Charlottesville Albemarle Regional Transit Authority Meeting   1/22/2026

Welcome this evening.

Welcome to the CARTA board meeting.

I will officially call this meeting to order at 504 p.m. and I'm calling it to order since we do have an election of officers on the list for today.

I do want to take a second and just acknowledge that we have two new board members.

So I want to give a warm welcome to Sally Duncan and Jen Fleisher.

Congratulations.

Welcome aboard.

The notice of electronic meeting.

This meeting of the Charlottesville Albemarle Regional Transit Authority is being held pursuant to Code of Virginia subsection C of section 2.2-3708.3, which allows a public body to hold all virtual public meetings.

The meeting is being held via electronic video and audio means through Zoom online meetings and is accessible to the public.

The method for holding this meeting shall not change unless a new meeting notice is provided.

Should the electronic transmission fail, you may reach out to the TJPDC at L. Shannon,

at tjpdc.org.

Notice has been provided to the public through notice at the TJPDC office to the media and website posting this agenda.

The meeting is held pursuant to the remote electronic participation and all virtual meeting policy as adopted by the CARTA board on May 22nd, 2025.

The meeting minutes will reflect that the meeting was held by electronic communication means

Thanks Lucinda.

Now we will move to the election of officers.

So just a reminder, the chair of the meeting presides over all of the meetings of the authority board and the vice chair performs all the duties of the chair in their absence.

Hey, Mike.

Yeah, sorry for the delay.

I wandered all the way over here to the Water Street Center, looked in the door, and was like, oh, no one's in there.

That's for sure.

That's all right.

You weren't here for me to say this, but I have done that before as well.

Consider it a rite of passage.

I know that CARTA is new.

And if my memory serves during RTP, this might be an MPO that I'm conflating, but the chair and vice chair switched between county and city.

That's how RTP had done it.

And I'm happy to do that, but I'm also open to thoughts, adjustments, anything else that anybody might want to arrange.

We can do what we want.

That sounds like good to me.

Me too.

We probably should know that because we definitely voted on whether it would be a two year or one year thing.

For a resident attorney.

So as the bylaws stated, it says that annually at your organizational meeting, you will elect officers.

Okay, so it's annual, which means we can change it as we will, but it also means the four of us are here until we decide in our own like board organizational meetings to remove ourselves, right?

Well, I guess Natalie and I have two years remaining on our term, but just, I guess I would reflect that.

and IT.

I motion that.

Is that how it goes?

Natalie is chair and Mike is vice chair of CARTA.

All right, we've got a motion and a second.

Yes.

Counselor Oschrin.

Yes.

Supervisor Duncan.

Yes.

Great.

Congratulations to our new chair and vice chair.

Do I take over now?

Yep.

All right, so that was the end of agenda item one.

We are right on time.

Moving on to general administration with introductions and announcements.

Should we all go around?

It's hard to do via Zoom, but whatever order that you're in, go around and say hi.

It's not showing me a panel, so I'm just going to jump in.

Sounds good.

Taylor Jenkins, TJPDC, Lucinda Shannon, TJPDC, Carl Williams, Charlottesville Area Transit, James Freas, City of Charlottesville, I'm happy to call on names too if I need to, Ben Chambers, City of Charlottesville, Scott, Mike, Mike Murphy, Jaunt, Scott Silsdorf, UVA,

Hi, I'm Jennifer Ruhl.

All right, great.

Hi, everybody.

Thanks for being here.

Now moving on to the acceptance of the agenda.

Does anyone have any questions or adjustments about the agenda they would like to suggest?

Second.

Second.

Great.

Motion by Mike and seconded by Jen.

Does anyone mind if I use first names?

OK.

Thanks.

Sorry.

who is doing some housekeeping.

Thumbs up.

Counselor Oschrin.

Yes.

All right, thank you.

And then the next piece is approving the draft meeting minutes from November 18th of 2025.

Can I interrupt for one second?

I think Ann Wall is in the waiting room.

Oh, thanks, Garland.

Thanks, Garland.

Yeah, she didn't accept.

OK. Do we want to try again?

So are we?

And there's Zoe.

OK, great.

We've got three new guests if anyone wants to say hello real quick.

Good afternoon, everyone.

Ann Wall.

Albemarle County.

Sorry, I was out of the room.

Great.

OK. That is everybody.

Thanks for the heads up about people in the waiting room.

So then the next item is to approve the CARTA board draft minutes.

Any adjustments or questions?

All right.

So moved.

Can we vote on them if we were not here for those?

I know sometimes you cannot.

I was just going to say, I think we otherwise would find ourselves unable to pass the minutes.

All right.

Aye.

All right, thank you.

Do we have any public?

Anyone from the public would like to speak, and you're all online, please raise your hand using the raise hand button at the bottom of your screen.

Or if you're a panelist, you can raise your hand too.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

And we will move on to the meeting schedule.

Thank you.

So included in your meeting packet was a staff memo that includes

Meeting dates, times, and draft topics for the calendar year 2026.

And so this serves a couple purposes.

It's definitely to get all these dates on everyone's radar just to make sure everyone can still meet these dates.

We did make one update to the regular date and time for the November meeting just because the regular date and time fell right before Thanksgiving.

And so we amended that to be November 12th.

The regular meetings are currently scheduled on the fourth Thursday of odd-numbered months at 5 p.m. And so we also want to confirm with you all that that time and that day during the week still works for everyone.

And we also have in here a formal staff recommendation to extend your regular meeting duration from an hour and a half to two hours.

And that's included in there because of the meeting topics that were included in the memo that was shared in your packet.

So we put together these draft meeting topics to really zoom out and just take a high level look at what should the board maybe be looking at, maybe be learning over the next calendar year.

So we put together some draft topics and staff noted, this is a pretty long list.

And so we thought to accommodate all of those items, if all these things are of interest, that extending the meeting from an hour and a half to two hours could be beneficial for that reason.

And so that being said, happy to take any feedback from anyone.

I first would like to say thank you for including the year at a glance.

That is super helpful.

I see what we're going to be getting into.

I trust your vision on the order of operations for those.

And the dates are all functional on our end.

I guess I want to kind of zoom out slightly because this is something, you know, as representatives, we got a question from a member of our board who's not on CARTA about basically what's going on.

I see we're doing this new transit implementation study.

When are we going to actually rub her to the road, right?

It was kind of, to summarize, a lot of the rehashing of the conversation we had had when Brian

had kind of said, hey, what are we doing toward the end of last year around September, if we remember that.

And so I guess I would just reflect, I am not seeing decision points where this organization is

coming together as a decision-making organization during this year.

And I guess that makes sense because functionally we're saying we can't reach any decision points on how to actually organize and structure transit under CARTA until the implementation study is done.

We don't know what kind of funding we're going to request.

We don't know what kind of organizational structure that's going to implicate.

But the one thing I just want to make sure is if we're going to be filling a calendar with activities and things to try and build board competency on topics, I guess I want to make sure we're leaning into and toward what we're actually trying to accomplish.

We want to make sure we are equipping ourselves to understand how we're actually going to fold together a transit operation under a unified vision and

I don't know.

At a glance, you know, I confess I haven't, like, one by one skimmed through every one of these topics and thought, is this leaning into that?

But I just want to make sure we're not spinning our wheels.

Right?

I don't know.

That's kind of just big picture riffing.

Now I definitely think that was really valuable feedback.

We appreciate that.

We tried to include topics in here so you'll notice that you have an update for the transit prioritization study slated in for every one of your meetings going forward because we know that's going to be the plan that's kind of anchoring the work that CARTA is doing over the next year.

And that would lead up to a legislative discussion about priorities, about what to pursue, you know, given if there were a General Assembly pursuit the next go round.

Additionally, staff also thought about, you know, what should the learning be?

And we also tried to include opportunities for inviting other guests in to talk about things like inviting a DRPT representative to talk about funding other places around the state, what other authorities are doing,

recapping the transit governance study, things like that to really help maybe structure the learning and guide what that work looks like.

Thank you, Taylor.

If I could just jump in.

To your point, Supervisor Pruitt, the work and to Taylor's point, the work we're doing with CARTA is really anchored on this prioritization study and that intent of the timing is to bring back that prioritization study in enough time that we could pursue funding from the General Assembly.

And so I think that

I think we're going to have to get with just a little bit of time to get the results of that study to then understand what that ask to the General Assembly would look like.

I think, and both your point, the previous one, both are responsive.

And honestly, I'm looking at this slate of topics and I think it is responsive.

I guess I'm just kind of stating, affirming what I think our principles should be when we're convening every time.

So the timing of the study is so that we get some enough information back with all the updates so that by July,

CARTA can sort of begin to coalesce around if there would be an ask to the General Assembly so that then the elected officials can go back to their boards and begin to incorporate that into the legislative agenda.

And we can do the legwork that we would need to do with our local delegation.

So I would anticipate that as summerish to early fall in anticipation of a January.

I guess it's January.

Is it a January or March?

Because we, on council, our legislative committee likes to have meetings in September to have the legislative requests done by early to mid-November.

So this kind of lines up exactly with that.

And last year we had our state representatives come sit in with us and have a meeting about things we wanted to talk to and ask them about.

So this is the kind of thing we could bring to them in that meeting.

That's council side, but also

This is kind of a tertiary point and really more of a Dave David question, I don't think he's here.

But I might assume that with the Democrats in power in all branches, the legislative and especially budgetary process is pushed further to the left, like it starts sooner.

Would that make sense?

Because they're no longer tinkering at the edges, they're driving the ship.

I'm wondering about the prudence of CARTA itself.

Starting the ball rolling with our delegation, adopting our own legislative priorities ahead of our respective organizations, just because I know the county moves slow on our legislative priorities often, and that's not impugning anyone.

I think we do good work, but it often gets to our lawmakers after they've already got their slate of bills.

I don't think so.

I guess I'm just reflecting, I think we need to start communicating and adopting our own internal position to CARTA before, like, I don't think that thinking should be CARTA communicates to Albemarle and Charlottesville and Charlottesville and Albemarle communicate to lawmakers.

It should be we communicate to our lawmakers and to our respective localities.

And sorry, I realize I've allowed myself to get off the topic of our yearly schedule.

Yeah, well, I have to rein you in, that's on me.

Okay, I think

I think we're sticking at five.

And if we end before two hours, we end before two hours.

Again, we don't have to fill the time if we don't need to.

Yep.

I think from a staff perspective, if I might, I think that we are here to serve the CARTA board.

And so we'll make any reasonable time work.

And it's six per year, not 12.

So we're also kind of rolling back the frequency from what we've been doing in the past.

Okay.

We don't need to vote on that.

Just kind of everyone thumbs up.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

So for this item, for the standing transit agency updates, this came out of the last RTP meeting, the joint RTP and CARTA meeting where during that meeting we all sort of reminisced and talked about what the value of the RTP was.

And a lot of what we heard was

that the value was in the communication between the transit providers getting to have that open forum to hear people talk about the things that are going on in their organizations, their goals, what they're working toward, the budgets.

And so Supervisor McKeel asked if staff could somehow commit this to the CARTA board somehow.

She wasn't sure whether it should be bylaws revision, a memo, but she asked us in some way to sort of document that that was really valuable for people.

And so we put this memo together for you all to see and really just

I would agree it gives a chance to have kind of a quick summary questions asked or you know things to highlight and we just have a little block of time in for that.

Any concerns?

Transit agencies we like?

OK, great.

Then we are back on time.

Governance and operations.

I'm sorry?

Do you want transit presentations now?

I believe that I've been granted the opportunity

to share.

So let's see if we can do that.

Perfect.

Okay.

And I'll apologize to the vice mayor that this is going to seem real familiar since I've been to council recently with many of these slides.

But the instructions were to get everybody up to

level playing field as we have a new group here.

And so I have a number of slides.

I'll try and move pretty quickly.

Certainly I believe staff has budgeted time at the end, but if you need to stop me, please do.

So just so you know, Jaunt is a public service corporation, which means that there are shareholders, stockholders, and Charlottesville and Albemarle are the majority owners of Jaunt.

along with Louisa, Nelson, and Fluvanna.

Greene County and Buckingham receive service, but they do not get voting privileges.

And this is a

Model that was prevalent in the 70s and 80s and then stopped being a type of organizational construct in the state code, but it is the same construct in other transit corporations around the state including GRTC, which is one of the ideas for CARTA's evolution.

And in September, we celebrate the anniversary of our 50th year of the very first ride that happened in Jaunt.

And over the course of this year, we're telling stories and we'll be culminating our 50th year with a celebration in September of 2026.

And we've been doing a little bit of rebranding.

So you'll see some tweaking of the logo on some of our buses that will be rewrapped as we purchase buses this year.

And we'll be talking more about our values and how all of our work anchors to those values.

And we have changed the tagline after considerable work with a communications consultant because the old line about where can we take you was a little misleading because we're not a take you anywhere you want to go.

We have particular zones and destinations.

And so when we talk to the public, what we want to emphasize is that we're a regional organization and that the idea from most people was the level of service, the level of care they received from Jaunt drivers.

I wanna give you just quick highlight about what is the scope of Jaunt so that we can put this in context.

The city of Charlottesville is just over 10 square miles.

and the CAT routes as they lay out account for just over or just under 10 square miles.

But when you think about in planner speak, oh, people could walk a quarter of a mile to a bus stop that incorporates about 18 and a half square miles for the bus routes as they stand for CAT.

Well, what we do in cooperation as the complimentary paratransit provider for CAT is we serve three quarters of a mile out from every bus stop, which makes it about 30 square miles, just a little bit larger.

And what you should know is, of course, that's in relationship to Albemarle County, which is represented at CARTA.

And that is our full service area here at Jaunt at just over 2,700 square miles in total, where we're serving people from the public during the week.

We operate every day of the year but Christmas and there are over 100,000 hours that we're serving people every year over a million miles and our passenger trips have been increasing and they're about a quarter of a million trips per year.

When we look at the city of Charlottesville, most riders are, or all, I don't want to say all jaunt riders, when we look at all jaunt riders,

Three-quarters of them are people who are booking a trip.

They're going from point A to point B through a reservation.

26% of folks are on a fixed route service.

They are trying to get on a commuter bus or connect buses, typically, you know, almost 90% of those folks to destinations related to the University of Virginia.

and all of our trips that are those bookings, those demand responsive type trips, over half of those are for the folks who have gone through an eligibility process at CAT and are eligible for the ADA service.

And so every hour that CAT is open, we need to provide curb to curb, door to door service for those clients within the urban zone.

We became the ADA provider in 1987, so coming up on 40 years of the relationship with the city of Charlottesville.

And as I say, like this is the maximum number of service or amount of service you can get from Jaunt.

It is almost 120 hours per week of access to that door-to-door service I described.

And in Charlottesville, as we report at every board meeting, we collect statistics and we are actually participating with CAT right now on a project with Ms. DeBruhl, who's on here from RKMK, to look at different ways that our statistics might be combined in the future with CAT to leverage additional dollars for the region that's under study right now.

and in Albemarle, same thing.

Of course we have a bit more robust level of service in Albemarle and Albemarle is of the seven jurisdictions we serve receiving the most service because it is a portion of the ADA ridership, demand response on every day of the weekday and then of course our commuter service.

We really take seriously both in employee behavior and in talking with the public about what you can expect at Jaunt.

One of the first things I did when I joined was to look at how we could be a more values-driven organization.

And so you'll see a lot about people, service, and connection when you're talking about Jaunt.

And our board is very purposeful and intentional in looking at

What is it that we want to accomplish?

And so I laid out for them last January and March a variety of major considerations for the future of Jaunt so that they could focus their priorities for the next two years.

and with that led to an exercise of 25 items that they might prioritize similar to how CARTA was trying to prioritize what I saw the other day was 44 pages of you know kind of service recommendations from various reports that have been written and where we landed

was the things that we're working on in calendar 25 and 26 are these five priorities, right?

Staying engaged with this body and being an important part of the solution regionally.

Securing a written agreement with the ADA service in Charlottesville since that lapse some time ago.

Implementing a micro transit pilot, which we're being trained on the via software right now, it's happening every Wednesday.

Of course, we can't do all this if we don't have a great team.

And so it was really important to me that we reform all of the internal processes around organizational development, training and performance evaluation.

And then finally, one of the constraining factors in being great at Jaunt is we're operating in a software platform for scheduling.

that they purchased 30 years ago.

And so we, through a lot of work with the state and our representatives from DRPT who are on the call, we have a million and a half dollars to procure in a joint procurement with a number of agencies, a software platform that should take us through the next five years in my estimation.

When you think about the budget for the year that we're in right now, it's about $21 million.

And the split of that is about three quarters operating and a quarter capital.

Part of the reason for the big capital emphasis is we are about to engage in a $3 million parking lot project because for the 50 years of Jaunt, at no time have the assets been secured.

And so no bus of the 104 vehicles we own has ever been behind a fence.

And so fencing, lighting, new carwash, all of that will be a part of this new project that was approved by the state.

and so in the year we're in the way the budget process works and everybody's working on their new budget to the state right now because it's due February 1st.

We have 10 projects that are funded in the state budget and they're very specific to like size of the vehicle and types of equipment and you see that that software that I talked about is on there along with that micro transit conversion that we talked about with the demonstration grant.

Jaunt tries to be a great steward of the public dollars and so when we have our audited, fully audited numbers and our audit for FY25 is back and is completely clean, we come back to the board and recommend a strategy about returning excess capital to the localities.

And so on the February 10th meeting of the Jaunt board, I will recommend a strategy to return to the localities

about a million dollars in proportionate shares to what those localities contributed.

When we looked at how to build the budget for this year, we wanted to make sure that we thought about what are the services that are needed in the area and

Of course we have to think about do we have all of the right equipment and there have been some concerns about funding streams and how do we live within some of those concerns particularly with the 5311 pot.

We were the beneficiary through some great work with Grant who's a member of your board and team to have

Our vehicles in FY26 be funded through a pot of money from the feds called 5339, which is kind of agnostic on whether or not you're serving rural or urban or a blend, which did save the locality a considerable amount of money because then we were matching at 4% instead of 37%.

And in fact, since the state has been working so hard to extend

all of the available financial resources, they applied for a different pot of 5339 money that I understand will reduce some of the capital costs to 2% in the year ahead.

As we think about, you know, what else when you're running an organization do you have to consider in your new annual budget, we needed to look at what was driving some of those excess capital

When I was writing budgets for the city of Charlottesville, we always budgeted for attrition.

Gjaunt had never done that before.

Now we've implemented that policy.

I have the benefit, of course, of having Jacob, who's the county CFO, on as my treasurer and has been a good sounding board for some of the strategies I wanted to implement.

Right now, we've got a COLA in the budget that we put out to the seven localities of about three and a half percent.

We'll see how that holds as time goes forward.

I will say, you know, concern for all of us.

Our fringe benefits have been escalating every year.

Last year, we had to make a switch on health care.

to mitigate the circumstances of a projected 72% increase, and we were able to get that down to 27.

This year, because of a rate cap that we instituted, it's only seven and a half.

But in the future, we'll be looking towards perhaps

leveraging some legislation that went through that would allow us to be a part of the state benefit system because public service corporations were added just a couple years ago.

And then finally, like everybody else, what are the things that we might hope for?

Wishlist items.

We actually signed a contract today.

Our management of people resources was happening in four different platforms and we're consolidating that down to one.

The finance system at Jaunt has traditionally been Great Plains, which is getting phased out.

And so we will need a new software of record for finances.

I'll be asking the board in the excess capital conversation to upgrade our conference room technology.

Because we take phone reservations, it's really important that we have a fantastic phone system.

Ours is okay.

And so that's what that voiceover IP is.

We've been engaged with the University of Virginia because we've really grown

The ridership of our Connect routes about additional financial support for FY 27.

And for the first time since I've been with the organization, we've hired a communications professional and created a communication strategy.

So we'll be doing a lot more marketing because the biggest thing that keeps people from riding Jaunt is understanding how to and when they can.

So that new budget that I'm describing is a little bit less.

It's a pretty lean budget.

It's actually a million dollars less in total than the last year's budget.

And it holds the line really for the city of Charlottesville and Albemarle County in projected costs.

And no locality is experiencing an increase of more than 1.8% at this time.

How you can help as a board is, you know,

know about the long-standing partnership and support it.

Remember that whenever you look at a change in the CAT schedule or routes, that impacts Jaunt because we have to then extend ADA service to wherever CAT goes and beyond.

And when we're in this prioritization process, it's certainly my hope that I believe the strength of the region is that you have three providers

And as you are owners of Jaunt, we can be very responsive and think about, you know, how all of us can contribute to the new priorities.

Certainly invite you all as I am when I go around to the other jurisdictions to schedule time, come down to our depot, learn more about Jaunt, schedule a ride.

We'd be happy to make that happen anytime.

I believe we've already got a decision that we're going to be extending fare-free service, so I won't.

give you the long speech about how important that is and how much resource is put into collecting fares.

But I know Garland Williams will shake his head and agree with me and maybe even give a speech himself if we need to.

There's going to be some opportunities, of course, to advocate for transit dollars at the state level.

And we know that there is an expiring federal act for infrastructure

that we'll want to track and perhaps ask our state legislators to help with advocacy at some point.

And as we are going to plan for success and know that there will be many things to celebrate, we hope you'll join us along the way.

So that's really what I have.

I'm happy to answer questions.

Alright, thank you very much.

Before I open the floor, I would like to thank you again for the presentation and for the work you're doing, but I would like to ask some questions first.

If you could go back to the, I mean you don't have to share your screen again, we can all pull it up, but the Charlottesville Service Statistics page,

I know everybody in the region are people we care about, but my constituents directly.

Could you help me interpret some of the findings from that?

I can see straight up the passenger numbers are less.

Is that normal?

Are we concerned?

Are there outside factors that affect these numbers?

Well, when I look at the Charlottesville service, I don't see that passengers are less.

Right well you know that's a that's a tricky little area that is considered a desert and you see that it is down but in the scope of you know the 50,000 rides that are Charlottesville riders that's only you know what

A thousand of those rides per year and so that decrease there is of little concern to me because it's not in relationship to the overall ridership much of a concern at all.

Okay.

No, no, I mean the only red flag there is it is certainly taking more

Okay great thank you so much we can go around

Do you have like is there a map of kind of where your riders are coming from?

Yeah I would be very happy to share with you more of a heat map kind of thing.

Great.

Jen or Mike?

I don't have any questions.

OK.

I'm good.

OK. Great.

Thank you very much for that presentation.

Go ahead.

Do you want me to share?

Okay.

That's not the one.

Oh, there you go.

All right.

And I apologize.

I just woke up the puppy, so you're going to hear some screeching.

So Scott Silsdorf, University of Virginia, Parking and Transportation.

I wanted to highlight that first word there because

Parking is half of my job.

And on days like today, it feels like it's 90% of my job getting ready for this winter weather.

But I will briefly go over how parking and transportation... Come here, buddy.

Come here.

You're going to have to hold him.

My governance structure is very different from what a standard public transportation provider would have.

I'm a unit of the University of Virginia, so it's the Department of Parking and Transportation.

Come here, bud.

We're an auxiliary business service unit and I report up to the Senior Vice President for Operations who reports to JJ Davis who's the Executive Vice President and COO and ultimately the President of UVA.

So, buddy, quiet.

Pretty straightforward reporting structure.

Here's our org chart just in terms of a broad sense of what we do.

So there's about 20,000 parking spaces at UVA and 18 structures and over about 100 surface lots, parking permit sales and enforcement, and almost all the parking operations, but not all.

So don't talk to me about football or basketball or VAF parking, but most of the other parking is run by my organization.

But I'm here to talk about UTS, which is the top of the transportation side.

UTS is, of course, our fixed route services at the university, but we also do have on-demand, we do charter services, and we do some amount of paratransit, as well as a whole bunch of incentives I've presented before, or folks from my team have presented before, on Wahoo Commute, our new TDM.

We also manage the micromobility at the university.

And we have a plane.

So that's the transportation side of the business.

Let's see.

We started as a student effort in 1971 was the outreach to solve the growing parking problems on the grounds of the university.

A temporary busing solution was proposed.

We have a couple of great articles in the archives about how students really kind of stepped up and were the first bus drivers, the first mechanics and the first folks doing all the work.

But as the next slide shows, we've changed a lot since then.

We now have over about 130 folks on the transportation side of the department.

And really, if you see the student drivers that have the CDL, that's only about 20% of our total drivers.

So we're really much more of a full-time, part-time driver with management supervisors and others kind of rounding us out.

So pretty large organization now.

Also couldn't be more different than when it comes to revenue sources.

So half of our funding basically comes from a mandatory student fee.

It is a component of a mandatory comprehensive fee that all students at the university, whether they're undergraduate or graduates, pay.

So you can see there the annual cost for a student, that's a fall and a spring combined, is about $278.

But if the students take either the summer session or January sessions, there's additional costs for that.

That amounts up to about half of our funding.

University of Virginia Health is also one of our key, basically like a charter, but we have a separate operations arrangement with them where we have a flat rate that we pay for all the service hours that we provide.

And essentially the health service runs kind of that last mile from parking, offsite parking into the university medical center.

We also have bus charters and fuel sales throughout the university.

Total budget for the year for last year was about $12.2 million.

That's what that amounts to.

And I should also state that that includes capital.

So we set aside capital funds within our overall budget.

We don't treat it separately.

We don't have separate funding sources.

All of this, though, is considered an auxiliary funded operation.

So we basically have to cover our own costs through the service charges that we charge folks for our services.

Here's a picture of our fleet.

We're up to about 44 vehicles now on the transit side.

This doesn't include on-demand, but we're all gilligs, almost all diesel.

Our electrics are almost two recent acquisitions.

The Carson's, EGS are those cute white little mini transit buses that we've talked about before at RTP.

We had five of those arrive last year.

and we in August received four of our battery electric buses that are Gillig 35-footers and actually just this week we started placing them into service so we have 44 vehicles in our fleet all together going back to 2012.

Our service types are also a little bit different than a standard public transportation provider because we are very student and university focused.

So full service means students are on grounds, classes are in sessions, health system is working, weekend service is sort of the supplement to that, still managing to student needs on grounds.

Exam service is slightly less frequent, slightly different service routes, but the students are still here.

Recess, generally the summer when folks go away, we still have to provide services for faculty, staff.

And then we have another service type called health service, which is really just in that weird time of the year, December, where the university is technically shut down, but the health system is still operating.

And so we have to provide services for our health team members that need to get into the medical center.

And if that was too many words, here it is in colors.

Basically, green is maximum service, red is no service.

Kendall might have reported this out at the RTP meeting in November.

December is our interesting month because we basically cover all six of our service types in that one month of December.

We go from full service to no service to recess, weekends, and health system only.

So December is a little bit crazy.

But as you can see, the summers are our quiet months.

May through August are the days that we do the least amount of service.

I apologize this doesn't zoom out far enough to show the full extent of our routes, but I think everybody on the call knows where UVA is.

We're on the western side of the city into the county.

Most of our routes basically go right around central grounds.

They cover both on grounds and off grounds primary student housing areas.

We do go to Barracks Road Shopping Center.

That route is the Gold Line, which some of it is shown here.

That's basically our farthest north extent of our current fixed route service.

ridership for unlinked passenger trips.

For last year, we had 2.2 million passengers.

This is just on the fixed route.

So this doesn't include charters.

Our largest single route, although I lumped a few together, is the service that we provide to the health systems.

And that's just where we've got a bus coming up just about every three minutes to pick up people in parking lots or the parking garages and get them to the medical center.

That's the red, the blue, but we also have clinic services in there as well.

University Transit Service does not operate the other buses that you might see, the UVA health system buses that operate between Fontaine Research Park, Northridge Medical Center.

They also circulate around the medical center.

Currently, that's run by the health system.

Those are just the lines for our fixed route services.

And then our night pilot, which I'll get to in a second for another time service.

That's our dedicated central grounds kind of loop between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.

So beginning at 10 p.m., we also offer on-demand service.

This is the one service that's actually not completely open to the public.

All of our fixed route services are open to the public.

Anyone can ride them.

But on-demand, we use Transloc as the software and you do have to authenticate to request and get on board.

But our on-demand services operate from 10 p.m. until about 5 a.m., depending on the service type that we're running.

We use many, many vans and full-size vans.

And there's our numbers for 25.

We did 33,000 passenger trips.

Probably not surprising.

Monday night is the quiet night.

We only have an average of about 84 trips on a Monday night.

Saturday night's the big night.

That's 156.

Here's a picture of the way that works.

So the blue circles and the pink circles are sort of our hubs.

And these are not all of them, but these are the ones close into our night pilot service, which is shown there in the black line.

So that black line is fixed route service that goes 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. And then the on-demand is supplementing it during that time and then replacing it after that time until 5 a.m.

Charter services, probably not surprising, our biggest groups are student grant orientation, graduation, basketball and football fan shuttles.

Last year was a pretty good year for us in riderships.

We had 72,000 total passengers on our charter services.

I think we were asked to talk about operations planning and this is also kind of unique for us so we do an annual customer survey that we do in March and April goes to as many different of our user types as we can so students, faculty, staff, health system members and then we take that data and we try and figure out okay what are they asking for what are the changes we need to make headways

We also have about three or four now different advisory committees that feed input to us.

We have Student Council is a big one.

I have a broader Parking and Transportation Advisory Committee and that has members of say the Faculty Senate, the Staff Senate,

and there are actually two advisory committees that represent UVA Health.

There's a Medical Center Employee Council and there is a separate Parking and Transportation Committee focused on UVA Health team members.

So there's a lot of feedback that comes to us that we use to tweak how we operate our services and where we go and what we do.

Land use changes in development, everything that changes at UVA results in some sort of a consideration of an operational route change.

And so like Fontaine Research Park going through a major capital construction project right now, that's what this image shows.

The Emmett and Ivy Corridor will be another one that will affect our routes.

We're building a new parking garage at the north grounds across from JPJ and Palmer Park, the softball field.

And that will actually be a transit hub for us for our commuter services to central grounds.

So that will have some operational changes as well.

Detours and construction, winter weather affects our operations.

And then lastly, what we do for emergency operations is kind of unique for the university.

We've been asked multiple times to do some rather unique

transportation services during emergency operations.

And so we stand by to partner with our university in that way as well.

Purple Line, this is just a real quick hard and fast example of a change of a route that didn't exist and now is going to exist.

This will start on March the 9th.

This is to feed commuters that will be working at the medical center, but parking at Fontaine Research Park.

And although this says 2.30 PM to 8 PM, we'll actually be operating it from 7 AM until 8 PM.

This is just a representation of what it will do at 2.30.

But it does kind of show, this is that sort of last mile that we do,

So we have every day about 800 to 1,000 folks who park on the west side of Scott Stadium.

Some of them walk to the medical center from there, but a whole bunch get on buses that are currently called the Red Line.

And then the new service will be the folks moving out of the Emmett and Ivy garage and into the Fontaine garage and getting on this purple line that will be at Fontaine Research Park.

And so basically, we'll be picking up both locations and dropping off at both locations throughout the day.

work plan really briefly and this is just our zero emission going to a zero emission fleet.

This was a kind of a timeline of some of the key things that have happened over the last few years with that.

I think I started

Two or three days after Proterra announced their bankruptcy.

So it was a kind of a nice entrance to the transit operations at UVA.

But here are some of the things that we've accomplished since then and are working towards a fleet transition.

That's the back end, if you don't recognize, of a battery electric bus.

So those are those two big silver panels are two of the seven buses on one of our new Gillig electric buses.

And then, as I said before, we got these mini transit buses last year.

They're 10-seat fixed seats, two flip-down seats.

We've been using them very successfully on various routes across grounds, most often the Silver Line, which kind of feeds throughout the day from JPJ into the medical center and central grounds.

We also used them last summer to do some parking shuffling for the orthopedic center.

Last thing, this is really probably our biggest focus for this fiscal year is enhancing our paratransit services.

So we're going to be launching in next school year a UTS-branded paratransit service to complement the UTS service that we operate right now.

We do have what we call DART currently.

and we'll be looking at either enhancing or replacing that service but it's coordinated screening and assignment will be done through the Student Disabilities and Activities or Accessibility Council.

We'll be doing acquiring more accessible vehicles but we'll be using UTS drivers and UTS dispatch for customer service.

And I think that was the last slide.

So that's kind of a really quick overview of our

primarily UTS services.

All right.

Does anybody need the slideshow to stay up as they ask questions?

No.

All right.

I know we've got at least one former UTS driver on the call.

At least a couple of former UTS riders.

So we do appreciate this.

I say that actually a lot with our medical teams talking about the service we provide for UVA Health.

I know you all want to drive and you don't want to ride the bus, but could you imagine, I mean, every one of those buses has 30 passengers on it, 30 more cars every two minutes on down JPA and down Stadium Road.

That is a challenge.

And I just took notes.

No major question.

March 9th, yeah.

So essentially, currently we have a red line and a blue line.

The red line is the one that services Scott Stadium, the west side of Scott Stadium straight to the Medical Center.

And the blue line goes from Emmett and Ivy Garage over to the Medical Center.

So both of those lines will be sort of consolidated into the purple line.

And so

That is a time-based service, so for folks who arrive between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m., they park at Scott Stadium, which is currently the red line, but basically means the purple line between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. will be pretty short, or will go from Scott Stadium to the Medical Center.

Interesting.

Okay.

That's cool.

That's a fun fact.

I did.

I'm so curious how staffing is going with like you have an odd schedule in the summer and you're not needed so much and then we're going to start paratransit.

And yeah, what's that look like?

It's a constant struggle to keep people engaged.

Currently, though, we are fully staffed.

We have some pretty tight requirements in terms of, you know, like for our part time drivers, they still have to do a lot of our special events.

But we've been successful at doing it.

The students kind of help round that out.

We push a lot of vacation time to the summer when our full time drivers aren't needed quite as much.

But that's it in a nutshell.

Mike?

Jen's question just kind of made me reflect, you know, both the city and the county's school system have had struggles in recent years, sometimes retaining a full complement.

of qualified drivers for our transit systems.

It sounds like that wasn't happening simultaneously at the same degree with UTS.

I mean, I've only been here three years, so this is my third year actually.

We were definitely coming out of a, hey, we couldn't quite staff things, but things have gotten better since then.

So I know coming out of COVID, it was very challenging to get the right level of staffing to do what we needed to do, but things are better now.

And we're hoping that they stay that way.

There's no signs of it turning back, so that's good.

We try to be adaptable.

One of the reasons we pulled on-demand services in-house was we realized, well, why are we using a vendor to provide the staffing when we can have more opportunities for students or maybe drivers that don't have a CDL?

That's nice because we now have two tiers of drivers.

the non-CDL drivers that are doing on-demand and will be doing the paratransit that helps us attract I think a broader pool and it kind of also shows hey you could start without the CDL and get your CDL and then do you know get paid more plus do more so

I think we're just trying to be as creative as possible.

And then I will quickly point out we've been super happy with a program, Pipelines and Pathways, which we've used I think three times now for first our on demand, well first our, we did it in partnership with CAT for the fixed route drivers when I started in 23.

but we used it again to pull the on-demand drivers in-house and we just finished a program that we called Fleet Keepers and it was targeted towards part-time only support folks so to help us do better cleaning and maintenance of the vehicles.

These are folks who don't have CDLs that won't be driving the buses but will help us wash the buses

empty the trash, post advertisements inside, sort of the fleet support stuff.

So we're calling them fleet keepers, but all three of those programs were done with pipelines and pathways and partnership to kind of broaden the pool of applicants.

Nice.

If I could jump in real quick before I get to Sally.

And it used to be they would call a cab and get reimbursed.

Is that

We're going to see how the staffing works out because I mean we think we can we're basically taking that the model for on-demand at night and applying that during the day but we also think that the demand may be higher so we're sort of trying to be as flexible as possible with that.

We're literally just starting to make the postings for the positions, and this is to target August, so we're just getting to that point.

Okay, thank you.

I just had a question about more like the bikes and scooter riders since that was also under UTS.

Do you have any kind of idea how that's going?

How many people are using them?

Well, I mean, we definitely, and that's another feature of our new parking garage.

We're going to build our first bike focused, I think we were calling it, gosh, just went out of my head, Wahoo Wheels Bike Garage.

Yes, Wahoo Wheels Bike Garage.

So we'll have like,

This is a basically indoor space where staff, hopefully students and others, can come and learn how to fix bikes and use them, promote safety like helmet wearing, how to lock bikes up properly, check your air, your brakes, your cables, basic stuff just for basic maintenance.

Full-time person currently with, it depends on the level of interest and the level of academics, student support that comes in and help with promoting that.

But we do a lot of cross promotions with Ben's group there at the city to kind of encourage safe riding and more riding.

All right.

Quick question about that, if Sally are you...

OK, thanks.

So right at the intersection of Massey and Copley, or if you go to JPJ, you can't miss the garage.

It's actually it looks like it's ready to open, but it's going to take another eight or nine months to get all those precast are up.

But now is the fun stuff, the electrical, the fire suppression, the elevators, et cetera.

It's kind of collaborative, but yeah, I'm probably about as most in charge of bike racks at UVA as any one person would claim.

But yes, we work with the grounds committee, so the Office of the Architect, we work with facilities management as well.

But in terms of placement, recommendations, yes.

And cutting locks when bikes have been abandoned.

In fact, we just revised both of our minor revisions, but two university policies related to bikes and e-bikes and scooters were just recently updated.

Okay, cool, thanks.

Alright, if that is everything for this section, we are still on time.

So, I know we just heard from Jaunt and UTS, but now it is the Roundtable Transit Agency updates portion of the evening.

Thank you.

I'm going to start off with schools.

So over the December holiday, we took advantage of that and got most of our folks trained.

95% of our operators were trained, all of our supervision.

We have two battery electric school buses.

The first day they went into service was actually the Friday.

I think that's the 16th.

Then they use it in the morning and then I don't think it was able to take the charge.

We had some charger issues in that afternoon.

Worked through some of that on the 20th.

We deployed both of them again.

and then we had an accident with one of them.

Knocked the mirror off, so it's actually in fleet, but it should be, there's no timeline, but we're anticipating probably in the next two weeks, getting the vehicle back.

Chargers are having some issues with the freezing temperatures, but we're working through it.

They're scheduled to do AM and PM trips, so we're incorporating them.

Greenbrier, Ivy Creek, we've used it on both of those

On the transit side,

We're all in the middle of developing and finishing tweaking all of our budgets, working through a number of issues of trying to get a handle on how much money we're going to continue to ask for amenities requests for FY 27.

We still need to make a decision on whether we're going to continue to go down the path to

by any more battery electric vehicles.

We have two that will be here in May of this year.

The two more we just got the quote from Gillick, so we're anticipating being able to get a PO out the door by February 1st.

which means it would be 24 months they've told us exactly before we'd be able to get the next two and if we're authorized to put in a submission for additional two that would be the six is what we had originally planned as for the pilot if not then we can actually shift gears and whether it's

Diesel, we just need to know so we can make our request to the state for roll a stop for 27 going forward.

That's kind of it for now.

Anyone?

All right.

Yeah.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Who's next?

Right.

I mean, you know, we're in transit.

Nothing's bigger than that weather right now.

People have been talking about it all week.

And we'll see how lasting the impacts will be.

Garland and I, and maybe others of you, were planning on being in Richmond all day on Monday for the Transit Legislative Day, which has now been postponed for a week.

So for our elected officials who might be interested in that, there will be events most of the day on February 2nd instead of January 26th.

As I said during my presentation, you know, we prepare seven local government budgets.

They're all in now.

I'm making the rounds.

I've made presentations to Charlottesville and Flubana thus far.

We are fortunate to, from a administrative side, be the most fully staffed we've been since the two years that I've joined Jaunt.

Over in that spectator area is my new chief of operations and we have a safety person and as I said, we've hired a communications person for the first time since I've joined.

So really happy with the team we've assembled.

We've been onboarding some new drivers and as Scott talked about, I just had a couple of our non-CDL drivers go up to Winchester and pass their CDL just yesterday.

Pretty exciting when that happens for folks.

Last thing is just to reiterate that we have a board meeting on February 10th.

Great.

Thank you so much.

Not much more to report.

I mean, I think the two things I said that are our focus are we're getting real world experience with the battery electrics.

They're now in service.

If you want to see them, they're solid.

If the minibuses were white, look for the big blue whales because they're bigger and they're just solid blue.

So

They are on the Gold Line and we tend to have them only operating when the mechanics are here.

Not that we're having any mechanical issues with them, but we just want to play it safe and make sure that we are following our procedures.

But they're on the Gold Line, which basically goes up and back between Barracks Road Shopping Center and Central Grounds and Observatory Hill.

Hop on board and rag one.

You can track it on the Transloc app.

I think I shared this info before.

It's the unit numbers that start with 25.

If you see a bus 25, that's one of our B's because those are the only buses we bought in 2025.

Great.

Thanks.

And not to bring down that exciting announcement, but I am interested in seeing what happens to the conditions of the road with the additional weight and how that's going to affect that piece of the infrastructure.

Okay, thank you so much.

Any quick questions before we move on to Lucinda?

Thank you so much, Lucinda.

Okay, great.

Thanks, Lucinda.

Awesome.

Well, good evening.

I will do my best to keep you on schedule, but I am here this evening to give you an update on the prioritization and implementation study, which has already come up on this evening's agenda and conversation.

Let me see if I can.

That's my slides.

So just as a reminder, the scope of work for the study is to develop an implementation plan that looks at the recommendations that came out of the Regional Transit Vision Plan in 2022, but also looks at recommendations from other studies that have been done throughout the region.

There are actually over 20 studies that we're pulling recommendations from.

So pulling all that information together, identifying cost in a common year for those services, and then coming up with some feasible short and mid and long-term timelines and strategies for implementation.

We'll talk about kind of next steps and schedule in a minute,

But I wanted to put a fine point on something I heard earlier this evening.

We're very much aware that you are waiting for this information to put together a legislative strategy for the 2027 General Assembly session.

So we've jumped in, we're doing as many things as we can at the same time to be able to have more of an implementation plan

a discussion over the summer and then bring you a draft final plan for approval in the early fall.

So that's where we're going, but where are we now?

Task one of the study is to pull all of this information out of the existing plans and work on prioritization.

That's the two blocks on the left of your screen.

We are working on both of those concurrently, again, trying to maximize the amount of time that we have to get

This study completed for you.

Those two tasks will really happen over the next three or four months.

We've got a robust stakeholder engagement strategy working with Lucinda and Taylor and the staff at TJPDC to pull together who those key stakeholders are and how best to engage them over the life of the study.

Probably the biggest thing that you guys want to talk about is how are we going to put together the prioritization methodology and what's that going to look like in terms of developing, pulling out what's really important to each of the individual jurisdictions, the agencies, the transit providers, the community.

So we're starting hopefully this month we're having some trouble getting some of these individual interviews on the calendar so January is running out pretty quickly but we're planning to have a couple of small interviews focus groups with with city county and regional staff to kind of start the conversation around you know what's important and how can we prioritize this very long list of potential projects

We're targeting late February for a larger group session to talk about potential elements of prioritization with those folks in those original interviews, but a much broader group of stakeholders really brainstorming what is possible before we bring that to the CARTA Transit Work Group in early March and to you for your March meeting.

So that'll be a

Your next meeting will have a big meaty deliverable to dive into with you.

And then in April, we will take all that feedback that we get from you and we'll continue to update and make modifications to that prioritization methodology so that we can then start working on the implementation strategy.

So in terms of next steps, the things that are on our plate right now, we're updating those service recommendations.

We've sent project lists out to be reviewed by the transit agencies and by the local government staff.

We'll be updating those recommendations to reflect a common year of analysis.

Some of those studies were done at different times and they have different assumptions.

We want to be able to compare everything with the common assumption year 2030 that's preparing for prioritization.

We expect to complete that probably over the next 45 days or so.

And then, as I mentioned already, we're going to discuss regional priorities with key stakeholders to start

pulling together that prioritization methodology in February and then have that discussion with the CARTA board in March before we really start getting into that implementation plan over the summer.

All right, would anyone,

If, instead of going around the room, if anyone has a question, raise your hand.

Okay.

Yeah.

I like difficult questions that helps us make a better product for you that reflects your priorities and needs.

Okay.

Thank you.

I think we're all looking for the meteor packet in February.

All right.

Well, if I have to do another, what comment are we,

Sorry, let me scroll back up to the top of my doc just to make sure we've got everything clear.

Okay.

So if no further questions, comments, or concerns from anybody, do I have a motion to adjourn?

All right.

Then our first CARTA meeting of 2026 is hereby adjourned.

Thanks so much, everybody.

Stay warm this weekend.

Good luck.

I'm sure we'll