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Des Moines Area Regional Transit Authority (DART) confirmed last week that it is still waiting to secure enough funding for its proposed $15 million transit hub.

“We have yet to secure the funding to build the facility,” said Michelle Orfield-Koranda, program development manager for DART. “However, it is a top priority of our capital plan.”

Orfield-Koranda said the funding is beyond DART’s control, though the agency anticipates it will come from multiple sources, including federal, state, and local governments and private organizations. However, the exact makeup of the funding is still undefined, Orfield-Koranda said.

The proposed transit hub would reopen Walnut Street to public traffic and shift DART bus loading to the new transit hub, proposed for a location along Cherry Street.

Substance Architecture Interiors Design drafted conceptual plans for a “green” facility that would incorporate a retail component and facilitate future modes of transportation such as rapid transit buses and electric light rail trains.

Todd Garner, the designer who worked on the project at Substance Architecture, said his firm has a good relationship with DART and drafted the concept for the proposed transit hub for a stipend. He said DART wanted a concept drafted so that it would have a visual component to accompany the proposal when it began requesting funding.

“The sole intent of this was to go out and to get funding,” Garner said.

Substance received the request from DART late last summer and was able to complete the draft within two months. Garner said DART had a Kansas City company draft a traffic-flow diagram that illustrated how buses and traffic would flow in and out of the new hub. Substance used that diagram to create its concept.

“This location creates a gateway from the south, which Ninth Street lacks,” Garner said. “(The Kansas City company) came up with the original diagram of how buses would flow, and when we were asked to draft a concept, we were told it had to flow like this.”

But despite bus flow, Garner said the transit hub project would be put at a standstill if the plans to reopen Walnut Street fell through. He said DART is waiting to see what happens on Walnut to actually secure plans for the new proposed site.

“This needs to be built to get the buses so that they don’t load on Walnut; so that the city can go ahead with the redesign plans on Walnut,” Orfield-Koranda said.

Once DART ceases bus loading on Walnut and the street reopens for normal use, DART will not be held responsible for any of the costs associated with the restructuring of the Walnut Transit Mall, Orfield-Koranda said.

“Opening that back up was a big issue,” Garner said.

Even though DART has used the few blocks of Walnut for years, Orfield-Koranda said the city of Des Moines will incur the costs associated with the plans for the restructuring and redesign.

Garner said DART would have to get federal funding through the Federal Transit Administration and pursue deals with Polk County, which owns the land that would house the transit hub.

“There’s a whole lot of stuff that would have to fall into place,” he said.

DART plans to issue requests for proposals (RFP) for other components of the project once the funding is secured.

“Once we find funding, we will do an RFP for the engineering and things like that,” Orfield-Koranda said.

Furthermore, the location along Cherry Street will be confirmed once the funding is secured and the contracts are signed.

Orfield-Koranda could give no exact timelines for construction of the bus hub, saying “it depends on things that are beyond our control.”