UMATILLA COUNTY — Umatilla County adopted an updated plan with 18 goals for improving its public transportation systems on Wednesday, Oct. 21.

The 61-page plan was developed in consultation with Eastern Oregon Business Source and drew on discussions with and surveys of transit providers and the public. The Umatilla County Board of Commissioners unanimously approved the plan, which was most recently updated in 2016.

“We need to work towards making transit just an integral piece of our communities so we’re no longer asking, ‘Do we have transit?’ — we just know it’s there,” said Nick Nash, who works with Eastern Oregon Business Source and presented highlights of the plan Oct. 21.

The plan is intended to provide a guide for how to invest in local transit systems and what funding opportunities are available for local transit providers from the state and federal sources.

Among the plan’s goals is connecting Spanish-speaking residents with information about public transportation. Information on route maps and bus schedules is mostly limited to English at the moment, Nash said, which is in turn limiting the number of people who have access to services.

“It’s going to inevitably increase ridership among those from the Spanish-speaking community, and help make the system accessible to as many residents as possible,” said Nash of increasing the amount of resources in Spanish about local transit options.

Another goal is to address chronic absenteeism among some local students by exposing more of those students to their local public transit options, which will be done through coordinated outreach with the InterMountain Education Service District.

“By working to educate kids across the county on alternative ways to get to school if they happen to have missed the regular school bus, what we end up doing is creating lifelong transit users,” Nash said.

The final goal Nash highlighted from the plan was addressing the difficulty in retaining and recruiting drivers for local transit systems.

“Finding qualified transit drivers is a tremendous problem not just here in Umatilla County, but in fact all across the United States,” he said.

Nash said the local recruitment problems arise from the payscale for drivers and the practice of local providers to recruit independently, rather than coordinating with other providers and recruiting drivers holistically for the region.

Other goals noted in the plan include maintaining and improving local transit infrastructure, expanding services to Ukiah, Echo and the Tri-Cities, along with making Dial-a-Ride services more affordable and flexible throughout the county.