El Paso Congressman Holds Town Hall Meetings on the Bus

When I campaigned for Congress I campaigned on accountability and transparency and said I would host monthly town hall meetings and quarterly veterans town hall meeting, both of which we’ve done. So we were around the office saying, these meetings are great, we get a lot of people at them and great questions, are reaching a lot of people, but what’s the next step? How can we do better?

We came up with the idea of taking the town hall to a population that typically do not show up to our regular town halls, and these are the customers on our public transit system. In El Paso, unlike some other communities, people who ride the bus do so, for the most part, because they can’t afford a car. Unlike DC or NYC or Boston, there are no parking issues, but it (public transit) is really an affordability issue. I felt like this was a population that was very underrepresented in our town halls and I wanted to have a chance to reach them.

During the portions of the route that were less busy I had a chance to sit down and introduce myself to each rider, ask them if there was anything we could help them with, and we got a lot of takers. There was a woman who is a US citizen, was born here, her mother is not, but her mother has been living here for 35 years. She wanted us to help with her mother’s citizen application process, which we are very happy to do.