Our elected officials aren’t doing much to hold PennDOT accountable
It’s pretty clear that PennDOT is trying to manipulate the results of their online survey to claim that there’s broad community support for their highway widening plans for I-95 in South Philly. I wanted to find out if, after having access to the raw survey data showing this, our elected officials were going to do anything about it.
I submitted a Right-to-Know Law request for correspondence between PennDOT and the following: State Rep. Fiedler, Rep. Regina Young, Councilmember Squilla, Sen. Nikil Saval, Rep. Amen Brown, Rep. Ben Waxman, Rep. Jordan Harris, Rep. Rick Krajewski (my rep! I am actually a big fan, he came to a Philly Bike Action ride and I also see him just walking around the neighborhood pretty often!), Rep Joanna McClinton, and Rep. Joseph Hohensten.
PennDOT didn’t have any correspondence with Brown, Waxman, Harris, Krajewski, McClinton, or Hohensten.
But there was correspondence with the others!
I don’t think my prior RTK request captured this email (or maybe I just missed it - I think my baby was teething and I was deliriously sleep deprived when I got the last batch lol). Back in January, Rep. Fiedler actually wrote to PennDOT to ask what’s up with I-95:
And PennDOT gave a canned response about current design standards:
PennDOT revised their slides and sent it to a bunch of reps on August 9th:
And Mark Squilla thanked PennDot. This man is a polite and prolific emailer.
The last major thing is that PennDOT sent this weird update email about May/June 2024 community outreach to a handful of reps, but the emails are dated 9/3/24.
And that’s basically it. One strongly worded e-mail from Rep. Fiedler, and basically nothing from anyone else.
Here’s the full set of documents I received (they sent it in two PDFs which I combined into one to post here):