Whom you can find here.
(1) What’s your vision for this region? (Name a place you think we should be more like.)
(2) To whom are you accountable? (“The public” doesn’t cut it as an answer – since you’re not elected.)
(3) What’s your transportation lifestyle?
the city should absolutely pose these questions to the new delegates, and Translink should absolutely have their responses posted on their website.
The decisions these individuals make affect us all, and we deserve to know whether they have our best interests at heart, or if they are operating in interest of big business short term gain, long term environmental suffering.
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
While that last question may at first glance appear to be a loaded question, a director could easily reply that they drive their car to work and remain within Translink’s mandate as a provider of road infrastructure.
The first question hits the nub of the problem – the vision is of the region, not any one city, and mayors would have to balance their city’s potentially conflicting concerns with regional concerns. This has caused problems in the past. The new scheme suggests that the board be deferential to the decisions of transportation planning staff.
For the second question, in a corporate environment, the board is directly accountable to its shareholders who elect them at annual general meetings. Perhaps the shareholders are the municipalities, as represented by their mayors who vote for the board. If the decision-making authority is held by the mayors, then the board would be accountable to the mayors or risk defeat in the next board election. But boards of directors aren’t ordinarily political arenas, so I doubt you’d see propsective board candidates “campaigning” for a position like you see with the Metro Vancouver board.
[...] It’s a question I’ll be asking the new TransLink directors – “What’s your vision for the region?” – and it’s one that Jordan Bateman answers in his blog, Langley Politics Dotcom: I would like us to be more like Portland (rated the #1 most sustainable city in the US in nearly every poll): with plenty of bridge lanes, light rail and excellent bus service; none of which is stopped by a Berlin Wall of a river. And following Portland’s example of continuing to invest in all three: roads, rail, and buses. [...]