[ad_1]
I’m Pat Patterson, 97 years old, and I’m writing this letter to complain about the Tillamook County Transportation District. Along with Bob Kenny, Jack Graves and other original District Founders I went door to door and taxpayers all joined in and agreed to fund a SPECIAL COUNTY DISTRICT to bring public transportation to citizens. At my age now, I might still have my driver’s license, but I was proud of the service of the local volunteers here in South County who knew me and the other citizens and could provide affordable transportation with a van that was parked here. in Pacific City available to us local citizens. After the volunteers got rid of things, things really changed, but not for the better. I went to a board meeting over the phone a few years ago and asked that the volunteers be kept and not forgotten because we had people doing a great job and not wasting money. of taxpayers caring about us in South County, but now they’re gone. And what is left here? We have buses that don’t even go down our Sandlake Road but go with maybe 2 or 3 people on them going through the shopping areas of the city. Sometimes we even see empty buses. For a parking lot to keep it from being overcrowded and for companies to take care of that, that’s fine.
But we are forgotten as local citizens who pay the taxpayer money that was spent carefully to take care of us.
We need a bus to travel our route where seniors like me and other citizens who need regular transportation to serve us! Sandlake Road meets Hwy 101. My suggestion is also to work with Artichoke Farm Store with the large parking lot where a bus could turn around with the owners by making a deal for a bus stop there. I know widows and other seniors who live here in my neighborhood of Sandlake Road who are stuck with no transportation and we need help with more local citizens voicing their concerns as well.
Dial a Ride served me as the original former board member. We had a deal after serving on the board for so many years to serve a former board member with transportation as I got older, but that doesn’t seem to be honored. My daughter Dee actually complained to management that I was not getting phone call services when it was an important thing to do. As a World War II Coast Guard veteran, serving here with Japan, sending submarines down our coast, I was also the last keeper of the Cape Meares Lighthouse when he was in surgery. The National Archives of the nation came to Garibaldi and wanted me to come to be interviewed and recorded to share my experiences. I had a ride to dial a scheduled ride to take me, but I turned out to be ill that day, so we requested that it be rescheduled for the following week. Instead of letting me know right away that it couldn’t work, we didn’t bring in the dial to take me away. Instead, a friend had to drive to Sandlake Road from Netarts to pick me up and take me in his personal vehicle. My daughter Dee, who is my babysitter living next door, called to file a complaint. There were no excuses. She and Larry Stephens also attended a board meeting for public comment to complain. They have asked the district to send each of them a written public document to consider which would be a complaint procedure in May 2021. It is October 2021 and we have never received this in the mail either. We don’t have a computer at home, and we, the citizens, are not ALL on the Internet or reading Facebook for our information on a county transportation district. We need our Tillamook County transportation district to be more person-to-person, just like we were when I helped the original Friends of the Wave set up a board of directors after the local citizens have adopted a property tax.
Now at 97 and don’t want to drive my car much at this point in my life, I watch the vans go up and down Sandlake Road, but I don’t really see how they are going to serve me at my own address. As the original 97-year-old Wave friend, I expressed my concerns here in this letter because my own duahgter never even received an apology.
-Pat Patterson, original member of the TCTD Board of Directors from 1998 to 2005
[ad_2]
