March 2003
The Newsletter of the Wyoming Public Transit Association

Looking Back . . . On the Growth of Wyoming’s Public Transit Program
Steve Kurtz, WYTRANS Administrative Consultant
     I started working for WYDOT’s transit program manager, Sandy McGrew, in the late ’80s, when WYDOT was the Wyoming Highway Department. Sandy was concerned that the transit funding was not adequately being distributed, so she recruited many agencies around the state into the transit program. The Rural Transportation Assistance Program (RTAP) funds, set aside for training from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), were not being spent. Sandy worked with the agencies and WYDOT to determine that the RTAP funding could be made available to an association of transit agencies, who would take over driver, dispatcher, and manager training.
     Sandy went on to the State of Nevada Transit Program, but in 1991, the Wyoming Public Transit Association, WYTRANS, was formed as a private non-profit corporation consisting of the transit providers in Wyoming that were participants in the WYDOT transit program. WYDOT immediately contracted with WYTRANS to provide funding from RTAP for the association to provide training for drivers, dispatchers, and managers.
     Geri Vincent-Haas, who was the director of the Riverton Senior Center at the time, was the first president of the WYTRANS board. She was president for several years, presiding over a board that was finding its way, developing a program, and coming of age. Geri and the Riverton Senior Citizen’s Center sponsored the first ten conferences and bus roadeos in Riverton. Attendance was good for the first real training provided in the state. The first roadeo was memorable. We had a course map and score sheets but didn’t really know what we were doing. We didn’t have a bus to set up the course. My wife, Libby, and I worked with a bus vendor, who, dressed in his Elvis coveralls, open to the waist, drove his 1965 Pontiac Bonneville convertible through the cones in our initial setup. We did have one driver pull completely off the course and parking lot and get stuck in an irrigation
Geri Vincent-Haas presents the 1997 Trainer of the Year Award to Faye Nash.
ditch, but over the years most drivers have done fairly well.

     In the early years, WYTRANS recruited a handful of trainers, most of whom already worked for a transit agency, and we started sending trainers around the state with RTAP funds to train people in Defensive Driving and Passenger Assistance Training (PAT).
     In the early ’90s the transit providers went to the Transportation Commission and Legislature to obtain state funding to match the federal funding, and nearly doubled total funding available to rural transit providers. The Casper and Cheyenne urban programs had been subsidizing the rural program heavily, but could no longer continue to do so. The legislation allowed transfer of funds between the urban and rural programs and allowed for a much better matching process.
     By the mid-’90s, the Community Transportation Association of America (CTAA) came to Wyoming with a new training program—Passenger Assistance and Safety Certification (PASS). WYTRANS trained fifteen trainers with the intent that they would take this new course, a much better one than PAT, to agencies around the state. Out of this group came a dedicated core of serious, professional trainers, who ultimately gained national stature and provide training across the country. Faye Nash, ringleader of the Wyoming trainers, was selected as the National Transit Institute Training Professional of the Year in 2001. The trainers have flourished with PASS, and when they found the Defensive Driving class lacking in the techniques necessary for bus drivers, developed a Safe Driver training course, which has been approved by WYDOT and the Highway Patrol. In 2002, WYTRANS had 22 certified PASS Instructors

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Wyoming Transit Express 1 March 2003