I almost fell off the treadmill while watching Emily Turner’s spectacular sweeps piece for Action News Jax spilling the tea on Jacksonville Transportation Authority’s scandalous attempt to boost NAVI ridership numbers while pretending not too.
Turner not only spilled the tea, homegirl shattered JTA’s porcelain pitcher down City Hall’s steps.
You’ll recall last month, after ANJ reported JTA allegedly “recruited” its own staff to bump up its embarrassing ridership numbers, I submitted a public records request, asking for clarification and any documents, emails, marketing, or incentives offered referring to the claim.
Six days later, JTA’s director of communications emailed back writing,
“The statement in your email is not accurate. Therefore, there are no documents to supply.”
Turns out…. it was, and they do. Oopsies.
Turner aired a full screen graphic of the internal email JTA passed around a month after launching NAVI – asking staff to ride during their shift with a SharePoint calendar invite to sign up.
Ya can’t make this stuff up folks.
ANJ also reported, despite JTA sending City Council members a document admitting “employee ridership numbers were included in their daily passenger count,” JTA still had the cojones to send Turner the following statement:
“At no time did the Jacksonville Transportation Authority (JTA) recruit employees to “boost ridership.” During peak hours, a limited number of JTA employees serve as NAVI ambassadors to help riders become familiar with the service and technology, and to gather feedback to inform future updates and enhancements.”
In other words – JTA didn’t inhale.
They simply shared NAVI’s numbers suck with a sad face emoji and included voluntold employees in ridership counts while telling Eye on Jacksonville they didn’t.
Por favor, manténganse alejados de las puertas Duval – this NAVI scandal is just now leaving the station.
