Heading in the wrong direction
By Colleen Cronin / ecoRI News staff
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| South County Routes impacted: Routes 66, 64, 14 reduced. Routes 65, 69 and 204 eliminated. |
EDITOR'S UPDATE: The RIPTA Board has postponed their vote on these proposed cuts after receiving a last-minute letter from Gov. McKee. McKee wants RIPTA to look at ways of raising more revenue (i.e. fare hikes) and other measures to deal with their $10 million deficit. - Will Collette
The Save RIPTA campaign, a coalition of riders, advocates,
labor representatives, and elected officials, held a press conference Monday in
Providence to urge the governor to plug a multimillion-dollar funding gap for
RIPTA.
“There’s still time to act,” said Liza Burkin, board
president of the Providence
Streets Coalition. Burkin said the state has the option of flexing funding
from other sources, such as the Department of Transportation, and a budget
surplus from the end of debt service payments to a bond.
Of the 67 routes the RIPTA operates, the agency is proposing
cuts or reductions in service to 58 lines.
Fourteen routes and two flex zones will be eliminated, and
dozens of other lines will see segments of their routes eliminated, weekend
service canceled, or diminished frequency, according to a RIPTA press release.
RIPTA CEO Chris Durand has said the agency will try to
reduce and modify routes without laying off employees, but pay cuts could be on
the table.
RIPTA is making cuts because of a $10 million budget deficit
for the coming fiscal year.
Rep. David Morales, D-Providence, questioned how cuts to service would help serve the state’s goals of bringing business to Rhode Island and making it a place that people want to live. Morales cited Hasbro’s potential move out of state, and the lack of public transit that has been used as a reason for the relocation.
“The bus is turning, but it’s turning the wrong way,” he
said. “Public transportation is not supplemental, it’s essential.”
Tommy Cute, a longtime RIPTA driver and the former president of the union that represents the authority’s workers, said the system will go from a statewide entity to a metro service as a result of the cuts.
He said 44% of the cuts are concentrated in Pawtucket, and
service to the western part of the state is getting crunched. Of the few lines
unaffected, service to Fall River will remain.
“Fall River is going to have better service than Pawtucket,”
Cute said.
Rhode Island AFL-CIO president Patrick Crowley said the cuts
amount to a tax increase on working-class residents, affecting the people who
will have to spend more on transportation or quit their jobs because they can’t
get to work under the new service constraints.
“Rhode Islanders are sick and tired of bearing the brunt of
budget shortfalls,” he said.
Crowley, a member of RIPTA’s board of directors, said he was
willing to work with anyone to try to fill in the budget difference.
“I think there are some places in the budget where we can be
creative,” Crowley said to reporters after the press conference.
When asked about the potential to use RIDOT funds for RIPTA,
Crowley said, “I haven’t spoken with the governor about it directly yet. I know
[RIDOT] director [Peter] Alviti wants to be able to have a system that is
complementary to his work at the Department of Transportation.
“He works for the governor, and I think we need to make our
case to the governor as strongly as possible that there are options in front of
us and let’s figure out the best on.”
Alviti, who is also chair of RIPTA’s board of directors,
told ecoRI News after the agency’s board meeting July 24, at which the proposed
cuts were announced via a press release, that he would be amenable to
potentially reallocating funding to RIPTA from RIDOT.
“Everything is on the table here,” he said. “Those are all
questions that will be entertained and vetted by [Durand] and his team.”
Durand said he is in frequent communication with Alviti
about the funding issue but has not spoken with the governor yet.
Immediately following the press conference, RIPTA staff held
the first public hearing on the cuts, at the Community of College of Rhode
Island’s Knight Campus in Warwick, where riders pleaded for their lines to be
spared.
About 50 people attended the public session, the first of several that
will be held through Aug. 6, culminating with a RIPTA board meeting Aug. 7 to
discuss the cuts. Several speakers said they had taken the day off from work to
attend the hearing and speak about their experiences.
Miles Brawn-Husband, a member of RIPTA’s Accessible Transportation
Advisory Commission and the Save RIPTA campaign, spoke about his
frustration with the severity of the cuts.
“I have been fighting tirelessly at the Statehouse, but
obviously it wasn’t enough,” Brawn-Husband said. “Unfortunately, I have to ask
all you fine people to do the same.”
Brawn-Husband, an advocate for people with disabilities, has
cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair himself.
Although the RIde paratransit service will not be directly
impacted by the cuts, two flex services that allow riders to call ahead for a
ride are on the line.
“All these cuts are deplorable,” he said. “I feel like they
are messing with people’s lives.”
Jeanelle Wheeler, a Providence resident who doesn’t have a
car, said she will be one of the riders impacted by the cuts.
Wheeler estimated she uses about 20 routes per month. When
service is dropped or delayed now, she often has to ask herself, “Can I afford
the Uber?” she said, “and usually I cannot.”
The cuts will stop her from seeing friends, getting to work,
and making it home safely at night.
“These budget cuts make me feel sick to my stomach,” she
said.
While advocates and riders spoke passionately about the
potential impacts of cuts after the July 24 board meeting, board members didn’t
discuss the cuts during the meeting.
The board held a nearly hour-long executive discussion,
citing collective bargaining and litigation, and investment of public funds as
cause for the session on their agenda. The minutes of the executive session were sealed,
but Alviti did say in a statement following the session that the board
discussed the cuts while the public was out of the room.
“Transit agencies around the country are facing a similar
kind of discussion that we’ve been having here today and will be having for the
next couple weeks,” Alviti said, citing lower ridership in many systems
post-pandemic.
“We, as an agency, need to adapt to the reality of those
changes,” he said. “At the same time we need to balance the need for ridership
and the people that we serve, and do the public good by allowing them to get
where they need to get.”
Members of the public were not aware of the cuts until the
tail end of the meeting, when RIPTA staff members handed out a list of the
proposed changes.
“This is way worse than we expected,” said Dylan Giles, a
Providence Streets Coalition operations manager, describing the cuts as
devastating.
Cedric Ye, a Providence high school student, attended the
July 24 board meeting and said that reduction of frequency on several routes
would impact his ability to make transfers and move around the state.
“Something like every 40 minutes to every 50 minutes doesn’t
seem like a big deal until you’re trying to transfer, where the 40 to 50
[minutes] can make you miss a bus and then it’s 50 minutes at Kennedy Plaza,”
Ye said. “As a driver, you get mad if it takes 10 minutes to get out of the
Providence Place Mall. Well, imagine spending 50 minutes at the Providence
Place Mall.”
Ye theorized that the reductions of service on lines that
take students to and from school would likely impact attendance come fall, when
the changes would take effect, something that could work against McKee’s goals
of reducing chronic absenteeism.
