MOUNT VERNON—Employment continues to be the number one reason riders use Knox County Transit, formerly Knox Area Transit.
The transit agency, which changed its name last year to better reflect its coverage area, logged 105,242 trips in 2024, compared to 99,394 in 2023 and 105,273 in 2022.
Transit Director Bethany Celmar told the county commissioners that employment accounted for 32% of those trips. Medical was second, followed by Kenyon College.
Individuals on group trips accounted for 4,240 of riders. These trips include shuttles to events such as the Knox County Fair, senior groups on field trips, a day care program, and Transition U.
General public riders accounted for 2,041. Celmar said there might be some overlap between the two groups, but they are most likely different groups of people.
“That’s a different section of the population because they’re part of a group that is taking a field trip versus regular riders,” she said.
KCT has more difficulty tracking Kenyon’s numbers because the transit company does not track the number of riders on each shuttle. In 2024, KCT logged 12,025 Kenyon trips.
“I do think it is safe to say we are probably serving about 1,000 Kenyon students,” Celmar said.
“It’s an estimate, but looking at all of those numbers, we are serving about 10% of the Knox County population at a minimum. A conservative estimate is 11% to 12% of people are on our bus at some point during the year for some purpose.”
Local match
County Administrator Jason Booth said the Kenyon route is important because Knox County Transit must meet a threshold of local match dollars to get government funding.
“Obviously the county is a partner, which we can use that for match. The city provides a little bit of funding, and that’s a match,” he said. “It’s difficult to get the local match we need in order to leverage the state and federal funds that we can get from those local matches.”
Contract trips, which are organized by an organization that either pays for or sponsors the ride, also count toward the local match.
Groups include Knox County Job and Family Services, disability programs, nursing homes, and the Fire and Ice event.
“The federal money we receive is supposed to offset the cost for the general public rider,” Celmar said. “Our federal money is supposed to bring the cost of the ride down.
“For the organizations in town, the federal government doesn’t want to subsidize that. They want them to pay the fully allocated costs.
“Fully allocated costs is a fancy word for what it actually costs for us to run,” she added.
Celmar said she has ongoing conversations with organizations because they do not understand why they pay contract fares instead of public fares.
“So that is the challenge: getting enough organizations on board to understand that this is community support, it’s supporting the transit company,” she said. “It is paying for the full cost of the ride, but it is supporting the entire system.”
Increasing NET ridership
Celmar said KCT’s goal is to increase its NET (NonEmergency Medical Transport) program. NET provides free transportation for Medicaid recipients on medical-related trips.
JFS oversees the NET program in Knox County.
“Most other transits have enough contract income and enough trips that they can solely run off of their non-emergency medical transportation,” Celmar said.
Some transit companies earn $350,000 to $500,000 monthly in NET fares. Muskingum and Guernsey counties earn $1 million.
In contrast, KCT’s NET trips average $28,000 a month. Celmar said the goal for a good local match is $40,000.
KCT recently updated its contract rates, which will help. However, Celmar said KCT is not getting the volume it needs to help with funding.
Celmar does not know whether nursing home personnel categorize a trip as NET if the resident has Medicaid. She also noted that Knox County’s Medicaid numbers might be lower than other rural counties.
“It’s a challenge getting good information out to the people who need it when they need it,” she said. “We’re working on different communication methods this year.”
(Below is a PDF with information about the program.)
December numbers for Knox County Transit
December’s trips were down compared to other months due in part to the Christmas break. Although KCT operated the Kenyon shuttle on a limited schedule, many students were not on campus.
“That took trips away, and then around the holidays, we seem to find that people have family in town, so they’re able to get rides a little bit more and people start to cancel their rides,” Celmar explained.
“Also, work can be closed down for some of those those times.”
Of the 8,220 trips in December, 2,417 were general public trips and 2,426 were for the elderly and disabled.
Fairgrounds Road
The City of Mount Vernon, in partnership with the county, is constructing public utility improvements (water main, sanitary sewer, and stormwater control) on Fairgrounds Road starting in mid-February.
The improvements also include road resurfacing.
The city is classifying the water and sanitary sewer work as transition mains. As a result, the city will not assess utility service availability fees to the properties on Fairgrounds Road.
The county will improve the stormwater system and resurface the road.
City staff will attend the Morris Township meeting at 6 p.m. on Feb. 3. The township hall is located at 13511 Beckley Road.
The county commissioners contributed $750,000 in American Rescue Plan Act money toward the project.