Ceremonial First Run of the Lakewood Shuttle

[Music] welcome everybody today we're about to take the ceremonial first run of lakewood's new shuttle bus service and pleased to have uh a number of dignitaries here with us today for this ceremonial ride and looking forward to the launch of the service tomorrow with me is Mayor akan and I will hand off to him so he can uh tell you about some of the people that are here today for the ride first of all I'd like to thank um Mr Ryman for working on this project for so many years uh there number of Mayors who have been through this uh through work working on this uh bus ride and seeing it a reality including committee manstein who's standing here right now who's arguably the mayor who started it in 2006 2006 correct 2006 um committeeman Kohl's who who worked on it as mayor committee man deia who worked in it as committeeman uh Deputy Mayor Miller who's not here but um and uh mayor May uh mayor and Senator Bob singer um we have Representatives here from a representative here from Chris Smith's office Congressman Chris Smith was very instrumental in getting this done because he helped secure the funding for this trial run we have Joe schoer here from his office to represent him we appreciate that you came um we have our town manager here and many other dignities including the owner of Jay's busting Jay Ellison who worked very hard on this with with his with his assistant and of course to Mr Steve fanti of the state who worked with Mr Ryman the entire time to to make sure that this is a reality we hope that this trial run will end up uh giving us a good indication if lakewood's ready for a full-fledged transportation system I'm going to hand it over to committee man lonstein to say a few words sure thank you mayor and I also want to acknowledge everybody that came out and all the dignitaries uh this has been a long time Inc coming put a lot of work into it um know nobody likes to be taken for a ride but I'm hoping today we all want to be taken for a ride and I really hope that this is going to be the beginning of uh a much needed part of the infrastructure of Lakewood you know we're working on our roads working on our sidewalks working on our Traffic Systems and I believe that mass transportation is uh is is going to be vital uh for the Contin growth of Lakewood it's important to note that a mass transportation system uh is not a profitable system it's a system that requires a lot of work a lot of um cooperation from different agencies and our goal is going to be to get these buses on the road to get them as full as possible and as successful as possible so that we can prove uh to all the different people and all the different agencies involved that Lakewood is going to make good use of this and then once those buses get rolling and once people see that the uh transportation systems actually being used we're hoping that we'll be able to build on it so I want to thank the mayor the rest of the committee for continuing to back me when I started this and year after year continuing to push this program through thank you all for coming out here today I would be remiss if we I didn't add that um that we could not have possibly done this without the lobbying skills and the caring of uh BMG who pushed for us to get this Grant and also contributed on their own to make that this this project happens feel like Papi you have my school buses now too right when I was a kid should fly the window they only put them in recently don't [Music] really and I head [Applause] [Music]