EPHRATA — A former auto dealership in Ephrata is scheduled to be converted into a Grant Transit Authority transit center. The GTA board authorized the purchase of 548 Basin St. SW at a special meeting Monday. The property was the Barry auto dealership until late last year.
General Manager Eric Loomis said GTA would pay $2.55 million for the property. It’s about 2.23 acres.
“This is a property GTA saw as an opportunity to own property in Ephrata, rather than the current lease process we do there. Not just for the benefit of transit in Ephrata, but also the surrounding cities there,” Loomis said.
The GTA’s only transit center and its maintenance facility are both in Moses Lake. Transit Authority board chair and Ephrata mayor Bruce Reim said a second transit center would provide more options for the areas north and west of Ephrata.
“It allows our bus service to expand and be more user-friendly,” Reim said.
Loomis said a second location to store vehicles provides more options for GTA, too.
“One of the ideas would be to store vehicles in there and have staff at that property, where our drivers wouldn’t have to come to Moses Lake and be dispatched from there back to Ephrata. There’s a huge efficiency gain there,” he said. “Then from there, those drivers would be dispatched to other outlying communities, like Quincy, Soap Lake and further north.”
Loomis said GTA officials want to evaluate the property to see if its electrical system can be upgraded to add electric bus charging stations.
The GTA plans to remodel the buildings already on site rather than demolish them.
“You would have some staff there, storage and minor maintenance for vehicles,” he said.
Eventually, GTA officials would want to add a lobby for riders, Loomis said, and possibly a public meeting space.
“We would want to do some safety and security upgrades,” he said. “It’s very open, so we want to look at our facility, have personnel-only areas off limits to the public (and) security cameras.”
That would require some remodeling, but those costs have not been determined.
“One of the first things we would look at is to configure the rear (parking) lot, which is fine gravel right now, and put concrete down for the buses,” he said.
The cost for that is still to be determined, too, but would probably be more than $100,000, he said.
Reim asked GTA staff for their opinions, and Stephanie Guettinger, financial resources manager, said she thought it was a good deal.
“We really need to expand into the outlying area. And to build from the ground up would be (expensive) — we’re spending almost $8 million just to add onto the maintenance shop,” she said. “It just makes a whole lot of sense, and it’s something we’ve been talking about for a while.”
A second transit center would mean more options as GTA expands the number of electric buses in its fleet, Reim said. The drive from Moses Lake substantially reduces their range, he said.