SEQUIM — A pair of grants awarded to the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe this year ensures passengers with medical appointments in Blyn and employees of the tribe will continue to have regular bus transportation back and forth from Sequim through 2018.
The tribe has received a total of $214,845 in grant money to support the existing Clallam Transit route — $76,413 recently from the Federal Transit Administration’s 2015 Tribal Transportation Discretionary Fund and a $138,432 award in June from the state Department of Transportation.
Coupled together, the money will fund continued weekday service from downtown Sequim to the Jamestown Campus in Blyn on Route 50 through April 2018.
“That will ensure we have consistent funded service through that time period, and in the meantime, we will continue to look for funding to keep service running past that time as well,” said Annette Nesse, the tribe’s chief operations officer.
Since 2010, the route has been underwritten primarily by grants awarded to the tribe and supplemented by tribal discretionary revenues, at an average cost of $80,000 per year, Nesse said.
The funding, based on Clallam Transit System’s actual labor and mileage costs, is passed directly from the tribe to the transit system.
Prior to the inception of Route 50 in 2010, Clallam Transit made three daily runs to Diamond Point on Route 52, stopping in Blyn at approximately 7 a.m., noon and 6 p.m.
This left long gaps during the day, forcing transit-riding clients of the Jamestown Family Dental Clinic or Social and Community Services — and tribal employees who worked split shifts in Blyn — to wait hours for the next scheduled run, Nesse said.
Because of this inconvenience to passengers, the tribe advocated for four runs per weekday — arriving in Blyn at 8 a.m., 11 a.m., 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays.
“We needed more convenient transit services out here,” Nesse said.
“We have our Jamestown Family Dental Clinic out here, and so we serve a lot of the community and take care of their dental needs, including a lot of kids,” she said.
“There is just a variety of reasons we needed more service, that being just one of them: to allow folks to get here to their dental appointments without having to spend their whole day doing it.”
Now, “there is more consistent service and more regular service,” allowing passengers to “leave Sequim on the noon bus and return in the midafternoon on the Clallam Transit service,” she said.
This route also serves as a connector to transit riders traveling beyond Clallam County to Jefferson County and is available to all riders, subject to fares set and collected by Clallam Transit.
For more information about pricing and bus route schedules, visit www.clallamtransit.com/Routes-Schedules.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Chris McDaniel can be reached at 360-681-2390, ext. 5052, or cmcdaniel@peninsuladailynews.com.
