The Kenosha Transit Commission voted Friday for bus service cuts needed to live under budget constraints handed down from city administration.

Then the commission passed a second motion, urging the City Council to find a way to fund two bus lines slated for closure and to avoid planned furloughs that would leave the area without bus service on five Mondays in July and August.

The actions came after about two dozen people addressed the commission in a late-afternoon public hearing, imploring the city to keep service on the Nos. 6 and 36 bus lines and scrap the furloughs.

Some said they and others would simply lose their jobs if they are unable to take the bus to work on the furlough Mondays, slated for July 26 through Aug. 23.

“How many jobs are we going to lose because you want to shut it down on Mondays?” asked Kenosha resident Tom Hughes. “You’ve got to come up with something better than that.”

Bettie Thomas, also of Kenosha, said she has to catch three buses each day to get her son to day care and herself to her job along Interstate 94.

“Seriously, it’s not right,” Thomas said of the proposed cuts. “I am very upset.”

Two routes affected

Route 36, which serves Southport Plaza, White Caps, Indian Trail Academy and the city’s industrial parks, is slated for complete elimination as it received a relatively light ridership of 4,920 pasengers in 2008, 5.6 per hour.

Route 6, which travels from downtown to Indian Trail via a meandering north-side route, would be cut to a morning- and afternoon-only route on school days.

Terry Boyd, a Kenosha Transit driver, urged the commission to consider the riders as people, not numbers.

“I ride the buses with the same people every day and it becomes very personal, because you do know them,” Boyd said. She said she takes a core group of regulars to jobs in the Business Park of Kenosha on Route 36 daily.

Alderman Donald Holland, the commission chairman, said the panel realizes that each person who uses the system depends on it.

The commission passed the motion recommending the cuts. Holland noted the body’s responsibility to develop a service plan under Mayor Keith Bosman’s budget.

Transit Director Len Brandrup said the Finance Committee and council would need to find about $115,000 in additional funds to leverage the federal dollars to continue operating routes 6 and 36.

Streetcar changes

Downtown streetcar service cuts were also among the proposals backed Friday.

The commission urged softening a previously proposed plan to shut down service entirely from January through March, however.

Under the measure endorsed Friday, service would remain on weekends only during those months, at an additional cost of about $19,000. The commission also urged against furloughing a streetcar mechanic during that period.

Brandrup said mothballing the system entirely for those months would result in the potential for greater mechanical costs when service resumes.

The council’s Finance Committee will take up the matter and other budget provisions at 5 p.m. Monday in Room 202 of the Kenosha Municipal Building, 625 52nd St.