Transit authority one step closer to ballot

POST FALLS - A proposal to form a public transportation authority in Kootenai County is one step closer to going before voters in November.

The Kootenai Metropolitan Planning Organization board is forwarding the request to Kootenai County commissioners to put it on the ballot.

"We will start educating the commissioners on the concept and hope they vote on it in April," said Staci Lehman, KMPO spokeswoman.

Post Falls Mayor Clay Larkin, who sits on the KMPO board and was on a sub-committee that reviewed the proposal, said the authority would create a manager who deals strictly with public transportation.

"Like everything else, public transportation is getting bigger and busier," Larkin said. "With the census coming up, we'll likely transition from one level of a statistical area into a more elevated one, so the timing is right."

A simple majority would be needed in November for the proposal to pass.

A regional public transportation authority is a government agency that coordinates services, monitors how federal grant money is spent and secures funding through federal and local sources.

An RPTA also requires accountability to the public, stakeholders and member jurisdictions, Lehman said.

Since Kootenai County doesn't have a transit authority - like Spokane Transit Authority in Spokane - different agencies involved in the KMPO such as cities, highway districts, the county and Coeur d'Alene Tribe are responsible for planning, funding and operations regarding public transportation.

"That can cause occasional issues with cooperation, conflicts of interest," Lehman said.

A loose-knit collaboration between the agencies is how this area currently gets by without a transit authority.

The original recommendation to form a transit authority came from the 2005 Kootenai County Public Transportation Feasibility Study.

Since then, several projects have come up that have illustrated how it would be easier to work through one operational fund than several, Lehman said.