RIPTA board members and members of Students for a Democratic Society hang around the RIPTA conference room after the students disrupted the board meeting yesterday afternoon.

The Providence Journal Mary Murphy

PROVIDENCE — A student group protesting possible bus service cuts halted a meeting of the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority board of directors yesterday, chanting and shouting down Chairman John Rupp until he gave up and canceled the session.

The students’ leader, Rhode Island College student Chelsea Miller, was detained briefly in a police car until RIPTA officials told the police they didn’t want her prosecuted for disorderly conduct.

Before she left, Miller ended up smoking cigarettes and talking with RIPTA General Manager Alfred J. Moscola in the parking lot outside the agency’s headquarters on Melrose Street.

“Al and I agree on a whole lot of things,” Miller said as she was leaving. “We disagree on tactics.” It was Moscola who had called the police.

With a growing budget deficit, the authority will begin holding hearings tomorrow on cutbacks that could eliminate as much as 20 percent of its service. RIPTA officials have said regularly that they want to expand service, not reduce it, but that sharply higher diesel fuel prices have wrecked the authority’s finances.

Yesterday’s board meeting was supposed to address the authority’s budget problems, but about three dozen SDS members tried to turn it into their own meeting, “passing” their own motions, offered by Miller, for no service cuts and telling the authority that it ought to pack up its roughly $9-million expected budget deficit and send it to the General Assembly.

The student group had appeared at a board meeting in July to demand, much less vigorously, that the board drop consideration of service cuts and eliminate a fare increase that took effect July 1.

The group also argues that the RIPTA board is remote from its riders and doesn’t represent them. Miller said that her group has talked to hundreds of bus riders who say that “they have no voice in this process.”

Before giving up on yesterday’s meeting, Rupp tried several times to get it back on track, including a notably unsuccessful attempt to declare the students “out of order.”

The students were having none of it and blamed the board for the authority’s problems. They chanted and made brief speeches, Miller having appropriated an unoccupied seat at the board table and plunked a card with her name in front of it.

Rupp argued unsuccessfully that the board doesn’t want to see bus routes eliminated, either. RIPTA gets most of its money from the state government, and officials there say it doesn’t expect enough revenue this year to even come close to balancing its budget without a service cutback. “You write the check,” or lobby the legislature, Rupp told the students.

The General Assembly ordinarily doesn’t start its annual session until January, and its leadership has shown no sign of intervening in RIPTA’s situation any sooner. Governor Carcieri, while saying repeatedly that he is a transit supporter, hasn’t publicly offered any help with the deficit. Most recently, in a statement last week, the governor said he doesn’t want service cuts and wants a review to “identify potential cost savings” at RIPTA.

Carcieri is scheduled to speak this morning at a “Financing Public Transit Summit,” organized by the New Public Transit Alliance, a group of organizations advocating for more and better public transit.

The students had given the media advance notice, attracting several television crews, but not the authority, which was apparently taken by surprise. Moscola said he called the police because the young people “were climbing over tables. A woman was sitting in my chair moving my papers around.” RIPTA doesn’t have any security guards. Moscola said they had one, but that the man died about five years ago.

The demonstration was, if not unique, close to it. RIPTA board meetings, held at noon, are usually quiet and poorly attended. The most dramatic event in recent memory was a brief flurry of angry rhetoric during a fight over the board chairmanship when Rupp was elected in August.

Members have said that the SDS chapter is largely made up of college students from RIC, Brown University and some other colleges in the area. Its members said yesterday that they will hold their own public hearing on RIPTA’s situation on Sunday, Oct. 5, at the office of DARE (Direct Action for Rights and Equality), at 340 Lockwood St.

blandis@projo.com