By Greg Horner, Senior Editor.
Imagine paying almost twice as much for transportation and receiving a poorer service for it. That’s what Delta students are currently dealing with after the Saginaw Transit Authority Regional Services (STARS) made changes to its routes in October and November of last year.
“Some students have had to drop out because they can’t make it to school,” says Bria Smith, leader of Delta’s Black Student Union and a resident of Saginaw. “We’re paying more money now for a longer trip… It’s no longer an express.”
According to Sylvester Payne, STARS general manager, the system has been dealing with financial issues for years as the service tries to deal with a declining city population along with stagnant state and federal funding. Starting in November, STARS consolidated 11 of their routes to seven.
“We’re no different than any other government operation, every year we have to review our budget,” says Payne. “It was determined that we needed to make some reductions because our expenses are exceeding the revenue that we bring in.”
The Ricker Express is an additional bus route that STARS has provided since 2013. The line used to ferry students from Delta’s Saginaw campus, the Ricker Center, to the main campus and downtown for a one-time semester fee of $56. For the 2015 fall semester, STARS increased the price to $121, then on Oct. 12, changed the route to include two apartment complexes and SVSU’s main campus.
Originally, a ride from Delta’s main campus to the Ricker Center took about 30 minutes. Following the changes and additional stops, that ride now lasts roughly an hour.
Payne says that the Ricker Express line has to pay for itself and that the price increase was necessary. “It did almost double on them. Working with the college we were told that they could get this out of their financial aid package. But, we didn’t realize that was going to put an additional strain on them with other things that they needed to do with that package.”
Byron Poindexter, a passenger and student studying criminal justice, says the changes have impacted him tremendously.
“I picked my classes around that schedule, and when they changed the buses I wasn’t able to get to my class at a convenient time.”
Poindexter now has to arrive earlier for a bus ride that’s twice as long. “Now we go all out of the way, in circles, on a big road and into busy streets.”
For Smith, announcing the route changes two weeks after classes started put students in an impossible situation.
“They should have told us all at once. They told us about the price increase, but they didn’t tell us about the route change,” says Smith. “We were faced with the decision: ‘do we keep these classes or do we work around this new change?’ ”
Smith says that some students weren’t able to work their schedules around the new routes, especially those who relied on the quick route back to get to work. “Two weeks into your semester you can’t change or drop classes because no professor is going to allow that.”
With the original route, a late bus wasn’t too much cause for concern;.However, with the new route, students are arriving to their classes 30 – 45 minutes late. For Rosemary Reeves, the Ricker Center coordinator, dealing with STARS has become a regular occurrence.
Reeves fears that students could be punished for reasons outside their control. She knows students who have had their grades affected by tardiness, and worries that some of them could get dropped. “That’s a big concern, especially if you’re on financial aid. Because if you get dropped, are you going to have to pay for a class that you didn’t take?”
Poindexter says that he hasn’t had an issue with professors, but recalls one classmate telling him, “‘Our teachers don’t care if the bus is late, they don’t believe us, and they automatically mark us absent.’”
According to Payne, STARS didn’t reach out to Delta before making the changes. “We did our research internally. Staff looked at the numbers… figured out that for the last run of the day… that there just was very low usage going out to the college.”
Staff is dwindling, and Payne admits that he doesn’t have the necessary workforce to manage the struggling service. STARS was recently penalized during a federal audit for several policy violations which has caused the service to temporarily lose a large part of its federal funding. Payne says the majority of the violations were due to their bare-bones staff.
“It’s a bad situation for us to be in… part of the challenge you have when the federal government looks at it, obviously they don’t live in this community, [and] they still don’t quite understand the economic problems that we have here, and are still trying to fight out of to make things work.”
Jamie Forbes, of The New Ezekiel Project, an interracial congregation-centered organization in the region, has worked with the community, STARS and the leaders of other public transport systems to deal with the changes. She understands the challenges that STARS faces, but believes that Payne and the service’s board of trustees failed to adequately inform and involve the community.
“People have respect for government entities that they feel they’re being listened by,” says Forbes. “Moving on now, I feel that because of this recent crisis there’s been a lot more movement and the whole organization is much more open to change.”
According to Forbes, the stops added to the Ricker Express at SVSU, Baypointe Apartments and Waterside Apartments in Saginaw Township were intended to extend the service to international Saginaw Valley students who had higher expectations for public transport.
Forbes understands the need for those SVSU students to get to class but at the same time says that since those students don’t live in the city of Saginaw, “They don’t pay [the] taxes. But I pay [the] taxes, and they pay the same amount to ride the bus as I do.”
Unlike most surrounding areas, Saginaw does not have a county wide bus system. While the students of SVSU must pay the $121 as well, they don’t directly support STARS like residents of the city.
“Which is one of the main reasons why our expenses have blown up too,” says Payne. “We still have to service Saginaw Township, Kochville Township and Buena Vista Township because that’s where our ridership wants to go. But none of those municipalities are contributing anything to the support of the system.”
Forbes sees the problem as a catch-22. “Do you just always say ‘no,’ and say ‘no we will not provide the service because you’re not paying taxes into it?’ Or do you provide the service because you want to show that it’s a good system and important to use?”
Poindexter thinks it wouldn’t be difficult for SVSU to accommodate students at the apartment complexes, especially since from his experiences, very few SVSU students utilize the stops at Baypointe and Waterside. “Why can’t they have a smaller bus, a Saginaw Valley bus, because there’s maybe three people at the new pickups? If we can have the Ricker Express why can’t SVSU make a Saginaw Valley Express?”
STARS currently has no plans to reverse the changes made to the (now) seven routes or the Ricker Express.
“I do apologize to the public for the changes going about the way they did,” says Payne. “But [with] the depth of the reductions that we had to make, we realized that it was not going to make the public happy. But when we were looking at our ridership numbers… they were steadily on the decline. Our expenses were still going up and we realized that there would have to be some deep changes.”
Payne is retiring in September, and the board of trustees is currently engaged in a nationwide search to find a replacement. Forbes hopes that new blood will help revitalize the system.
“I think it’s an opportunity for some new thinking and some boldness that we’re not seeing now,” says Forbes. “Change is happening, and that means that an opportunity for good things to happen is possible too.”
In response to the STARS situation, Delta has appointed Director of Learning Centers Kristy Nelson to act as a liaison between the college and the various public transport systems.
“It just kind of hit us unexpectedly, first with the price increase and then with the schedule,” says Nelson. “We’re just making sure that we’re communicating, so we’re aware of any changes and can be more proactive than reactive.”
Smith is also working to organize a student committee that can work and communicate with STARS to deal with current and future changes. She’d like a refund, but doesn’t expect one. She, Poindexter and Forbes all hope STARS will return the original Ricker Express route in the future.
“If they didn’t have the Ricker Express I don’t know that I’d be in college,” says Smith. “I just want better communication. We have a voice, [and] the next time there’s a decision like this, I want them to just… think about us.”