When Metro’s board holds an emergency meeting today to discuss a slew of safety concerns — red signal violations, a derailment, lax track inspection standards, a transit police officer who allegedly attempted to help Isis— they will be meeting in a different room than usual.
Metro Board Chairman Jack Evans said he plans to hold this meeting — and all future board meetings — in the committee room at Metro’s downtown headquarters. That room is smaller and more cramped than the expansive, regal-looking boardroom where Metro typically holds all its meetings of the full board.
Small and cramped? That’s exactly what’s needed, Evans said this Wednesday.
“It’s like the Imperial Room — you can barely see across the thing,” Evans said of the boardroom. “I want everybody to see the members. We’re responsible for this thing. This isn’t just: Come to the board meeting and spend a couple minutes and leave.”
The Metro Board has been criticized in the past for having a distant relationship with the transit agency’s staff, and a general reluctance to ask tough questions and demand answers. Some have said that weakness or impotence from the board contributed to the lax safety standards that caused the 2009 Fort Totten crash, the 2015 L’Enfant Plaza smoke incident, and the general degradation of the system.
Metro’s board has been largely revamped: A majority of the members are relatively new. Now, Evans said, they need to get in the habit of getting up-close-and-personal with the agency’s top-level staff.
And Evans isn’t just imagining the tone implied by the boardroom’s architecture. In “The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro” — basically, the bible for all things Metro — historian Zachary M. Schrag of George Mason University explains that the design of the boardroom helped contribute to the power Jackson Graham, Metro’s first general manager, wielded over board members.
While Graham would always defer to the board in public, in private he could usually have his way. … Even the layout of the meeting room was said to contribute to Graham’s command. With the board lined up along one wall, and the staff behind tables along the other wall (their seats assigned by Graham according to the day’s agenda), a board member with a question faced an intimidating battery of expertise.
With the move into the committee room, Evans wants to take some of that power back.
