Offering bonuses of $5,000 to $8,500, GRTC is seeking to lure more drivers to its ranks and avoid cutting service.

Julie Timm, the transit company’s chief executive officer, publicly disclosed the company is short at least 24 full-time driv- ers and has significant vacancies among its mechanic staff in detailing at Tuesday’s GRTC board meeting the workforce troubles the company is facing.

With personnel retiring or leaving faster than new people can be brought on board, Ms. Timm told the board that service already is being cut in an operation that often runs slower than its published route schedules.

She said, without offering specifics, that even deeper service cuts might be needed by December if the oversized bonuses do not produce workers who want to drive and maintain service.

Mayor Levar M. Stoney stated in a letter Tuesday to Richmond’s three GRTC board members that he was informed GRTC is considering cuts of up to 20 percent, which he considers unacceptable.

He cited plans to end all service at 11 p.m. and to have fewer buses operating on most lines, with 60-minute service becoming far more frequent.

City Council’s Land Use, Housing and Transportation Committee has yet to weigh in on an issue that could disrupt the lives of workers who rely on bus service and create a new problem for businesses and their employees.

Richmond is hardly alone. People with commercial driver licenses, or CDLs, are in short supply as are skilled workers in a variety of industries, with the pandemic only exacerbating the problem.

In the transit sector, small and large companies are struggling to fill vacancies. In multiple school districts, parents have to take their kids to school because there are not enough bus drivers. Trucking companies, meanwhile, are hunting for drivers to move goods.

Mayor Stoney apparently first learned about the prospect of service cutbacks during a meeting he held last week with the city’s three GRTC board members, the Rev. Benjamin P. Campbell, Eldridge Coles and George Braxton.

In his letter, Mayor Stoney urged GRTC to look for alternatives to service cuts that he said would hit hardest at the poor, the elderly and disabled who rely on GRTC service.

“The city would like to see decisions made on how to avoid service cuts that harm lower-income and vulnerable groups who depend on the system the most,” he wrote.

The mayor also noted that GRTC has other options, including partnering with ride-share companies such as Uber, Lyft, USURV and VITA, or creating “a community-based program that would put 10-15 smaller buses on the street.”

He urged the company to work with its union to “implement an emergency reten- tion strategy” to stem the personnel losses, including providing immediate pay raises of $5 to $7 an hour across the board.

He also urged GRTC to reach out to the city’s Fleet Division to secure support for bus maintenance and pledged that city departments would join in helping with driver recruitment, particularly in “the communities that would be most affected by the cuts.”

Mayor Stoney called it “inexplicable that we are proposing cutting 20 percent of GRTC’s service at a time when it’s actually politically popular to invest in transit services.”

He noted the federal, state and regional dollars that have been poured in to undergird GRTC and enable the company to offer free rides.

Meanwhile, Richmond has hopes of gaining additional millions from President Biden’s proposed infrastructure bill to expand Pulse bus rapid-transit, the most successful part of GRTC’s system. If the funding comes through, the city is planning to add a north-south line along U.S. 1/301, particularly the Richmond Highway stretch, to add to the current east-west line on Broad Street.