MANSFIELD — Jean Taddie is hoping for good news any day now.
$500,000 worth of good news, that is, for Richland County Transit.
Taddie, the transit development manager for the Richland County Regional Planning Commission, said she hopes to hear soon whether RCT has been approved for a grant that would help local residents with transportation to and from work — outside of the agency’s normal operating hours.
“We’re supposed to find out by (the end of August), which should be any day. I did check my email right before I left, so we’re anxiously waiting word on that,” Taddie said during a lunchtime presentation to the Richland County Regional Planning Commission.
“If we get this funding for the service, we would anticipate implementing that starting in May of 2026,” she said.
“If we are not awarded the funding, then we will continue to search for funding opportunities,” Taddie said.
RCT, RCRPC and the North End Community Improvement Collaborative joined forces in December to receive a $150,000 grant to design a pilot program that could help solve a troublesome local workforce issue:
What do people do if they work second or third shift but don’t have a way to get to their job and back home again?
The fact is that one in four Americans is unable to regularly and reliably access transportation they require to meet their daily needs, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Transit Administration.
The local partnership demonstration project was one of only eight selected nationwide by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Transportation Studies aimed at exploring strategies to improve people’s mobility and access to daily needs.
Taddie said the local team has conducted “extensive outreach, surveys and focus groups, engaging hundreds of people to develop a workforce transportation plan for a one-year pilot of transit service to serve workers before and after current RCT hours.”
“Workforce transportation has been a tough nut to crack, especially second shift, third shift and even very early first shift, for literally decades,” she said.
Taddie said 558 public surveys were completed, 68 residents attended focus groups and 100 stakeholders also participated.
The plan was submitted in July, offering a “deviated fixed route” model, in which riders can walk to a stop for the standard fare or request a pick-up within one-fourth of a mile of the route for a small premium, she said.
The pilot plan recommends adding early morning (4 a.m. to 7 a.m.) and late evening (7 p.m. to midnight) transit service, connecting residents to jobs in the Longview Avenue corridor and the Mansfield Airport Industrial Park.
“The pilot would support reliable access to jobs and help employers recruit and retain a dependable workforce,” Taddie said.
It would also provide an expanded mid-day service to the airport industrial park.
In preparing the initial grant request, local groups enlisted the support of Christy Campoll, a senior associate with R&L Associates from Dayton, the consulting company that helped RCT develop its 10-year strategic development plan in 2023.
One of the key “unmet needs” identified in the 10-year plan was “better workforce mobility” through extended early-morning and evening services.
Organizers have researched where people go to work most on second- and third-shifts and also the areas with the highest densities of zero-vehicle households.
They found north end and downtown residents, for example, have some of the highest rates of zero-vehicle households.
