What you need to know:
- Mat-Su’s public bus service will come under borough oversight starting Oct. 1, but routes, fares and schedules will remain unchanged through at least June 2026 while officials collect rider data and evaluate the program.
- A nine-month, $2.2 million contract is set to go before the Mat-Su Assembly for approval this week. The funding would come from the borough and a federal grant, pending Assembly approval.
- Bus service in Mat-Su was previously funded almost entirely by federal grants. A change in funding rules triggered by population growth now requires the borough to contribute about half of the program’s costs.
PALMER — Mat-Su's public bus service will come under borough oversight this fall, but riders are unlikely to see any changes as officials collect data and study potential updates as part of the transition.
Valley Transit will shift from its longstanding independent operations to a contract administered by the Matanuska-Susitna Borough starting Oct. 1, said Jason Ortiz, the borough’s planning and land-use director overseeing the effort.
Bus routes, fares and schedules will likely remain unchanged through at least next June, Ortiz said.
“We do not anticipate any lapse in service,” he said. “I don't anticipate transit looking any different than what it currently is, and that goes for expansion or degradation of service.”
Valley Transit’s nine-month, $2.2 million borough contract is set to go before the Mat-Su Assembly for approval during a regular meeting Tuesday.
The plan assumes federal officials approve a grant covering about half the cost, according to contract approval documents. If the funding is not approved, bus service will be canceled, the documents state.
Based in Meadow Lakes, the nonprofit Valley Transit currently provides about 33,000 rides to and from Anchorage each year on commuter motorcoaches and another 29,000 to locations throughout Mat-Su in vans and small buses via its on-demand service, borough officials said earlier this year.
Until this year, Valley Transit received nearly $3 million in direct annual federal funding with little government oversight of day-to-day operations. The borough did not contribute any money to the service.
But that setup is no longer permitted under federal rules due to Mat-Su’s recent reclassification from a “rural” to “urban” population category, borough officials said. The new designation requires local governments to cover half the cost of public transit, with federal funds covering the other half.
The Assembly voted in May to allocate $750,000 for the program — enough to match federal funds and keep the service running as is from October through the end of the fiscal year in June. Without that borough funding, the service would have shut down entirely, Ortiz said earlier this year.
While borough officials considered immediately reshaping the service, Ortiz and his team instead opted to leave it as is so they have time to study current operations, including detailed ridership data. Valley Transit did not fully provide that information before the assembly voted on funding, he said.
“This is to give us all the metrics that we need to tell us whether or not this works, or whether we can run this more efficiently,” he said. “Then we’ll be able to go and optimize things and say, we actually think we can decrease this, increase this, expand this, add this.”
Any future changes will be presented to the assembly before implementation because they will impact costs and the borough’s 2027 budget.
While borough officials hoped to have several bus providers to choose from during the takeover process, only Valley Transit ultimately submitted a contract proposal, Ortiz said.
Driver shortages since late July have prompted cuts to two afternoon commuter runs between Anchorage and Mat-Su and delayed on-demand shuttle response times, according to the Valley Transit website and local users.
Valley Transit officials did not respond to a request for comment.
-- Contact Amy Bushatz @contact@matsusentinel.com
