Opinion: County Should Keep Bus Routes Running
Tuesday, October 1, 2013 at 3:39PM It is no secret that we are in a tight budget year for Anderson County and county council has shown caution committing new funds to any project. But there are rare occasions when serving the greater good requires extraordinary creativity to invest in our citizens and our future.
The Clemson Area Transit bus, which runs from the city of Anderson to Clemson, Pendleton and Central, with other stops along the way, provides transportation primarily to students attending Tri-County Technical College, Clemson University and Southern Wesleyan University is one such project. The bus, which serves 150,000 riders each year, will run out of the $180,000 annual grant money required to service the route at the end of the 2013-2014 budget year ending in June. That leaves a lot of hard working people and students attending college without transportation to get to work or to do the work required to better their exsistence through education.
The Homeland Park bus route. which served nearly 40,000 passengers last year, will also lose their federal funding of almost $170,000 at the end of the budget year. This bus also offers transportation to so many citizens who depend on it to get to their jobs, medical appointments and other places out of reach without it.
Thus, Anderson County Council has been charged with coming up with the funds to keep those buses running beginning in January. The options are not pretty. The money will have to either come from other county budgets, most of which are already stretched thin, new taxes, bus fares or some other creative source of funding no one has been able to nail down as of today.
Council needs to remember history and take a long-term approach to this situation. If the routes are shut down, it is very unlikely we will see them again.
Remember when the City of Anderson had a contract with Duke Power to run our city buses in perpetuity? Duke had signed an agreement to offer bus service across the city forever and were allowed to wriggle out of the deal by offering a paultry one-time payoff to the city. This remains one of the most short-sighted decisions in the history of our local government.
And while the current situation is not directly about a financial payoff, there is a payoff involved.
Even with all the research and statistics, there is really no way to know how many lives would be impacted by the discontinuation of the bus routes. Some would lose their jobs, others their only shot at higher education, and still others their ride to the doctor.
In a tight budget year, county is council wise to consider every reasonable option for finding funding for these bus routes, and they have been searching. But charging those who are using the buses to get to work or school is not a good option.
Reader Comments (1)
Why not charge a nominal fee - say $1.00 for a round trip? Sell advertising space on the bus. Approach Pendleton City Council for subsidy; Tri-County Tech, too.