Senior Services asked to cut costs

On Dec. 16, the Klickitat County Board of Commissioners declined to support two of three public transportation grants prepared by Klickitat County Senior Services (KCSS).

Had they been submitted and approved, the grants would have enabled KCSS to open bus service between Goldendale and Toppenish, and between White Salmon, The Dalles, and Carson.

Without the board's support, the grants could neither be submitted nor funded.

Ray Thayer, most adamantly opposed among the three commissioners, was direct about his reasons.

"I want to make perfectly clear that my hesitancy is not toward seniors, but toward running buses up and down the highway with nobody in them," Thayer explained. "I see buses when I am going to The Dalles and back. At Dallesport I witness hardly any people riding ... Let's find ridership for the ones we have."

More fundamentally at issue, Thayer said, were overruns over the last two years in Senior Services' budgets.

"The department keeps telling me that by getting their grants they spend less of the county's money, but when I see them go $80,000 over budget, I don't get what they're telling me," Thayer said.

Klickitat County's Chief Financial Officer Glen Chipman confirmed that total overruns amounted to about that amount over the past two years.

Senior Services' Director Roger Gadway, said the lost grant opportunity would put off start-up of the new services, but would not affect current bus service to The Dalles.

Regarding the budget overruns, to which Thayer linked his opposition to the grants, Gadway said -- and Chipman agreed -- that some could have been foreseen, others not.

Gadway cited unexpected costs ranging from a payout for sick leave accrued by an employee who retired, to cost increases for workers' compensation, liability insurance, and health benefits, to "big repairs" on vehicles scheduled for replacement.

"Some expenses," Gadway said, "known before adoption of the budget, in hindsight I should have requested."

He did not quibble with the board's concern.

"I agree it is the commissioners' responsibility to see to it that we come in under budget," Gadway said. "It is their job to be skeptical."

He said that KCSS is tightening its belt.

"They may have had reason to think we were not in control of our budget, but now we are," Gadway said; he cited cutbacks in transportation expenses, some reorganization and adjustment of one position in senior programs.

In a recent budget workshop, Thayer expressed concern that KCSS was unwilling to reduce staff.

Gadway said the commissioners had not gone so far as to ask him to do so, adding that he sees "no obvious ways to cut positions without cutting needed services."

Meanwhile, Gadway and KCSS's transportation director, Eric Olsen, are watching ridership increase on buses to The Dalles, and this summer instituted changes aimed at increasing efficiency.

"It is a valuable service and we hope to convince [the commissioners] of that," Gadway said.

"I just see it going nowhere but up," said Olsen.

Since the run to The Dalles was finally converted this summer from a "taxi-style," on-call service to a scheduled -- yet flexible -- bus-style service, Olsen said that ridership has grown from 31 in August to 155 in October to 210 in the first half of December.

In any case, KCSS will have little choice but to keep watching pennies in the coming year.

Gadway said he had asked the board for "additional funding to cover normal increases in salaries and benefits."

However, out of an initial preliminary budget request of $116,000 for senior programs, which Gadway later trimmed to $98,000, the board anticipated funding $95,000, just $2,000 more than KCSS's 2004 budget, Chipman said.