Try a Representative for the Rest of Us : The Public Deserves a Truly Independent Voice on Transportation Authority Board

Dana W. Reed, the lone public representative on the 11-member Orange County Transportation Authority board, has resigned and will be leaving the board Aug. 1. That is none too soon.

We don’t say that because Reed has been such a bad board member during his 5 1/2-year tenure. He hasn’t been. In fact, he has been a leader, serving once as the board chairman and as its vice chairman when he resigned earlier this month.

The problem is that Reed, with his numerous business connections with firms and individuals who do business in some way with the Transportation Authority, is too often placed in positions of potential conflict. Being an attorney who specializes in advising clients and public officeholders like himself on the nuances and restrictions of conflict-of-interest laws, Reed realizes that all too well.

That potential for conflict became readily apparent at last Monday’s board meeting when Reed, not once, not twice, but four times, abstained from voting on issues because of his connections to those whose business was before the board. His explanation after the meeting was, “I had to abstain or go to jail.”

Well and good. But what happened should be an object lesson to the rest of the board, which now has the responsibility of selecting Reed’s replacement.

The authority’s board is made up of 11 members; six are from city councils and are selected by the League of California Cities chapter in the county and four are county supervisors. Those 10 select the public’s at-large member who must be a county resident and not have served in city or county government in the past four years. When Reed was last appointed two years ago, after the merger of the county’s Transit District and Transportation Commission into the OCTA, there were 61 applicants.

In seeking the new public representative the OCTA board should obviously be looking for someone with an interest in and some knowledge about public transportation; someone keenly interested in serving the public. It may be hard to do, and naive to expect, but in making its selection the board should set aside personalities, politics and power brokering. There are already enough “players” involved in partisan and power politics and city-county rivalries sitting on the board. What’s needed now is a public member who truly represents the mainstream rather than someone from the “good old boy” crowd who will pose more of those technical and political conflicts to cloud board votes down the road.