FAIRMONT — Prairie Lakes Transit has continued operations throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, at times trading actual riders for delivering meals and other essential goods.

Transit director Jeremy Monahan discussed how the pandemic has affected ridership levels, and how transit employees have enjoyed being able to help their communities in a time of need.

“Things are running smooth; we never stopped,” he said. “In terms of stats, we’re hovering around 40 to 50 percent of what we typically do for ridership. In the last few weeks, we maybe got down around 30 percent. April was the worst month in terms of ridership since the merger. In May, we started to see a little bit of an uptick, so now we are up to that 40 to 50 percent.”

Monahan said the system is utilizing the extra capacity for safety purposes.

“If it’s possible to have one to two people on a bus at a time, as opposed to jamming it full, that’s encouraged,” he said. “So we keep more buses out so we can have less occupancy on the bus at a single time. Then when the riders get out the driver has a chance to disinfect the bus. That doesn’t work all the time, but when we have more people on the bus we try and have them space out and we do the best we can.”

In addition to the social distancing, Monahan said the extra space is being utilized for food delivery. In April, the transit board unanimously approved a motion to adopt a food shelf assistance program.

“Right away in March, the governor went to the Minnesota Department of Transportation and said we need to address the issue of food insecurity; let’s make sure that people who have to stay at home don’t suffer from this and see how we can help them,” he said. “So transit has been pretty instrumental in helping with that across the state.

“Locally, we’ve tied in with some food shelves to deliver packages that the make for some of their clients. We’ve also taken over a few Meals on Wheels routes, so that’s quite a few daily things in both [Martin and Faribault] counties. And then we also do some other stuff that Human Services needs for essential goods for anybody that calls and needs something. Those are totaling at about 200 meals or packages per week. So if you take the regular passengers that we have and add the meals, then we’re closer to 75 percent of what we were normally doing.”

Monahan noted that the federal CARES Act included a section for public transit, essentially covering 100 percent of the bill for all public transit, less any fare revenue.

“It was given to the state, and then we’re the recipient from the state,” he noted. “That’s going to last at least through 2020, if not a couple of months into 2021.

“Locally, the [county] commissioners have been very supportive of everything I brought to them as far as what we need to do in terms of employee assistance or any type of sick leave and things like that,” Monahan said. “I also can’t say enough about how proud of the staff I am. They’ve really stepped up, especially with the food delivery efforts.

“They were all happy to pitch in and help. They’ve been out there doing this essential work throughout this entire pandemic, and so we’re still there. They’ve done an amazing job and I’m really proud of them.”