City explores bringing MET in house

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Instead of hiring an outside contractor, the city of Maricopa is exploring the possibility of bringing its transit services in-house, which could provide huge savings for the city.

“We’re pretty excited about this,” city Public Services Director Mike Riggs said. “The city manager (Rick Horst) brought this up a couple of months ago for us to look into bringing transit in house. We currently have all the management services of our transit system managed through an outside source in Phoenix. We’ve done our research on this and it’s more cost effective for us to do it ourselves.”

The city’s service, known as Maricopa Express Transit, or MET, is free within the city limits. According to Riggs, it would be about 30% more cost effective to bring the service in house. That would equate to savings of $57,556 in 2022; $66,096 in 2023; $75,604 in 2024; and $86,180 in 2025 if it did so, for a total of $285,436 over four years.

“You can see the savings go up as the years go on because of the contract costs going up,” Riggs said. “So that’s what we’re looking at in potential savings if we bring it in house.”

Riggs said the cost of adding drivers to the city payroll was included in the savings. The city currently pays its drivers through the outsourcing company, but also pays a management fee on top of the salaries, resulting in higher costs. He said the city will realize its savings by eliminating that management fee and added that existing city staff can perform the functions for which it currently is paying the management fee.

“There are a lot of wins to bringing it in house,” Riggs said. “We’ at that point in size where we can actually utilize it for other services within the community if we had the management in-house rather than outsourcing. That’s the big factor – we just recognize that there is a savings, and our recommendation is that we bring this thing in house.

The city has three buses, each with 24 seats, and three wheelchair-capable minivans with three-seat capacity for its Dial-A-Ride service. All rides currently are within the Maricopa city limits. The city also is evaluating whether to connect to Ahwatukee’s circulator service.

MET service runs from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and the city’s fixed route service provides stops at 12 locations around the city: Maricopa Meadows Park; Fry’s; Basha’s; Cobblestone Medical Center; Pinal County Health; Pacana Park; Central Arizona College; the city library; Walmart; Shea Way; Copper Sky; and Sun Life Medical.

Dial-A-Ride charges a fee of $1 per ride within the city limits. Reservations must be made at least 24 hours in advance and can be made up to seven days in advance.

The MET service runs in an hour-long loop around the city, running north along John Wayne Parkway to Smith-Enke Road, then east to Porter, south to Farrell and back west to John Wayne Parkway. Service begins at Maricopa Meadows Park at 8 a.m. and ends at Sun Life Medical just before 5 p.m.