HAMILTON, Ohio — At their Hamilton offices, the Butler County Regional Transit Authority’s executive staff spent Tuesday eagerly awaiting much-needed applicants at their first job fair of the year.
Hoping to hire dozens of drivers on the spot, Matt Dutkevicz, the executive director, said he had no idea what kind of turnout to expect, but he knew whatever they could accomplish that morning would likely just scratch the surface of BCRTA’s needs.
Like companies nationwide and across Ohio, BCRTA needs drivers.
“We probably need to hire anywhere from, I’m gonna say 30-60 operators full-time,” Dutkevicz said.
The regional transportation system takes hundreds of thousands of riders every year across Butler County, connecting its three major cities and the Cincinnati metro bus system to the south, while also providing ride-sharing services and paratransit.
At its best, Dutkevicz said BCRTA provides an affordable way for everyone in the region to get where they need to go. But he said BCRTA can only work at its best if it has sufficient staffing.
“Our typical demographic (for drivers) in the past has been a lot of people who are retired from other jobs and want to give back and they don’t really need to work,” he said.
Unfortunately, that also tends to be a demographic at higher risk COVID-19 so over the past two years, Dutkevicz said he’s seen more drivers retire than ever before.
“We’ve been trying to bring people in but we can’t keep up with the people who are leaving,” he said.
Competing amid a statewide shortage
Dutkevicz acknowledges this is not a unique problem.
A study by the Ohio Association for Pupil Transportation found that in the first half of the 2021-2022 school year, 90% of school districts were impacted by a driver’s shortage.
Meanwhile, cities from Cincinnati to Akron have consolidated or cut routes to make up for staffing shortfalls.
As a smaller system, though, Dutkevicz said BCRTA is feeling the crunch particularly hard.
Losing more than 50 staff members is difficult for any company, but at BCRTA, he said it’s brought staffing to 53% of what it should be.
“We need at least 30 drivers to get close to where we were at in 2019,” he said.
Those larger cities have another thing BCRTA doesn’t — deeper pockets.
Cincinnati is offering new drivers a starting salary of $18 an hour with the potential of earning $27 an hour within five years. Dayton is offering $16.55 an hour and operators can make more than $27 an hour in their seventh year.
BCRTA is hoping to get the funding to raise its starting salary to $15 per hour so Dutkevicz said he can understand why drivers might be tempted to commute out of county for a bigger paycheck.
“We have a pretty significant metro area south of us and a slightly smaller one north of us so that’s one of our other problems. In the past, we tend to be a training ground where people move onto other opportunities,” he said.
Keeping the busses moving
As drivers work to keep up with the service, Dutkevicz said they’re burning more and more overtime and something has to give.
“What we don’t want to happen is people to really expect a high level of service and not receive it,” he said.
That’s why Dutkevicz said BCRTA is once again considering temporarily suspending two of its routes: the R2 connecting Middletown and Oxford, which has seen an 85% drop in ridership, and the R4, which follows a similar route to the R6 taking riders between Hamilton, Fairfield and Springdale.
“Reallocating resources and temporarily suspending some things is going to allow us to redeploy resources so people receive the high level of service that they expect,” Dutkevicz said.
BCRTA last considered these suspensions in the fall, but its board decided to keep the routes going after getting dozens of comments pleading to keep the routes running.
This time, Dutkevicz is less optimistic.
“In the fall, we were somewhere between 60 and 70% staffing,” he said. “Now we’re closer to 50%.”
BCRTA held a public meeting Tuesday to discuss the changes.
The board will vote on the possible suspensions at the end of January.
Hope for new hires
Despite the difficult ride ahead for the BCRTA, Dutkevicz said he was grateful for the turnout at Tuesday’s job fair.
Several qualified candidates came through the door, passed their orientation and left with an offer letter in their hands, including Ross Eversole.
“I’m actually very excited,” he said.
He said he’s worked as a driver for school districts before and he’s looking forward to driving again as a way of giving back.
“Serving the community, that’s what I’m looking for,” he said. “And serving my passengers and operating safely, getting to know some of the more frequent riders and forming that bond.”
It will take another four weeks of training before new hires can hit the road, but Dutkevicz hopes the bus service will see some relief soon.
He said BCRTA will likely hold more hiring events over the next few months.
“We’ll be really happy with anything that we’re able to turn out,” he said.