Metro News Release
For immediate release: December 7, 2009
Metro corrects and comments on Washington Post story titled "Metro to cut official who oversaw safety"
Article makes false claim that Metro official was dismissed for safety reasons and repeats false claim that safety oversight officials were barred from track access
The Washington Post’s story, “Metro to cut official who oversaw safety,” (December 4, 2009) falsely implied that the thinking behind the elimination of the chief administration officer on Metro’s executive leadership team was related to safety, when it was not.
In a letter to the editor that appeared in today’s Washington Post, “Economics is driving Metro’s cut” (December 7), Metro General Manager John Catoe wrote, “I am profoundly disappointed in the Post’s coverage . . . The story portrayed the thinking behind the elimination of the chief administration officer on Metro’s executive leadership team as something far different from the reason I took the action. It had no relationship to any safety issue. It has everything to do with our budget shortfall. The reporter’s writing maligned the excellent record of service that Emeka Moneme has built as an employee of Metro and of the District of Columbia. There is one reason that the chief administrative officer position will be cut, and that reason is the grim economic condition the region and Metro are in,” he wrote.
The Post story also made a false claim that Metro safety officials “barred independent monitors from live tracks.” Metro officials have stated repeatedly to Post reporters that it was not preventing members of the Tri-State Oversight Committee from doing its work on the tracks rather safety officials were trying to do so in the safest way possible.
Tri-State Oversight Committee Chair Eric Madison confirmed to reporters last week that his group was never prevented from conducting its safety inspections. “We want to make it clear,” Madison told a group of reporters, including WTOP radio (http://www.wtop.com/?sid=1828270&nid=25) , “Metro wasn’t barring us from the tracks. The issue was how we access the tracks. Metro’s concern was that we access the tracks as safely as possible. And we wanted to make sure that we were in compliance with their rules as well.”
Metro has issued a line-by-line list of corrections, clarifications and commentary on the article as well as to the article “Metro barred safety checks on tracks, data show” (November 9, 2009) on the same subject, which falsely stated that Metro’s Chief Safety Officer Alexa Dupigny-Samuels was preventing TOC members from accessing the tracks when in fact she was working on how to allow TOC members to do their jobs safely. The corrections are posted online at http://www.wmata.com/about_metro/clarifications.cfm.
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News release issued at 4:58 pm, December 7, 2009.