Nobody asked us, but had they, we would have said: “Put a bond measure or property tax increase or something on the ballot to raise some revenue to fund a quality transit system in Deschutes County, or at least in the City of Bend.” Yes, we need funding for a bus system. And now!
A lot of you seem to agree in principle, but not in practice—especially when it comes to ponying up the funding to support an adequate and quality bus system, something that will increasingly become an essential component for maintaining the much jawboned about “livability” of Central Oregon.
Let’s be more specific: A recent Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council (COIC) study found four out of five residents believe that mass transit is “very” or “somewhat important.” The COIC manages the current bus lines throughout the region, and certainly some bias can be read into their survey, but that same survey also pointed out that Bendites refuse to put their money where their mouth is. Fewer than one in three people actually said that they would support a meager 35 cent property tax increase (per $1,000 of assessed home value) to support a transit system.
And, this attitude has a long-standing history in the region. In 2000, a ballot measure that would have helped fund public transit was voted down. Again, in November 2004, a proposed property tax was roundly thumped at the ballot.
Yet, in spite of this lack of community support for the funding of bus lines in and around Bend, in 2006, the City of Bend plowed ahead with plans to jumpstart a transit system. It was a debacle: City Council created Bend Area Transit (BAT), which, in turn, purchased six scrappy buses from a California company as its initial fleet (literally scrappy, as the Utah Transit Authority had sold the buses to the California company for scrap). Not surprisingly, the buses turned out to be junk, and the city sunk another $100,000 into repairs. A measure in 2008 was the most recent attempt to help fund transit with a tax district and was, again, denied by voters.
In July 2010, COIC took over, and in spite of the weak start to area mass transit, have managed to slowly expand lines and ridership. Even so, the history—and current state—of mass transit in Bend is not overly impressive, so why float the idea of a property tax to support and grow a bus system? Because, quite simply, the demand for a mass transit system is about to wash over this city like a tsunami. In 18 months, Oregon State University-Cascades will open the doors to its four-year institution here, with plans to have 2,748 of students by 2020.
And how many of those 2,748 students will have on-campus housing? 301, according to a recent Oregon State University-Cascades Campus “Space Needs Analysis.” Meaning: Some 2,247 students will be looking for affordable rentals—a commodity in acutely short supply, especially in Bend’s outer westside neighborhood where OSU-Cascades recently purchased acreage for its campus.
It is most likely that the bulk of students will move to the apartment complexes east of Third Street, like in the affordable apartment complexes around Pilot Butte.
This means: Erase quaint images of college students hoofing from their dorm rooms, knapsack slung over shoulder, with a fall foliage backdrop. Instead, the more apt image is the L.A. or Seattle freeway at rush hour as the main east-west traffic corridors of NE Greenwood and SE Reed Market Road, and NW Galveston and NW Colorado Avenues clog with commuting students.
How about them livability apples? Is avoiding this worth a 35-cent property tax?
We think so! There’s a glass slipper waiting to be filled.
This article appears in Oct 31 – Nov 6, 2013.
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Good to hear someone else recognizes that not everything about the new university is going to be wonderful. Our already abysmal rental situation will become even worse. Traffic getting to and around the west-side is headed towards disaster without an expensive upgrade of the city’s transportation infrastructure. A robust and reliable public transportation system is a critical part of the adaption to being a major university town. The problem is that a property tax to pay for it imposes the cost on all city’s the property owners – which almost entirely leaves out those actually using the system the most (student renters) and the facility that makes this upgrade mandatory (the new university campus).
This is yet another example of the costs of this shortsighted university location choice being pushed off onto the rest of the citizens of our community. Can anyone explain why the new university should not be sharing in paying for the requirements their facility is burdening us with? Anybody?
You can make the same argument about separate bicycle lanes (cycle tracks) – build it, and they will ride.
The reason the university should not be sharing in paying for city services like adequate transportation infrastructure is that the university’s mission is to educate people and the city’s mission is to efficiently move people around. The university will have a tremendous, positive impact on Bend’s economy – it is up to the City to collect an appropriate amount of tax money from that economic activity and apply it to addressing the externalities caused by the university. Of course the City seems unable to do this due to the extremely short-sited citizenry. Since the university won’t magically begin funding mass transit in Bend, perhaps people should be advocating for establishing such funding locally instead of complaining about the university.
Hello folks and TSW,
I work for COIC, the organization that manages CET, and I am staffing the regional Transit Funding Committee which is grappling with transit funding right now. I’d like to share a few comments:
First, there are several planning process under way right now aimed at addressing the transportation impacts of the new campus. All of these processes will have public engagement elements, so the broader community and nearby neighborhoods will have opportunities to get involved. The university and City have both mobilized resources to a) ID impacts, b) engage the community, and c) develop innovative and “made in Bend” tools to meet needs, including transit service enhancements but also bike/ped and other “transportation demand management” improvements. The challenge is that the timing is tight, but all the partners that I work with are committed and “get it” that this is extremely important work to be doing at this time. I strongly encourage anyone interested in this to keep an eye out for public meetings and other opportunities to get engaged.
Second, our work to date seems to indicate that there will not be an opportunity for a single solution to transit funding. It appears that a hybrid model is the most feasible, with cities helping to pay but also those entities that generate the most transit trips figuring out a way to chip in. There are plenty of models in other communities to guide this approach. And, if the needle of public opinion can be moved (through outreach, engagement, and further demonstration of the value of transit), at some point in the future the broader community will participate through funding measures like what The Source is suggesting.
Third, there is little appetite among Bend and regional leaders to propose a transit taxing measure in the short term due to the strong likelihood of failure as evidenced by the survey results, which showed less support for transit funding now than the results of the 2008 ballot measure.
If you are interested in finding out more about Cascades East Transit or the Transit Funding Committee’s work, all of their agendas, materials, and minutes are posted here: http://coic2.org/coic-board-local-transit-…
Scott Aycock
It was already built……………..and they didn’t ride. Despite the fact that taxpayers soundly voiced their opinion about money pit public transit projects, Bill Friedman decided he knew better. Of course he was wrong. I predicted in these pages the inevitable failure of BAT back in 2006. I later chronicled its demise as it was unfolding. I now stand agape at the continued efforts to take taxpayer money in light of the spectacular failure that was BAT. What is it that they say about doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result? The failure had nothing to do with the purchased buses, and everything to do with lack of demand. 2000 college students aren’t enough to fill the hole.