After Green Mountain Transit reinstated fares following a Covid-19 pandemic pause, the agency allowed riders to stay aboard even if they could not pay the fare. From now on, riders no longer have that leniency.
GMT has ended the policy known as “Let Them Ride,” which roughly 6% to 7% of riders used during the 10 months it was in place, Clayton Clark, GMT’s general manager, said in a Tuesday press conference.
The program caused more tension than it aimed to prevent: “There is a feeling of lawlessness that sometimes pervades our service area,” Clark said. “(Drivers) felt that it was more of a danger by having it demonstrated that people didn’t have to follow the rules.”
He said GMT will continue monitoring the end of the program to ensure that it will not open more opportunities for confrontations between drivers and riders who don’t pay. “I have no interest in having one of our employees assaulted over a $1 or $2 fare,” Clark said.
GMT aims to cover 10% of its urban operating budget — separate from its rural program budget — with fare revenue. Currently that number is 9.7%.
The news comes as GMT also announced additional service cuts intended to close a longstanding operating budget gap that Covid-19 relief funds have bandaged over.
Even before the pandemic, GMT’s costs were outpacing its revenue. Covid-19 relief measures buoyed the organization’s urban operations until now. “The pandemic funding just delayed — by about five years — this day of reckoning for us,” Clark said. “We find ourselves in a similar position to before the pandemic.”
As the pot of Covid relief funds dwindled, GMT has looked to close an annual $3 million budget gap, which it has reduced to $1.2 million over the past year through layoffs and securing transit funding from the state.
Tuesday morning, GMT’s board approved a third phase of service reductions toward closing that remaining $1.2 million gap. It cut what it estimates is $500,000 worth of service, which will add to the previous two phases’ total of $700,000 in cuts.
The additional service cuts will include shifts in service frequency on certain lines during periods of low ridership, some weekend consolidation of routes, and the elimination of Sunday service on the Number 11 bus from the Burlington Transit Center to the airport. These changes will begin in June.
“I want to make sure everybody’s clear that GMT is not selling this to you like it’s a good thing,” Clark said. “This is not the direction that we want to be moving in, but this is the direction that we have to be moving in, considering the fiscal constraint that we have, both within the state and national (situation.)”
These cuts are less aggressive than what the agency outlined may be necessary when it first set out its plans to reduce its budget.
Yet the financial future at GMT remains precarious: even with this year’s service cuts, the agency expects to see another $3 million gap in its budget next fiscal year, since, among other reasons, it will be the first year without any residual Covid-19 relief funding and some additional grants will come offline. Clark said he hopes GMT can partially cover this by working with the state to secure funding, and estimates that would leave $1.5 million of the shortage to be resolved by service cuts.
Clark also added that the agency is negotiating a new contract for its workers with the Teamsters union, which could also drastically change the predicted budget.
“It’s a sort of gaseous number,” Clark said about the predicted annual budget. “It grows and expands just based on how things go and what funding comes through.”
He acknowledged that 65% of the agency’s funding comes from the federal government. “We are very much vulnerable to any changes to the way the federal government distributes its funds,” he said. The agency is getting ready to “pivot” with any significant reductions in federal transit funding, he said, though there is nothing specific GMT is worried about losing at this time.
Changes at the federal level have already brought some shifts in GMT’s operations. For starters, the Federal Transit Administration has paused the multiyear grant GMT has received to buy electric buses. Currently, there are seven battery-powered buses in GMT’s fleet — a fraction of the agency’s intended 24.
Clark also added that, due to the Trump administration’s animosity toward diversity initiatives, GMT has decided to replace its Justice Equity, Diversity, Inclusion committee with a new rider experience committee, which will focus on barriers to service and other rider accessibility issues.
GMT is looking to the state government to step in to cover some of these additional funding challenges, Clark said, as the Legislature weighs a broad transportation bill and responds to a suite of other transportation initiatives also affected by federal funding cuts.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Green Mountain Transit ends program that let riders stay on board without paying .