not given us those figures. They don't even want to estimate them at this point. They feel that our industry has lost so much in the last five years that there would be significant increases in premi

ums.

Mr. HASTERT. To some people it might be obvious why the extra insurance is there. Could you elaborate why it would be?

Mr. MUNDY. Primarily because of the increased risks when transporting someone in a wheelchair, and also physically assisting someone in a wheelchair. Often our industry has a lot of turnover in it. There are not people who are trained in being able to handle. the handicapped, i.e., how to assist them properly, how to assist them onto the vehicle, if it were so equipped. In the case of an accident-and accidents are going to happen-there is great concern about the welfare of these individuals, especially near exits.

There is that kind of concern by the insurance industry of both the welfare of the individual within the wheelchair and other passengers on a vehicle if an exit is blocked. Typically, the favorable place for a wheelchair is near the exit door to eliminate the number of seats you would have to remove on a vehicle. In the case of an accident, which we know after so many hundred thousand miles, there is going to be, there is great concern that people will not be able to exit from this vehicle.

Mr. HASTERT. And is there satisfactory ways to secure a wheelchair, for instance, in a bus or a van? I mean, are there floor

Mr. MUNDY. There are floor fasteners that are satisfactory. They are not as sound as you might have if you have got a bolted seat on the vehicle, but no one really knows yet. We have not tested those wheelchairs on vehicles in crash tests. We really do need to assess somehow what kind of expected liability the carriers are going to have.

Mr. HASTERT. Do you think those insurance costs, say if they were increased 50 percent-I am not even sure what insurance costs on a carrier will be, I imagine significant-but if insurance costs were increased 50 percent or 75 percent, or 30 percent, would that be a significant amount to force different types of business decisions?

Mr. MUNDY. Very much so. Behind labor and fuel, insurance is probably the greatest single cost of operating-save the vehicle. So it is a major cost in anyone's operation-a cost which has gone up four or fivefold, by the way-in the last years.

Mr. HASTERT. I would like to ask Mr. Werth, and maybe you can comment. The feedback I have gotten back from my district-I have a lot of senior citizens that rely on paratransit-and they are literally very, very afraid, or there is a great deal of fear that if this bill is passed, all of a sudden the paratransits, people who provide that, wouldn't be able to provide it.

For instance, I have some senior citizens centers where senior citizens have bake sales, and these types of things. They have bought their own vans, and now if they are going to be required to have lifts and those types of things, that they can't afford it, and they are afraid that they will be forced to not have the services. Is that a threat out there with this legislation?

Mr. WERTH. According to the way I have read the legislation, if a jurisdiction had a bus system, they would have to offer the para

transit, but if you had a senior center, in other words, who went out and after this legislation was passed, had to buy a bus, would the bus have to have a lift on it, is that what you are asking?

Mr. HASTERT. Yes.

Mr. WERTH. I am going to have to yield to the floor on that. That is a question that I have as well, especially in a rural jurisdiction. In our area, almost everybody is operating bus service, so if you are not operating paratransit you are going to have to operate paratransit, and that should be a service to the senior centers.

The question is, who is going to pay for that service? The senior centers traditionally, even if they have fixed bus service, need the paratransit, and a great many of the disabled communities are elderly disabled. A great many of our riders are elderly who need to have the lift equipped service, and it needs to be door to door, and it needs to be passenger assistance, and we train all our drivers on passenger assistance techniques and everything.

So that is something that we do, but if a senior center was stuck out there in the middle of nowhere, and they had to have a bus to go to the grocery store and things of that nature, or if there was even a fixed route senior bus-I am reading this legislation that if they buy it, it has to have a lift or they have to have comparable services, and I am not sure, I am going to have to yield on that.

I think it is something that needs to be-maybe someone who testified before us can answer it. They are certainly I think capable.

Mr. HASTERT. What do you see, for instance in your case-DOT and DASH-what happens if DASH has a mandate lift program, the service as law they have to have it, what happens to your service?

Mr. WERTH. I contract, so when the contract is up, they can nonappropriate it, the city council can non-appropriate it, or this legislation they are going to have do-DASH is not lift equipped. They would have to lift equip under this new law into buses. They have an order in for 14 new buses, and their board has said lift equipment in anticipation of this legislation. Then they would come back and also have to provide the paratransit.

Now, would they have to-would they be allowed at that point to cut back on the hours of service, on the subsidy level, things of that nature? I am not sure about that. Also, we live in a very complex area in Washington, because Alexandria also has Metrobus that goes through it. So let's say in Arlington County, for example, that has no paratransit, door-to-door service, like Alexandria does. Metro would have to lift equip all of their new vehicles as they put them on the street, and Arlington County would have to have para

transit.

Now, Metro, I think, would be required to provide that paratransit in Arlington, and Alexandria might turn around and say, well, instead of doing our specialized service, we are going to latch onto Metro service, so the private-there are 13(c) requirements, you know, for labor, and they are not going to-Metro has to sue their labor, and that is very expensive. I mean, $7 a trip for paratransit within the City of Alexandria, I think is a pretty good rate. I don't know what the cost per trip will go up to.

It is a complex issue in multi-jurisdictional areas like Washington, and I personally need some clarification on it. I have asked-I have gotten opinions from different groups, so it is my understanding that Alexandria would have to continue to offer the paratransit in some form. Whether that be through Metro or a private contractor, I think is just up to the future to tell.

Mr. HASTERT. Thank you. So there is no real clear cut thing? Mr. WERTH. They would have to continue the paratransit, that is clear. How they do it and what subsidy level, it is not.

Mr. HASTERT. Mr. Mundy, your final statement caught my attention. You said that some companies just won't be able to afford to put those programs in and still be profitable and will cease to provide service. Does that mean they will go out of business?

Mr. MUNDY. There are two ways that can happen. One they would go to demand responsive and because they are so small with three of four vehicles hope that the provisions of the bill about undue burden would apply and they would not have to equip their vehicles or they would cease to exist.

They are small operators. They don't make a lot of money. If they are faced with a situation where they have to equip their vehicles with wheelchair lifts they will make a prudent business decision and go elsewhere.

There are hundreds across the country. When I talk to them, they say, "They are going to do what? That is ridiculous. They will never pass such a bill." They don't realize that it can happen and it could happen very shortly to them. They would be the people affected by the 30-day provision, not the six years. They would be affected overnight.

Mr. HASTERT. That is part of my concern. I have a mixed district, a suburban district and also 130 miles of corn and bean fields with small towns where there is not much left there. It is the entrepreneurs that have gotten the van services that move seniors back and forth to the doctors and shopping that I am afraid are going to be wiped out and we will have a large group of people out there with no service because nobody will be the entrepreneurs because they can't afford it.

That is the real threat this bill has on small town America. It is going to wipe it off the map.

Thank you.

Mr. MINETA. Mr. Payne.

Mr. PAYNE. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I would like to ask Linda Wilson to comment on your statement about the necessity of providing more funds.

I know when you and I were working on some transportation issues, we determined that the fares of the Federal Government, state government and all the local governments in the area, were not sufficient and we could not raise enough funds by increasing the riders' fares. We began looking at private sources and ultimately pieced something together that barely worked in order to continue to provide the necessary services. JAUNT, which I suspect like many other organizations is so thinly financed and capitalized that any more demands raises some questions about how they might be accommodated.

If they are accommodated, then it may be necessary to curtail certain services that are provided in order to provide those new services. Would you say that is an accurate assessment?

MS. WILSON. Yes, I think what might happen, I can see the possibility in the city that I serve now in Charlottesville where we currently provide transportation to all the handicapped who can't use the city bus system. The city is very flexible about how they approve for that system. If they have to lift equip all their buses then they could very easily get by with saying only folks who are in motorized wheelchairs or in very severe condition can't ride the city buses and can use the paratransit.

They might become much stricter and more restrictive about who can use the paratransit system. In rural areas like the area that you are from there are not very many handicapped people out there using the system because the cost of the transportation is so high that we have very limited service.

We are not doing the kind of service we are doing in Charlottesville. The reason for that is money. Charlottesville puts close to $100,000 in our transportation system. The highest amount of money I get from any rural county is $9500 and that goes down to one that gives me $950 a year. The burden will fall on the local governments. Those local governments that have the money might be able to implement it but they have a lot of other priorities as well. It will become a local burden. Over the years more and more of the cost of transportation is falling on the local governments. They are the ones that are going to have to do the cuts and make the cities accessible as well.

It is going to be a big burden. It is very unclear to me, in this bill, I mean, I share Mr. Werth's concern about the problems with the definitions, it is unclear what this means. Are rural areas going to have to have curb cuts? Does it mean when I pull up to someone's dirt road on their farm that they will have to have a curb cut?

It sounds ridiculous but I have been living with federal regulations for a long time. After it is passed, all the bureaucrats get together and play, "Let's interpret" and we have to live with it. We live in a nightmare of having to face this down the road after the bill is passed.

Mr. PAYNE. Would you comment on one other Mr. Werth. I would appreciate your views as well because I think we are dealing with similar systems in Charlottesville and Alexandria. Both are medium sized cities which have bus systems and a paratransit system, neither of which have lift equipped buses. Under this act all buses will be required to be lift equipped.

You mentioned your concern that that might affect the funding for the paratransit system in a negative way. In your judgment what is the best way to meet the needs of the handicapped citizens and at the same time provide the best overall service for all passengers.

MS. WILSON. Well, I would like to say that I really support the idea of having the buses lift equipped but I am concerned about the cost. I think the City of Charlottesville is probably ahead of the game because they do plan as they replace buses-and it is going to be a while before they do that-they do plan to lift equip the buses

because the handicapped community in Charlottesville has been very vocal and has gotten that across. However, I do feel that there are going to be a lot of surprises when that happens because I don't think it is going to be used as much as people think it will be.

I know in Winchester, Virginia, all the buses in the small community of Winchester are lift equipped or they were when I talked to the manager a year or two ago and he told me that every now and then they have to work the lifts to be sure they still work.

They may have one or two trips a year. The people in Winchester are now begging for a paratransit system because they want door to door service. My feeling is that the people I serve want paratransit. Among the handicapped community and I am sure the folks who testified earlier would probably tell you this, there is a lot of disagreement about whether there should be lift equipped buses or paratransit.

Mr. PAYNE. But you do see in an era of scarce resources that those two groups will be vying against one another for those funds.

MS. WILSON. It is not so much vying against each other as it is if the city's buses are lift equipped then that makes it easier for them to deny us funding because they say we would not have to serve as many people. Of the 37,000 trips a year in wheelchairs probably a number of those would be using the city system.

So it could eliminate funding for us. I don't know if Mr. Werth feels that is a problem for him.

Mr. WERTH. Because Alexandria pays me on a per trip basis, if I lose ridership, they pay less money. They put the lifts in the buses and more people use the bus service then their payments to me will go down. I don't think it is going to. They are not looking at dropping the DOT service. In discussions with the disabled community I think they would be open to reducing. I also see the ridership going down because the people. It is my feeling that there is a large segment of the disabled community right now that doesn't use paratransit.

They are using what fixed route service is out there, Metro call, driving their own vehicles, using companions to drive their own vehicles. They want to be mobile and independent. You are talking about two different groups, those who need paratransit and those who need the fixed route for independent living.

For the city, I think when you spread the costs of the lifts over 10-year useful life and the maintenance cost over that same life that the payout to the community is going to be a good payout. Rural Virginia is a totally different story but inner-city Alexandria, I think it will be a workable system.

Mr. PAYNE. You mean the $7 they pay you per trip versus the capital cost, however much that is, over some period of time you think that is the difference?

Mr. WERTH. The capital costs they would have would be only for the lifts and the buses in our system. That is a separate issue. If our ridership goes down, then the payments to the paratransit system will go down. I don't foresee that happening. We have had incremental growth, up and up and up as more people have joined the paratransit system. If the lifts are put on buses, will the ridership go down? I just don't foresee it.