This week, we're podcasting a conversation about public transit to the Great Outdoors featuring Corrie Parrish of Kittelson Associates, Andrea Breault of Cascades East Transit and Amy Schlappi of Columbia Area Transit.
Click the player below to listen to the full discussion. Or click here for a full AI-generated transcript (yes, there'll be typos!). Or check out the partially edited and cleaned-up version below.
Here's the edited transcript:
Corrie Parrish: Let's talk about the benefits and the challenges of working with private partners.
Andrea Breault: The benefit of working with partners, such as Temelo Creek, is that a company like theirs is doing marketing as well. And so we do have a great partnership. We also have what's called a sponsorship agreement where we will sponsor Temalo Creek and Kayak in terms of ads on our buses.
But the challenge we face as a public transit provider is that we don't want to dip into what we call chartered service, meaning we provide service to a particular demographic for a particular time of day, which is not allowed under our agency. We are public transit agency first, which means we are open to the public, scheduled, and we do not discriminate towards any group time or person. We provide that public transit, no matter what's going to happen in terms of someone else's business or what they're trying to sell.
And so just reminding our partners here in Central Oregon that we have to maintain an open schedule for the public to use and anybody is willing to board and you can imagine those conversations need to be reinforced every year. We are not a private service for a particular recreational need.
Amy Schlappi: I think working with partners is there's always a challenge because we all need to meet the needs of our customers. And for us being a public transit agency, we need to meet the needs of the general public. I think Mount Hood Meadows is a wonderful partner and they do a lot of advertising for us, which really helps. On the transportation options part of their website, we are there. And it's clearly communicated how people can use our service in order to get to Mount Hood Meadows. And they also help us with operational help as well because, there's winter conditions up there.
Sometimes buses get stuck in snow, or there's different issues that happen and because they have transportation staff on site, we're able to work really well with that. And I really appreciate them for that. We also have an agreement where they can stop at our location so that their employees can utilize our park-and-ride service and hop on either their employee buses or even our buses in order to get up to work. So that works really well, and they're just a big community supporter in general. I think just partners are really important. The U.S. Forest Service, Oregon DOT and Oregon State Parks — we just wouldn't be able to do our services if we didn't have the strong relationships that we have with them.
Corrie Parrish: Definitely. And I think partnerships are even more important because for you two because you both represent rural transit agencies. So let's talk about the benefits and the challenges of working for a really small transit agency and still being able to provide these services, because there is a certain large transit agency that recently cut access to several parks because of funding issues. But because you're so small, you do deal with more restrictive funding and also just people and capacity. So I'd love to hear about your perspectives of working for a rural transit agency.
Amy Schlappi: We're small. We have 13 buses that operate I have 25 employees. And we do a lot with that. In fiscal year 2023, we served 80,000 riders.
A lot of people, when they see our services, think we're a lot bigger than we actually are. And we don't have the funding resources, so we do a lot with little resources.
Corrie Parrish: Andrea, how tiny is your organization?
Andrea Breault: We are slightly bigger. We have a fleet of roughly 75 vehicles, probably an employee base of 80 to 90, but we are lean on the administrative side. I would say of all of our employees, 95 percent of them are in the operations, which is dispatchers, call centers, vehicle operators. I will say our biggest challenge is the geographical area that we serve. If you were to take the state of Delaware or Rhode Island, that is probably the area what we serve. Our most northern point, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs all the way down to the City of La Pine in southern Deschutes County.
So the geographical coverage is challenging. You can imagine those dollars don't go as far when you're traveling. Quite a long distance to pick up. Not a lot of people. And so that is where we really need to be strategic with our rural funding. The other challenge that we have here in central Oregon, even though it is 2024 is dirt roads.
Unfortunately, we do not allow our buses to go down some of these uneven old logging roads where a lot of our most vulnerable people live. A lot of it's communicating whether we can get those folks family members can drop them off to locations where we can pick them up. I understand Bend is a vibrant community, a very expensive place to live, but there are pockets where there are vulnerable people living in mobile home parks off of old logging roads that need to get to dialysis. The veteran community that needs to get to mental health services. And so a lot of the time and effort is trying to figure out how we can best serve these people both from a logistical perspective as well as a funding perspective.
Amy Schlappi: That is a big piece of what we do. We have 30 percent of our population is low-income and then we also have a lot of high-income earners in our county as well. Trying to meet the needs of the different groups, but also of visitors, can be really challenging.
And we have to be very creative with funding, but also with how we market our services and how we schedule our services. I think that goes back to my example for the Gorge-to-Mountain express of ensuring that there's transit service so people can go do night-skiing, is really important. But also for our Columbia Gorge express service, ensuring that we have seven to nine trips in between Portland. Ensuring that those times can work for a number of use cases is super important. So people can go to medical services. So people can go to work. So people can go to the airport. All of those are within the same service.
