Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
ORT looks at board changes to better urban area service
SPRINGDALE — Public transportation in Northwest Arkansas will focus on urban areas as it expands in coming years, and those who pay the bulk of the bills will have more say in what that looks like. Ozark Regional Transit, which is essentially the Northwest Arkansas Regional Transit Authority, is looking to change its board of directors to address an urban and rural divide in transit service as they begin to implement a new, 10-year regional public transportation development plan, Connect Northwest Arkansas. ORT officials say 96% of their ridership is in the urban areas, the four major cities. “Currently, the structure has a rural component of demand-response transit, and the plan that we have just finished up has a very urban focus because we’re planning for close to a million people,” said Tim Conklin, assistant director at the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission. He added that 98.5% of all transit funding in the region comes from five local entities. Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers, Bentonville and the University of Arkansas, along with state and federal government grants, pay for public transportation in the region to the tune of about $8 million a year. Washington County chips in about $23,000 a year and Benton County about $15,000. Carroll County and Berryville contribute about $21,000, together.
Madison County doesn’t contribute, yet they have the same voting weight on the board as other members.
The plan for Ozark Regional is expected to be considered Thursday and includes a recommendation to change the makeup of the board of directors to better represent the urban nature of public transportation and establish a separate committee to deal with rural transit issues.
Ozark Regional’s board currently consists of, at a minimum, the county judges and mayors within its service area boundaries, which include Benton, Carroll, Madison and Washington counties. Additional permanent members may include the mayors, or their designees, of the incorporated cities of all four counties.
Joel Gardner, transit executive director, said both needs are important but those paying for public transit should have more influence.
“We’ve got to make sure that the weighted voting, or the weighted interests, of the urbans is recognized based off of their financial capacity, but we also have to consider the rural special needs of that door-to-door service that is really only applicable in a rural setting,” he said.
Appointment to the board in the future would be reserved for the urban entities helping to pay for transit operations, based on their contributions. The total number of members would not exceed 10. One seat would be reserved for the area’s metropolitan planning organization, which is the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission.
THE ROADS LESS TRAVELED
A separate transit coordinating committee would be formed to discuss connecting rural to urban service and to look at ways to improve travel for those living and working in rural areas.
The rural committee would include one representative per county and a member from Regional Planning. The board representing urban transit would have a seat on the committee for coordination in areas that are transitioning from rural to urban.
Other members would include those who work with the elderly or disabled.
“It will be a group of people that are anything from county-level legislators all the way to what I’ll call community activists, people that work with seniors and people with disabilities, that sort of thing,” Gardner said. “The legislators at the county level always listen more to the people that are working in the industries than the transit guy.”
Gardner said having a committee dedicated to looking after the needs of rural transit users could help change the mind set of county officials who have often questioned the need to pay for public transit.
The committee would coordinate with Federal Transportation Administration programs but would also look to include services offered by or funded through entities like the Area Agency on Aging, hospitals, foundations, government or private entities.
The goals of the committee would be to improve efficiencies, eliminate duplication of services and to identify opportunities for cost sharing or centralization of resources.
The committee would make recommendations to the board. Rural service is always more expensive than urban service because of the economies of scale involved, Gardner said. Each rural trip, depending on the number of riders, can be twice as expensive as an urban trip, he said. A trip is defined as taking one person from point A to point B.
“We’re talking about how can we better serve the urban versus the rural because there is an urban versus rural want and need,” Gardner said. “Urban people want to be served with a lot of different places on high frequency. Rural wants to be served at my front door. Those two things can’t be decided on with a board that is either all heavily weighted urban or all heavily weighted rural.”
Conklin and Tim Simon with Alliance Transportation, the consulting firm that developed both a Connect Northwest Arkansas plan and the Ozark Regional strategic plan, say implementation of the long-term transit plan will require an increase in funding for public transit.
GOT A PLAN, NEED SOME CASH
in the urban areas of the region.
Ridership on Ozark Regional Transit and University of Arkansas Razorback Transit would be expected to increase from an average of 8,000 riders on a typical weekday when school is in session to eventually more than 33,000.
Individual plans within Connect Northwest Arkansas have been developed specifically for Ozark Regional and Razorback Transit to define their roles in a regional system. Individual plans have also been developed for each of the four major cities.
Work on Connect Northwest Arkansas was commissioned and paid for by Regional Planning. The plan and the study leading up to it cost $280,000.
Conklin and Simon have both said implementation of Connect Northwest Arkansas will require substantially more money than the region currently dedicates to public transportation.
“We’re talking about significantly increasing the amount of fixed-route transit in the urban area, in the four cities, obviously, that will take additional funding,” Conklin said.
The recommended way to to increase funding is a one-fourth-cent sales tax that would be levied within the four major cities that make up the urban area of Northwest Arkansas.
A sales tax would pay for buses, maintenance and operations. The tax increase would require voter approval in each of the cities, state law allows cities and counties to refer a public transit funding measure to voters. A sales tax would allow the cities to eventually eliminate their current contributions to public transit.
Fully carrying out the Connect Northwest Arkansas plan recommendations would take an estimated $42 million over three phases.
A proposed two-county, quarter-cent sales tax to fund Ozark Regional Transit failed to gain the needed support in 2012. Washington County voters defeated the proposal with 64% against. The Benton County Quorum Court refused to put the issue on the ballot.
The push for a sales tax will likely be delayed until after the covid-19 pandemic passes and the economy bounces back, according to Gardner.
“My goal and objective is going to be in 2022, we put on that full-court press to the four major cities for the quarter-cent sales tax. That’s when I would like to see it in front of the voters,” Gardner said “I think it’ll go through, no questions asked. I’ll never count any chicken before it’s hatchedb but I can say this: I have high, high hopes that it will go across all four cities. And then, the real work begins.”
Ron Wood can be reached by email at rwood@nwadg.com or on Twitter @NWARDW.