By: Diane Benjamin
1)
Don’t forget Tri-Valley is raising property taxes 5 days before Christmas:
2)
Bloomington had planned to meet tonight and next Monday to avoid Christmas. Tonight’s meeting has been canceled. Maybe raising taxes 2 meetings in a row had the alderman’s phone ringing too much.
I wonder if next Monday Gleason will try jamming through millions for downtown when no one is paying attention? Merry Christmas!
3)
From the last Connect Transit meeting:
Of course you can’t read the slides, only the people in the room can. Julie Hile mentions “paid transfers”. David Braun said there was 116,554 of them last year. Those are evidently people who didn’t buy a pass and are therefore charged to change buses. I didn’t know there was a charge to change buses! Just hit play to hear the discussion. Unfortunately no one knows (or won’t tell) the actual number of transfers. Currently they DISTORT ridership because people are counted twice and twice again for a return trip, we just don’t know by how many.
You do not have to pay to transfer buses and yes they have always used transferring buses to increase their ridership numbers. So one rider can be counted twice or three times if it takes more than one bus to get to their destination.
Why does he say 116,000+ paid?
I think it was mentioned that some buy a “pass”, maybe yearly or monthly? And that for some reason when it is used it doesn’t count as “paid”. Doesn’t make sense but maybe they can’t differentiate individual rides when using a pass?
I checked and I’m sure they don’t charge for transfers so I don’t know what he is talking about. Guess we’d have to ask him,