Jerome Stocks has recently claimed he wants to be a leader in transportation as part of the evolution of transit in Encinitas and throughout the nation. Transportation is clearly a fiefdom for Stocks and his regional seats with SANDAG and NCTD take him away from his council duties on a regular basis.
Despite what his campaign messaging is, Stocks has demonstrated in the Encinitas City Council that his "leadership" is not interested in what the citizens of Encinitas have to say about how transportation should evolve for our community. And he is wont to share anything of the work with these regional boards beyond the most perfunctory announcements. As stated before, Leadership is mythical when nobody is allowed to know where things are headed. If the public is treated as followers alone, this is dictatorship.
When the widening of Interstate 5's EIR was being unveiled by Caltrans for public comment period in August of 2010, city council chambers were filled with speakers asking for this subject to be put on the agenda for discussion as our neighboring coastal communities were had already done. The majority, with Stocks articulating the facile opposition led the refusal.
Follow-up to this? A couple of months later, during the thick of the last election which uncovered Dallager's unethical behavior (with conflict of interest in a bank loan and in a council vote in favor of a guy who gave him a free kitchen), Judy Berlfein returned to the council to summarize the failures of the majority members despite more than a thousand public participants in the workshop process these council members refused to allow for public dialog.
Dalager is gone, but the pattern hasn't changed in the least. Public service, for Jerome Stocks, is a myth and evolving transit Stocks has promoted so far sounds a whole lot like the car-centric faux-public transit we've seen for half a century.
It is too bad that Jerome Stocks couldn't have directed California Department of Transportation to schedule a public meeting of this importance on a night other than a city council meeting. How influential is Stocks as a leader in transportation to direct transit evolution, or whatever?
