With local officials responding to help the financially-struggling San Antonio B-Cycle, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff proposed a new idea this week: have VIA Metropolitan Transit run it.

In a letter Monday, Wolff said B-Cycle would fit with the transit agency’s mission of building a multi-modal transportation system and promoting development and sustainability.

“VIA’s inclusion of (B-Cycle) will give the bike share program the infrastructure it needs to grow,” Wolff wrote to VIA board chair Hope Andrade, other trustees and CEO and President Jeffrey Arndt.

“With bike racks on the buses, VIA will have the ability to take BCycle into neighborhoods, along linear creek ways, into parks, and reach the suburban hubs of La Cantera and the Alamo Quarry Market,” Wolff added.

Click here to see a map of B Station locations.

VIA trustees have told the transit agency’s staff in recent weeks to explore the possibility of contributing funding to San Antonio Bike Share, the nonprofit that runs B-Cycle, and VIA staff have said they will look into the matter.

In a statement Tuesday, Andrade said: “We are open to exploring working partnerships to ensure this important community resource can continue to be included as a piece of the transportation network of this region.”

B-Cycle has expanded a number of times since it premiered in 2011 thanks to grant funding, but grants generally pay for bicycles and docking stations and not operations and maintenance. B-Cycle representatives said earlier this year they were looking for private or public subsidies to help keep it afloat.

The program now boasts 55 stations and 450 bicycles in the city, mostly located near downtown and along the Mission Reach. Roughly 3,000 people have annual $80 memberships and about 66,000 people have signed up for day passes since it launched.

San Antonio Bike Share reported revenues of $1.1 million and expenses of about $950,000 in its last fiscal year, through June 2014. Most of its revenue came from government grants. In its 2013 annual report, the nonprofit said it had a net loss of more than $30,000.

Last month, the San Antonio City Council approved contributing $121,500 to B-Cycle this year to help it hire a new executive director and support its operations. The city’s move came after Cindi Snell, who has been working as the bike share’s unpaid executive director since it started, announced that she would step down later this year.

San Antonio Bike Share will remain a nonprofit, but the new executive director will be a city employee, city officials have said. B-Cycle has also put off a possible expansion that would have been funded with grant money to allow a new executive director to come on and help the bike share system stabilize.

In an interview Tuesday, Wolff said that B-Cycle was too important a program to let it go away. He said VIA, with its existing administrative staff and connections to advertisers, “could take it to a new level.”

Wolff added that preserving the bike share system was a public transportation issue, and thus should be linked to VIA instead of the city or county government.

“It really fits transit more than it fits the city of San Antonio or the county,” he said.

Doug Melnick, San Antonio’s chief sustainability officer who sits on the nonprofit’s board, said in a statement: “The City remains focused on our action plan of hiring an Executive Director and working with the San Antonio BCycle Board of Directors to develop a governance structure.”

djoseph@express-news.net