Charlottesville Albemarle Regional Transit Authority Meeting   6/5/2026

Do we have to follow up?

No, I don't think so.

But we'll just jump ahead to introductions and then start.

I am Mike Murphy and I am the CEO of JAWS.

Scott Silsdorf, executive director for the Sparky and transportation is immediately.

James Freestlepping, city manager for St. Charlottesville.

Natalie Oschrin, city council, city of Charlottesville.

Mike Pruitt, board of supervisors at Bob Cowen.

Sally Duncan, Board of Supervisors, Albemarle County, Grant Sparks, Director of Statewide Transit Programs, DRPT, Maria Zimmerman, the Director of the Department of Rail and Public Transportation, Ann Wall, and I serve as Deputy County Executive, Albemarle County, Taylor Lowery, Director of Transportation at the Thomas Jefferson Planning Division, Lucinda Shannon, Senior Regional Planner at the Bokeh JPDC, Gretchen, Christine, okay,

There's Christine, we miss Christine.

Christine Jacobs, Executive Director, Townshend.

Yeah, I am Gretchen Thomas, the Administrative Assistant at CJPDC.

Katie Keeler, Director of the University of New York City.

Ted Parsons, the Executive Director, Central Division Education, David Blount, Deputy Director and Director of Legislative Services, TJPDC, Sarah Minton, Program Manager for the Rideshare, our commuter assistance program.

And we would like to welcome our

Thank you for joining us.

Do we have one attendee online?

And anybody online, if you would like to speak, you can raise your hand now using the raise your hand button at the bottom of your screen.

Thank you very much.

I'll share this screen.

Yes, they really do.

So fuel to sales tax at work.

And it's just the same thing.

I'd be happy to take questions if there's time, or we can take a hold.

Sure.

Yes.

So be happy to share that if that's of interest afterwards, I can certainly send a link to that.

I think I was not engaged at that point.

And I think from what I recall, in our case, the administrators, the county administrators, the city manager of Richmond were all playing critical roles in, maybe not in drafting the legislation, but at least understanding what the key parts are going to be.

So, it's interesting that you're saying that they were involved but maybe not involved in the drafting role.

I mean, obviously there's staff engaged and, you know, people that would actually be writing it, but they all, they all were aware of what was happening.

I think it's a sale.

And that's a big part of it in terms of comfort, familiarity, you know, understanding how the regional process works.

Wait, what do you mean by footprint?

Our authority is the same members as our MPO and as the PTC.

Am I correct that we can't include green currently?

I think that would be beneficial.

And then we're going to see palliative growth starting to go east-west into a new kind of trial situation popular.

Is that providing any amount of concern or

Because otherwise the downside is we don't exist.

Can you talk a little about the ownership of the roads since you deal with the roads?

So, for the most part, the ownership in RICO and the city are doing more of themselves than it would have known of us.

No.

I mean, it's not a new thing for them to maintain their rights.

Okay, I will open the floor to anyone else to make a question.

I believe it was really just following the engineering terms.

It's very similar terms with the negative.

It wasn't very moving up.

Thank you.

But does being able to leverage funds, does that speed up your project process?

So I think the answer is it depends, but we should be seeing more good data over the next couple of years in terms of project advancement and how quickly we can get things out the door, just as it starts to get into the scheduler.

As somebody who's running a transportation authority, you might give us some insight as to what you think might be different if the only enablement is around a transit authority.

So, I mean, you all would be the experts on this region in New England.

You know, what the limitations of our current would go to make, enablement for sure.

Got another question, Shane.

No, there was a lot.

And then following that, we were able to have some flexibility of time to develop our data measures and application tools and all those things.

Was there a community desire to see that project go through, which really pushed the General Assembly to be able to create the authority to be able to fund it?

Let's, let's put something there.

All right.

I should also mention here that the CMTF, and Maria please correct me if I'm wrong here, I believe annually we get roughly 650 million-ish in CMTF revenues.

A little bit more, but that's close enough.

Okay, so that was state funding.

Just thought I'd do the math there.

The ones that I'm going to talk to you about here today are the 5307 Urbanized Area Formula Funds, the 5339 Bus and Bus Facilities Funds, as well as the 5311 Rural Area Formula Funds.

When they give us money, they're helping us out.

But there is this financial incentive baked into the federal regs to perform better.

Is that number for the Fredericksburg passenger miles for vehicle revenue an hour accurate?

So with that, I know that was a ton of just information about our funding programs and data, but I'm more than happy to answer any questions if you don't.

Any more questions?

I have a question.

In what context?

pure public transportation, but there's some programs that kind of are truly multi-modal in nature and small scale programs.

So that's a little bit of new territory for us, but I just want to know, like, I don't think we should so tightly always constrain what we mean by transit because transit, by nature, runs in a multimodal universe, right?

We're not doing a big highway wide data road expansion, so we'd love to build a bike share docked program that's going to cost several millions of dollars we don't have.

But if there's bike share that is a direct nexus to transit, yes, we're, we're talking exactly about that kind of thing.

I think it would, um,

Is it like not enough to move the needle or

So it's, it's not a whole lot.

But there has been some shift of programs that have grown out of rural into small urban or lost population and went from small.

So our reporting relationship with them becomes different depending on the designation.

We're snitch over time.

So we can just kind of start to think about using the space to say, where are we and where should we be going?

Everyone.

for transit providers and for localities, specifically those that are interested in expanding transit within the region.

So we look forward to working with you this year and over the next several years.

But the acknowledgement, the awareness that is beyond that is... And we'll be working with the Department of Housing and Community Development on that work too.

Cool.

What's the timeline for this?

So how do we think about with housing, but also how do we think about all elements?

Anyone else want to?

Can you speak a little bit for CVTA and if you can focus on the transit piece of the authority, can you speak a little bit to the initial engagement of your rural jurisdictions to where it is now, kind of like the evolution of how that's progressed through CVTA?

Can I be blunt?

Absolutely.

We need to figure out if there's any way to be more flexible with that funding and give, especially the rural localities, some freedom to make more choices in terms of how they can utilize those tax revenues.

Do those jurisdictions all have some level of service by transit agency prior to... No.

Yes.

I'll keep going.

I think yes.

I think that the language is actually provision of regional public transportation.

I think that's probably the case across the board.

So yeah, that's a very real issue.

Or can I say, can that money support scenarios there?

Yes.

What did you do with the cases with that 50% maintenance of effort, if they were already contributing to some level of transit service?

Batching funds for

I would just assume that they couldn't do it.

If they weren't providing any already, there's no.

There's no part of the funding beyond that.

really leverage the power of the state programs to really make those CBTA funds go as far as possible, which is a good model.

from us so that we're not just asking you guys questions.

Not that you maybe have an answer, but that's a question I keep in with, and I'm still like, how are you all going to approach that?

Service level is not as intense as in some of our other community areas, but that debate is probably because I'm constantly thinking

Because we already exist.

And you really have to meet that mindset with things that really are going to make sense and sell them.

at a larger level or thinking about the challenges we face in the system and why that isn't where we can put the scale anywhere just because that cost from ION fixed the coverage so much.

I mean, it's large.

So they don't, I mean, they have planning level estimates.

We did the original BRT process, it was like 46 million dollars.

Yeah, very reasonable cost considering the length of it, yes.

Yeah, very cool.

I mean, it is wise when you look at like what they can do in Spain versus what they can do here, and they have unions there too, and it's just, they're all, you know, they're a gradual boost of regulation.

I don't know why transit numbers are exploding the way they are.

Yeah, pretty crazy.

We're going to have a blitz through these transitions now.

My son's graduating from high school.

It's really important.

Thank you.

If I can just interject for both of your comments.

And when it's taken a long time to get these projects, we're not seeing the results that everyone's expecting with the investment we're making.

We made an invitation to you so whatever you want to say.

Well, we were talking about a joint Jaunt, CAT visit, so.

You can come anytime you want.

And I'm happy to invite you to grounds as well to see what we do and what we do.

Sounds great.

because the reason why I put DRPT in the room is that the city of Charlottesville won the Disney City Bike Challenge and it's super exciting for all of us at the city and those of us who know about the city and our bikes so thank you so much for putting that on it was it's great fun and

And we also have extra service for running up to DC for the big firework extravaganza.

We'd be happy to work with you all to help promote that promotion and get more folks off the road onto the bus.

We really appreciate you all coming.

This is really a wonderful meeting.

Thank you for spending so much time with us.

This is very, very, very helpful.

Thank you all.

But it was meant to profit.