Acting ferry director sails in

Acting Washington State Ferries director Mike Anderson stopped in Bremerton on Tuesday to put a face on the state-run transportation system.

“I clearly want to make sure that the focus is on customer service and clearly want to make sure that the focus is on the ferry’s role in the community,” Anderson said.

Representatives from the ferry system are available to speak at public meetings and the system will be represented at fairs and festivals as well, he said.

“We’ll even have a ferry captain come over and talk to kids,” he said. “We’re going to show them we’re a big system, but we have faces, too.”

Anderson said his 31 years of prior service in the ferry system have given him a definite sense of familiarity with the Bremerton community.

“I was involved with the Bremerton Transportation Center, which is really at the forefront of the development that brings everything in here,” he said. “We’re trying to make sure we provide a really good service that helps this community function and grow.”

One of those service-related issues is restoring food service on the Bremerton to Seattle route.

“We’ve already got service back on the Southworth-Vashon-Fauntleroy routes and that’s highly successful and what we see is sort of a momentum builder,” he said.

The system hopes that success will create more fruitful discussions between union representatives and the food service contractor Anderson said.

“I think now that we’ve got a

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