The Heart of Iowa Regional Transit Agency (HIRTA) already serves Dallas County but a new service is planned for the city of Perry. 

HIRTA recently received a 2022 Community Challenge Grant from the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) which Bilingual Outreach Coordinator Casey Young says will help provide Perry residents with a new way to get around town through a project that will provide a bus service within the city of Perry. The service will allow people to get to important amenities including healthcare and employment. 

“The outcome of this project is to implement a new service here within the city of Perry to allow people to catch a bus at several designated areas. We are looking right now at having a bench basically on each side of town, north, west, south and east and probably one in the middle where a lot of people are going to be.” 

Young tells Raccoon Valley Radio he hopes the new service will be up and running by the end of this year but unforeseen supply chain issues could delay that.

“Unfortunately, a lot of the bench companies right now, there is a supply chain issue, and so there’s a few months of wait time at the moment. We’ve kind of been looking for other companies but it seems like that’s a service wide thing. There has been an issue too with getting new buses, we are going to have specially designed buses for these particular routes.”

The nationwide grant program allows grantees to do projects that will help communities become more livable.