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July 5, 2010

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The 14 help wanted ads in this week's classifieds offer such jobs as a transit agency general manager and an executive director in academia!

NEWS HEADLINES

Sen. Byrd: A Champion for Transit in West Virginia

At the time of his death June 28, 92-year-old Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) was the longest-serving member of Congress in the nation’s history. His tenure in the Senate began in 1958. He was the senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and a member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Other Agencies.

Byrd always provided for his home state of West Virginia—including appropriations for the state’s public transportation agencies.

“Everything we’ve done over the years is because the senator was on the appropriations committee,” said Paul E. Davis, general manager and chief executive officer of the Tri-State Transit Authority in Huntington, WV. “He was such a key player. With every bus, every transit project we’ve done, he was involved in some way, shape, or form.”

Davis said Byrd’s support for public transportation appropriations allowed agencies throughout the state to upgrade their service. For example, he noted, bus systems in some rural parts of the state “were working out of old gas stations” before Byrd made construction funding available for garages.

G. Joe Lockhart, general manager of the Mid-Ohio Valley Transit Authority in Parkersburg, WV, credited Byrd for $4 million in federal funds toward the agency’s terminal that opened in November 2005. The facility also houses the authority offices and a parking garage “from which we get a good bit of revenue,” he said.

More recently, Lockhart said, his agency benefited from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, receiving $1.1 million for the purchase of buses in Parkersburg.

Susan L. O’Connell, director of the West Virginia Division of Public Transit, emphasized the importance of Byrd’s support for public transit throughout the state. “Sen. Byrd assisted in obtaining funding for ongoing fleet replacements and public transit improvements for West Virginia's 18 public transit operations,” she said, “including major renovations or new construction at transit operation facilities in Charleston, Clarksburg, Fairmont, Huntington, Kingwood, Martinsburg, Morgantown, Petersburg, and Summersville.”

She stressed that the federal discretionary funding promoted by the senator “enabled West Virginia to modernize its transit fleet and many of its facilities to serve its citizens for many years to come.”

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