The Butte County Association of Governments is in the process of constructing a new maintenance and operations facility for Butte Regional Transit in Chico.
The new $32 million facility includes over 41,000 square feet of new buildings for maintenance, operations, fueling, and administration. It will be open next month.
When B-Line first started service in 2005, its operations began at the current operations and maintenance facility located on Huss Drive in Chico, right next to the new facility. The facility was built for the Chico Area Transit System, CATS, but was never intended to accommodate the current B-Line regional system.
In 2010, the Butte County Grand Jury came to the conclusion that the old facility was not sufficient to house the grand system. Plans to establish a larger facility were made shortly afterward.
"We started operating out of the facility over there, which is pretty old and outdated and was really built just to accommodate the Chico system, not this larger regional system. We knew in time we were going to have to build a bigger facility" Jon Clark, Executive Director of BCAG said.
To get the funding they needed for this project, they applied for grant funds and received funding from the Federal Transit Administration and the state of California.
The B-Line service provides over 69,900 hours of fixed route service annually to the cities of Chico, Oroville, Paradise, Gridley and Biggs, along with the unincorporated communities of Thermalito, Magalia and Palermo. The old facility could hardly do its job any longer. BCAG plans to remodel the old facility into something completely new.
"We have a board of directors that meet monthly, so we’re going to turn that big part in the back into a board room area for having board meetings, conference rooms, and we’ll remodel the offices up front into additional offices for the future” Clark said.
Because the new facility is located right next to the old one, BCAG can continue to use the old one, even though its purpose will not necessarily be the same.
Because the new facility is located right next to the old one, BCAG can continue to use the old one, even though its purpose will not necessarily be the same.
