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RIDES Gives Updates On Services & Numbers

November 15, 2024 Steve Schwaller

(Spirit Lake)– A regional transportation provider is looking at expanding beyond the traditional services they provide. Cindy Vos, Associate Executive Director of RIDES, gave an update at Tuesday’s Dickinson County Board of Supervisors meeting…

“One of the things that we’re working on doing locally is we’re becoming a field fingerprinting station out of Spencer to service the community that way and we’re also continue to build our CDL program and hope to be able to provide whole CDL program testing in the very near future for our communities surrounding us.”

According to numbers presented at Tuesday’s meeting, the agency provided 30,577 rides this year in Dickinson county, compared to 28,653 last year. Vos says those number play a critical role when it comes to state and federal funding…

“Transits overall, not just Dickinson county but transits nationwide, are coming into a really difficult period. We’re going to see funding just decrease and decrease and decrease moving forward and so that’s part of why those numbers are so important to us is because that then turns into state and federal dollars for us by the number of people we transport. So it’s going to be really important that we continue to figure out how to do that in alternate ways.”

While the amount of money Dickinson county is being requested to contribute this coming fiscal year to RIDES is going to remain the same, Hugh Lively, RIDES Executive Director, says they may be forced to increase those requests in the future. He says they may also have to consider a possible increase in fares as operating costs continue to increase and state and federal funding decreases.

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