There will be a Rural Utah Transit Townhall Meeting to open dialogue about Rural Utah Transit Issues on Thursday, Dec. 14 at 6:30 pm. This will be a Zoom Meeting that you can participate in from the comfort of your home. Event Spokesman, Helper City Mayor, Lenise Peterman wanted to be sure to invite residents to participate in this meeting.

“What we’re trying to address is the lack of transit options, really not only in Helper or Price but Carbon County, rural Utah, it’s a real challenge for people to move around. So the dialogue is opened up because there are all these investment dollars made available through the Biden Administration with the bipartisan infrastructure law and the inflation reduction act that we are trying to figure out how do we get those dollars into rural places and this is a way to collect community feedback, that we can turn into actions,” stated Mayor Peterman. This is a great way to share your ideas and concerns about public transportation issues in our rural area.

“Well, we have definitely talked about the dollars, you know creating a public transit system is not cheap and frankly, I couldn’t think of a community in rural Utah who probably could fund something of that nature but it doesn’t mean we can’t go after funding to help figure some of those things out. That’s really the key component because I know speaking for Helper specifically, I couldn’t fund a public transit system, now collectively, maybe we can do something, you know if we all come together, and get after some of those federal dollars if could be a different situation,” stated Mayor Peterman. That is why it’s so important to get public comment about what the needs and wants are of our residents when it comes to transit services.

The United Today organization is who contacted Peterman to see if there would be interest in the transit topic. “So this is actually being conducted by an organization United Today, it’s a non-profit, they do a bunch of work across rural states or rural western areas. So they had come to me, approached me, about this to see if there was interest and if we could get some people engaged in a dialog. So that’s really the purpose of this,” said Mayor Peterman. If you would like to participate or listen in on the meeting you will have to RSVP on the United Today website at https://unitedtoday.org/ or bit.ly/ruralUT