How to resolve AdBlock issue? CLEARLAKE, Calif. – The effort to create transportation solutions for those in need – in particular, those with medical issues – was the focus of a presentation to the Clearlake City Council earlier this month.
Karl Parker, Lake Links manager for Lake Transit Authority, updated the Clearlake City Council at its Jan. 9 meeting about the program, explaining that he wanted to raise awareness of the special transportation needs in Lake County.
Parker’s presentation begins at the 12:40 mark in the video above.
Lake County has a large vulnerable population, said Parker. He explained that, on the one hand, there are extraordinary needs, and on the other, there are extraordinary limitations.
Parker has been working on nonemergency medical transportation for vulnerable populations and he offered the council an overview of the services Lake Transit has offered.
He said 335,000 trips a year have been provided for people who need transportation. Of those, 8,800 are wheelchair boarding. Another 9,600 are Dial-A-Ride trips per year, over half of which are medical trips.
Parker said 1,300 trips per year are helping homeless people get to the warming center in Lakeport.
Since 2017, Lake Transit also has made 3,400 trips a year to Adventist Health to transport people with medical appointments, he said.
Lake Transit received an $800,000 federal grant to fund mobility services. Parker said Lake Transit has written a second grant application which it hopes will be funded later this year.
He said there are still special needs and challenges that the fixed-route transit system can't meet, and that includes medical referrals out of the county, which are challenging for people with no car.
Parker gave examples of two people who needed help to get to out-of-county medical appointments, both of them cancer patients – a 79-year-old woman who lives in Lower Lake and needs to get to Ukiah for treatments and a 48-year-old woman who also needed five trips a week to Ukiah from Lakeport for six weeks, totaling more than 3,000 miles.
Over the last four years, Parker said Lake Transit has developed a number of solutions to help such individuals in need.
The solutions include the “Pay-Your-Pal” ride assistance program, a low-cost transportation system for elderly, disabled and low-income community members who are unable to use public transit to get to medical appointments, Parker said.
Parker said people can enroll over the phone. They will receive a 200-mile-a-month allocation, and they must recruit their own driver.
For a bigger course of treatments requiring more mileage, Parker said they created a 12-month plan that will give them all of the miles for a year upfront. After that, they wouldn't be eligible for further reimbursement until the following year.
Parker said the constraint is the amount of funds available, adding it’s painful to tell people they can't help them for six months.
The program offers a $0.35 per-mile reimbursement. Parker said the program had 123 clients from October 2015 to November 2019, for a total of 11,000 trips and 242,000 miles at a total cost of $85,000. The average per-trip cost was $7.50 and there were 14,000 volunteer hours.
In November, Parker said the program had 47 clients who made 433 trips totaling more than 10,000 miles, with the reimbursement costs totaling $3,500. The trips for medical care that month might not have happened otherwise.
Parker said better access to health care leads to better outcomes and reduced costs. The best part of all is that the numbers represent actual lives and the program helps people and makes a difference.
Last year, Lake Transit announced that it has launched a new transportation service called Medi-Links to transport people between Lake County and Santa Rosa for medical appointments. Parker noted that Santa Rosa is one of the main places people are referred for medical care.
He said the Medi-Links service runs five days a week. People who use the service are asked to get appointments between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.
Reservations are required one week in advance, and the cost is $20 per round trip, Parker said.
“This work that we're doing is a partnership between Lake Transit and Lake Lakes,” Parker said.
In 2014, the Lake Area Planning Council initiated a mobility management program, Parker said. In 2019, Lake Links was established as a 501(c)3 nonprofit to expand fundraising opportunities, opening up a new office on Lakeshore Drive, across from Griffin's Furniture.
Parker said Lake Links and Lake Transit are making a difference one life at a time, one ride at a time.
For more information, visit https://lakelinks.org/.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
