By Daniel Nash

The Courier-Herald

Pierce Transit solicited feedback on the direction of its organization from Sumner residents last week. The community design workshop was the eighth of nine workshops offered throughout Pierce Transit’s service area.

The public transportation organization hosted the workshops from early October through Thursday. The Sumner workshop took place Nov. 10.

Pierce Transit has been planning to rework its system for a few years now, spokesman Lars Erickson said. Current economic concerns have prompted the organization’s interest in affecting changes now.

A chart displayed by Executive Project Manager Amber Simonsen showed declining revenues since mid-2007. Seventy-three percent of Pierce Transit’s funding comes from sales tax revenue. A personal perspective is that for every $10 spent by a consumer, 6 pennies go to Pierce Transit, Simonsen said. But during the recession, fewer consumers are spending money.

The workshop took the form of a market focus group designed to assess which services were most desired by the most community members and which services could be reduced.

In addition to bus service, Pierce Transit offers shuttles for disabled riders and vanpools for small groups of commuters going in the same direction at the same time. The shuttles provide valuable social service to the disabled, but are one of the most expensive services to provide. Van-pooling is successful in that it takes 2,300 cars off the road during commute hours, Simonsen said.

“We have a 30-year-old system with 414 square miles covered by routes, and we want to make sure all those routes are effective,” she said. “That’s why we want your feedback. All of you are experts in your own community.

“We don’t expect you to come to a consensus solution for all of our issues, but we do ask that you disagree respectfully.”

Only a handful of people attended the Sumner workshop, and attendance has varied widely with each workshop, Erickson said.

Prior to the workshops, Transit authorities spent several months interviewing stakeholders in the issue of public transport and came away with six principles of service that could be assessed and adjusted. Those principles were safety and security, social service, economic development, environmental impact, geographic coverage and livable communities.

The session opened with a few quiz questions to establish a baseline understanding among the audience of the services Pierce Transit provides. This data was collected via radio wave transmitters working in conjunction with the Transit Powerpoint presentation.

Transit employees then split participants into small groups.

Each group table had a placemat with squares for each of the six principles of service, and over three rounds each group member allocated value to the principles via buttons.

In the first round, each member could distribute seven buttons. In the second round, they could distribute one more. But in the last round, they had to remove five buttons, ensuring that they would have to remove their affiliation with certain values.

After completion of the exercise, Simonsen displayed the comparisons between round two and three for each value, which could be read for the size of the drop-off between the two rounds. The number one drop-off was in the environmental category, meaning that when faced with a choice of what service to cut, Sumner participants were more likely to cut environmental services first. The runnerup drop-offs, from greatest to smallest difference in values, were livable communities, safety and security, economic development, geographic coverage and social service.

It is difficult to use this criteria as the primary indicator of community values, however. Though social service had the least drop-off in the valuation rounds, it did not have much given value to begin with.

Other complicating factors include the fact that meeting attendance has been split between public transit riders and non-riders. Mike and Sheila Crawford only ride the bus to the Puyallup Fair, but they attended the meeting because of concerns about speeding buses. Every community member’s opinion was valuable whether a rider or not, Simonsen said.

The exercise at least allowed participants a chance to empathize with the plight of reorganization.

“It was hard to take those buttons away,” Mike Crawford said. “You want to give everyone a piece of the pie, but you just can’t.”