Thirty to forty school buses from this part of the province joined others Tuesday at a rally at Queen’s Park as part of a years-long effort to change the government’s Request for Proposals (RFP) process.
Local school bus operators believe they will lose their routes and businesses to competition from large companies.
Sherry Barker of Parkhurt Transportation speaks for the Triboard School Bus Operators Association and says the current RFP system forces companies to bid on any of 15 bundles consisting of around 40 routes each.
“I have an operator that has six routes and those six routes are spread out over four different bundles which, if they had to bid on all four of those bundles, they would have had to bid on 157 routes. It’s just not economically feasible.”
Barker says a “benchmarking” process by a qualified person would be a fair way to settle bus contracts. Benchmarking is a similar process to arbitration in union contract negotiations.
” … looks at the books from the consortia’s (Triboard Transportation) side of the table and also looks at the books from the operator’s side of the table and then they tell you what the rates will be.”
Barker says a Hamilton area school bus operator, in business for half a century, recently lost 100 routes due to the government’s RFP process.
The Triboard School Bus Operators Association, representing around 25 businesses, is currently in litigation with the company responsible for the vast majority of school bus routes in the region, Triboard Transportation, on the RFP process.
The association is under contract through the 2021-22 school years.
