Transportation Center – Main Entrance
An artist’s rending of the planned Menominee Transportation Center.
~
Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin ~
Wisconsin’s Oldest Residents
— the Menominee Tribe —
Enjoy One of the State’s Best
Transit Services
by Scott Bogren
The Menominee people are
the oldest inhabitants of the area
now known as Wisconsin, tracing
their arrival in the state back some
10,000 years. Today, the Menominee
Reservation covers nearly 250,000
acres of largely rural, forested land
50 miles northwest of Green Bay.
With 400 miles of pristine rivers and
streams and more than 30 native
species of trees, the reservation is a
wildlife treasure, but a difficult place
to provide community transportation
— which is the job of Menominee
Regional Public Transit.
“Menominee Regional Public
Transit was founded in 1982 because
people needed help getting around
the reservation,” says current
24
Community Transportation
Menominee Transit Director Shawn
Klemens. “We had so many people
without vehicles, and with long
distances to travel just to get to the
nearest grocery store, transit made
sense.”
It makes even more sense today,
clearly, as Menominee Transit
services more than 90 percent of the
tribal population of 3,200 people
and provides an astounding 80,000
annual trips. With key partnerships
from the tribal medical clinic, the
College of the Menominee Nation,
the school district, local aging and
veterans services and Menominee
County Human Services, the
system will continue to prosper and
grow. And the system’s routes have
expanded far beyond the reservation
borders to include service to
Appleton, Green Bay, Madison and
even Milwaukee.
“Good, efficient public transit is
something that you don’t realize
how important it is and how much
it can help until you have it,” says
Menominee Tribal Chairman Lisa
Waukau. “We’re very proud of our
transit system and the work it does
everyday in helping people get to
places like the doctor or to shop.”
Noted transit consultant and
advocate Peter Schauer was on-hand
to conduct the original transportation
development plan for the tribe in
1981 (he completed a second set
of plans in 2008). He has watched
the system from afar as it has grown
in both ridership and importance
locally, visiting periodically to assist
the system. “The tribe really took
that plan to heart and used it to help
them build what they have today,”
says Schauer. “But they’ve done so
much more with the regionalism that
the transit system has grown to foster
and how the system could serve not
just tribal members, but everyone.”
Schauer points to the deliberate
nature of the Menominee when
explaining the success of Menominee
Regional Transit. That long-term
perspective is best illustrated by the
tribe’s long-standing success in the
timber industry. The Menominee
people have practiced sustainedyield forest management for nearly
two centuries. The results are
obvious: annually the tribe produces
more than 20 million board-feet
of lumber all the while increasing
the overall volume of sawtimber
on the reservation. Such effective
stewardship has shown equal success
in the transit industry.
Meeting Growing Demand
The word Menominee is derived
from an Algonquin word meaning
“wild rice people,” which alludes to
a staple of the Menominee diet. At
the outset of Menominee Transit,
isolation due to the lack of a personal
vehicle and — for example — the
lack of a grocery store on the entire
reservation, was also a local staple.
Originally, much of the transit
system’s service was designed to
connect the largely rural reservation
to Shawano and Keshena, which
are regional employment and retail
centers.
its investment though the state —
Section 5311, 5310, state tribal
transit and other funding sources.
Klemens, who took leadership
of the service in 1999, recalls a
system that met the basic needs
of local residents — but not much
more. “Just overcoming the basic
isolation of tribal members was a real
challenge then.”
“We have enjoyed very good
support from the state in my
decade here,” says Klemens. “We
communicate regularly with the state
DOT, and let them know what, how
and why we’re doing things.”
One factor in the tribe’s transit
success is the fact that the
reservation’s borders and those
of Menominee County are one in
the same. This has allowed for a
unique brand of coordination and
cooperation between tribal and
county governments that is not often
seen.
“Issues of finding local match for
the system’s original federal transit
funds and working together with
local government were made much
more simple because of this,” says
Schauer.
Sovereignty can be an issue for
some tribes that choose not to deal
with state governments and only with
the federal government. That said, it
has not been a challenge whatsoever
to Menominee Transit.
Menominee Transit enjoys
a fruitful and long-standing
relationship with the Wisconsin
Department of Transportation.
The system receives the bulk of
“For several years, Menominee
Public Transit has been one of
the most progressive rural systems
in Wisconsin,” wrote Rod Clark
of the Wisconsin Department
of Transportation in an awards
nomination for the system. “In
blending elderly and disabled transit
funding with Section 5311 funds,
the service has been able to provide
a higher level of service to both its
elderly and disabled riders and to
the general public than would be
possible with two separate systems.”
Today, Menominee Regional
Transit serves those same original
communities and connects to much
of the rest of the state, too. With
20 buses (14 of which are 18-28
passenger shuttle buses with the
remainder being vans), 13 fixed
routes and 11 daily intercity routes,
the service has evolved into a local
economic development incubator.
“ We began to really grow the
system around 2000, and our
ridership has more than doubled
since then,” says Klemens. “By
The system has an increasingly regional focus, connecting tribal citizens with much of Wisconsin.
Community Transportation
25
significantly adding to the service,
we’ve become more efficient and able
to connect local residents with so
many more destinations. We’ve really
become a one-stop transportation
shop for the tribe.”
The Health Care Connection
Around that same time — 2000
— the Menominee Tribal Clinic
was looking to both get more people
to its services, and connect patients
with specialists sometimes hours
from the clinic. Klemens seized upon
what he saw as a perfect partnership
opportunity. It helped that the Tribal
Health Administrator, Jerry Waukau,
had been instrumental in the original
planning of Menominee Transit.
allowed the transit system to
expand its services and connect
more local residents with areas
outside the reservation, and also to
bring more local residents into the
clinic. Waukau reports that missed
appointments have dramatically
declined since Menominee Transit
and the clinic banded together.
“A classic win-win,” says Waukau,
“because better access always means
better health care.”
“The ability of Tribal Clinic staff
to triage passengers and assist in
changing appointments both on
and off the reservation has allowed
the transit system to become more
efficient and essential,” noted Clark.
The Menominee have an
interesting history with health care
on the reservation. In 1977, they
built the first Native Americanowned and operated health care
facility in the United States. Today,
the clinic employs two doctors, two
dentists and a number of nurses
and pharmacists. Yet even with
this success, not everyone on the
reservation could get to their health
care appointments.
Originally, many of the trips
outside the reservation were for
medical appointments. But that
has changed in recent years, with
employment, shopping and even
visits with tribal members living off
the reservation being an increasing
share of the destinations. The
system has also developed important
partnerships with the local school
district, college and social services
providers.
“Outside referrals were such
a struggle for us,” says Waukau.
“Specialists and services like
chemotherapy and dialysis were
difficult to manage, until we
partnered with Menominee Transit.”
“We like to remind businesses and
services in our area that Menominee
Regional Transit will be one of the
main ways people get there,” says
Klemens.
The resulting arrangement
Effective partnerships have been a key to Menominee Transit’s success.
Looking to Tomorrow
As the system has grown to meet
the increasing local demand, its role
in planning on the reservation has
changed, too. Today, public transit
is a key aspect of all planning for
the tribe, whether it be new housing
construction or an industrial park.
“Transit is critical to our economic
development and retail planning,”
says Tribal Chairman Waukau.
“With so many people riding transit,
we need to make sure it provides
the connections all around the
reservation and beyond.”
Evidence of the system’s ongoing
growth is the fact that it has
outgrown its existing 9,000-square
foot administration and maintenance
facility and has secured a
combination of state DOT, Bureau
of Indian Affairs and economic
stimulus investment to build a new
31,000 square-foot administration,
maintenance and bus storage facility.
“I think this also shows a piece of
the economic benefit by developing
partnerships. We have seen a
creation of jobs to support the
partnerships,” says Klemens.
Most importantly, the ongoing
development and success of
Menominee Transit has helped
solidify a positive spirit among the
system’s partners and the local riders.
“The growth of our transit system
has been seen locally as a very
positive thing,” says Chairman
Waukau.
“We can do it,” agrees Klemens.
“The system’s success teaches us
that we can serve local residents
with efficient transit that meets their
needs and connects them to the
reservation and to the state.”
Indeed, Menominee Regional
Transit proves that tribal transit
operations can serve everyone, can
be regional and can be outstanding.
26
Community Transportation