The Times Argus from Barre, Vermont • 14

FOURTEEN THE TIMES ARGUS, BARRE-MONTPELIER, VT. TUESDAY, MAY 18, 1982 CYTA: Stimulating Better Transportation VERMONT Calendar TODAY A Winters Tale Part two of the ongoing saga of a pessimist who lives in a village on the banks of the Winooski River unfolds at the Plainfield Community Center at 7:30 p.m. The weekly spaghetti dinner precedes the show at 6:30 p.m. Poets Of The Community Members of Linda McCarristons poetry workshop read from their works at Barres Aldrich Library at 7:30 p.m. The free reading includes Michael Carrino, Nadell Fishman, Kit Gates, Paul Laffal, Sherry Olson, Susan Squier and Diane Swan.

OnStage Godspell. The Lamoille County Players present this exuberant, updated version of the Gospel According To St. Matthew. Hyde Park Opera House at 8:30 p.m. who is responsible for 122 van pools statewide, is alerted.

This is the kind of stimulation were encouraging. We hope to be enough of a clearinghouse so that we have information here to answer people's questions, Youngbaer said. Another project under way at the CVTA development of bus shelters is being coordinated with the Central Vermont Rotary in cooperation with the Agency of Transportation. Built into the grant is money to build six such shelters. And besides the obvious benefits of providing shelters against the elements, Youngbaer anticipates they will create visibility for public transportation, encourage use of bus lines and get people into a mind set of using public transportation.

Hopefully as fallout of that, ridership on buses would increase, buses would make more profit and they might have growth plans so they could extend services, for instance, to Northfield, Youngbaer said. Theres a domino effect to that kind of stimulation. Some of the shelters, he said, could serve existing commuter parking lots such as one in South Barre where people get dropped off to join car pools. Right now were looking at two places on the Barre-Montpelier Road and were working with the Rotary who would put some money up with us. We want to get two in Barre and two in Montpelier on the boards before snow flies.

His office is working with the public works departments, mayors offices and city councils in Barre and Montpelier to find out what their needs are. We were looking for and found concentrations of need that we could target for development, said Youngbaer. For example, Worcester, Calais and Barre were areas of high response as CVTA had anticipated, because theres no public transportation serving Calais and Worcester and Barre Town has a high concentration of people. Youngbaer said CVTAs response to these specific pockets of transportation needs is to try to rejuvenate the Hardwick Stage, which ran vans through Cabot, Marshfield, Plainfield, East Montpelier and into Barre. There was another from Hardwick down Route 14 through Woodbury, Calais and East Montpelier before going to Barre and Montpelier.

That service folded, however, because it was being run as a regular, daily service, and there wasnt enough ridership. Youngbaers solution? What were saying is that theres not enough ridership to do that on a daily basis, but on a weekly basis, yes. So take the two vans, for example. On Monday run one route, Tuesday move over and come down Route 12, get Worcester and Middlesex, and Wednesday do the Mad River Valley, Thursday Northfield, Roxbury, Brookfield His proposal is to fill the vans one day a week by subscription, a method being used successfully, he said, by the Waterbury Special operated by Ron Larivee of Twin City Transit. That route starts in Lower Graniteville and comes down and through Barre-Montpelier before going to Waterbury.

The people who ride this route are mostly state employees who pay a monthly fee to a coor By SARA WIDNESS In case you havent noticed, there are a lot more hitchhikers on Vermonts highways lately. And you may also have noticed there are a lot more people standing at what may appear to be random places along the roadsides waiting for rides in the early morning. Theyre the lucky ones who can get where they want to go without sticking out their thumbs. Chances are they have found their rides through the Central Vermont Transportation Association, which is actively trying to match riders with rides all over Washington County and in outlying towns through a transportation brokerage project federally funded to the tune of $109,000 for two years. The CVTA has just published a handbook on to how to get a ride in central Vermont, a project that grew out of a survey started last November of the central Vermont transportation scene its strengths and weaknesses.

Peter Youngbaer, codirector with Avram Patt of the CVTA, assured that the guide tells all there is to know about transportation from one point to another, and if theres no information on a route youre concerned about, that means theres no transportation available. The guide tells you everything that there is. This was a really good way for us to put together information that we could assemble, he said. The data collection process that resulted in the guide began with surveys distributed at Town Meeting, with 850 responding to questions about transportation: Do you use public transportation? Would you use it? Would you use it on specific days? dinator who hands the subscription money over monthly to the bus company. The riders, said Youngbaer, are responsible for keeping the seats full and getting the money.

All the bus company has to do is run on a contract, so theres little risk. Using the Town Meeting surveys that we have and having identified pockets of need, we can go to individuals and say Look. These 10 people in this town said they would like to go shopping on Wednesday afternoons. We go back to the people and ask if they would be willing to pay, for example, $4 or $5 a month to ride in once a week. Then we go to a bus or cab company that has different size vehicles and find out if they want to do it and for what price and tell them we already have the people.

The advantage to the company is that they dont have to take any risk, because were handing them the riders. In addition to polling potential users of public transportation, defined as school buses, taxies, human service and car pool vans, among others, the CVTA has also gone to transportation providers themselves to find out such things as how much it costs to get a Medicaid client from Northfield to the Central Vermont Hospital. In the process, said Youngbaer, weve learned what it costs for bus companies to run, what are the options to services providing transportation, the obstacles in the way of providing better use of existing services. For instance, he said, in the human service area there is particular concern about costs. One of the obvious places theyre seeking to conserve on money is in the transportation area.

Right now you have a situation where someone who is Medicaid-eligible has an appointment at the hospital. That person goes to the hospital via cab. Medicaid picks up the tab. It seemed a little obvious to us that Medicaid money that is busting state budgets around the country could be saved through better coordination, better scheduling at the hospital, through social and case workers, and through transportation. Our role is to find out what is possible and to work to get those people functioning together.

We talked to the medical people and were in constant contact with the transportation folks. Now we are going through the bureaucracies to find out what it takes for a person to become Medicaid-eligible as a transportation provider. The new CVTA guide, he said, is being used by the human service agencies as a tool to solving some of their financial problems by looking at the servicing of a client as a package that includes transportation. Their own financial considerations are enough incentive for them to do this. Theyre very interested, he said.

Also as a result of the surveys, the CVTA is able to provide a handle on transportation costs. For example, Youngbaer said that Janet Gershaneck, director of Project Independence, needed help determining how much it actually costs to operate the van her program uses on a pay-as-you-go basis from a clients town to Project Independence. They didnt know if they were getting a good deal or a bad deal. Then they started working with our matching and ride referral service. They found out that if someone wanted to get to them from Northfield, their client could ride a van provided by Washington County Mental Health.

Project Independence could reimburse mental health for much less than running their own van out to Northfield, and mental healths costs go down because theyre carrying an additional person on that van. The matching ride and referral service, said Youngbaer, has been promoted through a weekly newspaper and on radio stations in central Vermont. The third person on the CVTA staff, Linda Ricciarelli, is the information and referral specialist who coordinates all referrals and ride matching that have come in as a result of radio shows and from the newspaper. We have a fairly elaborate file system that allows us on a first call request 50 percent of the time to hook up with someone in our data bank, said Youngbaer. The matching ride and referral service is also tied in with the state Energy Office, which has a data bank plus highway signs advertising a toll-free number for carpooling information.

Youngbaer said his office touches base every Friday with the state office to update each others listings. At the same time, his agency works with the state to coordinate van pools. If CVTA finds that six or seven calls requesting transportation to the same place at the same time are coming in from the same area, then Lee Perkins at the Energy Office, TOMORROW Vermont Flutes The Noon Music In May series continues with a concert by the Vermont Flute Ensemble. Stowe Community Church at noon. Mimes On The Move The entertaining antics of mimes Gould and Stearns can be found at the morning performance at Cabot High School or at the afternoon performance at Twinfield Elementary School, Marshfield.

Open to the public. Amy And Friends An enterprising young lady, Amy Bowles of Montpelier, is sponsoring a dinner theater at 6 p.m. and again at 8:30 p.m. at Montpeliers Bethany Church. The purpose: to raise money so she can join Up With People.

The evening includes a lasagne dinner plus entertainment. Contact Phyllis Bowles for reservations. On Stage Godspell. Hyde Park Opera House. 8:30 p.m.

Nursing Home Operators Protest Medicaid Changes Film 42nd Street. Shuffle Off to Buffalo with this famous 1933 Busby Berkeley film extravaganza with Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers and Warner Baxter. Actually not the best of these classic Warner Bros, musicals, this is still the most appropriate with the live production having a tremendously successful run on Broadway. Congregational Church, Waterbury. 8 p.m.

patients. If the rules are adopted and court action proves unsuccessful, said Shea, the Winooski home will have no choice but to withdraw from the Medicaid program, leaving 31 patients facing transfers. Ruth Nelson, administrator for the Greensboro Nursing Home, suggested her facility might have to close if the state adopts its proposed regulations. Nelson said that providing safe care, let alone quality care, would be impossible under the proposed reimbursement schedule. Where are the savings if the rules close nursing homes? she asked members of the Human Service Agency.

Another critic, Willis Jones of a church-related nursing home in Vernon, claimed the proposed regulations will further limit the number of available beds to take Medicaid patients at a return below their costs, or they continue to take them until they collapse economically. Foote also claimed an inevitable result of the proposed rules will be the transfer of Medicaid patients out of local nursing homes. He added the rules, if adopted, will inevitably prompt a lawsuit and judicial review, Burlington attorney Charles Shea, representing the Green Mountain Nursing Home in Winooski which has among the highest rates in the state also suggested the home will sue the state if the proposed rules are adopted. Shea, like Foote, took issue with the 60-percent rule. He claimed that, under the proposal, the state will pay the Winooski home $10 a day less than it costs to provide basic services for its Medicaid and create undo hardships for existing homes.

Vivienne Wisdom, executive director of the Vermont Health Care Association, charged the regulations far exceed what the Legislature had in mind in mandating a prospective reimbursement system a system her organization has long lobbied for, she said. Enactment of these rules will cripple the industry. The inevitable consequences would be either a reduction in beds available for Medicaid recipients or a reduction in the quality of care to Medicaid patients. We do not want to see either result, said Wisdom. Kent Stoneman, director of the rate-setting division, told the Waterbury audience the proposed rules are intended to create incentives for holding down nursing-home costs and establish more equitable distribution of state Medicaid money.

MAY 18 Children RANDOLPH CENTER -The next in a series on Helping Your Child Grow will be tonight from p.m. at Vermont Technical College here with Corkie Hileman-Burton and Lex Burton discussing the challenges facing parents today and the basic ingredients of good parenting for all parents expectant, couples, singles, working and young parents. MAY 19 Fundraising MORRISVILLE Fundraising for Downtown Organizations will be discussed at an Agency of Development and Community Affairs training program May 19 at the Station Restaurant here as part of its Vermont Main Street Program. Bruce Westcott, former Montpelier on the Move president, and Paul Bruhn, a Burlington consultant, will speak on matching resources with needs, prospects and donors, mobilizing fundraising resources, strategies and techniques, internal accounting, and long-range revenue and expenditure accounting. The program provides funds to Bristol, Morrisville, Randolph, St.

Johnsbury and Windsor to hire a downtown coordinator for six months. Each coordinator in the towns is working with downtown organizations, merchants, local officials and interested citizens to plan and implement a revitalization program. Other workshops in coming months will include merchandising, historic preservation tax incentives, financing alternatives for downtown revitalization and the economics of revitalization. For information contact Jane Bechtel, Vermont Main Street Program director, in Montpelier. By ELIZABETH SLATER Vermont Press Bureau WATERBURY Nursing home operators and lobbyists are apparently prepared to sue the state if proposed regulations governing state Medicaid reimbursements are put into effect this July.

Critics charge the proposed reimbursement rules are arbitrary and could ruin nursing homes financially with high populations of Medicaid recipients. The rules would determine how much the state will pay for costs associated with Medicaid-recipient care until a new, prospective rate-setting system can be drawn up. As it now stands, the state reimburses nursing homes for costs already incurred. However, the Legislature has ordered that a rate scale be drafted by March 1982 that will spell out, in advance, what the state will pay for Medicaid- Sanders: By DEBBIE BOOKCHIN BURLINGTON The Burlington Board of Aldermen Monday rejected Mayor Bernard Sanders second attempt to place a nonbinding rooms and meals tax question on a special election ballot. In a meeting that Sanders and his supporters charged was full of politics, the board also voted down a motion to push back the June 8 special election date to June 22.

The later date would have allowed sufficient time to warn a special 7M-cent police tax question so it could be permanent, instead of one year. The June 22 date also would have given Sanders and his supporters more time to obtain the 1,400 signatures needed to circumvent aldermen and place the rooms and meals tax question on the ballot by petition. Sanders said he is confident the necessary signatures will be obtained in time for the earlier election anyway. We will get the signatures, even if I have to stay up all night, he said. The petitions must be filed in about a week.

The Monday night meeting concepts which built our country They assume the worst of human nature, the best of bureaucrats Foote took particular aim at a proposed 60 percent rule, which will reimburse nursing homes for Medicaid-related routine care costs up to 60 percent of the average costs incurred by all nursing homes. The apparent purpose behind the 60-percent rule is to move toward a prospective system aimed at encouraging cost-containment and efficiency. But Foote contended the proposal does not take into account how efficiently or economically any one nursing home is operated. The most bitter of the antiwelfare voices never calls for the deprivation of medical assistance to the indigent sick, he argued. "Yet where can a 60-percentile maximum lead Vermont except to such a result? Either facilities refuse Political agreed to place the 7'-cent police tax question on the ballot but only as a one-year item and again refused the rooms and meals tax question, making continuation of the petition drive mandatory.

I am disappointed again that the board of aldermen showed a lack of fairness in giving people the chance to vote on the rooms and meals tax, Sanders said. The rooms and meals tax, also known as a gross receipts tax, is an advisory question designed simply to gauge public opinion on whether restaurant and hotel owners should be assessed a tax for their revenues. The measure does not specify the amount of the tax, but Sanders has recommended a 3-cent tax, which would raise about $900,000 and diminish the burden on the property tax. This is obviously an issue of political blockade, said Ward 1 Alderman Richard Musty, a Sanders supporter. When you dont bring an advisory question (to voters) aldermen dont have to listen to what they say), he said.

One of the big losers is Burlington, which apparently will get a state aid check for about $542,000 a $162,000 increase over current levels. But the first version of the bill would have hiked Burlingtons state aid to $1.5 million; a subsequent rewrite reduced that to $1.2 million, and until now, officials had estimated the final version would net them up to $680,000. related costs. The rules proposed by the Human Services Agencys Division of Rate-setting would be in effect during the transition. The proposed regulations, however, were resoundingly criticized at a public hearing Monday that drew more than 200 nursing-home operators and relatives of nursing-home patients.

Middlebury Attorney Ralph Foote, counsel to the Vermont Health Care Association a lobbying organization for 33 of the states roughly 45 nursing homes charged the proposed rules were farcical, arbitrary and capricious. He also argued they conflict both with state and federal law and with legislative intent. Said Foote: They border on the immoral. They purport to legalize larceny They destroy individual initiative. The mock the free enterprise Tax Votes marked yet another chapter in the on-going debate between Sanders and aldermen on how revenues to run the city should be derived.

Last week aldermen voted to hold a special election on a 32-cent tax hike for the street department, which needs the funds for long overdue street repairs. At that meeting, however, aldermen rejected the police department tax and the rooms and meals tax questions. Sanders said either all three taxes should be on the ballot or he would veto the 32-cent tax item. He and his supporters began collecting signatures for the rooms and meals tax. Sanders also reaffirmed his support for the police tax, saying the 7'-cent increase is necessary to bring Burlington police officers salaries into line with those in neighboring communities.

Essex and Winooski recently approved giving their police officers a raise that makes the differential of our pay to theirs even worse than it is now, Sanders said. Monday night, aldermen sales and income taxes to pump an additional $23 million into state aid. As a result, just about every town and city in Vermont will get more state money next year. But the latest estimate of the changes indicates some communities will get less of an increase than expected, while others will get more. Banker Plans Lt.

Gov. Run YOUR OWN HOME COLLEGE EDUCATION OPPORTUNITIES FUTURE SECURITY MARRIAGE VACATION TRAVEL RETIREMENT EMERGENCIES PEACE OF MIND HOME IMPROVEMENTS NEW AUTOMOBILE THINGS YOU WANT GRANITE SAVINGS BANK. and uAt Qomyxcurw Prompt, Friendly and Efficient Service For All Your Banking Needs. With Two Convenient Locations a low-budget campaign, he continued. It concerns me that the cost of campaigns is preventing people from running unless they are wealthy.

Ryan, who served as the Rutland banks president from 1976 until leaving his job earlier this year, said he would use his business and development background to improve Vermonts economic picture. The main reason Im running is because Im disturbed by the trends in the Vermont economy at the present time, he said. The image of Vermont pictured in corporate board rooms is one of green pastures and dairy farms, Ryan said. When they are talking industrial development, they're never thinking of us. As lieutenant governor, said Ryan, he would seek authority from the new governor to launch a search for new industries.

According to Ryan, Kunin has said she would utilize him in that role, if she is elected. By VYTO STARINSKAS RUTLAND Vowing to knock on doors of major corporations in an effort to bring new industry to Vermont, Thomas C. Ryan of Rutland said Monday he will run for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor. An official announcement will be made Thursday. The former Rutland Savings' Bank president said he decided Sunday night to run for the post that will be vacated by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Lt.

Gov. Madeleine M. Kunin. Ryan will face Bruce Cullen, also from Rutland, for the Democratic nomination. Admitting that he is a political neophyte, Ryan, 51, said he is in the forming stages of his campaign, has not yet named a campaign manager and is hesitant about hiring one.

Im more concerned with developing issues at this point than raising money, Ryan said. I will say that Im planning Burlington Upset With State Aid 36 N. Main, Barre, VT 476-3147 Fridays, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Howard's South Barre, 479-1300 10a.m.to6p.m.

Fridays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays, 9 a.m. to noon BURLINGTON (UPI) -Burlington school officials say they are dismayed and disappointed about the citys state aid to education allotment under a new system adopted by the 1982 Legislature. The lawmakers broke a decade-long stalemate by changing the way state aid to local school districts is allocated, and they raised the Member Of The Federal Deposit Insurance' Corporation 1100,000 Maximum Insurance For Each Depositor.