Updated at 4:10 p.m., April 28
In a  move that caught the Rochester City School District by surprise, the Regional Transit Authority announced today that it will stop providing bus transportation to city school students when the current contract with the district ends in June 2015. The reason given: student disruptions to public safety. Â
“As our region’s public transportation provider, our first priority is to fulfill our mission to provide safe, reliable, and convenient public transit,” RTS CEO Bill Carpenter said in a written statement. “Several student-related incidents at the RTS Transit Center have fostered a perception among customers of all ages and across our community that the RTS Transit Center is not a safe environment.”Â
District officials were not aware of RTS’s decision until earlier today when Superintendent Bolgen Vargas received a letter from RTS, says Chip Partner, spokesperson for the district.
The transit center and East Main Street have been the scenes of several fights involving city school students over the last several years. But school district officials say that they were in the middle of negotiations with RTS on ways to resolve problems stemming from having too many students in the new downtown transit center at one time.
District officials were working with RTS to reduce the number of buses going through the center from about 120 to 70, Partner says, which would involve major changes to both the transportation and school schedules.Â
RTS says that the decision will result in the elimination of 144 jobs, though officials say that they expect the number of layoffs can be limited through attrition.
The district spends about $60 million on transportation annually. Partner says that he doesn’t yet know how students will be transported in light of this announcement.Â
Bus service continues normally for everybody else.Â
UPDATE:
A statement from Superintendent Bolgen Vargas says that, “The abrupt decision by RTS to end 37 years of service makes it exceptionally difficult for the district to provide transportation for our secondary students this summer and in the next school year. We will have no other choice but to provide our students daily passes to access the public transportation system.”
Spokesperson Chip Partner says that students will be able to access the bus system the same as every other customer. That means, obviously, that students would still be at the transit center — again, the same as every other customer.Â
The district statement also says that the district met every RTS requirement for negotiating a new contract, including plans to adjust school schedules that would reduce the number of student buses by 40 percent. And some earlier agreed-upon adjustments that would greatly reduce the number of students who transfer downtown will take effect next week.Â
This article appears in Apr 22-28, 2015.
I am sorry, but, from my view, the Bill Carpenter era has been a disaster for RTS. This is a bus company designed to serve those who need help with transportation…including students. He has eliminated bus stops, not budgeted for adequate security in the transit center, and now, throws the kids under the bus! His departure from RTS is needed.
You know what fixes this? Neighborhood schools with equal and adequate funding and plenty of community support. Instead of shipping our kids all over the city, they need to go to school where they live and invest in that community. Problem solved, $60 million saved. (Not really, but you get the point.)
Until just a few years ago, students rode RTS buses that only carried students from home to schools and back. Wasn’t it a lawsuit by a union that forced RTS to put the students on the regular routes and buses with the community at large. And what did that lawsuit cost the taxpayers? Not like it saved any jobs.
Thank you for telling us your agency mission Mr. Carpenter, but you are seriously lacking in of your stated values “Fresh Thinking: We take time to discover and develop ideas that create value for our company, our customers, and our community.” As a quasi-public agency that has reaped great benefits from public dollars including a spanking new transit center, this is inexcusable behavior. Roll up your sleeves Mr. Carpenter and start doing some of that “Fresh Thinking” you supposedly value so much.
So the decades-old city school busing saga continues. This was quite possibly the only way it could have grown worse.
RTS RIP
Those of us who opposed use of federal transit dollars for the Transit Center boondoggle consistently predicted the issues that almost immediately ensued following the opening of the TC. Those dollars could (should )have been used to improve the paltry public transit system. Instead, we have a crime issue, reduced service, removal of some 1/3 of the bus stops in a system that already barely functioned to get anyone where they needed to go, unless you’re a suburbanite working downtown, and those folks don’t seem to want to make use of the service much at all, and will now be even more hesitant since hearing all the bad news about the TC. Besides this TC debacle, we’ve also recently had a bus fare increase to fund bonuses for clearly incompetent executives. Can a mid-sized city hold its head up with essentially no public transit system? Yes, Bill Carpenter should be run out of town, but it was a large cabal of local officials who backed the TC cesspool. The level of cynicism and corruption in front of our faces should wake us all up to the sorry state of our local leadership, who seem all too busy feeding off the carcass of our dying city. For those of us who saw this coming from miles away, believe me, the schadenfreude nowhere near compensates for the sorrow and shame we now feel for our city.
Although it has been almost two weeks since I wrote my post here, the situation has gotten worse and the root cause is still Carpenter. Since my post, he has announced the lay off of over 140 families that relied on his competency, been picketed by the union that represents those people, and, rather than call “time out” and huddle with the district to account for the kids, he appears on television to act like he knows what he is doing.
The board should consider terminating him asap.