By: Diane Benjamin
Connect Transit can not cover wages with what people pay to ride the bus. Every month operations loses around $800,000 – that’s EVERY month.
That is taxpayer money being used to drive empty buses around town! Next to bike lanes without bikes, buses are an abomination to anyone who pays taxes. Government’s job is not to redistribute money with boondoggles like Connect Transit.
Even with losing tons of bucks, Connect found money to rehab a bus they plan to use to register voters and give people free rides to the polls. They even have a webpage announcing their plans: https://www.connect-transit.com/communitybus.asp
Connect Transit will roll out the #GetConnected Community Bus in early 2018 that will be a multi-purpose room on wheels! We have retrofitted a 2003 Gillig to feature a waiting room area in the back (seats 13), two booths for meeting space (seats 8), a television and DVD player and much more! Our goal is to partner with various organizations in the community to help better serve different areas throughout Bloomington-Normal. We will be holding voter registration drives, fresh food markets, reading literacy nights for children, mobile pop-up museums and much more. Interested in hearing more about the #GetConnected Community Bus, contact Jeff Holtke at [email protected] or by calling 309.829.1158! Check out the photo below of our retrofitting of the #GetConnected Community Bus!
The page says nothing about receiving donations for this extravaganza, so it looks safe to assume your tax dollars are being used for “Community Organizing”. Now that the bus has been retrofitted, they want to sell advertising. I wonder if candidates can advertise?
The obviously partisan League of Women Voters will be registering voters and teaching them about the voting process.
Since the League supports the “Welcoming Ordinance”, next up will allowing illegals to vote in local elections!
Maybe they will hold classes on how government creates prosperity!
Nonsense like this is why people are leaving Illinois in droves: https://www.illinoispolicy.org/land-of-leaving-moving-companies-rank-illinois-no-1-for-outbound-vans/
On Jan. 2, United Van Lines released its 41st annual National Movers Study and Atlas Van Lines released its 2017 Migration Patterns study. United based the study on its customers’ household moves made in 2017, and Atlas studied nearly 73,000 interstate and cross-border relocations of household goods from Jan. 1, 2017 through Dec. 15, 2017.
In both studies, Illinois was home to the highest rate of outbound moves in the nation. United’s study found that in 2017, 63 percent of Illinois moves were outbound rather than inbound, and Atlas found Illinois had an outbound rate of 62.4 percent.
This is going to be great!
(for Democrats)
How many buses that we have paid to replace could have been rehabed to run longer than replace them? It would seem be cheaper to do repairs than replace. They just proved in this situation it can be done.
Only in Bloomington/Normal could this kind of thing happen. This is definitely a situation comedy in the making. You would normally not be able to make such silly stuff up without the influence of drugs. But here in Bloomington/Normal we don’t need drugs because we have leadership without common sense, vision or even a little grasp on reality. Everyone (even Transit Connect apparently) knows that NO ONE rides their buses and they are a monstrous waste of taxpayer money. So now we are turning them into mobile ruling class indoctrination centers? Yes, who are you going to thank as you are driven to voter registration or have the broccoli on wheels bus show up in your neighborhood? Will our mayors photographs be placed in the front of the bus so people can remember who to thank? When the bus system is finally shut down (and it will be forced to shut down) we will have rivers of tears and loud voices in protest because we will be shutting down a bus system and its rolling community centers. This is a way for Transit Connect to build a base of support for their wasteful foolish bus system.
They do have lots of college kids riding! Their education is subsidized and their transportation.
In the end, Bloomington-Normal will be a liberal paradise. Government jobs aplenty, illegal aliens, high taxes, bigger government, government-determined quality of life. Of course, when real taxpaying folks that work hard and play by the rules leave town, no one will be here to pay for all of this garbage. Ah, socialism…
A liberal paradise is still a paradise. I’m in.
like Detroit? Chicago? You can have them!
I’m not against progress or innovation ,, but these idiots keep wasting money like there’s an endless supply to drain . and they keep hiding higher taxes in other things , upping fees and providing less so they can grab their goals . it wasn’t always like this , but lately it’s beyond control ..they’d save money if they just subsidized cab fares . and ended buses .
They say they provide 2.4 million rides per year. Are they lying? Impossible that NO ONE rides the bus. I see full buses in the ISU and Downtown area all the time.
Like I said, they are a bus service for college kids. I’ve NEVER seen a bus even half full downtown.
I rarely see a full bus. There are usually 5-7 people when I pass a bus in operation at any given time. Regardless, its a waste of money. $80,000 loss per month?! Really? Koos and Renner play a sad violin…’we just can’t find anything left to cut, so we have no choice but to raise your taxes’ (again and again and again). Such BS! Are they taking the bus to work or out doing errands? Of course not.
I live on E. Oakland and observe the bus going east and west with an average of zero to 4 people each time. It is never more than 8 people during shift times. It is a sad joke being played upon the taxpayers. We need to have a better voting turnout next election or we are going to look like chicago or detroit. What corporations would want to build here and why would taxpayers want to live here?
Community organizing used to be assessing a issue and organizing the community to pull together people and resources to resolve the problem. It has deveolved to looking for a problem and then calling in the government–not a long term way to solve a problem or teaching the community to resolve it on their own.
What do you expect? Who is the president of the Board of Directors for CT? The same person who is VP of Bike BloNo. He also works for WGLT. Any guesses?
Communist City Government=Communist Tactics=2 Cities Destroyed.
Welcome to Bloomington-Normal, the new Venezuela. (Without the good weather.)