At their Monday night meeting, the Transport 2020 Finance and Governance Subcommittee derived ways to make the public more aware of the specifics regarding the proposed Regional Transit Authority.
If approved, the proposal — now waiting on a vote from the Legislature — would create an RTA that would host a variety of different modes of mass transportation throughout Dane County, including a commuter bus and a new commuter rail system.
But despite the dozens of community meetings Transport 2020 hosted throughout the county so constituents could voice their opinions and concerns about the RTA, committee members said the public is demanding more information about the proposal.
“I wonder if it would be fair to put some more meat and potatoes into this document,” said Jim Pulvermacher, supervisor for the town of Springfield and representative for the Dane County Towns Association. “Most people I’ve talked to and listened to have seen the presentations and understand the presentations, but most of them want to know facts and figures.”
According to Pulver-macher, the community wants to “see something and touch something.” He said the non-attendance of community members could be attributed to a lack of advertisement and reliance on word-of-mouth communication.
However, Dick Wagner, co-chair of the Transport 2020 Finance and Governance Subcommittee, said there are multiple documents and spreadsheets available on the Transport 2020 website the public can view, adding the information is not hidden.
Fitchburg Mayor Tom Clauder said though there is a lot of documentation available on the web, there can never be enough information provided to answer everyone’s questions.
“I do think that people need all the information they can get on the RTA because it’s such a big topic,” Clauder said. “People have heard about the RTA I’m sure — unless they’re under a rock, they’ve heard about it. But the more information the committee can get out, the more information people can learn about it.”
But Mike Blaska, another co-chair of the subcommittee, said Tran-sport 2020 does not have enough information to publicize yet.
“There are still a lot of questions that need to be answered, and we need some legislation quite frankly to create an RTA and we don’t have that yet,” Blaska said. “We need to get more information to the public to get by, but we don’t even have enough information to do that.”
Wagner said though Transport 2020 has spoken to many communities, there is not enough information released to formulate an educated opinion about it.
Both Blaska and Wagner agreed the RTA cannot be a reality without legislative approval and said the county sales tax and/property taxes are not able to fund the project on its own. The county can’t add an additional sales tax to fund the RTA without the approval of the Legislature, Blaska added.
“It’s sort of like we’re in college [and] we’re studying and there’s lots of different courses, but we’re not to the degree yet,” Wagner said. “We’re more than freshman at this point, but we’re probably not graduating seniors yet.”
