A non-profit organization that has provided transit vouchers for elders and disabled people on the Kenai Peninsula for nearly 20 years will no longer be able to provide them as of July 1. Independent Living Center was not awarded their regular grant from the state this year. The situation is a symptom of tightening budgets and a competitive application process.
Joyanna Geisler, Executive Director of Independent Living Center says a state-subsidized taxi voucher program plays a big role in allowing their disabled and elderly clients to lead full lives.
“It’s assisted people to get to medical appointments, get to their shopping, get their hair done, go to church, socialize,” said Geisler.
But that could all come to an end in July due to the result of a transportation community group meeting in November. Geisler alleges that Jennifer Beckmann, the executive director of the Central Area Rural Transit System, or CARTS, said it was not important to prioritize projects.
“The statement from her was, 'we don’t have to prioritize. All these projects are important and have equal priority.' And so there was some question from the audience about, well – ‘why call it a prioritization meeting then, if we’re not going to prioritize the projects?’” said Geisler.
The group was submitting an application to the Alaska Community Transit grant program for the region. The Kenai Peninsula does not have a regional bus system. Instead they have CARTS which uses vans with scheduled pick-up times on the Central Peninsula. Beckmann was in charge of the process and her agency, CARTS, was the lead on the grant application. Geisler says that Beckman put her own projects at the top of the list.
“When the list of projects went in, CARTS’ two projects were listed one and two and ILC’s were listed three and four. So the proposal evaluation committee looked at the list and looked at CARTS as the number one priority and funded that,” said Geisler.
CARTS, based between Soldotna and Kenai, received nearly $706,000 in funding. That’s the fourth largest grant in the state according to DOT officials. CARTS also received $105,000 from the state for purchase of services, which will go towards providing rides and another $9,600 for a network server.
Independent Living Center, which serves the elderly and disabled population in the Central Peninsula, Seward and Homer, has sold taxi vouchers subsidized by state grant funding to provide affordable transportation since 1997 in the central Peninsula and since 2000 in Homer. More than 300 people use the vouchers. Geisler says she believes Beckmann misrepresented the process.
Independent Living Center requested a total of $178,000 to provide transportation services in Soldotna, Seward and Homer. However, it did not receive any of the funding. Beckmann says she was just doing things as she had done them in the past.
“The process was pretty loose, for lack of a better word. We just would vote for our own projects and so I started just listing the projects and submitting them to DOT. They were in alternating order – one year the Independent Living Center’s project would be on top, the next year CARTS would be on top,” said Beckmann.
And she says, this year, it was her agency’s turn. DOT officials say Beckmann was responsible for listing the community’s prioritized projects. Eric Taylor, Manager of the statewide Transit program says Beckman has been in charge of submitting the grant for the region for years and she should have known that prioritization was critical, especially this belt-tightening year.
“It’s been known for quite a while, this has just been a requirement of any of the areas that submit human service transportation projects,” said Taylor.
Taylor says the point of having the community work together on their application to DOT is to create consensus.
“Concerning coordination, the whole point of that is not to put different entities in the same community in competition with one another. The intent is to have them work out all of those issues amongst each other so they’ve got a plan on how to spend the money and they mutually agree on what their priorities are,” said Taylor.
Taylor says this year, the granting agency was only able to award half the usual number of grants and funding will likely be further reduced.
Beckmann agrees that the process needs to improve. She says CARTS did not get all the funds that they requested— they did not get a new van they wanted and are looking for other funding to pay for it.
Geisler says she has appealed to DOT. She says if Independent Living Center cannot find another funding source by July 1st, the disabled people and elders her agency serves will have to go without the vouchers and give up some of the independence the program has allowed them to become accustomed to.
