(Photo via Seven Valleys Health Coalition).
Cortland County is set to receive a big boost to their routinely-allocated funding from the Federal Transportation Administration.
The funding is used to maintain and improve the county’s public transit system and will total $5.5 million for the coming years.
“We are really excited to announce that early last week, we got the award for what we had applied for. The application is not unique,” County planning director Trisha Hiemstra said Thursday, calling into a Agriculture, Planning and Environmental Legislature committee meeting. “It’s what we apply for every year for all of our operating expenses, but the difference is we had applied for much more above and beyond what we normally do, including, new technology components for our system, and a transportation study.”
Legislative Minority Leader Beau Harbin (D-LD-2) said Thursday that some of the new technology includes advanced GPS and new ways to pay for county public transportation.
“That grant is going to really improve and modernize our transportation system,” he said. “There is advanced GPS we can use to know where buses are, and we maybe even can get to the point of telling users that their bus will be arriving in ‘X’ number of minutes -- the way you see at certain metro stations in other cities.”
The county also received funding to pay for an app for public transportation.
“There'll be no-cash payment of tickets through the app,” Harbin said. “There's just a lot of technology increases and improvements, and modernizations, so it's really exciting to see the big changes that are gonna be coming.”
The county will also build a new facility for buses, Hiemstra noted.
“Now the real work will begin to start working on some requests for proposals and going through all the solicitation components,” she said. “We’re pretty excited that the design for the facility was a little over $200,000 in total. The facility itself is going to be about $2 million, so we're going to we're ready to hit the ground running.”
Hiemstra said she would like to see construction of the new building sometime in 2025.
The local match for the federal funding requires Cortland County to pay about 10% of the total grant. The county receives federal Accelerated Transportation funding that is meant to be invested in transportation facilities.
“But in the past, we haven't been able to invest in that facility, because we do not own the current facility,” Hiemstra said. “We have been getting approval the last few years from the (State) Department of Transportation to be able to roll over that funding, and right now we have a little over $300,000. We've been premeditating using that funding as our local match for that facility.”
The increased funding, Harbin noted, is a “big win for Cortland County.”
“(The funding) is a big increase from all we've asked for in the past,” he said.
