Vicksburg and Yazoo City officials are talking about inking a startup bus system there with Vicksburg’s transit system, in business now for three months.

The cooperation could help workers who commute, said Vicksburg Mayor Laurence Leyens.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 130 people from Yazoo City travel to Vicksburg to work regularly, most likely at the International Paper Company mill near Redwood or at casinos. Yazoo City is about 50 miles or an hour’s drive northeast of Vicksburg and has about 14,000 residents.

&#8220We could get vans and they could get drivers, or they could get a city bus, to bring down people who live there and work here,” Leyens said. &#8220There are a lot of spinoff benefits to it.”

The $488,000 federal grant the city received through the Mississippi Department of Transportation earlier this year to start up what it has dubbed NRoute requires linking to other municipal transportation systems, Leyens said.

&#8220We have a responsibility to actively integrate our system into Jackson and some of these other places,” he said.

The agreement with Yazoo City, only in its preliminary stages, involves a private transit company funded through MDOT, which is working to start up a system there, said Henry Cody of the Mississippi Development Authority, who met with officials about the project for the first time Wednesday.

Yazoo City &#8220is working with another group who already is set up in several counties” to establish a transit system, he said, adding that the MDA is helping to develop a business plan for the project. &#8220They also want to do a tourism piece where they can do tours using their buses, but the primary goal is to get transportation for those who need it.”

Meanwhile, long-awaited local schedules and route maps to go in businesses and at bus stops are still in production, Leyens said. The city is also still waiting on shelters for the stops, originally due within two weeks of the system’s July launch, to arrive.

&#8220Every scheduled stop where you see the NRoute bus stop sign there will be a map posted on that sign,” Leyens said. &#8220It’s probably about a week away.”

Under its spending plan, the city expects $15,250 in fares for July, August and September. The system’s 2007 costs are only partially represented by the proposed 2007 budget, released last week, because of the planned spinoff of the commission, said Strategic Planner Paul Rogers. That plan, which takes effect Oct. 1, lists total costs for the system at $255,490.

Just over $60,000, or more than 23 percent, of that number is expected from fares. To meet that income, 3,300 riders per month would have to pay the $1.50 fare. The first two months of paid customers hit roughly 48 percent of that benchmark. Leyens has said he wants to hit 100 percent of ridership projections by the end of the year.

It was more than a decade between NRoute’s June 26 launch and Vicksburg’s last effort at public transportation, a system of downtown trolleys 11 years ago, which cost about $120,000 and did not catch on. In its history, the city has been served by horse-drawn carts, electric trolleys and conventional buses. The last bus system shut down in the 1960s.

Six of the 20-seat, wheelchair-accessible Ford E-450 buses were bought from Starcraft Bus of Birmingham, Ala., with the $488,000 federal grant. The Board of Mayor and Aldermen voted to amend its budget in April, adding $181,550 into the bus fund and authorizing spending $237,790 to get the system running. The remaining $250,000 went into the general fund to be apportioned for other projects.

The decision to seek the grants and commit local funds followed a Chamber of Commerce study assuring the buses were needed, especially in census tracts with double-digit unemployment rates and fewer personal vehicles.

More than 5,200 of the nearly 25,000 employed in Warren County come from 34 other Mississippi counties and 19 Louisiana parishes, according to Census data.