It’s easy for Tri-City transit leaders to make cuts when they don’t have to ride the bus

Members of the Ben Franklin Transit Board bent on cutting the agency’s budget need to slow down.

Thanks to a monumental effort by state legislators, there is now too much to lose and too little to gain by reducing transit’s local sales tax revenue.

That’s because the Tri-Cities would miss out on about $75 million over 16 years thanks to the state’s Move Ahead Washington transportation program.

A requirement of getting the state grant is that Ben Franklin Transit must keep the local sales tax authority at the rate that was in effect on Jan. 1 of this year.

And there’s the problem.

A number of transit board members want to reduce the sales tax rate by one-tenth of 1 percent.

While such a move would chop about $7 million from the transit budget — as well as forfeit the $75 million from the state — the savings really wouldn’t make much difference to the individual taxpayer.

Transit administrators made the calculations and figured that the plan the board is considering would, on average, amount to a savings of just $1.66 per month per resident — or just under $20 a year per person.

For all the talk of saving taxpayers’ money, that hardly seems worth the loss of service and jobs.

So why all the fuss?

It’s because Tri-Citians who’ve never had to rely on public transit see empty or near-empty buses on their streets and think transit is wasting money.

Public transportation is not meant to make a profit. It provides a critical service to some of the most vulnerable people in Tri-Cities — the disabled, the elderly and the poor.

As a community we should ask ourselves if we think it’s worth having a transit system that goes to the fringes of town in order to get a rider or two who don’t have other transportation.

At one point, we did.

Benton and Franklin county voters were the ones who approved the current 0.6% sales tax for transit — 0.3% was approved in May 1981 and another 0.3% was approved in March 2002.

Public transit authorities will tell you that there is a trade-off between ridership and coverage. Unlike other communities with a single urban core, the Tri-Cities is spread out and that means at times we will see buses running empty or nearly so in order to serve as many people as possible.

But those observations are just a moment in time anyway, and are subjective.

Are those same routes more heavily used at other times, or even at the same time but on a different day?

Will the jump in fuel prices encourage more people to use transit services? Could the state money help pay for more electric buses?

What about Tri-Cities growth? The Herald just published a story stating 1,300 new homes are being built in Pasco. Traffic is already a huge problem, and cutting public transportation likely would make it worse.

Also, could cutting bus service worsen the ability of local businesses to find workers?

Ridership fluctuates, and keep in mind not many people were out and about during the COVID lockdown.

What we need is time for discussion on Ben Franklin Transit’s future — not its past.

Our concern is that the newly-formed transit board appears stacked with like-minded individuals who have already decided that Ben Franklin Transit is flush with more cash than it needs.

But what do they really know about using the service?

We doubt any of the transit board members have had to rely on public transportation to get to work, to the store and to medical appointments.

It’s easy for those who have the advantage of personal transportation to ignore the needs of those who don’t.

If the transit budget is slashed and services reduced, the people least able to weather the cuts will be the worst hit.

We agree that Ben Franklin Transit should operate as efficiently as possible and that perhaps it should get creative and consider adopting more on-demand, corner-to-corner services, which have been successful in other communities.

But trimming the sales tax and missing out on millions in state money in order to save residents $20 a year doesn’t make sense.

This push to blindly satisfy an anti-tax rallying cry will reek of privilege and political grandstanding if transit board members don’t approach this issue more carefully.

▪ Board members will debate the issue at their next meeting at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 14. You can watch the video online, or call in at 877-853-5247 using meeting ID 989 6217 8731 and password 833979.

This story was originally published April 13, 2022 at 10:15 AM.