Brian Stone, a Tri-City Roadrunner driver, pulled up to a shopping center on the north side of Scottsbluff, Nebraska, a little after 5:30 p.m. on a Friday in mid-November. He was ahead of schedule, so he waited a few minutes for more passengers. Meanwhile, riders James Morsett and Francisco Gonzalez, already seated, chatted behind him.
For Morsett, the bus is convenient. He said it goes everywhere he needs to go, and his $45 monthly pass is cheaper than keeping his car fully fueled, maintained and insured. For Gonzalez, the bus is necessary. He wears two prosthetic legs, when things are going well.
“But I’ve been through the ringer, where I have to go in a wheelchair, one missing leg, crutches. You name it,” Gonzalez said. “So I appreciate this service.”
Tri-City Roadrunner is the brand name of Scotts Bluff County Transit, which is one of the few public rural transit agencies in Nebraska that has fixed routes. For residents who can’t access the stops or who live outside the conjoined cities of Scottsbluff, Terrytown and Gering – which have a combined population of about 24,000, according to the U.S. census – the agency has vehicles that pick them up at a designated location on demand.
“I use that service myself, now and then,” Gonzalez said. “Sometimes if something goes south, I’ll be on the wheelchair or on crutches, I call these guys in advance. They take me to the hospital. To me, it works.”
Scotts Bluff County Transit has a larger ridership, fleet and budget than most of the 51 rural transit agencies in Nebraska, but it’s facing the same cuts as its smaller counterparts for fiscal 2026, which runs from July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026.
Six months ago, the Nebraska Department of Transportation instructed all rural transit agencies in the state to cut 30% from their budgets after the department received initial requests for fiscal 2026 that, collectively, rose nearly 39% from the previous year, according to NDOT records.
The total budget requests from rural transit agencies for fiscal 2024 and 2025 both rose about 15% from the previous year. NDOT was able to keep up with the growth by using, in part, unspent federal funds from previous years and remaining COVID-era stimulus money. Both of those reserves ran out in fiscal 2025, according to Jodi Gibson, NDOT Local Assistance Division manager.
When asked if the depletion of stimulus and rollover funds was taken into account when planning for rural transit in Nebraska, Gibson said, “I don’t know if there is a good answer for that.”
“We were expanding. We were growing. We were able to fund things,” Gibson said. “We didn’t necessarily see that we were going to be, you know, $5 million short four years ago.”
Transit agency managers across Nebraska told the Midwest Newsroom they were surprised by the 30% budget shortfall, which they said threatens jobs, safety – and, in several cases – the very existence of agencies.
“We’re probably going to have to reduce the number of trips we can actually schedule per day, reduce our service hours, and hopefully scale back enough to avoid a complete shutdown,” said Curtis Richter, the Scotts Bluff County transit manager.
The current service level provided more than 45,000 rides in fiscal 2025, according to Scotts Bluff County Transit data. That’s a 23% increase from the previous year. To keep up with demand, Richter said his initial budget grew by about 27%. That was common among rural transit agencies, according to Gibson.
“So what you're seeing now is not a reduction of any federal or state funds for the transit systems,” Gibson said. “It's just their ask and need with inflation has been more than the amount of additional federal funds that we're getting.”
Scott Bogren, executive director of the Community Transportation Association of America, said he has heard from many rural transit partners in Nebraska. And while some other states are considering or implementing cuts to rural transportation, he said Nebraska is the most extreme case that he’s aware of. Every other cut has been less than 10%, he said.
“That 30% number is pretty steep, for sure,” Bogren said. “I wonder what’s going on and it’s worrisome, because if 30% cuts are enacted across the board, that’s going to really strain a lot of rural systems’ ability to serve their passengers.”
Those passengers, he said, don’t have many options and often have to travel long distances for potentially life-saving medical visits and even trips to the grocery store.
‘A tough pill to swallow’
The gap in funding affects riders who depend on public transit in areas with populations of less than 1,000 up to 50,000. The state’s rural transit agencies recorded more than 650,000 passenger boardings in fiscal 2025, according to the Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Director Josie Gatti Schafer said that’s an increase of about 50,000 boardings from the previous year, and she said there’s no reason to think demand will go down this year.
“We’re seeing the increase in need, right?” Gatti Schafer said. “And that pressure on the budget might push people to need transit more, even if they aren’t a traditional transit-dependent population.”
Gatti Schafer spearheaded a Nebraska Rural Transit Gap Analysis. The study shows that, compared to the state as a whole, rural Nebraska has higher transit-dependent populations – which the Center for Public Affairs Research defines as people who:
- Are over 65 years old.
- Live below the poverty line.
- Have a disability.
- Live in a household without a private vehicle.
Debbie Root doesn’t have a car. She joked around with Tri-City Roadrunner driver Mark McCall on her way to her job at KFC in Scottsbluff on a recent Monday morning. Her tone turned serious when the topic of cuts to bus service came up.
“They’d be stupid to get rid of the buses,” Root said as her bus approached KFC. “Because a lot of people rely on the buses.”
Richter attributes the jump in Tri-City Roadrunner ridership, largely, to the economic downturn. Nearly 14% of residents in Scotts Bluff County live below the poverty line, according to the latest American Community Survey from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Scotts Bluff County Transit will start curtailing services in early January 2026, and Richter has not ruled out fare hikes to fill the funding gap. He said he is also trying to expand partnerships with public institutions and private businesses, as getting more county tax revenue is unlikely, he added.
“It’s kind of a tough pill to swallow when all of us have worked so hard to grow our services and expand,” Richter said. “I don’t like surprises.”
And the budget shortfall was a surprise. Richter said NDOT even asked him to raise his budget by 3% before the announcement to cut back came in June. Other transit managers told the Midwest Newsroom the same thing.
According to the Nebraska Legislative Fiscal Office, the amount listed on the Federal Funds Information for States site that NDOT will receive from the Federal Transportation Administration for rural transit in 2026 is more than $11.9 million – which is about 3% more than last year. Gibson said NDOT can count on at least $11.5 million. She wrote in an email to The Midwest Newsroom that the $11.9 million figure was a preliminary estimate and will not confirm the increase until the official apportionment tables are released in the spring.
Most public transit funding comes from the federal government, but unlike metropolitan transit agencies like those in Omaha and Lincoln, rural agencies do not receive the money directly. NDOT disburses the federal money, as well as some state funds, to the smaller transit agencies based on budget requests the agencies submit.
Fiscal 2026 is the first for which those agencies were asked to cut their budgets, according to Gibson, due in
part to the depletion of rollover funds and about $8 million in COVID-era stimulus money.
“We’re now living apportionment to apportionment,” she said.
Gibson said NDOT knew those funds were depleted last fiscal year but didn’t know how much it would get from the Federal Transportation Administration in fiscal 2026, so the department could not have foreseen the funding gap. That amount has risen only between 1% and 2% in the past four years, according to NDOT records, and Gibson said she did not expect more than the 3% increase for inflation this fiscal year.
Gibson wrote in an email to The Midwest Newsroom that NDOT has encouraged rural transit agencies to seek other sources of funding, beyond the federal.
“They need to lean on city/county and possible private funding,” she wrote.
Going independent
Hooker County Transit was already facing challenges before the current budget cuts hit rural transit agencies. The agency shut down in 2024, with officials citing the heavy paperwork demands and costly upgrades required by the State of Nebraska and the Federal Transportation Administration. In early 2025, residents pushed back on the closure at a county commissioners meeting in Mullen. Mildred Starr, 94, was among them.
“I was very upset about that,” said Starr. “I’m afraid some of us older people would miss some appointments in North Platte if we didn’t have it.”
Starr spoke from the kitchen of the Mullen house she designed and her late husband built. She said she would have to leave her home if Hooker County Transit no longer existed. There’s no longer a full-time medical clinic or a nursing home in Mullen, so Starr said she would have to move to a nursing home 70 miles away in North Platte.
“It just seemed like things were forcing us out,” Starr said of the closures of other services.
Hooker County Clerk Jessica Hampton said transportation is the last tether keeping residents like Starr in place.
“They either have transportation to their appointments and what they need to get to, or they move,” Hampton said. “And I don’t want to have to see our community get smaller just because we couldn’t provide them something as simple as a ride.”
Hampton is also the assessor, elections commissioner, register of deeds and district court clerk in Hooker County. She said she lacked the time and resources for what she described as an ever-increasing amount of paperwork necessary for the county to be eligible for federal and state funds. The last federal and state disbursements Hooker County received totaled $6,815, according to NDOT records. To receive future funds, the county would have had to install tablets in its vehicles to track mileage, destinations and rider information, along with meeting other NDOT and FTA requirements.
“It was a huge expense that was just silly for the amount of rides we were doing,” Hampton said.
The community decided to go independent to preserve its transit system. Hooker County returned both of its operational vehicles to NDOT, and people came together to write a grant application and organize a spaghetti dinner to fundraise for a new vehicle, a six-seat Chrysler minivan that made its first trip on June 1.
On Nov. 13, Doug Boyer drove Dennis Daily, 66, and Don Younkin, 86, the 70 miles from Mullen to North Platte. The city of about 23,000 residents is the destination for 95 out of 100 Hooker County Transit trips, Boyer said. He’s retired but still drives the shuttle and an ambulance when needed.
“You have to have volunteers or the communities don’t survive out here,” Boyer said. “I didn’t take this for the job. I took it because there was a need in the community.”
Most of the Hooker County Transit trips are related to health care, Boyer said, but the service is also useful for errands. On that day, Daily picked up a rental car, and Younkin visited his wife at a nursing home in North Platte.
“If it wasn’t for this transit deal, I probably wouldn’t even come over here once a week,” Younkin said. “It’s convenient as heck.”
Both Daily and Younkin agreed that it would be better if the nursing home in Mullen was still open. But both enjoyed the ride, which was free thanks to a local donation that pays the fare for veterans. And Hooker County Transit has since started a partnership that brings it more money for transporting veterans.
Steering solutions
To keep rural transit vehicles on the road despite budget cuts, Open Plains Transit in Alliance, Nebraska, participates in a program through Veterans Affairs that pays transit operators $1.50 per mile for VA-approved medical visits.
Hooker County Transit recently signed up as a partner of Open Plains Transit’s Veterans Frontier Health Connection Program. Now, if it transports a veteran 145 miles round trip to Great Plains Health in North Platte, Hooker County will receive $217.50. Nonveterans on the trip are charged according to a fee schedule based on the number of riders.
“We want to build this network of veteran transportation providers,” said Jonnie Kusek, Open Plains Transit’s director of transportation. “If we don’t use this funding, we lose it.”
Kusek’s search for funding is especially critical, she said, because Open Plains Transit provides local and intercity transit, which have different federal funding sources that are both subject to cutbacks. And as a nonprofit, its intercity bus transit relies heavily on state funds, which Kusek said she was told by NDOT not to request for 2026. She added that she was never informed about the depletion of COVID stimulus funds, which was especially important in establishing and maintaining intercity transit during and after the pandemic.
A 2023 report prepared for NDOT outlines the specific fiscal vulnerabilities of intercity transit and states that, “If emergency funding runs out and there is no state match, carriers could be forced to discontinue operations in the state.”
That is the situation facing Open Plains Transit, Kusek said, which she estimates will lose 70% of its funding this fiscal year. It serves 15 counties in Nebraska, as well as destinations in South Dakota and Wyoming. Its ridership more than doubled from 2022 to 2024, according to its reported data.
“If we lose intercity bus services out here, we will have set the clock back 50 years,” Kusek said.
Kusek also said requirements for financial reporting and allocations have changed in the past several years, often retroactively, and that made matters worse. Hooker County’s Hampton and Scotts Bluff County’s Richter echoed this sentiment. Richter said he planned to hire someone to deal with the paperwork before he had to cut his 2026 budget.
'So much more'
The FTA has rigorous financial reporting rules, but Nebraska has added more of its own in recent years. Gibson wrote in an email to the Midwest Newsroom that the state auditor’s office imposed additional requirements on NDOT after identifying “issues with missing or incomplete supporting documentation for reimbursement requests.”
Brian Pierce said the paperwork is a challenge for Joyride, the rural transit agency he manages out of Oakland, Nebraska, though the accounting department of its parent organization, Franciscan Healthcare, deals with most of it. It also provides IT, human resources and administration support, in addition to supplementary funding.
As a result, Joyride has not had to cut services to Burt and Cuming counties in northeastern Nebraska, an area that had no public transportation before Joyride was created in early 2024 by Franciscan Healthcare – a Catholic hospital in West Point, Nebraska. Still, Joyride relies on federal and state funding for the majority of its costs, so it had to cut its budget by 30%. As a result, it can’t expand to meet the intense demand it has experienced in the past two years.
“Our three initial vehicles were full, booked at capacity every day,” Pierce said, adding that Joyride added three vehicles after nine months of operation. “Same type of thing, after a few months of that, those were full.”
For West Point resident Tim Ell, Joyride arrived just in time. He no longer drives after a double bypass heart surgery and the partial amputation of his left leg in 2023. It’s about a two-minute ride from Franciscan Healthcare to his house in the town of around 3,500. The Midwest Newsroom asked Ell to imagine life without Joyride on a recent ride.
“I’d be in a lot of trouble,” Ell said from the back of a modified Chrysler minivan with space for his mobility scooter. “It would take my wife away from work to take me to my doctor’s appointments. That’s why I call them.”
Carolyn Stengal’s ride from Wolken Therapy and Wellness to her home in Oakland is even shorter. But she’s recovering from knee surgery and can neither walk nor drive. Stengal and Eli each paid $4 out of pocket for the round trip.
That might cover gas, Pierce said, but it won’t cover the expansion of Joyride to meet demand.
“It’s sad because I know we could be doing so much more,” said Pierce, who was covering for the usual dispatcher on a recent Friday morning. “It’s hard when people are calling, and you’re not able to do it. You’re apologizing because, ‘Yes, I know it’s two weeks away, and I know you really need to get there.’”
There is a growing interdependence between health care and transportation in Nebraska, where there are five other hospital-affiliated rural transit agencies. Pierce said the model shows promise. Franciscan Healthcare provides support to Joyride – in funding and in kind – and Joyride gets patients to the hospital. But health care providers, especially those in rural areas, operate on slim margins and are bracing for leaner times to come with changes to Medicaid, many of which are scheduled to take effect in the federal government’s fiscal 2027.
Still, Pierce said that about half of Joyride’s trips are to and from health care providers, and Franciscan Healthcare is the only hospital in its coverage area.
“So it’s definitely a possibility that it would help,” Pierce said about the benefit for the hospital of subsidizing transportation. “But with the things that they’re facing, I feel like there’s probably uncertainty with any of that.”
After years of growth, the financial future of rural transportation in Nebraska is uncertain, according to Gatti Schafer.
“We're really at a very pivotal point,” Gatti Schafer said. “We've done a lot of important work to build the administrative capacity of these agencies to offer more services. Now they're ready to do it, but their costs are up.”
Beyond Nebraska, the Trump administration is considering two proposals that would significantly curtail public transportation funding and redirect it to highway construction, as reported by Politico. Transportation for America, an advocacy group, wrote that the policies would devastate rural transit agencies.
Francisco Gonzalez was in good spirits on that Friday evening in mid-November when he rode around Scottsbluff in the Tri-City Roadrunner bus. He wasn’t having any problems with his prosthetic legs, he was talking to his friend James Morsett – whom he met riding the bus – and Tri-City Roadrunner was still able to take him where he needed to go.
If that wasn’t the case, “I’d be screwed,” Gonzalez said. “I say that with all humility.”
The bus stop wasn’t far from his house, but driver Brian Stone passed it and drove Gonzalez right to the curb in front of his door before heading to his next stop.
The Midwest Newsroom is an investigative and enterprise journalism collaboration that includes Iowa Public Radio, KCUR, Nebraska Public Media, St. Louis Public Radio and NPR.
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METHODOLOGY
Reporter Nick Loomis was interested in the transit services necessary to service Nebraska’s rural and semi-rural communities. He spoke with Hooker County Clerk Jessica Hampton, who told him that transportation was keeping her community intact. He learned that transportation budgets for rural transit agencies were being cut by the Nebraska Department of Transportation. He requested ridership and financial data for rural transit agencies in Nebraska for the past 10 years to see what had changed in terms of the needs and how they were being met. He then planned trips to Hooker County, Scotts Bluff County, Burt County and Cuming County to meet the drivers, the transit managers and, most important, the users of these services. He also spoke with state and national transportation and health care experts, as well as officials in the Nebraska Department of Transportation.
REFERENCES
In rural Kansas, seniors are stranded by a lack of transit options — and it's getting worse (KCUR | Aug. 10, 2023)
Funding needed for Hooker County Transit (Hooker County Tribune | Feb. 25, 2025)
In Rural Illinois, Advocates Are Keeping the Faith in Public Transit (Midstory | July 9, 2025)
Nebraska Rural Transit Gap Analysis, Southwest Region
(University of Nebraska at Omaha Center for Public Affairs Research | June 2025)
Nebraska Rural Transit Gap Analysis, Panhandle Region
(University of Nebraska at Omaha Center for Public Affairs Research | June 2025)
Nebraska Rural Transit Gap Analysis, Northeast Region
(University of Nebraska at Omaha Center for Public Affairs Research | June 2025)
TYPE OF STORY
Local News Expertise - Local expertise is embedded in this news report (individual journalist or team).
News - Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources
