They're paying a cost for sitting in traffic, they're paying a cost for higher goods and services. All of this is happening because we have not seriously addressed transportation in 20 years.

As an organization we want to be very responsive to the needs of our members. When we heard from our members that they didn't get a chance to articulate [their concerns], we wanted to try to put in place a mechanism to allow them to do that.

A lot of our members expressed frustration with the fact they felt they didn't have a chance to speak at the breakfast.

If you say you're going to use funds for transportation, then you need to do that.

There are three proposals on the table and they have lots and lots of tools at their disposal. As intelligent individuals who have been elected by us -- and they asked for the job -- they ought to be able to reach a decision.

I think when you have situation where you cannot reliably know how long it's going to take to get to a certain place, or when you have businesses that are making the decision not to grow because of the state of transportation, or when you have families that are separated for such long hours because people are spending an hour-and-a-half to two hours to get to work, then I think you're in crisis.