Too many clients delay Call-A-Ride pickup

For several months now, the Call-A-Ride program has been picking up clients later than the expected 15-minute pickup time.

Tony Chong, director of the CNMI Council on Developmental Disabilities, said that a number of people who avail of the Saipan Call-A-Ride Program should not be doing so, causing those who really need the program to be late for work or school.

“We see that there are a lot of people who are very mobile but they take advantage of the program. This is a big concern for us,” Chong said.

Lydia Igitol, executive director for the CNMI Center for Living Independently, said some members of the organization have complained that they are often late for work.

“I had even heard some of them say that they were not able to go to work the past two days because there is no transportation,” Igitol said.

The Saipan Call-A-Ride is a program that provides transportation services to people living with disabilities who need to go to work and school and who are not mobile.

However, Chong said that Call-A-Ride has been accepting a number of people who are “fully capable” of getting from Point A to Point B on their own without the Call-A-Ride program.

Chong said the Call-A-Ride Program continues to accept them because the program itself never had a comprehensive set of eligibility guidelines since it began six years ago.

He said just about a month and a half ago during a board meeting, the Board of Developmental Disabilities had adopted a new set of eligibility guidelines for the program.

The new guidelines, which will be implemented toward the end of this year, are public transportation guidelines of the American with Disabilities Act.

Chong said a public hearing will be conducted sometime in July to educate the community on the new guidelines and to pass out a new and revised application for the Call-A-Ride Program.

“There’s a lot of people who are in the program who are not supposed to be in the program. Once we weed those people out, we should not have any more problems,” Chong said.

The program currently has one accessible van and one minivan providing transportation for up to 700 people with disabilities.

Chong said the Public School System is donating two vans to the Call-A-Ride Program and those should be received in six months or so.

He added that even with the two vans the program is operating on, there should not be a problem if the program cuts those who are not eligible.