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Sunday, July 30, 2006 By CAROL McPHAIL Special to the Press-Register Business is booming and unemployment is low. Sounds like the perfect situation for any county. But the combination of those factors in Baldwin County is forcing officials on both sides of Mobile Bay to take a closer look at public transportation in order to help businesses fill jobs and get people to work. On Thursday, area mayors and other elected officials will gather for a two-hour summit at the Riverview Plaza Hotel in Mobile to discuss the issues behind what some say amounts to a public transportation crisis. Among the items on the official agenda: a look at a seven-city transit system in Virginia, a preview of a regional transit study for southern Alabama, and an update on a high-speed ferry that could link Mobile and Baldwin counties. "We're going to have to be more like Boston, Baltimore and New York and remove that stigma from public transit," said Linda Ingram, who works for the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce and coordinates a group called Envision Coastal Alabama, which is helping to organize the summit. Bringing elected officials together to talk about transportation could heat up a discussion that has been simmering for some time. Envision has held multiple meetings paving the way for the coming summit. Baldwin County has a transit coalition that meets monthly. And the South Alabama Regional Planning Commission is wrapping up a study on transportation in a three-county area that includes Escambia. "I think we need to start planning ahead and not wait until we can't move from one place to the next," said Fairhope Mayor Tim Kant. "I'd like to see us agreeing to start working together for the common good of all the citizens of South Alabama." Officials will have to battle old stereotypes about public transit -- that it's only for the social or environmental good -- in order to convince taxpayers to invest in new and better ways of moving people around throughout Mobile and Baldwin counties. At Standard Furniture Manufacturing in Bay Minette, the issue is economic, pure and simple. "I have a big concern, long-term, about how the county is going to address the needs of workers," said Steve Pond, vice president for human resources. Standard Furniture, which employs 1,500 during busy seasons, has used payroll deductions in the past to pay for county-run vans to get people to work. These days, employees pay the fare, about $5 a round trip, on their own, but either way, they avoid a 30-minute or more drive from as far away as Atmore. Pond points to a troubling trend cited in a recent Baldwin task force study as more evidence of a crisis. The study, released in June, contends that although more middle-income workers will be needed in the county, they will have a harder time finding homes they can afford because of spiraling land prices. In short, Baldwin is going to have to look beyond its borders to fill its job openings -- an estimated 4,000 at any given time. Sounds simple, but getting from northern Baldwin or west Mobile to Gulf Shores every day for work is no small task, considering the distance, the traffic and $3-a-gallon gas. "At an area like Gulf Shores, all of those businesses are surrounded by condos. Those are not the folks looking for jobs," said Tony Stringer, district manager of Wal-Marts in Mobile and Baldwin counties. "When folks live 25 miles from where they're working, and the price of gas goes up, it creates a hardship on those associates." Wal-Mart pays mileage for the employees who agree to shift to the Gulf Shores store, considered "very busy," even by Wal-Mart standards, he said. Another Gulf Shores company, Tropical Services, found a way to make the employee shortage work in its favor. The company supplies college-age foreign exchange students to employers in about 40 locations in the area. But getting them there, beginning at 6 a.m. for some and ending well after midnight for others, isn't easy. Tropical Services contracts with BRATS, the Baldwin Rural Area Transportation System, to take care of part of its transportation needs during the hours from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m. Typically, Tropical Services picks up workers and delivers them to a hub, where BRATS takes over. Tropical Services plans to expand from about 300 students this year to more than 1,000 next year, according to Will Layfield, one of the owners. "There's a now hiring' sign on every establishment from Foley south, that I've seen," Layfield said. Tropical Services recoups transportation costs with a payroll deduction of about $20 weekly, Layfield said. BRATS and its Escambia counterpart, ECATS, attempt to fill the transportation void in a cooperative fashion. ECATS, for instance, starts a route in Escambia County that travels to Standard Furniture in Baldwin. And BRATS has talked with Mobile's WAVE Transit officials about hooking a Baldwin route into the central transportation center at the GM&O Building in downtown Mobile. "We haven't sat down and worked out the details," said Bob Williams, general manager of The Wave Transit System in Mobile. BRATS has even felt the crunch of the worker shortage, sometimes having trouble filling its own open positions. "We have employee issues like everyone else," said Taylor Rider, director of transportation for the Baldwin County Commission. Baldwin's low unemployment rate, under 3 percent, may be driving transportation discussions, but Mobile stands to benefit in other ways from a well-oiled regional transportation plan. Baldwin County tourism officials estimate 4 million visitors annually -- snowbirds and summer tourists -- who spend just under $2 billion a year. If officials come up with a plan to send available workers to Baldwin, why not use the same transportation to bring all those people from the condos back to visit the battleship USS Alabama, Bellingrath Gardens or Dauphin Street -- much less allow them to get around on Pleasure Island? "If we could have a really neat, fun, useful transit system in that area, then those 4 million people wouldn't have to drive every day," said Bob Higgins, vice president of the Baldwin County Economic Development Alliance. Smart transportation planning can also be used to steer a community or city's growth and development so that roads aren't as congested and the air isn't as polluted. The buzzword for planners, said the WAVE's Williams, is "transit-oriented development" -- in other words, steering growth so that residents can more easily rely on public transportation. "If we invest in public transportation now and start to think about how to do this in Mobile, we could save ourselves a lot of congestion and environmental issues," he said. The pressing need for service between the two counties was spelled out in the Mobile transit system's development plan, which is updated about every five years, according to WAVE officials. But the plan stopped short of spelling out how exactly to address that need. The Regional Planning Commission study, expected to be completed by October, started out as a look at the transit needs of the poor, elderly and disabled. But the commission's planners hope to take a broader look at the overall transit needs of Mobile, Baldwin and Escambia in the study. Tom Piper, senior transportation planner, said it's not clear yet what kind of recommendations will be forthcoming, but that the need for more workers in Baldwin will be considered. Williams said he expects to hear more about the benefits of coordinating systems from Michael Townes of Hampton Roads Transit in Virginia, who will speak at the summit this week. The Hampton Roads authority serves eight cities, which range from Norfolk to Portsmouth to Virginia Beach, and was the result of a merger of Tidewater Regional Transit and Pentran, the two systems that had operated in the area since the mid-1970s. Mobile Mayor Sam Jones is "very excited about a meeting of the minds" and putting together a plan for the citizens of Mobile "to make public transportation better and transit throughout the area as efficient as possible in the event that coordinated transportation efforts are at a premium, such as in a hurricane," said Adam Buck, public affairs coordinator for the city of Mobile. Buck said the goal is to link both counties by ferry by the end of 2007, with the ferry purchased using money from a federal grant connected to the planned maritime museum on Mobile's downtown riverfront. For now, officials on both sides of Mobile Bay prefer the term "networking," rather than "merging," when they talk about transit systems. Just getting some elected officials to focus on transportation beyond roads and highways may be challenge enough, said Williams. Beyond that, he said, his system is willing to work out whatever has to be done to meet the needs of riders in the area. "There's an open atmosphere in the two communities when it comes to transit, that we can work through all those things," Williams said. "I don't look at them as obstacles; I look at them as opportunities." © 2006 al.com All Rights Reserved. Eight cities served by one Virginia system Sunday, July 30, 2006 By CAROL McPHAIL Special to the Press-Register When officials discuss transit in Mobile and Baldwin counties, they are careful to stop short of recommending a regional authority that would supplant existing transit organizations. They suggest instead a network that would coordinate various transit efforts. But at a summit this week, elected officials are going to hear the story of how eight Virginia cities placed transit organizations under one authority, Hampton Roads Transit. Its chief executive officer, Michael Townes, will address the group in a talk titled "Building a Regional Transit Network: The Hampton Roads Model." Hampton Roads Transit was created in 1999, a merger between Tidewater Regional Transit and Pentran, two transit systems that had been operating in the Hampton Roads region since the mid-1970s. The system -- the first voluntary merger of two transit companies in the country -- serves about 1.3 million people with about 900 employees. HRT is governed by a commission made up of two members from each city served, a state senator, a state delegate and the chairman of the Commonwealth Transportation Board. The cities, all located in different counties, set aside money for public transit and receive services based on what each contributes. The state also allocates money. Portsmouth, for example, has limited services on Sundays, when it sends fewer people to Norfolk to go to work. Virginia Beach, on the other hand, employs trolleys during the peak tourist season, and warehouses the cars in the winter. Norfolk, meanwhile, is considering an electric-powered train that runs on streets to serve its burgeoning night-life population. "The difficult task for HRT is to make sure that the cities are in agreement on whatever we want to provide," said Christine Alvarez, public affairs specialist. © 2006 al.com All Rights Reserved. |
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