MPO Policy Board Meeting   7/26/2023

Ms. Scarpignato, Ms. Shackelford, Mr. Pinkston, we have a roll call for committee members.

Yes.

Supervisor Mallet?

Here.

Councillor Pinkston?

Here.

Mr. Nelson?

Probably.

Mr. Reith?

Yes.

Yes.

Ms. Monteith and McMeade as she may go on about Olivia Dubin.

Ms. Dubinsky with DRPT, Mr. Minor with FHWA, Mr. Kurne with FTA, Mr. Kondor with the Citizens Transportation Advisory Committee, and Ms. Jacobs with the TJPDC and VDOT.

We'll do that for us.

Thank you, Lee, for coming all the way to learn.

Thank you.

Is there anyone on the line here?

Yeah, I thought we all did.

Yeah, is there anyone on the line who would like to speak?

Please.

Just raise your hand.

Okay, from team one, we want another person on the room, if you'd like to speak.

Just me?

Yes.

Thank you.

Please pause and have VDOT correct that criteria.

Anyone else in the audience would like to speak?

There's kind of a variant of that.

You want me to?

I would ask a former politician, I don't understand.

I would get shocked if he said no.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

OK, thank you.

Would you offer people the need to add in to the agenda, or are you acceptable as it's currently ready?

No, I mentioned the 100 seconds of the agenda.

I think it's their presentation of this, and why this is.

Yeah, I have a few.

It's a standard that you'll have a map into and then you keep the

Working with the localities to make sure that the data is accurate and then add them to the data.

So, who will the council best, VDOT?

We will maintain that combined regional resource.

So it sounds like you're helping get the city and county data to VDOT.

You're taking that output back over to us and somehow adding in UVA as well?

Correct.

We'll post the files on our website but also we have an ArcGIS online account which will allow us to not only post the files but post some math that you can go and search for a particular location and view the data.

Any questions?

My question is, over the last several years there were some conflicts with the data information and sending files that were in the public place provided and what permitted them and that sort of aspect and clean up or will it be before things go on?

I think we're resolving that by making sure that the data that we're providing is already vetted through a VDOT process, so they're only going to be using the transportation data on publicly-based facilities, and then pulling in UVA's data, which is also a public access to UVA's providing that information to the parks and things.

No, that will cause the question.

It also won't show you who killed the public, someone who created the bullet.

I don't think that that's coming into that table.

It would be nice to see it.

It would be nice to see it.

That is clearly an issue, I think, certainly.

Just kidding.

It's easy as it would be.

The VDOT side of the house has the data that Sean is looking for?

So we can live and understand the network and understand the connections that we plan and use it for that purpose, more so than the actual trip planning.

It sounds like that's not really part of the scope of the project.

No?

and update from public engagement.

Any questions on this before I move on to the next slide?

Could you send it back?

And then there's maybe a slight disparity towards maybe the feedback we're getting is a little bit more humbling coming from people who identify as male versus female, but there's unfairly even distribution on that.

I think the important thing to notice is that we are keeping an eye on this and we are working to be very

So we're just going to keep rocking out some of our engagement, keep trying to make ourselves available today so that we can.

So what is the, in your overall project title, how much time is set aside for this part of the world?

We'll have our thresholds determined in September, and we'll be able to move towards the prioritization.

It doesn't seem like you've got it yet.

So we'll have more opportunities for engagement, but we certainly want to be comprehensive and make sure we're bringing about the needs from a good representation of the community upfront.

What are the typical ways you see our campaigns on social media or

So also just being really thoughtful, working with groups who work with communities that are underrepresented, to coordinate with them on how to have the best ways to get the best information.

Would that be helpful?

I hope that we will find a better solution now before we get to the end because they are able to make all those other outcomes before we develop the projects.

We have maps available, and we're just trying to talk one-on-one with people who are willing to have conversations with us.

So what are you planning to do with them when they're between medical and wellness, when you're saving yourself?

When we say that we're going to get out into the community and talk to these groups, those are exactly the conversations that we're having with those groups.

So where are the locations you're planning to stay?

We're going to be meeting with all of the CAC meetings, and there are a couple of other specific communities that I'm trying to follow up with to get some, to get on their agenda.

Sure, yeah, we've got 100,000 people out there that need to be out.

And some of this is just having the right contacts, so I would love to figure out, yeah, I'd love to figure out who I need to call out of an account.

So there are certainly other HOAs that could be involved.

They were on that initial contact.

Part of this has to be a tutoring, a little bit of a tutoring session, or at least where to drive the resources, so far.

So the end of the audience is the cutoff for when you're planning to reach all these other things, is that right?

Yeah, just for the sake of engagement, and it's not that we can't keep taking feedback, it's just that we're going to start meeting again, because then all of us start people thinking, and then we're going to be a few weeks later if I get around to doing some bad stuff, yeah.

Sorry, I know it.

Yeah, yeah.

We can certainly hope.

Anything else on that?

And it's certainly our goal to make ourselves available as a company.

Keep pushing on that.

Or she at least emailed me about it, so maybe it's pending.

That'd be great.

and request our other electives to do the same.

So when you're seeing the breakdowns, you can look for the land use area type B to know what that looks like for our area.

All right.

So those are basically designated growth areas from the localities.

And I guess the city would be the whole area.

So,

And you can see that they're picking up as that number and they'll have more conversations.

Yeah.

So we'll talk about what's been covered in May, June, and July in a little bit more detail.

Yeah.

Okay.

Once the decision is made by CTP on whether to sort of move forward with the staff-recommended scenarios based on the project scoring and determine if there's maybe a desire to consider project or project delivery performance and developing the final consequences.

It could impact being able to get future funding through these programs.

I'll pause there because I think a couple of folks wanted to make some statements.

Sorry for my ignorance, but there have been five rounds of SCARP SCALE starting with when?

2016, 2017.

It's every two years now.

I think that was implemented maybe around two.

It wasn't on an annual basis, but I think it just happens along the, the engines on the evenings.

So every year there's an application cycle that goes through the smart.

Do we try to engage those programs as well?

Well, I think it is sometimes eligible, sometimes it's not, but those also require a local match to be contributed and then the MPAO is a sub-path match resource and then those typically that are... You need to talk about it.

One of the problems I understand with the large number is there's no way to keep them out if they're incomplete.

You have to go through the whole scoring stuff because it seems like it'd be pretty simple for somebody with a sharp pencil to say

you don't have all the boxes complete here and it's not ready for prime time so you should decide don't spend time I think it's going to be easier if the department said no we're not going to help them figure it out and then you get to the application pay point and your application isn't ready to be figured out but what we do is we help you along the way and I shut down shop for six months to work on applications with localities to help them be ready at the back and then while we're doing that

So by going from five to two, or four to two, or whatever, you would still do the same hand holding all the way along, just with two of those hands?

I think one thing that's interesting to see, I think we had 38 applications in the last round.

I think this is probably, I don't want to say that it's not a lot of work for our district, because trying to shed meat

But we've done a better job of actually helping localities, including the private projects, that kind of services that are provided in some of the other districts, especially in the east of us.

And I just keep on making our projects happen.

Is that what we need?

So it's the last full number of possibilities that people have, so we've forced folks to

Right back to where we were when we tried to be 118 and they said it's too big and we can't have all the money to do it right, so now we're going to do something happened.

I don't like going around saying that.

So one of the concerns that was identified is that there's the high priority, the funding that's supposed to be designated to make these improvements on the high priority program on the corridors of statewide significance, significance of regional network is being reduced significantly because more of this funding is being directed towards these model projects.

And we can talk about a little bit more some of the specific concerns related to it.

Yes.

So this is other people, not anybody who is aware of what we've done here, but it does feel like we're a little after a bunch of people.

Any other questions on that slide?

I'm sorry, I thought Mr. Nelson was going to make a comment.

So a $10 million project and a $100 million project take the same amount of time to deliver.

Well, we're trying to get you...

I mean...

Well, maybe Belvidere wasn't really on everybody's part.

And so it's all a bottom of what we want to air the roundabout, but in the grand scheme of things, we probably should have had that all as one project also.

And to Ann's point, if it's going to be done, you know, if you want bigger projects.

We've got big projects.

But that to me starts to give a little concern.

It's the strategy, right?

And all of those projects really

Let me repeat it so that I make sure I heard that accurate.

Because they have a certain amount of applications they can put in.

Not every MPA goes through the same process that we get through.

But I think we each have to be pretty thoughtful about it.

Fair enough.

So for bicycle and pedestrian projects, 74% of their benefits for coming from the land use criteria compared to highway.

And the one, no, she told me just in round five.

Yeah.

So go back to the previous one.

So that's not what a few others are showing.

Right, correct.

It's not showing what the breakdown is for the amount of benefit they're getting from the other projects.

And so instead of having an overall benefit score of 13.4 for the Avon Street Multimodal Project, you would end up with a benefit score of 1.66.

It had all the points from land use.

They have to have strong benefits in other areas in addition to the land use is the goal they're trying to accomplish.

And they're specifically calling out congestion mitigation and safety, or is that just being called out in this example?

It's being called out here because this 15% of that is coming from land use, how can you agree on it?

In the shortcut, I mean, they could say in all those, 15% of all those,

Yeah, but these are the allocations that are part of the staff recommendation for when the funds should go now, but that is not a final issue.

Yeah, right.

They have to redistribute the 15% or whatever is the percentage in land use.

Yeah, so yeah.

So if we're divvying up this 15%, we should probably anticipate some of that on safety.

And then, um, congestion mitigation, I don't know.

Are there any other questions on this one?

And what do you think?

Shoulders, horns.

I hadn't thought you two would be able to.

Appreciate having this.

So yeah, yeah.

That was the conversation.

I can not watch.

I did pull those out of a local example.

I think everything that I've seen and I'm holding the executive work to support these changes, all of these questions have been around distributing anything from land use either in congestion mitigation and safety.

And I think that was part of the discussion that they had at the CCQC.

It's really, everybody says safety is first, safety is paramount, but we need to be more interested.

I'll have to go.

It's fine.

If you're not considering transportation projects in a way that positively impacts economic development, you're going to start sliding your ability to get resources that are paid for the transportation projects that are trying to get done.

It's basically solely on the safety, some of the actual world areas based on 100% safety.

Would the next step be for us to read these ourselves and provide some feedback directly to Sean or if we can't hold?

We've moved through the rest of the agenda officially, but I think this is important for you all to be aware of.

And you're going to give us these files.

And then just to give you a little, I'm really not picking on anybody on road overall, but you can see that they both gave on road and the US 250 Peter Jefferson Correct Way project, which were recommended in the staff, staff recommended scenario that was originally released for SMART SCALE project allocation for both of those and stuff too, because those were submitted by the CA-MPO.

And so what they did was,

And you can see that there's a pretty significant

And that's that earlier chart about these recommendations.

Yeah.

And there are some projects that typically would receive significant benefit from that.

They project the development that they know is coming into that area.

And then

I think everything that we've seen so far, the board has been going through this now for three or four months,

For the staff recommendation to be aligned with the way that the group has been thinking through, it doesn't happen temporarily.

It's a game.

That's how you think about it.

I don't want to talk about recalibration.

I think there are some bigger projects in this area that we need to look at and hopefully this process will hold.

We could have submitted a new project.

I think maybe the project to keep an eye on might be the best at any project, for example.

Past projects that

And then there's all the interest of the different regions watching the bike lanes reduction that's happening here.

Does he make other statements about bike lanes and how that impacts safety and congestion mitigation?

For the pedestrian improvement versus another type of improvement.

that time to maybe respond to some of the questions that people seem to be now and then.

Yeah, I think we do need to make sure that we are talking about long-range information, but if you send me that information ahead of time, I could kind of collect it, organize it, maybe provide some written response on it, but also, I think if there's feedback that we are consistently hearing among all of you that maybe the questions provide that, so if not, I'll just report that would be a good time to collect that.

They're going to have recommendations, and then they'll build a town hall in November, and then they're going to vote in December.

And then they'll meet again.

I need time to talk those things so I can ask them some questions.

Understood, yes.

Sir, Barnes, could you speak about VDOT pipeline projects?

Oh, are you coming up here, Michael?

I'll just do it here.

You got me in touch.

High level overview and an interest of time, that's a nutshell of what the process is.

Okay.

So this is the sort of like upstream of

What we've found in the district is if you don't have a strong application and a well-defined application and a good budget, you end up with projects that are underfunded, and that means that they don't get delivered on budget and they don't get delivered on time.

And we may pull in a couple that may be, could be spun off into local DGB projects.

But if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

Yeah, I mean, it's been talked a lot in our initial discussions.

Right.

We've looked to your staff to provide such people.

I mean, I think one of the things that came out of that study is like, you know, we were working on triangle about, and I think a lot of other issues started to pull at that particular project and, and it sort of made it something that didn't go forward.

And I hope, I mean, if the solution is to continue with that complexity, good luck.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

I would like to

Thank you for this.

Or is it also for building the darn

So it's just to be able to say this is what the actual cost would be, this is where the bridge would actually have to go to get some of those design plans in place so we would have a better idea of what the project costs and construction would be.

And where we would want to actually get the money to build.

VDOT or another RAISE grant, we would continue to have to pursue funding to build it.

I mean, we'd have to go back and reapply at that point, but yes, we could.

It could be, yeah.

Correct.

So either we'll be able to apply for SMART SCALE or we won't, regardless of which of the alignments we want to move forward with.

Well, I don't need a lot of excitement about changing the alignment.

I think once we give the base grant for the planning and engine alignment based on the environmental pathway, that lowers the risk on an uncertainty level, which then affects the plot and growth.

I don't think we know that.

So it still would have been pretty expensive, but that's just the back of the envelope calculation though.

Do we have those dates?

You should have however it was followed.

Who's going to go on the mute table here, VDOT, anything on the wall?

So we're trying to advance that start so that we can potentially get to construction for at a time before the quarter of 2022.

What's that?

I was saying that I'm working with you all on that.

We're going to call it that.

And then we will bypass the city.

Cool.

DRPT?

There's a little bit more there on the line.

Okay.

And we'll give an update on SMART SCALE just so everyone who sounds engaged about what's been funded.

My belief is that the club relief off-ramp that allows you to take the connection coming off 29 South

looping around to the west and up to the north onto Ivy Road leads a roundabout.

Thank you, Sara, for keeping us on track.