METRO releasing results of external review

HOUSTON METRO officials felt a top-to-bottom external review was necessary even though it was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing in that document scandal.

The METRO board convened for its board meeting this morning and on the agenda was a presentation from law firm Fulbright and Jaworsky on whether METRO is in compliance with state laws.

The board called for the review after allegations of document shredding during the tenure of former METRO CEO Frank Wilson. The District Attorney's Office did its own investigation and found no criminal wrongdoing on the part of METRO or Wilson. However, the board called for the review in order to restore public trust.

The review looked at four areas: financial, ethical and business management, as well as meetings and records. First discussed was how METRO keeps records of its business meetings.

"At a committee level, a decision might well be worked out at that level, but there was no record of how the decision was done. So we couldn't go in and look at minutes of committee meetings. We couldn't think through was there a decision being made at this level that really was the decision the board was making. And that lack of transparency bothered us," said Neil Thomas of Fulbright and Jaworski Law Firm.

METRO says it has just finished training 100 employees in its new documents policy and it has identified hundreds of boxes of documents that its dealing with in order to store them properly.

The presentation is still going on, so stay with Eyewitness News and abc13.com for the latest on this story.