(Spencer)– The impacts of COVID-19 on the community continue to grow. RIDES announced today (Monday) that with the exception of previously established dialysis trips and a few medical runs, it will be discontinuing operations in its nine county service area effective Wednesday, April 1st. Chief Operating Officer Cindy Voss tells KUOO news decision by the Board of Directors of RIDES and Executive Management was extremely difficult, but she says they didn’t have much of a choice from a financial standpoint…
“All the way across the board it’s been devastating. This is just really emotionally hard. This is something, you know, we’re designed to move people but the nature of this virus moved with people, and so the balance of between protecting our drivers and our communities finally came down to we just simply have seen our ridership decrease by almost 80 percent or more depending on some of our areas, and along with that our financial revenue has plummeted.”
Voss says the RIDES administrative office will also be closing for the time being…
“Unfortunately we’ve had to do some layoffs of full time staff. We’ve released about a half dozen people. We’re down to a very skeleton staff right now and we will be closing the admin office as of this week and most people will be working from home for the things that need to be done.”
Voss adds they do plan to resume services as soon as possible once the circumstances allow…
“And if that could happen tomorrow we’d all be ecstatic. But we do need to follow the directive from our health officials and our Governor and we definitely will do that. It is our hope that we can reach out to some of our local businesses, maybe do deliveries for them. We want to be able to serve the community still in the best way we can in addition to the dialysis. We just don’t have enough demand for those trips to keep the buses running in that aspect, so we’re looking for other ways we can continue to serve our communities.”
Voss says they’ll be posting updates on the RIDES website and facebook page.
