It’s back to the drawing board for the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority (RIPTA).
The agency’s Board of Directors voted Thursday morning to table a proposal that would have slashed or reduced services on the majority of its bus routes, all in the hope of repairing a $10 million hole in the agency’s budget for fiscal year 2026.
The somewhat anticlimatic reversal followed a last-minute plea from Gov. Dan McKee, who intervened with a letter advising the board not to act in haste by approving what he dubbed a plan too reliant on “across-the-board reductions to routes.”
“As Governor, I have a responsibility to riders and to hear their concerns — but I also have a duty to every taxpayer footing the bill,” McKee wrote in his letter, which was sent to members of the press at 9:21 a.m. and distributed as hard copies to board members around the same time. The board meeting started at 9:30.
Board Chair Peter Alviti Jr., who also heads the Rhode Island Department of Transportation, moved to postpone the vote so that the board could have more time to digest the governor’s proposal, as well as the results of a $412,346 efficiency study that emerged last week, well after its original deadline of March 1.
The agency will need to implement service changes by Oct. 1 if it wants to capture savings for the first quarter of the current fiscal year, RIPTA CEO Chris Durand told reporters after the meeting. That means time remains short for the board to approve viable alternatives, or the solutions McKee rebuked: An array of system-wide bus service cuts, ranging from 10% reductions to outright elimination of 58 of 67 routes. The cuts were set to take effect Sept. 13 if approved.
Alviti said at the meeting that any decision on the cuts, or other alternative solutions, will emerge in the coming days or weeks — a sentiment he shared earlier Thursday morning with WPRO radio host Gene Valicenti.
But both the meeting and Durand’s comments afterward made clear that the quasi-public agency’s essential problems won’t be solved in one year. Even with the proposed cuts, Durand projected RIPTA could face a $5 million to $7 million shortfall in fiscal year 2027.
RIPTA would have had an even bigger gap in its budget this year, $32.6 million, had the General Assembly not approved a $15 million infusion during this year’s legislative session. Favorable diesel fuel prices and market conditions for the agency’s pension plan lowered the deficit to $10 million.
As Governor, I have a responsibility to riders and to hear their concerns — but I also have a duty to every taxpayer footing the bill.
Now, options appear few, although McKee proposed eliminating or restructuring underperforming routes and administrative overhead, tapping underused federal programs, and raising fares or moving them to a zonal model, with prices changing depending on service area (a model unusual for bus service in the U.S.). Bus fares have been unchanged at $2 for 15 years. But Durand noted that comparable transit networks have begun adopting fare-free models.
Durand told reporters he was a bit taken aback by the timing of McKee’s letter, and he hadn’t anticipated its arrival Thursday morning, although he had recently been in contact with the governor.
“I think it does involve some sort of temporary freedom, which might help us out,” Durand said of the postponement.
But the CEO also expressed some reservations about their feasibility. Unlocking certain federal funding sources, for instance, may actually require expanding service, not cutting them.
“We have more rural funding today than we have rural service, which means we have to actually incur more costs to provide rural service,” Durand said.
Durand noted that zone-based fare increases don’t generate as much revenue as across-the-board increases. RIPTA is not ruling out a fare increase, he said, but it needs to be deployed carefully.
“What we have to balance is two things,” Durand said. “First of all, we’re making massive reductions to service, so we’re going to take away frequency, or routes altogether, and make it harder for you to assist [riders.] It’s difficult to then charge them more for the same thing.”
79 jobs under the bus
During the board meeting, Durand told the board that personnel costs make up over 80% of the agency’s operating expenses for bus service. Simply discontinuing the lowest-performing routes, or redirecting all resources into the highest-performing ones, wouldn’t remove the deficit. The savings, Durand said, are largely coming from taking jobs out of the schedule, noting that the agency would need to go from about 401 drivers to 322 to get the savings it needs.
Durand gave the 88 bus as an example, calling it “a once-a-week shopping trip” that amounts to about four hours of road time overall. The route runs from the Cranston Walmart to Simmons Village in Johnston and is indeed eliminated under the recent proposal. But it won’t generate many savings because it runs so infrequently, Durand said.
Also proposed for elimination are the 68 bus serving the Community College of Rhode Island’s Newport campus, and the 69 bus catering to students and workers at URI, which runs from the school’s Kingston campus Kingston to Galilee.
“People ride those buses,” Durand said. “We just can’t afford to operate them.”
But the potential for significant layoffs concerned board members like Pat Crowley and Normand Benoit.
“People who are going to get laid off are the ones that we’ve worked very hard to recruit and train,” Benoit said. “Recent hires…took care of the problem that we didn’t have enough bus drivers. Those are the ones who are going to go first, and I’m concerned that they’re not coming back.”
Crowley, meanwhile, reminded his colleagues that before the agency hired more drivers, “turnaround time…was so minimal that they couldn’t get off the bus to relieve themselves.”
Benoit admitted at one point he had entered the meeting with the intention to vote “reluctantly” to approve the cuts.
He was not overly optimistic about what comes next: “We’re not going to find $10 million. We can’t fix this fiscal year at this level, without the service cuts,” he said. “Larry Bird is not walking through that door to save us.”
But Benoit, recalling Crowley’s comments from a previous meeting, offered one hope: that the current fiscal year is still open to some revision until the governor’s supplemental budget emerges in January.
“Money can move around. That’s the purpose of supplemental,” Benoit said.
Will there even still be a statewide bus system?
Thursday’s meeting had an over an hour’s worth of public comment — a seemingly long stretch, but still an abbreviated runtime compared to a series of public hearings that preceded it. From July 28 through Aug. 6, RIPTA held a dozen public hearings on the proposed service cuts. The agency has uploaded detailed minutes for each one to its website, plus compilations of comments submitted via email and voicemail. Scattered across these documents are the names of state legislators who came to defend their constituents who rely on the bus.
And on Wednesday night, RIPTA riders and advocates gathered in Kennedy Plaza in Providence to denounce the cuts.
“Tomorrow we have an opportunity to persuade the board members not to go through with these devastating cuts, or tomorrow, we’ll be burying the corpse that is RIPTA,” Thomas G. Cute Jr., a retired RIPTA Driver, said at the rally. “We will not have a statewide bus system anymore.”
McKee’s last-minute letter may have assisted in saving RIPTA from a prompt burial, but transit riders were mostly unimpressed Thursday, describing the letter as platitudinous, tone-deaf, or a gesture that was too little, too late.
“This letter is garbage,” said Robin Barradas, a Providence resident and bus rider who wondered why McKee swooped in only as RIPTA is “at the edge of the cliff.”
Larry Bird is not walking through that door to save us.
Several transit advocates took particular umbrage with McKee’s reliance on the concept of “rightsizing,” viewing it as a euphemistic way to conceal layoffs. Among the dissenters was state Rep. Teresa Tanzi, a South Kingstown Democrat, who called it “absolutely foolhardy” to consider eliminating drivers’ jobs after the agency had spent months trying to fix its understaffing issues.
“We need to rightsize a lot of things in state government, and RIPTA is not one,” Tanzi said.
Indeed, several transit advocates turned to Durand and thanked him for trying to steer the agency through a dark time in its finances. The crowd’s ire fell more squarely on the governor.
Randall Rose of the Kennedy Plaza Resistance Coalition reminded the board that bus riders are not solitary creatures: “Riders care about this and riders’ family members care about this. Bus riders are loved.”
Said Rose: “There is an election next year, and bus riders will remember.”
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
