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f you take the Minnesott Beach-Cherry Branch ferry these days, you may see Oriental veterinarian Sherri Hicks walking between the cars, tapping on windows and asking for signatures for a petition she’s sending to Governor Beverly Perdue.

Sherri Hicks and her petition

Hicks’ petition asks that the Governor keep the current ferry schedule in place and not reduce it to the one ferry an hour that is being proposed during much of the day. She cites the hundreds of commuters who regularly use that ferry.

Currently, the ferries average about two trips from each side per hour. Dr. HIcks takes one of those ferries across the river every weekday morning from her home near Adams Creek. With the cuts proposed, she’d either have to arrive 45 minutes before she now opens her office, or arrive 20 minutes later. What’s more, she says, if commuters miss their usual ferry, they’d have an hour long wait til the next one.

She says a bigger group of commuters would be hurt even more: those Pamlico County residents who work across the river at Cherry Point. If they miss the ferry, she says, they’d have longer waits than they do now. The other option: driving all the way around via New Bern, a trip that can add dozens of miles.

The letter to the Governor – click the letter to see it full size

She says the NC Division of Ferries told her that only a letter to the Governor could stop the proposed changes from taking effect. She printed out a letter and petition signing page and began collecting names on her commute home on the ferry Thursday night. She’s also placed petitions at various locations in Oriental. As of Monday morning, she had more than 200 signatures.

Hicks says she’s never done anything like a petition drive before. “I may be spinning my wheels,” she says. Yet she keeps gathering signatures, because, as she puts it, “I could sit around and complain on a daily basis, or I could do something about it.”

So far, she says, everyone she’s approached at the ferry has signed her petition. Even, she says, one man who at first told her that the ferry changes wouldn’t affect him because he “‘only took it a few times a week’” and “‘had a boat in Oriental that he could use.’” Then, Dr. Hicks says, the man told her that if commuters like her kept clamoring to keep the old schedule it could lead the state to start charging a fee to cross the river.

“That’s fine by me,” she says. Hicks says that among other commuters on the ferry she has found that they also would prefer to have a ferry with a fare rather than limited service and the prospect of having to drive “all the way around through James City” to get home. “That,” Dr. Hicks says, “is not fun.”

Lucy Wallace, a spokeswoman with the Ferry Division in Mann’s Harbor says that the idea of charging a fare to offset the cost of adding required crew, “has been brought up here recently.” Charles Piner, Assistant Director of Operations for the NC Ferry Division cautions that that would not be “an overnight fix” since money would have to come in from the fares before the state could hire the crews to restore the service. Adding a fare to what is now a free ferry, he said, would be something the state legislature would have to enact.

In an interview Monday, Mr. Piner provided more details about the nature of the changes. The service is being scaled back he says, because the number of crews working on the Neuse River run was being cut from 3 to 2.

The ferry Floyd Lupton

Piner says it was an act of Congress two years ago that drives this: requiring ferries to conform with Coast Guard rules about staffing.

Under those rules The “River Class” ferries such as the “Floyd Lupton” and the “Neuse” would require 6-7 staffers — two on deck, two on the bridge and two “oilers” in the engine room. Currently those boats have been making the crossings with 4-5 crew on board. The smaller “Hatteras class” boat, “Kinekeet” which carries fewer cars and has fewer crew, would not make regular runs. The crew from that, would be used to make up the difference on the other two boats so that they would meet the new Coast Guard requirements.

Previously, free ferries such as the one across the Neuse River and the one across the Pamlico River were exempt from those staffing requirements. As of July they will have to comply. Asked when the changes in service would take place and if it might wait til July, Piner said there wasn’t a specific date. He said the division is currently figuring out the personnel shifts.

Another signature is collected at the Vet office

While the change would essentially reduce the ferry run on the Neuse to one per hour from each side, there is a period in the middle of the afternoon when two ferries would depart each side each hour. That’s because, between 1:45 and 4;15 there would be two crews overlapping, it being the final hours of the ferry’s daytime shift and the beginning of the night time one. By chance, that may help the Cherry Point workers returning home to Pamlico County from work. The proposed schedule, however, does not offer more than a ferry an hour for them to get to work in the morning.

Dr. Hicks letter to the Governor mentions the military base workers as well as employees of PCS Phosphate in Aurora; under the proposed changes, the Bayview-Aurora ferry across the Pamlico River would have just one crew. As a daytime ferry, it would end service in the late afternoon.

Her petition suggests that the state keep the current schedule and make up the difference by “eliminating a large portion of State vehicles and needless administrative jobs.”

Dr. Hicks hopes to send the petitions and their hundreds of names off to the Governor by later this week. In the meantime, the petitions are available for signing in her veterinary office as well as The Bean, Town and Country Grocery, Village Health and Fitness, and at The Broad Street Grill.

You may also find an opportunity to sign if you happen to make the same ferry runs that Dr. Hicks does every day.

Posted Monday March 9, 2009 by Melinda Penkava