If state funding can be obtained, Marion County residents who work in the Lebanon Business Park may be able to ride a bus to their jobs — and Boone County residents may be able to take a bus to their jobs in Marion County.
Sue Ritz, executive director of Boone County Senior Services, which operates the Boone Area Transit System, said Friday she’s preparing an application for a Job Access and Reverse Commute grant from the state. The application isn’t due until Aug. 17, she said, and a decision isn’t likely to be received until November.
“It would be an awesome thing to have happen,” Ritz said.
Two companies in the business park approached her for help in bringing workers to Lebanon, she said. There’s a pool of potential employees who have said they don’t have reliable private transportation.
Hachette Book Group and Gander Mountain, which both have distribution centers at Lebanon Business Park, told Ritz they have 150 temporary employees whom they would like to make full time, but can’t, because the workers have transportation issues.
Helping more workers find a way to get to jobs in Boone County might benefit the economy here, she said.
If the grant is approved, a bus would leave from downtown Indianapolis and stop somewhere in the business park. Ritz said she’s talked to Lebanon Mayor Huck Lewis about having a bus stop in the vicinity of the soon-to-be-demolished Quality Inn on Indiana 39 just south of Interstate 65. It’s too early for any decision on that idea, she said. “We’d do a morning commute and an afternoon commute,” Ritz said.
“We’re trying to make it a minimal cost, like $1, for the employee,” she said. Businesses too would “have a little buy-in.”
Ritz is also the county’s representative to the Central Indiana Regional Transportation Authority, which renamed its Central Indiana Commuter Services program “Commuter Connect.”
That initiative is different from the JARC grant, she said, because it emphasizes ride sharing, car and van pools, and bicycling and walking to work. “The rural transportation providers are trying to make connections between county lines,” Ritz explained. Already, BATS takes Boone residents who work in Hamilton County to a connection site at Zionsville First Presbyterian Church, at U.S. 421 and 106th Street, where they board a bus operated by Hamilton County.
Commissioner Marc Applegate said it appeared Carmel and Fishers were mainly benefiting from the project.
That’s partly because only an area in southeastern Boone County is in the Metropolitan Planning Organization’s jurisdiction, Ritz said.
“Transportation is more than 50 percent of what we’re doing,” Ritz said. “We’re doing at least 110 runs a day” through BATS. The fleet had had 19 vehicles but will be down to 18 until “hopefully late summer,” when a replacement arrives for a vehicle that had to be sold because part of the floor was rusting out, she said.
Ritz said BCSSI’s two other major programs are personal services, and outreach action.