MPO Technical Committee Meeting   5/19/2020

Rory, we've got you there, Nick.

I don't see a recording.

Yeah, I just started it.

Just wanted to make sure we got the actual roll call for recording.

Cool.

Yes.

No worries.

We've got Chip Boyles, also from the PDC who is here.

Rory, we've got you on the line.

We have Chuck Proctor from VDOT.

Julian Bivens from Albemarle County Planning Commission, Kevin McDermott from Albemarle County, Lucinda Shannon from the PDC, we have Dan Butch from Albemarle County, we have, let's see,

Bill Palmer from UVA, we have Jawon Lee from CAT, and then we have a number of public in attendance, we have Bill Emery, we've got Neil Williamson,

Paul Josie, looks like Brian Tinder, and then Sean Tubbs.

And then we've got, I think Jessica just joined us, Jessica Bowering from the PDC.

Sounds great.

I think this might be a new record for members of the public to come to an MPO tech meeting, at least in my chairmanship.

So that's good to see.

I'm glad we're making these accessible.

So let's go ahead and get started.

First item on the agenda is matters from the public.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you, everybody.

I want two questions about smart scale projects and primarily concerns about them.

So the first one is, I'll be quick, the Route 20 bike trail in the medium.

And so my my thoughts are that placing a non family friendly bike lane in the median

that would remove nearly all of the 80 plus memorial trees that are to Civil War veterans, I think is an ill-conceived location with little to no public input or process and would encourage a new concept plan locating it on either sides or through the existing tunnel under 64 in order to reconsider that location.

So strongly opposed to that.

And then secondly, the Preston knuckle at Grady, the idea of just rerouting Preston around

and cutting off the flow of historic, you know, Preston Avenue, not considering the larger picture of Preston, also seems like a very poor planning decision, very sort of small minded.

So for both projects.

Thank you very much.

Great.

I'm sorry.

Actually, it's under 64 and it was connecting 53.

There is one that they would go through the sanitarium ground area.

Yeah, that would be a new tunnel, not an existing tunnel.

Gotcha.

And we looked at it initially.

It's basically cost prohibitive for us to actually bore a tunnel under 64 from a logistics standpoint and a competitive standpoint from our current funding sources.

That's why we really didn't pursue it any further because there's no way to fund something like that.

Great.

That sounds good.

I think Bill Emery is up next.

If I didn't get that order.

Thank you.

Oh, I just saw a written statement.

This 2045 LRTP was approved a year ago.

This document addresses the circulatory health in our planning area, visions, the movement of goods and health, happiness and well-being.

There are 149 bike ped projects in this LRTP.

I wonder

How did the Charlottesville MPO choose the Route 20 median project, one of 59 second tier bike ped projects, to be brought forward this year?

I contribute to the bicycle and pedestrian plan, but I do not appreciate the destruction of a grove of trees done by a dedicated group of our neighbors.

The Charlottesville area tree stewards are the old people that risk sun, poison ivy, Lyme disease, and the case of the Route 20 median speeding cars today.

Plantings took place in 2015 and 2016.

Did planters reach out to the tree stewards and include them as stakeholders for the meetings regarding this Tier 2 project?

If you plan to build a road through a forest, it's a good idea to call the Lorax.

Conditions on the ground have changed since 2015.

There are now better ways.

I encourage you to call for this project to be removed from smart scale consideration.

Yeah, the tunnel of 2.2 million, I think was the estimated price.

Anyway, this sort of echo Mr. Josey too.

It's just common sense, common decency.

This isn't a good idea.

Just a quick note, Mr. Emery, you're breaking up a little bit.

Great.

And we'll, I think, talk about that a little bit more once we're in that section of the discussion.

John, are you with us?

Yeah, sorry.

I have so many tabs open that I didn't find the meeting.

Gotcha.

So real quick, these are just extemporaneous comments.

I'm going to chat something into the thing so you can see what I'm referring to.

I want to talk about something that was in this appropriation document in the city for appropriations for Charlottesville area transit funding.

I don't necessarily take issue with anything in it, but I want to draw your attention to something on page two.

and it says here the community engagement, and I'll just read this, Charlottesville area transit utilizes the Metropolitan Planning Organization's public participation plan to fulfill its public engagement requirements.

And it goes on to say that the MPO's PPP includes an opportunity for members of the public to request a public hearing on CAT's program of projects.

No public hearing was requested.

I would have requested such a meeting and such a public hearing that would have gone through MPO Tech, CTAC and the MPO

because I do think that these organizations, even though there's a regional transit partnership, it's these bodies that are the official ways through which these dollars flow.

And I looked at the plan.

And I've been covering this stuff since 2007.

I actually forgot there was a public participation plan.

I think maybe some of you might have as well.

It was last updated in 2016.

A former staffer's name is on it.

I just raised this as an opportunity to talk about public engagement requirements.

Maybe it's time to update that.

Unfortunately, I don't attend this meeting or the CTAC very often.

And I do want to thank you for opening it up to people electronically at this time.

So that's really it.

Just wanted to raise that for you.

Yep, and our fourth agenda item today is a discussion on community engagement.

So we'll have a chance to talk about that later as well.

Gotcha, thank you.

I think Lucinda Shannon is going to cover

kind of the background and feedback of what we heard from the May 13th public meeting that we did on SmartScale.

So the MPO and the PDC opened up a public webinar to go through the projects that we were submitting in this round of SmartScale and Lucinda will be able to kind of do a high level overview of that and what we received and kind of go into a little bit more depth on that.

Hi everybody.

Thanks for all the feedback and public comments at the beginning of the meeting.

So we did do a public workshop.

It was not a public hearing on the SmartScale projects.

This is the first time I believe that we combined all of the ones for the MPO area into one public meeting asking for comments.

We had the city and the county with us.

We got a tremendous amount of feedback, more than we expected, which was awesome.

I'm really excited to keep hearing from people.

We had over 50 comments submitted via the website during comments.

We had comments submitted during registration.

Obviously, we had a lot of questions and comments submitted during the workshop.

Over the phone line and on the Q&A chat feature, we've got records of all of those.

I've also received phone calls and emails.

So we're inundated with public comments right now, which is what we wanted, and we're really happy to be having them.

We're going to be compiling everything, getting it together and organized.

putting it into categories.

We've been sending them to the staff people that are associated with each comment as best we can and some of them are being answered.

They will all be answered.

It may take us some time and they will also all be published for the public to review as well.

We would like to wait until we have the answers associated with the questions before we publish everything.

So the comments and questions will probably be published after May, after the month of May, when we're able to close the comments, make sure that's everything that we've had, get them organized and get them out to the public.

The staff has been looking at the comments and talking about it.

We've heard your suggestions about the process and Sean, we also looked at the public participation plan that's on our agenda to be updated.

We're working to reach out to the public more and engage them.

So thank you.

Keep up the good work.

We hear you and we are, you know, doing the best that we can with the feedback that we're getting.

There is a large system in place and it does take a little bit of time for us to react to everything but we are hearing you and I really appreciate you taking the time to review these plans and projects and let us know your concerns and also your support for them.

Yeah, I think at that point I don't know that we're going to have a formal structure in place like the comment sheet or the

or the

like webinar situation to follow back up that way.

But of course the public will include our contact information for everything.

If the public has questions after those responses, they are so welcome to get in touch with us via email at that point.

I think we will work with the county and the city to the extent possible to coordinate all those efforts to make sure we're keeping track of all the correspondence.

But the idea will be that we'll be able to provide all of that information

Great, yeah that sounds good.

I think you guys really should be commended on your work for those webinars.

I've never seen any like that much public interest in something like that.

So are there other comments or questions on this topic?

All right.

And did we want to specifically talk about that Route 20 project?

So actually I should probably mention the Frays Mill Burnley Road route 29 interchange project, putting the R cut in, I think has surpassed the route 20 trees project in the number of comments that have been coming in.

I'll just add as you know the representative from the county that there will be a the Board of Supervisors will be meeting on all of the the smart scale applications but the ones that we are submitting and the ones that the TJPDC or MPO will be submitting so that we can get resolutions

And I expect there'll be individual resolutions.

This is gonna happen on June 17th at the board meeting.

It's not officially a public hearing, but you're welcome to provide comments to the board members, your representatives ahead of time, or during the initial public comment period of that meeting.

And the board will have the final say as to whether or not we move forward with any or all

these projects.

So there is another opportunity for a decision.

I think also the MPO Policy Board will be voting on these as well at some point.

Maybe that would be Sandy or Nick or Lucinda to give us the details on that.

And then the final thing I will say is that the concepts are early.

designs that we're using to make the applications.

But they do start getting into more detailed designs if the project were to be funded.

And I know Chuck may want to speak to this as well, but there's a public hearing at that point in time.

I mean either one of them could actually kill the project as far as I'm aware.

I think every project, even if it's being submitted by the TJPDC, my understanding is that you all need a resolution from the governing body of that area where the project's in and you also need a resolution from the MPO policy board.

So the board of Supervisors

And I want to address Bill's point specifically about kind of the process and the engagement with the public and particularly, you know, tree interested people.

What's the overview, the kind of bird's eye view of the process and where we are now?

Is this the stage where up until now or up until the webinar last week, it was all kind of mostly internal within staff?

I know we've talked about it once or twice.

Yeah, could you talk about me?

Can we just repeat what we were asking?

Sure.

Just wanted to see or talk about like where we are in the process now, you know, whether it typically would have already sought public feedback and kind of heard that or, you know, like this was the point where we got public feedback and that was kind of the plan.

Before now, it was kind of internal to staff.

I'm so sorry.

Can I jump in here for any projects?

I can chime in too.

All right, for city projects, we have had public input to date on the majority of them.

West Main had a long process of going through conceptual design, getting to basically about 60%.

We have the corridor study that was conducted on Fifth Ridge, McIntire, that had quite a bit of public input.

So that's another one of our grants.

And then the, let's see, Preston Grady 10th,

That is a resubmission of a grant project we've already discussed and submitted for and actually got awarded funding which shifted it to Elliott.

Elliott Streetscape is the one that we're going to need additional public comment.

We haven't really had public process on.

So those are the four applications.

These all come from our streets at work plan, the comp plan, other studies.

There has been public participation regarding each of these projects.

Great.

And just to be clear, the Route 20 project, it's crossing 64, but the city doesn't start until a little bit further past Moore's Creek.

So it's all in the county.

And that one I believe is under discussion with another recently formed committee.

And one question, has council been given the city's proposals?

We have presented each of our applications to the city manager and he authorized us to do the pre-application process.

So I imagine it's tripled up to city council.

We'll also be seeking a resolution of support for them

Thanks.

Jessica, are you ready to chime in?

Sorry, I apologize again for my kid and my spouse as a meeting at the exact same time.

So we're just doing things.

So just let me clarify, the question was about Route 20 and how that's been presented to the public so far.

Right.

Okay, so I think Jeanette talked a little bit about a new group.

It's not really a new group.

There's the Bike and Pedestrian Coordination Committee, which is a group of staff from TJPDC.

The city, the county, and UVA have been meeting for quite a while.

Just recently we started opening those meetings up to the public, although we admit they haven't been well advertised as public meetings yet and we're moving forward working on that moving forward.

Let's see.

That is the stakeholder group that worked directly with VDOT to see the first feasibility study on how we could get bike and pedestrian connections between the city and PVCC and

the Saunders Monticello trailhead.

So that group saw the feasibility study.

There were a couple members of the public who brought in as there were additional discussions about that study and about our smart scale application.

Great.

Any other thoughts?

Yeah, I was just going to chime in because Jessica was tied up, but she pretty much covered it.

Yeah, we just facilitated the study with our on-call at the request of the bike-ped committee.

And we're happy to help with anything that we need to do moving forward to get this project

Great, thanks.

So if there's no other thoughts on SmartScale, I think we can move on to the UPWP.

I was waiting to see if Nick was going to moderate.

Thank you.

So every year as part of our ability to get funding for the MPO, we submit the Unified Planning Work Program and this is reviewed by

The draft has already been reviewed by VDOT and DRPT for comment and then the MPO Policy Board ultimately will determine whether or not to approve the UPWP.

But this is basically a document that shows what funding we're going to receive from which sources and what we're going to do to use those fundings as far as moving the goals of transportation planning within the MPO area forward.

So there are a couple of different things.

I'm going to go to my version of the document, just because it's a little bit easier to see than the meeting packet.

It's divided up into several different large categories.

There's the administrative function, which is kind of the paperwork and meeting administrative things that we have to do every year, regardless.

So that doesn't really change a whole lot.

What has changed is that we have reduced our funding in this area a little bit to focus more on other projects.

These include things like the

regular adjustments to the TIP, amendments to the TIP, that kind of thing, making sure we develop these kinds of documents, make sure the committees are staffed, that we maintain the website, that kind of thing.

Sean Tubbs had mentioned the public participation plan, and so if you go down to 1E, you'll see that we have

We have allocated close to, I guess, $12,000 for updating that public participation plan.

And one of the things that has specifically been standing out to us is the need to have more effective outreach to low-income and minority communities, which are required in the federal regulations as well.

So we've actually already started the process of thinking through our processes, what makes sense for our organization and what we can

And then of course, you know, we're in this whole new world of using technology to make these meetings more accessible to the public.

And so that's something else that we really need to consider moving forward is how we can continue to utilize technology to hopefully continue to get

better participation in our processes.

I don't know if Lucinda covered the numbers, but the smart scale meetings we had like 64 people on the first one and 74 people or so on the second one, so I don't think we would have gotten that kind of participation if, you know, we had set up in a room somewhere, so that was really

That was really gratifying to see us and I think really opened up some opportunities.

If you go down to task two, this is the long range transportation planning portion of it.

So this is where we have a lot of funding.

allocated for studies and developing resources and that kind of thing.

The first one we have listed is developing a series of MPO 101 primers.

And this is basically intended to be a one page kind of overview of the different programs.

that the MPO administers in order to help the public understand our processes better in order to provide an easier sort of nexus into public engagement.

There's an easy resource that at a very high level will explain what these programs are and what we're doing.

We think this will be really helpful for people who are new to interacting with the MPO, who are maybe new to committees and are suddenly reviewing something like a tip or

a long range plan.

This will hopefully help provide them some context in a really easy accessible way, as well as helping the public understand the processes without having to go into really overly technical kind of documents.

Jessica has really been a champion for doing some bike and ped counts.

So she's going to start coordinating that effort.

There was a lot of question during the

during the, when we were updating the performance measures, there were just a lot of questions about that process and why we were going with the state goals and that kind of thing.

So we wanted to include in this UPWP just putting some time into an analysis explaining how the measures are developed, why the state chooses what they do, what the implications are for selecting certain measures, just providing additional context for that.

and then one of the things that also goes along with the public participation plan is really working to identify areas in the community that are currently underserved in the planning process and this will kind of be the starting point in helping develop strategies for our next long-range plan update.

So the idea will be to

identify factors that make it less likely that people will have representation in the planning process.

And then this will hopefully guide our outreach efforts when we move forward into the actual five-year plan update.

We continue to work on getting some grants.

We just submitted a BUILD grant for funding for

updates to the Amtrak station.

And so there's some work that we continue to participate in related to the regional transit partnership.

There's money for that.

And then the last project that is listed under the long range plan is the electric vehicle charging station needs assessment as electric vehicles continue to create a larger percentage of the market share vehicles.

And we really need to assess where are their electric vehicle charging stations.

where are the highest needs and hopefully take a step forward and just identifying how the community can support that.

Oh, and then I had forgotten this, but we're also seeing this with the smart scale applications that there's a need to coordinate some transportation

Planning between the rural and urban components of Route 29.

And so we have some many set aside in that budget to start working towards a process to do that.

So this would include planning along the corridor in northern Albemarle County going into Greene County and that would coordinate with the rural transportation planning efforts as well.

And then we move into the short-term or short-range planning.

So this includes the regular updates to the transportation improvement program as well, making sure that we're communicating that well.

I think you guys have already voted on the tip, but one of the things that Lucinda did really well was she went back and put additional notations into the tip and just made that a much more user-friendly document.

And so we'll continue to review the tip and see how we can

We are continuing to make that more accessible as well.

In general, we just have general money in there for things like smart scale applications.

We're still going to have a significant amount of work there due at the beginning of August.

So between now and July, there's a lot of additional information we're going to have to collect.

you know, probably information to process as we move forward to making final selections on what we're going to submit for SmartScale.

Travel Demand Management, this mostly supports, provides additional support to our Rideshare program and other programs that help try to remove traffic off of the roads and then support for the Regional Transit Partnership.

And then in general, we just have some additional funds for on-call services.

You know, if somebody needs something, they call us and we have

a certain amount of funding set aside for just those little things that pop up.

And the last section is just things that potentially might be on the horizon and not necessarily guaranteed funding sources, but we'll pursue them as we are able to.

And will there be another opportunity later to, I mean, are we gonna see this again?

Yeah, so the technical committee needs to vote on it.

There is a public hearing scheduled for it with the MPO Policy Board next week.

So one thing I do want to make sure that we're all aware of is that while we need to get a final document approved, typically it is by the end of May that we have to have this approved.

Because of the pandemic, those requirements have been

you know, relaxed a little bit.

But if we're able to get it moved forward, I think we'd prefer to.

We can always come back on amendment though.

There is an amendment process to it.

OK, thanks.

Just, I guess, a technical note.

It'd be helpful if on the agendas, we could denote when we're expected to take a vote and make a recommendation on something.

And I guess a question I have is, so we're allocating funds into each of these different pots.

How does that translate into you all

you know actually doing work in each of those pots like presumably you have fixed salaries and don't you know bill the FTA when you're working on online resources or whatever.

Typically the way we have been billing is sort of

more generalized than project specific.

So we typically break it down into administration, short range and long range.

Those are kind of the main bundles of funding sources that are available.

Each of those have their own program codes.

So that's how we bill.

VDOT actually is considering a more formalized process to actually require invoicing on a per project basis.

And so then we would need to track it a little bit more specifically for project and not just overall general area.

I think in general, though, we try to allocate

reasonable amounts of work within those categories on the different projects that are broken up.

Great.

Discussion?

I just have a basic

Just sort of a housekeeping question.

So on page 9 where you have the information about the tip and then you have a sort of an aqua color there with several X's.

The policy board did not approve that.

They held their public hearing, but they have not voted on the tip yet.

So the reason that's an aqua is because they have not approved it yet.

It says approved on the thing.

Yeah, that's on page three in the TIP approval, where it says March 25, 2020.

OK, thank you.

Thank you for catching that.

I was going to say usually.

Sorry Chuck.

I think the March 25th date was the date that the draft was updated when I went in and added in extra description speech project.

Yeah, the other thing I wanted to say was once the document is approved,

The board passes a resolution and that's attached as part as the first page of the document.

That's helpful to know.

I'm just I just for

for sort of the general public when you see something that says TIP activity approved by the MPO policy board on March 25th, 2020.

I'm just reading it off the document.

That sort of one might infer that that document's been accepted by them without knowing that there would be a

that the resolution would be attached to it.

So that's, this is, I'm not trying to make a big thing.

So I got a couple questions about specific items.

One is 1D cross-jurisdictional communication.

It looks like the end products are mostly attending planning commission and governing body meetings.

Is that something that's done now?

Yeah, it's done sort of on an as-needed or as-requested basis.

Chip has had a lot of the meetings.

We've done a lot of presentations, especially when plans are finalized and presented.

Chip, I know, was at a really late meeting mid-summer to talk about the bike and ped, the Thomas Jefferson bike and ped area plan.

at the council meetings.

I've attended CAC meetings, the area community planning meetings with Albemarle.

So we do a lot of those sort of as a request.

I don't think there's anything necessarily regular.

Sandy, this is Chip.

The other cross-jurisdictional is outside of our MPO jurisdiction, where we hold an annual meeting with the Shenandoah Valley MPO.

Okay, and got another couple questions on, I think it's 2C, bike and pedestrian counts.

So I like the idea of counting bikes and pedestrians.

I noticed that an end product isn't exactly

Counting bikes and pedestrians.

It's like find locations and like build an email list.

Is there a kind of quantifiable like number of locations or number of counts that we're targeting or think we might be able to accomplish?

So I'll start with the more innovative ways of counting so VDOT has offered some

Automatic counters that we could roll out that we could borrow from them and those would be great and because we'd be borrowing them from VDOT they would be free.

The thing is my hope is to do our pedestrian bike and pedestrian counts also with volunteers which would also be free aside from the staff time to manage those volunteers and those

Volunteer accounts often can get at information that the automatic counters can't if we want to gather data about how many people are wearing helmets or how many people are riding the wrong way or how many people are riding on the sidewalk because they don't feel safe riding on the street.

That's information we can only get from volunteers and from staff time to coordinate those volunteers that we couldn't get from the automatic counters.

Great.

That sounds awesome.

Is that something you guys have done in the past at all?

Or is that totally new?

So I just started at the TJPDC in August of last year.

So it's something that I've done at different, I've worked with other MPOs, and those are counts that have been really vital to the overall bike and pedestrian planning process at other places.

TJPDC did them in the past.

They had some success with it.

They also ran into some challenges and discontinued that.

Those counts for a little while, Sandy and I have looked at or are going to be looking at the reasons why that was stopped and trying to overcome those challenges in the future.

So I kind of see this as like a two-year process to really get it rolling.

Hey Rory, I'll just, Kevin here, I'll just say that this has been an effort that's been going on through the bike ped committee that Jessica works with us on and we in the county have been talking a lot with the folks on the VDOT bike ped

like Shane Sawyer has been really proactive with that and he's been reaching out to us.

We have the conversations in that meeting but he also has been reaching out to Dan and I and we've been identifying some places where we might be able to place counters and also talked about doing that on a regular basis so that it goes to this one spot for this period of time every year so that we can keep a

And I know he's identified some spots in the city as well where that's happened.

He works with

and Amanda.

And so it has been an effort that we've been working on and we are trying to formalize the process and Jessica's doing a great job leading that up.

Yeah, that sounds super interesting.

And I wonder if you'd consider something like putting out a camera and then having the volunteers count on the video so you can do it kind of asynchronously.

It might kind of multiply your resources.

And I want to hit on that point.

Jessica, I think you mentioned it's a bike pedestrian coordination committee.

I've never heard of that thing.

I would love to hear more.

When does it meet?

Where are the agendas posted?

How do I know it exists?

So really briefly because I want to keep you guys on the on the work plan.

The bike ped coordination committee meets every month on the second Thursday of the month.

This is the committee that has been involved in that whole route 20 process.

So this is the committee that had previously just been open for staff.

It was not a public meeting.

and then we realized that we really needed members of the public to be voicing their opinions so we started opening it up to the public.

Just in our last meeting we decided to investigate further turning that committee not just into a staff one but officially turning it into some sort of technical committee so I've got to work with Sandy on that process.

Great.

So other discussion on this work plan?

Anyone?

Going once, going twice.

All right.

So moved that we recommend approval of the plan.

This is Chuck.

OK. Do we want to do a roll call vote or do you think we can just do a vote by

All in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

And any abstentions?

All right, motion carries.

Yeah, so I think it's pretty timely that we're discussing these things, especially after the public meeting that we did virtually last week.

So this was a presentation that was given to the Rural Technical Committee back in January.

So that's essentially your counterparts for the localities outside of the NPO area.

So it was given to us by VDOT Lynchburg staff.

Let me see.

No?

No, we're still looking at your agenda window.

But maybe if you drag the tab in or share your screen rather than the tab.

What about now?

Yep.

Okay.

So I thought I would just kind of run through some of the lessons learned that the Central Virginia MPO down in Pittsburgh had kind of learned from their process of doing some virtual community engagement and then see if we could open it up for discussion on, you know, how do we kind of move forward in this age?

Obviously that's certainly changing, but are there practices and policies that we can continue once some of these, you know, stay at home orders and kind of social distancing are

So that way we're reaching a broader swath of the public.

So kind of just a general overview, the traditional open house style meeting where we all meet on a Thursday evening,

is kind of losing favor with the public.

You tend to have the same kind of folks that turn out, those that are already plugged in and have the same level of engagement, not necessarily a large demographic swath that's representative of the area that we're serving.

And there's a need to increase participation in all forms all around.

So how do you go about doing that?

So the Central Virginia MPO and VDOT have been working on an updated long-range transportation plan and they decided to kind of go a different route of you know instead of holding those traditional public meetings trying to plug into existing intercepts or public events that were already happening where there was large

gatherings of folks.

Obviously this was pre-COVID-19.

They're cheaper to do, so there's less printing and whatnot that would be required for a traditional meeting.

There's higher levels of engagement and it's more productive.

And then also a new surveying tool that we'll get into here in a second.

So the first kind of intercept that they did was to get downtown festival in Lynchburg, which usually draws between 10 to 15,000 folks held in the fall.

So the consultant team and the MPO staff were able to set up a booth to kind of do an interactive money and budgeting game to try and kind of pick out certain project priorities.

And they had 329 individuals that participated in that event.

They then did a second intercept with the Centerfest in Bedford, which is a street festival.

A little bit less participation, 33 participants there, but then, you know, again, trying to reach a broad swath of the community there.

But kind of the meat of what, you know, especially moving to kind of online platforms is this MetroQuest survey tool.

I know the City of Charlottesville's consultants for the

Rich have used this.

So it's, again, a surveying tool, but a little bit more able to reach more people than something like a SurveyMonkey survey or something like that or Google survey.

So it's more user friendly and, again, is able to reach a lot of people.

Currently right now MPO and PDC staff do not have access to the platform.

You'd have to work with your VDOT rep or a consultant team, but you can work closely with VDOT staff to kind of interpret and make sure that the survey is representative of what you would want for transportation projects.

So this is just kind of a quick little screenshot of what it looks like in the platform.

Again, it's kind of more user-friendly, it's more visually, you know, kind of incentivized than some of the other platforms.

So this is kind of the interesting part.

In this survey round, they were able to reach 957 participants, which was 14 times as many

as they reached in the previous update to their LRTP.

So it's great to be able to see such high numbers of participation.

that can really provide some of that valuable feedback.

This just kind of gets into some of those priorities that were pulled out of the information.

There is an interactive map feature that you could embed within the survey platform so you're not having to do kind of separate ArcGIS online maps.

So you could, for bike and pedestrian planning or transportation specific planning, you could see kind of

Some of those priorities come out in specific spots identified, which I think is really useful and helpful.

I think this is just some data that they got, but by using this MetroQuest platform, they went from 69 survey responses in the previous round of their LRTP update to 957.

So a significant increase and more meaningful increase

So I think you know as we're as we're starting to to see you know some of the successes that we've been able to do with virtual public engagement you know we know that this is not going to supplement in-person meetings but how do you replace in-person meetings but how do you start kind of trying to build on some of these successes and

and really try and increase public engagement as we've seen.

There's a lot of people that are interested in smart scale projects and the process that's going on with that.

So how do we

kind of move that forward.

But that was, yeah, I thought it was a timely presentation.

Obviously, it was given to us in January, so prior to, you know, the things that have transpired to date.

But yeah, I mean, I kind of wanted to just open it up to discussion on what are people's thoughts with, you know, increasing engagement virtually or other successes that they've had in certain processes throughout this time.

I'll just quickly said this MetroQuest, I had been hearing about it for years, but it never actually had an opportunity to try it until this

right now, and I was pretty impressed with the way the interactive nature of that format.

I thought it was a pretty worthwhile form of engagement.

Yeah, I sent that to my coworker who lives down there, and he actually filled it out.

I think there's a way to go ahead and chime in.

We had like over 1,200 responses to the survey, and there's a quite in-depth material that goes along with the back end of the data that you can evaluate

when you're reviewing the actual responses.

So it was really, really good.

We're using it more and more.

Actually, Shane reached out to the bike-ped group at our meeting last week about possibly utilizing it on some of our projects, even on a smaller scale, to try to get some more public input.

It's just logistics for the smaller studies, getting it plugged in.

Because normally, with the bigger studies, I get the consultant to do a lot of the legwork.

I know we're using it for the Zion's corridor study at Zion's Crossroads.

But we can start using it more and more as we identify projects that were especially kind of short time now between now and August for smart scale.

And it's easily convertible to the other languages.

I think that's automatic.

Cool.

I think this is, I agree.

I'm agreeing with what people are saying, but I would hope like to lift a different piece to this.

is that if this allows then staff to then engage with what I might call the individuals outside of the urban ring in a more intentional way, then I'm all for it.

Because what I didn't see in this, and perhaps Nick you can tell us, I saw no demographics in any of the information except realizing that when you were down in, I think it was Bedford,

But that's a rural community of sorts.

And so if we were to think that we would do something like that Fridays after five, well, that's going to exclude a bunch of people who never come to the downtown mall and who will never come to the downtown mall, but who would use those, who would use our services and use the infrastructure in ways that

that are important to them.

And so my only hope, my hope would be that if we do this and that allows us to allocate human resources or bodies to places with little or no broadband, I know Rory can't believe that there's any place that doesn't have broadband, but in those places that don't have broadband and those places where people are, shall we say, less comfortable engaging with the formal entities of government.

And we weren't presented on any of the demographic information breakdown, but I know in planning processes past, especially with the Cherry Avenue plan in the city of Charlottesville, the traditional public engagement method wasn't

wasn't going to be conducive to really kind of gauge valuable feedback so we were able to do these front porch discussions which came out of the think tank which was the community group that kind of guided that process but allocating staff time to go to individual

Community Residence Homes and just do something really informal and not have kind of that again typical like, you know, hi, I'm here from the government.

I'm here to help approach.

I think we were able to do six or seven of those throughout the course of that project.

I don't remember the exact numbers of

those that were in attendance, but things like that coupling some of those more personalized strategies with something like a virtual platform.

Because obviously we know that that's not going to replace any sort of that engagement that you can get from in-person meeting.

But how do you supplement some of that?

How do we start getting creative about the approach to incorporating that in the plans and projects that we do?

So I think that Cherry Avenue one is certainly more innovative than things that we've done in the past.

I don't know if that would be a template for other things.

Yeah, I can chime in.

I know on the Fifth Street project,

We actually went out and held a meeting in Southwood with the folks down there and presented the information for the study to that community down there at the coordination where they're doing the habitat coordinating that infrastructure improvement.

We actually met with the citizens

community at the community and actually gave them the both the Spanish and the English version.

And they had a translator there and we were able to get a lot of the feedback from that group at that time.

So we were able to incorporate that with the regular stuff we got from the survey.

And I know with Hydraulic 29, we reached out to a lot of those folks.

as small groups like you did with the Cherry Street to get feedback from all of the groups that we could.

And just real quickly, I think this goes back to highlight the importance of the public participation plan and we really hope that you guys will help support those efforts, especially as we start identifying other organizations and agencies that we can start building relationships with to help you sort of the community structures that are in place to help us

bring in participation from some of these outside places.

I think that's one of the steps, right, to try to build some relationships.

So it's not just all of a sudden us as government officials going to people's doors to get information, but it's using those community centers that are already in place, you know, your churches and your non-profits and your neighborhood organizations and those kinds of things.

So we'll really look forward to getting your help in that process.

I also think that as far as virtual

Participation goes, the benefit of something like MetroQuest is that while it doesn't replace the other social justice efforts, it does reduce barriers to people who are not as familiar with technology but do have access to it because it just creates a very easy platform.

So Julia and I do believe that places without broadband exist.

I just can't believe that people have to live there.

Go ahead.

So do you know, Sandy, if the application can be used on mobile phones, on mobile devices?

It can?

OK, that's brilliant.

And can you guys clarify a little bit on what do you mean by MPO staff can't access the system?

Is that like a licensing issue?

Yeah, right now, right now, basically any project has to be administered through VDOT.

The MPOs don't have their own accounts at this point.

We're looking at potentially there may be some opportunities for us to have a

I forget what the word is, but basically all the MPOs together could potentially buy into their own licenses with VDOT.

Yes.

But it's also an opportunity where maybe if the city and county and even the localities outside of the MPO area, if everybody felt that there was enough value, there may be an opportunity to jointly participate.

And then that would be a service that we could provide.

It's something we've kind of talked about.

I haven't done any major analysis of it.

Yeah, I do think it's a really valuable platform in reaching a lot more people and in asking more interesting questions that kind of elicit better responses.

And on that note, I've got a couple of thoughts.

On the one hand, I wonder,

Or one worry I have is that it's very possible with these online surveys to, you know, structure them and the question wording in particular so that you kind of lead people to answers that you're looking for.

And I wonder if you have considered partnering with, for example, I think UVA has a center that specializes in, you know, survey wording and, you know, proper statistical methods for doing these things, both in crafting the surveys in particular, and once you have all that information, and in particular, you know, demographic information,

from respondents of all kinds, then weeding the results to create something more approaching the results you have from a proper survey, like a proper statistically valid survey.

Separately from that, sorry, kind of the opposite even is I know you get these free form big responses where maybe sometimes the most valuable information is.

So how do you parse that qualitative data?

Yeah, I can talk.

We have been working very closely with the Weldon Cooper Center at UVA.

They have initiated a really neat

scientific survey process that you're describing at a reasonable cost.

One of the hurdles we have to overcome is to do a truly scientific survey.

You've got to have all the right numbers of people and demographics.

which costs a lot of money beyond our reach to do surveys when you're randomly selecting people.

The Weldon Cooper Center through their Be Heard, See Bill program is that they have pre-selected a number of volunteers who agree to take surveys so they already know all of the demographics on those families

And they're able to push these types of surveys out to a select group that still meets the scientific requirements, but they can do it at a much more reasonable cost.

And so I think that's what you're referencing about the UVA program.

Yeah, I got to say I'm a little skeptical of that program, just because it is self-selecting for people who opt into a survey program, which is, of course, sort of true of any survey, even random digit dialing.

I don't know.

Yeah, and I think that's the hurdle with all the surveys.

I'm not a big fan of just surveys.

I think it's a great arrow in the quiver

Yep.

And I will add, and the one thing that I will say about what UVA just initiated, the fact that they could turn around, many of us, depending on what media sources you read, you saw some of the first work for them around the COVID-19 attitudes.

And the fact that they turned that around in two weeks,

You know, that's the kind of stuff that typically in the survey center, you do a survey and you might see something in several months.

I used them when I was back at the institution.

And so I was absolutely really surprised that they turned around that data and gave us demographic breakdowns and ethnic backgrounds in a way that I had not seen coming out of that place.

out of that organization.

So I would just speak to that and say, and echo what Chip has said, it's one more piece that gets us deeper into our community and allows them to speak without them feeling as if they're being put out, which is, you know, nobody wants to speak anymore.

Yeah, I mean, I really think all of these options are better than the old status quo.

It's really a low bar to meet three people showing up in a room at 11 o'clock on a Tuesday.

Okay, I put a link to the survey report from the Fifth Street Study for the first survey we did.

So if you guys want to look at it, you can look at it.

And it's got the survey in it, plus it's got a breakdown of the data.

It doesn't get into individual like ethnic groups, but it basically breaks it down by zip code and where people are located.

And there are some specific questions.

The tool, you can't get into a lot of detail with the tool because you only have so many questions you could ask in such a certain way.

But you can see what the tool has and what it provides.

And if you have any questions, you can just let me know.

We're going to be coming out with another survey for the project.

The end of this like next week and it'll run for a month.

And we've got a public meeting scheduled for virtual public meetings scheduled for like the second week in June.

And do you guys publish the raw data somewhere?

Um, I, we can, I don't think, I mean, we published the report, but I didn't think we didn't put out the raw data from the, uh, survey data.

Um, but if it's,

something that you guys would like to see.

I mean, we could probably come up with that data.

The consultant actually did all this for us.

So I don't have access to the data per se.

Yeah, I mean, if it's not too much trouble, I would strongly support publishing the raw data behind any report at any time when it's available, just to let the community really dig in if they so choose that.

Not saying this report, but I've definitely seen some consultant reports that totally butcher the data and have obvious glaring errors.

I agree always.

So I think staff would hope that this might be kind of a broad discussion about community engagement as well.

People have thoughts that aren't maybe specifically focused on MetroQuest.

I'll throw in one.

Oh, sorry.

I would only say, thank you, Chair, that my hope is that we can figure out ways to engage or to create those networks

particularly the networks that came out of the August issues that seem to be looking for ways to be actively involved.

While there's always been a certain network of individuals, there seems to be emerging networks of younger individuals who have decided to make this region their home.

and so engaging with them I think would also help to sort of solidify that engagement and those conversations that may be emerging.

But also remember, until this particular administration is no longer in office, there is a lot of concern with people who may have unclarified legal residency.

but who also pay taxes.

I mean, they are full members of our community.

They pay taxes, they may own home and they pay personal property taxes.

So these are not people who are living at the friends.

They're just not living in the view of the general government.

Let's just put it that way.

And so how do we engage?

I don't want anyone to misinterpret what I'm saying.

I'm not saying that we're helping people to break the law,

Yeah, I think that's a really good point.

And whenever possible, I think it should be possible to submit feedback or respond to a survey anonymously without having to keep your personal information, which I think that was true in the 5th Street MetroQuest.

I think I didn't put my email in, so you wouldn't spam me.

Though, on the other hand, it also makes it really easy to just submit a ton of survey results, which I kind of wondered how you deal with that.

Since it's electronic, they can weed out if like one phone submits 50 surveys or one IP address because it is tagged.

in the system where it comes from.

Um, so they can, they're able to, uh, look at that, especially if you have a lot of it's duplicated.

Um, cause, uh, I know we do, one of the things they're starting that we're starting to do is for people that don't have access to the computer, we've actually bought, um, um, Google, Google Chromebooks, and we're actually providing them a public meeting so people can go on and take the survey at the meeting.

as a way to collect public comment instead of filling out a survey form.

Yeah, that's super cool.

And an idea I've been kind of kicking around lately is, you know, just taking a tablet and putting it up on a kiosk.

This is for, you know, after the coronavirus passes and people can touch the same screen again.

But, you know, if you just stuck it up in front of City Hall or, you know, in the hallway or even just anywhere on the mall and let people who are walking by, you know, tap in some responses real quick.

Really just all about lowering that barrier to entry as much as we can.

And actually on that note, a little bit of a pivot.

I'd love to see when we publish our agendas for meetings like this on Zoom, if we grab that Zoom dial-in phone number so that people who don't necessarily have computers or broadband can just call in and don't need to fill out an online form or whatever to find that number if they don't have Zoom in the first place.

All right.

Great.

Let's see.

Yeah, I'm still here.

So our next step is that we're going to keep working on regaining a draft.

We're going to get through this month first and then probably in, let's see what month is it now?

It is May.

In July, we'll bring that to the MPO committees for at least an initial discussion of them.

There is, in the public participation plan itself, there's a requirement that we have a 45-day comment period.

I think the idea would probably be to introduce it in July, hold the comment period between July and September, and then hopefully

be ready to vote on it.

Great.

Actually, another thought on the topic of Zoom meetings.

Is there a good option for broadcasting this meeting to some platform, YouTube,

Facebook, Periscope, whatever.

I know several of those are built into Zoom, but I don't know if your subscription allows it.

But I think it would be really helpful to have these go on some sort of permanent record.

And for this meeting, at least, to post that recording somewhere, I keep seeing a little recording icon on city meetings.

And I have no idea where those things go.

I'm just assuming they go right into someone's computer trash.

Great, yeah, that sounds good.

But again, I'd love to see a live broadcast option if that can be done with minimal effort, which I think it can.

It's gonna make a YouTube account.

And one day we'll convince the city to use YouTube instead of Facebook.

So any other action items that anyone has?

All right, well, I'll open it back up for public comment.

Do we have anyone who'd like to speak?

See Alex Perkins out there.

Any members of the public?

Feel free to just unmute yourselves.

I'm guessing there's none since I don't see anything in chat.

Wait, I'm getting a private message in chat.

Oh, yeah.

All right.

Well, if there's nothing else, Bill Taker,

All right.

Well, I guess we can call it a day.

I'll entertain a motion to adjourn.

Anyone?

Do we do that?

Second.

Aye.

That's a great thing.

Thanks, everybody.

Thank you.

Bye, everybody.

Thank you, everybody.