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| Volume 17, Issue 1 | Spring 2005 |
From the President Ron Baumgart, DTA PresidentRiver Cities Transit Pierre, SD Happy New Year everyone. I think 2005 will be a very exciting year for the members of DTA. Both North and South Dakota have legislative issues that are very important to the future of transit in the two states. DTA also needs to work with our Congressional delegation to get a Federal Transportation Bill authorized. As transit providers we need to work hard to tell our story; we cannot expect our state DOT's to do our work. DTA has taken a very aggressive role in promoting our needs and story to legislators in both states. We have hired lobbyists in North and South Dakota. Erica Cermak, Executive Director of ND Senior Service Providers, is working for us in North Dakota and Steve Willard of Willard and Associates will be working for us in South Dakota. We all need to help provide people at the hearings and support to our lobbyists so we can accomplish our goal of improving funding for transit. The DTA board met Jan. 6 in Fargo and faced an agenda that kept us very busy. The alliance with SURTC is a great asset to DTA. Jill Hough, Gary Hegland and the rest of the staff at SURTC are a great help to us and the DTA members. I will mention a few of the items that we worked on at our meeting. Hegland and staff have created a very high quality newsletter for DTA. We also have more planned for our future newsletters. We are now selling advertising in our newsletter. This allows businesses to target the transit market with their products and services and helps defray some of the costs of our newsletter. We ask our members to help sell ads. If you know a business in your area that provides supplies or services to transit approach them about advertising with us. You can get the information on costs and size of ads from Hegland, a board member or on our website, dakotatransit.org. We also encourage our members to show preference in conducting business with the businesses that purchase ads for the newsletter. This will encourage those vendors to keep purchasing ads. The DTA board spent several hours working on this year's conference to be held in Minot, ND. The conference will be in conjunction with the bus roadeo. We will be working with the folks in Minot to coordinate all the details of the combined roadeo and conference. Mark Sept. 17-21 on your calendar now to save those dates to attend the roadeo and conference. DTA is working with venders to add a venders' show at the conference. The venders' show will be Sunday afternoon and Monday morning. With the venders' show starting on Sunday, we hope drivers attending the roadeo will have some time to spend at the show. The conference will be held at the Holiday Inn Riverside in Minot. The hotel has plenty of room in their indoor facility for our venders' show. The show is just one of the highlights of this year's conference. We have most of our speakers and trainers lined up at this time. This will allow us more time to promote the great things happening at our 2005 Conference and Bus Roadeo. Hope to see all of you there. DTA has two task forces, one on insurance and one on training, that are beginning to work on issues that are very important to our members. The insurance task force will be working with Gary Hegland and others to come up with recommendations on insurance pooling for transit. We know this process will take time and will not be easy. Our hope is through pooling we might be able to save some money on liability and property vehicle insurance or at least reduce the increases that we all seem to face. The training task force has begun researching topics or issues could be addressed through training. DTA has made a commitment to the members to provide a minimum of two training sessions a year. The task force will determine the topics and priorities of the training. The DTA board looks forward to working with both task forces and to the many great things we will accomplish by working together. I have to say how enthused I am about the future of DTA. Our alliance with SURTC and having a home address and base is just another step forward in our work with public transit. I also want to remind all of you, we cannot succeed in our efforts whether it's legislative issues, training, insurance or funding without hard work and a united voice from our DTA members. I hope by our next newsletter we can report on the legislative successes that came about because of our united commitment and hard work.
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