After MATA’s implosion, Mayor Paul Young smartly established a new MATA Board, while also asking what happened? At the new MATA Board’s first meeting on 10/22/24, signs of hope emerged, which will be discussed in the next section.

But meanwhile, The Boyzzz on the Council must be chuckling and laughing. Why? There has been no media coverage of the colossal 5 yr MATA City Council oversight botch that led to MATA’s implosion. Lack of public financial oversight is what happened. MATA is a $70M per year public transit agency that requires local oversight of federal, state, and local funds. But instead of overseeing the agency, all the City Council did for 5 yrs was rubberstamp a $30M annual MATA budget subsidy. Does anyone really believe that MATA is the only local agency not getting adequate public oversight? I sure hope not.

Anyway, as far as lacking oversight, in November 2023 following the annual $30M Council rubberstamp and fund disbursement, MATA came to the Council, for $5M more. The funds were a required capital contribution to a mostly federal $136M bus rapid transit (BRT) project locally branded, the Innovation Corridor. Under the Council Transportation Committee’s chaired leadership of Ford Canale, get this, there were no questions regarding the progress of the $136M BRT project.

Canale, who has an accounting background, never asked to see MATA’s current financials or for a report on the progress of the $136M public project. The fiscally liberal Canale also wants the City to contribute $6M to an Audubon golf clubhouse. So wasteful, detached from reality and off the mark, the elitists are for fiscally liberally spending money as if Memphis is a tennis, golf, and classic art town and not a music and BBQ city. But the former is another story.

Back to MATA. At the time of the $5M Council approval, the BRT project that Canale did not care to know about, was far behind schedule. BRT started in 2019 and was supposed to be operational in January 2026. Soon after the Council approval of the local $5M grant, it was announced at the former MATA Board meeting in February 2024 that BRT service would not be operational until 2031! What the hell happened? Clearly both Canale and the local press don’t care to know. Canale chaired the MATA Transportation Committee botch 2022-23 to only end in a MATA implosion in 2024. What an idiot !

Then it gets even worse. At the very next Council Budget Committee November 2023 meeting, chaired by Chase Carlisle, MATA comes back for a $20M loan. The financially fluent and fiscally liberal Carlisle did not even ask MATA to submit their current financials, while giving them a $20M bailout loan. Come to find out there had been no MATA monthly financials published in years. Again, what an idiot!

In both Canale and Carlisle’s case the “idiot” label is kind. Worse is the alternative of “willful neglect” that was so routinely associated with Wanda Halbert and regularly published in the media. Why no reporting on this Council apparent willful neglect?

So back to the $20M loan. Guess what? The $20M loan was approved by the City Council and, get ready, not paid back! Based on recent MATA financials, it appears that federal and state government have cut off funding to MATA. MATA is doomed without needed federal and state funding. Hopefully, the new MATA Board can find a way forward. So, what now?

Commissioner Emily Greer chaired the first new MATA Board meeting on 10/22/23. And Greer started the MATA Board meeting off right recognizing public comment at the beginning of the meeting. This is a healthy departure from the previous board that recognized public comment at the end of the meeting.

In this way, board members are afforded the opportunity to integrate the public’s concerns into their decision making at that board meeting. The City Council should follow this example and allow public comment at the beginning of their meetings, like the County Commission and the new MATA Board, before all items are considered to include consent agenda items.

Later in the meeting, when the board considered delaying service cuts, away from rubberstamping, Commissioner Jackson McNeil asked for the increased costs of delaying service cuts. With the assurance that the service cuts would not exceed an expected $5M supplemental grant from the City, the board approved the delay. Still unclear is the value of continuing many of the fixed routes that result in empty buses throughout the City. But McNeil’s inquiry helped to assure board members and the public that MATA could afford delaying cuts with expected help from the City. Not pictured, Commissioner Sandi Klink also initiated thoughtful discussion regarding increasing fare revenue.

Late in the meeting, Commissioner Anna McQuiston asked the MATA administration for a status report on all FOIA outstanding public information requests. That request on the record should result in a formal FOIA status report at the next MATA Board meeting. The MATA administration trumpets their transparency. But MATA has not been transparent, which leads to this publication of my outstanding MATA FOIAs. In fact, MATA would not provide a copy of their federal triennial reviews for 2019 and 2023. As a result, I instead obtained the reviews directly from the Federal Transit Administration.

Some of my FOIAs, while not directly answered by MATA have been answered with the MATA administration’s new practice of publishing current financials. These financials had to be dug out of the botched ERP financial system and produced for the first time in years by MATA’s new interim CFO Hamish Davidson. But outstanding FOIAs remain. Here is a listing:

Fixed Route Costs (3/9/24) – Concerns the data to calculate average unlinked trip costs associated with fixed routes

Fare Collection (5/14/24) – Concerns BRT fare collection RFP and fare collection generally.

AllWorld Contracts (5/14/24) – Concerns a request for AllWorld contracts and associated RFPs that total $5M+

MUNIS ERP System (6/29/24) – Concerns a request for licensing and implementation contracts and disbursements related to the MUNIS ERP system.

Transpro (8/19/24) – Concerns Transpro deliverables and disbursements with MATA since 2015

Board Training Materials and Restructuring Itemization (11/1/24) – This is a new request and not outstanding yet. The request concerns the new board training materials and itemization of the FY25 $7M restructuring budget.

The above FOIAs go to answer the public’s and Mayor Young’s question in what happened? Even if the press does not care to know, the Memphis public wants to know what happened to their public transit agency.

Check the Facts

City Council Transportation Committee (11/7/23)

City Council Budget Committee (11/21/23)

MATA Board Meeting (10/22/24)