An advisory body created in 2017 to pave the way for an eventual government authority to expand public transit has endorsed a letter to elected officials asking them to finally create a long-planned entity.
“For more than 15 years, this community has talked about ‘what does regional transit governance look like?’” said Ann Wall, a deputy county executive in Albemarle County who serves on a working group appointed by the Regional Transit Partnership.
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The Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission has twice led efforts to create an authority that could bring in more revenue and coordinate expansion across multiple political jurisdictions.
A previous effort in the late 2000’s was shelved in 2010 after the General Assembly allowed the creation of an authority but declined to allow a referendum to be held on a local sales tax to pay for expanded transit. The idea for the partnership stemmed from a regional coordination study from 2016.
“It was intended to really identify opportunities to improve communication, coordination, and collaboration on transit matters,” Wall said at the August 22 meeting of the Regional Transit Partnership formed as an interim measure. “It was identified in that study that the Regional Transit Partnership was intended to serve as a precursor to an authority.”
Albemarle, Charlottesville, and TJPDC staff have been meeting since March to craft by-laws to run the authority.
For now, only Albemarle and Charlottesville would be official members of what would go by the acronym CARTA. The RTA’s Board of Directors would initially consist of two Albemarle Supervisors, two Charlottesville City Councilors, and four non-voting members to be determined by the Board.
Other TJPDC counties would be allowed to join in the future if they wanted to do so.
There will be a presentation on the Regional Transit Authority at the joint meeting of the Charlottesville City Council and the Albemarle Board of Supervisors scheduled for September 17.
One of the tasks of the authority would be to begin to implement a vision for expanded transit that came out of a study overseen by the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission as well as a governance study. (view the vision) (See Also: Regional Transit Vision Plan nearing completion, November 2, 2022)
“The idea was to create an authority where we would collectively look at and address transit needs in the community and also at some point in the future to pursue collection action on a dedicated revenue source,” Wall said.
However, if both bodies agree to create the body, Wall said it will not initially have any oversight or operational control over any of the existing transit agencies.
The director of Jaunt suggested that it may be premature to ask elected officials to create the authority given a lack of clarity about what kind of funding it might seek.
“When I see things even in the 2025/2026 plan about applying for grants, is that imagining that CARTA would ask for the [Department of Rail and Public Transportation] money instead of Jaunt?” said Mike Murphy, a former interim city manager and Jaunt Board Member who became the permanent CEO earlier this year.
Garland Williams, the director of Charlottesville Area Transit, said there are many models across the country where an umbrella organization pulls down money for multiple agencies.
“The authority then at that point is a partner because they are spending their money to get the additional services that they want without having to collapse,” Williams said. “But eventually I assume we all know that the region will function better if the organization was sharing resources at some point down the line.”
For instance, Williams said all of the agencies are currently struggling to hire and retain drivers. He supports establishing the authority to begin to move toward cooperation.
Murphy pointed out that he was not part of any of the previous discussions on regional transit until becoming Jaunt’s director in January. He served many years in Charlottesville government before serving as interim city manager from July 2018 to May 2019.
In February, the regional transit governance study produced by the firm AECOM was completed.
“The governance study was very specific to go ahead and activate CARTA through the legislation that was approved,” Wall said. “It’s actually a really good read. It identified communities that were similar and it talked about all these different models.”
Wall said the working group did not have conversations about what the model would be, but that would be the work of the authority’s board of directors.
The Board of the Partnership voted to endorse the letter.
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