Local officials are shelving plans to ask voters to approve a new payroll or property tax for transportation, after a recent poll revealed that voters in Central Oregon would not support such a measure.

Instead, officials will now begin to develop two separate strategies to pay for public transportation: one for the short-term, and one for the long-term.

“You might think that we just saw these results and got depressed,” said Scott Aycock, interim community and economic development manager for Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council. “But we really didn’t, and neither did our funding committee … What we saw is work to be done. We saw opportunities to take advantage of, in terms of leveraging people’s opinions into the future.”

COIC operates Cascades East Transit, and the board has begun to discuss funding options over the last year. Earlier this year, the council formed a new subcommittee to examine options to pay for bus service in the future. The agency stopped door-to-door bus service in many rural areas in fall 2012 after it lost some of its federal, state and other grant funding. Also, the city of Bend planned to stop its $1 million annual payments to the agency in the summer of 2015.

However, city officials have said that might not be enough time for the transit agency to find new funding sources.

Bend City Councilor Victor Chudowsky, who is a member of the COIC board and the funding subcommittee, said it is unlikely the city would stop paying for bus service before Cascades East Transit finds alternate funding.

“We can continue with the current arrangement indefinitely,” Chudowsky said. However, this means bus service cannot be expanded or improved anytime soon.

“The results of that survey were pretty disappointing,” Chudowsky said. “The support for really having a robust bus system isn’t strong, and if we were to attempt to form a separate taxing district to fund the bus system, the pollster basically said it wouldn’t pass.”

Chudowsky served on a citizen committee the last time local governments asked voters to approve a tax to pay for transit.

“It’s a really tough thing to pass,” Chudowsky said. Deschutes County asked voters in 2004 and again in 2008 to form a transit district to pay for bus service in Bend and Deschutes River Woods. Both went down at the polls.

In the short term, the transit agency could form partnerships to help pay for the service. For example, Cascades East Transit already partners with Mt. Bachelor to provide bus service to the ski area, and the agency could work with the new Oregon State University-Cascades Campus to provide transportation to students.

Karen Friend, the agency’s transportation manager, said it was not surprising that a majority of voters said their top priority is job creation and told pollsters they would not support a tax increase or new fee to pay for public transportation.

“It definitely highlighted for us — we have to spend some attention to making people aware of the services that are available,” Friend said.

The survey results showed that voters value public bus service. For example, Aycock pointed out that 79 percent of voters surveyed said the region’s public transit system is important.

The Bend City Council will listen to a presentation by the transit funding committee and discuss what to do next during a work session at 5 p.m. tomorrow.

“Right now, we’re looking at how do we continue transit service without asking voters for more money,” said City Manager Eric King. “I think with OSU-Cascades coming on board, a lot of our plans now are very dependent on transit. … It would be very difficult for us to pull the plug on the system at this point.”

The Cascades East Transit Funding Committee is scheduled to meet again on Nov. 1 and continue to discuss how to proceed.

“The survey has not in any way taken the air out of the issue,” Aycock said. “It’s forced them to be more creative. But it’s not taken the momentum away.”