Friday, March 05, 1999
Buses for disabled will keep running
BY TANYA ALBERT
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Marjorie Moeller and thousands of other Hamilton County residents with disabilities can continue getting to jobs, doctors' appointments and social activities via bus.
Hamilton County Commissioners are coming through with $100,000 to keep Access' bus service for disabled passengers running in Hamilton County for the rest of the year.
“It gets me around to different places,” said Ms. Moeller, 65, of Oakley, who uses a walker and a special cane. “I'm afraid of the (regular) bus because I might fall.”
Trips to 25 communities making up nearly 13 percent of Access' 244,000 trips last year were threatened as the bus service scrambled to find money to meet Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements.
The ADA required Access service be similar to Metro's routes and times. To meet that requirement, Access would have to operate longer hours in some areas and slightly expand service in others.
The bottom line: Access needed more money to do that.
For more than a decade, disabled residents have been able to call Access to pick them up and drop them off in areas of Hamilton County that the Metro buses don't serve. But according to the ADA, because Metro didn't go there, the law didn't require Access buses to go there either.
In 1997, the money to keep Access going at full service came from cutting Metro service 1 percent, about $250,000, she said. In 1998, a Metro surplus covered the Access shortfall.
This year, though, enough money was raised to ensure the service won't be cut. The Hamilton County Board of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities (MRDD) and the Council on Aging pledged $200,000 of money for Access. The last $100,000 will come from the Hamilton County commissioners.
“Important doesn't even describe it,” said Essie Pederson, executive director of the non-profit Capabilities Unlimited who helped work to get the funding. “We've been living month to month, day to day in fear. ... People will be able to maintain their current jobs.”
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