Banquet

  Back in 2015, the Midlands Transit Riders Association (MTRA) was getting some notoriety.  As president of the association, I was interviewed for TV and newspapers.  We were the voice for the bus riders in Columbia.  We were also recognized by government bodies both locally and nationally.  Our Board of Directors made most of the decisions pertaining to the MTRA, except for some route designs that I did.  Some of our directors didn't like that I was making autonomous decisions, but it had to be done if there was a time constraint.

 Word got to me that one of our members, who was not on our Board, had reached out to the Secretary of the United States Department of Transportation inviting him to speak at a banquet honoring the MTRA and the Comet for their work to make better bus service for Columbia.  I saw the letter, which stated that there would be a banquet at the Columbia Convention Center.  The attendees would be from the Comet, the MTRA, mayors of the affected communities and other political figures.  There was just one problem.  The writer had not consulted with us or anyone else about this banquet.  I called the Convention Center and asked them if they had a banquet on their calendar.  They said no.  I talked to the public relations person at the Comet, and she said she didn't know anything about it.  So, I wrote to the Department of Transportation in Washington to ask Secretary Anthony Foxx not to come to the banquet.  He had been the Mayor of Charlotte before going to DC, so he would have known about Columbia.  

 The letter was an embarrassment to me and to the MTRA.  When I called around to places asking if there was going to be a banquet, I felt stupid for myself and for our association.  There was never going to be a banquet.  We were a non-profit and couldn't afford such a thing, even if we wanted to.  To this day, I don't know why the man wrote the letter and concocted a story about a banquet.  I guess he wanted to be important, like the rest of us were, in the community.  It hurt our credibility for a couple of weeks.  We passed it off as a joke, but it wasn't.