Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Mountain Rides dodges funding bullet

ITD commits to full federal funding for fiscal year 2015

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By TERRY SMITH
Express Staff Writer

Jason Miller

    Mountain Rides Transportation Authority intends to make only minor cuts to its bus services in Blaine County after hearing late last week from the Idaho Transportation Department that Mountain Rides will receive the federal funding it was originally counting on for fiscal year 2015.
    “Last week, they [ITD] told us that the operational funding is at the level they allocated last spring,” Mountain Rides Executive Director Jason Miller said Monday. “That is holding steady. I talked to them again and they said they didn’t see any change to that.”
    Prior to hearing from ITD on Thursday, Mountain Rides had been anticipating a cut in federal funding of up to $140,000 for fiscal year 2015. That amount would have represented 5.7 percent of the organization’s fiscal year 2014 operating budget of $2.44 million and would have led to significant service cuts, most likely on the organization’s most popular routes, the Blue Route and the Valley Route.
    The Blue Route provides free bus service in the Ketchum-Sun Valley area and the Valley Route provides paid-fare bus service between the Bellevue-Hailey area and the Ketchum-Sun Valley area.
    ITD, the state agency that distributes federal funding from the Federal Transit Administration, had told Mountain Rides and other regional public transportation systems earlier that cuts should be anticipated because of an error in ITD’s accounting of federal dollars.
    “I was surprised that they came back and said they were going to go back to the allocation [originally budgeted] in the spring,” Miller said. “In July, they said everyone was going to have to share the pain, so I don’t really know what happened.
    “At this point, the best information is that we have federal-funding fully funded for the year.”
    Miller said Mountain Rides will need to make minor service cuts worth about $21,000 because of inflationary costs. The organization had asked its funding partners, which includes local municipalities, Blaine County and Sun Valley Co., for a 2 percent increase for fiscal year 2015 but was unable to procure the extra contributions.
    The Mountain Rides board of directors is likely to approve a fiscal year 2015 budget later this month with operational revenues and proposed expenditures at about $2.5 million. Fiscal year 2015 starts on Oct. 1.
    Mountain Rides plans on $909,000 in federal funding for operations and about $1 million from its funding partners. The remainder of the operational funds comes mainly from bus and vanpool passenger fares, advertising revenues and charter bus services for special events.
Terry Smith: tsmith@mtexpress.com

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