The Daily Reporter’s Sean Ryan today reports on objections to SEWRPC’s recertification as the Metropolitan Planning Organization for southeastern Wisconsin.

SEWRPC Executive Director Phil Evenson spins the truth so hard in the story that it turns into something else.

But SEWRPC spent the last three years establishing a stronger connection to city residents, said Executive Director Phil Evenson. It created a task force to respond to complaints that minorities and low-income residents aren’t properly represented by the com-mission. It also partnered with groups including the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin Inc. and the Milwaukee Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to hold hearings about the Kenosha-Racine-Milwaukee Commuter Rail project.

Evenson apparently forgot to mention that the NAACP and the ACLU have named SEWRPC in an affirmative action complaint, but Ryan, fine reporter that he is, did not forget that pertinent little fact.

As for the Environmental Justice Task Force to which Evenson referred — it took years of browbeating before SEWRPC agreed to establish the advisory committee, and Evenson already has made clear he will not implement recommendations from the group if he disagrees with them.

The task force, by the way, is supposed to assist in outreach to low-income and minority communities, but SEWRPC cynically did not ask it to promote participation in the recertification public comment period. SEWRPC and the Federal Highway Administration are quite clearly, in fact, trying to supress public participation in the recertification process by eliminating the traditional public hearing and replacing it with a public meeting, at which members of the public are allowed to wander around and talk to bureaucrats and give testimony in secret to court reporters.

Ald. Willie Wade yesterday called killing the public hearing “cowardly.” He’s right.

SEWRPC and FHWA are behaving horribly, singling out southeastern Wisconsin for discriminatory treatment. That makes it all the more important for people to participate in the recertification process. So a reprise from an earlier action alert.

As the region’s Metropolitan Planning Organization, SEWRPC makes recommendations about transportation planning. These transportation projects impact priorities for government funding, how healthy our air is, where housing is developed, job growth, the availability of mass transit, the supply of and potential movement of water outside the Great Lakes Basin, and much more. The agency, however, often has ignored the concerns of minority and low-income residents of Milwaukee. For example, SEWRPC has yet to conduct a regional housing study – something it promised in 2005 to do. It has denied requests from groups representing low income and minority communities to participate on advisory task forces. It rejected the requests of its own Environmental Justice Task Force to seek a diverse and inclusive pool of candidates to fill its Executive Director and Assistant Director positions.

WHAT: Public Meeting on SEWRPC’s Certification as Metro Planning Organization
WHERE: Downtown Transit Center, Harbor Lights Room, 909 E. Michigan Ave. Milwaukee
WHEN: October 22, 2008 5 p.m. – 7 p.m.