and Stamper for their dedication to the task of hiring a new transit manager and for bringing some sunshine into what had been a gloomy and discouraging situation.
Jean Fairgrieve
Chehalis
