Butler County Veterans Service Commission Executive Director Mike Farmer said they canceled the contract with Community First Solutions’ Fleet program late last year and entered into a four-month $99,999 contract with BCRTA to take veterans to their medical appointments in Cincinnati.
Community First proposed some contract revisions that would impact service to veterans due to the coronavirus.
“It is our intent to provide as many of the trips as possible if you agree to the amendments proposed. Given the COVID vaccine mandate and current national staffing challenges, we must continue to be transparent about our resources,” Amy B. Wylie, vice president of Community Based Services wrote to Farmer. “No one could predict the pandemic impact, and unfortunately there is no way to know how quickly or easily we can overcome the challenges the pandemic has created.”
They essentially wanted the ability to cancel scheduled appointments with very little notice and BCVSC Board President Chuck Weber said that was unacceptable, “Basically what they did was, we’re going to be your carrier but we’re not obligated to be your carrier if certain circumstances arise.”
The Vet Board was already contracting with BCRTA for local trips and medical visits at the Dayton VA Medical Center, so all that was necessary was to amend the current contract. BCRTA is having its own problems with a severe driver shortage but Farmer said they are getting the job done for veterans.
“What we’ve done under the emergency contract is allowed BCRTA the flexibility to kind of group like appointments and like times together and gather everybody up and then drive the hour to Cincinnati, drop them off and then have a common pick up time,” Farmer said. “So it’s less of a one-on-one ration and more of a group, however the feedback we’ve gotten from veterans is that they love it.”
Before the emergency agreement, the vet board’s three-year contract with BCRTA was $798,000 and $1.15 million with Fleet. The vet board split the transportation contract several years ago because of issues they were having when Universal Transportation Systems had the whole contract.
Farmer has put the Cincinnati leg of the contract out for bid and the winner will be awarded a one-year contract to April 2023. Then they will rebid the entire the three-year deal. He said they spent $257,269 in 2020 for around eight months of the transportation contracts and $321,503 last year.
Former vet board executive director Caroline Dineen said at the time veterans were having to wait — in some cases for hours — for UTS drivers to collect them from appointments in Cincinnati. She said drivers were also late picking people up so they miss their appointments and there are other issues. She said she thought UTS was overextended.
Farmer said they did the math and Fleet was only making on average about three trips a day. BCRTA Executive Director Matt Dutkevicz said the vet board’s willingness to be flexible and take fewer trips by consolidating riders allowed them to pick up the extra trips.
The BCRTA held a job fair on Tuesday and Dutkevicz was hoping to hire 40 people, only eight potential employees showed up. He said he wasn’t certain how many the human resources department ended up hiring.
The board also held a public hearing to get feedback on possibly issuing a temporary suspension of the R-2 route between Oxford and Middletown, the R-4 bus that runs from Hamilton to Tri County and amending the R-6 route that virtually mirrors the R-4 route.
Dutkevicz said they didn’t get as many comments as when they proposed and then later dropped the route suspension idea last fall, but the ones they got all were against it. Regardless, he said he will recommend the board suspend the routes at their meeting on Wednesday.
“There are going to be a couple people that are impacted,” Dutkevicz said. “It’s a tough decision, we don’t like to take anything away but we’ll see what the board says and get some direction there but we just don’t have enough people to go around.”
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