MPO Policy Board Meeting   3/21/2023

All right, good afternoon.

Welcome.

It's a little bit of a slumber crowd than normal, but it's good to see everyone start their meeting.

And also the time is probably late.

Councillor Snook?

Councillor Pinkston?

Yes.

Here.

Ms. Monteith?

Yes.

Ms. Dubinsky?

And just as a note,

Our representative of DRPT is taking another position with VDOT in their carers department.

Thank you for being here today, Tiffany.

Mr. Minor?

Here.

Mr. Koenig?

So three counts as a board.

Awesome.

OK, so I guess the first order of business is are there any members of the public invited to provide comments?

There's a limited three minutes per speaker.

Anyone present?

Okay, I guess we look to see if there's anyone online.

So I think the time for public comment, managing the public, is complete.

So we need to have a review and acceptance of the agenda.

Does anyone have anything they want to add to the agenda?

Could I have a motion, please, to approve without the agenda?

Second.

OK, we have a motion and a second.

Any public comment?

Aye.

Aye.

Okay.

The motion is by the vote.

With the approval of January 25th, 2023 meeting minutes, are there any revisions that we need for the meeting minutes presented?

All in favor?

Aye.

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

My name is the Citizens Transportation Advisory Committee as several term expirations.

The City Council will be appointed with three members of the Council.

At this meeting, the MPO Policy Board will be appointing or considering an appointment of Representative CTAC, the MPO Representative

So CTAC is part of the MPO subcommittee.

And so the city appoints

Thank you.

So, I read Mr. Lunden's application.

It seemed excellent.

Do we have any questions?

All in favor?

Aye.

Someone's promoting and appreciating him being able to serve.

Okay, next item, I guess you can say here, FY24-27 Transportation Improvement Program.

I think most of you all are probably pretty familiar with the TIP process by this point, but TIP stands for Transportation and Recruitment Program, and this is one of those required documents that MPS needs to prepare in order to program spending of federal transportation funds within the NPO region.

It is a four-year spending program that is updated every three years, basically, so there's a year of overlap between the existing TIP and the one that we are developing, in the process of developing, so it's work from the end of FY21 to 24th.

The anticipated expenditures are provided by the transit agencies and VDOT.

So this is the communication from the transit agencies on what they anticipate their expenditures will be over the next four fiscal years.

And then VDOT is basically developing the expenditure information based on federal project spending that has already been approved through their six year improvement program.

You'll see as you look through the document that there are two different types of projects.

Projects of regional significance are pulled out and they are shown individually in the set boxes, which provides an opportunity for us to make sure that we are aware of the status of those projects and how expenditures are being outlaid in support of developing those projects.

And then there are projects that are grouped into categories that are similar in nature.

So what happens is that by grouping projects, we're able to provide the state with a lot more flexibility in making sure that they're able to move forward on all of their maintenance and system improvement needs without having

So if you look at the document, this is the demonstration that shows the difference between these two.

So the top box shows one of the regionally significant projects.

You can see that there's a project description that's very specific on where that is occurring.

And then for the groups projects, you'll see that it states clearly at the top that they're grouped, and it tells you what the category is.

Sure, thanks Ann.

Since the packet was simulated, I went back to the original sources of information from the credit providers and I found some hidden room and some formulas.

The numbers and figures that are in your packet are happily updated with those figures shown on your screen.

I have received approval from John, so the John summary does line up and add up correctly and no word right now from CAD, but I think you've noticed.

Which table is this in the world?

Yeah, it's page 34 of your packet.

37, it's like a 37 on the PDF.

There are, I guess,

One new project that's different from what's in the current TIP, that's the Edition on Government Study.

There's also a new project in the TIP for a mobility manager on the previous project with the previous mobility manager.

In the current TIP, the previous funding is about $60,000, but it's a new TIP on that.

We'll confirm all of that information before we put it out as a last set of checks but thank you for looking at that.

This is a required federal document that we need to provide and then this goes back to VDOT and they use this to inform their STIP, the Stakewide Transportation

There are some requirements related to what we need to get through in order to adopt this plan.

So we will, once we get all of these updates incorporated into the transportation improvement program, we will provide an opportunity to hold a 30-day comment period.

So we'll have this up on our website and we'll have it available and make up their identification on our social media accounts so that people can read the plan and provide feedbacks.

And then at the next policy board meeting in May, we will be holding the required public hearing.

And at that point you'll be required to request this action on whether or not you'd like to approve it either as presented or with language.

As I'm getting lost in the project list, are there changes, is there a place where it shows where the changes are?

But it was broken, so I'm sure there are changes in there.

Yeah, we are starting with a new document.

So this isn't necessarily going to show the changes that are backed from that FY 21 to 24 project.

So as we go through and we do the amendments, we'll show how the funding has changed when those are approved.

Do you mean to the table that we're... No, I'm talking about the project list, because that's where I've been.

So it says page 10 on our way down to page 48.

So first of all, it says Charlottesville NBA was the top.

So is that all of us, or is that strictly in the city?

Appendix A projects by grouping.

Charlottesville, but then it shows a whole lot of rural area projects.

So is it safe to disclose that essentially anything in our whole region, regardless of the type of jurisdiction, that has federal attorneys attached to it is not visible?

Yes.

It's not a showing.

It's coming from transit agencies and VDOT, not a switch from the local, okay.

So you have a problem with repositing it, or did you see that you have no clue what they're doing?

Because it was in your meeting.

Yeah, but it's also fundraising stuff too.

So for example, the Mid-Street Screenscape, I think I saw it in here.

But other projects that the city is doing may or may not be in here.

Thank you.

I'll work online and see if it doesn't have to go to the wind.

So much better in the discussion we had here was just along with the generated targets that were provides that are locally calibrating around milk.

I see.

Well, we're in that neighborhood on page 13 of DVM with a new map of the MPO, and I'd like to know when you do that, because it is so far out of the world there.

If there's a way to the west of Roseville, I don't know if I would have been in and out on the east side to know.

I guess it's way beyond what we're seeing from the ground.

I assume that there were some kind of

There's been a few things that were involved with me in the interview.

Well, when did it get changed to look like that?

Literally, it went around the airport and went around for a year or two.

So this is the answer to my question.

Fantastic.

So, no actual part of this timeline we mentioned about the public hearing.

Any other questions?

Alright, the next item is the transit governance study update.

It's looked at how to fund the projects in the Regional Transit Vision Plan and was part of the recommendations of the vision plan.

And it also is going to look at if we do increase revenue for transit in the region,

How we'll manage that revenue and be accountable for it.

Hi, good afternoon everyone.

Excellent.

Yes.

All right, thank you again for inviting us to give you an update at this afternoon's meeting.

So this will be just a short overview of the status of the project.

It will take us about, we'll have about 10 minutes and then five minutes for questions.

And so many of you already have received the phase one of this

of the phase one memo to review and we received some good comments as well.

But this afternoon, we would like to just go through a very high level study overview, talk about the work that we've done so far and what we have remaining, any preliminary outcomes we have, and the next steps.

And so starting this project last fall, in November, November, December,

We finished phase one of the study.

We have five phases in total.

So phase one was the existing conditions.

Phase two, which we just completed, is the peer study where we are looking at governance structures of other transit agencies in similar areas.

Phase 3 will look at potential revenue generation sources.

And so Lucinda talked about the transit vision study and how we have those alternative futures for transit governance in Charlottesville.

And so what we are going to look at here is try to identify our potential sources of funding and how we are going to fund some of those improvements and what that would look like for the jurisdictions in Region 10.

Once we have some potential sources down, then we'll start to craft some alternatives for governance scenarios of what that would look like in Region 10.

At Phase 5, we would combine all the stakeholder engagement we do in Phase 4

That's just to give you an idea of where we are in the study.

According to phases, we are about in the middle portion.

Early part of the middle portion, we are about to begin phase three.

And so we are just doing a round of updates on phase two analysis.

Now, because you've already gone through phase one, just as a reminder, what we went through in the existing conditions was looking at what

The existing operators in the areas have looking at the organizational structure, their governance structure and their existing funding.

We also looked at the existing legislation that is available for the Charlottesville Albemarle area for potential authority and did a review on that.

And so just very briefly,

Just very high level.

We did, we spoke, we had interviews with both, with CAT, with Jaunt and with UTS, which are the three main operators in the area.

We got to understand how they are organized, understand the organizational structure and what the governance looks like.

We also discussed what their funding situation is like and how they interact as far as

where their services overlap or how they coordinate in that area.

And also in situations where there's some service that is contracted or funding provided, for example, from the university, what that looks like.

And so all of those details are in the phase one memo, which you already received a link to in the agenda.

So the next part of phase one was also looking at the legislative authority.

And so part of this study was to review what the current legislation.

So that's what you see in this first box here is this Charlottesville, Albemarle Regional Transit Authority, which exists.

So we did a review on what are the authorities, what are the powers, what are the boundaries, how is this structured, what is the

potential governance that is laid out in the legislation.

And then what we did was also compare it to other funding structures in Virginia.

So we looked at the NVTA structure, we looked at HR TAC, CVTA, and then other potential frameworks.

So for example, in Virginia, we have what we call the

the public service corporations which Jaunt is one of also GRTC in Richmond is also set up and organized as a public service corporation and then there's also the option of transportation district commissions which Hampton Roads Transit is as well as NVTC.

Interrupt.

The first column, the CARTA, you described it.

Correct.

It exists in legislation only.

It's not functional.

So if there were to be an entity to be set up,

Something we could look at would be, and that would go into my next

slide here, I'll go back to that, is because we have the existing legislation set up for the CARTA, we can call it, we can look at either modifying that to address whatever changes we would want in the entire region based on this process that we are going through.

So towards the end, when we identify the exact characteristics we want of what a transit entity or an authority would look like,

We could either modify the existing legislation.

That's the second option here.

There's also the option of creating a completely new entity, a new legislation.

And then our third is modifying another framework.

So one of the others that we presented at first to match whatever characteristics.

But what are those characteristics that we might want to consider in setting up such an

an authority or some other structure is what is the amount of funding that we want potential funding for now and even for the future thinking about the transit vision study looking at those alternative futures of either constrained and unconstrained analysis or whatever is in between that the stakeholders deem appropriate

You might also want to consider potential side effects of any funding generated.

What would the boundaries be?

Is it going to be all of the members of Region 10?

If you look at the existing CARTA legislation, the members of the authority are, it says Charlottesville and all,

all portions of Albemarle County.

There's also all portions of LaVena Green, Louisa Nelson.

So these are all potential boundaries for such an entity.

We can also include

private nonprofit or tourist service agencies, higher education facilities, for example, the university, UVA, or other public transportation agencies.

These are all options.

Or other cities or towns that would want to opt in as long as the existing members approve of it.

So there's many combinations to consider in what the potential boundaries would look like.

Looking at what a potential governing board would be.

And this is where our peer study is insightful or helpful in looking at what other agencies or other operators do in terms of how they govern and make decisions for their agency.

So next we, in phase two, was now digging into

What are other agencies doing?

In order to identify the agencies or operators, we had some selection criteria looking at places that has similar or near population for operating characteristics in terms of ridership, operating budget, operating budget per capita.

We also wanted to make sure that those areas had a presence of at least a large

University, also having a bus system as we have in the UVA situation and also multiple operators within the same jurisdiction like we have here with John's, with CAT's, with UTS.

So those are some of the factors we can be considered in selecting the

The peer areas.

And so we narrowed it down to six areas.

So we had Iowa City, then Ann Arbor in Michigan, Bloomington, Blacksburg, State College, and Ithaca in New York.

And so for each of these areas, we first did these, of course, online research reviews,

and then also followed up with interviews, video interviews with their staff.

In most cases, we spoke to either the CEO or the director or the director and an additional person.

And so these interviews were very insightful and we have the results of that also in our phase two memo, which is being reviewed now.

But as we were going through the study, just giving you an overview,

Some of the things we were conscious of or focused on was looking at their service, looking at history, how they evolved over time, especially in the cases where there was some consolidation, as in the case of Ithaca in New York, of three agencies combining into one.

We looked, we delved into that a little bit more, looking at their sources of governance, source of funding, and their structure.

Now, this table here is just a summary of the six agencies that we reviewed, giving you an overview of where the years they started, their comparative budgets, the jurisdictions that they serve, the type of governance they have, and any major organizational changes that have happened.

Now you'll notice that we had a good variety of different types of governance types amongst the agencies.

We had two that were city departments, just similar to CAT for the city of Charlottesville.

We also had a public transportation corporation.

We had one nonprofit, 501C3, and two authorities.

One was a joint municipal authority, and the other was a regular transportation authority.

So because of this diversity in the way they are organized and governed, we also saw differences in the way that they make decisions in terms of funding, in terms of the service they provide, and even plans for the future.

Some of the notable, I'd say, takeaways from

From our discussions and our chats with them, I would say was something that came up in at least two or three of the agencies was their relationships with the other agencies and their jurisdiction was very casual.

Most of the time, it didn't go beyond

Just coordinating on shared bus stops, for example, or for long-term planning.

In some cases where there was very close coordination, we saw discussions of potential consolidation.

So for example, in the case of Bloomington and in Iowa City, in both places, they had raised the topic of consolidation for efficiency.

In the case of Bloomington,

What worked against them really was there was a lot of lobbying by the agencies throughout the state.

Because of their state funding formula, the consolidation would have increased their funding, their state funding, and reducing it for the others.

So there was a lot of conflict there with the other operators.

But since then,

Their formulas have changed and is no longer dependent on that.

And so they are thinking this might be something they could pick up in the next three or four years as well.

And in Iowa City as well, this was something they talked about.

They talked about it a few years ago.

It wasn't politically feasible, but the director we spoke to seemed to think that that was possible in the near term.

Another thing that was significant was the close working relationships with the university.

In almost all the cases, the university funded a significant portion of the transit system in the millions of dollars.

In the case of Blacksburg, for example, the university provides all of their local funding with the city, the city of Blacksburg provided zero to little dollars.

That was very unique.

In the other agencies as well, either through contracted service or some sort of arrangement where they also provide service on campus or parts of campus, they were providing funding in upwards of at least one or two million dollars each year for their service.

And so that seemed to be something that we could look a little bit more into if we were to think about increasing

Another interesting funding revenue that we saw from at least three of the

The operators was that they were contracted service with housing developments and apartment complexes.

And that also was a large portion of their internally generated funds.

They would provide shuttles or routes to the housing complexes or the apartment buildings to their main routes.

And this seemed more common in the areas where the universities were larger.

So that is also a good potential

If it is applicable to this region.

Then in the case of Bloomington, for example, we noticed that they had what helped them with increasing revenue.

Recently in 2022, they passed a referendum that increased their property taxes for transit.

And that was for the idea of innovative transit.

And so they

They increased their funding by about $4 million each year starting in FY23 to fund a new BRT project.

And so the BRT being one of the city's priorities, but in all,

It was the city really pushed for increasing transit funding and the people, the residents were very supportive of it and it passed overwhelmingly.

And so potentially with the results from the transit vision study, there could be a way of framing this with a high possibility of increasing the revenues in that way.

And so the details of all of this are outlined in the Phase 2 memo, and you'll have a chance to review it as well.

So the next steps for this project is to initiate Phase 3, which is the potential revenue generation.

And so we'll have, we'll develop a list of potential sources.

We'll continue with discussions with members, knowledgeable people in Virginia for transit funding.

We'll plan to make contact with members from the CTB or other bodies that can help us with phase three.

Then we will move on to,

Individual discussions with the jurisdictions.

And so the region 10 members will be reaching out and coordinating with the TJPDC to set up one-on-one discussions to talk more about their priorities and what seems feasible for them as part of our stakeholder engagement process.

And then move then into phase four, which would be developing those governance scenarios.

So we are still, we are about midway now,

We are beginning to be in the midway, so we are still early in the process, but I believe with the work we've done so far, we are in a good place to really do some good work in the summer as well.

Thank you for that.

That was very informative and helpful.

Any questions here?

Thank you.

Some of them, not all of them do, but some of them do.

That's where we failed in the legislature.

Yes, so actually, CATA

is pretty similar to, has that same structure.

So they have, they are a municipal, a joint municipal authority, but they don't have tax and power.

So it's similar to the RTA legislation we have here.

And so because of that, they still need funding from the member jurisdictions

However, in some of the other cases, even for Bloomington, even though it's a city department, they have a property tax.

It wasn't an authority, but they still have a tax.

And the other question I had was, for Blacksburg and St. College, I understand that the university students who ride the bus system are a huge boon to the statistics, which then brought down God's more money to the federal government than we could possibly do because we don't get access to the ridership of the university, which is on our municipal.

Could you repeat your question?

So I guess your question is, in the cases where we see the university providing significant revenue to the system, is it because they're also providing that bus operation?

So in the third row here, we see that for Blacksburg, for CATA, and for TCAT, they provide the transit service for the campus.

But in the other three agencies, the campus also runs their own system.

But in all six cases, we saw that the university still had that they still contracted service from the operators for substantial revenue.

Even if they had their own system, there was still a large portion with either running loops around the campus or different types of routes that would support them to raise more revenue.

Thank you.

Questions in the room?

Any questions online?

Thank you very much.

This was very helpful.

All right, thank you.

One of them is linked to the agenda packet.

The other one we can send out.

We can put the presentation online and phase one is in the packet.

Phase two will be available soon.

Okay, I think we can move on to the next item, revisions to FY23 Unified Planning Work Program, UTWP.

Yeah, so since we have a couple of things that we're going to talk about related to the Unified Planning Work Program, I'll just give you a really brief overview of what the good and the why is important.

The Unified Planning Work Program basically is our opportunity to communicate to the state and federal agencies by giving our NPS funding what it is that we're going to use the funding for, and it gives them an opportunity to

That is consistent with what their priorities and objectives are for these funding expenditures.

So every year we get an allocation that is communicated through our state agencies, VDOT and DRPT, that gives us our funding allocations.

80% of our funding comes from federal sources, that's the Federal Highway Administration and the Federal Transit Administration.

And then our state agencies provide a 10% match and then we also provide a 10% local match.

That's how our MPO planning efforts are funded.

It is a federal requirement to develop this work program and also to communicate any changes in the requested funding as far as moving funding from one year to the next.

So this is what we're really talking about tonight is an opportunity to make funding that is appropriate for fiscal year 23 and make it available for fiscal year 24.

Our fiscal year 23 budget, which is the budget for our current fiscal year, was estimated at about $500,000, and that included a little bit of work from some previous years for a variety of reasons.

VDOT also provides an additional budget for their staff through the state planning and research program funding that they have.

There are two types of rollover funding that you're going to see in a couple minutes.

So the first is capital.

So that means if we get through a fiscal year, we don't spend all of our funding now.

We still get that money from the FHWA side of the allocation, but we don't get it the next year.

We get it in two years.

So we'll have some rollover funding.

We have some rollover funding from fiscal year 21,

In order to have funding available from one fiscal year to the next fiscal year, we have to make an action request to deobligate the funds from this fiscal year and ask for it to be available from that fiscal year.

We would like to go ahead and make a request to de-obligate a little over $100,000, $105,000 total from the fiscal year FY 23, and to actively roll it over into fiscal year 24.

The two items that we would like to identify that we would like to deliver the study from is one of these is for the Long Range Transportation Plan development.

As you may recall, we had identified in this fiscal year when we approved the Unified Funding Work Program that we would retain the services of our consultant to help us develop the program.

That was based on rollover funding that was beyond what our annual allocations were due to a number of different reasons that that had accumulated.

So what we are asking for is that we have estimated how much of that contractual amount of our consultants will be spent through this fiscal year, and we're requesting that the balance, which is $72,600, be rolled over into next fiscal year, specifically for the support of the Consultants' Services and the Long-Range Transportation Plan.

The remaining balance that makes up this $105,000 is based on the on-call services line item.

As you may recall, we had initially approved a draft of the Unified Planning Work Program for fiscal year 23, and then we got updated allocations for VDOT that showed that there were additional allocations beyond what we had initially expected.

And at that time, we processed our revisions to the Unified Planning Work Program, and we did not identify additional tasks at that point, but we put it in.

So the balance of $105,000 that we are requesting to have available next year is coming from that mobile call services, which means that none of the rollover requests is from planned activities that will be expected to be undertaken this year.

So this will not be impacting the government.

Any of the work products that we expect to complete.

So this normally de-obligates these products for business leaders so that we can have them available next week?

Yeah, sure.

We'll talk about that when it's signed.

Yes, perfect.

This is just the draft of the work program that we're developing for NSIS 24.

So taking it from that Williger funding, as well as any of that passive roller work funding.

So you see there's a line item from slide 22 that shows the passive roller that's going to be added, and this shows what I anticipated much at this point.

The first line is the annual funding that was estimated from the FHWA and VDOT side right now.

So that's that first line item.

The second item is the passive rollover from two years ago.

This is the active rollover that we are requesting.

And so this is the total that we're getting from the FHWA VDOT side.

On the FTA side, we are not anticipating rollover.

We are anticipating that we will spend down that budget and pull before the end of the fiscal year.

So the estimated allocations for FY24 from the FTA is $129,000.

This is the line I have right here that is estimated for the VDOT SPF for the year 2.

They've given us the estimate.

That's been pretty consistent over the last few years.

That could be implemented though once they get their file.

So as far as the work programming, this is going to be pretty similar to what you all have seen as far as the format.

There are a couple of line items that I'll mention.

These past one administrative items are pretty standard items that we have to include every year just for the ongoing compliance with doing our reporting and voicing staffing committees and information sharing.

I do want to point out that we increased this line item right here under information sharing from what it has been in the past.

And that is because one of the activities we would like to originate in FY24 is to modernize the MPO website to be consistent with the updated format to the TJPDC website.

So that line item is a little bit increased from where it has been previously.

The long-range transportation planning tasks is where you'll see them is very short, from year to year, so we will be continuing the development of the 2050 LRTP to meet our goal for updating it every five years in the federal regulations.

This line is required for the comprehensive safety action plan is one that we are also including as a recommended line for the Cold War program and that's for our staff to support the development of the safe streets and roads for all grants.

So this will be above and beyond.

The other thing I want to point out is that there's a new requirement for the FHWA funding that requires us to spend 2.5% of our FHWA planning funds on complete streets activities.

The MPA boundary analysis was one that we were hoping that we would be able to complete this fiscal year, but we're just now starting to get some information from VDOT about what the new eligible organized period is might be.

And so we're probably going to need to continue that activity into next fiscal year in order to process any discussions around potential investments to the MPA boundary.

So it is warranted based on the data.

This slide item about the transit governance is really intended to support the completion of the transit governance study that we have been discussing as well as support our staff's work toward any follow-up that is needed in order to support recommendations that come out of that.

This slide item about the commuter assistance program strategic plan is also included in the rural work program as a suggested task, and this is to support the development of our strategic plan for a rideshare program.

We have applied for a technical assistance grant to complete that grant through DRPT that will basically cover the cost of the consultants, but this will help provide additional support for the staffing needs for the development of that plan.

And then the last one in that list is this travel demand model update.

So VDOT maintains the regional travel demand model, which helps us protect system operations and conditions in future years that's updated regularly and

It will involve some coordination among the MPF SAC and the localities SAC.

Is that a computer model simulation that sounds similar by VDOT?

Or what is the model?

Is that an abstraction?

Yeah, it is an actual model.

We've got it.

Yeah.

Dravid model is something with things, groups, name it, Nelson's Law, that actually helps run Dravid models based on, you know, there is the generated Dravid in the area, the residential stuff.

You can run multiple scenarios based on different priorities that you might have that will generate outcome and show you where you're going to have to get a change of model for your study.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

Mr.

And then we are maintaining this on-call services or contingency budget.

Part of this is related to us waiting to find out about some other initiatives that we're taking.

So if it turns out that we're not successful in pursuing those initiatives, we will come back and look at whether there's additional programming that we want to start.

Depending on whether or not other funding opportunities come through, that will be something that we look at.

The short-range transportation planning, these are pretty standard line items that we include each time, which includes the maintenance, the ongoing maintenance of the transportation improvement program.

So once we adopt it, there are sometimes changes that need to happen so that we support to maintain developing SMART SCALE projects, the bike head and the transit

Thank you.

On page

O'Bryant, U.P.W.P.

Yes, it says for fiscal year 2022.

Any questions still or any questions online?

Yeah, thank you.

And the next item, letter of support from the DRPT grant application for corridor identification and development program of the Carnival corridor.

Yeah, unfortunately, I don't have a lot of information beyond that, but the DRPT that reached out to us, they reached out to us and outlisted the boards.

So it's looking at the east-west rail corridor and looking at improving passenger rail service between the Hampton Roads area all the way to Southwest Virginia, including a future direct connection between Charlottesville and the Richmond region, which would improve the efficiency of passenger rail travel pretty significantly for our area.

So SMART SCALE is a concept that doesn't really sleep for us.

We've adopted a concept to really be considering this year round, and it sounds like we're a little bit

I think everybody is familiar with SMART SCALE, but this is the FAPES process that we use to collect transportation projects for funding, and it is the main source of new construction funding for transportation projects.

Currently, based on the existing rules around SMART SCALE, which are always being evaluated, and this could be amended in the next round, we're a little bit ahead of

Where I think the state is as far as knowing what any sort of revenge ones might be applied in future rounds.

But as far as we know, at this point, we can submit four projects.

And for projects that are submitted by the MBO, we can submit projects that meet a couple of different criteria.

So first of all, any project that's submitted by any entity must be in need that is identified by the state's transportation plan, which is VTRANS.

And then the MPO is eligible to submit projects.

They either meet a need identified on the corridor of state or significance or in the regional network that is established to the patrons.

So there are other projects that localities are able to submit that MPO is not eligible to submit because it doesn't meet either of their criteria.

And around that, we implemented a new process to support applications and relevance.

So we identified the projects early, and then we identified projects that needed some additional support as far as developing the application and defining the project, submitting the application.

And as you recall, we conducted a pretty robust public engagement effort around the Urbana-River Ridge project, too.

We identified what the location was and what the alignment was that we wanted to be considered for that submission of that application.

Around 6, we would feel like to identify what the priorities are early and determine the projects that we are interested in submitting that may need additional development prior to that application submission.

However, there are some differences from around 6 as well.

And largely this is related to the phase of development that our projects are in.

What has happened is that since the last formation for teaching plan was adopted, we have a really nice problem in that we have worked through this mission and most of our priority projects for the region.

We've been successful at getting a number of these funded.

So we don't have a long list of outstanding projects that are ready to go that have been developed through planning initiatives.

We are in the process of developing a new plan.

So, you know, we're adding, we're developing new projects that we want to have in the queue, but we're not in a state where those are well defined.

We're doing that through a number of initiatives.

Yeah, this will all be vetted through the Long Range Transportation Plan.

So our hope is that as we talk about all the projects in these pipelines, it will start creating a list of projects that will potentially lead us to the Long Range Transportation Plan.

The other thing that's a little bit different is that the type of support that is needed to develop the app-cleaning projects is a little bit different.

Based on the phase of development that we're in right now, meaning that a lot of these need a little bit more technical support versus support around the public engagement, which the MPS staff is a little bit more capable of facilitating without a lot of outside support.

So as we start looking at the application development for round six, one of the first things we did was review the unfunded projects from the last two processes of direct scale, just to see where there may be opportunities to fund those projects.

And so moving forward, the two that probably have the most interest that haven't been funded yet is the Sturt Avenue Roundabout and Trafalgar Road, which scored very well.

It's very close to being able

These other projects that are grayed out are not necessarily because they're not important,

had not been identified as much of a high priority, or there's other work that we're doing on the bridge.

We know that there is additional work that needs to be done that we're doing on the hospital's SPART scale, but we're not in a phase where we have more information about where Nelson's at, and they got a more competitive approach in this next round at this point.

So it may not make sense, so I didn't find out as well what we're doing, so we went forward for round six.

Obviously, we'll know in June if we are successful in getting a re-experience funding, and maybe we'll have another conversation.

Yes, the is a criteria or let's consider having a criteria going forward that the community has to be unified on this because I think that's what's saying the phrase of organization is that there was no agreement about that.

The board was split, the community was split.

That probably got in our way when you went upstairs.

So that's what Ken said.

Those are some of your public planning processes that are there.

These are initiatives that are coming from VDOT.

We can talk a little bit about the previous projects, but these are other projects that have been identified as priorities that VDOT is going to be taking the lead on and sort of walking through and identifying potential improvements based on these areas.

I'm not going to start in the languages, but it's really through the secretary of consultation, both planning and investment, that the pipeline studies are advantage-approved, and they are managed to feed one scale or any other transportation funding sources.

We have to develop projects that go through a public process, so the public is involved throughout the entire time, as recommendations are being

projects.

The one you're looking at is the one that's on Berridge Road, running from left to right of Georgetown to Emmett Street in the city, as well as looking at the interchange there by that.

Issues that you can see down from that lower portion of the bike head and transit issues that involve capacity preservation while we're looking at that part of the project.

You know, hopefully we

Yeah, left or right, it's all very close, starting in Jordan County, going to the end of the city.

And then the second project is looking at a section of Abbey Road that also includes the T-15 interchange.

At this point, I guess it's important to sort of outline, really going from starting from this time from right to left.

It starts at the intersection of Old Iving and Iving Road and then comes to the interchange and then, you know, I guess that takes us all the way to the top of what Ford said.

And then looks at some of the issues we have on main lines.

I think you're going to find that when you get back to that traffic model we were talking about earlier,

I think the big problem is that the bridges that were built provisionally for the project are relatively narrow, from greater wing mold to wing mold, so you really want to pull off capacity out having to rebuild those bridges, so it's going to be an interesting period of time that gets done.

This study is not looking at the area of the triangle house, you may not have been, they wheeled up, they're wheeled up.

Yeah, it may be that,

The discussion I've had is I want to look at the entire area.

Okay.

I'm not sure what all that means, but I want to talk about this area of Kensyl Pinkston.

It's just to the west of the bypass and north of P-50.

There's Walker Drive and Old Ivy.

There's three streets that are there that you can potentially do a turn into the

It's not roundabout, I'm just going to bully you a little bit.

It's not roundabout, I'm just going to bully you a little bit.

It's not roundabout, I'm just going to bully you a little bit.

It's not roundabout, I'm just going to bully you a little bit.

It's not roundabout, I'm just going to bully you a little bit.

It's not roundabout, I'm just going to bully you a little bit.

It's not roundabout, I'm just going to bully you a little bit.

It's not roundabout, I'm just going to bully you a little bit.

It's not roundabout, I'm just going to bully you a little bit.

It's not roundabout, I'm just going to bully you a little bit.

It's not

and to get off on the yellow loop in the lower right future.

You can, without stopping and paying attention to any traffic light, just go right and the people in the mornings, well, anytime basically, the people are going five miles to eastbound 250, just keep going with impunity and they completely block up the eastbound 250 people who are sitting at the light.

The people at the light and the exit

The people from the bypass in the morning just keep going because there's no stop sign or there may be a stop sign or you'll find that they don't pay attention and if there were a stop sign there to stop that traffic then 250 would be able to keep moving.

That explains my situation to more of the north and south, and then we're going

I'm going for two more weeks.

It'll be in your inbox when you're done.

yeah just accessibility for that that whole neighborhood of the city i think it would be really good you talk about the different two different pools and funding because we would like we talked about it in um in field tech yeah so so as far as scale you'll recall that um the there are two different funds of projects there's a high priority fund which is a statewide fund those

at the MPO.

So we are competing for any projects that the MPO is competing against other projects within the state.

And then there's also the district grant, which is funding that's provided specifically to the whole district.

The locality is that the projects are eligible for both the statewide funding program and the district funding program.

What happened with the district avenue project is that it actually scored higher than other projects that were competing

So it brings the county to the city at that point, right?

It could.

Can you confirm that?

I believe the city line is sort of on the southern side.

So when will we, when do we need to have our sort of ducks that are willing to educate more?

I think so.

I think there are still some outstanding questions that probably need to be answered.

I think it's going to be later this year.

I mean, like, the end of the year, they're going through the process now of doing all the surveys, and we just really started with the study.

I think I saw from the other conference last week,

At the end of the year, we don't really start into the process officially until spring of 2020.

With that said, I think we all are recognizing the benefit of working on these projects earlier and spending more time trying to get public input.

I think what we really need to know probably in the next set of meetings is are there additional projects or initiatives that you all want us to be considering for development?

And then we probably need to identify what kind of additional support would be needed to make those projects ready.

Okay, great.

Especially with the absence of long-transmitting plans,

Yeah, so I have a couple that I'll start off with.

The first one is related to the Long Range Transportation Plan.

We completed the stakeholder discussion group, so we have three different groups, so three different types of stakeholders.

We got some really good feedback, so there's a technical memo that is included in your packets for review with some suggested

changes to the draft goals and objectives based on that feedback.

We will bring that back to you all for a deeper discussion next time.

But I don't think you're quite all the way there yet, but it gives you an idea of how some of the feedback that we've heard from those stakeholder discussions are being considered.

So we'll have a bigger conversation.

And then we've also been working on the

We completed the scope with Renaissance and Michael Baker on the Project for Organization tool.

So if you all want to see anything related to that, I'm happy to show you what that tool looks like, but we'll often be dissecting at our future meetings because we'll need to be making some decisions around how to evaluate a different project.

And then related to the race grant application, I would like to thank VDOT for their support and for carrying that application and for championing it and getting the agency to stand behind the project with us.

We were able to successfully submit the application.

We asked for just over $3 million and we should find out about the outcome of that at the end of June.

Yeah.

Yeah, this will be nice and historic.

So Acton Express, of course, launched their expanded service, so additional hours in the evening to accommodate hopefully the hospital workers there in the May and February.

So far, numbers have felt very steady.

They are still averaging about 58 riders a day.

In the February reports, we're still trying to get the word out about that new route to the public and specifically the UVA employees.

I know we're still working on additional marketing initiatives to help support and let folks know about that.

With regards to Rideshare, we are kind of

Just finished all of the grant applications that were due February 1st.

One of them being the technical assistance grant for a strategic plan for the program, which is a state requirement, and that is in addition to our regular operating funds.

So we're kind of in a holding pattern of getting ready to prep all of our funds for activities.

May is bike month, so we are working to coordinate and help support

activities with that both on the state level and on the local level.

You know, Earth Month and Clean Commute is usually something that we move a lot of promotions around so we kind of stay tuned for that.

And we are actually today just wrapped up the timeline for proposals for an RFP.

Is that it for earlier?

Yes, there was an adjustment to a TIP project in the current TIP.

This came from VDOT.

It was due to the D'Arby document, they had a servicing schedule for the industry TIP project.

VDOT indicated that there were some small increases

An adjustment that's not part of the policy that we're asking for.

Anything else of interest on that topic?

The administrative.

No, I hope the first one.

Round table discussion?

I think we're at that point.

Great.

So right off the bat, our friends from VDOT.

I would urge you all to be forthcoming.

What your thoughts are about the SMART SCALE.

There's now time to talk about it.

We're looking at holistic changes potentially to the program to make it better.

I am one of the executive working group that is kind of steering this thing.

So if you don't want us to do a survey,

They're planning to adopt a policy change by December of this year.

So they're kind of on a crunch to work through this effectively.

They're planning on presenting the recommendations to the CTPD for policy adoption in October.

So if you back this up, we're probably going to have a pretty good idea of what

What we're going to be targeting is on time in September.

They're going to be regular updates to the TTP, so continuing the TTP, they will probably be giving staff reports on a routine basis to update them on what we're going to be setting.

So look forward to working through that.

Other items of interest, the hydraulics,

So I have to go back and ask for judgment money to fully fund that to have a contract move forward.

Contractors who is currently being awarded this project with a little of this, Curtis Contracting, they also have the design bill fund for the VDI project and 151 Roundabout.

So contractors already mobilized.

As soon as they finish that work, they get spot on with this hydraulic project.

So we're excited about that.

And the last thing, talking about bundles, we've got another, the non-bill bundles that we're working on.

We just had a risk meeting here.

I believe it was a couple of weeks ago, it was not actually the end of February.

And that project consists of the Rile-Drowned or earthquake intersection, 5th Street, Old Lakesburg intersection, around 53 and 20 intersection.

Those roundabouts.

We're looking at trying to include some additional items.

If everything goes well with round five, we want to advance the genre of the reindeer that is there as part of that project and move that with this roundabout because the roundabout and the parkway intersection is right down the street from that project.

So we can move that and advance it and go along with this project.

Right now, that project is slated to go to its broad-set public hearing this summer and award

If everything goes well, it's turned out to be a 20-20.

And there's another non-building project.

So if the alumnis are busy, very, very busy.

Yeah, I'll just follow up.

Last time, I think I mentioned that we were in a private selection process.

There's a lot of talk right here about trying to do work with rooms of applications with private developers privately.

We had our cable office, someone will look at it as the northern part of the district.

We're doing eight projects in Culpeper County, volunteer county, what's in green and what's large.

Essentially what we've done is we've gone out, do a site visit with the locality, bringing their planners, their public works department, let's give you know where some of the utilities are, as well as folks from our engineering section, the local residency, and we're doing, taking that information with the concept that they want to do,

We're both looking at a conceptual plan and probably work through some of the engineering issues to inform some of the planning decisions, making sure that the planning goals are grounded in something that's dual, as well as trying to, by that scope, narrow the problem with the project to make sure that the engineers are looking down the street to understand what some of the planning goals were as applicable to the context, maybe something a little larger than the project itself.

We're going to have to try and get a better application because what we've been doing in the Culpeper District is we're trying different districts for VDOT, so each of those is a little bit different than the next, but we're similar to callback for Friday.

We start with the Smart Scale project, really developing the concept plans and the estimates for all the projects coming from low-value, you know, it does vary.

We're moving that to remember sharing a tab.

This is kind of our first really effort in the planning section.

Probably we can get what the engineers get to really put that good context around the project to make sure that the planners can understand some of the constraints for all the engineering side.

It has been great to be out in the field at a couple different localities where, wow, it's nice to be out here to see what the engineers are saying about our project.

So it's not good as a kind of dialogue.

We're getting ready to go back to the counties with some of these projects next week, the week after,

And hopefully, I think we're going to be close.

Some of them have been great.

We've had lots of information.

One study is a weapons study on a piece of property that they're going to work on.

So we're able to be down to the brass tacks and what the issue is with the project.

And hopefully that will end up making a better application that we get a better estimate on and hopefully will be delivered on time and on budget.

Is that something we see as being

I think there are various factors, you know, here locally that they, you know, we're attending to really go to the cap scale starting earlier than we have in the past.

We've been talking about coming out in January, coming out in July, August, my friend, this year.

and meet again local localities and see how we can help someone's smart to have a project.

I know that some of it is being considered now here locally and hopefully we'll be able to have strong collaboration with the projects to help a little bit.

I think, again, one of the great things about this, I think, is when you're a planner, you know, let's have them on the different side of this project.

And you're a planner, you're thinking about all this stuff, you're trying to look at it, you're not thinking about

Throughout the fiscal year, Albemarle County Transportation and Planning staff have been working on these conceptual design projects to give us better projects with more public input and more accurate process.

So we're wrapping up our Three Bridge Lane conceptual design project where we got the board's approval.

So we move ahead with planning a pilot program to turn Three Bridge Lane into a covenant.

So that's very exciting.

We're going to move forward with that quickly.

We also just kicked off our Route 20 shared use path project today with a site visit, and later this month we will have a stakeholder meeting where we'll get all the important folks in the room and talk through what that project might look like.

Great.

So not the free bridge itself.

The free bridge lane is a

Narrow, underutilized roadway that just is about three-quarters of a mile and it goes from Nardin-Tarrant Park down to Brevard itself.

So basically just pedestrianizing it.

Okay.

Right now it has vehicle traffic on it, but it's a little bit narrow and it has a shared use path on the west side of it that isn't well delineated from the roadway itself.

So it's a little bit of a safety hazard.

Yeah, we're in the river a lot, too, which is really wonderful.

Yeah, so the northern end point would be the city coming line.

So there are bike lanes right now on road bike lanes that end in 4E Road.

which is about that section.

And then going south from the city down to where we're going to put in the roundabout at Route 20 and Route 53 or Jackson Parkway.

So we are working through our non-lunarized prioritization projects right now.

So that's looking at all of our bike and structure that we have as priorities from our 2015 bike pet plan and from our street sport plan in 2016.

We have worked through the quantitative analysis with our consultant and they have handed it off to us and said, take a look at this and make sure it makes sense.

And then we'll be putting together sort of our staff recommendations to rule out stakeholders in the public before we grant counsel.

Once we do get a thought by counsel, we'll be taking it to VDOT and saying, how can you guys

on our roadways in the past year in response to our candidate parent responsibility zones.

We are shifting from project style work to program work now, getting more programs in the schools for bikes, and also going out to the community where kids are helping them fix their bikes.

Last week, we had a mobile bike workshop.

We have a few of these set up throughout the spring.

The first one was last week over here at Friendship Court.

And next week, we'll be doing

I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to

bike-to-work week, bike-to-work month, bike-to-work day, bike-to-school day, bike-to-school week, all of those.

What else are we doing?

DOCSIS permits, we are reviving our regulations in the city for DOCSIS permits.

We had some issues with how Bayo was performing on our streets, especially with parking and safety, and they had some issues with their profitability, so they were looking for some trade-offs.

We are working through that,

It's currently under review with our legal department.

We're expecting that to go smoothly and hopefully get them a new permit in the next month or two.

That permit will be managed by our head coordinator, which we're currently trying to hire.

So hopefully we'll have both a new program and someone to manage it at the same time on their side.

Good question.

Because the place where I usually trip up

So we do actually have one built into the regulations that was there before.

We just rediscovered it as we were editing the regulations.

We haven't done that yet because...

I'm just still working that out with everybody, but I hope so.

Just a couple quick ones.

We will be accepting, there will be an ordinance that will go before council that will allow us to accept $324,000 for

passenger amenities that will help us do improvements that are sorely needed at a number of our bus stops.

We are also in the final stages of finalizing an RFP that will allow us to hire a construction management company

Those are big things for CAT in the next, hopefully, 90 days.

Uh...

Supervisor McHale has had conversations, I believe, with VDRPT.

They're working through a process where they're going to help transit agencies around the state to get, I guess, three or four different shelter designs that will be acceptable by VDOT.

That way we can kind of hopefully shorten the process because the process that VDOT goes through to

accept the structure in the public right-of-way.

The private right-of-way one, those would be ones where CAT would have to work out with the owners.

Great.

Okay.

UVA?

Anything for the graders?

Okay, all right, great.

He had to jump off as well.

Okay.

Okay.

Actually don't have anything that DAPT didn't already cover, so do a good job of that.

Thank you.

This is good seeing.

And then anything else from the TJPDC?

OK.

Excellent.

Any additional matters from the public?

Anyone like to provide a comment?

One minute and three minutes per speaker.

Thank you everybody and I'll make it very brief.

I'm Peter Krebs from the Piedmont Environmental Council.

First of all, terrific meeting and what a rich packet this is.

Sandy and our team did a great job preparing the Rivianna River pedestrian bridge raise grants.

It's worth looking at to see quality work product.

Even I was a little bit astonished at what a great looking project it is.

I just wanted to quickly mention that we at PEC are very concerned about what might happen with SMART SCALE.

We encourage both Charlottesville and Albemarle County as well as the MPO to keep an eye on it as it changes.

Certainly there are ways that SMART SCALE can be better.

But in general, SMART SCALE has been good for our region.

It's data driven.

And the way that it looks at data is very compatible with both Charlottesville and Albemarle's approach to land use.

So let's keep an eye on that.

Hopefully, it gets even better.

But that's all I have for now.

Thank you all for your service.

Any other comments from the public?

Any other questions?

Okay, I thank you.

All right, all in favor?

Aye.