MPO Policy Board Meeting   10/25/2023

It is four o'clock on the dot.

Ms.

I will.

Supervisor Malek?

Yes.

Councillor Sniff is not present yet.

Mr. Nelson?

Present.

Ms.

Mr. Reek?

Mr. Williams?

Ms.

Mr. Wagner?

Here.

Mr. Miner?

Mr. Koenig?

And Ms.

Excellent, thank you.

So are there any members of the public present who would like to provide a comment?

There's one and three minutes for speaker.

Hi, my name is Paul Grady.

I live just outside of Crozet.

For the first smart-scale round of projects, this area's project was the widening of the 250 bypass from four to six lanes from Emmett Street south and the replacement of the four bridges Old Abbey Road, the CSX Railroad Bridge, and the two route 250 bridges.

The project did not get funded.

What occurred to me was that about 25% of the traffic either got on or got off at the route 250 interchange, which meant that only 75% of the traffic actually went under the bridges.

That means that the bridges don't need replacement yet, but the 250 bypass still needs to be six lanes.

Before UVA built Leonard Sandridge Road, I spoke before the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors and said that the exit ramp of Old Army Road and the entrance ramp of Leonard Sandridge Road should be connected and similarly its exit ramp should be connected to the entrance ramp of Barracks Road interchange.

That didn't happen.

Every time I come off the old Abbey Road exit ramp and have to merge into two-lane traffic only to turn off seconds later, I curse.

About five years ago, I attended a lecture by the UVA architect, Alice Rauscher, and one of the things that she said was that UVA would really like to have an interchange at Lawrence-Andridge Road.

County, and VDOT.

So we'll close the public comment period.

And then we're going to do a quick introduction.

Mr. Daniel Wagner, it's nice to have you here.

Can you say a little bit?

Sure, thank you.

My name is Daniel Weidner, everyone.

I am a native rich vendor, but also have plenty of family in Charlottesville area.

And I have recently been assigned to represent DRPT in any field of political policy.

How long have you been with DRPT?

About two years now.

OK.

So I'm in the planning team.

County agencies with their long-range planning processes, as well as preparing for any XPA discretionary grants, as well as the smart scale opportunities for any of our discretionary programs as well for new pilot projects or also just basic state program projects.

Yeah, thank you all for that.

Right, so we on council, City Council, but I have to move you at six.

So we have an agenda in front of us.

Does anyone have any additional additions to the agenda?

Could I please have a motion for adoption of the agenda?

Second, please.

I have to abstain.

I was not there.

The next one was the joint session that we had with our friends over in Stanton at Lanesboro.

And I thought that was a really great meeting.

We all did a lovely job putting it together.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you.

Any revisions that you have to make?

OK.

May I have a motion, please, to adopt these?

OK.

All in favor?

Aye.

Fantastic.

So we have an agenda, and we have our meeting

So it's been a little bit since we talked about the long range transportation plan, we had our joint meeting.

So there's a lot of information to cover with you all at this meeting.

I'm going to try to move quickly through this, but feel free to stop me if you have any questions at any point.

So first of all, just as a reminder, we have been working basically since February to do this first round of public engagement.

We started with stakeholder meetings to better define our goals and objectives.

And then we've been conducting more

more general public outreach basically throughout the summer.

And the goals that we had established for this first phase of public engagement were to set and establish and prioritize the goals for our transportation system regionally, identify from the public what they see as the travel needs for the region, and then also use the information that we received from the public to really guide how much weight to put on the different

evaluation metrics related to the evaluation of the data when we get to the data analysis part of the long-range transportation plan.

So those were our three goals for how we were going to incorporate the engagement from the public.

So this slide, I'm not going to go through all of it.

I just want to highlight the level of effort that our staff has put in to get the public engagement to date.

We were able to document contact with almost 600 individuals, I think,

Technically, we reached 599.

I was a little disappointed we didn't get that last one, but pretty close to 600.

And that included 16 different community events that our staff was able to show a presence at and total we reviewed more than 2000 comments.

So the comments were collected as part of our MetroQuest survey that was out to the public.

It was collected through the public intercepts and our public engagement opportunities where we went out into the community.

And then it also includes an analysis of comments and feedback that were received through previous engagement efforts, which included

Comprehensive Plan feedback that had been gathered to date, and then also the Transit Vision Plan.

So utilizing all the information that had been collected through some of these previously completed, but also very much still relevant studies.

This graph just shows a breakdown of what the sources for all the public comments that we received.

So out of all the comments that were analyzed, you can see about half of them came from our MetroQuest survey of the 2300.

And then approximately another 40%, so about 800 or so came from the past engagement efforts.

And then another 12% came from the in-person engagement.

So that's where our feedback was collected as far as the comments that we received.

So the information that we were collecting from the MetroQuest survey, we basically had four different types of data collection that we were asking people to respond to.

The first is that we presented the different scoring priorities, safety, environment, multimodal accessibility, land use coordination, and the efficiency and economic development.

And we're asking for public feedback to prioritize among those five different prioritization categories.

The second exercise is that we presented the public or their respondents with a couple of different trade off scenarios and ask them to wait where on the scale they might prefer one trade off compared to another trade off.

And then we asked for the comments through the interactive map.

So I'll go through those in a little bit.

And then finally, we collected demographic information.

So we knew who was represented in the survey and what types of populations we might want to do more intentional outreach for that whose perspectives were not being captured in the survey.

So just to go through this briefly, when we asked the survey respondents to prioritize among the different scoring categories, this is the outcomes that you'll see.

The majority of survey respondents prioritized safety, that was the highest, followed by environmental considerations, and then followed by multimodal accessibility.

And here, scoring the lowest from the survey respondents were

were the categories for land use coordination and then efficiency and economic development.

Now, there could be a number of reasons for that.

I could come up with some theories for why this happened.

We did include definitions for what we meant when we said land use coordination, so there was more information that survey respondents could respond to, but based on what was presented to them in the survey.

this is how they ranked these different scoring priorities among themselves.

The three sets of trade-off questions we asked, the first one was related to how much prioritization should we give to roadway improvements versus prioritizing multiple modes of transportation and this was really intended to help understand should we be continuing to prioritize roadway improvements or should we continue investing in

projects that are primarily going to support public transportation, active transportation projects.

And as you can see, based on the public respondents, there was more favorable responses for prioritizing the multiple modes of transportation, not just integrating them into roadway projects.

I'll also mention that as part of developing the survey what I tried to do was sort of make the best case argument for why one might suggest that it's more important to prioritize one or the other so respondents could respond based on which argument they agreed with more strongly.

So the next trade-off question we asked is, is it more important to improve access to jobs or is it more important to improve access to

non job community destin stores or coffee shops or might need to run errands maybe what would be consi development job centers and

and there was some feedback that we received that probably places where people want to run errands are also places where people have jobs so there is some overlap between us but it is an interesting question to ask and so what you'll see is that the distribution here was pretty even with most people falling in the middle it's not necessarily more important to prioritize one or the other they're both really important for people for overall quality of life and then this last question was really intended to gauge what the public favored in terms of what are

what our strongest actions should be related to addressing climate change and climate action goals that have been identified in the region.

So this was intended to say should we focus on reducing congestion on the roadways, meaning really help reduce unproductive idling, making sure cars aren't sitting somewhere, not going where they want to go, improving roadway operations.

or should we prioritize active and public transportation to provide an alternative to single occupancy vehicles.

And again, there was a stronger preference for prioritizing active and public transportation as a preference for addressing our or moving towards our climate action goals in the region.

This just goes into the mapping exercises.

I'm not going to spend too much time on here, but you'll see that based on the feedback that we received through the MetroQuest survey, it was a little bit over 1100 comments that we received.

So almost 500 of those, just a little under half were related to bicycle and pedestrian, either places where they identified a need or places where they identified an improvement.

So they might say this is an unsafe bicycle or pedestrian.

situation or they might say I would like some sort of infrastructure improvement here.

A little under a quarter of the projects were related to safety and just about the same amount of those are related to roadway improvement.

And then 139 comments were related to public transit.

So that's kind of the breakout from the MetroQuest survey comments.

I'll also mention that there's probably some overlap between some of these.

So somebody could have, people chose which kind of label to put on their comments.

So they might label it as a bicycle and pedestrian need, but it could also be a safety need potentially.

So there is some context that will need to be applied to these.

We have, the consultants have pulled all this information into a map where you can go to the dots and you can see what the comment was.

So we'll be able to look at this with a little bit more information.

and be able to share that publicly, but this is just something to give us a really high level view.

And then this map shows all the comments that were collected for the region.

So again, it kind of just looks like a lot of dots right now, but it does give us a lot of information for once we start sort of overlapping the information and the data together.

This is a really good

baseline to help us understand what kinds of feedback and what kinds of projects people might want at these different locations.

The majority of the projects were in the City of Charlottesville in the urban ring of Albemarle County, and you can see that they're clustered along North 29 and then also in Creuse.

And then there are some comments around 64, but you can see that there are quite a few also in the stretch of 250 here.

But we'll provide some additional information as we start using this information to really help us start identifying where the priority transportation needs are and then helping to match where our candidate projects are related to the transportation needs.

I just want to take a quick note.

I'm not actually going to go through all the demographic information as part of the presentation today, but I did print out the demographic breakout for what the respondents, how the respondents responded to the survey for MetroQuest, but I do want to caveat that a little bit that this is just the demographic information that you have is just who responded to the survey, not overall.

We used

We use basically the responses from the survey to determine which populations were underrepresented and that helped us inform some of our public engagement efforts in terms of where we might want to conduct outreach to get a better overall representation for the community.

So I do just want to highlight that we do not have an overall demographic report for the entire community because we were not collecting demographic information at the end person intercepts.

So as far as what we heard in person, basically, we documented all of the comments that we received through all of those public intercepts, those 16 meetings, we documented all of that feedback.

And the consultant team at EPR went through and coded all of those and started categorizing these based on themes that were emerging.

So what you can see is that the number one most of the highest number of comments were received were related to public transit, which makes

since especially since we did some outreach at the transit center, followed by a combination of comments related to bicycle and pedestrian needs and then followed by safety.

Those were kind of both we had 75 comments related to both of those.

And then the next two categories were related to system wide efficiency and connections.

One thing I want to say about connections because you'll see in this circle right next to here is that there's this

small number for land use is that a lot of the connections comments were related to sidewalks or walkability of an area.

So it probably would make sense to consider those connections, largely supporting some of the land use goals that have been identified through some of the different transportation planning.

Those are the primary types of comments that we received through that.

And then one of the other things that we did at a few of the public intercepts that were more of the Joplin events was

We tried to replicate that ranking process that we went through on the MetroQuest survey.

So we played what we're referring to as a money game, where basically people would come to the table.

We'd give them fake money, not real money.

We had a lot of confusion here about like, no, we don't.

We do not want your real money.

We would give them 100 transportation dollars.

They had a train on them.

We were not like counterfeiting any money or anything and asked them to invest in these different categories.

And it's pretty interesting because there was a pretty wide range of what emerged as the priorities at some of the different public intercepts.

So I don't know that this is necessarily

universally indicative, but it does show how different different people based on their contacts might respond differently to what's important to them.

One thing I want to note is that the blue here is the feedback we got at the transit center.

And the transit and at the transit center, they really resonated the whole idea of having an efficient system and efficient

system was really important.

So their number one response was the multimodal accessibility, but then that was followed by efficiency, because once they're on the bus, they want the buses to run efficiently.

They don't want to be faced with travel delays.

So I thought that was a really interesting observation from the Transit Center.

But otherwise, there was a pretty broad range of responses based on where we were and who we were talking to.

I also want to mention, though, another thing that was really interesting is that as we were talking to people in person, this whole idea of safety was a less common theme that came up.

So when you ask people specifically what should we prioritizing with safety accessibility, they're saying safety, but when they're providing comments to us, safety was less common of a thing that just came up in the feedback that was provided.

And this map just shows based on the in-person engagement that we conducted through the long-range transportation planning effort, this is where whenever somebody mentioned a specific location or improvement, we map that as well.

So based on our in-person engagement, this is where the public had identified travel needs.

Again, we're going to combine this with the MetroQuest survey, but wanted to show that there were

what each of those efforts uniquely told us.

So then the consultants also analyzed the past engagement results as we talked about, Albemarle County comprehensive planning feedback, Charlottesville comprehensive planning feedback and the transit vision plan.

And it's fairly similar.

Public transit again was the top ranking type of comment followed by bicycle and pedestrian improvements.

and then you'll see down here that right around the same level between 170 and 180 comments each were the ideas of supporting projects that would support land use, connections and again you can kind of maybe almost consider those in conjunction with each other and then system wide efficiency and to a lesser extent safety.

So it's possible that this specific form of engagement wasn't prioritizing safety since it wasn't a transportation specific

And then again, similarly to the other efforts, if there were comments that had specific recommendations that were based on locations, those were also mapped.

So we have all of this mapping data that is being pulled into a single map for review.

So we have all of this data right here.

The next step that we're going to talk about in just a minute is how to prioritize the evaluation of the data, how to evaluate the data to understand the system performance.

And then what we're going to do is we're going to start mapping these and looking for matches between where there's a transportation need identified and where we have candidate projects that are already lined up.

So the candidate projects are projects that have already been identified through some of our past planning efforts, either through the previous long-range transportation plan, an Albemarle County or Charlottesville specific plan, either the comprehensive plan, a small area study, one of the pipeline projects like what VDOT is working on right now, anything that helps us develop and identify projects or pooling all of the projects that have been identified, those become our candidate projects.

So we're going to look for matches between existing candidate projects, transportation needs.

We're also going to look at where there aren't matches and that's going to help us understand where there might be a need for future studies to help develop solutions.

So we pulled all that information together.

This is the map of our candidate projects right now.

So we'll be using those to overlay with the transportation needs.

There are quite a few of them to choose from.

We'll be narrowing this down so you don't have to evaluate.

No, the candidate projects came from previously completed studies or previously identified.

So those are our VDOT pipeline projects, small area plans, things that were identified as recommendations.

Yeah.

All right.

So very high level.

And again, there's a whole public engagement report that gets into a little bit more detail.

But the general theme of the engagement that we've heard so far is that people desire safer roadways and intersections, dedicated and protected bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure and an enhanced public transit system and seem to want to prioritize safety and accessibility over maybe some of the more car centric improvements that could be considered.

So before we move on, because I'm going to ask you all to kind of reflect on this when we start talking about the evaluation metrics and how much waiting to give to those, I just wanted to pause and see if you had any questions or feedback or comments.

So was there any consideration of the different regions in this, what's been reported makes

and the rural area where there's no access to any of these things, then I just don't know how I can get to town without a car.

There's no other option for people who live out there.

So, to see that there's total privatization by a number so far for bike and ped and forget about the roads, then that's a real problem for anybody living outside the donut.

Sure, yeah, understood.

Yeah.

Yeah, that could be, that could be a number of factors.

Yeah, I think, again, I keep in mind that the public information is intended to inform decision making, but doesn't necessarily have to be the decision maker in this process.

That's ultimately your job as the governing body.

All right, well then we can we can talk a little bit then about the, about kind of what this means for our evaluation of the data and the different waiting scenarios and this might be Supervisor Malik where we have a little bit more discussion related to your concerns, as well as your observations Ms.

Monteith.

But basically what we're going to have to do based on the public feedback that we've used and what we've intended for this to be doing is to be informing how much weight we give to each of the evaluation metrics as we look at the data.

So not last month, two months ago, we talked about the different thresholds that we were going to use for the data analysis.

So I'll go to that maybe.

Maybe it's easier to go to that slide first.

So we looked at all of the different evaluation metrics, determine what thresholds we're going to use to determine what qualified as a need in order to make it into the system for evaluation.

And now what we need to do is start looking at how much weight we want to give each of these performance metrics.

So before we get into the evaluation metrics specifically, the first thing we can do is start talking about like more big picture, how much weight would it make

to give to each of these different prioritization categories.

So when we developed the prioritization process with the Office of Intermodal Planning and Investment and Retained Consultants, they developed a couple of suggested weighting scenarios.

We don't have to use any of these as they are presented, but they do give us a good opportunity to start with

to see how much weight we might want to give to the different priorities based on to what extent we want to incorporate the public feedback or to what extent they might reflect what our goals are for this region.

So the accessibility focus scenario is going to focus on helping people to their destinations.

And so it is going to give

less weight to the efficiency and economic development performance measure and more weight to the land use coordination measure.

The balanced scenario is basically saying all of these are important and maybe we want to consider them all equally as important and just give equal weight to all of these different prioritization categories.

And then the mobility focused measure.

This focuses a little bit more on the system efficiency and operations and so it's going to put more weight on those efficiency types of measures and a little bit less influence on that land use coordination.

So based on the public feedback we received, it seems like there is strong public support for the accessibility-focused waiting scenario.

That was what was recommended by the NPO Technical Committee.

But if you all want to discuss this at this point, or if you want to wait to look at the evaluation metrics in more detail, we can do that here.

My initial response is that I don't care what they say,

I think safety always has to be a top priority.

Sure.

I'm also curious, I'm trying to think about what it would mean to have, just to think of an accessibility focused scenario, what it would mean to have a lower priority for efficiency in economic development.

The efficiency and economic development measures so we can we can look at what's actually being measured under those economic development.

Basically, if there is a operational concern so if a project is scoring high in relationship to how much congestion or road segment is experiencing or, or very

very high on the travel time reliability, meaning that the amount of time it's going to take you to get somewhere is very unpredictable because there's a lot of potential disruption in the area.

What that means is that

That's what's being evaluated under that efficiency.

So if a project is scoring high in that category, but then it's not demonstrating that there are safety improvements or potential for accessibility improvement or something like that, that congestion score just isn't going to do very much to bring that type of project to the top of the list.

The predictability that that would be captured in the in the planning time index regardless the planning time index is mode independence related to the roadway.

So anybody who's using the road that would be reflected.

we're also because one of our goals for developing these performance measures was to make sure that we were measuring performance for make sure we were developing a multi a truly multimodal process was to make sure that we weren't just looking at metrics related to vehicular movement but also on-time transit or transit and other modal movement and so for the efficiency piece it made sense to also look at transit on-time performance which will be impacted by the performance of the roadway system

um, as well.

So there is or intersection between t and maybe some of the tra and travel time predictabl

That would be that would be captured in the efficiency metric with the economic development.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The accessibility isn't related to the operations.

The accessibility is related to like except except for the vehicle.

I will say that is captured in the vehicle movement.

So there is a potential for accessibility improvement as captured in the vehicular accessibility metric.

Sorry, that's a potential for accessibility improvement.

That's the, if you remember two months ago when we were talking about like all the different blocks and how there's an opportunity to improve access by increasing the comfort and efficiency of movement by different mode, that's that potential for accessibility improvement measure.

So really we're looking for a recommendation from you all on which of these waiting scenarios to use.

The MPO Technical Advisory Committee did have general consensus on supporting this accessibility focused waiting scenario.

Maybe you answered the question and I didn't hear the answer or maybe I didn't ask the question clearly enough.

I'm trying to figure out as I look at accessibility focus and mobility focus

One gets 10% in economic efficiency and economic development and the other gets 10% in land use coordination.

yeah so the mobility focus will obviously give more weight to projects that will improve congestion so that's going to give more priority probably to more roadway centric traditional roadway centric projects the land use coordination is looking for this is going to give more priority to projects that are in high densely developed areas where there's already a lot of different

basically destinations within that growth area.

So the land use coordination score is the only one that uses our future growth projections.

Yeah, I think, well, that's a conversation they have.

I don't think I'm going to be very helpful because it depends.

It depends on if you want to support travel within the growth area or if you want to make travel more efficient within the larger region.

So I'd say for the former, the accessibility focus might support people being able to walk within, walk to the parks, walk to school, things like that.

The mobility focus will help

reduce travel delay for people that might be traveling from Crozet into Charlottesville or Pantops or something like that.

Yeah, we are asking, we are asking for this to be like a regional scoring metric.

What I want to reassure you all of though is that this is just one source of information.

We're not necessarily holding you all to the outcomes that come from this.

This just gives us an indication on based on these different weighting scenarios.

Yeah, it's a guide.

I'll say the one that you have there, accessibility focused, I have a lot of respect for the NPO tech committee and it seems like they have the time and expertise to delve into this more than I do in the event.

No, we're trying to get consensus just so we can start our data analysis using these weightings.

And again, we're not going to hold you to any of these necessarily.

I have a follow-up question.

So, do you mean that there's an existing infrastructure and it's from the body and therefore it should get work?

Not that you're considering putting new infrastructure into a place which floods, which would be bad.

Yeah.

Correct.

Just want to make sure.

And I don't think I have anything really substantive to add.

I don't know that choosing the balance scenario is going to be too much.

I think that's what I would get by myself.

I won't tell you which way to go there.

And ultimately, Sandy, this is to run a scenario that will give a

and ranked list that can then be adjusted.

It's a guide.

I mean really it comes down to that efficiency economic development land use because those are the only two that are flip-flopping I mean I'm fine with going with the accessibility one because I know walkability is a priority but I you know this is one where I would love something to show me like you take an actual project and show me how they the nuances switch so that I can see that

you know travel time I guess it must be in the nitty-gritty of the project where when you look at a specific project you go we're really trying to attack travel time even if it's

accessibility focused, and it's a project where walkability is not necessarily that important in that project area, then that's when we have to subjectively go, no, we're going to go against kind of the ranking and say it for this reason.

So we don't lose anything by picking one of these because of the guidance nature of it.

But to help me understand it more, to see a project that scores with 30% on one and then flip flop it,

I don't think you can give that to us right now.

Yeah.

And one of the challenges is that we're actually not scoring projects right now.

We're scoring transportation needs.

But what we can do is once we sort of have all of the data and the metrics in place, we have those with the thresholds.

I don't think it's going to be as challenging to change the weighting.

So we can maybe show what one output is compared to another output and see like maybe where there are changes or adjustments.

But for now, I will.

It sounds like

you all are leaning towards at least tentatively supporting the accessibility focused scenario as a first go.

Yep, that's good for now.

Thank you all.

So I'm just going to give a quick update on the regional transit governance study.

We are heading into phase four and then phase five will be recommendations.

So we're looking at governance options at the moment.

And so we had a steering committee meeting in September and talked about the different types of governance

and structure for that and some of the things that we discussed were board membership and then the role in transit planning, the role of the agency in transit planning which some of these things will help the jurisdictions feel more comfortable with joining a regional transit authority and

raising revenue locally to go into this and then we talked about indicators of accountability which are you know representation for the board and then there could be a technical advisory committee that would advise them on that decision-making criteria so that the jurisdictions would know how decisions are going to be made and we could you know weight them as we just discussed now with the

the Long Range Transportation Plan.

We could, you know, we have a list of projects, transit projects in the vision plan, so there would be a way to prioritize them.

We also talked about financial reporting and the funding oversight.

Those are some of the things that a governance structure for a regional transit authority would look at.

Thanks.

So currently, this is the state of transit funding at the moment.

And it's about $9 million for about each transit agency.

And for the vision plan,

We worked on the assumption of a constrained budget, which would cost about $35 million.

and an unconstrained budget which totaled up to about $85 million.

And you can see here the different contributions and then the deficit that we would need to make up to enact the vision plan, the constrained and unconstrained.

So what we would be looking to raise with the Transit Authority would be an additional $18 million.

Yes, yeah it's for services.

So we discussed a lot of local funding options like the general funds expenditure and I'm not going to go through all of these they're in the packet and I have a report over there because there's a couple slides of these.

uh yeah so then I've got these tables and I think again they're in the handout that you got um and there are also a couple extras up there so tax revenue is only the only one that we looked at that would need state authorization um to enact and collect and we calculated out how much we could raise starting in fiscal year 2025 and then going through 2029 for each one for each jurisdiction

So you can see the sales tax would raise a total of $36 million, which would be enough to fund the projects in the vision plan.

And then there's a lodging tax revenue, which would be about $1 million total for the region.

Personal property tax, about $12.5 million.

The real estate tax would be $50 million.

And we spoke with each of the... Just to be clear, it says an additional 0.1% tax.

That means 10 cents.

That's a lot.

It's about a million dollars of paint, right?

At the moment.

0.1% doesn't sound like much.

What would you think of it?

Yeah, when we spoke with the jurisdictions about these different options, Charlottesville thought that that one was not.

So the next steps are we are engaging the jurisdictions in individual meetings and also another stakeholder another yeah steering committee meeting.

So we're working with the steering committee which is a one representative one elected official for each jurisdiction and one staff member for each jurisdiction and

Yeah, and I've been copying you on it.

and the working group that he has set up with the community gave an update and they mentioned transit at some point but didn't really talk about sort of the specifics.

Does that team meet on a regular basis?

I know you've gotten some feedback from the media as part of your

I mean, I would be happy to engage with them.

I mean, this is different than like with UTS directly.

I don't think that they're all doing the same thing.

What we're doing is different.

So I can look into it for you in terms of what that actual group is doing.

But I think a lot of this conversation is happening with regional transit partnership and talking about the different transit

I'm just thinking like in terms of, you know, I just hope that there's that mechanism of which change gets made, the sort of like regular standing meetings that we have, and I think there could also be another way, maybe a more sort of blue sky way of change occurring if the leadership of those committees

really understood what we're trying to do here.

University might be inclined to say, yeah, sure, we want to get on board with this, just like they're getting on board with workforce training and all of that.

It was interesting, all the thing in affordable housing.

Yeah, I think that'd be great.

Because they mentioned transit a lot in their conversation today.

And yeah, I'm just not sure.

I have no idea.

Well, it's great that Julie is on there.

Yeah, and the Regional Transit Partnership we also work with.

Because I mean it could be the case that that committee, I don't want to speak for them, but I just think that this is one of those kind of more blue sky kind of you know higher level vision type things where you could have a real alignment between what that committee is wanting to do and what we all need the university to do and they write a source of revenue.

yeah yeah so um next steps so we're going to be engaging the jurisdictions which you've already started on

talking about the governance structures and trying to come to a consensus with the jurisdictions on what would work for them.

And then also we'll be talking about revenue sources.

And then we'll finalize kind of a proposed governance option, which is something I think like the blue sky, like this will really help the community move forward.

with transit because it'll have a structure of making regional decisions around transit that engages all of the jurisdictions and everybody feels comfortable with.

And so that's something that we can kind of lean back on and utilize to continue moving forward.

The point that I made to comment is we had this presentation at the commissioners meeting, not this exact one, but a similar one.

And, you know, you look around, all the counties are represented there.

And any time you see tax increase in some of our neighboring counties, you know, you're getting liable.

But, you know, the creation of the Transit Authority, I think I made this comment then, was that

that opens up new funding to come down because of the authority.

So the increase, if there is to be one, is almost like a match because you're not having to pay for all of that.

So if that constrained and unconstrained is really what we need and it opens up those contributions because we have that authority, the deficit now becomes what the localities can gain, all of that money for what they put in.

It doesn't mean you have to do sales tax or transient occupancy.

you're just going to go, if you want to participate, this is your piece.

Now you figure out how to pay for it.

You're not backed into having to raise tax and dedicate that tax rate to it.

You just have to go, well,

budget for it.

Now, does it replace what like, so in Albemarle, we pay for our transit services, we pay CAT, we pay, you know, we give money to them to do that.

Would that money just go into this instead?

I think that's still part of what is possible.

There's, what is it?

Do you remember what it's called?

there's a term for it but yeah if that were to occur yes maintenance of effort thank you if that were to occur and albemarle's portion is 24 million and we're already i don't remember what the heck what we pay for for this but that 24 million would be deducted out and then the remainder would be there so it could be that money you're already putting into the system is already included in the total it's not all brand new money you have to find so if you quickly just go well that's 10 cents you know i'm not

Criticize your point.

I mean, you're exactly right.

But yeah, that is it in total.

But that doesn't mean it's all necessarily new money.

Some of the money is going to be shifted.

Then there'll be whatever the remainder is.

And then that remainder you go, wait a minute, if I'm paying into that and that's getting us an additional, what, 17 million dollars or 15 million dollars.

One other thing on your list, will you be including comparisons, I'm thinking of State College Pennsylvania where the university, all those tens of thousands of students, their leadership at the university is part of the region because they're all

I think the problem I guess is that it's up to the city and county to get to the table and say we agreed on this and then perhaps the university may say okay we have grownups here now so we can join in.

I don't think, I'm guessing that like with the water it was up to the jurisdictions to figure it out and then they were willing to come to the table again so they're not having to be the arbitrator or whatever.

I think that's a difficult position in which to put that.

Even if they weren't contributing any more to themselves,

Charles Walton UVA.

This theorizes Nelson Green, and now that opens up more than just what the city Albemarle UVA dynamic sometimes can turn into.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, let me ask that, just because, you know, I've always kind of assumed the Regional Transit Partnership's taken the lead on some of this stuff.

And then the other, this body, the PVC, the jurisdictions will then take that.

Well, the jurisdictions will take it.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

But in terms of that point when this work is done in December, are you going to look for the RTP, the NPO, and say yeah we signed off on this?

I think what we are going to be asking is for the Commission and Christine's answer.

Christine, feel free to jump in if I misstate this.

We're going to be asking for the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission to basically indicate that they are supportive of us continuing to make efforts.

There's probably not going to be an immediate next step.

There's going to be sort of preparing for what the next step looks like in implementation, but we're going to be looking for general direction from the Commission at that point.

No, that's exactly right.

Excellent.

Okay, next item up, socioeconomic data for travel demand model.

Sounds really great.

I get the privilege of talking to you about all the data I got today.

All right, so first of all, just before we start talking about the socio-economic data, because this is something that I need some action on from you all tonight, I'm just going to give you a really high level overview of why we're asking for this data.

And that is because we need to update this information in order to run our travel demand model.

So the travel demand model is basically an analytical tool that we use to develop traffic forecasts.

So one of the things we talk about is existing congestion and future congestion.

This is outputs and information we get from the model.

So the model will help us produce a map that looks kind of like this map right here on the left, where the red segments show places where the volume of anticipated traffic on the road, or in some cases, current traffic on the road, exceeds the existing capacity of the roadway.

So that indicates where there are going to be operational failures

or where a segment is going to start experiencing congestion basically.

So a couple of things that we can do with the model.

First of all, it helps us understand future scenarios for what traffic looks like now compared to what it might look like in the future based on our growth assumptions.

It helps us test alternative scenarios so we can compare what does the operations of the roadway network look like under existing conditions compared to what it might look like if we implement some sort of improvement.

And then it helps us evaluate between different types of improvements.

What does it look like if we expand the capacity of one road versus the extending the capacity on another road that might be a parallel road network and helps us understand how all of that could impact future traffic conditions.

So what the travel demand model evaluates is how many trips are generated, how trips are distributed through the region,

how different modal choices might impact demand on our roadway segments, and then basically how vehicles are traveling between different zones, so what routes vehicles are taking to get from one destination to another.

So that's what the travel demand model does.

But we need to provide some information in order for it to develop those outputs.

And so we do this by establishing what's called these traffic analysis zones.

So these are smaller geographic boundaries that are used to evaluate the number of trips because we assign different information to each of these different geographic boundaries that are developed.

That includes socioeconomic data like things like the number of automobiles per household, how many types of different jobs based on the different types of sectors are estimated within each of these traffic analysis zones, what's the average number of school-aged children,

are there group living quarters or like university dormitories that kind of thing within each of those TAZs and based all of this information that we are entering in for the TAZs that's going to generate estimated trips from each of the TAZs as well as how many trips are going to be attracted to each of these TAZs which helps us understand how much traffic is going in and out of each of these TAZs and helping us understand what the transportation network might look like.

So we have to develop information both based on the current conditions, the current baseline data.

and then also future growth projection data in order to run the model.

This is something that we do in conjunction with VDOT.

And it's also, I want you all to know that one of the reasons we do that is because we are required to, since our region has a model, we are required to use an Aspire for long range transportation plan and we are required to maintain this in perpetuity.

So we do this because it is helpful to help us understand the impact of different improvements we could implement, but also it is a requirement.

So what we need to do right now is that we are not changing the geographic boundaries of the traffic analysis zones right now.

We're going to have to do that in the future.

We're not doing that right now.

But what we do need to do is update the socioeconomic data for our region in order to be able to run the model for use in our current long-range transportation plan.

And the policy board must approve

So our staff has worked with the VDOT modeling staff to prepare updated socioeconomic data.

We have basically taken the data that was prepared for the 2045, the previous long-range transportation plan,

applied the same sort of growth projection assumptions for that data and interpolated, did an interpolation, which is a standard accepted way to develop this data in order to develop the updated socioeconomic data.

This has been through a quality control process, so we compared how much, what the population is that we get from this method compared to the Walden-Cooper Center's population, and it is within the accepted threshold

We have reviewed this approach with locality staff as well as the MPO Technical Advisory Committee.

They are comfortable with this approach, but we do need formal action from the policy board to approve the use of the data.

Yeah, we're basically assuming that there's going to be a linear growth rate across all of the years and we're basically saying well we're not going the full 25 years that we went previously we're only going five years of that assuming a linear growth.

Did I miss the rationale for why the traffic analysis zones need to be updated?

There are a couple of reasons.

One of them is to meet federal requirements.

There are actual federal requirements for establishing the TAZs and one of those is that they have to align.

with existing census blocks.

So what happens is between the decennial censuses, the census blocks change.

But the other thing is that there could be a new traffic generator that pops up in one of these TAZs that might cause you to want to break these out a little bit differently.

Yeah, yeah exactly.

like a new interchange that's improved, would that change the... I don't know if the interchange, I think it's based on more like what would generate trips, not on the transportation system.

That's my idea, yes.

Yeah, yeah.

The 29 solutions are going to be operational improvements, but okay, so that is actually related to the assumptions that are in the model itself, not the TAZs.

But the 29 solutions, I believe, are not actually, the improvements are not actually going to be captured in the model because they are not major capacity improvement projects.

So the model won't necessarily reflect the impacts of the 29 solutions bundle.

The 29 solutions projects are going to be included as network improvements.

Those would be in the base year conditions because they're already completed another way.

So the four laning of

29 north of the river would be in there.

Adding Berkmar would be in there.

Hillsdale Extension would be in there.

The new interchange project at 64, that's going to be added.

That would be one of the new ones that we would add.

It's not really changing because it's a point location, but the ramp configurations changed a little bit.

So from five years ago, the updated socioeconomic data would be, all right, these three major developments have come online.

This school has been built, that's been updated.

This employer has come into the area, set up shop.

Okay, so at this point you're looking for a motion from us, or as a resolution, to approve the use of this socioeconomic data as prepared and presented by staff.

I tell you, that data chart, that was some compelling stuff.

Alright, next item up, Smart Scales.

Yeah, yeah.

So I'm going to again, try to go through this really high level.

There were some new information related to economic development.

So we're gonna spend a little bit more time on that.

But the first thing I want to do is go back and provide you all with some updates based on some revisions that hadn't been made to previously identified recommendations for revisions.

So the first one is related to the application caps.

As you recall, basically there was a recommendation to reduce the number of applications for all localities and the CTB and the Office of Intermittal Planning and Investment staff did receive a lot of feedback on that recommendation.

And one of the things that they heard is that there could be a justification for adding a mid tier or middle range of projects.

So there are some localities who said, you know, we're not like these big major metro areas, but we're also not these smaller areas.

And so there was a request to add a mid range.

And so there was a revised staff recommendation from OIP that was presented, I think, in October at the October meeting.

Yes.

These numbers are people.

So based on the population, the revised recommendation from the Office of Intermodal Planning and Investment staff would be for the smallest entities, so for localities with a population of less than 100,000, or regional bodies, which include MPOs, PDCs, and transit agencies with an overall population of less than 250,000.

Instead of reducing the application limit to two, they would reduce it to three.

And then they would be adding this mid tier right here.

The mid tier only affects within our region, Albemarle County and Jaunt as regional entities.

So for Albemarle County and Jaunt, they would actually be able to maintain their application number for applications.

And then the larger localities would experience a reduction to six.

So that is a revised recommendation that was developed by OIP staff.

So instead of two applications, most of the entities within our region would have three.

County, which would get four and John's as well.

So the other thing I want to go back and review is that there has been this discussion about

providing better definition for what should qualify as an eligible project through the high priority program.

And remember, these are the projects that MPOs and PDCs and transit agencies are only eligible to apply for projects through the high priority program.

So there was this original list of six different project types, and they added two additional project types to this list, transit transfer stations and new bridges.

And this would also include new bicycle and pedestrian bridges, not just new roadway bridges.

So part of the reason they did this was because it aligns with the tiering process that they use for the economic development scores.

And we'll talk a little bit like this, but this does expand the types of projects that the MPO would be eligible to submit for as far as market scale applications.

All right, so based on this and based on reviewing some of the priority projects that have been discussed at the locality level as well, what this means is that this is basically the list of projects that the MPO would potentially be eligible to submit based on that revision to the definition.

County.

So if that application limit is reduced to three for the MPO and the PDC, we would have a total of six projects that we could submit between the two.

And out of the projects that have been discussed throughout our region at this point, these are the projects that would miss the definition that are kind of queued up at this point.

There's we haven't discussed this at the MPO, but it has been identified at least tentatively by Albemarle County as a high priority project, and that's the diverging diamond interchange.

at I-64 and 5th Street.

We've been talking about the Ravenna River Bike Pad Bridge, and I realize that maybe there is some question about whether or not the MPO might want to support the Hillsdale South Extension Project, but that would be an eligible project that the MPO could submit.

and then there are also projects that could potentially be queued up through the VDOT pipeline project.

So I did want to mention just briefly, we can discuss these projects very high level at this point if you all would like to, but I did want to at least mention this DDI project because if there is interest in general support and at least considering this project for a round six project application, there is some additional work that would need to be done to develop this project for an application by VDOT and so

that they would like an indication that there is interested in pursuing this project, at least generally, not necessarily as a commitment.

That's not the last transportation priorities conversation we had in a county.

We weren't getting to project specifics.

We were more process conversation.

So that would have to, at least from

and Anais perspective have to be probably come out of our transportation priorities conversation.

I think we're looking to, you know, try to do some traffic analysis and stuff that we require on that.

On that occasion.

This year?

Early next year?

It probably did, but the conversation at that time was more around the process to eventually land on what those numbers are going to be.

within the actual project.

Do you want to add anything, Jessica, or do you have anything in addition to that?

No, I mean, if there's any questions, it was ranked as the number one project in our prioritization.

But as you guys mentioned, we're not stuck with those particular numbers.

With the feedback that we got, we do want to revisit the exact

project prioritization numbers.

So that might not stay the same.

However, the reason it was scored so highly in the first round is because there's a lot of development that has recently been in there and is going in.

I can't imagine the board would be able to object.

And staff's expecting them.

And staff's expecting us to do it.

to give them the go-ahead.

It sounds like we'd be in agreement with that.

So do you need us to vote on this?

We got an email from somebody complaining, well a resident just lit us up about congestion issues around this and he did, I quote, said, the new interchange at 124 is the only thing working properly.

So you get some kudos from somebody.

Any feedback?

I think that's right.

The reason I asked Sandy to add this to the meeting, just it's the time it's going to take to do the study.

It's going to be elongated because of the new regulations that we have to do regarding interchange improvements on 64 and we've got involved the feds and there's a lot of

public outreach that we've got to do to do that.

We didn't do a lot of it with the Fifth Street study.

We just said, yeah, this needs to be studied more in the future.

We need to include some pedestrian bicycle facilities on a bridge to get across because right now there's very limited.

But to do that study, it's going to take a lot of time.

Got it.

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you all.

Back to smart scale economic development updates.

So to start talking about this is going to be a little bit more technical than some of the other updates, because what they're talking about with the economic development conversation is really changing the scoring methodology pretty, pretty substantively.

So I'm going to explain a little bit about how they currently evaluate or determine economic development benefits of projects and smart scale.

And then we'll talk about the recommendations for how they're proposing.

we could determine the economic development benefits through SmartScale.

The first thing I want to just make sure it's clear from the beginning is that one of the things that is intended through the economic development scoring measure is they want to be supporting new economic development projects, not existing commercial development.

So there continues to be an emphasis on projects that will provide incentives for new development activities.

The current economic development evaluation includes three different scoring measures.

There's this project support for economic development.

That's the biggest scoring measure.

That's the one we're going to talk about.

There are two other measures.

One of them is related to intermodal access and efficiency, which is really about measuring freight movement and freight access.

There is an adjustment to the second scoring measure, but that change isn't actually going to impact project outcomes.

So I do want to make sure you know that there is a change to measuring the freight impact based on freight volume versus how it was previously measured, which is on freight tonnage, but it's not going to have an impact.

But what they did is OIP staff worked with the Virginia Economic Development Partnership and Virginia Economic Development Partnership made some recommendations to adjust the way that economic development is being measured through smart scale to better reflect the

to better reflect sort of how the state assesses the impacts of the economic development.

The current way that we do this, that they get this information is actually very manual in nature and so basically the staff, your locality staff, the MPO staff actually uploads site plan information into the SmartScale application.

That information is validated by VDOT and OIP and I don't know if DRPT validates economic development sites but probably everybody that touches SmartScale does something with that economic development evaluation.

And then based on how big or how intensive a transportation improvement project is, that defines a buffer for how many projects, what the buffer is for the number of projects that can be captured in the economic development score.

So if you look at these tier three projects, these are big projects, your big capacity improvement projects, your new bridges, your new transit stations, those are tier three projects.

Those are going to have the biggest buffer of three miles.

And so remember, a couple slides ago, we talked about adding those additional definitions or project types eligibility for the high priority program.

Those are based on aligning with what is considered these tier three projects in the economic development scoring measure.

So big projects can capture economic development sites within the three mile buffer.

Smaller projects like new bike lanes would only have a half mile buffer.

So they'd only be capturing a smaller buffer area of economic development.

So that's just reflected here.

If it's a big project, your circle is bigger, smaller projects.

Your circle is smaller.

So some of the criticisms that have been identified related to their current economic development scoring methodology is that it is the only scoring criteria that requires the applicants to upload information into the database.

So it's very manual and it does take a lot of time.

And then the other concerns are that it doesn't address what's considered best in class economic development impacts that are being assessed by the state.

and largely the state is interested in supporting projects or industries that add to the gross state product that have economic impacts like job creation or capital investment and are interested in supporting projects that demonstrate a high level of market demand.

And so those are some of the factors that the EDP is recommending try to be captured in these economic development methodology.

So first of all, they want to capture the potential of a economic development site in terms of generating new jobs and in terms of generating capital investment into the site, because those are basically metrics that are important to localities and help localities generate new revenue as well as the state generate new revenue.

They want to capture market demand by adding in a site visit factor.

So basically, once you get to a point where an industry is interested in visiting a site, because they've shortlisted it and they've done a national evaluation to determine where they might be interested in siting their business, that's been through a pretty significant evaluation process.

And so the number of site visits that a property experiences

is a good indicator

the tobacco fund.

If there are other state programs that have already invested money into that site, that's going to give additional benefit points to a site in terms of its economic development benefits through SmartScale.

And then there's also a factor to account for site readiness.

So how much infrastructure has already been placed on site?

To what level is somebody ready to move in versus additional preparation that might need to go into preparing a site for a business to locate there?

So those are all factors that they want to be part of this new economic development measurement.

What they are recommending is that in order to consider all of these different new factors is instead of having applicants upload all of these individual site plan information, they want to pull in information from a statewide database known as Virginia Scan.

What this means for us in this room is that

Only sites that are identified in the Virginia Scan database would basically contribute to the economic development score.

So it would be really important that all the localities are working with their economic development directors to ensure that any site that is eligible to be entered into the Virginia Scan database is entered into the Virginia Scan database.

Unfortunately, I do not have a lot of information on what's eligible to be entered into the Virginia scan database.

So that's probably a conversation that you all would want to have with your economic development offices if if this change goes through.

So this just shows kind of a breakdown of how this new score would be established.

I'm not going to go through this in a lot of detail, but basically they can use the characteristics of the sites that are entered in through the Virginia Scan database to determine how well it aligns with the characteristics of other sites in terms of estimating how much potential job growth a site is likely to support and how much capital investment a site is likely to support.

So using historic

historic outcomes based on characteristics that are similar to properties that are entered into Virginia Scan will help them predict what likely outcomes might be for the measures that they're interested in evaluating.

And then I just wanted to show that this is what is entered currently for our region in the Virginia Scan database.

So I don't know, those of you that have done SmartScale in our region probably know that probably at some points we have

I mean, in a formal relationship, yes.

I mean, it's always been sort of implied.

I mean, they talk about site down there, and it goes into the industrial park, all this, you know, to be able to buy some space to rank this, this kind of thing.

So, implicitly, it was always picked up a little bit.

This is more explicit.

I think, in some respects, may, I don't know, in Charlottesville, a lot of the points you're getting from mixed-use buildings, you have some carceral on the bottom floor, and then you have a bunch of residential.

You have to count all that square footage.

I think this time around you won't, my God.

So they just went through the OIP staff.

They've been very conscientious to demonstrate that these are illustrative examples of outcomes based on if everybody submitted the same projects in round six that they submitted in round five under these changes.

But you will see that there are projects that increase in score because in some cases there are major sites that weren't necessarily uploaded by locality staff because they maybe didn't have the capacity or just were unaware of certain sites.

But then there are also projects that decrease in scores

So there are going to be outcomes and unfortunately I don't have enough information to necessarily predict what those would be for our region explicitly.

But I do want to make it clear that this could have potential implications for our region in terms of how many points we are getting or what kinds of economic development benefits are being reflected in our project scores overall.

So I just want to go through a couple of really high level things and then we can come back to the economic development piece as we have this conversation.

But I provided with you all a summary of a discussion we had at the MPO Technical Advisory Committee.

And one of the reasons I want to make sure that we are conveying any of the discussions that are happening at all these different levels is because based on the last Commonwealth Transportation Board meeting, there are a lot of items that are still up for discussion.

And so if there are preferences or if you have

If you have a desire to make a statement on a preference between different scenarios, there certainly are some discussions among the CTEB where you could state what kinds of scenarios you might want to support.

First of all from the MPO tech committee if you consider all of the wholesale proposed changes together there is generally concern that these do not reflect locally and regionally identified priorities.

There was concern about the reduction in the number of applications but obviously since then there's been a change to that and so the revision to the application caps that were proposed by the Office of Intermodal Planning and Investment staff could help address that concern.

There are concerns that the revision to the economic development scoring methodology combined with removing the land use score as a standalone scoring measure would disproportionately benefit projects that are in proximity to those new large-scale economic development sites while reducing the importance or the value of projects that maybe support smaller scale or infill economic development and also provide needed connections for existing residents and then

And then also some concern that, yeah, I think I just covered the last point in that second point.

At the CTEB meeting, these were some of the items that have been discussed.

And so I just want to mention this to you all.

There was a lot of question among the CTEB members about the economic development methodology and whether or not that would adequately capture the benefits for all parts of the state and all types of economic development, specifically that in infill and smaller scale economic development.

There was also an alternative that was proposed to the reallocation of the land use weighting factor if it's converted to a multiplier.

So the recommendation from the Office of Intermodal Planning and Investment staff was to take the points that would be allocated to land use and apply those to a combination of safety and congestion mitigation.

There was an alternative proposal from the CTB members to reallocate those land use points to a combination of safety and accessibility.

And what I did was

I put handouts for our project scores from rounds four and five for our projects at each of your seats.

So this shows you where the points are coming from for our region across all of those different factor areas in case that helps you sort of understand whether or not we might have a preference between putting points towards congestion mitigation versus accessibility.

And then there was also one recommendation by a CTV number two in addition to the other projects that were that were added to the high priority project eligibility list to also add some sort of consideration for bundled corridor projects.

So where you have multiple projects that maybe one of them isn't a big project, but you have multiple smaller projects that are intended to work together.

There was some discussion about whether or not that might be an appropriate addition to the high priority program eligibility list.

So just thinking specifically about the land use scoring factor reallocation, I did run some back of the napkin scenarios on this.

So there are differences in scoring and what's likely to be funded in our region based on these different, whether you put five points towards congestion mitigation versus another five points to accessibility, that does make a difference for what the

anticipated outcomes could be for a region.

So, the allocation of the land use points might benefit to the combination of accessibility and safety are likely to benefit the same types of projects that we submitted in round five, but reallocation of the scoring factor to congestion mitigation versus accessibility would provide greater benefits to those larger scale roadway or capacity improvement projects.

So I ran this scenario and what it looks like is that under, there are limitations of this.

This is just intended to give you an indication of what the outcomes would be.

but basically reallocating to safety and congestion mitigation as recommended by the Office of Intermodal Staff.

If everybody submitted the same projects they submitted in round five, basically there wouldn't have been projects that were funded in our district grant program.

However, the caveat with that is that this 250 Peter Jefferson Parkway Intersection Improvement Project

If it was submitted by one of the localities and was eligible for the district grant program, it would have scored well enough to be funded through the district grant program.

However, if we reallocated those points to a combination of safety and accessibility, it looks like the Ravana River Bicycle and Pedestrian Bridge would have been funded.

The Belvedere Boulevard project would have remained funded.

So the x factor, though, or the caution, I guess, I mean, this is a

Yes, we have to do this analysis.

We have to understand this.

But the one thing that is different is that when we submitted those projects, the existing projects, we knew the game and the rules.

So when you do a cross-the-line comparison and say, well, this would have been funded, wouldn't be funded, that's true, but for the subjective nature of how you applied for the funding.

Because I see in the tech committee and other folks that have already given public comment at our board

that this is just the level of analysis, that this is going to be a huge change in what we get or don't get.

But both are not taking into account that we submit projects based on how they score, and that's not captured in that analysis.

So it has to be cautioned when we bring this up.

So like Belvedere, we would submit that under some new set of criteria, you would take all that new set and go, all right, this is a big project for us.

So this is why walkability, bike ped, these things that remain important to both Charlottesville and Albemarle, the prioritization of the, that's not going to change.

We'll stay committed to that.

Yeah, I think the question about all of this is, are these the projects we want to have funded?

And is there a preference for where the scoring is?

Because there does seem to be some opportunity that not everything is settled, that there are discussions that are happening at the CTP right now.

So if there's preference from among you, this is an opportunity where

That preference could be shared.

Well, it seems like the option three for the tiering of the different population sizes, that's something that I think is a good improvement that their staff made.

I don't know that I, from the face value of it, the economic development criteria up there, I'm actually not reacting negatively to them.

They're acting favorably to.

What's that?

Yeah, just looking at the time, and I don't want to rush this,

Well, it was prepared by staff on behalf of MP of Tech.

Thank you.

Yes.

I mean, I'm ready to take their into consideration, but I also want my own understanding to be clear before I start taking recommendations.

They may be further along in their understanding of it than I am, but I'm not ready to

and thank you because the economic development explanation there was pretty, was well done.

I will mention that there is a town hall that is being planned for October 31.

I do not think that our policy board is meeting again before the comment period closes.

So I think that's going through mid November.

And at this point, the CTB intends to take action the first week of December on these changes.

They were talking about you potentially having a November meeting when they don't pass on schedule.

Last one, that one.

This is the summary right here.

I mean I don't know enough about on bullet three.

I don't know if I can agree with that or not because I don't have enough information to agree with that.

But if you go back to the three points that Sandy had there, the application caps by the staff recommendation, I think we'd all be supportive of that.

That helps us.

That doesn't cut us back as far as it did prior.

The second bullet point is the one that I'm still not sure about, and I don't

And I'm certainly not in a position to go to a town hall with CZD and say anything about any of these because there may be, and I don't know, but guidance at the CZD level that says we really want to push toward the governor's priority on mega sites and that kind of thing.

We don't have any of those.

But there's really very little point in my mind in going down there and reminding about how we don't have any of those because

Well these are the items that were major topics of discussion at the CTE meeting so I think these are the places where there's potentially not consensus among them.

I think what I can say is thus far with the public feedback and some of the concerns and fears that are being expressed, I'm not as fearful and as concerned, and I may regret making that statement publicly down the road, but it's just a matter of what I said when that table was presented.

Yes, this project might not be funded under a bare bones, just analysis of the scoring points, but it doesn't take into effect that if the scoring existed three years ago, that project may not have been submitted that way.

So that's the part that is why I'm not as, not as disguised following here, because it's going to mean, and I have faith in our staff that they're going to go, Oh, okay, well, this is how we submit projects under the new criteria.

and they'll be making strong recommendations to us of how to get that funding done.

And then we work with the PDC and the city and trying to figure out who best submits them and who can under the new rules.

Overall, if less projects are getting, there ain't nobody's projects getting done if we just, they just don't at some point put a cap on what can be accepted.

It does seem like though, and I hear what you're saying, that makes a lot of sense.

I do, it does seem like the sense of the Indio Tech Committee was that

And we've also had really big projects that didn't get done as big projects because they were too expensive that now we've done piecemeal and we still can't get done.

Hydraulic 29 is the perfect example of that.

Under these new rules that might get done as one big project and we were advised to break that out.

So now we're doing, well we got the District Avenue, we got the Hillsdale South is one thing, we got the bridge going is another.

I mean there's what four, at least four or five of that

This is only, if you all want to issue any sort of formalized feedback, I just need direction from you all.

I think we're still in a wait and see, and the CBB is not even aligned.

But they're not aligned.

It's not like they came out and said this is it.

I mean, the application caps, I mean, that's a win for us.

So that's the only thing I would be like for sure would say, yeah, that's a good idea.

And then that alleviates one of the concerns in the tech letter because it was about reduction of applications.

Yeah, and I know I know that we are short on time.

I do not think there's anything else that we need to cover on the agenda today.

Yes.

Oh, hi.

How are you, sir?

How are you?

to improve safety on the roadways by reducing and eliminating serious injuries and fatalities.

So we entered under contract with Kingley Born and Abcor last month and had our kickoff meeting with them.

They are a consultant team for this project where we aligned on project administration, discussed branding and generally got underway on this project.

And they are currently

developing a detailed project work plan, schedule, and public community engagement plan.

VDOT presented to your locality staff on some preliminary data analysis that they have been working on for road safety, and locality staff provided feedback on areas of additional interest or they want more analysis in the future.

That analysis will feed into the development of the plan ultimately,

And one other thing I want to highlight is we are working to schedule a regional safety summit for either December or January.

The safe streets and roads for all projects will end up with a blister

Thank you.

The next meeting will be the combined November and December meeting on December 5th.

Questions about that?

And then, I guess, roundtable updates.

I may have to bail on this.

Can you just go quickly, number one?

Sure.

We're also scoping out work for the winter in terms of planning and restriving plan for West Main.

We need to expand our permit zones and change our permit program in general.

Yeah, county staff are in the middle of a lot of big and little projects, including the comp plan update and transportation priorities.

I would just tell you that the pipeline project should move along pretty well.

There are three phases.

The first phase is to define the problems and sort of wrap our arms around what the university's solutions are.

We're wrapping that up.

We had a very productive meeting the past Monday with all of the constituents from the county and all of the IT corridor that I think worked very well.

We've taken up

in spite of what possibilities could be out there trying to rank whether or not they are viable or not viable or in the middle and I think that was well-received by the citizens and very in-depth review.

Do you have any updates?

Anybody online?

What was that again?

If you don't mind, I'm trying to be quick.

It's part scale, even round six.

We've been to all the localities within the district trying to gather the projects.