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1965–1968 · THE STATUTE, THE FINDING, THE PURCHASE
The Indiana mechanism: Fort Wayne's takeover followed the path Indiana law had laid down in the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1965, whose machinery the Court of Appeals later described in the Fort Wayne case itself. A system in financial difficulty could apply to the common council for assistance; if the situation was more desperate, its management could ask the council to determine whether the public should acquire the system, and if the council so found, it could by ordinance declare public acquisition in the public interest and create a public transportation corporation to take the system over, with its employees protected. Over the same years the new federal Urban Mass Transportation Administration was offering grants to help cities do exactly this. Fort Wayne Transit's situation met the statute's terms. The City of Fort Wayne established the Fort Wayne Public Transit Corporation as a public utility — the corporation's name in its own corporate and federal usage is the Fort Wayne Public Transportation Corporation — and in 1968 the corporation purchased the assets of the private Fort Wayne Transit company with federal assistance.
The corporation since: The PTC is a quasi-governmental body: its board is appointed by the City of Fort Wayne and the City Council, and its budget comes before the council for approval each year, funded from federal and state subsidies, a local property-tax levy, and fares. Public ownership did not end the system's legal growing pains — the 1973 Court of Appeals case, over whether the Public Service Commission had jurisdiction to approve the transfer of Fort Wayne Transit's intrastate operating certificates to the corporation, is the fullest contemporary account of the acquisition that survives. In 1977 the young corporation published the transit centennial poster "One hundred years of transit in Fort Wayne and then some," counting its own lineage, as this section does, from the horse cars of 1872. The buses have run under a service mark — Citilink — for the modern era of the corporation; the year the name was adopted does not appear in the sources reached for this section, and is recorded as a gap rather than guessed.
Sources: Fort Wayne Transit, Inc. v. Indiana Motor Bus Co., 302 N.E.2d 786 (Ind. App. 1973) (the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1965 and its acquisition machinery; the certificate-transfer dispute); Indiana Code 36-9-4 (the public transportation corporation chapter in its recodified form); Fort Wayne Citilink history (the 1968 purchase; the corporation as public utility; "Citilink is one of the service marks used by the Fort Wayne PTC"); ACGSI Public Transportation page (the 1977 centennial poster); Citilink's published statements (board appointment and annual council budget approval).