Special Report: A rural bus service for no one
Dona Ana County residents are spending nearly half a million dollars to fund a rural bus service almost nobody is riding.
Since launching in February, the South Central Regional Transit District has been at the center of heated debate. The service takes you through small, rural communities like Anthony, Chaparral, Sunland Park and Alamogordo.
After launching a pilot project in 2014, voters rejected a $10 million per year tax increase to fund a permanent program. A year later, commissioners imposed newly-authorized tax by the legislature, allocating $800,000 to re-launch the bus program. This year, it is costing taxpayers more than $465,000 to run the bus line.
SCRTD Executive Director David Armijo, who makes roughly $92,000 a year, said the cost to fund the bus line will decline as more people ride the buses. “I think you’ll see much more dynamic ridership growth in the coming year,” Armijo said.
ABC-7’s New Mexico Mobile Newsroom wanted to know: is it worth the cost?
The service has five buses that have traveled more than 100,000 miles since March. ABC-7 requested records for the fares collected from March to August for the four main routes: red, blue, purple and turquoise. The yellow route is is executed from SCRTD’s contractor Zia Trans.
Armijo said they didn’t actually start collecting fares until July, stating it made sense to defer from collecting revenue until the beginning of the new fiscal year on July 1, 2016.
In July and August combined, the blue route made $203.10. The red route made $295.69. The purple route made $128.67, and the turquoise route made $35.51. It costs $1 to ride a route one way.
When ABC-7 asked Armijo about the turquoise route making only $10.51 in July and $25 in August, the executive director said, “You picked the negative. The red line actually increased by 50% in ridership and so what we did was we leveraged some of the trips we were using because the turquoise bus wasn’t performing well.”
At a recent meeting updating commissioners about the bus service, Armijo said they did take away some trips on the turquoise route because of low “ridership.” At that meeting, numerous community members showed up in support of the service.
Sunland Park Mayor Javier Perea said his city has a lot of jobless people living in poverty. He said public transportation is necessary to change that.
“Looking at that information there is a big opportunity for us for the residents of Sunland Park to get to the job that they need in order to lower these demographics,” Perea said.
Anthropologist Marisol Diaz told commissioners at a recent quality of life symposium that a lack of transportation was brought up as an issue, by not only community members, but elected officials and health and business professionals.
Some community members were concerned the service is unsustainable. “A $1 fare is certainly not enough to cover even the smallest percentage of cost per ride,” Las Cruces resident Mark Best said.
Other residents described the service as a “gross misuse of tax-payer money.”
ABC-7 reporter Jamie Warren and News Operations manager Tom Scott rode the turquoise route, which takes you from Anthony to Chaparral and back.
When they stepped on the bus, all of the seats were empty, except one. Robert Garnica said he rides the bus twice a week, and he’s always the only one on board. “It’s like my own limo,” he said.
Once Garnica got off, no one else stepped on for the entire trip.
Come November, a few new commissioners will be on the board. It’ll be up to them to decide whether to keep funding the service.
If you’d like to know more about the service, the South Central Regional Transit District holds public meetings every fourth Wednesday of the month.
