The need is great . . . support, support, support! And yes, lets work on 10 ride passes or other options and Homeless Bus Passes.
This issue is that Larry Palm is asking for additional money to get more bus passes in the low-income rider program because they run out in the first week of the month.
PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Brenda Konkel – Says that everytime I tell someone about this program they ask “Can’t we get half price 10-ride passes?” Just wanted to throw that out there. It made me think that this number on the back here where it says it is going to reduce the adult 31-day pass revenue – I don’t think that is true because the majority of the people can’t afford those right now, they can barely afford the $27.50, the few times I have gone with people to go help get a bus pass the reason they can do it is because someone donated money for them to go do it – its not because they have the money and would be spending it one way or the other.
DISCUSSION
Larry Palm says that this was an item that he put in the 2013 budget and it is not his intent to be the only thing that solves transportation issues in the city of Madison, but like Jim O’Keefe (Community Development Director) said earlier about cold weather shelter and we need to start doing what is necessary now. The existing program goes quicker, he will bring the question to Chuck about if they can provide lower priced 10-ride passes, but that takes months because they want to set up everything in more detail and this took 30 days. Pass this, get some people in to a better place and then chip away on what we can do next for individuals that need our help.
Satya Rhodes-Conway thanks Palm for taking that discussion to Metro, but she thinks that we should look at being more flexible about what type of passes are available, she wasn’t on the committee that set that up so she doesn’t know if that was a subject of discussion or not, it would be worth revisiting that and see if there is a way to administratively adjust that or if it has to come back to us, but it seems like a worthwhile topic to consider.
Shiva Bidar-Sielaff says she was on that committee long ago and it wasn’t really addressed, the conversation from the get go was about monthly passes, so they didn’t really discuss other option than monthly passes. It might be worthwhile.
Joe Clausius notes that part of the resolution is that Chuck Kamp is going to bring a report back prior to our 2014 budget so the concerns that Alder Palm addressed before, lets try to meet this head on.
Palm says that we did make this more flexible by offering the 150 passes at the half month to allow people that didn’t make the first cut off only have to wait two weeks for the second cut off. And the second thing we did was expand it to anyone over the age of 18, previously it was only one per household and families don’t just have one scenario, one is making alot and one is making a little and we thought that would be useful. That is really why I wanted the report because Kamp didn’t really know how many bus passes were needed. People have to go to the outlet, they could be doing a tabulation of who asked and didn’t receive. And when we moved it from one per household to one per person we could have an avalanche of people, we just don’t know, so that is one of the reasons that we want . . . I think that his report will work on this program and we need to start another conversation about . . . currently there is already conversations happening about true homeless bus passes or tickets so the next question is there a bridge point, but that happens over time.
Motion carries.
