GREYHOUND NOT STOPPING ON SPANISH

Greyhound buses are not stopping in Cape Girardeau, a company spokesperson clarified Tuesday.

"If a person from Cape Girardeau wants to catch the bus they have to go to Perryville or Sikeston, to the station there, and they'll transport them," said Tom Clayton, customer service manager for Greyhound Bus Co. in St. Louis. Customers must buy their tickets at those places, he said.

Greyhound announced late last month that it had suspended service to Cape Girardeau because it could not find an alternate site for a bus station that had closed only days earlier because of a city zoning conflict. But Assistant City Manager Al Stoverink told the Cape Girardeau City Council Monday that, although Greyhound is still seeking a bus station here, the company's buses have been picking up and letting off passengers on Spanish Street in downtown Cape Girardeau.

On Tuesday Clayton questioned where Stoverink had gotten his information. Contacted by the Southeast Missourian, Stoverink said the information had come from a city staff employee who had been at the Bus Stop Cafe on Spanish Street between Independence and Merriwether.

Stoverink said he believed the employee had passed the information along to him about one and one-half weeks ago.

"That's what he was advised of," Stoverink said of the employee. "Maybe there was some miscommunication. That was the information I had.

"It was second-hand, so it could have been miscommunicated. I didn't pursue that to confirm it."

The city's last bus station closed July 22 at Spanky's Texaco Super Store, 353 S. Kingshighway. Spanky's was the fourth bus station site to open in the city in just over a year.

Clayton said he hopes to have another bus station in place for Southeast Missouri State University students before the university's fall semester starts. The semester begins Aug. 26.

Recently a Greyhound customer service supervisor, Bill Lefler, who was in Cape Girardeau, said a city police captain pointed out a couple of potential bus stops. The captain, Steve Strong, showed sites that are correctly zoned for a bus stop, he said.

Clayton said he and Lefler discussed the areas that were pointed out. "We weren't really satisfied" with them, he said. As a result, he said, Lefler or someone else will be back in Cape Girardeau next week to continue the search for a bus station site.

Stoverink said the suggested sites are a vacant lot on Spanish Street across from the Bus Stop Cafe and the old firehouse that is the site of the River Heritage Museum at Independence and Frederick.

Clayton said Lefler told him that none of the suggested sites had public telephones or facilities that would afford Greyhound passengers protection from the weather. Any bus station site, Clayton said, would have to have telephones, some type of protective facility with restrooms, and be able to accept 40-feet long buses. The site would also have to be a clean and safe environment, he said.

However, Stoverink said the city had only suggested the two sites as temporary bus stop stations until Greyhound found a permanent spot.

Stoverink said people are looking to City Hall to solve the bus station issue, but that's not where the problem or a solution exists.

"The main issue here," he said, "is you've got a free-enterprise operation that needs to strike a deal with another free-enterprise operation in Cape Girardeau. Until there's a marriage of the two ... I don't see anything else that we as a city could do."

Enough people use bus service from Cape Girardeau to make it worthwhile to continue looking for a bus station, said Clayton. While the university was in session, and when Greyhound still had a bus station here, Clayton estimated that 300 customers rode buses out of Cape Girardeau every week.

"We come in and offer a good commission (to an agent) to operate the bus station and we have enough business to keep the business going," he said.

"We're truly interested in getting back in Cape Girardeau. It's a situation where, if we could locate a spot that's good for everybody" and one that would satisfy the city fathers, "we would be happy to put the buses back into there."