[Music] the young mother she was um pregnant really short tiny SCH looking um got up and testified to her experience of getting off the bus at the right State campus and then having to W her way on foot over the I 675 overpass which is a very busy overpass which has no pedestrian sidewalks no pedestrian stop signs and yet here she was a young vulnerable pregnant woman who walked that at night to an entrylevel job and talked about what it was like in the winter when the roads were slippery and icy she took her life in her hands to go to work I looked at her and I thought thought this is a terrible thing [Music] [Music] it seemed like you could come across the county line from Montgomery County into Beaver Creek you get in the atmosphere if you got your car windows open you feel the temperature get cooler it was just a frame of mind you imagined it but it actually [Music] did when I first became hacky in the Chamber of Commerce in Beaver Creek this was this was a farm field 675 was completed and the economic development uh expanded exponentially along I [Music] 675 and because of the attractiveness and Rural atmosphere of beaver Cree people wanted to move out of the what was considered then the the down town of Dayton and move into Beaver out here you live on half acre lots and you've got space you got Elbow Room that's what people wanted and other areas that were Fields now are built up with homes I moved here in ' 85 I saw Beaver Creek as a a place where families really cared about kids and people I viewed it as my hometown and a place to thrive my neighbors are nice and we have community events and we care about you know so so there's a lot of good things that happen in Beaver Creek the population has increased by almost 40,000 we're approaching in in Beaver Creek 50,000 population the contractors have just gone crazy in in development Beaver Creek is a great location so developers want to put things here particularly along I 675 two of the largest major shopping centers are both located in Beaver we have the mall at Fairfield Commons and we have the green consequently both of them are right off of Route 675 I think that you get so much accomplished when people take pride in their community and they care all that neighborhood all that Community Pride made a positive difference and I think paid off very well now we've got commercial we've got good housing we've got excellent schools Beaver Creek was selected to be one of the top 100 cities in the in the nation one in number 84 quite frankly we don't go to mgy County Much Anymore Beaver Greek's growing up do it at home you can do you can do it right here in your own backyard and and yeah I'm happy with the way it is [Music] [Music] what the Industrial Revolution gave us was was a elevator to match the middle class we lost that elevator when industry took a downturn Chrysler and General Motors and the day time Rubber Company and NCR was another one we thought that the goose that laid the golden egg would never fly out and it [Music] did all the schools and all the access even even mom and pop business started moving they decided it wasn't worth staying in Dayton because there was no plan to keep this part of Dayton that had made so much money for for so many to leave it vibrant enough to survive on its own we lost it all and so if I'm coming and I'm an investor and I want to see where all your growth is happening where your school districts are growing investors decided if it's not near 675 and it wasn't important we weren't worth investing in well people that live in Dayton still want to feel safe they want a opportunity to to to elevate their lives to get a quality education they're competing for jobs that they can barely get access to here now where do you go to get those jobs continually they get further and further away from the city where the people live at because the type of jobs that they seek aren't here it's around 675 so it shouldn't be a crime that you can't afford an automobile and until you get to the point where you can get an automobile you need some way of sustaining yourself to give your family hope the hope that D is making a comeback and we we educate our children every day with the hope that they too can live this American Dream but when they look at their neighborhood they live in they don't see the same America as they do around 675 lead is leaders for equality and action in Dayton and Lead is out to make a better this case Montgomery County city of Dayton a better place for the multiculture that's here it's a a Community organization composed of the social action committees of a bunch of local churches white churches black churches churches from all around the area and Lead is proactive system speaking up for persons who don't have a voice for themselves and getting people to realize that um when we all get together and we all speak with one voice that people listen they put their heads together and decide and look at problems in the community and decide which are those that they they want to take on we have what we call problems assembly We Gather persons from the neighborhoods and ask what wakes you up at night what keeps you up at night when you think about Injustice at some point a few years ago they decided that access to transportation and transportation Equity was an important issue that they wanted to get involved then they noticed one particularly outrageous example of access to Transportation being denied and that was the situation in Beaver Creek I got a call from somebody saying they were with a group called lead which I had never heard of actually uh and they said they had some issues they wanted to discuss with RTA and and they really needed me to come to a meeting and so I said sure uh and the meeting was held on the West Side here and I I arrived that night and it and it was a gridlock and there were several hundred people when I got to the church and when I tried to get into the church I said oh no no are you mark from RTA I said yes they said no you come with us I thought oh my God what's going on here in this church church was full two Hispanic women got up we had a translator for them and they were young one was pregnant actually and told the story of walking U every day excuse me from colonel Highway through the snow to a lousy minimum wage job on Pentagon Boulevard we were just like stunned by what we heard and we were all very emotionally affected by it because nobody should have to put their life in their hands to have Safe Transportation to work not when a bus is available to take them safely it was so much worse than we really understood getting to work like they have to get to work how are you supposed to get home if you don't have a bus ride how are you supposed to get there in the first place well surely we can do something about this we've got to do something about this this is just wrong and you know I looked over at my friend Frank who I work with and I said you know this is why we're here it's as clear as day you know a lot of community problems are complicated and you're not quite sure what to do about them well this was very clear she is the reason that we're here and uh obviously it's stuck with me we um currently transport about 10 million passenger trips a year and uh about 60% of those rides are going to and from work you know two-thirds of the people uh that are getting on our buses every single day they're going to or from work that is what we do we have uh a very important role at access and mobility and the committee had done the research and they knew that the vast M overwhelming proportion of of entrylevel jobs were at two places in the Miami Valley they were at the Dayton Mall they were at the Fairfield comment uh what I didn't know is that they they had a way of doing business which was basically to put folks on the spot in front of a large group of people and get them to commit to doing EX exactly what they wanted so I'm standing there looking out at this large crowd of hundreds of people and the place went silent and will you do will you are you willing to change are you willing to help you get a thousand people looking at you and you're the person with power and you got a thousand people looking back um there's some weight to Bear the minister forced the uh the opportunity for me to explain my position so you explain to these people who are buying your product you explain to these people people who are your constituents and you tell them why you can't do something for them we're happy to talk to you about it these are things that I don't have the authority to do but we would want to do some analysis and then then we would decide and so the whole lead group said no we have to do something about this there needs to be a safe bus ride so before I went home that night I came here and wrote a very long memorandum I'm going to go to my board I'm going to put this on the table and say I I think we should go for it they they gave us a green light and at the same time every elected official that we spoke to in Montgomery County said yes we support what you're doing there was clearly demand so we went in with the idea that in as little as three months we could probably get bus service rolling along that Corridor and of course the that was the beginning of the process uh where we said you know so how do we do that and so we move forward to connect with the Eva Creek staff initially to talk about what steps need to be taken to have bus stops installed and our Transit service diverted over to the Pentagon Boulevard area and we started working through the city engineer on the stop issues the design issues and the location issues of the stops the city of Beaver Creek though had a very very rigorous uh list of criteria that that had to be um to be met before you could could install one bus stop um it was very challenging there was a lot of push back but there was progress we complied with all of the requirements of the ordinance our eyes were dotted te's were crossed so we prepared for the public council meeting where we anticipated a vote and it had been suggested to us directly that if we were in full compliance with the ordinance that the council had no choice but to approve our application that's exactly the way it was said to us our first item up is a public hearing for a Transit stop application is the applicant here to give the presentation when we got into the meeting at that point I decided there's nothing really for me to say other than we are in full compliance we'd like to move forward with our project thank you very much for having us today and thank you for considering our proposal Dave Beach the city engineer was asked to make the presentation he did through a number of iterations of the application to get to where we are today basically said really all that needed to be said he made it clear that we were fully compliant with the ordinance as he understood hearing tonight uh completes the review of the application if we're comp action is uh per our ordinances it's decision time folks I think that the plan that Mr Beach worked on with the staff is the best alternative that we have given that um I would recommend um approval of the plan as presented from the get-go I knew that there was a law on the books and RTA met all the all the aspects of it RTA has met the rules that Beaver Creek has set forward they had to be approved they have the right to be in Beaver Creek you know the first time that there was a public hearing kind of looked like the city council out there was going to do the right thing we' we had many public hearings applications plans ordinances resolutions come through before us you know I appreciate everyone being heing and speaking to council I really appreciate everyone's input in every instance I've reviewed them thoroughly so in my estimation there is considerable amount of bus service from Montgomery County that already makes its way into North Beaver Creek area I'm here to represent our our citizens as all of us are and then you saw this sort of 180 I I can't I have not been presented with a case where this application presents any benefit at all to the city of Beaver Creek you know the city of Beaver Creek did a huge survey on what our citizens want and they strongly have said that they did not want this type of Transportation in our community and unfortunately the people that have sent me letters in support of RTA are not from within Beaver Creek majority of the city council did not hear that there was a law on the books and RTA met all the all the aspects of it one of the problems with surveys is that you do not know what was totally the basis upon which the person was thinking I sincerely believe they did not hear that M Mr M just to clarify what maybe I misunderstood the the conversation regarding the law as long as they meet the the ordinance that we set forward we need to um to approve that right am I misunderstanding that Council can uh approve it can deny it can modify it um if Council chooses to you know a basis of denial you would need legitimate non-discriminatory reasons to act upon a denial basically and what might those be I certainly uh would have no problem providing to council legal Guidance with respect to these issues I think it fairness I would prefer to put that in writing and not do it off the cuup tonight would a simple motion to table suffice that' certainly be appropriate you do have 45 days I think they still thought that they could um make some changes to the ordinance and we said we need to consult with legal and we need to find out where we stand what is our position what can we do or what can we not do I think the bur thing for us to do right now would be to table this I don't want to be make a decision tonight uh I don't want it this to be an emotional decision and that's when you got the sense that um there is a real problem [Music] here I have a motion in a second to table the activity on action on Transit stop application all in favor signify by saying I I opposed I 61 motion carries immediately the issue kind of became real public the fact that the RTA wanted to take buses there but the city of Beaver Creek was not embracing the idea that became public and [Music] obvious Mr Mayor I had one change on the bottom of page five or on the middle of page five where it's we were um talking it says the plan was presented plan presented was the best alternative they had given the law and was doable and she recommended approval of the plan presented there was a time when I had hoped that Vicky jamb brone might be the champion on that Council I I think what I said was is that uh I recommended that we consider the plan as presented not approve the plan as okay a lot of people aren't aware Vicki worked for RTA early in her career the law says we as in city council are only in control of the design standards within the right of way and our vote isn't about um whether RTA can come to Beaver Creek she knows what RTA does and how things go and what you know what happens with bus service we can only control the site design standards and that's when we went down that slippery slope where you know my sense was people started looking for methods within the ordinance to say you may be compliant but you're not and if that is the case I want to ask staff to look at all the applications all of the pages of the application to address my concerns or we can find a way for you not to be compliant by adding other conditions what are the writers ship surveys what are the employment surveys this was a delay tactic what is the analysis that justifies this expense it was you know let's not move forward with the application process and all of a sudden they're cooking up all these reasons not to do it quite frankly I think the buses that are proposed for this which are the very large scale buses I think they're entirely too big and dreaming up all these unreasonable conditions to impose I think we had issues about security the issues of Public Safety uh increased pedestrian traffic there and then I would also like to look at the options that have been um actually agreed to in other municipal alties where there are many cities who require uh video cameras at bus stops and so I wanted to ask them to look at that as well I would like to see this on a closed loop I don't want to see what happened at a bus stop 24 hours after it happened it I mean it's a safety issue but it has to do with the design of the stops so additional design requirements that I'm asking staff to look at if so if we agree as Council to do that would be lighting cameras fencing and queuing add that to we got to have an agreement on that the first list had 19 new requirements that the council felt they had the right to add so there's I think there's a lot of things that need to be looked at and and Jerry's mentioned some we've all mentioned items that need to be looked at and I think it before we would pass this I believe that we need to look at the bus uh stop shelters and I know a lot of people deny this but there were full climate controlled bus shelters demanded in that list of 19 then we look at environmental controls and that would be Heating in air if that's going to be necessary which you know we only found one air conditioned bus shelter on the planet Earth and that was in Dubai we would sit at a meeting and we see all these fancy papers and know that they're talking about hundreds and thousands of dollars of bus stop fancy stuff so to do all these other ridiculous extraordinary things were obviously just attempts to do deril you know the eventual service being located on the street and it's a bunch of nonsense it was a situation that just the reality of it communicated itself very clearly and very widely to the community all right if you if you'll jump through this hoop and spend all this money then maybe we'll let you put a bus stop here and and it was a game like that even though the language being used to turn down the buses was very coded it was all about crime it's uh hard for me to understand those who suggest that Beaver Creek citizens have no good or reasonable basis for the concerns given all of the issues that have been at the Salem Mall the Dayton Mall and downtown Dayton but when they started speaking they said we don't want our community turning into the Dayton Mall the Salem Mall I want to be sure that we Safeguard our citizens interests so we didn't bring the issue of race in their own imp they implied it by their statements that doesn't mean that the people on the bus are bad it doesn't mean that the bus is bad that the people they were talking about were centered in the African-American Community these are not manufactured concerns and they're real and they're well documented and they need to be discussed I had tried so hard to explain why it was important all these topics that you're bringing up make it sound like there's a lot of fear and I think you know these these buses won't just have criminals these are going to be regular people Mrs Van I I excuse me Mrs Van they just didn't get it the opinions of the majority of the residents and their perception of RTA and its impact on Resident safety adverse impact on economic development they kept saying it's not Prejudice it's not Prejudice then please tell me what it is what is your what is your fear as a result of that potentially impact the quality of life for the citizens people are coming out to spend their money in your community and I I cannot see in the future me looking back and my decision causing Pentagon Boulevard to be the corner of chaos so thank [Applause] I would say I found most offensive the the meeting I think it was the 28th where each council member was reading these emails and giving their positions and talking on and on and on I received 157 emails calls and letters and out of the 157 10 people said yes and 147 said no to me and to hear this group of negative comments coming from emails that people supposedly received it is of the people for the people and by the people uh my guess is all that total was probably a tiny little fraction of the population of Beaver Creek uh and yet we're going to go through this and it was quite a show I don't care whether it's Federal money Montgomery County money local money or state money it should be about that's all our money and that's what this is all about the people of Beaver Creek in my opinion have spoken and they have spoken very loudly politely but directly to the point but no one else in that room was given an opportunity to speak prior to them taking a vote on this issue resolution Number 1133 it's a resolution by the Beaver Creek city council approving an application by the greater Dayton Regional Transit Authority RTA for the location of certain public transit stops in the city of Beaver Creek and I will please ask for a roll call vote council member Howard no council member Petra no council member Wallace No vice mayor Jarvis no council member JM Bron no mayor Hadley no between that first public hearing where it looked like the city council was going to do the right thing and the final meeting where they voted six to zero against allowing the buses so much of that public conversation was encoded racist terms I'm disappointed in your vote today on the bus stops I don't care how many people called to tell you they didn't want this I don't know who you're talking to but we can always find people that believe in what we say I think you needed to show some leadership what kind of people are we going to be maybe the people that are speaking to you have collected together because yes they have the same values people in the community had no problem Discerning what it was really about it's just thinly veiled discrimination that's all it is but you're hiding behind elections and political beliefs very thinly veiled and so you realize that the issue we were dealing with here was race it's good enough to have these people come out here serve our food empty our trash scrub our toilets but they're not good enough to have a safe affordable Dependable ride to work when you raise your right hand as a public official you are swearing that you're going to uphold the laws of the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic and to have those officials become an enemy of the people it was totally unacceptable I'm wil M Ryder a member of lead and our issue remains safe affordable Transportation I don't think people know what racism is and it's not safe I don't think they understand it so that issue for us has not been resolved in terms of its you know political or sociological roots and we're going to keep pressing that issue one way or the other thank you you even if they said we didn't mean to discriminate against people that was not our intent the line got crossed it's it's all the assumptions that people have and and it's all the dirty tricks someone should have been responsible enough to say we need to negotiate what's right and no one in the city of beer Creek's government stepped up to do that [Music] at that point was becoming really clear to us in the research we had done that if RTA took on this Beaver Creek issue by itself we would probably never Prevail for the simple reason that in legal terms we were not an affected party and we couldn't be we're just a we're a bus system we're a public entity there's no negative impact to us that we could argue that would win the day we needed someone who was directly impacted by the city's refusal to let us on Pentagon Boulevard to be out in front and I think the folks at lead they didn't need my help they immediately said this is why we exist you know this is a cause that we believe in and we will take this on when we got to know obviously the news media jumped right down on it at new at 11 the bus stop battle Beaver Creek are we going to have to wait even longer for bus stops yes we were frustrated the council unanimously rejected the application yes we couldn't understand residents argue the decision made Monday night it's discrimination there's always that kind of thing like should you just cut your losses and move on to another important issue and it was like uh for me it was no battle over more RTA bus stops in beer Creek is far from overp leaders for equality and and greater Dayton also known as lead say the bus stop is about improving lives can't discriminate from those who are seeking jobs or seeking Healthcare uh who are seeking to expand just to live lead says it's not about the bus stop it's really about the human beings there are jobs here people want to get to those jobs that's all we want to do I think it's a death Trum I did know something about how to take the the the issue and make it public they have a right we believe they have a right and put on pressure I think we ought to be very straightforward about this things that would be focused and hard-hitting they don't want the people who ride those buses in their Community we strategize understanding that we needed to regroup so I showed up for the committee and we got together to figure out figure out a new strategy well let we need to go take this higher we need to expose this more and there we were sitting around this table saying well what are we going to do and what are we going to call this so we did on we did letter writing campaigns to local State national government how about that line from go down Moses we make phone calls we flooded phone lines to state senators we uh did interviews with anybody that would listen to us I mean we did everything possible to make sure that this issue didn't die tell old Pharaoh let my people go let the people ride and that is what the group became we began to design of chaos what would be a public campaign so who's going to be the voices if we really want these this action to happen leave speak up justice sometimes you just have to get tough [Music] lead had made a request to the city of Beaver Creek to do kind of a parade over the bridge imagine the human bus a group of 50 people walking walking across Colonel Glenn Highway across 675 from the last bus stop to the Fairfield Mall and the response was given to them that it was not safe to do that and I said well gee did you get that in writing from the city because that's the whole point point of what we've been talking about for 4 years whether it rained or whether it shine on Saturday on Sunday men women black and white Multicultural people joining hands with us holding signs of pickets one of my favorite signs that came out of this demonstration [Music] was we are those people there was a little boy Caucasian boy and his mother and father the little boy told his mother I want to stand with him and he grabbed me by the hand and we stood there with our sign and I'm sorry for getting choked up but this little boy uh was as proud as he could be waving his sign shouting let the people [Music] ride in that campaign we attracted the attention of the lawyers from Abel meeting the civil rights attorneys that was probably the greatest Gods say that we've had the lawyers called us says okay this is a civil rights issue we think you have a case there really were some things in the law that we might be able to work with that could add something to the overall campaign We Came Upon title six of the Civil Rights Act you know which says that if you're accepting Federal benefits you're not discriminating against folks based upon race or national urgin I was very surprised that they came up with that reason they can't do that that's not why we decided it I didn't think they had cause we're not claiming and we didn't try to show that there was a discriminatory intent that's really hard to show well in first place there was never a title six uh even considered never ever was that discussed at all what we claimed and what we showed was that there was a disperate impact in other words it's a way of show of proving discrimination when you don't have over statements of intent Beaver Creek is 3% africanamerican the city of Dayton where that the bus that they wanted to run there um comes from is more than 40% African-American More than 70% of the Riders on the RTA buses are minorities um so the statistics make it very clear that if you bar buses from your community you're going to have a disperate impact on minorities and so uh so they were justified in filing the way they did by seeking relief from disperate Impact really what you're doing is you're taking into consideration the historical context within which something exists the way cities are built the way schools are built there is an there is an Institutional side to racism all over the country so there's a history that resulted in African-Americans living on the west side of Dayton uh and being unable to move out of the Westside Daye for a really long time if you take the benefits and if you take the Privileges you can't just say you can't come in even if you that wasn't there's no overt reason why you can't move out anymore that's the reality and we need to be able to recognize that in our law so if you have rules that say it's going to be hard to get from West Dayton to where the jobs are maybe even if there's no intent it has a disperate impact because of the history of Housing and Development and Etc because otherwise we have no ability to overcome our history [Music] [Music] the complaint was actually sent to us in August I began my federal tenure in September of 2011 and it was one of the things that I inherited when I walked in my office a pile of paper and one of those papers was this complaint against Beaver Creek the approach that the attorneys at Abel law took going to Federal Highway was brilliant the Federal Highway Administration has created to develop a nationwide um highway system our mission is to provide funding and Fin and financial and Technical Support to State Transportation agencies currently we have an annual budget of about $40 billion to develop and maintain our network of roads and bridg throughout the country Beaver Creek was developed on the Dole I don't think they want to admit that but they got a lot of money and we did our research and discovered that money that we provide to um the Ohio Department of Transportation actually filters down to um Beaver Creek's Department of Public Works um it wasn't clear why they had determined not to have any types of bus stops intersecting this community so I immediately dispatched an investigator to um go to Beaver Creek and to uh meet with the complainants and to um do a thorough investigation to determine the merits of that um um issue that complaint Warren Whitlock our associate administrator for the the office of civil rights uh determined that he wanted to have the investigation conducted out of our headquarters office out of the office of civil rights we talk about civil rights from the standpoint of people being compliant and uh doing the right thing at the end of the day you know we want entities we want municipalities to do the right thing our ability as Federal Highway if we were to determine that the process had a discriminatory impact we would then request the city go back and redo it in a non-discriminatory manner if there are entities that are you know reluctant to doing the right thing should we find a violation we have the hammer of withholding federal funds I scheduled the on-site visit for early April of 2012 so they brought a team basically to our community and did I'd say an exhaustive investigation talking to every group especially the impacted parties they spent a great deal of time here at RTA and then with representatives of the city as well based on those conversations it wasn't very difficult to determine that these people had a legitimate issue and we H that the agency would would address it our lawyer said well what do you want to do what do you want to do with them and we said we want to take him on a ride we want to take them on the route [Music] when I arrived initially they took me from the end of from the Wright State University to Pentagon Boulevard across um the uh the overpass across I 675 and where they had wanted the three stops then later that evening they held an open Forum the investigators showed up at College Hill Church uh in Northwest dayon where we had hearings and people got up and gave their testimony and it was packed um of course the media any amount of the media was there civil rights leaders community members and RTA bus riders joined forces to speak their pieace in front of a civil rights investigator from the Federal Highway Administration he's here to determine if the Beaver Creek city council violated civil rights um there were 250 people there who who got up and and could say from their own life and from their own frustration what it meant that they couldn't have a safe bus ride people should not have to turn down any job especially in these hard Economic Times because we do not have the means to go to and from work so that was very helpful uh to give me an understanding where persons who didn't have cars of their own transportation of their own as to what they were facing one of Lester frle Associates said you know um we don't we're running out of time run out of time and it was funny cuz he just sat back and he looked at them said I want to hear everybody my role as the investigator my role was to establish the facts so I asked each of the council members and the mayor and vice mayor what did you base your decision on documentation information what informed your decision to vote as you did on the application here are how my bosses the people I report to the citizens citizens of Beaver Creek have asked me to vote the transcript and the videos had shown them to speak to this informal survey they had conducted of the citizens the residents of the city of Beaver Creek when I conducted the interviews knowing that I then asked them the basis for their their decision John p no John R no John Indiana no 82% of our citizens have stated in surveys that they did not want the RTA and when I wasn't hearing the informal survey I brought it up and it's not 50/50 it's 82% you know I read the transcript I I looked at the videos and I noticed that uh that you had indicated that the the survey was very important Linda no no Lisa no and the the members indicated that either it had no additional weights Michael B no Michael S no or did not weigh at all in their decision so that is the deciding factor for me is what do our citizens want and yet on the video they've said it in the survey and in the transcript they've said it in the letters that I've receiv received it was very evident that they were speaking to this survey as the public is speaking out and they're against it and so therefore we're against it and so I have to look at our our constituents that put me in this office at this point I'm sighting with our citizens thank you mayor one of the major themes I heard from all the council members including the mayor and vice mayor when I interviewed them was they didn't get ridership information by the Regional Transit Authority I've asked for a writers ship study I've asked for some public um safety studies and I don't have those I haven't seen any estimates or even a wild guesstimate as to how many people they're going to transport from mcgomery County to Green County and so it's difficult to make any kind of good decision without data um so that's my position so I showed them the letter from the RTA and I showed them the answer about 75 to 105 uh persons uh per day they said they had not seen that the second meeting after the second meeting is when the uh city council with mayor and vice mayor requested numerous additional items that the RTA needed to address before the the city council would even entertain voting for it there are some significant design requirements that we haven't addressed to this point it was evident that they were that the city was attempting to add as much as they could and hopefully the RTA would you know go away the last thing he did before he left the city and went back to Washington was to get on foot and walk the route so I then took a disposable camera and walked the overpass the overpass itself is not built for pedestrian access there are no sidewalks there are no there are no striping it's built for just Vehicles period And while I was going and coming back there were at least three people who walked it uh at that time and uh and I I took a number of pictures which which were then used as uh part of the report and then they just you know they kind of went back to DC and worked on this for a while we didn't hear from them for months we we went through all the Alternatives we went through every possible perspective that the city council could have designed uh we looked around the country to determine if there had ever been a violation of title 6 and what the grounds and the basis were for those they didn't really have a track record of dealing with these kind of uh complaints so there was no way of knowing how they would deal with this we did not have an internal precedent on which to stand we didn't expect a lot the first question that came back to me from my chief counsel was Warren this is your decision how do you want to proceed and I said I had to think about it you know because there are you know Federal Highway is not a compliance organization Federal Highway as I mentioned you know our job is to help fund and maintain roads and bridges with these civil rights offices this is a really important aspect of our work so I recognized that this was going to take us in a different direction so I said look there's no other alternative but I'm getting emotional it's tough you know there's no other can we stop we did some follow-ups to the Highway Administration saying how far out is this answer when is this answer coming back and we got some information well it's still pending well we know it's pending but how close the pending for or against please don't forget us because the weather's going to get cold again and we still don't have buses we found out that people were predicting that we wouldn't be able to fix it that we're not going to be successful on this [Music] [Music] issue I was sitting in this building with a meeting of the Committees of my board and I had my iPad up and I saw boom there's a email from Lester fle at dot.gov I said oh my God it could be the answer so from there um it was secretary L Hood's concurrence with our administrator's decision that we go forward with a letter of of of non-compliance in title six so we made the announcement right there in the meeting uh you know that the the day had been one we were really pleased when the letter of finding came out and it was as thorough and well thought out as it was and that the the uh the mandate to Beaver Creek was as clear as it was because this was the first time in federal highways history that we had taken a title 6 complaint and issued a letter of [Music] non-compliance our Law Firm was retained to evaluate the city's legal options in light of the uh Federal Highway administration's letter of finding um my recommendation as the council knows is that you do approve the bus stops and the resolution before you this evening in light of reality of dealing with where we are now which is a finding by the Federal Highway Administration the withdrawal of federal or state highway funding that is expressly mentioned in the letter of finding um potential references to the Department of Justice for further investigations or civil litigation uh the possibility of heightened oversight by uh state or federal bodies of the city I just thought it was important to make those points in the context of the city's obligation to meet the deadline set by the federal government in this in this case of course Beaver Creek pushed back um wasn't happy but that's to be expected sometimes we find that there is reality that gets in the way 10 million or so million dollars a year from the uh Federal Highway unless we want something uh catastrophic to happen in our city with our finances that we don't have a lot of choices here the Golden Rule comes into effect he has a gold makes the rules you know you wish that in approving it they would have acknowledged you know the problem with their prior process and prior result and and indicated that they'd learned some stuff that kind of stuff seldom happens having said that um it's now time for a vote council member Lal yes council member Upton yes council member Wallace No vice mayor Petra yes council member Hadley no council member Jarvis yes mayor Gan BR yes okay city manager report from that moment forward we started to plan how can we move to implement the stops uh our goal was we wanted to start service immediately if we could January I think it was January 12th of 2014 is when they started the bus service on a Sunday morning or bright and early um the executive director drove the first bus uh and they said well you know it's going to be first trip on a Sunday morning I said who cares uh after four years of this I would love to get up at 4:00 in the morning on Sunday and go do this got up Sunday morning and it was very emotional everybody at RTA wanted to be a part of it everybody did they had a special bus done and so many people showed up uh so they were lined up in the bus garage I said well well let's get going we got we've got to get out of here and then the lights went out and the engine started and the bus began to move I don't know there's a sense of unreality like is this really happening we're in a bus and we're going to go over 675 so we hit that bridge I don't know who started it but that bus just exploded I looked up in my mirror people were back there singing song and chance and laughing and the singing people are just elated and the bus would have to come up up up and we were on the overpass and somewhere off there in the distance what are those lights is that the mall is that the mall yes that's a mall and we were going in we we were really here and we really came on a bus and we got here we got here safely it was an emotional moment for everybody on the bus uh and certainly for me the most emotional bus drive I've ever had in my life uh and perhaps the most enjoyable it was a great day it was a great day it was a great ride who would have thought in all the working and the fantasizing and whatever you just never thought it would be this big and it was huge I hope we didn't frighten the guy who was getting a bus ride you know to work I mean it's really cold outside and it's a it's a 1.1 hike from the the bus stop down there to here so I mean it means a lot I work here about 6 days a week so it means a lot that I don't have to walk to and from that other bus stop but for the rest of us it was like can you believe this I really didn't know there was it was this much support behind it until this morning when I got on the bus I was actually going to work it was nice to see positive people doing positive things people saw that happen and people thought that's great look at that man people are actually winning if you get a group like Lee a small determined group like Margaret mean said who wants to work hard and fight hard on an issue they can overcome some pretty significant odds and Achieve something significant and important that's a great lesson I mean municipalities around the country have been calling our division officers asking them what they need to do to um be in compliance with title 6 I would venture to say 80 to 90% of federal recipients do not understand their responsibilities under title 6 and our job is to help them see what the right thing is to do I have no interest at all in judging them as individuals I objected to it being built it got built the decision they made initially was a very bad decision so uh and I've not been on the winning side of a lot of things things that I've voted on I mean people are seldom as bad as we think they are or as good as we think they are people are complex and that's okay to the extent some of their ideas that it was going to bring Crime to the community uh they're now learning that it doesn't follow from bringing buses I mean I don't think anybody should feel bad about it being there and hopefully the entire Community is learning something from this we're seeing all these Supreme Court decisions knocking down the Voting Rights Act impacting other civil rights rules that are based upon the idea that somehow we're in a post racial discrimination world and that's not true cuz for me through this whole thing I never lost the picture in my mind of that little pregnant woman in her I knew minimum wage job trying to help her family keep their family afloat she deserved a safe ride to work and I wanted that ride [Music] [Music] a young young man uh looking for some extra money and started driving a school bus uh for additional money in Omaha Nebraska back uh 38 years ago so what I didn't realize at first was the reason they were hiring was they were about to embark on a program of desegregation in the Omaha Public Schools so I was involved in the very first trips of desegregation of the Omaha Public Schools as a bus driver [Music] um in the 1950s and 60s it was about whether or not you had the opportunity to choose your seat on the bus and today it's really about whether or not the bus is going to come to your neighborhood and whether or not the bus will take you where you need to go essential places like workin afid truth okay like this one in Beaver Creek are critical to lift up for at least three reasons one it allows other communities that may be victimized by policies that have a desparate impact to be aware of their legal options two it might incentivize the federal government to step in in other areas where they have not in the past and to be as aggressive and forthright as we've seen the Department of Transportation federal highways Administration be in this situation and their findings three it helps to educate and inform local and state governments and other recipients of Federal Aid of their obligations under civil rights laws in that they cannot have policies that are neutral on their face but disproportionately harm certain [Music] communities we work with our state and our local Partners to ensure Public Safety to work out any issues that might arise and it's it's actually very productive and very positive from time to time though there is a role for the federal government to step in and correct perceived wrongs and that is something that was highly was demonstrated uh quite strikingly during the Civil Rights era when the federal government played a huge role in in correcting racial disparities the the need for that uh has diminished I would like to say since the 1960s but it's still there and sometimes they're they're blatant violations sometimes they're not so blatant violations but we are the back stop the federal government is the back stop to protect civil rights and understandably local governments and and individuals may not like the federal government coming in but that's our duty under the laws and that's something that we will continue to do as necessary [Music] there will come a time when RTA is going to ask for more stops because they can't be limited to colel gland Highway