BCRTA Chief Operating Officer Matt Dutkevicz said he expects there to be about 10,000 trips a year, and the plan is to start the buses rolling by March or April.
“It certainly has the capacity to provide probably 40,000 to 50,000 trips a year if the bus is full all the time,” he said. “Obviously, that’s not going to happen in the first year. It takes people two or three years to learn to ride a route, to adjust their schedules, it’s kind of a slow development.”
The total cost to run the route from 5 a.m. or 6 a.m. to midnight would be $289,101, BCRTA officials said. In addition to the county, BCRTA has asked the cities of Fairfield and Hamilton to tap their CDBG funds to help pay for the job shuttle. BCRTA is focusing the route around Hamilton and Fairfield because that is where some of the area’s key industrial parks are located.
County commissioners only have $1.1 million available for CDBG projects, and they will pare the requests down in January. Commissioner Cindy Carpenter said the county would find a way to fund the request.
“If we are working to get individuals employed and our business outreach finding those jobs, which will likely be for less skilled workers, may be in industrial that are growing around our growing communities of Fairfield Twp., Liberty Twp., they are going to need transportation,” she said. “A great many individuals list that as a barrier.”
Hamilton City Manager Joshua Smith said city officials are big backers of the new route.
“I absolutely support it,” Smith said. “We need to enhance our public transportation and get available workforce to the employers that need them.”
Fairfield City Manager Mark Wendling said the city’s CDBG funds for next year have already been committed, but that doesn’t mean they won’t come through with funding.
“At this point we are looking at other avenues we could fund them,” Wendling said. “They came in front of us during our grant funding cycle, and we decided it’s more an economic development project, and we need to look at it from that perspective.”
A few business owners who attended last week’s County Commission meeting implored commissioners to support the planned route. Lisa Schaffer, human resources manager at FinPan, Inc. in Hamilton, said the company lost five employees in one day last year because one of the employees was the carpool driver, and he died.
“There is no transportation into any of the industrial areas, the major employers aare within,” Schaffer said. “A rising tide floats all ships, and the great job that has been going on with economic development in our area is not supported in transportation. With the economy having been so bad, so many of our lower-economic employees and the employees we’re trying to fill labor positions with, lost their transportation.”
Dutkevicz said BCRTA has a $180,000 commitment from the Regional Transit Authority, and if the county, Hamilton and Fairfield come through, they will only have $34,000 unfunded. He said they have some other options, perhaps the Hamilton Community Foundation, or they could always reduce hours of operation.
ThyssenKrupp Bilstein of America, Inc., in Hamilton is one of the stops on the proposed route. James Bax, a project analyst with the company, said they have an attendance policy that requires their employees to show up consistently and on time, and the dearth of public transportation poses a problem.
“You see a lot more unemployed job seekers, and we think one of the causes of that is transportation,” he said. “You don’t have a car, well, you’ve got to get a job. Well, how are you going to get a job when you don’t have car? We have a cycle of poverty that we want to work to improve. At ThyssenKrupp Bilstein, we need people, we have about 60 open positions right now.”
An interactive map of the proposed new shuttle route can be seen at: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=z9S9kLgZOYgk.kHlY4qZPZU5k
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