Cameron Appointed to New Commuter Council

Jim Cameron of Darien has been appointed as the first member of the reorganized Connecticut Commuter Council.

He says he hopes other veterans of the previous council will get appointed so the state doesn't lose their experience. Cameron was chairman of the Connecticut Metro-North Commuter Council for the past four years and served on that council for 18 years.

The new council, an ombudsman-like organization that speaks up for commuter interests, is designed to operate (on paper, at least) much the same way as the old one, although it will cover a future commuter line (New Haven to Springfield, starting in 2016) and the Shore Line East Railroad (east of New Haven).

In February, Gov. Dannel Malloy proposed a reorganization of the council that Cameron and others criticized. Cameron said it would have turned the board into public relations flaks for the state Department of Transportation. Among other things, the governor's proposal would have put the decision to name the chairman of the group in his hands.

State Rep. Gail Lavielle of Wilton, with the support of other legislators, proposed an alternative to the governor's plan, and the compromise which eventually became law expanded the purview of the council to new commuter lines, left the council to pick its own chairman, but ended the terms of all the council members.

"I think that was a very powerful endorsement by the Legislature that we had done a good job," Cameron said on Wednesday.

State Rep. Larry Cafero of Norwalk, Republican minority leader in the state House of Representatives, was one of the state officials with the ability to choose members of the new commission, and he picked Cameron (who is a Democrat).

Cameron said he hopes to be chairman of the new 15-member council and hopes plenty of members of the old council are picked. The governor appoints several members of the new board, as does the speaker of the House of Representatives, and other high-ranking state officials pick other members.

"I'm cautiously optimistic that the appointing authorities will recognize the great work of the Commuter Council over the past 25 years and appoint them over somebody new," he said.

Cameron is also a member of the Darien Representative Town Meeting and runs TV79, the town's government-access cable channel. A former journalist with NBC News, he now runs Cameron Communications Inc., a consulting firm advising clients on public relations and media strategies.