Annapolis Capital Punishment

The local newspaper reports that the air conditioning on our city buses will get fixed. Ahh....it's only July. They even hired a consultant to fix them for $3800. Yawn. They have had this problem for decades, and on every make of bus from Chance, to Thomas to Opus....CP has seen this before. As a bus rider, CP knows the buses are hot, but it is not so in other cities where CP also rides buses. The problem is because of mismanagement and incompetence. Here is what entrenched, 25-year bureaucrat (at 109k per year) Transportation Director Danielle Matland says from her air conditioned office which she drives to every day from her air conditioned home just a mile away:

"Every summer, we have trouble with the air conditioning," Ms. Matland said. "Through a combination of heat, humidity and loads, they breakdown. But we're not giving up. We're trying to do a better job of maintaining them."

Maybe she works on this when she is not off on one of her multi-week expeditions to Libya or China or Morocco...Check the archives at the newspaper and you'll see that she's been feeding the same line to reporters for years while the overall maintenance of those buses remains abysmal. The mechanics are hardworkers trying to do the right thing. They are just poorly supervised and managed and that's mainly because Matland keeps hands-off and out of their way--and does not ride the buses. Perhaps she is scared because of the EEO suit they brought against her some years ago. Perhaps she feels threatened by mechanical challenges. Perhaps she does not care.

If it's not broken AC's on the buses, it's broken AC's in The Market House. With all the hot air emanating from City Hall, it only gets hotter. The best way to fix things on our buses is to fix up the management. IS ANYBODY LISTENING??? I worked there for 8 years. I don't make this stuff up. I know what a mess it is. Those buses are HOT and they don't have to be that way.

See the article (even though it does not tell half of the story) at:
http://www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2008/07_22-23/TOP