Twin Transit Shifts Gears From Expansion to Introspection

Posted

Twin Transit is no longer looking to build a new transit center in the Twin Cities. Rather, the agency is exploring a large-scale renovation of its current facility at 212 E. Locust St. in Centralia that could include adding more than 3,000 square feet of operational and office space.

Plans to construct an outsized transit center at 415 N. Pearl St. in downtown Centralia fell out of favor last year as the estimated cost ballooned to nearly $10 million. Former Twin Transit manager Derrick Wojcik-Damers attempted to justify the need to accommodate a dozen buses at a time by floating a potential partnership with Greyhound and other outside partners, though none had been involved in discussions with Twin Transit prior to Wojcik-Damers’ resignation earlier this year.

The agency now plans to instead focus on improving what it already has, including a number of bus stop locations in Chehalis and Centralia, before potentially looking to construct a few smaller transit stations at key interchanges along its route structure. The Pearl Street property will likely change hands again in the near future, a little more than three years after the City of Centralia sold it to Twin Transit.

“We knew that if we were going to create a place for just our operations side, we had to move it off our main site,” said Joe Clark, Director of Transit Services for Twin Transit. “That was the intent (on Pearl Street), that they were going to only put the operations there and leave maintenance on Locust. When I came on (in April), I told the team, ‘I’m not splitting up the families. We’re going to stay in one spot, we own this building with no debt against it, so why don’t we look into a renovation?’”

Clark said during a meeting of the Twin Transit Advisory Board on Tuesday that preliminary cost estimates to improve working conditions and add needed staff and community space at the current facility, a pole barn constructed in 1976, range from $800,000 to $1.2 million. Agency staff also hope to redo the parking lot and fuel systems at their facility in conjunction with a remodel.

All told, the top-line estimate for the three projects would be about $2.1 million, or close to 20 percent of what the now-discarded design for a new facility would have run Twin Transit. Even if it had been able to secure grant funds for what some local officials referred to as a “Taj Mahal,” Twin Transit would have needed to provide about $2 million in matching funds as part of the contract.

“It just made sense to stay where we’re at in terms of being cost-effective as far as housing us over the next 10 years,” Clark said. “Even if it’s not all $2.15 million, we still have the ability with our projected cash flow to make a pretty sizable payment of somewhere between $75,000 and $100,000 per year, so we could finance it over an extended period. We have some reserves we can use for some of the readiness stuff, and with our team, we can do some of the digging and excavating on our own.”

Clark said hopes to be able to start construction in August or September of this year, with an eye on finishing the renovations by next spring.



While self-financing a majority of the work in the meantime, Twin Transit still plans to pursue grant funding for the renovations and is in the process of applying for $2.15 million from a Federal Transit Administration grant program for buses and bus facilities. Clark said he hopes to hear back from that agency in October. 

The in-house improvements won’t be limited to the facility on Locust Street. Twin Transit received $528,000 in special transportation funds from the Washington State Department of Transportation that the agency plans to use for updating bus stops. The award given as part of the 2019-2021 state budget cycle was about twice as much as Twin Transit has historically received from that program, Clark said.

Twin Transit plans to work with local firm Skillings Connelly to first update four stops in Chehalis, including a trio on Market Street that have proven unsafe for pedestrians and vehicle traffic. They will turn their attention to stops on Harrison Avenue and Main Street in Centralia during the 2020-2021 construction season.

“I think we’re on the right track of improving what’s already there,” said Rebecca Staebler, who serves on the Twin Transit board and the Centralia City Council. “The choice to focus on what we have now and make it work for where we are right now is an appropriate place to be. Focusing our energy on addressing issues and concerns to make sure we’re meeting the needs of our passengers rather than using that energy and time on building something new.”

Skillings Connelly will assist Twin Transit with performing public outreach to get input from community members about changes to the bus stops and potentially the bus routes themselves. Clark hopes that by the end of 2020, the agency will have completed renovations to its facility and made changes to bus routes following a process of collecting ridership data and community input. There should also be two new Twin Transit buses sometime that year.

After those areas of need are taken care of, Clark then hopes to focus on how Twin Transit can best play a role in WSDOT’s mission of using public transit to reduce traffic on Interstate 5. It is unlikely Twin Transit would strike out on its own to create routes that take riders to other counties, but the demand appears to be high enough to warrant the conversation.

“Intercity Transit (in Thurston County) sends 21 van pools down here a day,” Clark said. “They’ve talked to us about expanding it to as many as 50 per day. If there’s that kind of response, we should be able to figure out a way to get people back and forth. Our goal here is to work to move folks from the Twin Cities more efficiently and to integrate other areas that have growth coming, like the Port of Centralia. … Then we can look at becoming more integrated along the I-5 corridor in line with the WSDOT model of connecting public transportation from Vancouver, Canada to Vancouver, Washington.”