On Monday evening, May 8, I listened to the Labor and Veterans Affairs Committee’s noble but futile attempt to save Vitran jobs and prevent the
excising of 50 percent of Vitran’s service.
I don’t even use Vitran; there has never been bus service anywhere close to my residence. However, I have long been a strong supporter of an efficient mass transit system for the Virgin Islands, and I believe that the present situation, leaving hundreds of bus-dependent citizens stranded on the roadside, borders on the criminal.
In the latter half of the 1980s, as the League of Women Voters’ representative, I served on a DPW Traffic Group. It had broad representation and it was able to accomplish a great deal, including recommendations for bus service and traffic control improvements, locating sites for the parking segment of a park and ride system, and planning a paid in-town parking system (not meters!).
However, when several years passed and none of this came to fruition, the advisory committee members began to realize that public transportation had absolutely no priority in the Department of Public Works. Attendance dropped; the group dissolved. Then, during the Schneider administration, the Traffic Group was replaced by two other advisory groups. It soon became apparent that the sole purpose of these groups was to put the final stamp of approval on what became known as Plan 8.
Monday evening’s hearings should have made DPW’s low priority consideration of public transit very clear, especially after several senators managed to pull out of Commissioner Thompson the admission that, in the past two years (and probably several previous years), zero T-21 dollars have been utilized for Vitran.
The commissioner indicated that the entire V. I. T-21 allotment has gone into "transportation planning". He did not elaborate, and no senator pursued the question further. If they had done so, they would have learned that, in the DPW agenda, "transportation planning" translates primarily to highway planning. The result: thousands of dollars paid out to stateside engineering firms for the design of expanded roadways which cannot be built within any reasonable time frame. In the meantime, Vitran was left to disintegrate.
It is possible, I suppose, that some additional money will be found somewhere to return the Vitran employees to full-time employment, but that would be a temporary fix. A longer lasting solution is needed.
Then too, all sorts of allegations of mismanagement, and worse, have circulated during the past few weeks. They need to be cleared up. One way to do that, as Sam Topp has suggested, would be by means of an audit of the Vitran management procedures by the V. I. Inspector General. A federal audit of the utilization and expenditure of federal transportation funds would also be helpful.
But it is not just Vitran! The whole question of DPW’s transportation policy, with its emphasis on highway expansion at the expense of public transit, should be thoroughly investigated.
The May 8 hearing merely scratched the surface, and the Legislature should not be allowed to drop the issue. So if you are concerned about the future of Vitran, please contact Sen. Gregory Bennerson and request Committee on Government Operations’ hearings on St. John, St. Croix and St. Thomas — now, while the subject is hot.
Editor's note: Helen Gjessing is the chair, of League of Women's Voter's Committee on Planning and Environmental Quality.
