METRO has stepped up the pace on its North and East End light rail lines these last few months. As today's board meeting showed for many business owners in these areas it's not fast enough. Find out what METRO is doing to please disgruntled locals.

As light rail construction moves forward across the city METRO has set up a business assistance program to compensate local business owners on both the North and East End lines for any lost trade or inconvenience. This amount is to the tune of 25,000 dollars.

Even with this in place METRO CEO and President George Greanias says there have been some obvious teething problems.

"We are looking at the program. It’s very well intentioned. It was crafted with a lot of thought, but now that we’ve had some experience with it. We need to go back and look at it and see what change we can make to make it more effective and address some of the concerns we heard today."

So far under this program local businesses have been given 1.5 million dollars. METRO Chairman Gilbert Garcia says ultimately their goal is to make it a more efficient process for business owners to get their hands on this cash.

"We want to make sure that it’s not overly burdensome to participate in the program, number one and number two we want to make sure that the time delay between when someone applies versus when they get a check is minimized as much as possible."

How efficient and effective this program is will be looked at — at next month’s budget meeting. Greanias believes that getting out of both areas as fast as they can will go a long way in solving these problems. In the meantime METRO are hoping they’re dealing with local’s concerns and that it won’t be a full house of complaints at next month’s board meeting.  

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