The government shutdown is pushing some of the nation’s small, midsize and rural transit systems to an existential crisis, prompting bus agencies to scale back service, prepare for furloughs or even contemplate closing their doors entirely.
The transit authority in Wilmington, N.C., an area still suffering financially from last year’s Hurricane Florence, is considering whether to shut down all bus and shuttle service at the end of February if its monthly payments from the Federal Transit Administration don’t resume. An agency serving most of Missouri started cutting service hours Tuesday. One transit nonprofit in Arizona may have to cease operating for good.
Story Continued Below
The trauma for crucial transportation lifelines in rural or small-town America, including in states President Donald Trump won in 2016, underscores the damage the 34-day shutdown is inflicting hundreds or thousands of miles from Washington, D.C. While the loss of federal dollars is hitting transit systems large and small, including those inside the Beltway, the most vulnerable agencies are those that don’t get significant state support. And their riders are primarily low-income seniors, people with disabilities and veterans.
“We are certainly anxious, and that anxiety has been building up since Dec. 22 when the shutdown began,” said Albert Eby, executive director of the Cape Fear Public Transportation Authority in North Carolina, which serves about 1.4 million riders annually. “I’ll go to a meeting one week and say I’m confident that the shutdown is nearing an end. This week I’ve stopped saying that.”
Morning Transportation newsletter
A daily speed read on transportation and infrastructure — in your inbox.
Eby’s transit agency, which runs 16 bus routes and a downtown shuttle in and around Wilmington, has gone without its normal monthly $250,000 federal reimbursement — about a quarter of its revenues — since Dec. 18. It’s also still awaiting reimbursement for some expenses from the recovery effort from September's hurricane.
Its board will consider a plan Thursday to shut down service next month, absent a cash infusion. Eby said closing the whole system is simpler than trying to choose which routes to shutter, which would run the risk of provoking a civil rights or Americans with Disabilities Act complaint depending on what service got priority over others.
Some expenses — such as insurance premiums and utility bills — will continue even if the agency’s entire workforce is furloughed. And a downtown transit center that FTA has agreed to fund, now in the middle of construction, isn't receiving reimbursements because “the employees who release funding through the electronic clearinghouse have been furloughed," Eby said.
Though rural areas are more vulnerable, urban areas are also struggling. The Washington, D.C., transit system is losing $400,000 a day in fares and revenues due to the shutdown. Some New Jersey officials blame the shutdown for their inability to restore service on some transit lines that it had closed to install a federally mandated safety technology called positive train control before the end of last year.
In Missouri, Operating Above the Standard, a transit agency that serves almost exclusively seniors and people with disabilities throughout the state, started reducing services Tuesday even though it still has some reserve funding.
“We could blow through all of our emergency funds very quickly,” OATS Executive Director Dorothy Yeager said. “We are reducing services at this time so we can stretch those dollars out, because I don’t know how long this is going to last.”
Yeager said she would probably have to make much deeper cuts in service by the end of the month if the shutdown doesn’t end soon. Federal grants make up 35 percent of OATS’ operating budget.
Bruce Morrow, the transportation manager for Cottonwood, Ariz., is drawing up a plan to reduce more than half of his agency's service, which operates four bus lines and paratransit service southwest of Flagstaff, with about 100,000 riders annually. The agency is waiting on $500,000 of reimbursements from FTA.
white house
'This is her prerogative': Trump gives in to Pelosi on State of the Union
Morrow said he doesn’t blame Trump, who won the county with a 31-point margin, for the shutdown. He said Trump has “conceded some of his goals and made a viable compromise with the House, and so far they’re not playing. So who do you hold responsible?”
Whoever deserves blame for the shutdown, Morrow is responsible for figuring out a way to cut service before the city stops propping it up at the end of February, “which would be quite painful for everybody.”
Rather than eliminate entire routes, Morrow said he’d opt for narrowing running times. But if drivers start to quit, staffing backup would present a major problem, considering drivers need to pass a drug test and an extensive background check and have commercial licenses, he said.
Some agencies, if they shut their doors, may never reopen.
Cottonwood’s neighbor, Yavapai Regional Transit, is a nonprofit agency serving seniors, people with disabilities and veterans with flexible-route transit that will pick them up at their door as long as it’s within a mile of a regular bus route. It hasn't gotten a federal reimbursement since November. It's paying for operations out of its bank account.
“If we do get down to the point, we are out of business,” said Yavapai Regional Transit Board Chairman Ron Romley. “We’re done. Anytime we have to pull a route, or if we don’t do something like we normally do, we lose a lot of customers, and it takes a long time to try and get them back.
“If this continues on for very much longer, we are probably going to be in that situation,” he added. “We’ve got to make a decision.”
Transit agencies are accustomed to continuing resolutions and short lapses in federal funding. FTA normally waits until it has four or five months of funding before it begins to distribute it to states and transit agencies. But agency heads worry that even if a deal were reached today, it could take months to process all the funding requests from all 50 states that have languished for a month.
Government Shutdown
Senate set to reject government funding plan it once embraced
Between October and December, FTA was still distributing some leftover funds from fiscal 2018 and prior years, but no fiscal 2019 funds have been obligated yet, nearly four months into the fiscal year.
In California, Monterey-Salinas Transit's contingency plan for funding lapses would reduce service levels to what it can provide just from state and local funding sources.
“I can’t force bus drivers to come to work without pay,” Monterey-Salinas Transit's general manager and CEO Carl Sedoryk said.
Like Cape Fear, Monterey-Salinas is embarking on a $10 million bus facility in rural King City, a collaboration between FTA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But it can’t start bidding it out before USDA reviews the contracts and documents, and “the one person in the state that is working on that for us at USDA has not been at work for a month.”
Sedoryk also worries about being able to pay the vendor for the trolley replica buses ordered to replace 14-year-old vehicles that run in the historic Cannery Row area.
“It’s a mess,” Sedoryk said. “That’s all I can say. I wish I could see a way forward.”
