WAUSAU, WI (WSAU) — The city of Wausau may see new bus shelters in the coming year.
At Thursday afternoon’s monthly transit commission meeting, Transit Director for the city of Wausau Greg Seubert informed the members of a grant Metro Ride had applied for to upgrade customer amenities at bus stops. This would include potentially buying new bus shelters for existing locations and more benches at high traffic stops.
Seubert says the grant money would mainly be used to make the current bus shelters ADA accessible. “What we’d like to do is make them all ADA accessible. All of the shelters have had a long lifespan. In fact, they were placed at their current locations before the Americans with Disabilities Act was even passed. We would like to replace all of them with ADA accessible shelters at their current locations.”
The money for these upgrades was not expected to be available. But when Metro Ride found out the funds were available, they applied for the grant. These funds are actually already available to the city as Seubert explains.
“We receive funds for elderly and disabled transportation every year. There is a reserve account that some of those funds have rolled over into if they’ve been spent. We can use those funds for the purchase of capital items. Capital items would be vehicles or for instance bus shelters. So we put their request to use those funds for the replacement of these bus shelters.”
The grant has been submitted and Seubert expects Metro Ride to be notified soon, either at the end of the month or early January. As the city already has the money Seubert also expects the request to be approved as it’s a fairly routine request.
Seubert also mentions that the funds do include a matching requirement. “You have to match whatever 85 21 funds you spend on a project, you have to contribute at least 20% to match it. So we’ve done the math to project costs. We’ve got some estimates on the shelters themselves. We’ll get estimates on the concrete pad which they will be fastened. And we’ll bring that back to the next meeting.”
The matching funds are something that would have to come from the city. So once the funds are approved through the grant, Seubert says the next step would be to go to the city to use the department’s reserve account. The action would then need to be approved by the city’s finance committee to make those funds available.
