Officials discuss next steps for rural transit with Cottage Grove residents.
COTTAGE GROVE – On Monday afternoon, Lane Transit District representatives and members of the community gathered in the Shepherd Room at the community center in Cottage Grove for an information session for South Lane residents to learn about upcoming service changes.
Cosette Rees, LTD’s director of mobility services, led the meeting, alongside Eric Breitenstein, director of marketing, and LTD board member Heather Murphy.
They discussed changes to Lane Transit services, focusing on the Metro shuttle. The shuttle currently operates five days a week and will transition to a two-day pilot service in South Lane County. The new service will operate on Mondays and Wednesdays, with additional trips on Route 98 starting in September. These additional routes will extend services to Highway 36 between Mapleton and Deadwood, and Mohawk Valley, where services currently do not exist.
The two-year pilot aims to prove the concept for future funding. According to Rees, ridership helps determine the amount of federal funding programs receive.
“The federal funding that we receive is in part based on our ridership,” Rees said. “If we can get more riders, we’ll start getting more federal funding again.”
According to Breitenstein, there has been a nationwide trend of a decrease in ridership, with few agencies recovering to pre-pandemic levels.
In the crowd, city councilors Dana Merryday and Jim Settlemeyer, executive director of Community Sharing, Mike Fleck, county commissioner Heather Buch, and community members advocating on behalf of folks involved at organizations like PeaceHealth, the senior center, Be Your Best, and Cottage Grove as a whole, voiced their concerns about impacts to citizens who utilize the transit service.
“One of the elementary school principals wanted me to just pass on the needs of some of the kids in school who have higher needs for primary care,” said Samantha Duncan, Be Your Best coordinator. “They might be in a special-ed program, and we don’t have the primary care providers here, so they have to go up to Riverbend or clinics up in Eugene. Losing that service will impact those families as well,” she said.
“One of the things that we’re out here listening for is so that we can go back to our state legislators and tell them we need more funding,” said Rees. “LTD is doing our best to serve our rural communities, and there’s just a limited amount of peanut butter to go across a very big piece of bread.”
Murphy and Merryday encouraged attendees to reach out to their legislators now, since they are not currently in a session, and let them know that rural transportation needs more funding.
“Let them know to get that transportation bill done, and consider the rural areas,” Merryday said.
“We’re going to do our best to continue to be responsive, to continue to provide those connections. We know that they’re very important,” Rees said. “We’re going to continue to look for funding.”
The Request for Proposal process for the Cottage Grove connector was also discussed, highlighting the need for a fair and consistent evaluation. Rees encouraged those who are curious about the procurement policy to look at the procurement page on LTD’s website. Since the new procurement process has started, officials are limited in what they can say.
