PITTSFIELD, Mass. — The Berkshire Regional Transit Authority board voted Thursday to discontinue the route realignment proposal.

BRTA currently operates 36 weekday runs with 26 available drivers, leaving 10-13 open runs available for coverage each day. The proposed plan would have reduced weekday service to 30 runs between the 26 drivers, reducing open runs available for coverage to about five per day.

On Thursday, Administrator Kathleen Lambert announced that they have found a new way to continue the schedule without any cuts or time reductions.

She said Omar Oliveras from the BRTA's new operating company, Keolis, is a transportation and operations and maintenance executive who has been able to use run cuts and make them work with the drivers they currently have to reduce the cancellations.

"What Omar has done is he's cut our service into groups of work that we can do with 25 drivers, including the Link 413, so it's a big deal. That is taking it from the 36 pieces of work that I talked about in my presentation down to 25 or 20 bits," Lambert said. "So that's a big difference, you know what I mean. So now we're able to insert people. We're able to get our supervisors to fill any gaps if somebody calls out, because we have enough people to do that."

The schedule will be the same and will not lead to any changes or reduction in frequency, with the goal of having no cancellations.

Board member Renee Wood motioned to disregard the complete packet on the route realignment proposal, which included the Link413 service, a partnership with Pioneer Valley Transit Authority that provides transportation across Western Mass. A lot of the meeting was spent debating whether the Link413 was included in the motion.

Wood argued that it was never voted on as a board to start as a service, which was then agreed it was. Mayor Peter Marchetti said he did not realize in his vote that they were also voting to stop the Link413 service as did many other members. 

Marchetti made a motion to reconsider the previous vote and then motioned to deny the proposed route realignment and "hold harmless Link413" until next meeting. This was with the expectation Lambert will have report regarding cancellations, an update on if there are enough drivers to continue the service, and a conversation with the participating RTAs.

"She's got 30 days to have a conversation with our sister agency, saying that we have issues. I don't think it's fair for us to pull something out that we already agreed to, that we have an agreement with two other parties, even though, yes, our primary responsibility is to the Berkshires," the mayor said. "We entered into an agreement as an entity, and I think that we owe it to them to provide something more than don't expect the Link413, to show up in your community tomorrow."

Wood requested that at the next meeting for Lambert to find where they voted on the service to start, to which Lambert agreed.

Lambert also explained Link413 is not a barrier to operating the new schedule, which is expected to start in the next three weeks, as before it had taken some drivers away from routes.

The service's low ridership was brought up and if it's necessary to run it now; Lambert said it take six months for a service to take effect. Link413 started in late January.

"The adoption of the service takes at least six months before you really have a feel for what it's going to do. We have already met our projection for the start of the service in terms of riders per hour that we put in our original proposal. I know it seems low, but, you know, ask Peter Pan what they're doing out here. Not much better," Lambert said. "I think we're doing better, and I think it's only going to grow, because it's, like I said, it's an opportunity for people don't have those opportunities to go do something different." 

A recruitment program is set for April 7 to April 9 and 25 people are lined up for interviews already, with the plan to get them trained and driving quickly.

"As we move forward with our recruitment event, we move forward with onboarding. There are two drivers that are supposed to come on board right away and start training. So if we start doing that right away, then we're going to be up to 27, our recruiting event, where I'm hoping to get a class of 10 or 15," Lambert said.

She also spoke about the five new Dodge Ram vehicles that will soon start in the paratransit, microtransit, and community shuttle rotation. These new buses are better and lower to the floor which helps make it easier for people to get onto the bus.

"Our next steps are to work towards the community shuttle pieces, to build, go towards micro transit, and to go towards, I would really like to implement and express that goes the whole length of the county, utilizing the 999 instead of the 921," she said. "So there are some initiatives that we'd like to move forward with, but we don't want to do them now until after the new operations company is in place."

In other notes, it was also Administrator Robert Malnati's last meeting and he thanked the board and was congratulated.

"Thank you for the board, this is it for me, and it's been a pleasure working here for this many years. And I'm sure Kathleen will take over and do a fine, fine job for everyone."