MPO Policy Board Meeting   12/7/2021

Let me pull it up, pulling up the electronic notice.

Notice of electronic meeting due to COVID-19 state of emergency.

This meeting of the Charlottesville Albemarle Metropolitan Planning Organization is being held pursuant to Code of Virginia 2.2-3708.2, which allows a public body to hold electronic meetings in the locality in which it is located as declared a local state of emergency.

And the catastrophic nature of the emergency makes it impractical or unsafe to assemble a quorum in a single location.

And the purpose of the meeting is to provide for the discharge of its lawful purposes, duties, and responsibilities.

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

There will be an opportunity for public comment during that portion of the agenda.

Notice has been provided to the public through the TJPDC offices, to the media website posting an agenda.

The meeting minutes will reflect the nature of the emergency.

The meeting was held by electronic communication means and the type of electronic communication means by which the meeting was held.

A recording of the meeting will be posted at www.tjpdc.org within 10 days of the meeting.

I will move on to matters from the public.

I'll open public comment now.

If there's anyone from the public who would like to speak, you can raise your hand icon in the Zoom webinar.

Sure, the first item I would like to address is we have two staff updates.

One of them is on the agenda, the second one is not.

So we have an update on a change in JOT staff and then a change in the VDOT staff.

Thank you.

So it's my pleasure to introduce you to Ted Rieck, who is our new CEO at John.

He just started this past Monday, and he comes from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Years of experience in transit.

And I'll let him take it from here, but please give him a warm welcome.

Yeah, hello everybody.

I wish we could meet in person, but obviously circumstances don't allow that.

Really happy to be here in Charlottesville.

As you all know, this is a great community and a great part of the country.

So I'm happy to be here.

Welcome, Ted.

Thank you, Karen and Stacy.

OK, great.

I'd like to introduce Sean Nelson.

He is Culpeper's new district engineer as of, I guess, mid-October.

Sean is not new to the department.

He's been with VDOT for about 17 years, most recently out of our Richmond district, but he also

worked in Fredericksburg for a time and an acting capacity in Hampton Roads and even years ago back in Culpeper District in our materials section.

So we're glad to have Sean back.

He is from Louisa County.

He and his family live there now.

He's a licensed engineer in Virginia, went to ODU and we've known each other the better part of my 10 years at VDOT.

So I'm certainly glad to have him here on Culpeper's team and

Wow, Stacy, I can't believe you remember all that stuff.

That's pretty good.

But no, thank you, Stacy.

I'm glad to be a part of this team here.

Culpepper's got a great team.

I look forward to continuing to keep things going the way John Lynch did and just hold the steering wheel and carry us into the future.

So I appreciate being here and plan to be an active participant.

Welcome to both of you.

I just wanted to go ahead and update you all on the return to in-person meetings.

We will be meeting electronically in January, and I have to apologize, we were not able to

to find the exact date that the current Charlottesville state of emergency is expected to end, barring that it is not extended for a period longer.

I think it's March 22nd.

I can nail that down for you.

Well, once we confirm that, we'll know whether or not we will tentatively be planning on resuming in-person meetings in March or whether our meeting in March will be also held electronically in the same format.

But in January, we will continue to meet electronically.

On to acceptance of the agenda.

A second?

Second.

All right.

All those in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed?

All right.

The motion passes.

onto approval of September 22nd, 2021 meeting minutes.

All those in favor?

Aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

The motion passes and the minutes are approved.

Yeah, Mr. Payne, as we discussed a little bit ahead of time, just so you understand the process, the bylaws for the MPA policy board state that the chair shall appoint a nominating committee to nominate officers at their first meeting after January 1st.

So tonight we have asked Mr. Payne to go ahead and make that appointment for the nominating committee.

The nominating committee will reach out to the eligible committee members to determine interest in serving as the chair and vice chair.

Sure.

And my understanding is Julia Monteith and Wood Hudson had been reached out to and agreed to serve on the committee.

So I would appoint both of them unless there's any objection.

I'm glad to help if it's necessary.

Now, Sandy, here's my question for you.

Is it written policy or just custom that we have gone back and forth between city and county electives since 2000 anyway?

I don't believe it is written policy.

I believe it's just what we have done.

And both County will not have their, will not know who their people are probably until mid January.

So this will have to be sort of a hurry up at the sort of middle of January to make any nominations.

Once the new representatives, if there are any, are chosen.

I suppose I would point to Supervisor Malek as the third person for the committee.

Is there anything else necessary?

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you.

I just wanted to spend a little bit of time going through where we are as far as getting through our work program for FY22 and going through where we are as our budget is concerned.

As many of you know, we have had

A bit of a staffing shortage at the PDC since the beginning of that fiscal year and what that means is that we've really had to prioritize which projects and programs we have been able to pursue while we work to fill those vacant positions.

So we've had to really focus on the things that are most urgent, things like smart scale, things like meeting our federal requirements, things that were already in process, like the North 29 corridor study.

I wanted to make sure that we are being completely transparent and open about where we are because there are some things in the work program that we haven't been able to move forward on at this point and make sure that you all know that we are keeping a very close eye on these.

We know that all of these items that were identified on the work program are things that are important to you all in your localities.

So what we've done, like I said, is we're focusing on making sure that we're moving existing initiatives forward.

So we are moving the SmartScale projects forward.

We are participating in the VDOT process for the pipeline.

studies that they're doing to prepare smart scale applications.

We are making sure that we are preparing for things like our long range transportation plan and that we're going to be able to do a good job with that.

It does mean that there are some projects that we just haven't been able to pursue for right now, like focusing on how we can better integrate climate action initiatives into our long range transportation planning process.

So what we're doing is we're looking for other opportunities to

Make sure that we are still moving those initiatives forward, just maybe not utilizing our staff time to do those at this point.

So we have applied for the

for the grant for technical assistance to help us develop some performance measures that would include evaluating project impacts on climate action initiatives as we go through our long range transportation plan to help us develop a methodology so we can consider that as part of our project development.

It also means though that we're not likely to be able to program the $25,000 if you recall that we had programmed for kind of to be determined later.

And that brings us to the next point that I wanted to mention is that we had initially reached out to several consultants regarding the

strategic plan that we were hoping to have developed for the MPO.

And we did not get responses.

And so I had reached out to a couple of the consultants that we had sent the solicitations to and got a little bit of feedback on that.

And I think

The private sector is experiencing a lot of the same constraints that the public sector is as far as limited capacity and for a variety of reasons.

The scale and the scope of our

strategic plan along with our proposed budget did not make it a very attractive project for the consultants to bid on.

So what we would propose is putting that $25,000 in unprogrammed funding towards the strategic plan to make that a little bit more of an attractive project for the consultants to want to respond to.

And that actually would help us catch up a little bit as far as our spending.

through the work program.

Today, well, through the first quarter, which ended in October, we were about $42,000 behind what we would have spent if we were spending consistently our entire MPO budget throughout

that first quarter.

So we do have some additional revenue compared to where we would normally be that has been unspent.

So we do have the resources and able to support that additional funding for the consultant.

Of course, we are working to hire additional staff.

We recently hired a planner one, so we're excited to get her plugged in working on the MPO and we are continuing to try to advertise and hire for a transportation planner.

So we're working to fill those positions, but it's unlikely that we'll be able to catch up and complete the work program before the end of the year.

If we do end up not being able to spend that full budget, we have a plan for that as well.

We are able to roll over funding.

So in that case, we could put some of the funding over the next year or two that rolls over into the update of our long range transportation plan, potentially using consultants to support that effort.

We have some other plans that we think we could potentially support, either with our staff or with additional consultants.

support using those rollover funds.

So we're not concerned necessarily that we'll leave funding on the table to pursue initiatives.

It might just be that we have to reallocate when those initiatives are pursued outside of this fiscal year.

So I wanted to make sure that you all are aware of where we are, that you know where we are budget and work program wise.

And if you all would support putting some of that on call program funding that has been unprogrammed at this point towards the strategic plan, we can move forward with doing an amendment to the work program at our meeting in January.

Okay, so this makes me very nervous that we're going to turn over something as particular and local as our strategic planning to some consultant who probably has no familiarity with us at all.

And I don't see that as very good use of money, especially when we don't have a plan or staff to be able to carry out these things right now.

So we've been having the same interval since the year 2000.

That's when I began working with the chart committee then.

And there's been the same plan throughout the year, the federal and state obligations that we have.

And so I'm really in need of learning what the benefit would be to be talking about something in strategic planning when we could be

I was going to say, do you want me to respond, Mr. Payne, if I could?

Supervisor Maud, right now in the work plan, there already is a line item for a strategic plan to be completed by a consultant.

So that was already predetermined in the work plan.

So, I mean, the strategic plan may have been a reasonable benefit at $25,000, but is it going to be a benefit at $50,000?

That's what I would like to have comments upon and discussion about here.

And people are using COVID as a great excuse to jack up their prices, everything from gas to eggs.

So I don't know that we have to really necessarily fall for that.

And I may be just being ornery.

I would like other people to have something to say here.

I guess I would be curious to know, and maybe I should know this, but I don't.

The next last paragraph on the first page of the memorandum says, after seeking some initial feedback from consultants we reached out to, we believe that we did not allocate enough money to attract consultants to respond, given the limited staffing capacity being experienced across all sectors.

Do I infer from that that the consultants were saying,

We don't have the capacity to do the job that you're looking to do.

I think it's more of a matter of because there are staffing shortages, people are relying on consultants more, and so they have more opportunities to respond to proposals.

Okay.

So basically the feedback we got is that the scope was a little bit broad for the budget that we had proposed and so to them there wasn't enough of a margin for them to be able to assure that they could do the work when they had much more

Was there something about what we were asking them to do that was unusual or unique or more trouble?

We could potentially pursue that.

I do know though that it is a little bit innovative for an MPO to be seeking a strategic plan.

There aren't any others that I'm aware of within the state of Virginia that have strategic plans that have been developed.

I would be very supportive with the new year, with the new members, whoever they are, to budget a meeting to discuss all the issues that are involved in whatever we would anticipate getting out of this.

And I see no need for our MPO to be the poster child or the guinea pig to figure this out right now, not in times when

the delivery of the answers is gonna be challenged by their calls for other more expensive projects.

I guess two questions I have, is there a sense of,

without consultants, sort of what the, even just roughly delay on the timeline would be for it.

I think one of the reasons that we were moving towards using consultants is because our staffing is so limited right now.

And so it probably isn't something that we'd be able to complete this fiscal year.

We could certainly work a little bit on scoping out what it would look like if we did this internally to see what that timeline would be for our January meeting if you wanted to continue the discussion there.

As far as deliverables, there have been a lot of changes in sort of the processes and the planning that the state does over the last couple of years.

And I think one of the challenges we have as staff is really knowing how to

How to present opportunities to you all as the policy board.

How do we identify what's important and can we think of it on a longer term versus just year by year to better make sure that we are strategically building resources and

studies and the methodology that you all want the MPO to be pursuing over a course of time beyond just year by year.

So that's really what we were hoping that the strategic plan could do would be to help us really identify a longer term vision and opportunity, also taking into account some of the changes and how the state is supporting planning.

You know, regarding their pipeline processes and things like that.

No, just from a budgetary standpoint, I mean, certainly programming staff to get this done by the end of the fiscal year is highly unlikely.

We're already having a difficult time.

making sure that the other items in the work plan that were allocated for staff time are going to be completed.

I have actually a comment, if I may.

We had an interesting, some people here know that we're currently doing a master plan for UVA, which is called the grounds plan.

And we initially had planned to hire that consultant team in 2020.

We had gone through the whole RFPQ process.

And then we had the interviews a week before we were all sent home.

And so what we ended up having to do is put, and that was a lengthy process for us to queue up to, if you can imagine.

We ended up putting the project on hold until post COVID or post better understanding of COVID.

But one of the things that we did during that year is we did some enabling projects in-house that we felt that we were capable of doing to inform the plan.

And that lowered our

once we got to hiring the consultants and led us to come to the plan better informed.

And what we did was we segregated the work that we felt that we were going to have a better professional expertise with than consultants from the outside.

So I'm just saying that there might be a way to think about this a little bit differently.

Yes, thank you.

I think that that is a grand idea and perhaps early in the list

would be to have a formal presentation from our VDOT representatives about these changes, because that may save Chuck some phone time with me calling him and asking what's really going on, which would be very helpful.

And if there are significant changes that we all need to know about those, and we certainly don't need to pay somebody else to do our community outreach either.

We're all very capable of doing things like that.

So I think there's plenty of way to be able to

I have much more direct questions if they're already for an outside group once we have a discussion in the winter to figure out what we really benefit from rather than just another piece of paper that sits on the shelf.

That's my concern.

There have been plenty of those in other ways since 2000.

Well, it sounds like we should not move forward with making any changes to the unified planning work program at this point.

I'm getting the impression that that is not something that you would like us to pursue.

So we will probably discuss this amongst our staff and come up with some potential options moving forward.

And just one minute of follow up.

Sandy, you mentioned about how you wanted this strategic plan to be preparing

the agency for identifying new opportunities, et cetera.

I'm a firm believer in the community of the whole that the whole MPO and all of their staff, their county staffs and city staffs, et cetera, need to be in on that discussion.

That shouldn't be just something where the PDC staff is meeting in a small room with the VDOT people to know what's going on because it just means a lot more work for all of you when you have to translate it.

So I think that's just one example of these kind of learning experiences that can happen in upcoming meetings to help us all get up to snuff on what other communities are perhaps doing and what our opportunities are in that way.

I was just wondering, I was looking back at the scope of work from the meeting back in September and looking at things like development revision, mission statement, review of policy board, bylaws and policies, these kinds of things.

I would imagine that other MPOs, whether they've had a formal strategic plan or not, other MPOs surely have done these kinds of things.

Do we have access to what other MPOs have done?

For example, I've always been a great fan of bylaws.

If you want to give me five sets of bylaws that have worked in other places, I'm happy to take a look at them and see what we can do and come up with a set of bylaws that seems to work for us.

There may be other things like that that we can do that would take it off of the plate of the folks who would be coming in from the outside.

So yeah, we do have, we can't get a lot of this information from the other MPOs.

That's not really the problem, but the challenge is going to be more in terms of the capability of the staff to support this at this point and how much time we'll be able to put into doing that analysis.

But I think that's getting at Julia's point is some of those items we could probably go ahead and pursue.

I think that they have been reviewed now and then, certainly within the last five years.

And the public participation thing was just adopted or readopted last year.

So these are not things that have been languishing.

Certainly I think we're required to look over things every now and then to make sure that we're current.

So it's always, that'd be fine for all of us to study them some more.

Okay.

That's going to be me, Chuck Proctor from VDOT, Culpeper District Planning.

And let me share my screen to the presentation, and I'll go through it.

It's like 30 slides, so hopefully we'll go through it pretty quickly.

One second here.

All right, great.

Basically, every between every round of smart scale, we look for where there's opportunities to make improvements to the system, whether it's just changing a modifying some of the regulations a little bit to actually this is two changes to the scoring processes for ones for environmental and ones for land use.

And I'm just going to go through them for you.

So you understand that this is the same presentation I presented to the CTAC committee a couple weeks ago.

So I'm just going to present it to you.

The actual material was presented to the CTB back in October, and they're actually representing it today to the CTB for their consideration for next round of smart scale.

Basically, we're going to be talking about the environmental

factor and the land use factor.

The environmental factors broken down into two categories.

One's air quality and the other one's natural resources and cultural resources.

So the first one we're looking at environmental and over the history of smart scale, it's been changed a couple of times between round one and round two.

There was definitely some changes because

It has some significant impacts to some projects where they got all of their points from environmental.

They didn't really have any other needs.

So that was part of the reason for the correction between that round two and three, there wasn't any changes.

And then round three to four, they actually made some additional modifications to where they used E1 as a subtractive or E2 as a subtractive measure

because it's basically showing what your impacts are to resources and E-1 is looking at the air quality.

So they basically made those changes to it for that round.

For this round, what they're proposing to do is the current process looks at E-1, it's...

weighted at 100% where it was weighted 50-50 before with the E2.

And that's because the E2 measure became a negative value.

It's basically points are awarded based on the amount of trips that are non SUV trip, SOV trips based on a per capita basis.

The points are awarded based on your energy efficiency.

And that was one of the things they're going to change this time.

and it looks at freight and it's change in congestion means you don't have as much emissions from your freight.

So it basically would give you a percentage based on your larger percentage of larger vehicles.

And then the captured in the cost of other items in the scoring techniques.

So basically, these are the current method.

Basically, we look at these different factors.

One of the things they're doing this round is they're going to eliminate the special accommodation factor for hybrid vehicles.

But these other factors will remain the same and that you get points based on on the amount of the different particular items that you're

projects going to improve like bicycle factor for every additional trip you're taking off the road and adding, because you're adding a bike facility, you're going to get a number of points for that.

And it's multiplied by these points.

The trips are multiplied by these points to give you a score.

And that goes for every one of these factors at the top.

And then your freight is basically calculated on your percent of reduction in delay that it's created by your improvement that you're making.

And it's going to give you a score based on the reduction in delay for the volume of heavy vehicles that you have that are affected.

So basically they looked at several options.

and what they finalize to do is they looked at option two and option five and a combination of those two and option eight was what they finalized to do or what they decided to do in the final version and it's basically a modification of option two and option five and they're combined at a 50-50% and I'll go through each one of those

Show you what it looks like.

So option two basically gives you points based on your totals multiplied by those points that I was telling you about.

But it basically looks at, the current volume looks, method looks at the total points of

that you get for all of the different mode shifts that you're doing multiplied by each individual one of the factors.

So it overestimates, over awards points because it's multiplying it by every one of them instead of segregating out like the bike trips for the bike points and the park and ride trips for the park and ride points.

So this basically change would actually segregate out those points.

It also looks at the increase in the users for the delay of the freight component and looks at accommodation.

And like I said, it eliminates the special accommodation for your hybrid vehicles and your electric vehicles that might be in your fleet.

And this is a comparison of the current E1 versus the proposed E1.

And as you can see, basically what it did before is it would calculate the number of increased users and multiply it by each one of the various factors.

And it will give you a higher measure when it summed those up for the non-SUV points.

And the new version basically would just

Multiply it by the specific users that it's affected.

Like for this, in this example, there weren't any bike accommodations because you're not adding facilities, you're just adding lockers and

Parking spaces at a park and ride lot.

Whereas the pedestrian, you're adding sidewalks.

So you're going to attract more users because of that.

So you're basically times the number of points you get by the number of users that you're increasing as a result of that improvement.

And it does that for each one of these factors, then it sums it up and gives you a total.

The other thing it's doing is instead of just adding these together,

it's weighting these and combining them at a 50-50%.

So it gives you a more accurate representation of what the score should be versus what the possibility is by not doing it the same way.

It's scaling the scores both for E1 and E, for the trucks and for the non-SUVs.

and giving you a score based on 100% weighting of those two different parts of the factor.

The other thing they were trying to look at was, well, how can we really look at air quality?

Because they don't have a methodology for doing that.

And so there's a current study going on

through the environmental division and the research council where they're looking at a pilot study, trying to determine a methodology and a tool to calculate greenhouse gas reductions.

So, but we don't have that yet until we do that.

Option five was developed to sort of figure out, predict or take on stab at how we could calculate that.

And it does that by

calculating the CO2 offsets.

And that's what this next portion of the slide deck's about.

So you've got your existing conditions and most of these scores are calculated based on other factors that we calculate as part of the application.

So they're all readily available and we can use them to do this calculation pretty quickly.

So what they basically do, they multiply the number of users by the length of the trip that they're going to take.

And then they multiply those numbers by the type of distance that they would normally travel.

For pedestrians, it's around 0.76 miles.

And for bicyclists, it's 3.54 miles.

And those are average trip lengths from the National Household Travel Survey.

So those are the numbers they use for that.

The increase is determined by summing these values once it's calculated.

And then they multiply that number by through this equation to calculate how much CO2 emissions that would be taken off the roadway.

And that's to calculate the CO2 offset.

For the trucks, they basically do a similar type of conversion by looking at the delay and the reduction in delay and that the trucks are experiencing.

And they do a similar conversion by calculating the CO2 offset for the heavy truck vehicles.

And then this is how that portion would work.

Basically, you would still do your multiplier like you did before up at the top, but you'd basically be using a slightly different methodology.

And then you do the calculation for the trucks at the bottom and you'll get the percentages and these would be added together.

And then what option eight does, it would weight those at a 50, 50%.

option to calculate what the total weight would be.

A lot of information.

I know there's probably a ton of questions on this factor, but this is basically how they're proposing to calculate the freight environmental factor for this round from a scoring perspective.

the other part of option what option eight does it adds this lower part in which is is limits the amount of reduction depending on your percentage so basically if you have or your delay reduction is between zero and two you'd only get a half a point and then if it's between two and a hundred you would get one full point multiplier and then

it's over 100, you would get a two point multiplier by the, your truck weight measurement over here on the right.

In this case, it was, the delay was between two and a hundred.

So it's one, so it's one times the 350, 3,515.

And that would give you your total number for that.

And then it's basically, these are 50, 50 on your weighting to the right.

and it would give you a score of 54.4.

The next slide is basically, it really doesn't have an effect that much on the scores.

Basically, this is different options and how the scores would have been affected for this change.

And in this case,

We would have one project, this is in Orange County, would have gotten funded and Covington's Corn Project up in Fauquier County wouldn't have gotten funded.

So the other ones weren't really affected overall for the change.

All right, the next is the E2 factor.

And this is basically, you're looking at the wetlands and historic cultural resources impacts.

And currently we look at it like this.

They do a quarter mile buffer around the project.

They look at how many acres are affected by the project and how much of each different resource are impacted.

And those are summed and it's multiplied by your environmental document

factor and then it gives you a total environmental square footage that are impacted and if it's less than your impacted buffer zone that's the result you use.

So basically what they're doing with this one is they were looking at

Shifting going from the quarter mile buffer because there are some projects that are in the right away and you don't have a lot of impacts outside of the right away.

So applying the quarter mile buffer to all projects didn't make sense.

So looking at a variable buffer distance

depending on your type of projects.

And the other thing was the sensitivity areas.

And this is more of a formalizing the process.

We get the sensitivity areas from environmental division.

And instead of just us getting those data layers and then we reviewing it, basically environmental is going to review the data, the projects based on their data sets that we're there's no chance of an error occurring in the review.

These are the different tiers for various projects.

And this is, depending on your tier, what the score is gonna do.

It's gonna basically give you a buffer based on your tier.

Tier one would be 30 feet.

Tier two would be eighth of a mile.

Tier three would be a quarter mile.

So most of our projects are in the tier one range.

So it doesn't affect most of our projects.

There are some, and I'm trying to think of the park and ride lot that we did last one, I would still be a tier two.

But most of our, like I said, most of our projects are all in the tier one range.

As I said before, the tier one would be a 30 foot buffer, tier two would be an eighth mile buffer, and tier three would be a quarter mile buffer.

And from a statewide perspective, these are the,

changes that would have occurred as a result of that and it didn't really affect a lot of projects across the state.

For this factor, this is the break line and this is basically how it would affect the scores, the benefit score and then the tier ranking and like I said it affected a few movements of a few projects up here and some down here but they weren't very

much change overall.

All right, land use.

This is the one that's probably going to have the biggest impact on the district as a whole.

And it looks at basically the amount of accessibility, so to speak, of walking distance of trips.

And by looking at the density of

the area around the project they calculate what the based on the population and employment in that in those areas they apply those are applied for as a scoring method and depending on the density in an area and the change in density in the between now and 10 years from now they basically come up with E1 and then E2

and those are combined on a 50-50 to give you your land use score.

In the area types, only area types A and B have land use factors.

And that's where there's a lot of disparity because outside of the MPO area, currently that's an area type B. I'll go to the next slide.

And you can see this is a breakdown of the area types across the state.

Area type C and D don't get land use.

And as you see on the table below, area types A and B get land use.

And because these area types C and D don't get land use, they're at a disadvantage in scoring because they don't get it.

And the data shows that a large portion of the benefit scores that projects are getting, especially in an area like Culpeper, where we have both area type D

and Area Type C and Area Type B.

So it puts the Area Type C and D at a disadvantage to the MPL.

So this is basically a way to try to correct that impropriety, so to speak.

And then the next slide is going to go into some more detail.

We looked at a bunch of different methods for doing it by looking at the radius of the buffer around a project.

for calculating the population and employment and then basically adding that percentage to the other area type C and D. But what they ended up doing once they looked at the data is actually modifying area type B to be more reflective of what you're seeing in this region.

So in this slide, this is basically from round four of SmartScale.

They looked at how much your score came from, which factor area, and this table just shows basically where the bulk of your score came from.

In area type B, the bulk of the scores come from land use, 44%.

So you're basically talking out of 100% of your score, 44% of your score is coming from land use.

and if you look at the scores for the MPO projects, MPO, the city projects and the county project, they were getting eight points of their score were coming from land use, mostly across the board.

Out of 13 projects, 10 of them had land use scores of eight or better.

So as opposed to the other C and D areas

they're not getting anywhere near that score for any area on any other different factors.

So this is the difference between the performance table that I just showed you and the actual percentage table which I showed a couple slides back.

So the red basically shows where you're underperforming and the green shows where you're overperforming in the various area type of area factors by area type.

So what this is trying to do, it's trying to make some corrections for this and to figure out where to pull the percentage from percentages from to make the change.

So this is what was proposed based on the changes.

And as you can see here, they're looking at taking 5% from accessibility and area type B, which is where the MPO is and adding it to your 15% land use.

So this will basically give you more score in the land use area.

And for Area Type C and D, for Area Type C, which is the TJPDC area, it's taking 10% from accessibility to create the land use percentage.

And Area Type D, which is the northern part of our district, it's looking at taking 5% from accessibility and 5% from economic development to create the 10% land use factor.

The other thing it did,

was it looked at the area that it was gonna utilize and instead of going out three miles, it's basically looking at a one mile area for all of it because that's a reasonable distance for a walking trip.

And that's what we're trying to account for here.

The density within the area and promote that nodal type of development that's gonna generate a lot of non-vehicular traffic.

so bike and pedestrian type of trips.

Basically, if you look at those changes with the new percentages, these are how the benefit scores would have changed from what they were before in the lower table is the differences.

So you can see that you're still getting a large portion of your score from the land use and less from some of these other ones.

and the differences are less.

Once we got to this, they did look at some other possible changes, mainly for area type D, but they're not going to pursue them this round because they just came up with them earlier last week, I think.

So that was one of the changes that they're not pursuing for this round.

And this is basically how the land use scores would have changed

and it would have affected several projects in the MPO area.

Basically, your Emmett Street project and the Fifth Street Hub project would have not been funded this round, this past round, if this system was in place.

But what it did was it allowed like the town of Warrenton and the town of Culpeper to get projects funded, which they didn't get projects funded.

last round.

So it's promoting that core development type of of land use that we're trying to promote.

And because it's less expensive to try to maintain it, we don't have to maintain it, put as much resources into maintaining the roads out in the rural areas because we're promoting land use, good land use decisions in the growth areas and the urban areas that we already have established.

All right, and that's pretty much the end of my presentation.

Basically, the CTB is reviewing this again today, and they may be voting on it to approve these changes at the meetings today.

Tomorrow?

Well, I feel as if I'm sitting in the lecture in Economics 101, where we have to deal with the IRS

I am really glad that you are here to explain all of this.

I would very much appreciate getting the file so that I can look at these with bigger and try to understand what in the world this is.

So just a couple of quick questions and that is,

Does any of the mathematics take into account the character of an area?

And I'm thinking of back in history when a lot of the super highways were run right through the middle of historic black neighborhoods and people just galloped right on.

I mean, who's watching out for that environmental justice side here?

And is that something that's folded into the land use category?

And where's my other...

I guess that's really the only biggie I had, right?

And also how important is environment versus the others?

Because I know many communities didn't even have environment at the beginning when we first did our scoring years ago.

And then it was put back in or put in because it seemed important.

Environmental has always been included in SmartScale from the beginning.

The percentage has always been 10% for every area type, and that really hasn't changed any.

It's just the methodology we've used to do the calculations have been refined.

because we can only do it based on the data we have available.

So as the data, amount of data we have increases, we can better refine the tools that we use to calculate those improvements.

But we're all looking at, like I said, air quality is one of those factors.

The other one is impacts on resources, whether it's cultural resources, historic resources,

Natural Resources, those are all different layers that we look at when we're doing those calculations.

And depending on the project type, it is, it varies.

Regarding the equity question,

We look at that to a certain extent, and that's more or less would be factored into the environmental document that we would be reviewing.

We don't do a lot of new roads.

If we were looking at new roads, we would actually have to do a more detailed environmental document.

And one of the factors that goes into that is the amount of area that's impacted.

is times by the type of environmental document that you have to have.

So for a new alignment road, you would have to go through a probably a EIS or an EA type of document.

And that's going to give you the higher percentage weight.

I found one more.

You mentioned about delay having to do with trucks.

It's in the project area.

If you're making an improvement at a location, basically we're going to look at what that improvement does.

and the amount of delay that it reduces.

Sorry, I was for stumbling through it the way I did.

But if you have any questions, just reach out to me.

This has been something we've been working on for a number of months now.

So I know that the folks at central office have a lot more details.

And I tried to pull something together and provide it to you guys so you would have an idea of what we're looking at changing.

And are the slides available anywhere?

We can send those out.

I've sent them to Sandy so she has a copy of them if you want them.

Basically, the CTB slides is where I pulled most of this information from.

So they are published on the CTB website if you want to go back to their October meeting.

And they'll be out there for the November or the December meetings also.

Yeah, I'll just add like I was looking at the CTB slides as you were going through it, Chuck, to kind of line it up.

And I think

It's a good resource to look at.

And I will say there was a bit of good conversation today at the CTV about these, these proposed changes.

Cool.

Thank you.

Definitely still just trying to take it in and make sense of it.

It's a lot.

And there's also a lot of spreadsheets and stuff that are behind the scenes on, on all this stuff.

and I have all those spreadsheets.

Okay, thank you.

You're welcome.

If there are not any other questions or comments, we can move on to agenda item seven, staff updates.

All right.

Basically, we've wrapped up the first round, the first phase of the pipeline process.

And we had our second round of stakeholder group meetings.

And we had some preliminary ideas that were floated and the preliminary analysis that was run and that information.

And it's all being put out there on the website.

So it should be out there probably shortly.

I'm not sure they're still working through that logistics on getting it posted.

The next round of internal meetings are next week.

And the next round of stakeholders group meetings are the following week.

So we will be rolling out the alternatives analysis and

The future no build scenario and all that information should be available.

Well, we're going to have it at the stakeholders group meeting next week.

So that'll be available.

And then after that, we will refine that information and hopefully we'll look to have a public meeting sometime in January to present some of the material that we're currently developing.

Well, I could say that we do have two project pipeline studies underway.

The one of them is for Pantops.

It goes from Hanson's Road to the interchange at 64.

And the other one is the Shadwell intersection at 22 and 250 and also Milton Road, North Milton Road and 250.

So those are the two locations in the MPO area.

We have five total studies underway and they're all about the same on the same timelines.

If you would like more information, I could come back at possibly the January meeting and give you an update with some of the recommendations and slides from some of the meetings that we've had previously to give you more information.

Any questions?

Anybody interested in the update for January?

Sounds like Supervisor Malek is, so that would be great.

Thank you.

Yes, Policy Board, I just wanted to make sure that you are aware that we are moving forward, continuing to follow the process that you all voted to support regarding SmartScale.

So we had our first meeting with the Stakeholder Advisory Committee for the Ravenna River Bike Ped Crossing on November 30th, where we reviewed the project

Basically background and history where we are today and started talking through what our process to work with that committee is going to look like.

I'm just getting the results back from the Doodle pool to find the availability.

I think the next meeting is going to be on December 16th and I'll need to confirm the time.

Supervisor Malek attended the first meeting, so if anybody else would like to be on the distribution list to know when those meetings are happening,

Please let me know.

I would love to get them on a more consistent schedule, but right now with the holidays, we're kind of getting the meetings in when there's availability from the committee.

At the next meeting, we'll be talking a little bit about some of the consideration areas and talking about how we can consider what the impacts would be from the different crossing options based on some of the consideration factors that were

identified through the C-TAC and MPO tech committees as well as

the members of the Stakeholder Advisory Committee, and we'll potentially be talking about what kind of public engagement we may need to move forward with informing the application.

We will be looking at the other three applications probably in January, meeting together with some of the staff to determine

just where we are as far as moving forward, any sort of processes that we need to follow to make sure that they're able to get support from their councils and boards to support the projects and really developing what that additional engagement might look like for the other three projects that identified

that were identified as needing some level of engagement but not the same level as the bike tread bridge.

And then we'll plan to again in the spring, maybe February or March plan to do a full meeting where we go through all the projects for the MPO area as well as the PDC area.

Great.

I just learned this week that UVA has moved a lot of their IT department out to Hydraulic Road and they were very interested in safe crossing to Stonefield for lunch from the 2211 Hydraulic Road business and until those contacts came I never even had seen

The crosswalk signs that are there hidden, they're tiny little things.

And the crosswalk, if it's painted on the street is invisible.

So I was not the only one who did not even know that there was a crosswalk there.

I mean, was pedestrian crossing there.

Definitely.

It's always nice to be able to go back to people and say, hey, we're working on a solution to that.

Very good.

And then, unfortunately, we sort of had to leave a little bit early, but I just wanted to make sure that you all are aware that we did have some adjustments to transportation improvement plan.

So these do not require a public hearing.

These are just an FYI so that you know, I'll share my screen very, very briefly.

Let's see.

But these are just some items that are being moved from one group block to another group block.

So group blocks are projects that are not individually identified in the transportation improvement.

plan or program.

So we have $500,000 that's being moved from the traffic and safety maintenance group to the preventative maintenance and system preservation group.

So just money moving from

One category to another.

And then we also have some funding that's moving in the federal fiscal year 21 and federal fiscal year 22.

from the group block for bridges to the group block for traffic and safety.

So again, these do not require public hearings and these have been updated in the transportation improvement program.

And they're just small administrative adjustments at this point.

Doc did say not to worry, but $2 million is a lot of money to me.

Well, I think I am up next for just a quick update on Tri Transit Month or Discover Transit Month, which we did in the month of October.

and then also a brief update on the Afton Express.

So partnering rideshare with Jaunt, CAT and UTS, we produced three different videos talking about some of the challenges of riding transit and how those can be addressed and the ease of how it can fit into your everyday.

Again, just to kind of remind folks

that transit is there and that it is safe and to try it out if you haven't.

I feel like those videos performed very well.

You can

take advantage, or if you haven't had a chance to look at those, you can see them on, I think, all three of the providers' Facebook pages, as well as Twitter.

And I believe Kat also has them on their main website as well.

Brief update too on the Afton Express as it is continuing.

They just finished their third month of service.

And in those three months, there have been over 1,500 passenger trips taken.

to the number of total boardings.

And that is across all of the four morning and both four evening runs.

And the service does go Monday through Friday.

We did see higher daily passenger trips in the month of November.

The numbers looked really great, especially considering there was a very big holiday that consisted of most of one week.

We're continuing to monitor all the passenger counts.

the route performance to know where and how to make potential tweaks to the schedule and the route down the road.

Currently no schedule changes will be made in this calendar year, but there may be additional schedule changes or route changes potentially in 2022.

I know they were looking at making sure that there was a little bit more of expanded service possibly for some of the health profession workers.

at UVA that work those longer shifts.

A couple other really quick things.

The newly enhanced park and ride lot in Waynesboro is finally complete.

That was a smart scale project that our folks over at CSPDC handled and that many of those of us who come across the mountain may experience.

So with that expansion, there were many things, that's one of the busiest park and ride lots in the area looked at, but they also put in a stop with a shelter for the Afton Express, so those kind of things went hand in hand.

Afton Express was also just getting ready to launch a text alert system called Text Marks, and this will give any of the riders the option to sign up where they will receive real-time information and alerts

for the route, such as if there was an issue that caused it to be late with traffic or weather, all of that information would then be texted to those who chose to opt in to get that information on a timely basis.

So that is really all of the updates that I have, but I am here for any questions.

Thank you.

So what's the size of the absent express?

I don't think it's 36.

So the ridership is more than half full, would you guess?

So when they did the study with Kimley Horne to apply for this pilot, they were hoping to eventually reach 80 trips per day.

And right now they're averaging just a little under 40.

So we're getting there.

Okay.

And you know one of the big things to keep in mind too is that both October and November saw pretty significant increases in ridership and those are the two months that folks had to pay.

The month of September it was completely free.

So even with that, I think it's six dollars round trip, we're still seeing increased ridership.

I expect to see even more increased ridership as we get into the winter season with

dicey weather.

I feel like it will be even more appealing for folks to hop on that rather than to have to make that drive across the mountain.

We are also doing extended outreach with Apple Express on the Rideshare front because all of those folks who take it at least two days a week qualify for guaranteed ride home.

They also, anyone who takes it no matter how many times is eligible to use our Rideshare app where they can earn points

that they can cash in for different rewards.

I would expect the higher gas prices are getting more people on the bus because 10 years ago when gas hit $4 a gallon, people were screaming for the bus in Crozet.

And it just took us five more years to get it there, but it'll fill up.

That's great.

and we'll keep updating everyone as each meeting comes on as long as you guys would like to continue to receive this.

Great.

Any other questions or comments?

Not.

Well, I don't see Kevin here, so I've been talking way too much.

Oh, there he is.

OK, well, I'll get out of the way and ask Kevin to go first.

There he is.

Sure, Kevin McDermott, Albemarle County Planning Manager.

I'll just give a quick update on some of the things we're working on related to transportation in the county.

A lot of construction projects underway right now.

We've started a lot of the locally administered sidewalk projects that have been

InDesign for a long time, including a new sidewalk out on Rio Road East near John Warner Parkway, a new sidewalk and pedestrian crossings out in Crozet on Route 250 right by the Harris Teeter, that area there, it's under construction.

And then also the new sidewalks on Avon Street extended on both sides of Mill Creek under construction.

Also recently completed out there was the Mountain View Elementary School Safe Routes to School pedestrian crossing of that road with the new rapid flashing beacons and center pedestrian refuge.

That one's already installed completely.

We're getting ready to start the construction of the Albemarle High School, Greer Elementary School, Jewett Middle School shared use path out on Lambs Lane that will take folks from Hydraulics all the way back to the schools back there.

We're also in design for the new shared use path that will extend Berkmar, the Berkmar project that crossed the river, the VDOT project that was completed a few years ago.

This extends that shared use path all the way from Hilton Heights down to Tariah Road.

It's going to be one of the longest shared use paths in the region, I think.

when that's complete.

Also working hard on the new sidewalks and bus stops and pedestrian improvements all along Commonwealth, starting from Hydraulic heading north up there.

And then, of course, we've got all our VDOT projects that are currently under construction.

that were approved for the round and smart scale a number of years ago, including you've seen all the construction around Route 250 and I-64 where the diverging diamond is going in and as well as the roundabout out at 151 and 250.

under construction and around about on Route 20 at 649, that's Prophet Road up north of Pantops.

Those are all being worked on now and of course Chuck already mentioned all of the planning projects that we're working with VDOT and the TJPDC on for the next round of SmartScale.

We've also got quite a few projects that we're looking at

From the county's perspective, additional sidewalk improvements on Avon, pedestrian and bike improvements on 5th Street extended, and working on the

Rio Corridor Plan, which is analyzing some improvements by Belvedere, as well as a lot of other pedestrian improvements all throughout that area.

So those are, I think, the major projects we have going right now.

I'm happy to answer questions about anything else.

I'll mention, so I don't forget, I know Ann will want me to point out that we did submit our revenue sharing application for the

Eastern Avenue Extension South with the bridge over Lickinghall Creek.

We continue to work with the VDOT team that is reviewing that application to make sure we've got the most accurate cost estimate.

I'll just jump in and say the one roundabout you didn't mention was the one at 240-250 at the Trestle.

So I understood that was going to be 2020.

Now it's now not going to start until three years from now or something.

Actually, I'm not sure.

Maybe perhaps someone from VDOT might be better to speak towards that.

It was something that was supposed to start design last year.

This is a VDOT administered project.

And I know that it was delayed, but I'm not sure exactly why or for how long.

Chuck said earlier he would dig around.

Yeah, like I said, I know it went to the Alternative Intersection Committee about a month ago and they reviewed it and had some comments.

And I've been talking to Hal Jones, who's the project manager for that project.

And they're actually moving forward with that project in the early stages of design.

and these are just some of the steps they have to go through.

I don't have anything to talk about.

Just one project we've been working on.

It's a capital project.

We're trying to put together a pilot shelter project.

We're going to use Belmont Park as kind of that test.

There is a shelter there.

It's not compliant.

It's not ADA compliant.

It basically sits in the street.

We're going to remove that and put in a shelter so everybody can see when we're starting to do capital projects along transit.

what it looks like and what we have to do to make it compliant.

So we just signed a contract with the contractor today and hopefully we'll be able to start moving forward on implementation in the next 30 days or so.

But we'll be applying for our state allocation and we'll be asking for more money for capital for any project improvements

We have a couple of other city folks here as well.

Good evening, everybody.

Not tonight, this time.

You know, the only thing to add is

As you all know, council approved the comprehensive plan, you know, a few weeks ago.

We are real glad about that.

So we are gearing up to begin the zoning rewrite.

There will be a wholesale rewrite of city zoning ordinance.

And then I would add, I'll just talk about the projects we have in construction or going to construction.

So of course we have the Belmont Bridge project.

We did our first major traffic shift.

We are starting demo of the bridge, coordinating with the railroad and relocating utilities.

Those are our major activities right now.

So that's going well.

We have two projects that we're trying to award a bid for, and that is the Rose Hill Rugby Sidewalk, and then there's a Rose Hill Rugby traffic signal.

And we're working with VDOT right now to try and get that awarded.

We are re-advertising a Harris Street Sidewalk project that also includes a bid additive for undergrounding utilities.

We also have, so we'll be re-advertising that, hopefully award that in the coming months.

And then we also have the four SGR bridges that are underway.

Melbourne's been wrapped up.

We have a little additional work on the Emmett 29, and we should be starting the ones on 250, ones over the Norfolk Southern Railroad, and the other I believe is on Rugby.

So that will be starting in the next couple months.

The contract's ongoing.

It depends obviously on whether of when they can get that going.

So I think that's it for just the construction.

Great, thank you.

Mike Lutter, you're in charge of this meeting.

Not really, I mean, the only other thing that comes to mind is I read, I don't know how official or final the number is, but I'd read in the news, Charlottesville will receive 19 million from the infrastructure bill.

Yeah, I'd say Kevin and Chuck pretty much handle everything on the VDOT side there.

So the only thing I kind of give an update on is the US 29 hydraulic design bill.

package that we're putting together.

That is slated for a public hearing in March or April of 2022 with an RFP to be released at the end of July 2022.

Anticipated award December 2022 with the project completion the winter of 2024.

That includes the pedestrian accommodations there in the US 29 hydraulic area.

with the pedestrian bridge over top of 29.

And then also the roundabout there at the hydraulic Hillsdale intersection.

So pretty big project for the region in the area.

So we look forward to it being successful as what we've done on 29 in the past.

And just one comment from me, the roundabout at 240, that one, that project was originally part of the design-build bundle with the other projects.

That's why the dates were, you know, further back.

It was pulled out of that package.

And my latest note says that the ad date, advertisement date is next fall.

Exactly.

Okay.

Well, it's a really hot spot, so hopefully it won't slide again.

We can start with the nonvoting members and it looks like Ted had to step out.

Hey, so obviously our big news is Ted who started on Monday, but we had, we have two employees who are going through the process to become credentialed to be testers for CDL.

At this point, they won't have the credentials, Garland, for your buses, but just for ours.

But they're in search of an area big enough to do the testing.

And so if all of you could think a little bit in terms of any locations you know in Albemarle or the city or UVA that

is at least 250 feet long and 30 feet wide.

Then occasionally we'd be really interested in using those areas for testing like once a month.

So anyway, so give some thought to that would be really helpful.

As you know, anybody who's been to John knows we have absolutely no space for testing out like this.

So any thoughts you have,

I think Ted stepped out.

He had to step away.

Hey, Karen.

You might want to talk to the state farm folks.

They have a big parking lot, and they're not even using it.

Oh, that's a great idea.

So that might be a good place that you could use.

I know the county has some spaces there for,

access to the trail hub.

That's fabulous.

Thank you.

I hadn't even thought of that.

We've been all over town looking around and trying to negotiate with the owners of the Fashion Square Mall.

But thank you.

We will definitely reach out to them.

Thanks.

Karen, this is Wood Hudson.

Have you talked to PVCC?

I know they do CDL training at the what used to be that visitor center over by Monticello.

Thank you.

I will definitely

Have a look at that as well.

There's some kind of caveat where if there's a certified area for another group that's doing CDL testing, you can't duplicate that.

So I don't, Kyle's looking into it more, our safety manager.

But anyway, if it's not actually at PVCC, maybe we could still use it.

So thank you.

And this is Julia Monteith, UVA.

So if there's any place that you have in mind in regard to UVA, I know that you and Rebecca White coordinate a lot on things.

So you might check with her because a lot of our, we double use our space for events.

So the parking lots are, that's the problem.

I mean, we'd love to offer some space, but the events are,

That's great.

Thank you.

And of course, you know, we'd probably just use the space for a short period of time, about once a month.

But the problem is that we may not always know when we have an event.

All right, thank you.

I don't have any updates at this time.

Sure, got a couple quick updates.

Just a reminder, as of the first, it is transit grant season.

Our portals are open and will be open until they close on the first of February.

We held a grantee workshop at the end of November.

Those resources are available on our website and on our YouTube page.

We do have a new grant program open this year, which is for the FY 23 trip regional connectivity program.

Eligibility is determined based on certain locations in the Commonwealth.

The Charlottesville region is an eligible region for this program.

Additional details related to the program are available on our website.

but are basically for regional transit connectivity.

Regionals define largely as services going between jurisdictions.

So I know Garland is aware of that and all of the transit agencies are aware of that program is available.

Last thing I'll touch on is

There's been a slight change from FTA in terms of the guidance for our section 5310 grantees.

They will be providing MPOs with letters by December 31 this year.

The slight change relates to the fact that MPOs will have to program those funds into their tip for the year of

Request versus the Year of Award will provide additional details when those letters start to roll out to the MPOs.

Well, sorry.

I'm not super familiar with the program.

I could always reach out to our program manager.

I believe it's more focused on operating related to transit services.

Okay, thank you.

I'm not sure if Christine is available.

Christine, do you have any updates for the PDC or the MPO?

The only update that I would add is we recently hired a planner one year at the PDC.

She will be working on both our environmental and our transportation program.

and then we still have listed a Planner 3-4 that is vacant right now.

So we are actively trying to hire for that position so we can get our MPO fully staffed.

All right, thank you.

No items added to the agenda.

Move on to the last matters by the public.

I will open public comment.

If there's anyone in the public who'd like to speak, you can click the raise hand icon in your Zoom webinar.

Seeing no one, I will close public comment.

And with that, meeting adjourned.

Thank you, everyone.