Cherriots officials are negotiating to acquire property for the long-awaited South Salem Transit Center as the transit district recently learned it would receive $3 million from the federal government to help with future construction costs. Cherriots General Manager Allan Pollock told Salem Repor ter a solid timeline on the project is contingent on an offer being accepted. He said the hope is to have the property in hand by summer and estimated the project would take about two more years to complete. Pollock said Cherriots has made an offer on two adjacent pieces of land, both owned by EAWEST LLC, at 5800 Commercial St. S.E. and 1821 Wiltsey Rd. S.E., according to records from the Marion County Assessor.  The two properties combined are worth roughly $2.6 million, the records showed.  “We have been in discussions with the owners for some time. We are pretty confident we can come to an agreement on the transfer of ownership,” Pollock said. “We are fully funded for that (land acquisition) now.” The transit center has been in the works for about a decade, with some setbacks.  It’s intended to make local bus service more efficient, serving the growing south Salem area by allowing riders to connect or change routes without having to travel to the downtown transit center. It would also allow Cherriots to offer bus routes directly to high-traffic sites like the Amazon center off Highway 22 southeast of the city. “The idea is to bring potentially smaller busses or on demand service that goes into the neighborhoods in the south Salem area, bring people to the transit center where they can … connect to another smaller bus to go somewhere in south Salem,” Pollock said. “If they need to go somewhere else, they can get on the bigger bus that is more frequent and bring them to either downtown or to east Salem, or to wherever they need to go.”  Cherriots officials identified the properties along Commercial Street as their chosen location for the project in 2022.  In 2023, Cherriots received federal funding for about $2.5 million to help pay for land acquisition, Pollock said.  The more recent federal grant was announced Monday, Feb. 23, by U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley and U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas, who supported the agency’s grant application to the federal government, Pollock said.  The total cost of the project is about $17 million, Pollock said, including site selection, design and engineering, land acquisition, project management and construction. So far, the transit district has roughly $7 million saved up for construction costs, not including the latest federal grant. Pollock said acquiring the land has taken a long time because of the nature of the project and its reliance on federal funding.  “One of the things we had to do was complete an environmental assessment of the property. That took a while. Then we had to get two appraisals as required by the Federal Transit Administration,” Pollock said. “All that is now complete. We’ve made an offer, and now it’s just the back-and-forth process. With a government purchase there’s a lot of rules because we are using federal money that we’ve got to follow.”  Pollock said the transit district is focused on securing other funding sources to get the project fully funded.  “Once we own it, and do the final design, we’ll get much more firm cost numbers, and we may have to phase in pieces of it, we may not be able to do all of it at once,” Pollock said. “We will want to get to the construction of the actual transit center as quickly as possible because some of our service changes are contingent upon having that center in place.”  The transit district landed in hot water with the Salem business community last year after it considered imposing a payroll tax on businesses to help pay for expansions to local bus service. The plan was to use some of that tax revenue to pay for the transit center.  The transit district has since delayed a vote on the tax and on plans to expand bus service. Board members are now meeting with a group of business representatives in hopes of negotiating a compromise. Cherriots leaders first floated the idea of building a transit center in 2015, zeroing in on the parking lot of Walmart’s Southeast Commercial Street store. But they failed to close a deal with the retailer. In 2019, Cherriots lost $1 million in state grants for the project after not being able to use the money in time.  Contact reporter Joe Siess: [email protected]. LOCAL NEWS DELIVERED TO YOU: Subscribe to Salem Reporter and get all the fact-based Salem news that matters to you. Fair, accurate, trusted – SUBSCRIBE The post Cherriots receives $3 million federal grant for long-delayed south Salem transit center   appeared first on Salem Reporter. ...read more read less