In Idaho, a public transit program can take you to the doctor. If it has enough funding.

Kirkwood, who uses a wheelchair, has tapped a free medical transportation program through Valley Regional Transit, a public transit agency in southwest Idaho. 

But when she went to book her ride that week, she was told she couldn’t: The service, called Rides2Wellness, had been suspended after it ran out of funds.

Then she put her journalist hat on — calling policymakers and reaching out to journalists to see why the service was halted. 

“I canceled my appointment, and thought if I made enough phone calls, maybe somebody would come to the rescue,” Kirkwood said. 

Transit officials say the medical transportation program had hit a budget hiccup. 

Money set aside, largely by hospital systems, wasn’t enough to account for rising demand for the service as health insurance companies cut benefits for medical transportation, officials said. So they had to limit how many trips the service could do each month, until the health care systems came through with more funding.

But transit officials say the lapse is part of a bigger budget problem for public transit in Idaho.

The state doesn’t dedicate funding for public transportation. And without the ability to tax to fund public transit, local transit agencies rely on whatever local governments and other entities are willing to chip in, and what the federal government matches.

“When we talk about it piecemeal, we find piecemeal solutions. But we never really address the root cause, which is that our transportation system is not very resilient,” Valley Regional Transit CEO Elaine Clegg said in an interview.

In the spring, the Valley Regional Transit board approved a plan to let the agency lobby state lawmakers for the power to tax. But that push will likely face an uphill battle in the Idaho Legislature, where Republican lawmakers have cut state spending to make room for more state tax cuts — by adopting cuts from the federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act — after years of deep tax cuts. 

Why the medical transportation program hit a funding hiccup

The medical transportation program, founded in 2016, is built with a partnership from the region’s two largest health care systems — St. Luke’s and Saint Alphonsus. It serves Idaho’s two most populated counties, Ada and Canyon. Officials are testing an expansion pilot phase into Elmore County, a nearby rural county.

Last year, the program drew 16,000 rides. But this year, transit officials say demand spikes after some health insurance companies cut transportation benefits, as part of efforts to cut back on supplemental benefits. 

By May, Valley Regional Transit officials said they needed to limit how many rides people could take, so the program could stay on budget to finish up the fiscal year by Sept. 30. 

In Ada County, that cap was 500 rides per month, according to an internal budget memo shared by Valley Regional Transit. The entire month was booked. For Canyon County, it was already at its budget by the start of May, the memo showed. 

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That meant Valley Regional Transit needed to turn riders away.

“At this time, all rides for May are being denied,” the memo said. 

The demand shows up in the data. 

The program budgeted for nearly 1,300 rides in Ada County, and nearly 250 rides in Canyon County for each month of the entire fiscal year 2026, which ends in September. But by the end of April, demand had already outpaced that by about 14%. The actual number of rides booked each month was more than 1,400 in Ada County, and around 370 in Canyon County, according to the memo.

By the end of May, the health care systems came through with funding to resume the services, said Leslie Pedrosa, Valley Regional Transit’s chief operating officer. The amount committed — $77,500 — is enough that the transit system isn’t expecting more interruptions for riders this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, the memo said. 

For next year’s budget plans, Valley Regional Transit is preparing for more rides — about 5% more than it will do this fiscal year. 

When rides were capped, Kirkwood tried to figure out other ways to get to her doctor’s appointments. 

The service, she said, has “been a godsend.” Her husband is too sick to drive her to all her appointments, and she said she ran out of friends to ask.

“It’s a lot to ask a friend to take someone in a wheelchair to the doctor,” Kirkwood said in an interview. 

So she thought about hiring a company, like Valley Regional Transit contracts with for the program, to drive her out. But it was unaffordable. Each trip would cost $60, Kirkwood said.

How strained city budgets are — and aren’t — funding Valley Regional Transit

In Nampa, which doesn’t fund the medical transportation program, City Council members are facing a tough budget year as they brace for millions of dollars in deferred maintenance, said City Council member Sebastian Griffin.

Earlier this month, the Nampa City Council voted to cut funding for Valley Regional Transit, instead of reducing funding to around a half million dollars for less services in the city, the Idaho Statesman reported. But locals can still weigh in on the cuts at a public hearing on Aug. 17. 

In an interview earlier this month, before the council decided on the cuts, Griffin said funding public transit has been an issue in Nampa for years.

“I feel that a number of us don’t feel that the numbers justify the cost, that the service isn’t proper when you have to weigh it against … potable water and sewer piping,” he said.

But he acknowledged that the transit agency has a tough job. 

“It makes it an enormous lift for (Valley Regional Transit) to go and lobby every city in the valley, just to be able to provide a service,” Griffin said. “I feel — my heart goes out to them. I wouldn’t want their job. And it’s just a difficult situation all the way around.”

Meridian is the only city that funds the Rides2Wellness program. The city contributes about $64,000 this fiscal year, less than half of what each of the two health care systems give.  

But the city is preparing to scale back, by $10,000 to $20,000, amid a tough budget year, said Brian Whitlock, a Meridian City Council member. 

He also serves as president of the Idaho Hospital Association, an organization that represents and lobbies for hospitals. And he sees the needs for the program.

“Look at what a gallon of gas costs. People just, financially, are struggling to the point where they’re making really, really tough decisions,” Whitlock said in an interview. “And if the cost of a gallon of gas is going to keep them from accessing healthcare, then I think the community and I think nonprofit entities can step up and should step up and say ‘No, we want you to be healthy.’”

But he also thinks policymakers in the state need to start talking about the role that public transportation should play in one of the fastest growing states in the nation.

“If a case can be made that a separate taxing authority can be set up to meet the needs that we all agree on, then we have a path forward,” he said. “But if the decision is made that ‘No, we want a patchwork quilt. We want to keep this thing together with baling twine and duct tape, and not look long term of what the needs of this community will be,’ then we’re going to suffer from those consequences.”

Whitlock said he feels those repercussions daily.

“I sit in traffic coming from my home in Meridian to downtown Boise, where I work, upwards of an hour every morning and an hour every day, every evening. And that’s not a productive use of my time, and the 10s of thousands of other people who are sitting in vehicles next to me,” Whitlock said. “ So, public transportation needs to be discussed as an alternative to that.”

Valley Regional Transit’s budget for the medical transportation program next year accounts for Meridian’s decrease — by raising contributions from the healthcare systems to more than $226,000 each. 

Valley Regional Transit lobbies the Legislature for taxing authority

Idaho is one of just two states that doesn’t dedicate state funding for public transit, according to a 2024 report by the Community Planning Association of Southwest Idaho.

The medical transportation program is one of several specialized transportation services that Valley Regional Transit has created, on top of its regular bus ride system, said Clegg, Valley Regional Transit’s CEO. Other regions with more public transportation don’t have as much need for these speciality services, she said. 

“Without the revenue, the service hours on regular service, we’ve instead (used speciality services) as a stopgap until we can, we hope, become a more robust transit system,” Clegg said in an interview. “… I don’t think the need for Rides2Wellness will go away, necessarily, if we had really robust transit, but it would be less pronounced.”

In January, the board that oversees Valley Regional Transit endorsed a plan to push the Legislature on state taxing authority — including floating a draft bill.  

Back then, Idaho’s 2026 legislative session was just starting up. And lawmakers were gearing up for blanket budget cuts across state government services — and to make even more tax cuts. 

Transit officials acknowledged their push would be a slow burn.

“The idea is to begin the discussion now, and hopefully by next year have it ripe enough that we can begin more active discussion on it,” Clegg said at a Jan. 5 board meeting, according to Boise State Public Radio. 

Part of the pitch, Clegg said, is that transit is treated differently than most other specialized government agencies, called political subdivisions, like cemetery districts and mosquito abatement districts. 

“We are one of only three political subdivisions in the state of Idaho that don’t have property tax levy authority, or permission to ask voters if they’re willing to increase property tax to pay for the service we provide,” Clegg said.

She said talks with lawmakers this year were more conceptual, focused on how the Legislature could allow transit authorities to pursue dedicated funding, which is a class of state tax revenue that’s set aside for specific purposes.

“There was pretty good agreement that many (in) the Legislature, at least philosophically, support letting voters make choices like that,” she said.

But House Speaker Mike Moyle, a Star Republican who is one of the state’s most powerful lawmakers, bluntly summed up the chances of that clearing the Legislature. 

“Hell no,” he said in an interview. “… I do not see the Legislature, in any way, going forward with an increase in property or sales tax to fund empty buses.”

He pointed out that several cities — like Nampa and Eagle — recently cut funding to Valley Regional Transit. 

“There’s this perception that if you build it, somebody else will ride it,” Moyle said. “People don’t come to Idaho to ride a bus. Most of them have their own cars and everything else.”

The Idaho Republican Party updated its platform this summer to call to remove property taxes, which some might look to tap for public transit. 

But Sen. Treg Bernt, a Republican from Meridian, said he’d be open to exploring the idea more. 

He said he’d need to explore a few things first, like ridership levels.

When he served on the Meridian City Council, he said Valley Regional Transit “wasn’t hugely popular.”

But he sees the promise public transit can offer. 

“As communities grow … especially in a regional level, I think that the more that we can get cars off the roads and people in other forms of transportation is important,” Bernt said. “I don’t know if the Treasure Valley is to that yet. I don’t think that we have the population yet to be able to justify that. It’s just my thought. But there’s going to be a time when we will be there. And I think that it’s important to start having these conversations right now.”

Weeks after her canceled doctor’s appointment, Kirkwood made it in. And she found out her problem wasn’t cancer.

“That had been hanging over my head for weeks and weeks,” she said.

But she’s left uncertain about whether the service will need to be paused again.

“I think that’s inevitable, unless there’s a change in how it’s funded,” Kirkwood said.

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