The Park City Transit department is experiencing some growing pains and the city manager, who isn’t surprised, says change is coming. Melissa Allison has more:
The Park City transit department is about 40 years old and City Manager Diane Foster said after talking with some staff members, they quickly realized they needed to make some big changes.
“We were having discussions, Public Works Director Blake Fonnesbeck and Brooke Moss our HR director and I and really looked at, ‘Okay, we need a structural change because we’ve grown so fast. Particularly in the last year when you think about the addition of the electric express. A lot of a growing fleet of electric buses, the route out to Kamas,'" Foster said. "That we were growing, and we needed a new structure to support that.”
Foster said they’ve already filled two of the three positions which will drive these changes.
“Kory Kersavage on the business administration part, and he used to be in our budget department so he’s a great resource there," Foster said. "Kenzie Coulson will be moving from parking over into transit quality manager and that is a deep position that includes a deep responsibility for supporting the system and then we’ll be bringing in a transit systems manager and the front runner, the candidate right now is someone who has run a transit system that their staff was larger than the staff of the entire city. So, we knew we needed to bring in some transit depth in that area and someone who had a lot of experience with the Federal Transportation Administration and with states and things like that.”
Foster said they’ve also brought the Summit County Council into the conversation, after county council member Roger Armstrong vented that changes were needed and the county, given its financial participation in the transit program, needed to be involved.
“In fact, we met again with Roger and Kim recently, Andy and I did that a couple of weeks ago, to talk through the reorganization," Foster said. "And you know, I think it was great, you know, Roger said, ‘Look, we need to change technology. We need a different structure.’ And we are now nine weeks into the reorganization and I’ve been really impressed at how focused our team has been on the reorganization.”
The city, Foster said, have done a lot of training with the city’s employees but it will take time before the public sees any real changes.
They’re also part of a joint transit advisory board with Summit County. Foster said the county is supportive of the changes the city wants to make and even invite the public to join the conversation.
“And we’ll be going to, actually public meetings of the Joint Transportation [Transit] Advisory Board," Foster said. "So, if you live along a bus route or you want a bus route, you can actually come and talk to elected officials specifically in meetings designed to talk about transit.”
The reorganization discussion is scheduled during work session that will begin at 5:15 p.m. on Thursday.
I’m Melissa Allison, KPCW News.