MPO Policy Board Meeting   12/6/2022

And the first item here because number two matters from the public.

And do we have anyone here who wishes to speak to that?

We have one taker.

Okay, please come forward and state your name, and you will have three minutes to address the board.

Thank you.

That does look like an office.

It's called a mountain.

I know.

Well, Mr. Al.

Good evening policy board, fellow planners and advocates.

My name is Peter Cress from the Piedmont Environmental Council.

For 50 years, PSC has been a voice for well-planned communities and intelligent transportation solutions across our nine county region.

We have supported SmartScale since its adoption and we think it's an important tool because it uses data instead of

frankly politics to decide which transportation project should happen.

Like many of you, we are concerned about the cost estimates for the latest round of applications from the Charlottesville, Albemarle, MPO area.

Frankly, they're shocking and in some cases double what we have expected.

Take for example, the MPO's 5th Street multimodal proposal

which is actually a fairly modest project.

Between inflation and various contingencies, the cost is nearly double what we have expected.

Projects of such modest ambition is the shipment cost $45 million a month.

I'm not sure how we're gonna name transportation planning if that's the new reality.

I mentioned inflation and contingency together because they are related

and some interesting ways.

And there may actually be a bit of a loop of uncertainty created between the two forms of uncertainty.

Clearly we're in an inflationary environment.

I watched the CTV presentation and I understand the reasons.

And I know enough about economics to be dangerous, but I will say that these numbers appear to be worst case.

We might just have to wait and see, but I really hope this grim scenario does not become some kind of new normal scenario.

The contingency numbers are also wild, sometimes approaching 50%.

This doesn't really reflect a very high confidence in the underlying estimates.

Projects certainly vary, but

At least as of today, the SmartScale portal is reporting that most projects in our residency are actually on budget.

It'll be interesting to see the statewide numbers and how this all shapes out.

If we're subject to this degree of handicapping, it goes without saying that that same standard needs to apply across all districts.

I look forward to seeing the full discussion beginning in 2023 and what happens next.

Perhaps there could be a re-examination of the formulas or some kind of positive hedge, such as a wait list in case things actually get better than we expect.

In the meantime, I also look forward to watching your own deliberations and hearing the update about my small scale of this presentation.

And I always appreciate your steadfast work to make the community better for everyone.

Thank you.

We will close matters from the public.

And that will take us to item number three.

So this is review and acceptance of the agenda.

Mr. Galloway, did you recall that Mr. Meyers is not able to participate?

Is there a motion to approve as amended?

Second.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed?

Thank you.

And then we also have the September 28, 2022 meeting minutes.

Any

Changes are as needed to those that are calling for a Dr. Matt Chance for review.

I'll second that.

All right.

All in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

Opposed?

The minutes are approved.

Thank you.

This is just an appointment for the slate of policy board members who will recommend officers for consideration to serve in January.

Traditionally, there's been an alteration back and forth between

the city of the county serving as the chair and vice chair.

So currently Mr. Gallaway for Albemarle County is serving as the chair.

So traditionally it would be the city's chair to serve as chair next.

But among every shelter of the people, Mr.

Very good.

It's open December.

Are there any objections to the nomination?

Folks being appointed to the nomination, you know?

So that will take us past number five, which we removed, to number six, which is one of our first presentations.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

So the Title VI implementation plan for the Metropolitan Planning Organization needed to be updated and we decided to make a Title VI plan that covers all of the federally funded programs for the TJPPC.

So one of the changes to updates was that it's now the TJPPC Title VI implementation plan as opposed to just the MPO.

We've made substantial changes to this plan according to some of the updates and requirements.

And the purpose of the TJPDC's Title VI implementation plan is to describe the measures that the TJPDC adopts to ensure compliance with the Title VI Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin.

and the plan applies to the Charlottesville FPO and several other TJPEC programs.

So the TJPEC is the contractual administrator for the Charlottesville Albemarle FPO and it's also the administrator for the Charlottesville Regional Home Consortium and several other programs that are listed on this slide.

The updates to the TJPDC implementation plan include posting the Title VI implementation plan on the TJPDC and FBO websites, including non-discrimination notices with our contracting materials when we contract programs out, including offers for interpretation and translation services with public notices and public meetings.

Updating, we updated the platform and developed procedures that would help

the person filling out the complaint form to understand the process that we go through with the complaint that we received before.

And we posted those on the website and posted notices in the Office of Strategic Agency in the public area, notifying people of those options.

So for the MPO engagement plan, the TJPEC had a public contact period for 15 days, which is the requirement from October 24th to November 15th.

The draft plan was announced publicly and shared with the TJPEC staff, the MPO technical committee.

It was emailed to community stakeholders, posted in social media,

posted in the TJPDC office at the Water Street Center and on the website.

And we also translated the announcements into Spanish at Farsi.

And there were no public comments received.

It's kind of a drive.

So the staff recommends that the policy board vote to approve the use of the updated Title VI

TJ Peterson, Final Six implementation plan for the Charlottesville metropolitan planning organization.

I wanted to ask you a question.

It said that the Chief Operating Officer is the one who saw that the PDC within some work with the managers here at the PDC or the VDOT civil rights committee?

Medical programs to make sure they're implementing Type 6 within the EEC or any federally funded programs.

So somebody holds that kind of responsibility for each program.

Yeah, I think it's every three years they will be updated.

Typically the updates are looking at the demographics for the area and understanding if there is a large percentage of non-English speaking populations that are affected by our programs.

I move to approve the use of the updated TJPPC.06

And what notation, like Michelle, so Albemarle, Metropolitan Planning Organization.

All those in favor, please say aye.

Opposed?

All right.

The next item, number six, Regional Transit Division Planning and Government Study.

So who here has not seen the Regional Transit Vision Plan presentation?

So we did the plan.

It was a 28 month plan of $350,000 and it was supported by DRPT, the City of Charlottesville in Albemarle County.

We did a lot of public engagement.

We came up with two service networks, the administrative and the string.

We have a final report.

One of the ventures that we looked at was the access to jobs, which also has access to shopping and other amenities because people left jobs going, but this is people's shops.

So there's the baseline of the constraint would increase accessibility by transit by 33% and the up constraint would be avoid increased by 40%.

And then the next steps are to do transit governance study to communicate and organize around a regional authority, long-term planning, coordination between land use and transportation,

help the transit agencies find more drivers, implement guidelines and track service improvements, and build consensus around bus traffic transport improvements.

So based on those recommendations, we started the Regional Transit Government Study for Region 10.

I know.

This is with the consultants.

OK. Yeah, so this study is building on previous studies.

So there's the Transit Authority Study in 2009.

And then there was legislation passed in, sorry, the study was in 2008.

In 2009, the General Assembly passed legislation for a transit authority for the region.

However, it's not funded.

There was no funding mechanism.

And then the Regional Transit Partnership formed in 2017

which also was kind of like a precursor to an authority.

And in 2022, we had the Albemarle Transit Expansion Study at the Regional Transit Division 10.

So we're kind of building multiple studies and we've talked with other authorities in the region or in the state and they take about 10 years to pull them.

So we're right on track.

So the study goals,

are to, I'm sorry, what slide is that?

Okay, got it.

To develop two service scenarios, sorry.

Well, the study goals are to develop a,

a mechanism for bringing in revenue for transit services and then governing that revenue and being accountable for that revenue and having it be something that the region would feel comfortable with and enough to enable some kind of additional revenue source for transit.

So the approach of the study is we have a kickoff meeting and we're working on existing conditions.

So we're looking at

how transit is governed right now, how we make decisions around funding for transit and the accountability for that funding.

And then we'll do a peer regional transit study and look at how other regions are making decisions around transit and bringing in additional revenue.

managing it.

We'll look at potential revenue sources for our area and what works for our area and come up with a list of sources and work with the stakeholder committee which represents the regional jurisdictions to form some sort of consensus around the potential revenue generation mechanism and then we'll develop a scenario of

governance and funding allocations, like a system that allocate those funds based on, again, working with the jurisdictions to make sure that there's agreement and consensus on that.

And then there'll be a recommendation from consultants.

So there will be extensive stakeholder engagement to make sure that we can build a consensus.

The steering committee is representatives from each of the jurisdictions from region 10 that will also be working with transit partners.

You are met with all of them.

And the project team is TJP and CSAF, the AECOM Consultants, the City of Charlottesville, Albemarle County, and TRPT.

So this slide on the top, you can see these are the phases that I just went over.

And this, again, just kind of

shows how much engagement we'll have with all of the stakeholders in order to form that consensus.

I guess when this was attacked back in 2005, it was called the Transportation Working Group.

And I'm sure there's a big pile of papers on one of your shelves back there.

And it was the decision making, which was the stuff.

We had five options.

We could have put up a legislature for different options for funding, but if there is going to be decision ability spread amongst the jurisdictions, then everybody was going to survive.

Next, a follow-up question on that, just for our notes.

Are you saying that there was no research around who would make the decisions about the funding

There was no willingness on the part of the city at that time, I think a whole bunch of castle players to believe in the total control of who was going to be born.

And so that's sort of the sitting part of the authority that has been quasi-dependent or so.

Well I think it'd rather be in transit than all the other parts because I assume I'm looking after this rather than just what CAT is doing.

Then that bigger one, that's what that is, it's an analysis of the water zone

Those taxes were lent to the General Assembly.

Darren could come down and ask for money, but we had no other way to make such a difference.

But as I said, the Southern Bloc was not worried about money.

Very good.

Yeah, we're a little ahead of schedule, so I didn't even think of it.

Earlier, we had a really robust conversation around long-range transportation plans.

I'll leave that up to you there.

So just to give you a little bit of an update on where we are with long-range transportation plans, I know we don't have a whole lot to look for on GDS, but we have to work on it.

So, so far, based on the recommendation from CTAC, one of the comments they made is that it's still a really technical document, maybe we need to think of something else to call it, such as an offer and transportation plan to get people to feel like they can engage in that.

So, I will reveal it for you in just a minute.

We've built a lot to deal with our staff and have developed a non-technical name for it.

We've developed some draft website content, so we'll hopefully have a draft website set up soon.

We procured consultants to provide some technical support for our staff.

Again, this is still going to be very much staff-driven, but if not, we have a small staff and we have an opportunity to get some additional technical support.

We were able to procure the EPR and the ORAS consultants to provide a single process.

We're about 80% of the way through our demographic analysis based on the five-year ACS data.

There are some data gaps where the data is not available at a block or block group level.

So that's something that we're going to continue to monitor and possibly later this winter or early spring we'll have some better data that we could at least go back and review what those gaps are and see if they provide any additional information that we're not able to clean.

We've done a preliminary crash safety data analysis, so we looked at where the major crash incidences are located.

I have not gotten back in touch with VDOT, but we should be prepared to run the model pretty shortly.

So between the crash data and the modeling, that will give us a pretty good overview of the existing system operations once we're able to get that information.

We conducted a high level review of related plans, as you recall.

One of the tasks that we were completing was to review other related plans, including looking at other former studies, comprehensive plans, small area plans, TDP as well, but we wanted to reach back out to get those updated TDPs, but we've been working on going through all of those related documents, including things that are a little bit more adjacent to transportation, not directly related things like that.

We have developed a draft rules and objectives for the conversation and then based on some consultive feedback we have developed some revised public engagement strategies out there every year this afternoon and then in progress we're still developing our project for organization

So we've been able to incorporate a lot of the feedback that we got through the MPX Technical Committee of CTAC into developing and refining some of our performance measures, or measures that we use.

Alright, so the big reveal, the name of the Londrey Transportation Plan is, maybe for 2015.

So,

So we have this little logo that we developed and we hope that this will help make engagement more comfortable and inviting for the general public and make it feel a little bit less comfortable.

Alright, so the public engagement process has changed just a little bit from what I presented to you all initially.

My initial thought is that we would sort of have the draft rules and objectives and go out for broad public feedback and that would be a separate, expensive public thinking process from the prioritizing the system needs and then going back through and prioritizing the projects.

So I researched this a little bit based on having some discussions with our consultants, which I think will give us

more comprehensive public feedback on the Josh holes and objectives prior to putting that out before the public at large.

And then looking at what some of the other MPOs have done for their home race transportation plan, it did make sense that we could combine that effort to

link the goals against each other, prioritize the various goals against each other along with collecting the public public understand what the system needs are and the same engagement process.

So instead of doing those separate processes in order to maintain the overall project timeline, I can find that goal prioritization and need identification into one set of public engagement activities.

So that's where we're going to start the broader public engagement

So there are really four different steps in this process and while these are four different phases, that's not to minimize the amount of effort that's put into each of those.

Imagine that each of these is going to be really extensive.

So the public engagement strategy is what we talked about is that there are a number of stakeholders that are not engaged through this MPO.

We're one of the MPO committees that have really important perspectives on the transportation system needs.

And so, thinking about how this would come across to the public and how it would be expensive to sort of get some of this really important stakeholder feedback early enough in the process and how to easily inform the way the rest of the process would hold, the consultant suggested that it might be helpful to have some really early stakeholder meetings with some key community representatives that can speak from the perspective of

There were a couple of reasons that they suggested this.

One is that it helps us look at how we're creating this through different lenses and make sure that we're capturing all of these different perspectives up front and including all of those needs from the very beginning.

The second benefit for developing these stakeholder discussions very early in the process is that

We can use the involvement of some of these workers to help inform our public engagement process moving forward.

So they can provide that as an insight on how to engage some of the communities that they are involved with as we go through the process.

So there were really a couple of different benefits to doing this way.

It helps us get some additional perspectives embedded in the process early.

and then it helps us also be successful and reach out to all the populations that we want to reach through the implementation process.

So the idea would be that we will talk about the goals and objectives.

We'll have sort of a baseline of the draft rules and objectives and then we'll start scheduling some of these discussion groups with these stakeholder representatives from the community and then have a fairly open-ended discussion with them about

you know, what they might see as what they like or don't like or what's missing or what, you know, land doesn't land well.

I'll be working to develop sort of that framework for what those discussions will look like with the consultant.

A couple.

So I'm looking at the chart that you included in the packet that shows the five goals and then the groups down below.

It seems, and Sean please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like federal dollars are going to be saying, you don't get to put the environment at the bottom of the list.

So I guess the point of my question is, when we're asking the general public to prioritize things, I think we should be very careful about whether they have the ability to prioritize on a change they've already decided by others.

And so they don't just get mad.

Because that really makes people mad very fast, is when you ask them something and they don't pay any attention

It's not because we don't want to, it's because this is the way that our lives will go.

So I hope that that can be brought about when you go forward on this.

And also, I see in your groups, you pretty well sequestered everybody, but it would be helpful, I think, to have one person from each group listening in on the other.

so that there is a better, not necessarily that it sets out the day, but that people can hear what others are saying.

So that's a thought.

Thank you.

Well, yeah, maybe we can figure it out a little bit more in detail a little bit later.

But yeah, that, I mean, I can actually,

Do we want to make sure that our priorities align with, you know, other funding priorities or do we want to, you know,

I thought through a lot of this is that some of these goals and objectives, let me talk through this in a little bit more to tell us about, there are a lot of these

like evaluation systems that aren't necessarily confined to the goals and objectives.

So, you know, something like the environmental considerations are really being assessed throughout, you know, and dispersed throughout the goals and objectives themselves.

So part of this is how we're improving these and how we're prioritizing these.

But some of these things like the land use coordination metrics that we're using also support the environmental goals as well.

So that's going to be one of those things that we have to work through as well.

And that's something that I hope that consultants will help us really dig through carefully.

I'll just make a comment that I know that regional housing partnerships

So, you know, at this point we have somebody go, what's the MPO?

That can be very useful then in your next, your follow-up steps, which is what your point is.

So I think I appreciate that the group was kind of allowed.

As I had mentioned in a prior meeting, my citizen

My particular citizen advisory committee, the long range planning process and how it works and what it is, is just not, you know, in their brain.

It is a lead, it's on that team, and even it needs some involvement with CTAC.

So, you know, he'll help inform that particular group, but a group that's pretty engaged like that isn't even necessarily paying attention to that process, so.

Well, I think they would be,

because they're not necessarily the stakeholders on here.

I think there is some value in identifying specific stakeholders and getting their input, but then having to do that, of course, it worked well with regional housing partnerships.

Sure, and I will say for the CACs, or neighborhood associations, those type of things, those would be at the very beginning of the next more broadly public outreach, because I think it could also help

Yeah, and then that can be more expensive.

I'd also suggest in your situation that sometimes the cross-pollination of these groups.

Again, why don't you break it down in this way from an organizing group and make it some way that's

but having access to the editors, even if there's one draft of all four, it's not necessarily an exception, but giving them the information, letting them respond could be useful there as well.

So the goals that we have, those are all good goals.

And then the groups that you're talking about reaching out to, those who like the groups,

I can't think of anyone else to add to that.

So then the next step is it will be like that broader ability engagement.

So we'll take the draft goals and objectives

will have been reviewed through their stakeholder discussion groups.

And then we'll assess what kind of feedback we get.

And then we'll have another conversation about finalizing the schools in the checklist prior to taking it out generally to the general public.

I was hoping that we would potentially be able to do this by our January meeting.

I mean, that's probably gonna be a little too ambitious.

So I would expect to bring that back to you while in March.

given that a lot of the celebration might be difficult to organize around.

But I'll get working on it the right way.

So then the next step is going to be that really big push.

So like I said, probably the Stacy's are going to be one of the first groups that I reach out to to start doing some of this awareness.

We'll also develop some general public meeting opportunities and look for other public intercept opportunities as well as conducting this survey online.

All of those, of course, will be vetted to the extent possible, but really we just want to make ourselves as available as we can to find the right opportunities to reach as many people as well as reaching out to the representatives that were participated in the stakeholder discussion groups to help us determine how we can engage with our communities more broadly.

So this will be sort of a, probably a debris of different sort of engagement opportunities.

And then of course, we'll just be tracking the feedback we have very carefully, regardless of what that format looks like.

My hope is that we would be able to be moving on this probably pretty soon after we have the goals and objectives and a final state, not necessarily for that change, but

Could you tell us just what you said something about when you started to start what part of January you got on March, which is- The discussion groups, the stakeholder discussion groups.

Yeah, so what we're going to be doing during this, the space right here is we are going to be asking for feedback on how well these draft policies, or all these draft rules and objectives, how important are they relative to each other, how important is it for safety compared to equity compared to the environment, but there's several things, and not all of us start knowing how much weight to get to these different metrics that we're going to be evaluating as part of our process.

and then the other thing we're going to be asking is instead of going back and doing this analysis as I had originally intended to say okay these are the priorities that we've heard from you all and these are the system needs we're going to ask for feedback on the system needs for the reorganization process so what that means is that when we get to the point where we are starting to identify and prioritize the transportation system needs we're going to have two sets of data and we're going to have our quantitative analysis based on the

based on the weighted priorities or goals and objectives that we've heard public feedback on and then we're going to have public feedback on what the public perceives as being the needs and we're going to be able to look at both of those side by side and see where there might be some overlap and see where there might be some differences in those two approaches.

I would just offer the CACs, just so we're clear, and I don't know the association in the city that equates to the same structures.

Our CACs are very defined, so it's a good jumping off point.

The HOAs, neighborhood, and community associations can still be an area to go after the public engagement, especially since you hear from them a lot when they're

But the CHC's would not replace that.

I want to be clear, the CHC is a very specifically value-driven commission.

Yeah, that's what we can just vote on.

It's the table.

I was just referring to figure out.

The CAC can be very helpful in getting two other folks to engage

Sorry.

You can't have anything like that.

It's too much.

You can't work in the city, or not just the city, but the city and the county in terms of Ned's point about trying to

get as many as possible with neighborhood associations or equivalent of that in the county.

So are your neighborhood associations, those are just like a community association, are those specific entities of the city council?

They're not specific communities in the city council.

On our website, there's a list of the neighborhoods, you know, who's the chair of,

even by Friday Spring.

But it really varies across the city in terms of how engaged and how intentional.

And it's also like we're fighting with our car plan.

Some people in the neighborhood association have been there for a long time, and they'll get feedback that really is not at all aligned with the rest of how the neighborhood feels about things.

And so it is kind of tricky.

I'm assuming

Yeah, I mean, I'll say yes.

I'll also say that that was our leader in the rest of that.

We just love that, a little bit different.

But yeah, I'll work with the city as well.

I think these representative groups will also be able to help us out.

How do we reach those populations?

What are the best formats out there to engage them?

And I brought it up mainly to make sure that the CACs in the county are committees of the board, that they are very specific to geographic boundaries and not all community associations, HOAs,

in the county, so you want to make sure you're more inclusive than just going after our CACs.

So it's a community advisory committee?

So it's a, and we have them set up where you have like a large, there's specific categories that your membership is made up of.

A school representative, a business representative, a small neighborhood, a large neighborhood.

And the idea is that, um, so any supervisor has their own standard on what you do, but mine keeps a watch list of items that are problematic.

So.

The Belvedere Drive, left-hand turn at Belvedere on Twilight Road, for example, is on the launch list.

And that's going through a smart-scale application, et cetera.

Bus activity in the center, because the center is within that particular CAC.

The Greenbrier-Hillsdale intersection is in the middle, so those objects are on the launch list.

that have a requirement to do a community meeting will often schedule a true CAC because it's on the calendar already so that they have to satisfy their public engagement piece.

They can go to the CAC, members of the public can attend.

If nobody does attend, they're at least going to be feedback with people from the CAC themselves.

And we often have staff, board and supervisor members, and planning commissioners of the liaisons too, not members of the board.

and obviously it's staffed by the by the county.

So, you know, like I know this, my particular CDC is giving presentations conversation with our review boards on entrance quarter requirements and things like that.

So, you know, just different presentations.

Mike, I didn't mean to go into that for everybody else.

But you're welcome to attend my second session.

And the president, as an example, has people from different neighborhoods.

There must be all sort of middle-sized down there.

A combination of a long, long time presidents and really just out here.

Happy to discuss more with someone else.

Thank you.

Oh, thank you, Julia.

Can I ask a question back to someone on the engagement?

with the groups that you came up with, if, I know at the end of this you're going to be asking for general consensus from the policy board, are we moving in the right direction?

Yeah.

So if you think of something like, oh, then please let us know so we can add that to this list.

What I would suggest for Charles was kind of an in-group

and definitely sort of on a progressive edge of some of these things.

I don't always agree with everything they say, but I think they do a pretty good job of its well-informed, thoughtful advocacy for the sorts of things that we want to do here.

And so I think that's

as opposed to just saying listen to Twitter or whatever.

It's a great way.

Listen to social media.

And Sandy, I was just going to suggest that it's really demystified the name.

You might, in addition to talking about what an LRTP is, talk about what it does for them, and then there'd be some way to give concrete examples of what it yields and belong to them.

This will probably be the most substantive.

So I'm sorry, but I don't see CARS on there.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

This third phase of public engagement is really going to be about reaching back out to a lot of the people that we heard from in the previous phase and saying, you know, this is kind of what we've done with the word comments and this is what it looks like our project priorities are now that we've heard what our overall goals and objective priorities should be.

Now we know what the system needs are.

This is what we've done with it.

Give us feedback.

Do you agree or disagree that this is the outcomes that should be based on the criteria?

Really give a chance for us all to start weighing what the outcomes are of the process that we've been working through against some of the public engagement.

I imagine that this is probably where we'll start getting into some more specific, regular discussions about specific projects.

This might be a fairly iterative process where we start looking at, you know, if we implement this sort of project, what will the outcomes be versus if we really have a difference of potential projects with our priorities.

But I want to build that time in to really

Good, give us some of what the public feedback is going to be for the final recommendation, to give us a little bit of back and forth.

Probably around this time is when we'll move to monthly meetings with the policy board and the NPO committees to start sort of working through more of the details of having more of an opportunity to have regular conversations about it.

And in the final phase, this is just the required public hearing.

So again, this shouldn't be, you know, we hopefully by the time we get to this point, we've already heard the substantive feedback that we would expect to hear, and this is more of just the

administrative requirements.

This is when the plan will be assembled as a whole and everybody will have a chance to review it.

It's not been convenient at all, but these are the particular discussion groups.

We had a little bit of a discussion with, especially with NPO Tech, about whether it made sense to organize these around the type of stakeholder or whether it made more sense to organize these around the types of topics.

I think from my perspective, thinking about how organizing stakeholder discussion groups, you know, the

But the real idea is to have a pretty open-ended conversation.

So these aren't going to be necessarily, you know, I virtually remember calling them focus groups.

They're not really focus groups.

I don't have specific questions or specific, like, content I'm trying to get their feedback on.

Really, I wanted to see, like, what are the general perceptions of the draft rules and objectives that were put in before them?

What kind of feedback do they have?

What makes sense to them?

What doesn't make sense to them?

Those kinds of things.

So, of course, we'll work to structure and create a framework

But to me, thinking about how this would potentially be facilitated, it made a little bit more sense in organizing these by the type of representative and really going into this thing, like from a business perspective, this is what I see as being something that's missing from your goals and objectives, instead of focusing around, well, the economic development needs that are represented here are discussed in this.

So my hope was that each of these groups would be able to sort of speak to all of the goals and objectives through the lens that they're representing.

I hear what you're saying about the cross-pollination of the representatives in these discussions.

I think there could be an argument that maybe you don't separate them by the type of representative and maybe you just, all of them are mixed groups.

That could be an option where we're taking some people from each of these categories and putting them into a different group that can also be an option.

But my goal is really to have, to provide a forum to really have sort of a open discussion to take care of what kind of insight, what kind of feedback we get.

So with any of you guys, I've been reading down your suggestions so far for additional groups to include.

And the ones that are asterisked are ones that were added based on the recommendation by the FDA attack or CTAC.

So they're helping some additions and we'll see about that better than others.

This is Blue Ridge Apartment Council and TDEC is now Blue Ridge Area Coalition for the Home, so that's B-R-A-E-C.

Yeah, we do have a Charlottesville area line, so we could add that as well.

Right, we don't have commitment from everybody, so this would be in the 2020 class.

So the reason there's four of them is that we probably want to keep the crews around, eat our stuff, and we want to make sure that there's an opportunity

you know, have these perspectives and probably need to plan at least for such a meeting.

You have, first, the Baptist Church.

Yeah, and they're not listed as a big name.

Any other feedback you have on the bird or a bird shoot?

My own personal

So my personal feeling is I'm more interested in making sure we hear from as many of these folks as we can more than if they are in the same room.

I think it could be interesting once you hear from everybody to let them start reacting to one another.

Having them together would be interesting.

You get somebody from the business community that starts talking about equity items back and forth.

There's a notion that whatever can be distributed and then people would be prepared and they can sort of be thinking about it.

The Fire Department and the Rescue Squad are the ones who respond to accidents.

Well, Charlottesville has its own fire department, which has a headache and has a patch to it.

There's also the Rescue Squad, which is independent.

Alright.

Any other feedback on the discussion groups before I move on?

Okay.

All right, so the next thing that I want to review with you all then is just the draft rules and objectives.

And again, these are not intended to be necessarily the final versions.

They should be, hopefully, a jumping off point to have some really good conversations.

But I anticipate that these could be invested, especially once we have these stakeholder discussion groups.

So the first thing I want to start with is just to keep the end product that we're working to develop in mind.

So the required outcome of the long-range transportation plan.

Not to say this is the only thing that it can do, but the required outcome is that we have a list of prioritized projects that are based on what our estimated funding revenues are going to be for our projects.

So it's really a list of prioritized projects is the major outcome of this transportation plan that we have to work towards.

The goals and objectives are going to inform how we prioritize the different projects.

So the goals, when you think of the goals, these are our general value statements, these are the things that are important to us related to our transportation system.

And then the objectives are what can be measured, or what does it look like if we start achieving those goals?

So you think about safety as a pretty straightforward word, while we run our transportation things, some of that is safe, we want to reduce crashes.

So what it might look like for the objectives is that we're reducing the number of vehicle crashes and the severity of the vehicle crashes, and then we're also improving the safety and comfort of pedestrian and bicycle related instances.

So the objectives are the more specific and measurable outcomes that reflect what it looks like to achieve the goals.

And then the metrics are what we use

to assess how likely a project is to help us meet those goals.

So the metrics are really what we're doing, the quantitative process that we're using to evaluate how well a project or a need is going to help us determine how important a project should be compared to the other projects.

So it's possible that as we go through this public engagement, stakeholder engagement process, we might identify some objectives that

can't necessarily be quantitatively assessed.

And so if that's the case, we want to make sure that we are still considering those in the process, and we'll have to work to develop a methodology to make sure that we're incorporating those considerations into the process.

But our hope is that to the extent possible, we'll be able to create quantitative measures in order to help us determine whether our project is going to move us closer or farther away from our desired goals.

And this is consistent with the federal movement towards supporting the performance-based project for organization.

This really just gives us a starting point to have a conversation.

So this is there to help us say that based on our goals and objectives, when we run this analysis, these are where the important system needs are, and this is how well the projects that we have available to us are going to help us achieve our desired goals.

but that doesn't mean that we have to accept what comes out of that quantitative analysis.

That just gives us a place to start that conversation and then we'll have a larger conversation about whether or not that's the group that we want to move forward.

So again, the MPO committees as we're doing tonight are going to be vetting the goals and objectives and then we'll use the stakeholder discussion groups to help us determine whether or not there are things that we'll be seeing.

or other things that we should be adding to those.

So, in your packet, this is the list of draft goals and objectives as originally, or not quite as originally, but sort of the starting and launching out point for what this language is.

There were a couple of things that were changed or adjusted based on some conversations with MDOTech specifically.

There was more of an emphasis added to this efficiency

goal and objective language to better capture that we're looking not just at roadway efficiency improvements, but also looking at the functional improvements that we want to make to the multi-level system.

So the major goals and objectives, and again, these are based on looking at the previous Honors Transportation Plan goals and objectives,

benchmarking against other MPMs, Wal-Mart transportation plans, and then looking at what some of the emphasis areas have got from the local, state, and federal planning processes that have occurred since the last Wal-Mart transportation plan.

And so these are the five old categories that we pulled out and developed as a launching point for our discussion.

That includes safety, that includes the environment,

Equity and Accessibility, that one is really measuring access to jobs, and as Lucinda mentioned earlier, jobs also sort of can be a proxy for access to opportunities and services that are needed.

Then there's land use and economic development.

which is measuring how well different projects will help connect to other important community features.

So this is going to be measuring whether our project is going to support land use planning and having connections sort of these areas where there are more community assets that people want to function.

So things like, I don't like health care as listed, but things like grocery stores and parks and libraries and schools and things like that.

So to help sort of with that land use coordination piece.

And then the efficiency,

It's not measuring how reliable the system is operating.

Yes.

There's a long list of projects that we've been carrying from RTP to RTP.

Where do those get?

I think the television plan was already said a lot.

Yeah, so we'll get to that.

You know, we're going to do this like draft rules and objectives process, and then we're going to prioritize where the system needs are.

So the first thing we do after we prioritize the system needs is we're going to look at what are the projects that have already been developed and where is the overlap between projects that are developed and where our most important safety or system needs are.

And that's going to help us give us a starting point for which projects we want to start with.

evaluating to start working towards a constraint project list.

It is possible that we might identify some really important system needs that we don't have any sort of pipeline projects in place for.

And so that will help point us towards, well, we're not ready to prioritize this project, but we really need to prioritize studying this area or developing some solutions in this area.

I'm just going to say on the first one, you know, I hear and appreciate the quantitative and going after the quantitative.

But your objective under safety, improve comfort, comfort is a very subjective call to take a thing.

And just because I would be comfortable with a four-way stop doesn't mean I'm going to get a warning analysis that allows me a four-way stop.

Because I can think out of a lot of places in my district alone where people would be more comfortable and feel more safe with things that we're not going to get.

because the quantitative data says no.

So just be careful of that.

Yeah, the other thing, and this just occurred to me after the MTO tech meetings and CTAC meetings, the other thing I was thinking about is I think there might be a desire to highlight some of these things that are interwoven throughout a lot of things that maybe aren't clear, you know, just looking through those list of goals and objectives.

So for example, to supervise our knowledge point earlier, I think there might be some things that we want to pull out as guiding principles that are saying overarching to the extent that

you know, we can, we are considering how environmental considerations can be integrated with any of these other metrics or project evaluation processes that we're using.

Same thing with, you know, equity, if I make sense to pull this out and say, you know, there's equity, equity is being considered throughout the way all of these other measures are occurring, not just, you know, within that one line item.

So I don't want to start with that necessarily.

I think with our Department of Transportation's Secretary of Transportation,

I think a bigger point that maybe we're thinking about as we go through this, I see in this community, if we go out and go, hey, bike lanes, everyone's like, yes,

But if you put bike instead of bike, and I'm thinking of the cost increase that we may begin to when we think of our bike head bridge and the explosion of the costs there, that if folks are talking about priorities of what they would want, it's really easy to go on with this, on with this, on with this, on with this.

But when you start giving them a cost per mile, while they might, by going either number one, they might say, well, wait a minute, per cost given, I'd rather have

I would hope that's a level of conversation we could perhaps get at.

We did the trade-offs on the mission plans.

We talked about, you know, you want this, we'll deal with that.

That might be something you can integrate into a survey and then you can see that you needed that sticker.

Well, some communities what they do is they give people their projects, like so many dots.

I think that's kind of going to be your point.

Not that kind of a dot, just stick a dot.

Well, it's important, it's a super resonance point of not setting up the public to do this work.

Those who engage will take it seriously.

to have them identify their priorities, but then none of them make it in.

Like, well, then why didn't we bother?

So we have to be mindful of that so that we don't set them up to build this franchise after investing time and effort in something that we want them to be in.

Yeah.

You know, what kind of decision are you making?

I got to Mr. Rake's suggestion, similar to the evaluations for restaurants where you have only three to four dollars, it seems like that should be

apply these choices because in this room, some number of years ago, I don't know if it was Christmas, maybe my phone was here, there was a group that came in and basically took over the whole of that process.

They had hundreds of people who all came and they had not been to anything else the whole series.

And it was just a BS term.

figuring out a way to calibrate that so that you actually get a bonafide, reasonable suggestion that you can use, as opposed to just somebody's sample of this will be really helpful for you all.

On the plus side of the plus side, hundreds of people wanted to participate in the large.

Any other feedback on this?

Thank you very much.

This isn't really something that I have a very specific request for, but I just wanted to make sure that you all have a chance to see these project cost estimates prior to

The CTB meeting in January raised to develop the staff-recommended projects to be funded.

So the important thing to think about through these project process that were developed through Smartscale is that when we were talking about a lot of these projects, we were really talking about the base process.

because they probably mean what it is and because of the complexity of some of these projects.

There ended up being some pretty high contingencies of inflation costs that were added to this project, which did increase the final price tag pretty significantly.

For some of these projects, you know, we'll just have to wait and see what the valuation looks like, what the sport looks like, and what this looks like across the state because, you know,

These test estimate inflationary factors should relate to pretty consistently should be applied to all the projects.

So what this means is that we probably won't get very many projects funded this round and hopefully we can use whatever feedback we do get based on the outcomes to inform and refine our scripts for projects moving forward.

But there might also be,

a desire or discussion we might have about whether or not there are opportunities to get some phases or some work with these projects funded separately in order to move the project forward, specifically thinking about the Rivera River back in the pedestrian bridge.

One of the reasons the final project was so expensive for this one is because it's a complicated project and we don't have a lot of answers to some of the questions that, as you well discussed, prior to submitting the Smartsville application.

So this could be an opportunity where we want to look at whether or not there might be another federal grant opportunity that we want to pursue since we've done significant amount of work to try to get some of this design work or answer some of those questions before we apply or resubmit.

For another application on the smart scale so that we can reduce some of the unknown information and hopefully reduce some of those contingency costs, it could also be that we want to

Look at how this project can be phased out separately.

There are some potential options to do that.

But I think as we move forward, there are two things to keep in mind.

When we talk about our project cost estimates for any of our long-range transportation plan, we want to make sure that we're also factoring in that there's going to be some additional cost besides just the base cost estimates as we're developing our constrained budget and our list of projects.

And the other thing to keep in mind is that we want to make sure that we're being really

A couple of, so he is the engineer, R.W.

So we have a pretty documented system of how we go about developing these applications.

On some of these projects, in particular, projects that have bridges, if you don't have gold rings, we don't know what we have to build a foundation.

So we are applying risk to these projects based on what we know at the time.

And quite frankly, a whole lot of the planning studies, we don't get some of the information we need to develop good estimates without that risk associated with it.

The inflation, and Chuck and Stacy and Mike, correct me if I'm wrong, the inflation was applied automatically in a smart scale pool in the application process.

So that is done consistently across the state.

The contingency should also be done consistently across the state because we now have a documented process.

Yeah, it's interesting.

It's helpful.

Thank you.

So often with the work that I'm in, we will include contingencies, which are to partly cover cost escalation and inflation.

But it sounds like you all are, you've got contingencies based off like risks, having to do with unknown, yes,

So, I think to your point, other jurisdictions and municipalities are going to be facing the same kind of thing.

I think we can get better.

And what this shows me, honestly,

It seems to me your risk aversion is almost as much as the base project.

That's what I'm saying.

The project may not have been fully rated during the planning study.

You get certain aspects of it, but you don't get some

Boring sort of went a long way.

So maybe we should have a PDE study before we submitted the application.

Or maybe even added that as a part of the study to capture that information.

Half of a percent of your cost is unknown.

In our normal project development, these risks are drawn down over the life cycle of the project.

So as we go out and get additional borings and get additional information, estimate will go down.

So this is a newer methodology that you're doing here in terms of your... And in the past, and Stacy will mean, we had this issue in the town of Orange where

A revenue sharing project which is a 50-50 match between the department and locality.

An estimate went in that was a traffic engineering study estimate.

It did not go through the

Right disciplines to review an estimate and it was just put in the portal.

So what happens in that circumstance?

So they were funded in the first, the first time they applied for funds, they got what they, almost all of what they requested and now they have insufficient funds to cover the whole project.

I think it's important to note too that the old pre-smart scale way of developing projects is that we started with a throw something up against the wall budget that wasn't expected to cover everything.

So the augment were funded only for PE or only maybe for PE and right of way.

And we did that scoping, to your point, the scoping process happened after a project was identified and funded and actually in our program.

And we were then able to assess what those risks were and ask for additional funds from our CTV.

But now this process,

and the ability to look at projects without some of that political subjectivity piece of it means that we're doing a lot of that scoping up front before there's even the ability to fund that.

I mean, where do we even get the funds to do the forms and all that?

We're sort of in this, you know, this Catch-22 right now.

How do you, how do you funnel that?

With that old process work, we could start projects.

It took them a while, but there was a lot of money spent on engineering projects that really got to the scope.

So we've had its own problems of front-loading too much.

So you've got to find a new balance.

But I think we're in a unique situation here.

Out of that cost estimating office, they've taken a tool that was developed in Culpeper District for conceptual design estimates.

They literally took a workbook that staff in Culpeper District developed to utilize statewide as a tool.

So we've got good resources.

We just need to continue to work closely together in looking at round six.

There's things that we want to do.

Let's start having the conversation now to make sure we can get this risk down as much as possible.

What does it cost to do the boringly necessary?

It depends on the project.

It's an access.

Yeah, I mean, I would have to talk to our materials people drink.

But I mean, in particular, I mean, I think the biggest one here is the bridge.

I mean, if you've got a bridge, that's a big unknown.

So for most of our work, we don't really need a whole lot of that.

Well, for that project, a whole lot of that work was done up front through some kind of design build also.

So they're designing it and building it all at the same time.

He was talking about the hot lanes coming in front of the bridge.

Without having the geotechnical information,

And without an alignment, or without alignment here, right?

We didn't have a war in the geotechnical way.

It was supposed to be part of that first thing.

But the line that I remember is that it's a type of war which means spending 100 grand at a low-level value of money in the beginning to get this information.

or when you find out there's a possibility of getting funded by a big one in six years and then you go back and do it then, which is what we've done in East London Bridge.

That makes total sense when it comes to the bridge.

I'm a little surprised, though, with the district avenue roundabout.

This is what I'm wondering about at the theater.

Right.

So I understand 10% were engineering contingencies.

and then you've got 30%, 40% right of way contingency and then you've got 50% of instruction.

I wouldn't have thought there'd be that much risk involved in that in terms of like

Well, I think probably your construction costs in risk there is probably with management of traffic.

And right away, some of the access issues that you may encounter there could be part of the race.

With me, I haven't looked at these.

OK.

But that's based on some sort of methodology, the culture.

Yeah.

So it's not just someone's holding something out of there.

No, no, no, no.

But I mean, to Mr. Kreb's point earlier, what happens with these things is you don't do projects because you have the contingency, the risk that you're trying to cover with contingency, and then the potential for inflation, and unfortunately, you don't even develop projects.

So what happens after this?

Yeah, I mean it's going to get stolen.

So I mean they had a presentation today at the CTV talking about which projects went through validation and were moving forward.

Out of the state there were 411 total applications with a total of $7.6 billion in requests.

And what is that?

How much money is available?

There's the Cool Pepper district on the phone fund for certain types of projects.

So the next, you mentioned the word validation.

Have these been validated?

Yes.

Okay.

So you've got your bid and then it's been submitted to someone to be validated and then we'll wait to see how the scoring turns out?

Yep.

Okay.

What would a community do better on costs if they did all that up front work?

I mean, would you not?

If it's a beneficial project and it's something you want, then yes.

If you got to score better.

Well, you would have all down the risk.

You would have assumed some of that cost, which I've heard localities say they can do achievement in us.

And if you can develop a project through people cheaper than us and get to a great estimate, we'll all afford it.

And we'll try to fund it right away in construction.

Get 30%.

Even that just is significant.

Maybe you're reduced to at risk by half, you might be in a better position to get your project.

and certainly the cost of that up-ground work isn't going to be $4 million, as you know.

Yeah, but if you say like the $4.7 million or the district, excuse me, $4.7 million, you know, if we had to spend a quarter of that, what is that, $400,000 or $400,000 split in account of the city,

200,000, that's actually, yeah, that's right on the border.

Each of us would be investing like $200,000 to get a really good set of plans that could be.

Then maybe the net result is all of our risk goes down so we can score better.

That's the kind of trade off you're talking about.

I don't know if we have that kind of funding available.

But you're also buying down the cost of the project, right?

These are a portion of one of the phases.

It helps you cross benefit ratio.

I mean, Albemarle last round through contributed significant dollars to some of the projects.

I'll also mention that, well, you know, it's unlikely that we'll get all these projects funded.

We were very successful over the years for us in getting a lot of sort of pipeline projects that have been sitting on our list moved forward.

So I think this is just really good information to help us out how to be successful in the future around.

But we've still been successful at leveraging the smart scale resources well in the past.

And this is probably a conversation that is happening

Well, I'm personally very grateful that VDOT has taken the leadership to make sure that there is sort of fair, documented approach to rural jurisdictions, because that was some hard work.

So I have two basic questions.

I don't think it's a flat.

There's a range based on the complexity of the project.

So for complex, you might be at a higher contingency range

Some sort of project lower end, and then there are other elements that can raise or lower that number.

And I mean, I guess one thing too is all the documentation for these estimates have to be uploaded into the portal.

And then I guess one last thing is the Cost Estimation Office is sampling 10% of all projects and looking at our estimates and trying to find places where we maybe missed something and we're, I think, trying to warm between the rest of the states.

But if you all would like to have a structure to face my last reading, we can get to that.

We can get to that.

I mean, I've got it up now.

Part of trying to understand this well enough to then turn around and explain it to folks, that is what it takes for me to help try to understand it.

play out a real world scenario here about the base cost.

I mean, inflation ultimately is just base cost.

So I appreciate this Peterborough, I'm not here just to be able to look at these different inflation numbers.

But using this scenario of how it was built and accounted for, can you use the, you ran into the runaway truck issue with the Crozet railway project.

That sounds to me like to correct and do the,

That sounds to me like a contingency that would have come up.

There were no contingencies.

That was a different set of funds to address the issue that everybody agreed with.

It was the right thing to do.

But it wasn't sort of scale without change.

We use ASEP funds for that, wasn't it?

No.

No.

So the contingencies, there were no contingencies.

So that would be a case like for a tree here, there was a contingency number attached to it.

It just wasn't enough to cover the contingency to top that off.

Because it was not a risk that was even thought.

Yes.

There was money left over for the Billsdale connector from Hydraulic up to

True there.

Potentially.

Because we had the opportunity to retain some of that, so it wouldn't just go back in, but it could still be through, and that was applied to another project.

So how do you use the

We need to talk especially about the previous vote to use the color of the billionaire and billionaire to put something together.

And every year we will be using much of our show's pedigree partly.

Which is a perfect example of Michael saying he should put in 1.5 billion for 15 years before he gets voted for.

Any questions or comments here?

Thank you.

Is there any final things actually?

All right.

Next item, number nine, our round table updates.

And why don't we give the panelists a round of applause.

Actually a couple of pages.

So, some projects that we've been working on that we submitted or we can't do communities grant application through FHWA recently and you can find out in January or February that's done from it.

We are doing some conceptual design for our project as well.

We've been interested in those three years laying projects to explore transitioning that roadway to either one way south to unpack it only or closing it to vehicles entirely.

We have two concept ideas from our consultant and we're going to be taking those to the FSCA team in January.

And then I can just briefly speak about our talk plan.

Thank you.

Gentlemen, any updates?

I don't have anything to say, but I think the thing is that updated is probably just me.

I'm still chambers on the defense creation plan.

Still working on the truck arrest where I'm trying to get that thing finalized so that we can start to work on that.

The right-of-way was going well, so that's a good thing.

We'll probably have that project finished up this spring because the pages are going to stop us from completing those plans.

On the DDI, it's not in the final configuration.

So I know we've had issues with traffic through there coming through laptops.

try to adjust the timing as much as possible, actually, for some drones to try to help us look at it.

Where the traffic is to help us time the signal a little bit better.

Contractors hoping to try to get there and pave this week to try to get the additional lanes open to be at full capacity based on the weather it was looking like.

It does not look like that it's going to happen.

So as soon as we can find a window to pave at night, we will do that to try to get those lanes back open so things can flow through that area a little bit better.

And then last thing, the hydraulic bundle.

They're proprietary meetings for the short list of firms on this Thursday.

I haven't worked with that SparkScout if we talk about that enough.

Any updates over there?

Thank you, sir.

Thank you, sir.

What is on Mr. Hudson?

Well, Mr. Hudson, I didn't see his name.

Sure, I have a couple of quick updates.

First off is the DRPT grant season, open December 1st, and will close on February 1st.

This includes our capital, operating, technical assistance, demo project, and intern slash workforce programs.

Our TAM plan is available online through our DRPT's open data portal.

All MPOs should have received revised transit asset management performance targets for inclusion in the TIP and STIP.

Well, not STIP, excuse me.

On the tip front, MPOs should be working closely with transit agencies, in this case CAT and Jaunt, on identifying transit projects for the new updated tips.

If there are questions about the tips, please reach out to me in this case if it's a transit project.

I think the room has been muted.

Yes.

I do appreciate the update from the 124 and the construction going on over there.

It's not happening right now.

In the county, we are, as I imagine, this is the same city here.

We've got the budget time.

See, I know the front there is operational and all that, so we have a joint meeting with our school board tomorrow, so I know we'll all go away for the holiday, but come back in the midst of a budget time.

Are there any updates, Andy, as well?

Alright, we will close matters for the public.

Our next meeting date will be January 25th, 2023.

I hope you all enjoy a wonderful holiday and a happy new year and I will take motion to adjourn.

All right, all in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed?

Very good.

Nice job.

Thank you.

Ned, what was that date?

The date?