Lifelong Birmingham bus rider Butch Ferrell glances over Birmingham bus routes dating back to 1976. Photo by Cody Owens.
Last week Federal Transit Administrations Acting Administrator Therese McMillan handed Birmingham city officials a ceremonial-sized $20 million check at the Birmingham-Jefferson Transit Authority maintenance facility.
Officials accepted the check in the absence of outgoing Executive Director Ann August and without an acknowledgement of her role. Meanwhile, across town at city hall, plans were underway for a farewell party honoring August — and there, members of the transit board would be absent.
Those events on Friday marked the end of one era — where the BJCTA, by all accounts, had benefited from the leadership of an admired director who is now gone — and the beginning of a new one, infused with fresh cash but in need of a new leader.
As previously reported, the $20 million federal TIGER Grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation will be used to implement a state of the art Bus Rapid Transit system connecting 25 communities from Parkway East to Five Points West. Birmingham is one of 39 cities that have received federal TIGER Grant funding.
The plans for the 15-mile route are still in the preliminary stages and the exact locations of the stops have not been finalized, according to Barbara Murdock, interim director of the BJCTA.
“It’s been like a patchwork quilt in the past,” Murdock said, referring to the bus system’s service. “This would make for a more interconnected system. Maybe people will think twice now before buying a car and get on the bus.”
The routes are expected to reduce transit times significantly. McMillan explained that a trip from Parkway East to Five Points West could be cut from over an hour down to about 44 minutes. A trip from the airport to the UAB medical district will take approximately 18 minutes as opposed to the current 30-minute transit time.
An estimated 130,000 jobs are within walking distance of the proposed route, along with roughly 27 percent of the population in Birmingham.
During the press conference, Mayor William Bell spoke to the importance of rethinking the current state of public transportation.
“We’ve done a lot in the past five or six years, but we have a lot more to do. As mayor I can’t be just satisfied with just $20 million,” Bell said, pointing to the check propped up beside the podium.
“We need a whole lot more, and we’re going to be talking to [The U.S. Department of Transportation] about some other programs that have come under the ladders of opportunity. We want to create a system that people can rely on and one that touches every citizen regardless of age or income,” Bell continued.
August, who until her sudden resignation as BJCTA executive director Oct. 9, had spearheaded the efforts to revitalize Birmingham’s ailing bus system, was not mentioned during the press conference. Later on Friday, however, a small group gathered in a conference room on the third floor of Birmingham City Hall to honor August and what she accomplished during her tenure.
It was a somber gathering, as August tried to hold back tears while she thanked those who supported her during her time at the BJCTA. While she has been guarded about discussing the circumstances surrounding her sudden resignation, August did allude to the situation leading up to it.
As has been previously reported, a faction of the BJCTA board has been at odds with August. She said that she was shocked to see the board would be accepting her retirement notification during the Oct. 9 meeting.
“On the agenda, they were going to approve my early retirement,” August said. “Then I was informed by the chief of staff, who is now the interim director, that I had to be out of the office by 5 p.m. that day. I couldn’t believe it … if a person is going to be retiring you allow them to say farewell to folks. Cross over for a week or so to do a transition with the person who is going to be the interim. Not a 24-hour period of time.
“I was shocked they wanted to do it that day, even though we had talked about [them] buying out my contract that was less than 90 days from expiring anyway,” August said.
While she would not comment on the specifics leading up to her resignation, August said, “I hope and I pray that everyone can get past this and move forward. This city, this region, this state should have quality transportation. There should be no reason that Birmingham, the largest city in the state, should not have better transportation.”
Butch Ferrell, a life-long Birmingham bus rider (he said that his foot hasn’t touched a gas pedal in 63 years), attended both transit events. During August’s farewell address, Ferrell expressed his appreciation for what August had been able to accomplish since 2013.
“She has done something that not many people could have accomplished given what she had to work with,” Ferrell said. “Us bus riders hate to see her go.”
Ferrell pulled out a wad of papers bound with a rubber band from his pocket, to point to a bus schedule from 1976.
“If you look at the weekend schedule from then, you can see that the buses run more than they do during the weekdays now,” Ferrell said. “Then the busses ran until midnight. Now [some of them] are only running until 9 [p.m.].”
Despite being released from an extended stay in the hospital a week prior, Ferrell said that he had walked from the press conference at BJCTA to city hall, 13 blocks, to attend August’s farewell party. He looked down at the pedometer on his hip. “I already clocked 16,000 steps today,” Ferrell said. “It just made more since to walk since I would have been late to the party if I took a bus.”
While basketball legend Michael Jordan was playing baseball for the Birmingham Barons during the 1994 season, Ferrell made headlines by walking 40 miles round-trip just to see him.
“I lived on Lloyd Noland Parkway in Fairfield at the time,” Ferrell said. “I’d walked there about 10 times before, but eventually the general manager caught wind of what I was doing and let me meet Michael [Jordan] after the game.”
After that, Ferrell got in free to the Baron’s games at the Hoover Met and was chauffeured to every game he wanted to attend by someone with the organization.
“Ann [August] is the first director we have had where I genuinely felt like she had my interest in mind. She loved the riders and knew us by name, and we are going to miss her dearly,” Ferrell said.
During the farewell gathering, Birmingham City Councilor Kimberly Rafferty presented August with a plaque commemorating her service to the city.
“I came from South Carolina and I didn’t have any family here,” August said, wiping her eyes. “The job became my family along with all the people I met along the way.
“When I accepted the job people said, ‘Ann we believe in you, but we don’t know what’s going to happen with the board because they change so much,’” August said to the small crowd.
In her parting words, August told her supporters not to give up the fight for better transit: “You all are on the verge of greatness. You got to keep pushing. You can’t accept the status quo. You can’t accept what you’ve been getting. You have to demand more than that because that is what you all deserve.”
