Regional Transit Partnership (2017-2025) Meeting   12/8/2022

I'm just looking.

It doesn't look like we did.

We have to mark the same gallon.

No, we don't need it.

We'll put that back here.

So we have four?

Yeah.

OK.

Wait, wait.

Let's put it down a little bit today.

OK, that's what it looks like.

OK, yeah.

Kristen, can you hear us?

Stephanie, can you hear us?

Yes.

Thank you.

It is 4 o'clock, so I'm going to ask everyone to join us in a second.

You do have a forum, I think, Lucinda, somewhere around now.

All right.

That's what happens in the morning.

So how are we in order?

It's lovely to see everybody.

There's no- I need to look at this.

Sherman White is- I'm gonna put it right here on the table.

So, yeah.

So we would need to approve to consider all of our voting members, right?

Hey Charmane.

Hi.

Getting our meetings started and everything.

All right, so I'd like to call the meeting to order.

I appreciate everybody being here.

I think I have that choice now, so we are really involved in order.

Let's go around to our introductions like we always do.

I'm John, we're represented.

Lucas Ames, John Urban, we're represented.

Diantha McKeel, Albemarle County, Lloyd Snook, can you hear me?

Christine.

Christine Jacobs, TJPDC.

Excuse me.

That's okay.

Joanne May, Charlottesville, Maryland.

Ben Chambers from Washington, D.C. from Charlottesville.

Jessica's from Alabama.

Karen May and I are sharing the same thing.

And before you go on, let's take your coat off.

Would you please introduce yourself?

There you go.

Thank you, Michael.

I can see you.

All right.

And Wood.

I think Wood is there.

Is he now?

He seems.

with Matt, we have an agenda before you and I would entertain a motion to approve the agenda.

Ryan has been moved to approve.

Is there a second?

Second.

Becca has seconded.

All those in favor please say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

All right.

And you had in your packet our last meeting minutes from October the 27th.

Did anyone note any matter edits or anything that needed to be addressed in the minutes?

Thank you, Hal.

Hal, is there a motion to second?

Second.

Bea is there a second?

All those in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

Any nays?

Any abstentions?

All right, I think we have our minutes approved.

We're moving right along.

If you are online and would like to participate in public comment, please raise your hand using the Zoom feature at the bottom of the screen.

We're looking at other attendees in the background.

All right.

Okay.

Then we are ready to begin our first presentation of the afternoon, which is the frictional area mobility system.

And I'm actually pretty excited about this, but as I understand, this is something that

We had talked about from the very beginning of establishing the Regional Transit Partnership was to figure out a way to get all of our transit systems under the same, I don't want to say this, so that to the community we look like we're one system, right, in that they can interface

if they need a transit provider without having to go to Jaunt or to CAT or when they want to move someone's system to have to access them separately.

I think is that fair, Christine?

Do you want to go on?

Yeah, so there's a federal program called 5310, and the purpose of the program is to augment

and they do that through coordination and providing capital for expenses and also part of it can be mobile management.

So DROT used to provide the mobile management services and they asked us if we could apply for it because we're a regional agency and we're not providing direct transit services.

It made sense for us to do that.

And so we're looking at, we talked to DRPT about it, and they suggested that we look at it about the end-of-the-ground meetings of the Regional Commodity Management Program and do something similar to that.

So we've got to look at it, and Christine is super helpful with providing us with information and helping us

with our application.

So this is pretty exciting.

And Chris said you are obviously the model.

So I want to make sure, is there anyone online that cannot hear us right now?

So my understanding, Kristen, is I'm just going to, while we're figuring out a little bit of the technology, I'm going to have the Rabbit Head, Rabbit Head Regional Commission

Yes, ma'am.

Our community.

All right.

I guess we'll turn it over to you.

As long as you can hear us, we're good.

OK.

So I was just going to go over kind of how we started and what we do now.

We've had quite an evolution take place over the last few years.

And ours is a model.

Our mobility management system is a model.

It was the first one call, one click center that was established in Virginia.

And that came out of

A need that was identified in the community to try and centralize mobility supports for the target audience.

And the Department of Rail and Public Transit considers the target audience to be older adults or people with disabilities.

And the Regional Commission's role is to try and kind of bring people together when there are issues that are faced by more than one location or more than one locality.

and to try and create solutions that are obviously targeted responses, but also really great solutions for the community at large.

And when this option came available for funding to be able to implement one of the ChISM directed solutions, we kind of jumped on that.

So one of the things that happened was in kind of in 2009,

The state of Virginia started to establish a CHISM plan, which is coordinated human services mobility.

And that's basically a set of best practices that are identified to support people with all kinds of needs for them to be able to access services in the community.

And they identify a lot of different strategies and those strategies can be applied at communities at different levels.

and some work for some communities and some don't for others.

And so the plan is very flexible in that it's offered two parts of Virginia for us to kind of pick and choose our types of solutions that we wanna implement or try out.

And in 2009, we started with the call center and it was this concept that was very new to the region because everything prior to this was very isolated or siloed.

And we ended up introducing this call center

And I'll be jumping through different types of materials here.

And everything that I cover has a lot more in-depth information and I can go into any of it at any time.

Feel free to interrupt me or if I move too quickly to ask me to go back.

But we started in 2009 with funding to establish this kind of concept of coordinated human service mobility in the region.

And then in 2017, actually established the call center

in Virginia with a single phone number.

And that was really just to provide a single location resource for people to be able to call and get information for any type of transportation need in the region.

And they were able to call this one number and get all of the information about where public transit starts or ends, how much it costs,

where it goes to, who can ride it, what the eligibility was, and for public transit, for private transit, for volunteer transportation, for any types of subsidy programs or other types of resources that might've been available for transportation.

And so it was kind of meant to become this resource for the community.

In the first year, they got over a thousand calls and our region only serves

or excuse me only has a population of about 200,000 people so this was pretty substantial because the funding that was initially provided does not provide money for advertising services and for this introduction of the system and the support was done all through community channels and it was very successful and they started with one and a half employees and

immediately ended up realizing that that was probably not going to be enough and there were a lot of needs that we were seeing that were falling through the gaps and services that were already being provided in the community and so when you start kind of really touching base with those transportation needs on a daily basis you start to identify trends you start to realize that there's a lot of work to do so we got to work and we started in from 2017 all the way through 2018

We ended up providing services and expanding into a role to coordinate transportation for a volunteer driver program.

And then we ended up expanding into offering gas card subsidies.

And so in the first few years we were building out what we were doing from just information in referral to actual provision of some type of service or connection to a service.

In 2018,

Our system experienced, and many of you all have probably experienced this as well,

That change in federal administration when the new presidential party took over, they diverted funding away from transportation towards other priorities.

And they kind of let us know as planners, hey, you're going to have to find money from somewhere else.

And I remember specifically sitting in a meeting with planners in 2018 and 2017 and thinking, oh, yeah, right, this is a federal change.

It's probably not going to trickle down to a local level.

But go figure, in a couple of years we ended up getting a direct order from our funder, Department of Rail and Public Transit, to diversify our funding because the funding cut had trickled down to our level and we were going to face a reduction.

And in 2019, that reduction in federal funding coming down to the state level

kind of coincided with several other issues that we were facing as a region.

We were facing losing some contracts for public transportation, and then our programs were also facing losing transportation funding at a local level.

And so that didn't affect us directly, but the programs that we were referring people to were going to lose funding.

And so we went through this mitigation process with our community in 2019 and we tried to come up with solutions of how to deal with these issues with loss in funding.

There's no magic checks that we could find and we knew we had to come up with some kind of different type of out of the box solution.

And when we did that,

When we met with all of these community programs and we talked through these solutions, we came up with this collaborative entity and collaborative in a working sense, a very different sense than we had ever experienced it.

We had this mobility call center in place and we had a network

and information network established, but we didn't have a working collaborative.

So in 2019, when we mitigated, we came up with a solution to introduce an umbrella organization.

And we named that the Regional Transportation Collaborative, which is similar to this group that's meeting here today.

And we introduced a concept of leveraging resources and

Reducing local competition for funding and trying to unify our mobility solutions in a much more strategic and working way.

And so we spent the next few years prior to the pandemic trying to introduce this concept to the region and to all of our partners.

And we came up with what we feel like is a really successful model in our area.

So we have this call center

And it's a very simple concept.

You call one phone number, you get all of this information and you get connected to resources.

But that's just like the foundation of everything else that we do to manage mobility needs in our region.

And because we introduced this collaborative entity to be able to work on transportation needs

in a team way and in a way that is efficient, that is really looking at priorities at a regional level versus each program kind of just fighting for their own.

We've really been successful in our impacts that we've been making and the types of programs we've been able to introduce.

One of the kind of illustrations I like to show people when I present is what things look like for us prior to 2020.

Before 2020, we're kind of here in this last house, we had our call center and we got our money from DRPT and we had this goal of serving the localities needs and increasing access to mobility.

And then in our region, we had all of these other houses, all of these other programs that were doing very similar things.

If you look at the goals across these programs, very similar.

The audience that they served, very similar.

If we look at where money was coming from,

There's a lot of overlap of where money was coming from to serve all of these different programs.

We were competing with each other on a local level for local grants to introduce solutions for the same people, for the same goal.

And not all of us talk to each other.

We didn't have consistent communication.

In 2020, when we introduced the Regional Transportation Collaborative idea,

It was very foreign to everyone that we were talking to.

This idea that we could really leverage our resources if we work together, that we could really leverage grants and local funding if we collaborated.

And so we introduced this concept and we established this really stable communication between all of our programs.

We still serve our same audience,

with our similar goals, while also each of these organizations is free to exercise their own additional goals and individual funding and goals.

So we work together to source funding and utilize it in a collaborative sense.

And we've eliminated that local competition.

So now when there's a grant available, for example, from a local foundation, instead of all seven of these entities competing against each other to get that money,

We meet together and we decide where are the priorities?

What are we really looking at?

Where would this money really be best spent?

And what projects do we have ready to utilize or to implement to use those funds?

And who's best at managing it?

And because we have all of these little houses in our group now, we're eligible for much more funding than we were in the past.

So if one program wants a set of funding that they wouldn't be eligible to apply for, somebody within our collaborative is eligible to apply.

They're eligible to be the applicant.

And those applications that we submit for funding are much more lucrative to stakeholders and to funders because we have such a strong collaboration and partnership within these programs.

We also leverage

Resources, and that goes from everything from tiny little resources to I have a color copier, you don't have to buy one, you can use mine, to I need a marketing staff but I only need them for five hours and so do two other programs so let's employ a marketing staff full time and we'll share them among four programs.

or I need a vehicle to provide volunteer transportation but I only needed a couple days a week and two other programs need that.

Well, let's buy a vehicle.

We will share that vehicle among programs to fulfill the needs and so it's used every day.

So we do this leveraging of these resources from a really small perspective all the way to a large perspective and all of the partners that are established under the collaborative have access to those resources throughout the year and access to grant writing and grant support and funding.

The Mobility Center now is much more diverse than just that one phone number and that one and a half staff that it started with in 2017.

Now we do a lot more.

We utilize a cloud software and that cloud software has become the foundation and infrastructure of all of our mobility management.

It's a online,

software that anybody can use.

It's a nationwide product and it's completely adaptable to whatever your needs are.

We offer this as another resource to our partners but we also utilize it as our infrastructure.

Keep a tremendous amount of information about the people we serve through that one phone number.

Through that one phone number we're able to glean so much information about who we're interacting with and what that interaction means on an impact level and how it translates to the amount of money that's invested by stakeholders and grant programs into our community and what that actually ends up looking like.

And so we collect a lot of information through the software.

We collect information on clients.

Trying to move my screen down.

I apologize.

Every time I do it, it gets hidden.

We collect information on clients and on their interaction with our one phone number.

We collect all of their demographic information, and then we keep a record of every time that they interact with our system, every time that they've called, every time that we've called them back, every time that they've gotten some kind of a support.

They got a gas card on this day for this reason.

They got a ride on this day for this reason.

They needed a ride this day for this reason, but they couldn't find one, and this is why.

So we keep this information on each client

And it allows us to glean a lot on the needs of our individuals that we're serving, what trends we may be seeing, and also how to create solutions that might impact some of this.

We keep information on all of our communication that goes in through that one phone number and it translates to a lot.

This is an example of some of that data.

This is our communication broken down by the reason people call.

And you can see this giant red piece is medical reasons.

This is all people who have called in or communicated with us through our text or website to get information about traveling for a medical reason.

And we can break that information down into a lot of different facets.

We also have information broken down on

You know how much need is coming out of our program, out of our communities every day.

What that means to each individual locality and what their response is, how they feel like that guides their investment into public transit or other types of mobility solutions.

This is an example of all of the requests that we get for people to travel for medical reasons every single day.

It's very overwhelming when you look at it in different types of sense of the data brackets.

So we collect a tremendous amount of information through this software that we use with the call center and it allows us to kind of analyze that on any type of parameter that we like.

We look at it on a yearly basis, but we also look at it on a quarterly basis and also by need when we see things that come up that are unique, that we don't have a solution in place for.

And we,

Through our mobility management and our call center, we implement a tri-core service model and that has provided us with a lot of success.

We go through three different models that are really important to us.

The livable community is something that AARP defines.

and our Area Agency on Aging follows.

And so every solution that we try to implement through our call center is meant to benefit the community at large.

So these solutions are for the target audience, but they're also meant to be something that the community can utilize.

So for our call center, when we pick up the phone, we don't say, are you old?

Do you live in this county?

We say, what do you mean?

Let us talk about it.

Let's have a conversation and figure out how we can help you.

And so we don't eligibility anybody out.

That call number is meant to benefit the community at large.

We also operate on a non-competitive filter model.

This one I think is particularly interesting to your area because you have more substantial transportation, public transportation supports than we do.

We have limited transportation, public transportation, but it is an invested solution by our localities and by the state.

We don't want to compete with that.

We don't want to compete every time we introduce a new solution, have any kind of issue with us competing with funding or solutions or customers that may be a better serve on public transit.

So we operate on this non-competitive filter model, which basically means that anytime someone calls into the call center, when they tell us what their need is, we first try to match them up with public transit because it is an invested solution by the localities.

So if they are able to be served on public transit, we give them that information first.

If they're not able to be served on public transit, then we match them up with any volunteer driver programs that we may be partnered with that might be able to provide them with a ride.

There are many times when volunteer transportation and public transit do not offer the solution that's needed.

And when that happens, we go through some different conversations with the individuals to try and figure out whether a gas card subsidy would be an appropriate solution.

And we walk through that to see if those individuals need that.

And we partner with 11 different locations throughout our region to provide gas cards and distribute them for us in a location that's convenient for those individuals.

So by doing that, we're reserving our financial or our subsidized resources for last.

So we're keeping a reserve on those because they're the hardest to get.

And we're using our public transit first because it's the most invested solution.

The last type of model that we use is that leveraged collaborative where we're using our resources in a partnership

And all of our partners are able to provide or utilize resources at any level that they need throughout the year.

So it is fluctuating and we run the collaborative as in a model that enables and empowers those partners to utilize those resources to provide the supports that they're already providing and to do that well.

Let's see if I can get back to my presentation here.

So when the community calls into the mobility center, they're able to get a host of different types of resources.

Right now, in the last few years, we've expanded our model to add a lot more services than just information and referral.

We provide case management and wraparound service referral, so we've partnered with other stakeholders that do those types of services and we refer callers who fit that need to those individuals.

A lot of times when people call in, they're calling in for help and that conversation leads to a lot of other needs other than transportation.

So we connect with these other partners to be able to connect the dots so that people don't fall through the cracks when we're having a conversation with somebody and they're saying, I need to get to the pharmacy.

I've lost my medication, this, that, or the other.

Well, maybe they would benefit from some help with home health coming in.

So we need to connect them to that type of resource as well as giving them transportation.

We also connect them directly with volunteer ride coordination.

So we coordinate on behalf of the other programs.

So we have five programs that we coordinate volunteer transportation with directly, meaning their phone calls come in directly to the call center.

People can ask for a ride and we coordinate that ride.

We communicate with their volunteers.

and we track all of their data and their mileage through our system.

That allows us to be able to get that data, to capture that data, to provide all individuals who need transportation with kind of a centralized type of support.

While those programs can remain small with small budgets and maintain what they do best, which is recruiting and training volunteers.

We also subsidize extreme need rides.

We partner with a couple of different programs to provide a reduced fee

rides when none of these other types of supports will offer a solution.

We offer Medicaid transportation facilitation because we serve a vulnerable population who have difficulty navigating their own Medicaid benefits and so we can help them schedule that transportation if they have that need.

We partner with a local foundation to get funds to give out gas cards to individuals but we also do what's called a gas scholarship

So we have types of individuals who have unique needs who can drive but have frequent chronic health issues where they can't afford this gas transportation they're going from place to place to place each week.

So we'll provide them with a temporary scholarship and then also refer them to a case management support, see if there's any long-term changes they can make to help impact that.

We also partner with some area health clinics to provide extended access gas cards.

A lot of our programs, free clinics in our region will refer individuals to UVA Health System to get supports in Charlottesville.

And when that happens, we partner with those programs to provide those individuals with a gas card so that they will follow up on those diagnostic reports and try and finish out those health solutions.

We also introduce lots of different pilot programming throughout the year.

and offer supports to volunteers.

Our volunteers provide a lot of support in our region.

We don't have Uber and Lyft here.

We only have a small footprint of public transportation.

We have one connection to Charlottesville a few days a week.

Other than that, we do not connect to any other locality.

We do not connect interlocality within our region either.

So our system is a really difficult equation and we rely a lot on volunteer transportation to kind of make up the difference of that.

Our volunteers in FY22 provided over 7,000 rides and we tracked over 100,000 miles that they donated.

That ended up their mileage and their hours equaling out to over $350,000 in charitable donation equivalency to our community.

So that is all coordinated through our call center.

We also provide a lot of funding to recruit and vet those volunteers because we know how much we rely on them.

We provide money to do recognition and appreciation for them.

We do pilot programming for those volunteers, such as gas incentive programs.

And we partner with our community programs to do data studies, surveys, need analysis, and then also grant applications and community engagement.

So we have a lot going on from just this one single phone number.

It has branched out incredibly over the last few years.

When we got this bad news that transportation funding was being reduced in 2019 and we went through this mitigation process, I don't think any of us thought at that time that we would be able to

hold on to our program, let alone experience such substantial growth.

But in the last few years, because of the collaborative that we've introduced and because we have broadened out our supports and services and utilize this technology, we've really been able to experience a tremendous amount of growth and serve a large amount of people in our region.

I think that's everything from me

And that was a lot.

But if you have any questions, please let me know.

I can't hear you again.

I'm not sure why.

One of the problems, I'm just going to repeat what I said for you, Kristen, is one of the problems is showing that Cadillac is thinking that our region will just go in here or whatever it is they're doing, but we have a completely different dynamic here.

We've got public transportation like they said they do not have.

We have Uber and Lyft like they do not have.

And so for us at PDC, what we were thinking behind this and what we talked to our commission about is exploring this over a year or two to find out where are those gaps that were not meeting the needs of the community and using something like that software in a one-call, one-click center

to be able to find out from community members what is it that they're needing that we are going to not be able to provide them the service that we need by something that already exists and start to collect that data so that we can then build if we can then begin to fill those gaps like PAMS has done perhaps we need small bands and we need to coordinate with all these other agencies and we need to find ways to get folks where they need to be that we don't already have

in this region.

But I want to be very clear, we are not necessarily thinking we're going to be able to replicate everything that they do.

It could be urban or rural, like I encourage you guys to ask for some of these, like what are these gap needs that they've been able to fill and what that might look like for us because we're all brand new at this, we're just learning about this funding, we're trying to get

We're not going to be providing transportation services at the TJPDC.

That's right.

5310 can be used for capital purchases.

And a lot of our information that we gather does guide public transit decisions.

It helps the localities know whether they need to up their investment in public transit.

They need to add more stops or more routes.

It helps to guide whether the public transit route needs to run longer.

All of a sudden I've gotten X amount of calls the last four months that need to travel at this time in the evening, but I don't have a public transit route that matches up with that.

So I pass that information along to these providers so that they can make informed decisions.

The only way to gather that information is to have some kind of interaction with the individuals that you're trying to serve.

And the One Call Center offers that at a really, really minimal investment.

If you're talking about the lowest part or the smallest part version of our model, one phone number, one and a half staff, and that's it.

So yes, how much does the target audience factor into the considerations for the current and such that once you translate into an urban setting that does have public transit and you have huge populations,

Yeah, so DRPT defines the target audience as now this year as 65 and older or someone with a disability.

They do not strictly define disability.

Disability is an open term.

And you don't have to prove that.

And like she said, it's not that they won't serve other people, but that is what the funding is designed for.

And every solution that we put into place, every single solution that we've tried to come up with in our region has ended up

Within a week or two weeks of putting that solution into place, you come across a unique need that cannot be served in that solution.

We continuously are surprised with new needs that don't fall into those solutions.

I'd like to just ask Garland and Ted to react, because I see Garland nodding his head a lot during this conversation.

So actually, I had a personal conversation with Christine about prison.

I'm all in favor of exploring this concept, because I think it adds value for it.

CAT in that the infrastructure is necessary to ensure that we get a lot of calls especially in the peak periods and I'm using my supervisor's staff who could be

in the street actually helping to my service run better to answer calls.

That is not in my humble opinion the proper way to use that talent to answer phone calls.

So if the backstop is they can create that model sort of what already Ted has in-house for a county, I'm all for it because it actually helps

Long term, we have to set off and create a model, it shows where that for more, they're already leaders.

Well, I think to some degree, John kind of does coordination.

But our economics might not support that long term.

The other thing is John needs to really focus on our core business discipline.

So having another group kind of helping earn the cast would be really helpful.

I just hope as we think this thing through, you know, John has a call center.

You know, so I would hate to replicate the capability.

So that means just adding more reservationists or call takers or whatever.

When I was in Tulsa, you know, we, our call center handled both extra and air transit people as well.

So I have a great pulse on this team and I'm very well trained in doing it.

Outstanding.

There's a technology issue for CAT that we can't solve necessarily right now, but this grant may be able to tap into doing that.

So that's why I really have that because the technology for us is I need to be able to get to real time to be able to move away from predictive because what I'm always showing right now is

We put the schedule here and people think of us as coming, but it's not running, it disappears.

Because it's pending and it doesn't...

So that's where people are frustrated.

And I can't move to real time until

There's some infrastructure pieces I can get done.

It's pretty expensive to make that switch.

So if we can work through that, then that actually is kind of the backdrop where it would allow everybody to see real time what's happening on the street.

As opposed to our folks, which is why we're getting the call, is this bus running?

So what I'm hearing, I guess, is what we're hearing is that the 5310 could help pay for, is that what I'm hearing?

Sort of.

That we need to explore.

Yeah.

It could be possible, if that's what that means.

Yeah, because between this screen and what it could do,

Fund, and other opportunities for mobility as a service, which is more like what would, and we've had presentations on that as well.

And UTS would love to be part of the mobility as a service piece.

And how does that dovetail into what this grant might offer so that I think

Is that?

Yeah.

Was it Dallas?

Are you able to say, sort of, simply I guess, what is the infrastructure, technology infrastructure

I have Juwhan in the room, and we've been going through a series of upgrades on our existing software with Dr. Beiner.

It's ETA, right?

ETA.

And it's still predictive.

It's not real time, but

So what that means is, it's based on a schedule meeting with them, and based on that schedule, it means at certain points to see that the bus is tracking.

So what happens is, we need to get away from that, where your computer on the bus is actually giving you every 30 seconds, real-time information where the bus is.

that infrastructure, that hardware upgrade, it's pretty expensive.

And really what you're also doing is turning each one of the buses really into a cell phone because it allows it to really communicate back and forth.

And as we go from 800 megahertz to the next generation, every time we do that under Peter, we will have to do that for an upgrade for every single one of our buses.

Unless you upgrade.

Until and unless.

Every upgrade we do will have to match what's up.

If it's radiating.

Right.

Well, it won't be, again, that.

Well, in fact, we had an ETA in Tulsa.

You know, the same offender has been, we got to the point where you could, I think our GPS guy can talk differently than what we were talking about.

And we were able to,

If you're at a bus stop, you have some of this with you.

Text the bus stop number and it'll tell you when your bus is actually arriving.

And we did that and it actually worked pretty well.

And then you can also on Google transit track the bus as well.

So that is an evolution that will be very helpful to get to.

We want to get to real time tracking of our

demand response vehicles as well.

We're looking at upgrading some of the technology that we have today so that not only can people book their trips by themselves, I'm not going to reservation this, but the system would tell them when their vehicles would also arrive.

Can I ask a question?

We have the presentation down so that we can make sure that the people that are on Zoom, we can see a hand that's up or anybody that might be there.

And this may be a naive question, maybe Charmane can help you with this, but this sounds like the tracking that we've had in our public schools on our buses for years, Charmane.

Right.

Indeed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's not what this is because I know when I was on the school board,

Dr. Halse used to have it on his phone and he could put in a bus number and say that bus is on rival road turning to this to do it then this and you still have that I assume, is that what you want?

Because we have the GPS's on our buses where we can track and see where they are.

If you don't have that, you can't do any of that.

So that allows the individual to potentially engage where the bus is.

What I'm talking about here is getting away from using a

I want to do away with that and have it tell us exactly where the bus is at all times and that is an upgrade of hardware to make that happen.

Every time that

The software to keep that relevant upgrades be why the upgrade.

I talk to lawyers, they say, well, people can't go to medical trips because you only go one trip into Charlottesville and one trip back.

So the person that's

So it's a way to upgrade the service and let's see where all the resources are available.

I mean, we actually have, we have a program, there's a development program, which people go through and learn about the community and stuff.

And then you do a project, one of the projects this past year,

was, they talked to people at, for those of you who are really involved, and replicated a system in, in that county.

And that was pretty interesting report.

We said it was there for the presentation, which was probably what they did.

And that makes sense to me that the rural counties, yes.

I'm not sure the city does.

Okay, I'm trying to understand all this.

I and Joe Blow try to get a bus ride.

So right now, over jaded.

Right now, I have a schedule for you.

I have a schedule.

So you're talking about, and then I heard others say, you're looking for real time.

You do have that.

And so if you have this upgraded software and hardware,

You know like when you ride in Metro or the bus stops, I think in Richmond you need to do this, there will be like a digital screen that says this bus is arriving in 8 minutes, this bus is arriving in 3 minutes, it will have that detailed level of information.

And the problem is that CAT has that now.

and the down compensation.

So it delivers the sense to the public that, oh, there is the digital board that I'm used to looking at and other places.

Oh, it says the trolley will be here in 24 minutes.

But that's based on schedule, not based on request.

And it would be accurate.

We've had these conversations when it was at Givens North about helping get to that next iteration of things.

But I would say as a consultant, I don't know if I want to say a consultant, that

That next generation of where we need to be, we are eventually going to have to get there for the system that we got boarded up with anyway.

And cautious though, it is somewhat of an illusion still, when you have all the right generation and all the right equipment because if the system is predicting the bus is five minutes away,

and a car accident happens right in front of the bus and the system has some AI in it but not enough to say it's predicting it's five minutes away and then it continues to predict it's five minutes away for forever until that until whatever happened right in front of the bus so just I just caught you that it's not like everybody looks at it and assumes it's

I'm not certain it will pay for his song.

No, he said his whole life.

If there was mobility management, one call on a click center and we could access real-time information on what is going on there.

We can connect with our agencies so that we can provide very accurate information without saying

Actually, I think that bus was pulled off, but I don't know.

And Kristin, can I ask a question specifically about your program that I believe I know the answer to, but I think it'd be important to share is the RRRC, the Rappahannock, Rappahannock Regional Commission only staffs Kristin to manage this program.

but they receive funding for several positions that they pass through to their partner agencies so that they can operate, they can share operations at the call center and have staff at multiple places serving the community.

We have nine right now staff that we get paid for through different parts of 5310 and those are housed with four different partner agencies.

And we do a strategic process every year.

Every July, we meet with our partners to figure out what their needs are, what the trends have been, and what our data shows.

And we discuss through what needs to be in that application from 5310 for the following year.

For example, this past July, I met with our public transit provider and asked if they needed an international staff member.

and additional staff for their call center because the public transportation does have a call center, but they're inundated with calls and needs that they couldn't serve.

Thank you.

I was actually asking that vein because I know we're in the valley.

What was the big thing that you experienced with some of these different agencies?

If I may, I want to share two comments online as we produce the comment section.

The community foundation, you said this is an enormous need for the local nonprofit sector.

particularly those who serve seniors, those with mobility issues and youth trying to get to afterschool programs.

And then Wood Hudson commented and shared the link for the open standards for virtual location data sharing.

Right, fascinating.

So where do we go from here?

I know our next speaker is supposed to be starting pretty soon.

We just wanted to share this information with you all.

So we can send to apply.

All right.

Any follow-up questions or comments?

And just share it with Lucinda, I guess, you know, Lucinda.

But actually we call it region 10 in those textbooks.

all right without any other comments or questions christine we really appreciate you joining us today thank you very much this was fascinating thank you thank you oh well we appreciate your time thank you very much all right then we are going to move on to our government study introduction stephanie is there she is

I say Stephanie.

Yeah, so many of you, I think all of you have heard that we started a governance study.

It's a follow-up to some of the recommendations from the Regional Transit Vision Plan.

And Stephanie will talk about it.

So we hired, we received funding from DRPT, Albemarle County and the City of Charlottesville and TJPDC.

to conduct this governance study and hire AECOM to help us with it.

And just to remind folks, we're talking about the governance study for what an authority.

We're looking at the authority at least.

Okay.

Yes.

I think we can hear you clearly.

Excellent.

All right thank you all very much for giving us this chance to meet with you with the RTP.

I think we've met with many of you already in the room either through the steering committee meeting or with one-on-one phone calls or teams calls but today in since I know many of you have already heard about the intro we would

This will be to give an introduction to those who are not familiar with the study as well as give some updates and so to provide some introductory information we'll go

over the study goals and objectives, and then dive into the progress so far, some of the interviews that we've had, and give updates on those, discuss the next steps, and then have a brief time for questions from all of you in the room.

So the goal for this study, as Lucinda mentioned earlier, is to identify strategies that

We can implement the recommendations from the transit vision plan that just concluded.

And this is twofold.

The two main objectives are one, to find options for transit governance within the region, the region 10 area, and then two, how to increase transportation investment.

So how can we increase funding

to be able to produce the outcomes that were suggested in the transit vision plan.

So this is going to be a year-long study and we kicked off a few months ago and so this will carry out through December 2023.

And so you'll be seeing me more often and it's a five-phase approach.

We are currently wrapping up with phase one which is the existing conditions

which includes doing a general overview of the existing service in their region, doing some stakeholder engagements and then doing a review of the current legislation.

The next we'll do a peer study.

Then in phase three is when we look at the funding piece.

So we'll look at what are potential sources of revenue that we can generate.

Well, once we have a good understanding of the funding piece, then we can develop some scenarios for governance and funding allocations.

And this is where we'll have a lot of stakeholder engagement to get your thoughts and your feedback so that we can bounce around ideas on what looks, what would be best for the region 10 area.

And phase five just includes finalizing all the information we've gathered and

completing drafts and final reports.

So what we've been able to accomplish so far over the last several weeks is the existing conditions.

So we had a few one-on-one meetings with the stakeholders.

We spoke with Garland, Mr. Williams in the room, Mr. Rieck from Jaunt, Rebecca White from UTS.

We were able to speak with another representative from one of the local town governments.

And this is our presentation to the RTP.

So with you together, be able to get some feedback and your thoughts on the direction for the rest of this study.

And we've also initiated the legislative review.

And so I'll just go ahead and give you updates on the outcomes from some of our meetings and some of the document reviews we've done and we continue to do.

And so we'll start with CAT, which was actually our first meeting, our first interview.

And so from our discussions and document reviews, background on CAT, it started in the 70s, in 1975, originally named the Charlottesville Transit Service.

And it was formed as a division of the city, the city of Charlottesville under public works.

Contracting work from Albemarle County began in 78.

And then in 85, the city assumed the bus, trans, pupil transportation, as well as providing transit services.

And then finally in 2010, there was a rebranding to what we now know as CAT, which is the Charlottesville area transit.

So just a little bit of overview of CAT's service.

They provide

Service, fixed route service within the city of Charlottesville to Albemarle County and also to the UVA grounds.

The table you're looking at is just 2021 operating characteristics about forecast.

And so we see that it operates within an approximately 38 square mile area with a service area population of about 90,000.

In 2021, they

completed about 600,000 online trips, 730,000 revenue vehicle miles, which was about 74,000 vehicle revenue hours, and did all of this with an operating budget of about $9 million.

So CAT's org structure, like I mentioned before, is

It functions as a division of the city of Charlottesville.

And so all of CAT employees are city employees, city of Charlottesville employees.

As you can see from the old chart here, the transit director reports directly to the city's deputy city manager, who in turn reports to the city manager.

The CAT as an agency, sorry, the city rather operates, it operates as a council and city manager form of governance.

And so the transit director is appointed by the city council and the city council members are voted and are elected by the people, the voters in the jurisdiction.

So there's five council members

They serve the four-year terms and they select the mayor and the vice mayor.

The reason this is important is because we're talking about CAT governance and as a branch of the city inherently the answer of it goes to the city council and so they are accountable to the city.

So in terms of financial accountability or any other kind, CAT's

Operations are reported through their annual financial reports, financial audits that are performed by the city and so any all of CAT's information is in the city reports.

So CAT's funding is a mix of federal, state, local, and some directly generated funds such as

advertising money from the pupil contracting.

And even pre-COVID, there was some flat fee paid by the university for services.

That was pre-COVID.

And so that's just an overview of the operating characteristics, the governance structure for CAT.

Now looking at Jaunt, Jaunt is,

It was described as a public service corporation.

And so it was formed in the 80s and 82 by the city, Albemarle County and Nelson County.

However, the stock is owned by five localities.

And so as a public service corporation, there's about 100 shares.

And currently the stock is owned by the Albemarle County, the city of Charlottesville, Flouvena, Lisa and Nelson County.

And

As you can see, the share is five for the first two, and then two each for the other three counties.

So now just looking at some operating characteristics, Jaunt provides three different types of service.

They have the demand response service, they have the paratransit service that they provide for CAT, and then there's the commuter bus service as well.

And they operate in

The service area covers a larger area, about 2,000 square miles, because it covers parts of Albemarle, Buckingham, Havana, Green, Louisa, Nelson, and the city through the power transit service.

And it has a similar operating budget, about $9 million for 2021, and a capital budget of about $900,000, as reported in 2021.

All of the numbers were from

NTD National Transit Database.

And so looking at John's organizational structure, slash the governance structure.

Sorry.

We don't refer to the National Transit Database, so just an item.

So the 2021 data, is that fiscal year 2020?

Is that calendar year?

Fiscal.

Fiscal, okay.

Got it.

And just to clarify, UTS does still provide some flat, fat dollars, a lot amount of money, but not as much because of the fare-free conditions.

So that still does continue in number three,

On the slide with the timeline, I just don't know if it rises to that level of being on the timeline, but in 2008 is when the reciprocal ridership program between UTS and CAT was created.

2008?

Okay.

It was piloted, I believe in 2008, and then adopted.

which is a significant thing because that said UTS could be the public provider.

CAT was able to reallocate resources that were running on Arlington Boulevard, Rugby Road.

Those resources got redistributed.

Thank you.

Okay, so looking a little bit more at John's

structure, Jaunt is set up a bit differently than CAT, which is a division of the city.

Jaunt reports to a board of directors, and so they have a board that currently has 12 members.

The board of directors is their each stockholder, so the five localities mentioned earlier,

They nominate the board of directors and the nominations are based on how many stocks or shares they have.

In the case of the city of Charlottesville and Albemarle County, the number of votes they have is, not votes, sorry, the

Nominations is rounded down.

So instead of five, they have four.

So they have four each from the city and Albemarle, and then two each from Savannah, Louisa, and Nelson.

There are also three non-voting ex officio, you can say, directors on the board, which includes Buckingham, TJPDC, and DRPT representatives.

So this board, like I mentioned, is nominated

and voted and elected by the stockholders.

They serve three-year terms.

They have their meeting, their monthly meetings.

And from among the board members, they elect the president of the board, a vice president, secretary and treasurer.

So these are the officers of the board and they serve for two-year terms.

And the board also, they also select directors to serve on the various committees.

So Jaunt has the executive committee, which is made up of the president, the officers, right?

In addition to the media past presidents and then the executive director or the CEO.

The last two are non-voting members of the executive committee.

Then with the finance committee, they have the treasurer and two other board directors that are appointed to the board.

So this gives you a little bit of an idea of John's structure in terms of the accountability.

From the finance committee and the executive committee and the board, everything is accountable to the board.

And so when it comes to the agency bylaws, it lays out how many audits are performed

Other items that includes how contracts are conducted, checks, inspections of books, and things related to that are all laid out in the bylaws, even though they're, yeah, it's pretty short, but it shows you the structure for Jaunt.

And lastly, I'll talk about the UTS, the University Transit Service.

So UTS is a completely different kind of transit service.

It's not public transit.

It's completely under the university.

And so all the funding is from the university.

It's very staff driven.

It's funded through user fee so that all the students pay a transportation fee.

And they also get some funding through charging for parking from the health systems as well.

The structure in terms of if there's any like governance structure is the ultimate accountable ultimately to the Board of Regents for the university.

And so the director reports up through the associate vice president of operations.

Now, organizationally, everything is very staff driven.

They make use of the university's resources for things like

They share a lot of their resources for procurement, human resources.

They rely on the university's facilities management team, et cetera.

And so they operate as part of the division for parking and transportation as well.

And so UTS, I think it was, I'm not sure who was speaking, but it's probably Rebecca.

They do have the partnership with both CAT and Jaunt.

And pre-pandemic, they had that flat fee that it would pay for the service to their grounds.

And I think they're in talks of how to reestablish that as well for the future and what that would look like.

But in summary, the

Like we can see the three main services, transit services, are very different in terms of their governance structure and their organizational setup.

But we have the private university, the university system, the public service corporation, and the city government.

But what we also saw, at least with our discussions, that there is some level of collaboration between the

the heads of these agencies.

And so that was a positive thing that we saw.

But in our discussion, even with one of the local town governments, there is a real need or an interest, a very strong interest in providing transit service, whatever kind it may be, demand response, fixed route, micro transit into their localities.

for not only connections into downtown Charlottesville or to the university, but even between other localities as well.

And so in moving forward in our discussions and how to think about what the transit governance would look like in the region, we'll definitely take into consideration the smaller jurisdictions, the smaller towns that also have that need, although it may be a very small need.

And so trying to see what,

What a good compromise would look like for them to be involved in this governance structure and be able to also receive some transit service, especially with the, there's a lot of support for the transit vision plan, at least from that local town.

So we'll be discussing that as well.

So in terms of,

Our next steps is to complete the review of the existing conditions.

So we've looked at the organizational, we've looked at the governance structure, we'll be looking a little bit more into the funding, as well as the legislative review.

Following that, we'll initiate, that's next in the winter in 2023, we'll initiate the peer study, which is phase two.

Before I conclude here, I did want to open this up to discuss your thoughts on if you had any comments or any questions, but specific in general to the whole study, but also for the peer study and looking at some of the criteria that we'll be using to select the peer study areas.

For now, we are looking at

service area demographics, the number of transit agencies in the region, the operating characteristics, whether similar or close to what we currently have, so medium or small, and then the governance structure and the funding mechanisms.

If there's any thoughts or particular areas that particular regions you think we should include in the peer study or thoughts, we'd love to hear from you.

We're going to use this as the criteria in narrowing down some list of regions or agencies to review and contact for some interviews.

But I want to open it up now to any thoughts or questions you have, either for the whole study or for the next phase that we'll be initiating pretty soon.

Thank you very much.

We appreciate it.

And we'll open it up for questions.

And you might want to take your presentation down so we can see you again.

It's kind of nice to, if you don't mind.

So, questions, folks?

There we go.

That's great.

The comment is that the University of Virginia does provide not only funding for CAT, but we are working with John on when they need it to provide fixed funding or some amount of fixed funding for their services as well.

Okay, I'm watching the time here, so let's open it up for questions.

So, just to support, the recent one where we were a ridership thing, that was a negotiating thing for many, many years ago, and back before the trolley, there was that thing called Big Blow, and people are telling me, I don't remember that, and then it kind of morphed into the support of the trolley, so that's really

The origin of what remains now the fare free when it comes to the Jaunt, we are supportive of the Jaunt Connect services.

We are interested in the work trips, supporting a work trip.

So that means fixed route.

So Caroze Connect, Cunningham Connect.

Yeah.

Similar to, I mean, it's, and we support the Athens Express as well.

So Stephanie, the next step will be the peer review, I think if I remember correctly.

Yes, so that would definitely be...

So for phase one, we're doing the legislative review, which includes a review of the current legislation that we have.

That makes sense.

Other comments or questions?

Oh, yes.

Yes, here.

I'm kind of on this kick about whether the authority should be used singularly or multimodal in order for it to be more successful in getting funding or not.

Thank you.

Yes, that's something that keeps coming up with that.

Well, if you have a road project in there too or something.

Right.

So I think coming to Richmond and being part of those conversations, it was the amount of money that was being generated

that push more into the pot because road projects are fairly, I mean, extremely expensive.

But we're talking about the road projects here and our pool area is smaller.

You could just need all the money for road projects and transit is zero.

So there is a little concern on transit side to side where we know we need more dedicated funding.

to continue to enhance our services.

And at the pace that we're going, and it will have to go to make all the efficient for everyone in the region.

The general funds from the city and the county are not going to be able to support that.

So at some point in time, there really definitely will be a real part of our decision about whether we

I don't know if they've been able to say whether they've seen all the, how do y'all get the beer?

No, they don't mind the criteria.

There's a tool on the web somewhere

If I can remember where that is, the one I think is next quarter.

This would be NPD, a similar tool that was developed by the Florida, I think it's called the INCD,

I wonder, looking from us, is there any other criteria we want them to consider?

Yeah, I appreciate Garland's comments.

There's only so much money to go around.

I would like to add a little bit of transit as well.

I'm just trying to think politically.

To piggyback on what David just said, I hear multiple times about trails, multi-muscle, to deal with that emotional aspect of it.

and I think that is a potential way to include more big tech kind of content but I think the percentage I wish you would dedicate to transit versus kind of the trails and blackheads

There's no one going to the BIPAC community that gives them the opportunity to split right and we're really talking about something called the 2020 split which would really help all parties but also lift training and give us the robust system that the community says they need and reset that criteria out front because I'm also very interested in making sure that the rural communities

No, if they get into this, that there's money to have them design whatever system they want, and if we saturate that money, I couldn't get large traffic projects, that might as well go away, and we're never going to have to be able to do that.

Are there goals for the authority?

Maybe a goal could be

Well, what I think for this stage, we don't necessarily need to make that decision in this stage.

In the service area demographics, our university I think is mostly considered maybe a mid-sized university as opposed to large, you know, just so you don't get Texas A&M or Ohio State or something like that.

That's Johnson City, I think it is.

So that's kind of a mix of rural urban.

Iowa State has mixed urban and rural.

That's a pretty substantial system.

Offer some suggestions about some of our, you know, one university campus that,

I'm looking at a little bit of the game.

I can't see mine.

But it's hard.

Well, demographically, it's good.

Functionally, it's mainly a Town of Chapel Hill system.

There is a regional system, Triangle Transit, but it isn't like, it's not like part of the wireless truck itself.

Or you can send it through Lucinda.

That's what I do.

And then we interact with her.

Yes.

So under criteria for governance structure and funding, are we only going to look at places that are governed by public funding?

I'm just saying like Amherst, you know, in Massachusetts where the university, well, you know, the University of Massachusetts system in Amherst, they have a weird, they have an interesting thing, but they might... That's my system.

So the university saw a need for transit service in the community and they started providing transit service for the students and the towns.

Oh, that's a brand new way back.

Eventually, they turned into a

How about Ithaca, New York?

Yeah.

That's the other one then.

So Ithaca, New York.

That's Cornell.

Cornell, yeah.

Yeah.

Any other comments?

I'm still watching time here, and I'm not trying to cut Stephanie off.

I'm sorry, sweetheart.

Thank you.

We really appreciate it.

I really enjoyed seeing the description of the three entities.

It was kind of a great summary for us and informative.

Thank you very, very much.

Any other comments or thoughts?

I think we'll see you back.

Thank you.

All right.

Yes, real quickly, we've received a draft of our transit development plan, which is a five-year plan, that's shared with some of the local providers, but we'd like to get public input, reaction to the plan, so we're going to make that available on our website, actually, before we'll get it.

A summary of that was actually the plan itself.

Also, we were grabbing up our alternative fuel study, recommending battery electric buses for us as a future, and that'll be presented next week at our board meeting as well.

In other words, would it be interesting to have Ted present their alternative field study?

I would very much like to see that.

Could we put you on the agenda?

Well, Lucas was the chair.

Oh, well, there you go, Lucas.

I mean, that'd be really interesting.

After, obviously, first of the year.

Well, we have a transit development plan, which doesn't really get into the needs of anything.

But it does talk about service expansion opportunities in some of the rural areas.

Well, that might be an interesting topic for us as well at some point.

So a couple of agenda items coming out of that, especially the rural folks are staying quick on us.

All right, so we are certainly in the trenches of trying to recruit and working on retention with our employees.

The other major thing that has had me really so occupied is that I am presenting and have already presented a strategic plan, transportation plan for Albemarle County Transportation to

the superintendent and his cabinet.

And I presented five approaches.

I won't go into a whole lot of details with it yet because I have not gotten final approval.

But one of the things I do want to mention in this meeting, especially to the transportation folks in this group, I have submitted a solicitation, a RFP, where we want to outsource a portion

our transportation and if parts of that looks interesting to either you or your groups can help out then certainly we've also written this solicitation so that you can share in

We can look at a vendor jointly if you so desire.

So that information we just put it out there today.

If you don't see it tonight, I'm not saying you're going out there tonight and look at it, but for sure tomorrow.

It should be out there, so take a look at it and see if it's something that looks appealing or that can in some way help you.

I know, Garland, you and I had talked about maybe a special needs transport.

And so it's going to be an opportunity for us to look at maybe a vendor helping us.

Again, the solicitation is written so that you can share in, we can team up and see whether or not we can find some resources to help us.

So I've really been in the trenches of that, trying to lay out some sustaining plans for transportation.

I'm just a firm believer in doing the same thing, expecting a different result.

No, we say that's insane.

And indeed, in order for us to change this, we got to come at it differently.

So that is exactly what I'm trying to do.

Great, thank you.

Can I follow up a question?

Sure.

Yes, I'll send you the information.

Thank you so much.

Excellent Charmee, thank you.

That's maybe one of the best ones.

I didn't see everything.

The academic session did end.

I'm sure everyone has noticed on the road, so I didn't look at it as the exam period is over.

So on ground, of course we move employees every day, thousands of them.

If the hospital clinics are open, our police services run.

But as the academic calendar winds down, we do reduce services during the winter recess.

So we're in that mode right now.

Very operational.

So we are actively working on, and as we've been developing our teams today, looking at finalizing our, I have to get a, our TSB, which is the Transit Strategic Plan, underway.

We are probably going to have, I hope the next several weeks, get a contract on board in January and be done by December 15th.

to make sure we're completed with all of our checks and balances that the city created and adopted to be on track to have it completed by December 31st of 2020, 2023.

So that is what we would put a lot of effort into.

I'd say we are at what will be 10, 15 have finished their alternative fuel.

We are in the woods that are in our stakeholder portion of our community.

We have already made the decision to bring on some level of electrical equipment.

The question is how big and where can we put them?

So that's where all of our interview folks have been and it looks like it's probably going to be a small pilot because the range is just not there.

for a full-born year.

As it improves, we will be able to just blow that out more and more because our vehicles, like Ted got back to me, our vehicles do not have that luxury.

They're out there 19 hours a day and we will have to have almost a two-for-one if we know that we're going to try to do a full-born, even battery model.

Our family can't support that.

First and foremost, and there's infrastructure that can go home in the city to support any of it on the second wave.

But we're still moving forward, so we're hoping to finish our study with the takeover of peace in February, early March, and then we come to- I was gonna say a little bit too on this.

And have that conversation.

We're also gearing up to do a review

I'm booking, wish you could drive with me, but it's like they're running twice a year.

They're doing our booking.

Late March, early April, at that point in time, five million will be added in the century.

That's where we are at this point.

Peter will be seen coming from the early January, be the sign of the agreement to allow us to come over here properly.

Somehow or another, I feel like we should pop a cork of champagne.

We're anticipating being able to invest it because we're anticipating being able to have more drives.

We should actually be making a lot of work.

And that's been the road the whole time.

We have been pulling back services.

We want to pull services.

And to build that chance that we got here, we get to the point where we get back to where we can add our normal services back in.

And we keep the pipeline of the ladies right now.

We're hopeful to be able to do that in the next month or so.

Great.

And school services?

Schools are the same thing, we're full board, we're working on, we also are a marketing person, we reached out to him and he's gonna help us, and we wanted to do some commercials to actually advertise the fact that we have a 21 hour starting shooting, since we may even need to, well that's just Albemarle, one of those.

We're trying to avoid the Albemarle, you know that.

We're trying to avoid the Albemarle, we're trying to avoid the Albemarle, we're trying to avoid the Albemarle, we're trying to avoid the Albemarle, we're trying to avoid the Albemarle, we're trying to avoid the Albemarle, we're trying to avoid the Albemarle, we're trying to avoid the Albemarle, we're trying to avoid the Albemarle, we're trying to avoid the Albemarle, we're trying to avoid the Albemarle, we're trying to avoid the Albemarle, we

So with that, we're trying to get as many as we can.

So commercial, we have a commercial that we made four or five months ago, six months ago.

We're editing that, and then we're going to put that out.

So we will start our bus marketing to get more drivers.

We're pretty much done for this kind of tool here.

So we'll be adding pieces, but I can't welcome you to the level that we really need.

And we're also going to be, over the next five, six months, really aggressively trying to gear up over the next week.

And I also want to take this opportunity to thank Arlen because he is coming back.

Hi, Arlen.

This is us.

About my last week.

So, yes, the last thing I will say is that we have, we were very fortunate when we realized the state before, so I just want to try to

to improve our transit in this infrastructure.

So we have about $300,000 that we can dedicate to shelters and benches.

The problem is we don't have a SAC.

The person that we had left us.

So we are trying to very long consult with her and we reach out to be help.

So there's a concern about the amount of money that's going to be necessary just in the reference we're going to put out and able to, you know,

We're hopeful that a firm with that level of professionalism can hopefully help to make some offers for it and we'll work with that to actually help us move this project along.

It's a significant amount of punishment.

We have to deal with that because there's significant things we have to do to make sure we cover all of our FDA guidelines.

We don't want to get back on the back side and do what's wrong.

We don't want to go through that now.

That's what we always have to do.

workout, so you can move forward, and it spreads the fashion to it.

And I know Peter and the folks who are at CA

Yes, I'm here.

Just have two quick updates.

First is a reminder that DRPT's grant season opened on the 1st and will be closing on February 1st.

This includes our special programs, capital and operating grants.

Guidelines and applications are available on our website.

Secondly, I want to mention that DRPT has an open position for our 5310 project manager, so if you guys know anybody that is looking to direct them to the state's hiring website,

And then we have a number of studies that are ongoing.

We're looking at doing things related to statewide electrification, software procurement and technology.

Thank you very much.

All right.

I do not have any

Other business, or does anybody else?

Just two seconds.

So we have a December.

We have the 29 North Japan tops.

We have North Carolina, we have California, and we have San Francisco.

The focus right now is we know we need to have, we're working on getting out of the vehicles that have been somewhere in the road that keep it on track.

The question is now who's going to do it, whether it's a separate form, whether it's doing some partnership with Jaunt, or doing a third part about it.

We're working with the county to decide what makes sense for them and what can be done the fastest

Okay.

I think that's spring.

Any other updates or reminders for today?