MPO Technical Committee Meeting   10/6/2026

All right.

We're ready to go then.

Sure.

Thomas Safranek?

Hi.

Zoe Macomber?

Here.

Danny Yoder?

Here.

Jessica Dimmick?

Here.

Tonya Swartzendruber?

Here.

Alberic Karina-Plun, Lonnie Murray, Charles Proctor, Sandy Shackelford, Christine Jacobs, Taylor Lowery, Jason Espie, Bill Palmer,

Thanks, Wood.

My location is 401, sorry, Richmond, Virginia, 600 East Main Street.

Thank you.

All right.

And we need to vote to accept remote participation.

So all in favor of allowing Wood to vote,

All right, I don't think there's any opposed.

Any abstentions?

All right.

Moving on to the next item, there'll be matters from the public.

Do we have any members of the public who would wish to speak?

I'm seeing Mr. Peter Krebs.

Good morning, tech committee.

It's funny, I was just asking myself, would I go to the meeting if it were in the county office building and I was saying, less likely, and here we are.

I wouldn't have come if I had read my email, so actually it's on me.

Anyway, thanks for allowing me to speak.

Three points I'll try to make very quickly.

Number one, I'm looking forward to hearing the debrief about the Ravenna River pedestrian bridge.

However, I will note that the US Secretary of Transportation has stated, as a matter of policy, that bicycle pedestrian facilities are harmful and not helpful.

So I just think in the next cycle or two, it would probably be a waste of time to ask them to help with BikePed.

It doesn't speak to the merit, and they've made a policy decision now.

On the contrary though, I wanted to indicate that it's likely that there is going to be a large amount of funding for bike, pedestrian, especially trails that are connected coming at the state level.

And I'm talking about perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars supported with a bond issue in two budget cycles.

So that would suggest to me as you're working on things like the three-notch trail there's a bit of incentive coming up to have a couple of shovel-ready pieces because readiness for construction is going to be a high weighting criteria so now might be a good time to be thinking about actually

Moving stuff out of the planning phase.

I'd say 18 months of Horizon, which should be enough time to work on that stuff.

Then finally, the last point is I wanted to invite all you all.

I think you might be interested in this speaker that's coming to UVA next week.

His name is Bruce Appleyard.

He was a local planner here in Charlottesville.

He worked on the 29 Solutions package.

He's speaking at UVA in Campbell Hall on Monday at 5 p.m. And that'll be a big lecture.

You can learn more about it by going to ARCH, that's spelled A-R-C-H dot Virginia dot E-D-U.

It'll pop right up on their events calendar.

Then the following day PEC and Liveable Seaville are co-hosting a just intimate happy hour with Bruce.

That'll be at the T-Bazaar a week from today at 5 p.m.

So come join us.

It's free for everyone.

All right.

Thanks for the info, Peter.

Any other members from the public online?

All right, we don't have any help here in person.

So we can move on to review and acceptance of the agenda.

Second.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

All right, thank you.

We're going to take a look at the August 4th meeting minutes.

Hopefully, everyone's got a chance to review those.

I looked at these a while ago.

You just have to skip it.

Oh.

She's on the phone.

Yeah, it does have you as not being here.

Oh, okay.

All right.

Nevermind.

Okay.

I'll move to accept the meeting minutes as presented.

All right.

All in favor of accepting the minutes, say aye.

I'm really excited to introduce Eamonn Lauster who's sitting right over here on the side of the table as our new Regional Planner 1 started on September 16th with the TJPDC.

He has a master's in urban planning and policy with a focus on transportation from the University of Illinois and he joins us from the Urban Transportation Center in Chicago.

So he will be supporting both the MPO and our rural transportation programs.

He already hit the ground running with

work on the rural long-range plan and doing some freight mapping work in coordination with VDOT.

So we'll welcome them.

New business.

Right.

So I'm going to share my screen or my seat here.

Good morning everyone.

Thanks for joining us for our technicality meeting this morning at an offsite location.

Today I'm providing an update on the benchmarking effort that NPO staff are working on this fiscal year.

Today's meeting is going to be mostly foundational, so introducing the state and the federal context around MPOs and also walking through each of the MPOs that we have in the state.

I do want to mention that I've condensed a lot of the information about the specific MPOs for the sake of time for today's presentation, but you also have a written document that was included in the meeting packet that has a lot of information about voting versus non-voting committee members and other context about those.

So I just wanted to highlight that.

So at the end of the meeting I look forward to just throughout hearing your questions because there's also on the next step slide an opportunity for you all as a committee to also tell us some of the things that you're interested in because we also have a direct outreach component of this project that we'll be moving into after today's meeting.

Alright, so Virginia has 15 MPOs total that cover its urbanized areas and three of them actually cross state lines.

That's the Bristol MPO, the Kingsport MPO, and the National Capital Region TPD.

So we have a few MPOs that actually have multi-state agreements, which is important to point out.

The big takeaway here is that every MPO is meeting the same federal requirement.

So it's written out in code that's linked here on the slide.

But each of us might be doing that a little differently.

Each of us have different service area populations.

Some are bigger, some are smaller.

And there are other characteristics that we'll talk through today as well.

So before we get into the profiles, we thought it was worth talking through just a few key terms really precisely because I think sometimes these are tossed around a little bit interchangeably.

So we want to make sure that we're all kind of speaking in the same language on these.

So the MPA, the Metropolitan Planning Area, that is better known as our MPO boundary.

So that defines the geographic area that's covered by an MPO's planning process.

And so the boundary is established through agreement by the MPO and the governor.

Have we done that?

So it happens after every decennial census, we're required to do a review of the boundary.

Now we don't have to make changes every census, but we do have to review it and see if there are changes that need to be made.

So it minimally has to include the census defined urbanized area, but it also can include more the area that's expected to become urbanized within the next 20 years.

And so the last go round, and I'm looking at Sandy because she was here when that one happened, our boundary actually got pulled in just a little bit because of changes to how the census defined urbanized areas.

And I believe there were discussions in the round before that, but that's prior to any of us having been there, related to Greene County and parts of Fluvanna County being eligible, but they did not decide to join.

So when you go through the census redrawing, most of the changes I do have to the City of Charlottesville, so you're probably not coming to me and saying hey we need to change these lines, but if you're coming to the county, did they have to approve, is there an approval process for that?

So typically, if you look at areas that have drastic changes, like another jurisdiction might come in, or maybe a jurisdiction goes out because the population decline, what you typically see is those go to the individual boards to say, we do want to expand this, we want to be part of the MPO, or we don't by way of resolution.

Yeah, I have one question.

Maybe I'm jumping ahead.

No, please.

So you can't, what you're saying is,

The boundary could be expanded, but it has to be within areas that are either urban or expected to be urban.

No.

I am not 100% sure about this.

I know in terms of calculating

population for purposes of at least like the allocation of funding.

It's based on the population within the urban area, not within the MPO boundary.

So the TMA and designating MPO that uses the census defined urbanized population.

And so there's some discrepancy you'll notice between, I specifically pulled the NPO database population because that does differ from the census urban defined population.

And so those things are different.

So your NPO population could be larger than your census defined population.

So the census uses their urban number to come up with, here's where we need an NPO, here is a transportation management area, but for VDOT's funding formula, for other things that are based on the NPO's population,

So the population count that is the 200,000 that determines whether you get access to STBG funds is based on which population?

The census urbanized population.

Which does not change with the boundaries.

Correct.

Okay, thank you.

All great questions.

I appreciate this.

So we talked through a lot of that already.

The one last thing I'll note is that MPO metropolitan planning area boundaries cannot overlap.

And so if you share an urbanized area, which is the case for a couple MPOs in the state, they have to have written coordination agreements for how they will be meeting the federal requirements, who's doing what, what jurisdictions are impacted.

et cetera.

So that's true for the Richmond urbanized area.

We have the Richmond Regional TPO and then the Tri-Cities MPO.

They share Chesterfield County.

And then we have the Transportation Planning Board and FANPO up in Northern Virginia.

Any existing MPOs come together from two nearby MPOs saying, hey, it's kind of weird that we're duplicating services for the same urbanized area.

So at least in the case with Richmond, I can say that even though they share that one locality, they still have other jurisdictions that are south of Richmond, right?

So in the Tri-Cities, it's also so well, and second solution to that, which might not necessarily also fall in the Richmond MFA.

So I feel like there are a lot of complexities.

Yes, that's a really great question.

They largely differ based on the region.

There are some transportation authorities that only do funding, right?

And so they lean on their regional partners like the PDC and the MPO to do the work of prioritizing projects, determining what's eligible, and then passing it off to their funding arm, which might be patient authority.

In other areas, the authority actually does hands-on planning, especially in Northern Virginia, where TPB is the federally designated MPO, but the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority does a unconstrained long-range plan for the Northern Virginia localities up there.

So it's really a mix across the state of who carries what responsibilities, but we did see in every case that there is a defined relationship with the MPO somehow.

It just might look different.

Great questions.

OK.

And then a couple more things on the MPA.

So we did talk through this already with the census urbanized area about how those two are different.

I also wanted to point out that it's also different from the MSA, the Metropolitan Statistical Area.

That is a separate thing that's maintained by the Office of Management and Budget.

And people use that data for all sorts of reasons, right?

To do economic analysis and things like that.

Kind of unrelated, there are counties within the Commonwealth that are also members of two different planning district commissions.

I'm just also noticing that there looks like there's one in North Carolina as well.

Yes.

Bristol and Kingsport are right next to each other down there and it's a little faint, I wish my little mouse could show here, but this is actually the Tennessee line right here.

One other note, for the Charlottesville MSA, that includes all of the jurisdictions in the TJPDC with the exception of Louisa County.

Louisa County is in the Richmond MSA.

Another definition is for transportation management areas.

And those are places where the urbanized area populations are over 200,000 as defined by the Census Bureau.

I wanna clarify that this is not a designation of the NPO, but of an urbanized area.

So if an NPO is covering an urbanized area that has this designation, that means they have additional responsibilities, access to additional funds and things like that.

So in Virginia, we have four urbanized areas that are designated as TMAs.

That's Virginia Beach and Norfolk, which would be affiliated with the Hampton Roads TPO.

I feel like the last time I checked it was like 118,000 or something.

Yeah, either between 118 and 160 something.

Okay.

The TMA serving MPOs have additional responsibilities, and so I listed those up here on this slide.

They have to maintain a congestion management process.

They have to undergo a joint certification review at least every four years, which can result in findings and corrective action.

Here at the Charlottesville MPO, because we are not serving a designated TMA, we do self-certification every time we update our TIP document.

So every time we have a comprehensive update, we also sign something in coordination with VDOT that says that we self-certify.

And then they also get dedicated regional allocations and greater project selection authority for certain federal transportation programs.

So that includes a surface transportation block grant, transportation alternatives, and carbon reduction funds.

And I do want to pause here because I think this is very relevant to sometimes the questions that we have about, well, how does MPO get access to these types of funds or where's the point where we can have a little bit more influence in what goes into our TIP document and how we approve projects.

Typically, that lies with the MPOs that are serving TMAs because they get direct access to that funding that they then award to projects.

Yeah, so we can still participate in those programs.

It's just we don't have like a dedicated allocation every cycle.

Does that help?

That is correct for transportation alternatives.

So we, our localities apply through VDOT for access to that funding, whereas comparatively for like a Richmond or Hampton Roads, a portion of that allocation goes directly to the MPO that then gets to make decisions about what gets funded.

The carbon reduction funds are, there are carbon reduction funds programmed to the MPO, but because the MPO is not a TMA, they, this MPO is not programming those directly.

Those are being applied to other projects through the six year improvement program, like as part of the whole funding puzzle.

There's money coming in, it's just not,

That decision is just not made locally.

The Surface Transportation Block Grant, I'm not sure about this.

Chuck would probably know if he was on.

I can follow up with him.

I think there's some Surface Transportation Block Grant that's just available to VDOT as a whole that gets programmed throughout the state.

Yeah, I'm on.

I was having a hard time logging in, but I got on.

Yeah, that's true.

How are those decisions made?

That I couldn't answer.

That's a question for federal programming because they're the ones who deal with all those programs.

There's like the demo, there's a bunch of different funding programs that are applied across projects.

We've seen some of them in this district in the MPO area.

And then Chuck, if they were applied to programs in the area, would they have to be in the TIP?

Since it's a federal- Correct.

Thank you.

All right.

Separate from TMA status, some MPOs also have air quality designations that they cover for jurisdictions.

So that would result in either a non-attainment or a maintenance area.

So a non-attainment area fails to meet the national ambient air quality standards for a variety of pollutants.

A maintenance area is a former non-attainment area that's now in compliance.

There are some complexities with this, like there are legacy pollutants that used to be captured under some of these and legacy designation.

So there's a little bit of complexity in how these are determined.

But I wanted to give you the base definitions here.

So MPOs that cover non-attainment or maintenance areas also have additional transportation conformity responsibilities.

So they have to demonstrate that their LRTP and their TIP are consistent with the state's air quality plan.

They coordinate directly with air quality agencies.

They get conformity determinations from Federal Highway and FTA.

And they're also required to update their long range transportation plan every four years instead of every five years.

So every time there is a TIP amendment or an amendment to the LRTP, they have to go back through that conformity process to be able to demonstrate the impact of the project that's changing.

And we are not one of those areas, right?

So just a few notable peer findings from our initial kind of reviews.

So a number of Virginia MPOs have university partners that sit on their committees, ourselves included, but the level of involvement varies considerably.

We also noticed several MPOs coordinating with multiple transit providers, which is also relevant for our region, thinking about how we plan for our region and planning for transit.

Two regions stood out as particularly good comparisons for us, Harrisonburg, Rockingham, and New River Valley, both smaller metro areas that are anchored by a major university.

But we also wanted to note that Stanton Augusta, Waynesboro, and the Winchester Frederick MPOs are also worth mentioning and looking at from like a benchmarking perspective.

Mainly because their planning areas and populations are closer to the scale of ours compared to some of those larger MPOs.

Fascinating.

Oh, they reached out to me a while ago.

They just stood that up.

That's a new advisory board for Winchester.

And it's council appointed versus ours does not.

Well, actually, I don't know.

Hey, I will say there used to be a community mobility committee in the MPO back in the early 2000s and it was eventually absorbed into MPO tech.

So if you go back

to that time period in the early 2000s, there was a separate committee and they specifically looked at bike ped and transit as well as light rail and a lot of other different modes of transportation beyond just transportation, vehicle transportation.

That's interesting.

Roanoke has a group, but it's under their economic development.

which I find to be a very interesting choice.

One other point in thinking about what represent peers.

Appreciate it.

And I do agree, like, I think there's a lot of merit in, you know, not just writing off the larger ones, like we can learn from their processes, right, and how they do things for Medicare federal.

Alright, so these are in alphabetical order.

I didn't put them in any particular order for you all, just by the alphabet.

So Bristol is a good opening case study because it's one of our more unusual peers, like this crosses state lines, so there's a lot of higher level coordination that's going on.

It includes membership on their executive board for either the governors or their designee, assuming that's because it crosses state lines and their interest for both states and how that works.

who was designated back in 1982.

Smaller service area, about 142 square miles across five jurisdictions.

Its technical committee, as far as we could see, only meets as needed rather than on a fixed schedule, which is worth noting if we ever want to think about like meeting cadence and what are they talking about at these meetings, we do plan to do more of a deep dive into actual agendas and topics for these in the next phase.

And then Bristol also has multiple transit systems that are operating in their region.

So I abbreviated a lot of the membership, but it's written out a lot more detail than the document that was in the packet.

For the Central Virginia TPO, the designation year was 1979 and the host organization is the Central Virginia PDC.

I didn't touch on this in the last slide, but host organization means who is the administrative organization that is staffing the MPO that's being their fiscal agent.

So we looked at that to see if there were a lot of differences across the state.

And what we found was that typically it's at a regional body in the region, but you'll see what the Tennessee ones, those are hosted at local jurisdictions.

But we pulled that out for everyone.

It covers 354 square miles and five jurisdictions.

One notable thing about this MPO is that their technical committee actually serves somewhat of double duty.

So it supports both the MPO and their rural transportation planning program at the same time.

This is us, so I won't spend too much time on this next one, but it's useful to see ourselves kind of in the same format as everybody else in case you were flipping back and forth to look at things like population and dates that it was established.

Hosted by the TJPDC covers 243 square miles across two jurisdictions.

We coordinate across multiple transit providers, which is also a recurring theme that we see elsewhere too.

Danville is on the smaller end of the spectrum, so it was designated in 1983, hosted by the West Piedmont PDC.

It covers 198 square miles and two jurisdictions.

Like Bristol, its committees meet on an as-needed basis rather than on a fixed calendar.

Sorry, Danville.

My bad.

Thanks, I appreciate it.

That's correct.

Thanks.

Hey, I will note that the same for Danville with SPR, they were, it was, we could have dropped them from getting SPR funding, but because of the agreement with the governor's office, we chose not to eliminate, basically eliminate the MPO altogether.

back when they dropped below that threshold.

So what Wood says applies to the SPR funds.

So they still get an SPR allocation, but we technically don't have to give it to them, but we still have the agreement with them to be an MPO from a state's perspective.

State transportation and research dollars.

That's what funds, well, it's like PL funds, but it's a different fund of money.

PL is the MPF funding.

So, Fredericksburg is a step up in complexity.

It was designated in 1992, and it's hosted by the George Washington Regional Commission.

covers 705 square miles.

And what's notable with this one is that two additional jurisdictions participate even though they are outside of the formal NPA.

So they have two formal members that are within the NPO boundary, but they also have two jurisdictions that participate that are outside of that.

So I wanted to point that out for BAMBO.

They have four standing committees rather than two, including a dedicated citizen and bike pet advisory body.

And then it also shares that boundary relationship with TPB, which ties back to that MPA coordination point from earlier.

Hampton Roads is one of our largest piers by a wide margin, designated in 1991, hosted by the Hampton Roads PDC.

It covers over 2,000 square miles across 15 jurisdictions with a population over 1.7 million.

Other than it's just sheer size, what makes this one distinctive is it has a mix of interests that participate at the MPO.

So military, port, freight representation are all pulled into as coordinating partners for the Hampton Roads TPO.

They also coordinate closely with the Hampton Roads Transportation Accountability Commission.

So Mr. Murray, that's another kind of version of an authority that they have down there that they coordinate with directly.

And they run a very large committee structure.

Taylor, have we come across an example of another university yet?

Yes.

For Central Virginia, they have a university.

I'm a member of the Policy Board for Liberty.

Yeah.

And Liberty's a private institution, correct?

Yeah.

Yes, I do.

I put in the table a little bit earlier in the presentation, so I didn't include it on each individual slide just because of space.

But we have them all listed out here for who those partners are.

And there was one example specifically.

I think New River Valley also has community college participation for their MBA in addition to these.

The Harrisonburg Rockingham MPO, this is one of the peers that we flagged as especially relevant for us designated in 2003.

So one of the newer MPOs is hosted by the Central Shenandoah PDC.

I want to point out that Central Shenandoah has two MPOs under their umbrella.

So this is one of two.

and then this PDC also operates transit service.

So the Acton Express that we're all familiar with, their PDC operates brave transit, private transit provider.

Kingsport is another two state MPO.

This one spans Tennessee and Virginia.

It's hosted by the city of Kingsport and it was designated in 1977.

Covers 298 square miles and nine jurisdictions.

So like Bristol, its technical coordinating committee meets as needed with the executive board meeting quarterly.

All right.

So TPB is the largest and most complex MPO in the entire state.

I won't spend too much time on this one, but it was designated in 65 and it's hosted by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.

It spans three states and DC across 3,500 square miles, 22 jurisdictions with a population of 5.7 million.

So similar to Hampton Roads, it runs a much deeper committee structure.

probably more than anything else in the state that we've seen, just the layer of committees and subcommittees that they have.

They also directly coordinate with federal organizations like the National Park Service, the National Capital Planning Commission, which is the federal government's planning arm.

And they also have direct engagement with the Passenger Rail Authority and also the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority.

So it's useful context, maybe not the best peer comparison for us, but it's good to know that they exist in the state.

The New River Valley MPO was designated in 2003 and this one is hosted by Montgomery County rather than a PDC.

It covers 143 square miles and five jurisdictions with a population just over 105,000.

And one thing I forgot to point out at the beginning of this presentation is when I'm making mentions to jurisdictions, sometimes I'll go and see the

And so even though towns are typically inside of counties, most of these MPOs have separate voting representation for towns, even outside of the county center.

And so I wanted to point that out.

The other things that stand out about New River Valley, the density of its educational participation, as I mentioned earlier.

So not only Tech and Radford, but also community college and three separate transit providers that all coordinate at the MPO.

So that's a lot of partners for a relatively small region.

So I thought that was notable to point out.

The Richmond Regional CPO is designated in 74.

It's hosted by PlanRBA, which is the regional planning body for that region.

Covers 2,000 square miles across nine jurisdictions with a population over 1 million, which means that it covers a TMA area.

It runs four standing committees, including a dedicated community transportation advisory committee.

A few things worth noting, again, a boundary

with the Tri-Cities MPO, so it shares Chesterfield County, that jurisdiction gets split.

This MPO also has the exact same boundary as the Planning District, so I wanted to point that out for everyone, and the exact same boundary as the Transportation Authority that they have in that region.

The Roanoke Valley TPO was designated in 1974.

It covers 248 square miles across seven jurisdictions with a population just under 240,000.

It also covers a TMA.

Notable about this MPO is that the policy board includes the chief administrative official from each member jurisdiction.

So that was a little unusual compared to a lot of the computers that we saw.

So you all might remember that joint meeting that we held last year.

So we do have a formal partnership MOU with this MPO.

So we have already affirmed that we are very similar.

We share a lot of the same needs and there are MPO just right across the mountain.

It was designated in 2012.

So it's one of the newer MPOs in the state and it's also under the Central Shenandoah PDC.

Since I have been here, we have not.

No, I mean, this partnership preceded anybody else here.

I'm fascinated that there was, I guess it was the,

National Parks.

We have East End Augusta and us and between us we have this major National Park where we're sharing this road through it.

I mean I think like the Blue Ridge Parkway compared to VWI or GW Parkways, those parkways are used almost exclusively for commuter purposes, right?

Oh, that's interesting.

I'm just noting maybe the difference in how they're currently being used, but I think there's more to our transportation.

San Francisco.

The Tri-Cities MPO, it was designated in 1974 and it's hosted by the Crater Planning District Commission.

It covers 322 square miles across six jurisdictions, population around 168,000.

It does serve a TMA and it also sits within or covers a non-entainment or maintenance area.

So it's carrying both sets of those additional responsibilities for their MPO.

This one also has a military dimension similar to Hampton Roads.

So Fort Lee and Petersburg National Battlefield Park is a partner with their MPO.

And this is the one that shares part of Chesterfield County with Richmond.

And so Tri-Cities shares the Richmond urbanized area with the Richmond Regional.

TPO.

And so they both have to coordinate to meet those responsibilities for the TMA because Richmond, that urban area.

So it's the whole urban area between two.

Winchester Frederick was designated in 2003, hosted by the Northern Shenandoah Valley Regional Commission.

It covers 105 square miles across three jurisdictions with a population just under 92,000.

It has four standing committees despite its size, so including that bike pad committee that Tommy you mentioned earlier and also a citizen advisory committee.

The last time we checked back when we were doing a lot of work around CTAC was that their citizen committee was not active at that time and it still didn't seem like they had at least any published meetings that we could see online.

Shenandoah University participates here and they hold a voting seat on the bicycle and pedestrian advisory committee.

rather than their tech committee, which is different than what we've seen for other MPOs at universities.

All right, so that was the last one.

That's sort of the Virginia landscape throughout the state.

From here, our plan is to move into direct outreach with some of these MPOs to ask them, you know, we've seen this, here are some questions that we have, can you talk to us about your processes around these things?

looking at the actual work products of what they do so is there anything notable about their long-range transportation plans or tips and then a first understanding their processes around prioritization and funding public engagement and setting up ad hoc committees so I also want to mention here part of what came out of the sunset of CTAC was the policy board directing us to look into setting up an ad hoc committee for the next long-range transportation plan so staff kind of have

while we're doing this work as well to come up with a public engagement framework that could serve us for the next LRTP.

So we're doing that as part of this process as well.

I do want to hear from you all.

Are there things that aren't on this list or anything that you saw today that maybe spurred some more questions?

Jessica, I know that in speaking with you, you're very interested in the funding piece and what are some additional funding opportunities that could be available to us.

I think along with that I would be interested to know which MPOs have access to which pots of money and how much money and for what projects have they used that funding for.

Successfully.

I'm interested in the authorities, some of the transportation authorities that are within the MPOs.

I know Richmond has one, Northern Virginia has one, and now we have CARTA, which I think is technically an authority, but it's not a broad transportation authority, it's a transit organization.

So I guess

I don't know, I guess I'm curious how those interact with the different bodies within the MPA regions and how, I mean, my understanding is that the other authorities are kind of funding, they're there, they collect taxes and then they put that into transportation and how do they get established?

I think the relationship between the two hats

I mean, I know a lot of the work that CSPDC does is around transit for their region.

I don't really care about what their MPO does.

I know SAW MPO does work and they have to do certain things to make sure that the federal money is flowing correctly.

But are they doing all of this public engagement?

Are they doing a bunch of project prioritization?

I don't know.

Maybe that's CSPDC's role.

So one thing that occurs to me at least at least one maybe a couple of those also has the National Bike Route 76 through it and so I'm curious about

How they have dealt with that sort of thing.

Have they chosen that as an opportunity to help increase bike path along those routes?

And then also just in terms of success of funding.

What bike path projects have they successfully funded and achieved in here?

Maybe along those lines, a couple other things that might be helpful is the actual amount of funding that the MPOs receive.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

There's a narrative, and then there's the data behind it.

To your point, TJPDC put together a plan for Route 76.

It's been a while since I've looked at that.

But did other PDCs, do they have a 76 plan?

Did we talk with them when we worked on that plan?

It's pretty old and maybe outdated.

It's been interesting to revisit that and also to see what was informed to that plan.

I'd also be interested to know a little bit more about the relationship with Liberty University.

To me, UVA is a state institution and it makes a lot of sense.

Maybe it's easier to work with a state institution.

I wonder like how that relationship is with like a private institution.

I'm at the table.

I mean, there's really a status of a respected, built, and pretty extensive broad infrastructure.

And so maybe that has something to do with Shenandoah University.

Like are they saying, hey, we want to build this thing.

We have the money.

Thanks.

I'm with Liberty.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

So, I know that we've got some tension with Liberty and us because they they spend a lot of

And we don't have one.

So I think it's part of the separate.

I want everybody to kind of keep their ears on for, like, what do we want to do coming out of this, right?

knew that this would start spurring some conversations about things like that, because there are things written in our bylaws that we don't necessarily have certain members that are joining.

And as part of that activity center plans, we've reached out to the airport and they're very interested in what we're doing.

All right, any other questions on this?

Great.

Thank you, Taylor.

So this item includes two different items.

The first one is an adjustment, which does not require an action from the technical committee.

It's just informational.

The second one is an amendment to the tip.

that requires a recommendation from the MPO technical committee to the policy boards.

I'll start with the adjustments.

So this one is by request from VDOT.

It pertains to the preventive maintenance and system preservation funding, specifically moving $10 million from FY 27 to FY 26, and that is federal dollars.

The reason for this adjustment is to delay some of the land obligations.

Yeah, I'll speak up.

No, so I can maybe, I can't answer your question.

I can like give you a peek behind the curtain.

When these blocks come to VDOT, they come basically like this block.

And there are places where we can go to get additional information, but it's like a line item, like you're reading a budget line item.

So it'll tell you like what gets moved, but it doesn't necessarily give you a lot of details.

So there are a couple, and Chuck can jump in, jump in and fill in any gaps that I mix.

So there are a couple things that are important.

First of all, if these changes are occurring within the block, the reason they're inside the block is so they can make these changes easily.

And it doesn't necessarily trigger any need for additional federal review.

So I was talking to Stacy Laundrie before this meeting, and one of the things that she pointed out is that the majority of VDOT's funding is not actually federal.

A majority of it is state.

So it's possible that there are decisions that are made to advance certain federal dollars to spend those earlier versus later because they're eligible, and that's the way to maximize making sure that we're meeting

getting our federal matches from the funding sources and so we want to spend those dollars eligible at the opportunities that we have and save our state dollars for things that wouldn't be eligible to be federalized so that's one thing that could happen.

It could also be that there's something like under preventative maintenance and system preservation it could have been that

You know, we had to switch.

We had to like change types of money between different districts.

It could be that there was like something significant that happened that we needed to pull that money in sooner.

But it doesn't mean that there's no money in FY 27.

It just means that there's no federal money identified for planned obligation in federal 27 based on

This table.

So I know that's not a satisfying answer.

What I can say is that this is a complicated document.

And I think part of the disconnect that's happening is that the people that are generating these tables aren't necessarily the same people who are making decisions about the projects.

And so information, these decisions are being made about spending money.

And then somebody on the federal programming side is looking at what's eligible and how they can best

Yeah I mean that I mean that pretty much gets it it's like plant mix schedule we spend millions of dollars in plant mix schedule every year and if we the way maintenance works is we have to spend our allocations every year or we lose them plant mix is one of those schedules that's easy to increase

So we can actually spend a lot more money in the plan with schedule so quickly.

So that's one of those areas where we see a lot of increases and those are all federally eligible.

expenditures.

So just because it shows up as a planned expenditure, I mean, if you look at your obligation report, which we publish every fall, and it shows you what we actually obligated, it's a lot less than what the planned obligations are for the MPO.

So even though it's in here, it doesn't necessarily mean we're obligating the money.

That's helpful.

Thanks.

I think for me, it just raises the question maybe that we as a group think of because these amendments or adjustments come before us.

You know, is it is the expectation that we just see it as an accounting exercise and rubber stamp it?

Or is there an opportunity to get a little more information that accompanies this in the future, requests like these in the future, so that we have an understanding of what the what the movement is?

There is a report that's generated every month and it's provided to the MPO and a lot of the other, well some of the major MPOs like Camping Roads, they actually publish a financial report every month that uses this information but every time the

That's that line item that I was talking about where we can kind of see what is transferred.

What I will say is that I think the answer to your question depends a little bit on what the significance is of the change that's being made.

So for something like this, that's an adjustment.

This really is just an accounting exercise that that money has already been moved within the block.

So that's nothing that is, you know, that action.

There's no action that's requested from the MPO.

It's informative.

For the amendment, that is this group agreeing to change the planned obligation.

And so there's more responsibility there, I guess.

So we've talked through the adjustment.

Great to move on to the amendment.

This is an item requiring action from the technical committee.

This one also comes by request from VDOT.

It pertains to the construction, transportation alternatives, byway, non-traditional grouping of projects.

The change is adding a funding to the FY 27.

So they're adding $8.4 million in addition to those projects.

So it pertains to three projects.

That is the Fifth Street Hub,

Let me start over.

So this amendment is to add, to change the amendment for the FY24 to FY27, specifically adding funding to the right-of-way phase, construction phase, in total about $8.4 million.

So

The reason why this amendment is presented for you is because the current tip FY24-27 is still the approved tip document that we use.

The new one has not yet been approved.

And because that is the reason, because the new tip already includes these projects into the document, we have to add them into this one because

They're not there right now.

And we use this as the current document.

So there are no, and VDOT can correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no changes to the actual projects.

And so my understanding is that this was primarily due to the delay in federal approval for the new TIP document.

So our policy board did already approve that 27 to 30 TIP, the one that we just updated,

But because of delays with other MPOs, they are not able to submit that for federal approval at this time.

So my understanding is that we're just trying to make sure that these projects don't have a gap in their ability to draw down any sort of reimbursement to them because they are not in the 24 to 27.

But that this 8.4 would have shown up in our 27 to 30.

Yes.

You're just pulling it forward and stocking so that we can actually use money.

And what are the other two projects?

You said Fifth Street Hub.

Middle Creek Trail, Fifth Street Hub, and the Rodney Road Trail projects.

Thank you.

And we've got a second for Lonnie.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

Alright, thanks y'all.

Sure, my screen real quick.

So this is another project that the NPO staff is working on.

This is the matched mapping project for the FY 27 to FY 30 tip.

The purpose of this is to add all of the physical projects that are within the NPO to have information where anybody from the public or policy board members or NPO to England committee members can go and provide information.

This is a work in progress but the goal is to make one layer of each of the projects or one layer for all the projects and then when you click on the projects you have information about the UPC that's presented in the TIP, which jurisdiction it belongs to, the scope of work that was done, what distance does it cover, and what was the funding that was

either spent or obligated on this project.

So the goal is to have all the completed projects, but also all the active projects.

So this is just part of the projects that are located in the TIP.

We have bridge replacements.

We have traffic light timing adjustments and so on.

Another portion that we have is the projects from the Charlottesville area transit.

We don't have any physical projects like improvement of bus stops and any other, but we have projects related to like purchasing equipment and buses and so on.

They're all located where the headquarters of the Charlottesville area transit is.

And then we have the projects that are in the TJPDC, which is the mobility management program and the PATH program as well.

Specifically, those projects would just show what category they're in and what is the funding for them.

I think it'd be useful.

I don't know if we've talked to the Albemarle County GIS staff.

It'd be nice.

I mean, I'm sure the public would appreciate, you know, being able to see what transportation projects are being evaluated as well.

We get a lot of questions from the public.

When is that going to happen?

What's the proposed solution for this?

And so it might be a nice layer to drop into.

Any other comments or questions?

All right.

Thank you, Gorjan.

So we let you all know at your last meeting that we received notification that we were not awarded for the BUILD grant that we applied for to complete preliminary engineering for the Rivanna River by Pedbridge.

Since that meeting, we have held a debrief meeting with USDOT.

We have that on September 24th.

to hear feedback about the application and to also hear about the ones that were awarded and some other statistics.

So we included a memo in your packet today that includes a summary and a breakdown of this round.

I thought that was really useful information to see what were the projects that were selected on there.

And there's a link also to where you can see nationwide the projects that were awarded.

But just a couple of things that I wanted to pull out.

This round of build, USDOT received almost

1,200 eligible applications totaling $14.5 billion in requested funding.

So there were a lot of applications, a very high dollar amount of requested projects in this round.

Of the $1.7 billion that was available to award, 127 projects were selected.

Three of those were in Virginia.

This round, 62% of applications were in rural areas, 37% were in urban, 1% was undetermined.

And then there's also some information about the breakdown for those projects that were actually, so we included that information.

We called out what projects were funded this round in Virginia.

So we had a project that was related to rail.

We had a project that was a road capacity expansion, and then we had one that was maritime.

So those are in there.

And then for the feedback on our actual application, this meeting was different than any of the others that we've had.

I just kind of want to leave with that.

Since we've submitted this in prior cycles, we have always received a rating of project merit or highly recommended.

We did not receive that this year.

We actually got a rating of not recommended.

We tried to ask about what were some of the things that the reviewers were looking for.

I'm constantly told that it seems like the merit criteria were different from the last round that you all were responding to.

And so we directly asked their staff during the meeting, has there been an articulated priority for the types of projects that you all want to see?

And they just continuously told us, just refer to the NOFO.

We are awarding projects based on our statutory responsibilities, so we didn't have a lot

So we are working with local staff already.

We've had a couple conversations about next steps for build if we want to submit something else.

But I can say early on, it's at least empty of staff's opinion that we probably should not submit this application again.

We've submitted it multiple rounds.

And particularly in this climate, it doesn't necessarily seem like a favorable project.

Yes, I did hear a lot of questions about this.

Like, is there some way to make something that's a lot more basic?

Maybe it doesn't achieve an activity for cyclists, for example, but would achieve something for pedestrians.

I do think this application or this project, so we only submitted for preliminary engineering, but I do want to point out we are not an eligible applicant in SMART SCALE for this, but it could be locally submitted if that's something that would be a priority that the county wanted to consider submitting this for full construction funding for SMART SCALE, but I'm not sure where it would fall on the hover.

I'm sorry, I don't remember everything.

Was both sides of the county, right?

But it's also, we can't submit it as an appeal because of the project type that it is.

But we couldn't, we couldn't, the city,

Well it doesn't matter because it's not like we're on the other side of the river.

Wasn't there also something about, well first I don't think any of our entrance corridors

Between City and County should be not involving bikes.

Like I think we should be doing more, like looking at more ways to build bike and pet infrastructure, not just pet infrastructure.

You know, we have a lot of relatively new sidewalk projects that have gone into entrance corridors that would have been much better served if it was like bike as well, facilities past, for example.

But wasn't there also something about this design that was there was some like emergency like had to be built to a standard to accept like emergency or transit potential one day for that?

This application would have been for preliminary engineering.

That would have given us a lot more of the design kind of aspects.

What we had to submit this was general location and like the type of bridge that we wanted.

It was using like the island in the middle to help as an abutment of some sort, right?

Like it was like a pedestal.

So that was like that design that we kind of moved forward with.

It was, it was taking advantage of that island in the middle of the river.

Right.

I don't know.

I think we'll have more discussion on BUILD grants over the next couple of months as we figure out what to do for the next round.

Move on to VDOT.

Sandy, what updates do you have for us on STARS?

A couple updates on the current studies that were started.

a while ago and are still not quite wrapped up yet.

US 29 at I-64 exit 118.

If you recall, we ended up pivoting from the pipeline study to identify kind of a shorter to medium term.

I-64.

Maybe address the magnitude of the need that was there.

So we ended up using that pipeline study effort to basically develop a VISA model, which is a type of transportation analysis software that's used to analyze operations.

to cover a larger area including the interchange system going up to Ivy Road and then the interchange system along 64 going to Fifth Street.

And so there will be a report

documenting the analysis that was completed through the pipeline study and then there will be a calibrated VISTA model with the existing and committed infrastructure improvements that we will be able to use for an upcoming STAR study.

So we will have a deliverable from that that will make that next study effort allow that to be a little bit more comprehensive and utilize the effort that has

been put into the study to date.

And then for the Fifth Street project pipeline, there will be a final report that's under development.

That final report is going to include an updated analysis of the recommendations that were submitted to SMART SCALE applications around five that included not just the diverging diamond interchange, but also the improvements at Fifth Street and Fifth Street Station.

and a little bit further up the corridor there were some access restrictions and relocation of movements and things like that.

So that will give us an updated analysis for that.

So those are the final deliverables that we'll be expecting from the current pipeline studies.

And then for the current STAR studies that are underway, the biggest next step for those is that there will be two public surveys that are scheduled to launch on October 13th, one for the US 29 corridor and then one for the US 29 interchange.

So we'll have two different surveys.

They're going to run concurrently.

Those will run for two weeks.

We'll check the response and make sure that we're happy with that response before we close those.

The VDOT district, we will be developing press releases.

We'll be posting these on social media.

I think the district is going to tag the localities, but the localities are also welcome to do their own additional publication of those surveys.

Yeah, I think so the next step after we get the surveys is to select the preferred alternatives.

So we'll try to have a study work group meeting following that survey probably.

and either early November or maybe between Thanksgiving and Christmas to do that and then we can finalize the analysis.

I know there's some potential interest in whether or not

that this effort could pivot into a grant application.

I think that we probably could support that.

There's no concern about the analysis part of it.

I think depending on if there's interest, we would just need to know that sooner rather than later.

And if we're able to support that, we really want to be able to.

But I would say probably early next year for everything to be completed and for this project to be closed out.

Any other questions?

All right, for the new studies, we have two project pipeline studies that we are getting ready to launch.

One of those is at US 29 at Airport Red in Albemarle County.

And the other one is mostly in Greene County, but it also includes the Frays Mill intersection in Albemarle County and going up to Mathews Mill.

also along US 29.

So far we have held the project alignment meetings.

These are like the phase zero meetings as they're dubbing them to make sure that everybody is in agreement on what we are going to be addressing as far as the scope.

The traffic data collection is actually underway this week.

So if you're driving up 29 and you see traffic counters, they're related to these type of studies.

And we are, this will be going to the Commonwealth Transportation Board next week for a formal notice to proceed just to authorize like that.

There's actual funding for the studies and then we'll start the kickoff meetings with everybody.

For STARS, as you all know, we're converting the pipeline study to a STARS study at the US-29 and I-64 XO-118 interchange, so we're already kind of kicking that off because there have been some meetings between the new consultant team, which is going to be Michael Baker, and the old consultant team that's developing the model to make sure that they

understand what the handoff is going to look like.

We've also as you all know are going to be looking at the Preston Ridge McIntyre intersection and then I'm really pleased to be able to share that we were able to add a third star study to the list.

So we will also be able to look at the US 250 and East High Street intersection as well the East High Street corridor in the city of Charlottesville.

And so far on the SARS studies, we're working on drafting the data collection plan and then we'll work with the consultants to prepare the scopes of work for the framework phase.

This is going to look a little bit different as fires that kick off for the project pipeline.

We're not doing this phase zero.

That said, we are trying to coordinate with the stakeholders in the

Yeah, so Michael Baker is going to be the consultant for US 29, XSI 64, so everybody is very familiar with SAC at this point.

Question, Sandy.

Yeah, we went back and forth with this quite a bit.

So one of the things is that we're going to have a data collection point at the 20 US 250 intersection in Albemarle County, but there's already a planned project.

Really what was happening is that the project was getting pulled in a lot of different directions.

We're trying to solve a lot of problems at one time in one study.

And so we felt like to better manage the study and be able to come to this end of this with some agreed upon solutions, we needed to figure out what the most important question to answer was.

And the first question that I think we need to answer is,

What are the operations at the 250 and East High Street intersection?

What are our opportunities to make improvements there?

To what extent can we kind of

make improvements and move the needle like in the short to midterm.

And from there, that will sort of give us the information to know what kinds of longer term solutions we need to look at.

So this isn't precluding anything we were talking about before.

We're just trying to break it down so that we're tackling the first question, if that makes sense.

What do you mean by include the bridge?

It will include looking at the intersection is going to be what is limiting the capacity.

I think in terms of talking about the bridge, I mean, maybe we can talk generally about the bridge.

I think your last answer to the last question about how

We're trying to look for things that we could do in the short to mid term.

That's kind of what STARS is aimed at, the affordable part of STARS.

It's an acronym.

Yeah, I'm not, I'm not, I can say I'm not thinking of that.

I'm thinking more like, um,

Like is it, I mean, I'm assuming the intersection is going to relook at like the configuration of turning lanes and like, you know, how there's bike and pedestrian crossings that may affect congestion, but also like, you know, the access, you know, into the bridge on both sides for biking and walking is both good and bad.

I guess basically the turning lane from East High on to 250, so going right towards the county, like the concrete's completely crushed by semi-trucks.

Well, maybe more importantly.

Yeah, I think looking at those kinds of things would be within the scope.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I'll back up.

I need to pile a list of areas frequently used by cyclists and runners.

And one of the places that showed up on there was Frays Mill Road is a heavily used area of bicyclists and runners and I noticed that comes up in your project pipeline study.

Yeah, that actually came up in the project alignment meeting.

Albemarle County brought that up.

Yeah.

That said, I do want to manage expectations.

There aren't currently existing infrastructure there.

So we'll look at making sure that there's safe ways for bicycles to navigate through the intersection and things like that.

So there's two aspects to that, right?

I mean, one is, certainly can you make it better?

Yes.

But two, don't mess it up.

Sure.

Fair, yes.

I have to say the second one is actually the most important one.

Understand.

Understand.

Any other questions?

All right.

So is it OK to keep going?

Yeah.

All right.

So the other thing I wanted to briefly, we wanted to briefly go over was there was this question that came up at the policy board to compare pre-application and final application cost estimates.

So we just prepared some documentation and wanted to provide a little bit of context around how the pre-application cost estimates are developed versus the final cost estimates.

So that's really all this is intended to be.

I think one of the things I want to emphasize as part of the information is that this really isn't intended to look at specific project cost estimates and determine why did one escalate so much versus maybe some of the others, but to more understand what factors might influence costs increasing significantly between pre-applications and final applications.

Yeah, I got a question for Taylor real quick.

Yeah.

When you're going around to these different MPOs, is there a way to ask them, like, are they experiencing the same type of cost estimate changes for their projects?

Like, you know, I hear all the time about Charlottesville kind of being different.

Is there a way to quantify that and like,

I might have some information on that.

This is probably more important than looking at the specific breakdown of the cost estimates.

But the way that cost estimates are developed in the pre-op is significantly different than how cost estimates are developed in the final application.

The most important thing to know is that there is no

Wallety requirement for the pre-application cost estimates and in fact if you watched the pre-app SmartScale webinars they specifically state that placeholder cost estimates are permissible.

Like we could even submit applications with just a dollar.

So there's no requirement for what process has to be used to develop the pre-applications.

That said, the VDOT Cool Pepper District does try to assist applicants with developing the pre-application cost estimates.

They're basing those on either comparisons to previously awarded projects, if those are available.

Is there a similar project?

How much of that one costs?

Is this about the same magnitude?

If they don't have that, they'll use planning level cost estimate tools to develop a cost estimate.

What's really important though is that this is also based on the estimator's understanding of the project scope at the time of the pre-application.

And that scope is often in development through the whole pre-application period and might not be finalized until just a couple weeks before final applications are completed.

And then the other thing that's really important to know is that the right-of-way division at VDOT does not provide a cost estimate on the right-of-way cost during the pre-application phase.

So that is when the pre-application cost estimates come to you, it's using very high-level understanding, it's using very broad cost estimating tools, and we don't necessarily have all the information.

Whereas at the final application stage, the project scope is finalized, project risks are identified.

And then there's also a specific format that is required to be used to develop these cost estimates.

And everybody throughout the state has to use the same project estimate summary format to develop the cost estimates.

Final cost estimates are also validated either at the district or central office level depending on the size of the project.

And then the right of way division also provides cost estimates for the final application submissions.

So there's a lot more information and the requirements are a lot more stringent at the final application level.

So you can look through the document that was attached with the

with the packet if you want to get into the weeds.

But we looked at a couple of different ways of comparing different applications to see if there was a difference between how many projects increased in cost between the pre-application and the final application based on different categories.

So this is not measuring how much a project increased or decreased in cost, but just how many projects within each category either increased or decreased by each phase between pre-app and final app.

And so we looked at which planning district a project was in, what the project type was, whether it was a resubmission or a new submission, whether it was urban or rural, defined as whether or not it was in a census-defined urban area, and then project complexity as measured by cost.

We used $20 million as the threshold to say there was a low project cost if it was under $20 million.

It was a high project cost if it was over $20 million using the final application cost.

So those are the categories we looked at.

When we compared against planning districts, there wasn't really much of a difference about the same number of projects in the RRC increased compared to the same number of projects or about the same number of projects in the TJPDC.

Danny, did you say you might have that information, like raw data, certainly not all put in a little table, but do you have that raw data for all of the districts?

For all of the districts?

Yeah, we can get it.

The one thing I will say though, is that we probably have to wait till after like the portal information is published.

Yeah, but we can get it.

So comparison across planning districts,

Comparison across types of submissions, this makes a lot of sense, right?

Because what we see is that if the project is a full resubmission, basically there's a likelihood that the project is going to see a decrease.

There's a higher likelihood that the project is going to see a decrease between the pre-application and the final application.

We have more information on full resubmission, so we're gonna be a lot closer to what those final cost estimates are at the pre-op level.

By area type, whether it was urban or rural, again, you see there's not much of a difference between how many projects that were urban increased in cost versus how many projects that were rural increased in cost.

That's pretty minimal.

Probably the strongest correlation here is the project complexity.

So what we see is that for projects where the final project cost was less than $20 million, about half of those across the board for each phase, approximately half of those increased, half of them decreased.

We have 50-50 shot, are we going to go under or over 50% chance of either?

However, projects that had a higher project complexity, we see that 90% of those increased in cost.

And that makes sense.

There are more components to that.

There are more things that you have to consider when you're doing the pre-application cost estimates.

We're using final project cost as sort of like the indicator.

So there are projects that are outside of an urbanized area, for example, that might cover a really long section of the 29 corridor.

And that would be a complex project.

And I think the project in the city was less than 20 million.

So based on this definition, that project would not be considered as complex, for example.

So there are only two categories of comparison that has strong correlations with project cost changes, and the rest of it is kind of just fluctuations that happen as you get more information.

That's the application type, how much information is there at the pre-application, so new submissions will have more variation and likely see more increased costs, and then the project complexity as we just discussed.

So I think the most important thing I think is just understanding that these are the factors that are most likely to sort of limit the reliability of the pre-application cost estimates and to know that there's got to be a lot of variation and help provide some additional understanding about what those cost estimates means at the pre-application level.

So any other questions?

Sandy, you're going to have to forgive me if I just missed this.

But in here, it's saying the number of applications that increased.

Is it giving us the percent that it increased by?

This breakdown is not, that information is available.

Yeah, that showed like the actual cost, that showed the actual cost if you want that information.

Part of determining the strategy in which applications to put in are which are likely to be funded.

And when you have increases that are X percent over from pre-app to app, that may not have been the most strategic decision.

So I think that's what they're getting at.

Thank you.

I was misreading that one.

I got a comment and a question.

I mean, so I mean, this is just an anecdote, but like I talk to people at DOTs around the country for my job and I hear from a lot of

I'm sure what you're seeing here is not unique to our region or Virginia or anything like that.

Second, it's a really interesting analysis.

I like the way you broke it down.

offered some really good suggestions about causes of cost escalations.

I know we're not really supposed to talk about individual projects, but you do have an appendix with some numbers and one of them, one of the projects

in our region saw a right-of-way cost escalation, or I don't know what you want to call it, of 623% from 1.5 million to over 11 million, which is a pretty eye-popping number.

And I assume this is the Barracks Road Ram project.

Yeah, so I actually talked to our cost estimator about that project specifically, and that's in our region so I don't mind talking about it.

But one of the biggest things is that when he did the pre-application cost estimate, he did not know at that time that the auxiliary lane was going to be extended all the way back to connect the two lanes.

So that's one of the biggest reasons is because he did not have the full understanding of the project scope when he did that.

The other thing that's important to know is I think just because of where the project is and negotiating with the landowner and things like that, that was a much more significant.

I think there were several million dollars just in legal fees associated with the right of way.

And again, because the right of way division

is not providing that information at the pre-application phase.

And does right of way, does that category, I mean, obviously it's like land acquisition, but you mentioned legal.

Okay.

Okay.

Seems like I'm looking at that table, the phase where we have the most variability in cost, whether it's going up or

I think that's really going to be difficult because the way it works is that right-of-way kind of ends up on the back end of providing the estimate.

So they have to know what the project concept is in order to know what the right-of-way impacts are going to be for them to provide their estimate.

So we can't get the right-of-way to weigh in with that information until we have the concept sketch close to finalized.

Well, and that's I think part of the challenge with like this one that we went through at Barracks Road.

I think that concept was shifting as we were putting together that one.

Correct.

I mean, I think everybody would agree that that would be ideal.

I think the other challenge, though, is that it depends on the capacity, the workload, the resources that are available for everybody that's involved with making those.

I think one of our goals is to do more of that work within the STARS and pipeline studies themselves so we can get farther within those studies and be able to have that information earlier.

But as we know, sometimes the studies are not

Completely complete before the pre-application either.

So I think it's an opportunity for improvement, but there are a lot of different people who have to be involved and a lot of different disciplines that have to be involved in that process.

Any other questions on the side?

All right, thank you, Sandy.

Yeah, you're welcome.

Our next item is staff updates.

Taylor has included updates in the packet.

I just wanted to pull out of there the design public hearing that's coming up for the Avon Street multimodal improvements project.

This was a project that was submitted by the MPO and funded in round five of SMART SCALE.

So that's coming up on Thursday, October 22nd from 5 to 7 at Monticello High School.

and then one that we will send a separate email about because it wasn't captured in here was the upcoming fall transportation meeting for the Culpeper District and that will be held on November 10th at 2 p.m. in the Culpeper District.

Any questions from anyone on the staff report that's in here or any items Taylor has brought to us?

We can move along to our last item, which is roundtable updates.

I'm going to start with our folks online.

So, Wood is the only person to get an update from you.

Sure.

Seeing nobody jumping at that opportunity, but thank you.

Sure.

For Albemarle County, we're continuing to work on the process design for our multimodal transportation plan.

I'm giving a presentation to the Albemarle County Planning Commission at their next meeting on October 13th.

So we're identifying our goals based on AC44, trying to wrap our arms around the public input to date from prior planning efforts and other sources, data compilation and starting to think about performance metrics and a review of prior plans and studies.

County staff attended the VDOT local programs workshop two weeks ago and I'm happy to report that Albemarle County received two LAP awards, locally administered project awards for the Crozet Square Oak Street project, one for community impact and the other for the 2026 project of the year.

Really great.

We're starting to think about the revenue sharing and transportation alternatives.

Alberic is presenting the transportation quarterly report to the Board of Supervisors tomorrow.

Roadway reconfiguration for Greenbrier Drive and South Pantops, that's moving forward.

We're hoping to have the designs finished by December so that those can both be implemented next year with the regular repaving.

And then for three notch trail, staff are working on letters going out this week to potentially impacted landowners.

I'll ask a follow-up question and I'll ask it when it gets.

What is your standard, when you're reviewing previous studies, what is your standard practice for how far you go back?

And this is in response to a question from Supervisor Malek asking of both the CARTA staff and MPO staff.

So just curious what each of your standard practices for what's that cut off for how far you go back.

We don't have a standard practice.

I was just wondering if we all do it the same way.

We are basically just looking back at what is currently effective as our studies.

What are we pointing to and saying, well, our bike ped master plan says this, we're not going much further beyond.

It leaves in our current existing conditions work that we've done sort of to set up the procurement for the mobility plan for the

We're working through budget season and the beginnings of that, like I'm sure a lot of you are.

So that's keeping us pretty busy these days.

We do have a good event coming up on Sunday.

Our neighborhood walk is on Sunday at 10 o'clock.

We'll be leaving from Crow Pool over by the former walker up elementary, the current early learning center.

And we'll be walking through the barracks rugby neighborhood.

So very nice.

We've peed and looked at some projects with us.

Just want to highlight Loop Deville real quick.

Loop Deville was the biggest and best one yet.

I don't know if you all attended because I was running around all day.

I saw Matt, but we had 1,000 people, 200 volunteers, 800 people hit the trail.

And they all crossed a lot of the roads we talked about today, including Avon.

And this was our first year having traffic control at those places because it's so dangerous.

But yeah, it was a great day.

Heard a lot of positive feedback.

And it's more and more helpful to have the city more engaged in that process.

We're excited about that because 15-Minute Service is the best service you can buy for transportation.

Not withstanding EVA will last for three weeks, which is great.

But anyway, we're excited about that.

There are some other updates I can't give you final last time.

But that's about where we are at this point.

Yeah, so yeah, this is night, isn't it?

Yeah.

Anything from your view?

Nothing really to report.

Any other items from compute or TJPDC?

All right.

I think that's it for everybody.

down to the left.

Oh, you're right.

Do we have anybody else online to prefer members of the public to please matters?

Or if Peter wants to give it another go.

I think we're good.

All right.

Well, I will adjourn us until December 1st.

We will be in person at Water Street.

Thanks, everybody.