ALLENTOWN, Pa. – Pennsylvania’s state budget plan is causing concern for public transit in the Lehigh Valley.<\/p>\n
A hefty $50 billion Pennsylvania state budget plan has been passed.<\/p>\n
But public transit funds are missing from the list.<\/p>\n
“Unfortunately, it didn’t make it into the final deal,” said Owen O’Neil, Executive Director of LANTA.<\/p>\n
It leaves regional transit agencies like LANTA, trying to figure out what’s next for their bus services.<\/p>\n
“Some of the transit systems, like SEPTA and Pittsburgh Regional Transit, were able to get some short term funding to help them over the next couple of years,” said O’Neil.<\/p>\n
O’Neil said they’re working to do the same in the Lehigh Valley.<\/p>\n
“We have also submitted a request for some additional short term funds, and we are still waiting to hear back from PennDOT,” said O’Neil.<\/p>\n
But O’Neil said having the long-term funds helps the transit agency nail down a plan for the future and answer the big questions: how much service can LANTA offer, how often can the bus routes run and can bus routes be extended to different places?<\/p>\n
Without long-term funds, O’Neil also said LANTA could face significant service cuts.<\/p>\n
“If we don’t get any additional fundings, we would have to move forward with some, some pretty significant service cuts early in next year, like that could be anywhere from 25% to 40% of our service that would have to be reduced,” O’Neil said.<\/p>\n
O’Neil said additional money will be appreciated, but it’ll only be short-term funds.<\/p>\n
“We are hoping for the best. We are optimistic. So we’re really just kind of moving forward with a plan that doesn’t involve those really significant service cuts and hoping we don’t have to go down that road,” said O’Neil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. – Pennsylvania’s state budget plan is causing concern for public transit in the Lehigh Valley. A…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34580,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[214,119,121,120,232],"class_list":{"0":"post-34579","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-allentown","8":"tag-_homepage_top_stories","9":"tag-allentown","10":"tag-allentown-headlines","11":"tag-allentown-news","12":"tag-allentown-area"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34579\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}