MPO Policy Board Meeting   3/24/2022

being to order for this Thursday, March 24th, 2 p.m. meeting.

I'd be happy to.

This meeting of the Charlottesville, Albemarle NPO is being held pursuant to

The Code of Virginia Section 2.2-3708.2, which allows a public body to hold electronic meetings in the locality in which it is located, has declared a local state of emergency, and the catastrophic nature of the emergency makes it impracticable 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 notice at the TJPDC offices to the media website posting an agenda.

The meeting minutes will reflect the nature of the emergency, that the meeting was held by electronic communication means, and the type of electronic communication means by which the meeting was held.

All right.

Thank you, Sandy.

Welcome, everyone.

And we'll go ahead and get started and jump into number two, which is matters from the public.

And do we have some folks, Sandy, that we are going?

Any takers for public comment?

I see Peter Krebs' hand up first, so why don't we start there?

Thank you.

I'll be quicker than three minutes.

This is something I would have said at the end of the meeting, but I didn't see public comment at the end.

Just sort of recognizing that you're at the end of a sort of enhanced community slash research project around the smart scale project for the Ravenna River pedestrian bridge.

I simply wanted to thank the policy board for authorizing this approach.

I think that you're going to find that this application is going to be much stronger than it would have been had the discussion not happened.

I think a lot of community members came out.

Some of them are here.

They brought their wisdom.

And again, I think this fuels a better application that's going to be more successful.

And it's also going to address some longstanding

community problems adjacent to the project itself.

As you guys look at next year's work plan for the MPO, I would consider again doing this for the next round of SmartScale, perhaps for more than one project.

And just thank you and thank the many members of the community and especially Sandy who really put a lot of work into this.

Very good.

Hi, my name is Jenny.

I'm a fairly closely adjacent neighbor resident at 718 Franklin Street.

I'm really excited about this project.

I would be happy with either location, but I've been messing around with maps over the past few days looking and taking some drives to get a better sense of the adjacencies.

And I just wanted to voice my enthusiasm for considering this project in tandem with the Broadway Economic Development Plan and with

I'm not really certain if this is ever something realistic in the future, but the idea that increased passenger rail service to Richmond might also pass through this area.

One of the things that I think has been confusing for the public who are more accustomed to crossing over to Pan Tops using the free bridge is how deep the ravines are on the other side and the node that this bridge would provision you towards the State Farm complex

is actually really opportunistic and I noticed this morning that it would, for example, only be a 1.5 mile walk to my house, from my house to the Kluge Room Museum, which I just thought was exciting and I wanted to share that.

Thank you.

Any other takers today for public comment?

All right, seeing no additional takers, we will close matters from the public.

Thank you to those who spoke.

And we'll move to number three, general administration.

Yeah, real briefly I just want to mention before we get too far into the meeting that we do need to make sure we wrap up by at least 3.50 this afternoon.

We have another meeting back to back so we do have kind of a hard stop there.

So as far as staffing, I just wanted to make you all aware that we have had another planner leave the PDC.

who was not directly doing work with the MPO, but we have had to shift some of our staff around a little bit.

So we are again hiring a regional fair.

This person we anticipate would be supporting the transportation programs as we've moved staff to fill the vacancy that

This other person left.

So just be aware that we are very thankful to have had the positions filled that we have.

But we are once again, you know, at this point, a little bit shorter staff than we would ideally be.

But we will continue to work to make sure that we are providing the MPO with, you know, the important services and prioritizing the work that we know is

Very good, thank you.

Any questions on that item?

Yeah, so I just wanted to briefly update you all since we were waiting on Charlottesville to determine what action they were going to take regarding their in-person meetings.

Counselor Smoke and Counselor Pinkston, feel free to jump in if you want to add anything, but they have extended their emergency order for six months, largely to allow for

The development of a transition back to in-person meetings.

So the PDC is going to be working to develop a transition plan, assuming that we will be transitioning back to in-person meetings probably sooner than six months.

But we'll be working to communicate that with you all too.

And we'll provide as much notice as we can once we make that determination that these meetings will

No longer be virtual.

Thank you with that.

Only that it's correct we're trying to work out how we would return to meetings safely and have a procedure that we're starting to implement.

Partly the issue is, for example, we don't have something like the Lane Auditorium, which is a large enough space the way the county does.

All of our spaces are smaller and it's going to take a little bit of finagling to figure out how we're going to make some of these things work.

But I've been meeting with the city manager already to develop some safety plans and I'm hopeful that at least for our, what I'll call the larger, the more important boards and commissions that will be back to either fully in person or at least some kind of hybrid model within the next month or two.

All right, any additional questions here?

OK, then the next item, we do have an agenda.

Are there any changes that need to be made to our agenda today?

So moved.

Second.

We got motions and seconds, very good.

Supervisor Mallet?

Yes.

Yes, thank you.

The motion is approved.

And the next item, we have the January 26-22 meeting minutes that need to be approved.

It appears to me as though what's in the packet is a very incomplete version.

There are a lot of blanks.

There are a lot of things that aren't filled in.

We can check on that.

If you would like to table the vote, we can look at that and confirm that was the correct version.

I mean, for example, Paragraph 9, VDOT Project Pipeline, Per ends minute.

Okay.

Very good.

All right, that will bring us to number four, the year 22 Unified Planning Work Program Amendment.

Yeah, so the first thing I want to do is just because we have two unified planning work program agendas, I want to go ahead and just at a very high level review the process of developing the work programs and then we'll talk about what we're asking for you all to do as far as the FY22 work program and talk about the draft FY23 work program.

So some of you have been through this multiple times, I know, but for those of you who are a little bit less familiar, the MPO gets funding through two different sources.

The first is the Federal Highway Administration and the second is the Federal Transit Administration.

And 80% of our funding comes from these federal sources that requires a 20% match.

So in the state of Virginia, the state matches 10% of that additional revenue that is, or the additional funding that is required to fund the MPO programs.

Thank you.

So in order for us to be able to receive this funding, one of the requirements is that we develop a unified planning work program that identifies the activities and initiatives that we're going to be undertaking and communicates to our federal and state funders what it is that

The MPO is going to be doing and then that work program gets sent to them.

They review it and approve it to make sure it's consistent with the overall goals of the programs.

And then we are authorized to go ahead and move forward with that.

So for FY22, our annual work program was just under $321,000.

And that's money that comes directly through the MPO.

So you'll see when we talk about the FY 23 work program, there's going to be an additional line item that shows state, I think it says state SPR resources that state planning and research, a line item that says state planning and research.

And that funding amount does not go through our MPO budget that the PDC administers.

That is an additional

resource that VDOT programs for VDOT staff to support the MPO.

The FY23 budget allocations have not been provided to date so far.

So when we start talking about the draft for FY22, we're using the allocations from FY22 because we do not have the FY23 budget allocations yet.

So just be aware that between what we present to you today as far as the draft and what will come when you get the final version of the

FY23 work program, there's going to be some adjustments once we have the most up-to-date budget amounts.

But for purposes of presenting a draft to you, we assumed that we were going to have level funding compared to this current FY22 year.

So what's a little bit unique is that what we're gonna be talking about now is the programming of some of our rollover funds from one fiscal year to the next one.

Traditionally, our MPO has been able to spend its annual program allocations within the year that we have received it.

So we haven't really gotten into rolling over funds into a different fiscal year.

But because of some of our staffing shortages, we've been really unable to utilize all of the resources to do programming.

And so we're going to talk a little bit today about what we are asking as far as being able to roll over funds from this fiscal year into next fiscal year that we're not going to be able to utilize this fiscal year.

There are two different types of rollover that we're going to talk about in the upcoming work programs.

The first one is a passive rollover.

So this is funding that only applies for the Federal Highway Administration sources.

It's not an option with the Federal Transit Administration funding sources.

It does not require any action.

And basically what happened is that in FY21, when we had a transition in our executive director, we had a shortage in our staffing for the last portion of the fiscal year, which led to a $35,000

unused portion of our FHWA funding.

That happened in FY21.

We didn't do anything to change our programming for FY21.

It just was unspent in FY21.

That becomes available in FY23 without us taking any sort of action.

It just comes back to us in two fiscal years.

So we're gonna have that FY21 rollover.

As far as FY22, in order for us to be able to utilize any unspent resources from this fiscal year, we have to go through a process to de-obligate that funding and show where the allocation is going to be reduced.

based on what we have programmed for the FY22 work program in order to actively make that coming available in FY23.

So that is why we are going to be talking about an amendment to the FY22 work program.

So basically what I did was I went through and looked at what our spend-down was for all of the tasks that were identified in our FY22 work program and started looking at where we weren't going to have the staff capacity in order to spend the full amounts in those task areas by the end of the fiscal year.

So this is base time.

Previous spending projects that we know we don't have the resources or there didn't feel like there was as much of a priority for us to complete.

And then looking at realistically what kind of additional resources we needed to successfully complete the projects.

And so this is what led us to make the recommendations for making the adjustments in the unified planning work program as shown here.

So this first column shows the total change in funding amount for each of these program areas.

And then this column over here shows the amended total that will remain allocated for each of those tasks.

through the end of the fiscal year.

Just starting with some of the more straightforward items.

We reduced the amount in the MPA strategic plan and the on-call services.

The on-call services, if you recall, was sort of set aside as a placeholder to program a future project.

When you all approved the FY22 work program, because we didn't have staff available, we never went back to program that funding.

and so we went ahead and reduced that line item by $19,000 and then we also reduced the strategic plan by $27,000 and that was because we did not have staff capacity to complete that in-house and we're not successful in retaining a consultant to do that work for us.

Can I ask a quick question?

I'm sorry.

So I guess theoretically, there would be another column over to the left that would be like the current budget for each of these, and then the total change, and then the amended total.

Is that right?

Yeah, the total changes are all negative.

So basically, if you want to know what the, I could have put another total or another column that showed the original amount here.

Yeah, you're welcome.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so you can see the bulk of the reduction came from the long range transportation plan line item, which was the strategic plan and the on-call services.

And then for the short range transportation plan, the bulk of the reduction here is due to smart scale.

And that's just because again, we put as much staff capacity as we could to supporting this public engagement process that you all had identified for smart scale.

We were down some staff and then there was one project that was identified as meeting significant engagement when we were expecting to.

So we didn't need quite as much resources as we had anticipated.

So we were able to reduce that line item a little bit.

And then we also reduced the citizens transportation advisory committee and public outreach line item.

Again, focusing our public engagement around sort of the smart scale and the other projects that were in process versus doing anything more generally as far as supporting public outreach for the MPO.

So those were the places where we were able to reduce that budget a little bit that made sense.

And then for the administration budget, this is mostly just a reduction due to a lack of staff that was available to participate in committee meetings or other information sharing types of activities.

So you should have received a draft of the revisions to the FY22 unified planning work program, as well as a resolution that you all could adopt to support the changes.

But what we're asking for is for action from you all regarding the proposed amendments to the FY22 in order for us to allocate some of this rollover funding into

our FY 23 work program that we won't be able to send down in FY 22.

Thank you.

So just, this all seems very straightforward, but so are there any categories that we are subject to lose the money?

That's the first easy question.

All these things you've described are going to stay in the bucket.

We just go to the next year.

I think we're not necessarily going to plan to just move these projects over to the next fiscal year.

We can talk about that when we talk about the FY23 work program.

Sure.

Okay.

Yeah, and what we would probably do is we want to include a pretty substantive amount of funding for the long range transportation plan going into next year.

So you'll see that, you'll see that budget, you know, intended to do public outreach, but public outreach specific to the long range transportation plan.

Are there any other questions here?

And we are asked, there is a resolution that was included in the packet, so we're looking to, looking, oh, let me find the title of that resolution.

Okay.

I move that we approve the amendments to the fiscal year 22 UPWP, or I guess I better say it, Unified Planning Work Program from the MPO Technical Advisory Committee and its requested approval amendments to the UPWP from the MPO Policy Board in order to program those funds into the fiscal year 23 United Planning Work Program.

Is there a second?

I'll second it.

Yes.

Sorry, I should have been prepared for that.

Yes.

Thank you.

Sandy, I think the vote's taken.

I think the comment I would make, and I know Christine's probably on the call as well, but when I hear so much about don't have the staffing, we had a staffing update that we lost another staff person.

I think that we probably need to have some up to have some sort of game plan or

update on what the TJPDC is doing to address the staffing issues that obviously are being dealt with.

You're not the only organization, but we probably need to have some sort of update at this policy board at a near meeting so that, I mean, because this is

If the work isn't being done, then we can roll over it as much as we want, but the staffing issue has to be fixed.

I'm not thinking you guys will snap your fingers and fix it, but we need to know what the plan is or what the efforts are.

We can definitely put that on a future agenda.

This is Christine.

Two of the four vacancies were actually anticipated.

So they were folks that we knew well in advance that they were either relocating to another state or transferring to the private sector.

The other two we were not aware of in advance, one of them being the executive director.

So as some of you all are also facing,

Filling those for us as a staff, it was incredibly important that we filled them with the right candidates and not just filled the vacancies.

And so we were really intentional about making sure the staffing that we're bringing on, especially for our transportation program, has the required skill set and the technical skills that we need in order to make sure that we have a technical team for our GIS, for our mapping, for our transportation program.

So I feel very confident that this most recent transition, which is one of the staff that we knew that this was coming, this wasn't a complete surprise, that we already have the position listed and that we know exactly what type of candidate we're looking for and we're hoping to get a good pool to pick from.

Mr.

Chair, before we leave this, I should just note that I finally pulled up the resolution from the website.

And I note that it says that the resolution was adopted on the 26th day of March.

I'll make that update.

Very good, any other comments before we leave this item?

All right, so then we will go to the, oh, we got Ryan that's taking the next one, drafted the fiscal year 23 unified planning work program.

Is that right?

Yeah, sure, thanks.

I'll go ahead and share my screen again.

Yeah, so the first thing I want to mention is just as we start talking about the FY23, our budget is going to increase.

So thank you all for approving that amended FY22 work program.

You'll see that this shows the rollover from FY21 and FY22 for the PL is really, I know it's a little bit confusing, but this refers to that FHWA sources.

So you'll see that we have, in addition to what the base annual program is, we have this almost $105,000.

And then for the FTA active rollover portion, we'll have about an additional $26,000.

Again, the FY 23 funding will be updated once we have the allocations for both the FHWA and PL funding amounts.

So you can see that our budget goes from about $320,000 in the previous fiscal year to about $450,000 once we use that rollover.

So again, we want to be really intentional about making sure that we are

you know, identifying how that can really be utilized to improve the work of the program.

And as we start the long range transportation plan, we think there are some really good opportunities to use that to really enhance the long range transportation planning process for the cycle and also support a new set of staff that

that that will be working on this long range transportation plan update.

And before I turn it over to Ryan, there's one other point that I want to emphasize that we included in the draft UPWQ that might speak to your concern.

Supervisor Galloway a little bit.

And that's that in this on call services, we put a line item here that's not just intended for us to pick up sort of unplanned or, you know, requests and

unprogrammed requests for technical assistance from localities or a program or something like this.

But we want to actually develop an on-call consultant program so that if we do run into this situation where we don't have the staffing support, we have a service in place where we can have a relationship with consultants to have them help us continue to move forward on some of these.

initiatives.

And so we do want to make sure that we have, you know, that we're looking to fulfill both our staffing obligations, but also make sure that we have the resources to, you know, be able to continue to move the work forward.

That's really important to the area.

Sure.

Thank you, Sandy.

Some priority tasks that the MPO will undertake in FY 23 include the submission of the applications for smart scale.

There may be some adjustments made to the MPO boundary based off the 2020 census.

So staff will need funds to take a look at that.

The update of the 2050

Long Range, the update of the 2045, which would be the 2050 Long Range Transportation Plan.

The development of the FY24-27 Transportation Improvement Program, a Regional Transit Governance Study, the development or continuation of One Map, On Call Consulted Programs.

I can briefly sort of clue you in on One Map.

One Map was identified in the Jefferson Area Bicycle and Pedestrian Plan circa 2019.

The purpose of One Map is to come up with a shared naming system of bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure and agreed upon definitions.

both the city of Charlottesville, Albemarle County, UVA, bicycle and pedestrian facilities are incorporated into this One Map project.

And the goal is to either A, have it be used by the public as a tool or by planning staff

but those details will be fleshed out hopefully in the next fiscal year.

All right, questions here?

Thank you.

I know the data for the One Map has been collected by the jurisdictions for a while.

I'm not sure how many years, but what comes next?

So right now we have the MPO has the data for both the university and the county.

We are in the process of getting the information from the city.

All right, other questions?

And Sandy, just remind me, the on-call services, this was from a couple of years ago where there were a couple of suggested projects.

We didn't really land on one of them or two of them.

That was what we did last year.

This has been kind of a standard line item to cover any sort of technical services that might be requested by Charlottesville or Albemarle that maybe we didn't have planned just so that we had a resource to do that.

So we're really trying to rethink what on-call services are.

We can do the same thing that we did last year, which is as we move through the work program, if we end up not

I'm meeting this line item for any of that kind of work.

We could look at if there's something else we want to move this funding over to this.

But, you know, especially given that we've had some of these challenges with with turnover, which is pretty common with planning stuff right now, we also thought that it would be valuable to actually develop an on-call program similar to what some of our other

Thank you for that.

Can I ask a question?

It's a little off topic.

But it relates to something that came up as a council meeting a couple nights ago when we were appointing new members to the CTAC.

And somebody asked, what exactly does the CTAC do?

And I had to say, well, I can read what's on the piece of paper here, but I don't know exactly what we expect

A member of CTAC to do in terms of frequency of meetings in terms of general topics of what they're going to be discussing in terms of how the topics get discussed.

Sure, I think it's been through a couple of different iterations.

So one of the things that we are trying to do with the CTAC committee right now is to engage them to help us inform any process that involves public engagement or public support to help us understand from a citizen level perspective what the priorities are and how to get

The feedback that we would like from the public or that is appropriate from the public through these processes.

As we go into the long range transportation plan, this is actually the most straightforward opportunity for the CTAC to have a really meaningful goal to help us

really identify and hear from the community itself as to what the transportation priorities are, what the concerns might be, help us vet processes to know whether they are going to be effective or meaningful to the more general public as they engage in transportation planning.

But it's really to help us understand

I will just jump in to be a cheerleader for C-TAC as a long years member back in the 00s, 2000s.

Through the two long range plans and the lots and lots of local engagement was carried out by a group of probably 15 or so

Folks, we met every month for eight years and traveled all over the place and took the dog and pony show all over the place because that's the way you did things back then.

And I was joking with staff earlier today to say, I hope after the pandemic, we will learn that there were some things we did better then than we have been recently.

And so we hope to re-engage those going to where the people are type activities.

And I think that the Citizens Technical Advisory or Transportation Advisory Committee, formerly known as CHART,

would be a great asset for that.

Very good.

Any additional questions?

Councilor Pinkston did.

We clarified in the chat if you haven't seen that.

But for those listening, C-TAC does stand for Citizen Transportation Advisory Committee.

One thing I would like to add, and thank you Supervisor Mallek for adding that, is I think that is the direction we would like to continue to move CTAC.

I think we have coincidentally had a very technical group of people on our CTAC, but I want to make sure that

We are clear that it's not a citizens technical committee.

It's intended to be a citizens advisory committee.

And we want to make sure to keep very clear the distinction between our MPO tech and our C-Tech so that we are not getting too different types of technical feedback.

Supervisor Malek?

There we go.

To try to get that broad base of citizen we had Mr. Burton who drove a cab and somebody else who has a truck company and the university architect Pete was on our group for years.

I mean it was incredible.

So I really appreciated the people from the neighborhoods and everything who were able to commit

to doing this work.

And you're right, it was not done with a slide rule.

This was done with a gut reaction about how things were going to work.

And every time I drive in that slip lane between 29 and Barracks Road, I think of Mr. Burton because he was apoplectic saying that was a bad thing to do.

Any other questions here?

Yeah, mostly we just wanted to make sure we were heading in the right direction if you all have any feedback or things that you want us to be aware of as we prepare the final draft.

Thank you very much.

All right.

So real briefly, we need to make some decisions about the Ravana Bridge tonight.

So I'm just going to go through a couple of items really high level.

And I know there were some things that came up in the last couple of days that we need to review, but mostly I want to leave this open to discussion.

We had the in-depth work session earlier this month, but I did want to come back and make sure that I corrected my statement about the ADA accessibility concerns at East Market Street.

I think there are still some more general safety concerns just about the lack of width for the mixture of

Pedestrians and bicyclists along with cars getting through from East Market Street to the bridge landing site there, but it's not actually a great consideration and so it's not specifically an ADA accessibility issue.

There is still, to be aware that there is still a need to amend the path of the shared use path on the east side of Pan Tops at the

at the alignment at East Market Street, but that will be required to comply with ADA accessibility concerns.

And then there are some steep grades coming from the sidewalk network or the transportation network into Chesapeake Street accessing the park.

Yeah, I think so.

They're both going to have to meet the ADA accessibility requirements.

All right.

Thank you.

Yeah.

As far as the public webinar that we held earlier in February, I just wanted to really briefly go through the feedback.

13 people preferred the Chesapeake Street alignment, five preferred the East Market Street alignment.

And then looking at this graph right here, you can see that for the actual bridge design preference, which we'll talk about here shortly, you can see there was a stronger preference for a cable state bridge at the Chesapeake Street alignment, whereas there was not

Nearly as much of a strong consensus from the public as to which bridge structure was preferred at the East Market Street alignment.

And then briefly to go through the survey results, we asked survey respondents what their highest priority was for consideration of the placement of a bridge.

The number one response was pedestrian connectivity, followed by increased recreational access.

And then the third most important priority was maintaining the park as a natural area.

So there did seem to feel like there was a little bit of tension between the first and second priorities and this third priority.

It seemed like the survey respondents considered the Chesapeake Street alignment to have this better recreational access, but then they still wanted to maintain the park as a natural area.

So there's a little bit of tension there between the top priorities that could be something that we discuss a little bit further.

Location preference based on the survey, again, we had 833 people respond to the survey.

They were asked to rate each one out of five stars, which one they preferred.

And so you can see that at Chesapeake Street, it got an average of 3.98 stars, whereas East Market Street got an average of 3.4 stars for the location preference.

and then we asked about the design preference at each of the locations.

And again, this was pretty consistent with what we heard from the other public feedback that we had.

There seemed to be a stronger preference for a cable staid bridge design at Chesapeake Street versus while there are still a preference for a cable staid bridge design at East Market Street, it wasn't quite as strong and there was more support for

a Standard Trust or an Arch Trust Bridge at East Market Street.

And thankfully we were able to go back and collect the data for preferences on the Standard Trust Bridge.

And some of the comments seem to be consistent again with what we heard in the Stakeholder Advisory Committee that the East Market Street already feels more industrial.

So a more industrial style bridge feels like it would fit in a little bit better and wouldn't need as much of an aesthetic enhancement at that site.

And then just as a summary of feedback, you can see that the stakeholder advisory committee was pretty even on which of the alignments they preferred.

And then as we sort of expanded that feedback to the public, there was a stronger preference for the Chesapeake Street alignment and the MPA technical advisory committee recommended the Chesapeake Street alignment.

Within the last couple of days, I know some of you have already had some conversations about this.

There are a couple of other considerations that I want to mention as part of the discussion tonight.

First of all, there was a concern raised about the impacts to historic resources, specifically at the East Market Street site, since there are some remnants of historic structures there.

An evaluation of any impacts to those historic structures will have to be part of the VDOT environmental assessment that's completed.

So that's going to be part of their process regardless.

And any historic resources that are identified through that will

have to be preserved and protected.

And I'll let the VDOT folks talk a little bit more about these other items, but really briefly.

There could be a need for environmental mitigation at either of these locations, especially as we get more information about some of the studies that are being completed on flood activity and floodplains in those areas.

So it seems like the risks are higher at the East Market Street site, but also if a mitigation is needed from what has been developed as part of the concept.

The mitigation opportunity at the East Market Street side is also a little bit more straightforward.

Sorry to interrupt.

Correct.

And we won't know exactly what that is until after the hydraulic studies are completed.

So there's a higher risk that there will have to be some sort of mitigation, but it's also a more straightforward mitigation at the East Market Street site than it would be at the Chesapeake Street site if some adjustment needed to be made.

Probably the most significant consideration is really regarding the type of bridge structure that could feasibly be built.

Thanks, Andy.

So I think during the last meeting, I kind of brought up this question about about maintenance.

And I guess it's kind of in my background.

So I started to think about it, I think, as a whole lot of conversations when we're talking about projects like this early on, the ongoing calls for maintenance is not really brought up.

So I went and gathered some information from our bridge section.

And they did confirm that cable stay bridges do require a little bit more maintenance than an art regular art style or trust style bridge.

But the one thing that came out was that a cable stay bridge would be considered a complex structure.

In 2019, that was legislation passed, the Robert O. Norris Bill and Special Structures Fund, which classified certain types of structures in Virginia as special structures.

Our tunnels, the Verona-Enon Bridge, our movable bridges, they're all considered special structures, which require a little bit more detailed maintenance and funding in order to make sure those assets are maintained over the life of their lifetime.

When we're looking at new projects, we generally don't try to promote or support projects that would provide an increased cost for maintenance when it's not really necessary.

So from our stance, if this structure, a cable stay bridge were to be proposed, approved,

The department would not like to bear the cost of that additional maintenance for those structures.

How much

Would we expect to be spending on maintenance of a bridge?

That's a great question.

We really don't have any firm data on that.

The only cable stage structure similar to this in the state of Virginia that we've got right now that I'm aware of is the Verona Enon Bridge.

And coming from Richmond District, it's a totally different type of structure than we're talking about here because this is a pedestrian bridge.

We spent quite a bit of money on the maintenance of that structure.

The general consensus from my bridge section was that based on the type of bridge, cable stay bridges, there are more elements that need to be inspected and more maintenance that is required.

I have no feel for what order of magnitude we're talking about for maintenance of a bridge like this.

Is this a $10,000 a year expense?

Well, I mean, you would think that as time goes on and the structure gets older, you're going to be spending more money on it to keep that serviceable.

Supervisor, thank you.

We had some background noise coming from your mic, but you muted there, so you're good to go now.

Well, again, I wonder whether there's anything at all that you can tell me in terms of order of magnitude.

I mean, is this a $10,000 a year issue or way more than that?

Yeah, if I give you that number, I'd be guessing and I'm not going to do that.

I really can't tell you that.

I just know that on our side, when it comes to inspecting bridges and using on-call consultants to develop agreements to go out and inspect bridges, we're talking more than $10,000 for an inspection of a bridge.

The one good thing about this bridge

with it being a pedestrian bridge it's not required to be under the national bridge inspection standard because it's a pedestrian bridge but as an owner of the bridge you have some due diligence to ensure that that structure is safe for the public.

So I would think as the city you would have, you have a bridge program, you may want to ask someone in the city there what their program is like as far as how much they're spending a year on some of the inspections that they have, because I mean ours is all vehicular traffic.

I've got some background on the structures on the Virginia Capitol Trail, which are totally different than this.

They're smaller timber structures.

We're inspecting and doing maintenance on those when I was in the Richmond District on a monthly basis, based on the bicycle pedestrians that are going across those bridges and just the nature of how those structures are.

Yeah, so this is Brennan Duncan, a traffic engineer.

I can answer a little bit about that, I guess, about our program.

We do have a kind of yearly inspection program, Lloyd, going through all of our bridges.

We do include our pedestrian bridges in that have the same kind of

Pool of money to inspect those as we do our vehicular bridges.

I guess my question for VDOT would be, the inspection money is paid by the city, but normally if there's going to be maintenance issues or whatever, we apply for state or federal funding for that.

Oh, so Brendan, and this is, I think this is the first time this has come up since we've established the Robert O. Norris Bridge Fund and Special Structures.

Those structures all have a 30-year plan that detail out the maintenance over the life of their project and they're funded accordingly throughout the life with special funding.

You would likely be able to apply for funding if it is deemed a special structure in the state of Virginia.

My understanding was yes, because that drives the next phase.

I think that now this is a layman speaking.

So there's plenty of experts.

I might step in it here, but trust bridges, I think, and the connectivity of the cables to the cable stay are two very different processes based on the meeting we had the last time, but that was my understanding.

So, you know, the engineering to figure out how the cable stay works somewhere is very different than the two trust out bridges.

Thank you.

So, Sean Nelson, can you give us some

examples of the kinds of things that we can't prepare for, but the localities would be responsible to fix.

I mean, what comes to mind is accidents, floods, trees getting stuck on it, those kinds of things.

The uncertainty of that local responsibility to maintain is very troubling to me and I know you introduced that idea to us more than a month ago and I don't know if any of the locality staff in the room have worked on this at all to find out.

So I guess if there's any extra information you can give us about

Bob, take a stab at that.

The things to expect, I mean, it's a pedestrian bridge, so you want to make sure that the deck of the bridge is in a maintainable position where you've got some skid resistance and whatnot for the traveling public over top of it, which is maintained totally different than the way you maintain a highway bridge.

There are certain aspects of the bridge, the superstructure, the substructure that would need to be reviewed.

You'd have to have some type of commitment there to ensure that if something were to happen, if there was spalling over time, you'd have crews go out and replace that.

So, I mean, there's a multitude of things that come with the ownership of a bridge.

It's just like your house.

You just can't live in your house and allow it to become dilapidated.

You have to continue to do routine maintenance and preventative maintenance on your house in order for it to function well.

It's the same thing with bridges.

But it being a pedestrian bridge, it adds a little bit of complication to it because a pedestrian user is very different than a roadway user in what I found over the past.

In the second part, as far as the design goes and impacts with getting funding, I think it could go either way with the cable stay or the trust bridge.

It's all really going to depend on those estimates.

I think there's risk associated with each site location.

To me, the site location is probably one of the biggest factors here that we need to consider as opposed to the type of bridge that we put across it.

So

On a somewhat different topic, I think there was some mention at one of the earlier meetings that having the particular design of the

where I'll call the southern most of the two possibilities where it's got two separate legs with a pillar in the middle and a change of direction that there is some notion that having that pillar in the middle increases the cost to a significant degree.

And my question I guess is why is it then necessary to have that

I would imagine the pillars because they can't span the entire length of the channel with one span.

I don't know.

Yeah, that's correct.

I mean, that location is close to 600 feet across.

and that's the reason for that.

To get the connection to work, we designed it with a pier to reduce the cost because once you start looking at that long of a span, the trust section gets really large.

The ones at the Chesapeake, those have multiple piers, they're just not in the water.

So that one's, we're able to reduce the cost on that one because you only have

You have four piers, I think.

Three or four piers.

Are there fewer pillars or piers on the cable stay design?

The cable stay structure is the middle of that section.

It's just making sure that it can span the whole river on both sides.

At least, I mean, going east.

The west side, you can add additional structures because you're on land.

It's just trying to span the waterway without putting a pier in the river.

And that would be part of the design moving forward if we went with this cable stay bridge.

The biggest thing about it is, I think, and I don't really have a definite answer to, is can you have a cable stay that's going to be inundated with water during a flood?

And both locations, the eastern end of the, I mean, the western end of the landing points are both in the floodplain.

It's going to be more difficult to address a cable stay bridge if we have to raise it at Chesapeake than it would be to raise it at Woolen at East Market Street.

Because it would be easier to raise the structure higher at East Market Street than it would be to, because if you raise the one at Chesapeake, the tie down point

You either have to turn it 90 degrees and run it down into the park at some point, or it would extend into Riverview Street to get it out of the floodplain.

Yeah, I mean, we did have an example that we didn't actually review, which does connect to the road, Riverview, Riverside Street, further north, further south or further north.

And it is completely out of the floodplain, but it has multiple piers in the park.

So a couple of questions.

So to Supervisor Malek's point, which I really like, you know, I really want to pick a good work boot as opposed to necessarily having the perfect glass slipper.

You know, I, to me, I really want to see a bridge there, a pedestrian bridge, bicycle, pedestrian bridge.

You know, I,

I guess all things being equal, it would seem to me that the sort of classic truss style or the box truss or whatever would be the easiest to maintain and the least expensive.

Yes.

You can get that powder coated and there's a lot of examples of those across the state and that are pedestrian bridges even in the Charlottesville area where you have a simple truss bridge and the truss isn't fully enclosed like the example that we showed before in some of the presentations.

Most of those trusses are just like

Yeah, it seems like there's so many variables here we're being asked to evaluate.

It's hard to make a good decision.

But to me, if the least expensive, more likely to occur option is to have it at the park on the northern side

Even if you had to make a longer bridge with the sort of traditional truss box truss and it went up to Riverview or to Riverside Drive like Mr. Condor had noted, you know, if that's something that you think you can do and you feel like it, you know, you can work around the floodplain issues, the maintenance is less intensive, and we feel like the costs

would be less than some other option down near Bullen Mills, then that's where I land.

Yeah, they do.

I mean, the trust bridge is going to be the least expensive option.

And it's just, it's all based on

the length at that point for the bridge.

But I think in our conversations the other day and I think Mr. Condor pointed this out as well.

I mean, it's a fairly, I guess the cost basis per linear foot for lack of a better word is such significantly less box style truss bridge that you can get a lot more length

then you could, for cost, then you could with one of the other style.

Yes.

Yeah.

I'm with Supervisor Malek.

The question that I'm not understanding is if, if the,

I'd have to look at the cost.

I don't recall off the top of my head why there's such a difference in cost.

I know that the center pier is more expensive for the Woollen Mills site because you've got to access the river and build the pier in the middle of the river.

And the trusses are longer at that location than they are at the northern end.

So the truss cost is probably going to be a little bit more expensive because the height for the truss is going to be larger.

I am attracted aesthetically to the cable stayed bridge, but on the other hand, and I guess where I'm a little puzzled by is how it ends up being $4 million cheaper than the trust form.

But of course, the trust form is at the other location.

So obviously, there's something about the location that is the key variable.

I'm just trying to figure out if there is some, I mean, if we wound up with the cable stayed bridge,

on the northern option for $4 million less, the trade-off for that would be that we would end up having to pay, well, two trade-offs.

One is we'd have to pay the maintenance going forward, perhaps, and two is that there's a significant portion of the local folks there who really don't want it there, but

It's $4 million less.

And if we're thinking, to use Mr. Pinkston's phrase, looking for the work boot, we're looking for the less expensive option, it seems to me.

We end up with what I think is a more aesthetically pleasing one.

It just happens to be in a place I'd rather it wasn't.

I don't know.

But I think, Chuck, you made, or it was in the presentation, the bullet point that you put up, Sandy, is that I guess the Will and Mills location, there is more opportunities to mitigate at that location than it is at the other location.

So that's the kind of thing that I keep thinking about.

And by mitigation opportunities, you're basically saying the possible ways to get it out of the actual flood zone, flood level.

Thank you.

Mr. Nelson, could you explain a little more about

the processes that happen after today because I think that will help us to know because all of us I think are getting wrapped around things that maybe we shouldn't get wrapped around right now because we don't even have the possibility of those answers.

So I think these estimates, and Chuck, correct me if I'm wrong, Chuck or Sandy, I think these estimates are coming from the consultants who looked at this field study.

These estimates have not been looked at by experts at the department, meaning our location and design section.

We need more our bridge section to kind of give us a really good refined estimate that would be useful for us.

So if we kind of know the direction we're going to go, we can present a concept to the subject matter experts, which isn't me, we've got people that can do that, to give us a better understanding of what the cost would be, where the risks are, and what type of contingency to build in an estimate to ensure that if we put forward a project, let's say it costs $10 million, but there are some unknown risks and you may need

$5 to $6 million of contingency to help mitigate that.

You're putting forth a project with a cost not to exceed to ensure that you can mitigate some of these unforeseen issues if you were to get the funding.

Yes, it did.

Are there additional questions here?

Do folks want to start?

Councilor Pinkston suggested a preference.

Do others want to start suggesting what their preferences are?

We have to make a decision on this today.

I will start us off.

Option two is my preference.

That is the

Woolen Mills, eastern most on the water, southern option.

Historically, that location has been considered since the early 2000s.

I think it's been considered by the local residents as well as the community at large.

And I think it has a lower impact on the residents very much nearby.

As a person with new knee and difficulty doing hills on my bicycle anymore, I would find the Broadway connection to be much easier to handle than one having to do the steep hills at Chesapeake.

So I think it would be a little more welcoming to people of my physical ability to be able to either walk it or bike it.

There are things in the Broadway corridor which the county has been planning and working on for several years including more sidewalk connections and improvement of the connector road which would also benefit users of the bridge and yet not be part of our bridge project.

and having stood next to those old railroad bridges on many visits to the area, I am not offended, although I would love some airy beautiful artistic bridge, I am not offended by the more utilitarian trust bridge in that location because I think it is sort of appropriate to the history and the area.

So that's where I would throw in my two cents at the moment.

All right, does somebody else wish to go second?

I'm happy to voice some thoughts on it.

In trying to consider the location, you know, part of it, it seems like the northern piece or the Riverside location

You know, if we were just to put in a trail that's to enjoy the park and the walking and the trail of it, I think that's a worthy endeavor.

I think making that connection is worth it in and of itself.

It seems to me that the connection at the East Market Street provides an additional value or return on the investment in that it's connecting two activity centers from Pan Tops over to what's being planned in that Broadway corridor to include transit connections and such coming from that area to downtown.

So, you know, part of me was like, well, is this just about, you know, the trail activity and the aesthetics or the appreciation of the trail activity?

Or can it be that plus an economic development type of project?

So for me, when I started hearing about the amounts of money being invested, that additional economic development piece that could be beneficial to the localities and I think could enhance the usability of the trails and some folks may now be willing to walk if they know they have a destination at the end who maybe don't participate in trail activity, but there's some upsides to be there.

I have to defer or kind of listen closely to our city, to the counselors about the residents who live in the Riverside because it seems like there is there are concerns there.

If they were my residents, like the you know the one design that had the bridge in between the houses I wouldn't

I'd have a real hard problem.

I'd have a hard time with that.

So the parking, I know just when Little League happens over there is interesting.

So there are things that, you know, if we were taking on parking bills and stuff in the county, I'd be looking at that closely myself, just as a concern.

So now from the bridge style, of course, I would prefer the cables, the cable style bridge just from an aesthetic standpoint.

But the fact that that would be underwater if in a flood, if that was not mitigated, that would be problematic for me.

It seems to me based on the phase of the project we're going into, just from a pure aesthetic appreciation, I would prefer the arched truss versus the just the regular truss.

And since it's one that we still have some unknowns,

I would be perfectly fine with the basic truss bridge, but if there was perhaps an interest in having the arched one, and then we found out after we know the mitigation, the actual costs after the next phase of the study, if to get to maybe the more aesthetically pleasing bridge is possible and within a cost acceptability, then I would think you would try to get the more aesthetically pleasing bridge of the two.

but if you don't get there and the basic trust makes the project viable, then we go that route.

So to me, I think the flexibility of the project would still allow us to go, okay, if we don't go with the cable staid bridge and we go with the trusses, we would still have an opportunity, I believe, to pick which design perhaps could be there and that could be made after some cost figures are more firm, if you would.

but in listening to the comments from folks I think all of our priorities to get the connection over the river and listening to the input that's how I'm thinking about this so it would provide both trail activity the connection over the water for those appreciating the trails but then also provides a critical bike ped connector between two economic centers in the county and the city much like we're going to do

over from Stonefield across 29 with the pedestrian and the bridge that we're doing there.

Yeah, OK. Well, let me I guess I'll go next.

Just to build a little bit on what I was saying earlier,

My first concern is simply the location of Market Street as opposed to Chesapeake.

The big concern, I guess, you know, when I talked to the neighbors, I met with them down there one Saturday and it was

kind of a chilly Saturday, but even so it was the park was really kind of jumping and there wasn't any room for any more people to park.

One of the tensions we've got here is it seems to me that the neighbors conceive of that park or would like to conceive of that park as more, almost a more natural kind of experience rather than a developed

Park.

You will notice there are no basketball courts there.

The one built amenity is the playground.

And so the notion of putting the bridge in there and thereby increasing both car traffic and foot traffic and bike traffic and everything else through that area that the neighbors would

would rather think of as more natural is a bit jarring to them.

I also think that there is something to be said for having a diversity of park experiences in Charlottesville.

There are plenty of parks you can go to that have the basketball courts and the more built up kind of experience.

But I don't know of any other park really that offers much, certainly no other park that offers river frontage and a chance to see a great blue heron.

But you've also, I think it's a,

It's really pretty unique in the Charlottesville Park system.

And I'm not anxious to see it further developed.

On the other hand, I don't want to have it be completely inaccessible.

And certainly if somebody were to walk across the bridge to Market Street, it's only about a two minute walk beyond that to get down to Riverview Park.

The fact that there is more flexibility to be able to mitigate

as yet unknown harms from flooding is important to me.

And the fact, if we're just looking at designs, the fact that the city would not be on the hook for the maintenance or the city and the county together wouldn't be on the hook for maintenance is important.

Finally, if we're looking for ways to justify the bridge, whether it's an $11 million price tag or a $15 million price tag,

I have sort of a gut feeling that whoever is evaluating these things might think of it more favorably if we could, with a straight face, argue this economic development piece.

I don't know, but that just seems to me to be something that, in somebody's scoring system, that might give a little bit of an extra bump.

I have no feeling about arched versus traditional trust bridges.

I have confidence that somebody would figure that out.

Looking at the picture that's given to us, the traditional truss bridge looks pretty boring to me and the arch truss

It looks a little bit more interesting, but it's also probably one of those things that I'm not going to sit there and say, no, you've got to spend another million dollars to give it an arch.

So that's the kind of thing that I'm sure would be refined once the process got further underway.

So Sandy said at this point, I mean, we've got, I don't know if there's any further discussion that's needed or we can move to a motion.

Yeah, I can go ahead and speak to that real briefly and Chuck or Mr. Nelson, if you want to correct anything, feel free to jump in, but we would go ahead and prepare pre-application based on the feedback we get from you all.

Those are due at the end of the month.

and then between now and August 1st we would prepare the final application and that's when we would get more refined project estimates including contingencies and might have some better information on the cost differential between a Arch Trust or a Standard Trust.

It sounds like maybe based on what you all are saying and

Depending on what the vote goes, we'd probably base the application on an arched trust if that's the motion that you make.

So Mr.

Chair, how is this going to work?

There's north, south,

style of bridge.

I mean, the consensus is, I think I'm the only one who's proposing the north with a trust bridge.

And I'm happy to defer to the consensus of the group.

I don't know if it's a roll call vote that you just need to take to get the consensus.

Yeah, we'll take a vote typically.

Just historically, even though all the voting members will place a vote, the city and the county reps will voice their votes first.

But yes, then we just will do a roll call vote, and each person can vote on the piece.

And if you want to vote for or against, I mean, that would be your prerogative.

So with that, we would need a motion.

Supervisor Malek, question?

A quick question, if someone, Chuck or Sean, could illuminate those five smart scale criteria.

Someone had referred to would economic development help our project, and I think that that is one of the five criteria that smart scale uses for evaluation.

Yeah, I can take a crack at that.

There's actually six factor areas.

Economic development is one of them.

Land use is one, and that looks at population and employment in the area around the project.

You've got accessibility, which looks at the interconnection between employment and residential to see how it expands your ability to get from

employment to residential.

You've got safety, which for this project, it really doesn't have an effect.

And then environmental, which looks at your historical, your cultural resources.

And it also looks at your CO2 offsets.

So it's got two parts.

But those will both be looked at and considered as part of the evaluation process.

And the last would be congestion.

And since this is a new facility, they would look at nearby roadways for

diverting trips from the roadway, vehicle trips from the roadway to pedestrian trips across the bridge, bike and pedestrian trips across the bridge.

So you do have a corridor especially the 250 bridge at 250 corridor and the free bridge that's in 64 are the only two bridges in the area but 250 especially

There is a lot of congestion there, so they will look at the impacts of those diverted trips to this facility to determine what the congestion effects would be for that roadway.

Does that make sense to everybody?

That's very helpful to me, thank you very much.

And the only other thing, qualification for me is I really think about option two as the Broadway connection much more than an East Market Street connection.

So I hope that that will somehow end up, we'll really emphasize that because that's where most of the employment is and it is also connected to residential but it's where a lot of improvements are going to be made.

Thank you very much.

Go ahead.

You're ready to go?

All right, is there any further discussion needed?

Very good.

The motion carries four to one.

I did not.

Before we move on to the next topic, I would just say that I think the board is appreciative of all the efforts put in by staff to get the public comment and have the meetings to receive the input.

and obviously for everyone to participate to send their input and feedback to the policy board.

All right.

So the next item is smart scale projects update.

I'd already needed myself.

Sure, so there are three other MPO projects that the MPO will be applying for with SmartScale.

What you see on your screen now are three projects that both the city of Charlottesville, the MPO, and the county are pursuing on Fifth Street extended.

The city section project is from Cherry Avenue to Harris Road.

The MPO project is from Harris Road to about the city limits, roughly.

And the county portion is from Stagecoach Road to Ambrose Commons.

Thank you, Sandy.

The next slide.

For the MPO project, this is again from Harris Road to about the city limits.

There are a couple of improvements and I probably want to direct you more towards the bottom sketch rather than the top, but both are fairly straightforward.

For the Fifth Street project, there will be an additional

Left turn lane into 5th Street Station Parkway, as Sandy is pointing out right there for you.

There's going to be a median adjustment at Willoughby Shopping Center with the construction of a left turn lane mid-block into that shopping center.

There's a loon that is being proposed

Down by, I can't remember where that crossover is, but there's a loom construction there just below the southern entrance into the shopping center.

I think it's just off that screen, off my screen.

There will be a shared use path from Harris Street to

to about the Holiday Inn.

It's an eight foot wide shared use path with a four foot buffer.

It's about 20 from my back of the envelope estimate.

It's about 2,400 linear feet of shared use path.

and I believe there is an additional right-hand turn lane on Fifth Street going into Fifth Street Station Parkway.

And that's pretty much the crux.

If anyone has any questions or maybe

I will point out one comment.

The northbound left-turn lane that goes into Willoughby right now will be closed, and that's the one that's going to be relocated to the northern entrance to Willoughby Shopping Center, as shown in this drawing.

You can see that the other one is greened out at the bottom.

from what's shown in the upper illustration.

No, at this time we're not planning a traffic light there unless it's required or meets warrants.

There's not a large number, but there are some because there's not, I mean, basically we'd be peoples mostly South of 64 that would be going into the shopping center and there's just not a lot of volume making that maneuver.

and there's a lot of other ways you can get there too.

Any other questions?

Okay.

The next project is Avon Street Multimodal from Druid Avenue to approximately the 5th Street Station Parkway.

Again, my back of the envelope estimate.

This project will add an additional 3,700 linear feet of new sidewalk on the west side of Avon Street.

and approximately 4,700 linear feet of bicycle lanes.

So sidewalks and bicycle lanes are proposed for this project.

Travel lanes, there will be two 11-foot travel lanes and road widening on the west side of Avon Street.

And there's some possible changes

to One Street Parking potentially.

Yeah, I'll chime in a little bit.

We are looking at the bridge crossing at Moore's Creek to see what the possibility is for that to work.

And so we may end up looking at a parallel bridge for that facility if we can't put the trail or the shared use path on the on the bridge itself and still beat separation from the travelway.

So we're exploring that right now and we'll have a better idea.

later what that's going to whether that's going to be feasible or not.

The section that's north of in the city that where there's not sidewalk now we're basically not trying to get any right away we're going to shift the road and eliminate the parking on the east side of Avon Street and basically put curb and gutter and sidewalk on the or curb and sidewalk on the west side

along with bike lanes on both sides of the road.

Chuck, please clarify what you just said.

Basically, we're gonna look at the parking and we might include some additional parking for these four townhouses that are five, four townhouse units that are here, because that is really the only place that's where we're having parking concerns.

The rest of it, they either, there's no parking there, they have driveways, or they have parking in the rear.

Okay, I seem to remember always seeing cars parked in front of those houses and I was just concerned about those folks.

Any additional questions?

All right.

Yeah, there's one more, Supervisor Galloway.

Thank you, Sandy.

District Avenue roundabout.

at the intersection of Hydraulic Road and Cedar Hill Road.

Currently there are sidewalks on Hydraulic Road leading into District Avenue.

Right now bicyclists, there are no dedicated facilities for bicyclists on Hydraulic, so they share the road with the vehicle traffic.

According to VDOT's average daily traffic count data, about 15,000 vehicles travel through the section.

So the project is a proposed roundabout, and there will be a pork chop at Cedar Hill Road, as Sandy's pointing out.

So it would just,

It basically restricts or controls the access on and off of that roundabout and at Cedar Hill Road.

Yeah, we're reviewing this concept right now.

I actually just got a revised initial sketch from the consultant that's doing the new design.

And the only really changes, it shifts a little bit because there is some development that's proposed on that northwest quadrant at Stonefield.

So we're going to have to work around that concept to fit the roundabout in.

The diameter of the roundabout is a little smaller in the proposed concept we're considering.

And the only question that we need to really resolve is

with the city on the entrance to Cedar Hill Road.

Is that what they want or do they would like it connected to the roundabout?

I just wanna make sure because once we can incorporate that into design, if that's what they want, otherwise we can make it a write in, write out.

It's just, we wanna get that flushed out before the final application is submitted in August.

Thank you.

The little finger that comes down, that's the Cedar Hill connection that you're speaking about, is that right?

Okay.

That's just a write out right now.

And right now they have a write in, write out.

And this has been,

I know the city engineers will be consulting with the neighbors, but I will just report what I see on a regular basis because that's the way I come to town.

People really want to go west out of Cedar Hill.

And currently they drive around the pork chop and then go in a wide left turn when there's an opening in the traffic.

So perhaps they will appreciate being connected directly to the roundabout.

That's just a question that you'll have to ask them.

I would see many, and going right to then want to go west on hydraulic, I don't know where they would effectively turn around between here and 29.

Yeah, and now I'd like to second Supervisor Malek's point.

I'm sure Mr. Duncan will weigh in as we get closer to the final design, but

I think that being able to go west there, both east and west, would be very important to be able to do coming out of the meadows.

Yeah, I think what we need to balance, and we'll work through this with VDOT, but really in order to make that connection, we'd end up having to condemn one, if not two more of those houses right there at the corner, which we don't necessarily want to do.

Two people speaking at a time.

Yeah, I just would be interested, Mr. Duncan.

Not now, obviously, but at some point, I'd be interested to know more about that process.

I certainly would hate to have to condemn those houses at the same time.

I was just going to say, my first point was that both of those residences are actually duplexes.

So we're talking about losing four dwelling units.

I agree that whatever we did, it would make a lot more sense to try to figure out something that allows people in that area of town to have access to

to the roundabout and putting the access to Hydraulic Road about 50 feet west of the roundabout defeats that purpose.

We'll coordinate with the city moving forward on it because roundabouts do give you some flexibility about how you make the connections.

and we may be able to incorporate a connection into the roundabout that doesn't impact multiple houses.

The first house we will probably impact with whatever

configuration we come up with just because if it's a close proximity to the intersection, but the one with the brown roof, we can probably avoid that one.

And we may be able to avoid the first one.

That would be good.

All right, board.

We did have, earlier today, we noted a 3.50 stop time because of additional meetings starting at 4 o'clock.

Sandy has confirmed that the last item can be tabled until the next meeting.

Sandy, that's correct.

And this current item that Ryan gave, this was just an update, getting some initial feedback.

But that's all that was expected for that item today.

OK. All right.

Very good.

And there were no items added to the agenda.

So number eight, the staff updates on the TIP amendment.

We will need to table that just in the interest of time so that staff can move on to the next meeting.

But we were able to get through everything but one.

So thank you, board, for moving through that today.

We'll come back to you next meeting with some official requests for resolutions.

All right.

Thank you again, everyone.

Without objection, we will adjourn.

And the next meeting will be May 25, 2022.

Thanks, everybody.