Rural Transportation Advisory Committee Meeting   7/21/2020

The Thomas Jefferson Planning District Rural Transportation Advisory Committee is meeting today July 21st, 2020 at 1 p.m. with a quorum of voting members through electronic virtual communication of Zoom software application.

Meeting agenda and virtual meeting address has been posted for one week at 401 Walker Street.

You want to keep going?

at 401 Water Street East on the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission website and provided to local media outlets and provided to the general public and policy board members contemporarously.

This meeting is open to public viewing and public comment will be allowed through electronic communication as such time is provided on the meeting agenda.

As a public body, the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission Rural Transportation Advisory Committee is allowed to meet utilizing virtual meeting procedures and policies as outlined in item 4.0-01 of the Virginia state budget, HB 29.

Item 4.0-01 allows public bodies to meet through electronic communication means during emergency declarations, such as the current COVID-19 emergency.

The governor has declared a state of emergency.

The nature of this declared emergency makes it impractical or unsafe for public body to assemble in a single location.

The purpose of this meeting is to discuss or transact the business statutorily required or necessary to continue operations of the public body.

The TJPDC shall make available a recording of the meeting on its website in accordance with the timeframes established

and State Code Section 2.2-3707 and 2.2-3707.1 of the Code of Virginia, the nature of the emergency, the fact that the meeting was held by electronic communication means

and the type of electronic communication means by which the meeting was held shall be stated in the minutes of the public body.

We will begin by calling attendance of the policy board members and then the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission Rural Transportation Advisory Committee staff members

We ask that you keep your communication devices on mute until you prepare to speak.

In addition, you may use the raise hand or chat feature to indicate that you would like to speak or ask a question and the host will call on you.

We ask that the public stay on mute except for the public comment periods to cut down on background noise.

Those wishing to speak during the public hearing or public comment periods are asked to use

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The meeting host will call your name and then you can unmute yourself and speak to the group.

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To see the raise hand feature on your screen, click on participants at the bottom of your screen.

The raised hand will be at the bottom left of your screen under the list of participants.

Jim, you have your hand up.

Yes, it is.

Thank you.

There was a glare on my screen and some big words came up I wasn't prepared for.

All right, I've seen the minutes.

I motion to approve the minutes as written.

Do we have a second here?

Second.

All right, the minutes have been approved.

Next election of officers, is that time already?

I go ahead and nominate myself a chairman again, unless anybody doesn't want that to happen.

I'm flexible.

I'll second.

And then we need a, who would like to be nominated for vice chair?

If I'm not mistaken, correct me if I'm wrong, but am I Vice Chair?

I believe you are.

I'm willing to serve again.

All right.

Well, I second that.

Mr.

But we're flying through.

I know, right?

All right, review of the FY21 Rural Work Plan project timeline.

Yeah, let me, let's see, open it up.

OK.

So this was just kind of an attempt to take the rural outreach plan that was before you guys back in May and just kind of briefly attach some timelines to the projects that were identified for the upcoming fiscal year.

So it just kind of provides, again, a brief overview of kind of our time sequencing for these projects.

And like I said, it's pretty short.

Just kind of running through it, assisting rural localities with local planning efforts, that's going to be ongoing throughout the fiscal year.

We did have scoped in some assistance for Nelson County with the transportation planning efforts.

We do know that Dylan informed us that the comp plan has been put on hold due to some funding constraints.

So there is opportunity to kind of

work together and even though they're not in the comp plan update process but to provide some transportation assistance there but that probably wouldn't happen until after the first of the year just based on staff availability and time here.

Kind of the next thing under that

Rural locality planning efforts would be inventorying existing electric vehicle charging infrastructure and then kind of formulating some sort of regional need study.

So initial project meetings and scoping have occurred.

I think that happened earlier in this month and then a full scope of work would happen here in the coming month and then would be back before you guys in September.

In terms of the rural long-range plan, we had outlined kind of the need to dashboard some of that information online just to make it a little bit more accessible.

You know, the public or interested stakeholders don't necessarily need to go run through a giant document, but to pull some of those high level data out and then try and put it in kind of an easily identifiable and digestible format.

This was something that was also identified in the MPOs work program.

So we're going to be mimicking

kind of the work that they're doing on the urban transportation side so those conversations began again in July on the MPO side so we're hoping that you know it'll be easy for kind of the rural transportation side to piggyback on some of those efforts so we're not you know recreating the wheel or anything and then hopefully have that back in front of you guys a draft version of that kind of come November so

It gives you an idea.

We did have the town bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure assessment.

So Jessica is going to go kind of more in depth on some of the details of that.

But thinking of kind of a September 2020 through February 2021,

kind of timeframe for that project.

Hoping that we can start really developing a robust scope here in August and again have that available in September to coincide with a kickoff date there.

And again, we'll go into more detail as to what

what that would actually look like.

And then the final project that was identified in this year's work program was a regional freight and traffic study.

And again, that would kick off in December and then run through June of 2021.

So kind of abutting the end of the fiscal year.

We probably won't have a full scope until November, December timeframe, but

anticipating about a six month long process with that.

So yeah, again, just kind of a high level, just a way to start organizing kind of our workflow in the coming fiscal year.

I will caveat that there is some flexibility within these projects, especially

All these interesting things that we've had to kind of prioritize over some of these.

So they're certainly subject to change, but this was just our initial kind of first pass at trying to provide some of that information and just kind of make sure that you all are aware of kind of where we're landing on some of these timeframes.

So that's all I've got on that.

Any questions?

All right.

Simple enough.

Hey, the only question I had, sorry.

This is Chuck.

I had to unmute myself.

I know we've got the Zion's Crossroads Study that's going to be wrapping up this fall.

Yeah, I guess we were just attaching stuff for the FY21 work program.

And since we didn't pull that over into this year's plan, but we are aware that obviously

Those efforts will be ongoing.

Yeah.

Well, Tom and Brad and Douglas, I think we discussed this with Chuck.

It was actually Chuck that we talked about this.

You know, I think we're going to wrap up the PDC work probably with the next round of public engagement for the most part before we bring a final document back.

We are probably also going to need to amend the work plan anyway because

In the MPO Unified Planning Work Program, there was funding set aside for a project on 29 for the northern portion of the 29 corridor in Albemarle County going into Greene County to do sort of some

at Transportation Corridor Study in that area.

So that is also not reflected in this work program.

So we probably will need to come back and do an amendment at some point.

Sandy, is that Route 29 in conjunction with the

I mean, it's not directly because of that project, but it will certainly incorporate, you know, looking at traffic through that area, which that project is trying to help address some of the

congestion and safety concerns.

So yeah, I don't think we've defined the project boundary yet.

We'll be working with you all and Albemarle County to sort of develop that methodology.

That will probably just because of how our other projects are scoped out now, we're probably going to look to not start that until maybe November-ish anyway, and that will probably carry over into our next work program.

Great.

I mean, it's definitely needed because I think between sheets and the river, there's a lot of congestion that's not really being addressed.

Yeah.

Sure.

All right, I guess we could move into the bicycle and pedestrian plan.

So I'm just going to share my screen.

Give me one more second.

Okay.

All right, can everyone see it?

Perfect.

Okay, so I will be talking about the Rural, Bicycle, and Pedestrian Infrastructure Assessment.

So like Nick was saying, this is listed in the Rural Transportation Planning Work Program.

It is Task 3.4.

Staff at the TJPDC have about 160 hours to dedicate to this project, so a fair amount of time.

And just pulling directly from the work program, the description of this project reads,

to develop a bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure report for existing facilities in the towns of Louisa, Mineral, Stanardsville, and Scottsville.

Much work has been undertaken at the county level to inventory and integrate data into a regional GIS data clearinghouse with the towns receiving less attention.

This will provide an opportunity to inventory existing conditions and identify network gaps and projects that could be phased for TAP funding.

So based on that project description, we have two main anticipated deliverables.

One being a bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure inventory, and the second being a network gap identification and recommended solutions report.

So I'll go into detail on each of those momentarily, but I want to clarify it's anticipated deliverables because what I'm presenting today is really just a draft initial scope.

And I'll be working with hopefully a steering committee composed of town managers and county planning staff

to really finalize and approve a final scope of work.

Okay, so first the bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure inventory.

So this would look at four main things ideally.

Existing formal infrastructure, existing informal infrastructure, existing barriers and destinations.

So taking those one by one, the existing formal infrastructure would be the stuff you guys think of automatically, things like sidewalks and bike lanes and shared use paths.

But there's a couple of important points about how we would collect the data that I think are important to share.

So first, I think that data should be gathered and stored in a way that aligns with other state and regional efforts to inventory bike and pedestrian infrastructure.

So the NPO has an ongoing project to collect the data, this kind of data from

The MPO localities and store that in a place where all the data is comparable.

The state is doing the same thing.

Anything that we do for the inventory for the towns should be ideally gathered and stored in the same way so that it could be combined with these other ongoing projects at both the local and state level.

I thought it would be kind of cool if the data that we gathered and stored was gathered in a way that we could easily translate it into maps for the towns, for bicyclists, for pedestrians, even for tourists.

That's something I think is cool, but I would definitely want to hear more from you guys if you think that that would be a valuable item.

So existing informal infrastructure is stuff that is not put in place by planners but is put in place by users when they feel that the formal infrastructure isn't meeting their needs.

So an example might just be a simple footpath that's created along a side of road where there's no sidewalk or

Pave Shoulder, indicating that this is an area where people are trying to go from point A to point B on foot and they need the formal infrastructure in order to do that more safely.

Existing barriers.

The inventory should identify barriers residents face on bike or on foot or barriers that prevent them from attempting these travel modes in the first place.

And destinations.

The inventory should identify important community locations, especially those that residents desire to reach on bike or on foot.

So again, those would be the four main things captured by the inventory.

So I just want to take a quick breath and ask for you guys here, do towns or counties already have some or all of this information?

I would recommend reaching out.

Kind of Louisa and the Town of Mineral separately, but I would request that anytime you reach out to them that you CC me so that at least know the conversation, I'm in the loop with it.

I'm going to have to do a little digging on my end to see what I have or what was here before I got here for you.

So just check in with me.

later this week or next week to see what I've dug up.

Great.

What format do you want this information in?

It's easy enough to come up with, at least for the town of Sandersville, because it's tiny.

And that's fine.

That was just information that I wanted to have.

Does it exist?

I don't want to reinvent the wheel.

I think that there are ways to collect this information that would really inform the inventory.

So I just wanted to make sure that we weren't duplicating efforts if you guys had already done that.

I'll just comment on Scottsville.

This was inventoried by the PDC and updated in our One Map data.

So you'll have that access to that.

Yes, please.

All right.

All right.

Okay.

So how would the inventory be accomplished?

So it sounds like there might be some existing information out there already, but not a ton of it.

And it might not be super up.

It might not be up to date with the exception of Scottsville because Albemarle County is already working on

The one map project which was the MPO mapping project that I was talking about earlier So I envision this inventory being accomplished mostly through ground truthing done by TJPDC staff as well as I think if we have the time it would be very cool to try a walking audit so specifically for each towns downtown to minimize or to to focus on

The space that we would be working with for the walking audit.

So if you haven't heard of this term before, it's basically a public workshop where you bring residents together and you walk around a space with them and they tell you what they think about the infrastructure, both formal and informal in that area.

And that can be a really great way to get out what some planners would call the invisible information.

Things that an outsider like me coming from Charlottesville might not, I might not have all the information and just by walking around in a town I might not understand all of the intricacies of walking and biking in that area in the same way as residents would.

So that would give us a lot more useful information that would come from the residents directly.

I think that these could be done virtually given current limitations.

We would be potentially walking around a space using Google Maps or some sort of GIS thing.

So I don't think that the COVID situation is enough to rule this out entirely.

We would just have to be a little bit more creative about how these things would be done.

But I think it would gather a lot of useful information for the inventory that hasn't been gathered before.

And what would the end product look like?

I would definitely want to see it mapped in GIS.

I would like to, if it's valuable to the towns, have that translate to a printable or online map that users could access.

and also just working with the steering committee and with the community to figure out what else the towns might want from the inventory.

And I don't think we have to answer that question right now.

Yeah.

So I think that a community survey could definitely be an important piece of this, again, if we have the time to do that.

And yeah, I agree.

MetroQuest would be a great way to gather that information.

So I think that that could be done either in addition to or in place of these walking audits.

OK.

And then the second deliverable was the Network Gap Identification and Recommended Solutions Report.

So as the name implies, this would be a single document that identifies gaps in the formal infrastructure network and recommend solutions to address those gaps.

So in order to create this report, we would use the inventory that we just created to identify gaps that are, one, preventing existing infrastructure from being used effectively or to a greater extent.

So if you, as a town, already made an investment in things like sidewalks or bike lanes, we want to make sure that you're getting your money's worth and that if there needs to be additional infrastructure added on to either end of those things, that that is where you focus your efforts to make sure that you get

bang for your buck for your initial investment in this kind of infrastructure.

We'd also use the inventory to identify gaps that are preventing users or potential users from accessing important destinations, especially if you care about using bike and pedestrian infrastructure to meet transportation needs for your community.

We want to focus on those destinations and people being able to reach

where they want to go using this infrastructure.

And finally, use the inventory to identify infrastructure gaps that are currently being filled by informal infrastructure that is unsafe.

I think the best example I can give for this is that sometimes you'll see certain locations where people are constantly using a mid-block crossing instead of walking to an intersection and crossing there.

Identifying that information in an inventory can help identify where you might need to invest in crossing pedestrian and bike crossing infrastructure.

Okay.

And ideally any recommended solutions in the report would meet transportation alternative funding requirements.

We want to make sure that you can fund these ideas and also would meet the needs and desires of the community.

And that's where I want to get into a little bit more about the survey, a potential survey.

Let's see here.

So how would we determine the bicycle and pedestrian focus needs and desires of the community?

that would inform those recommended solutions.

So the main thing would be a steering committee like we talked about before composed of town managers or planning staff and county planning staff.

I'd wanna bring everyone together not only to finalize a scope of work for this project but also to help every step of the way with the project to ensure that the inventory and the recommendations documents are meeting your needs.

A community survey I think would be an important piece, just like David recommended with MetroQuest.

And the walking audits I think would be a great way to get at the needs and desires of the community.

Okay, so a little bit more what might appear in a community survey and what the steering committee might voice an opinion on.

OK, so when we're determining bicycle and pedestrian focus needs and desires of a community, I think it's really important to identify upfront whether there's a preference for investment in transportation infrastructure or recreation infrastructure.

So if you guys remember, I'm from Tucson, Arizona.

So I've almost lived here a year.

And once my year is up, I won't keep using transportation.

to some pictures but this is my last time doing it.

So here we have on one side a protected bike lane on a fairly busy road that is not a place anyone is really going to be biking just for fun to get out in nature or anything but it is a great way to get to those important destinations by bike and it's a safe enough place that whole families can use it.

On the other side, you can see a recreational path, a shared use path.

That is something that people are going to hop on to just for fun, just to get out in nature, just to get some exercise.

It's wide, it's pretty.

These are the kinds of things that families also really like to use.

And then there's the question of, once you've determined if you're thinking about transportation or recreation, although there is a lot of overlap between those, sometimes recreational facilities can be really useful for commuters.

Sometimes commuter facilities can be really fun to use for families.

We also want to know what is the desired outcome of your investment in the bike and pedestrian infrastructure?

I have two slides on these desired outcomes.

The first one here we're talking about you could potentially be looking for an outcome of improving safety and the picture I have here is actually a pretty low cost investment where they've taken an intersection that was really

Frequented by commuters.

It's just a four way stop.

They found that bicyclists were experiencing a lot of right hook crashes or near misses where the vehicle makes a right hand turn while the bicyclist is trying to go straight and that can cause a crash.

So what they did is they highlighted the bike lane with some green recycled glass.

You could also more cheaply use paint

But that's a great way to make the drivers aware of the bicyclists in that lane and limit the number of right-hook crashes.

So something like that could be a desired outcome.

Another desired outcome, especially if you're looking for a recreational trail, if you're focusing on recreation, could be to improve the quality of life for residents.

This is a local picture.

These are my kids on the path near Riverview Park.

It is a great recreational path.

It improves our quality of life.

I'm sure it does for all the other people on it.

Other desired outcomes for investment could be tourism and a great example of that is the Virginia Capital to Capital Trail.

There's lots of research out there, which I won't bore you with, but towns that are along the Virginia Capital Trail have seen huge increases in tourist dollars.

People want to stay overnight as they are biking along the Capitol Trail.

They want to stop at restaurants.

They want to stop at bars.

This can be a great thing for your community if that's what you're looking for.

Or economic development.

So these are pictures.

I think I've shown you got this group, the pictures of the street calming project in the bottom right where they put some paint down and some cafe tables and some plastic bollards to protect the space.

and the businesses in that area saw an increase in sales.

You can also go cheaper.

Just putting a large bike parking area outside of a business or in a commercial area can indicate to bicyclists and pedestrians that this is a really great spot to stop and spend your money.

Okay, and then I kind of ran out of steam here.

So we're using, so there are other considerations that we would include in this, in determining the needs and desires of the community space requirements.

We would never want to put in a too narrow recreational trail.

We want to make sure that if we're trying to entice families to come out on a recreational trail and we're expecting a parent to be pushing a stroller and a toddler to be on a bike,

We want to make sure that there's enough space for them to do that right next to each other and for people to pass them.

Comfort level of bicyclists.

We don't want to ever create infrastructure that's only going to appeal to the hardiest of bicyclists who don't mind getting within three feet of a motor vehicle moving 50 miles an hour.

We want to create infrastructure that's going to appeal to bicyclists of all comfort levels, including those who are a bit nervous.

So sometimes people think about bike and pedestrian infrastructure as primarily addressing the needs of existing users.

You might know that there are a bunch of kids walking along a roadway to get to school and we want to meet their needs, but we should also think bigger.

Think about creating new users for the infrastructure that you're investing in.

And that's when I like to pull out this quote from a planner from Vancouver who said, when asked to prove that bike lanes would be well used, it's hard to justify a bridge by the number of people swimming across the river.

When you don't have bike and ped infrastructure in place, it's really hard to figure out how many people would be using it because it's just not there yet.

And we can't tell in the same way that

We can't tell the number of people who would come out and use it just by counting the number of people swimming across river either.

Okay.

Checking in with you guys.

And we're pretty much done here.

But how does this draft scope or plan sound to you guys?

What do you expect your communities to think about this project?

Jessica, this is Douglas from Fluvanna.

I wanted to listen to your whole presentation.

And in the 2019 Jefferson area bike and pedestrian plan, when you were talking about, we don't have a town, but I'm just mentioning the information that I sent before lunch.

For instance, the Palmira area, the information in there now is from our community and from our county perspective is really

Unfortunately already inaccurate.

We don't want to use that part of route 15 anymore.

And I've talked, we've talked to Chuck Proctor about it before, but so just when you're asking some of the towns and counties, you may want to see if theirs is still viable in the 2019 plan and on the flip side, the information that's in there for connecting to larger trails.

And for instance, we've been working with Jennifer Wampro from DCR for connecting to the James

River National Heritage Trail.

So that information in the plan for trails and pedestrian parts of it is great.

It's just our specific one that we were already switching from Route 15 to Main Street is no longer valid, unfortunately for us.

Great, thank you.

I would just comment, and I'm sure it's the same way with Louisa and Tom.

In Greene, the towns are somewhat isolated.

So in the town of Standardsville, we have reasonably complete, although there are improvements needed, pedestrian infrastructure in the town, but it's

260 person town, and it doesn't really easily connect to anywhere else in the community.

So the biking portion or pedestrian portion to get from the town anywhere else, there are some limits.

I would also say that while we're talking about it, for Chuck Proctor's benefit, if we could get the large shoulder on Route 33 brushed,

I would agree there's a lot of sidewalk infrastructure within both towns.

Maybe I think one of the reasons we were thinking to narrow this down into the towns is just as far as scope goes, and also we haven't done a lot of work with the towns.

So that was part of what we were thinking through, but maybe part of this needs to also be just at a higher level, not in the same amount of detail, but at a higher level, think about connection points outside of the towns and

and where maybe there are.

But I think some of that, Nick or Jessica, you might be able to correct me.

Now that they have like in the 2019 plan, they inventoried sidewalks through like GIS.

So that exists.

I don't know if there's like particular

You know, to the extent that Jessica was talking about the destinations and whatnot, I'd have to go back and look through it.

I know in Greene, and it's probably the same in Fluvanna and Louisa and the other communities, in the established towns, there are existing sidewalks and some easy improvements and maybe safety add-ons.

But in the newer development, in our case, Markersville, which is quite urban, there is zero infrastructure.

No sidewalks, no bike paths, no interconnectivity, and it's from a

And David also said, would it be worthwhile to look at Livingston as well as something else?

That brought up a point that Douglas had made before the meeting to asking about potentially, because there are no towns in Fluvanna or Livingston, there are some of those areas.

So maybe it makes sense to include those.

Dylan, you can weigh out on Nellie's part.

I think definitely there's interest in Livingston.

Yeah, I like that idea with, um,

Plant plan update we were supposed to do, I was, you know, in discussion among staff and the board and planning commission, we had kind of liked the idea of making Nellie's Ford and Lovingston, some type of overlay district where we could concentrate stuff like, like pet infrastructure, mixed use, and then push, you know, the agriculture bigger lots outside of it.

So that way we can concentrate the commercial development where we where we have it.

Great, so it sounds like we have a little bit of work to figure out exactly where this project is going to be taking place, but I'm excited that people seem interested.

So that's good news.

Justin, could I add in one?

Since we're working on our comp plan, and it was originally officially going to be kicking off July 1st, but now it's probably September 1st with COVID, but we've been doing a lot of background research and studies.

So the reason I mentioned or brought up the question about using Palmyra as an opportunity as our town, even though most people think of it as our county seed in the county complex, but

For those of you who don't know, I did send an email briefly before.

We're starting up here at the end of the summer and early fall, most likely Labor Day weekend or something.

But Food Truck Friday is on Main Street.

We have some other interest in doing things from that from an economic development standpoint.

And then we also have connections to all of our trails kind of

come and go across the Ravana River and then to Pleasant Grove Park.

So people were also coming in and out of the town of Palmyra that way.

And the best thing is we have a county administrator who is very active and who wants to see those type of things occur.

So we have some good synergy going on.

And not to say other towns and county administrators don't,

But so we kind of have a little of that going and we'd like to finish it.

But again, we would take a backseat to anyone else has a strong project ready to go forward as well.

So I just wanted to add that in your study.

Thanks.

Jessica, on the 1st of July, the Ohio Planning Association, Ohio chapter with Massachusetts did a speeding up slow streets project CE credit webinar.

You might want to gander at that because they talked about how COVID-19 has caused a lot of localities worldwide to take a look at their existing bike and pedestrian pathways because now they're being used more than they ever have because there's nothing else to do.

and perhaps they're not being used the way they're intended or now they're starting to get, hey, we've been neglecting this and we should maybe change the way our path is.

So it kind of just touched on bike path a little because really the webinar was about speeding up the slow street projects, but I believe that's the right one unless I'm wrong.

Yeah, no, and I appreciate you mentioning that.

I'm really familiar with the movement, but I will check out that webinar.

Thanks for the recommendation.

Well, thank you very much.

Yeah, the only thing before I let you guys move on, I was just gonna show this last slide.

So the next steps would be for us to create a steering committee and host a first virtual meeting and draft the scope document and get approval from the steering committee.

So that's where we're at.

Great, thank you.

Sure.

I mean, the only thing I want to say is I'm glad they extended the deadline to the 17th.

Yeah.

So the biggest thing with SMART SCALE, the PDC has four projects that we're doing.

The biggest thing is just if you haven't done so yet, make sure you start working on your

letters of resolution for support, gathering your economic development sites data.

If anybody needs any information as far as technical guidance or support that we can help you with, let us know.

But the deadline is August 17th.

You do not need your resolutions of support by then.

October 30th, if you need some extra time to get those.

I think I sent out the PDC's

Resolution of support for all of the local projects that were submitted.

But if you need anything like that from us, let us know.

Dylan and Nick and David and I are going to hang out after this meeting to discuss Nelson County's projects.

But I think we're in good shape.

We know what we need.

Hopefully you all know what you need.

And if you don't and you want to reach out to us, we would be happy to facilitate

Chuck, it's Jim Frydl.

We've done two resolutions for our project already.

One to support VDOT's efforts in doing the planning and one for the pre-application.

I'll have to go through and look at the pre-application resolution because

We had your concept done at that time, so that may be adequate enough.

I'll have to go look and see.

No.

Thank you, but I think we probably have enough.

I'll have to look and see the wording on that resolution, but the one in for the pre-app is probably going to be sufficient.

OK, thank you.

And just to let everybody know, we should be sending out the final material probably in the next week or so.

L&D's wrapping it up right now, finalizing all the cost estimates.

And we didn't put David's name on the agenda, so I apologize for that.

I think Sandy and Chuck just about covered it, but we'll work through the details and the follow-up call for Nelson.

One other thing I want to just mention really quickly, Chuck had mentioned this in another call, but you do not need to upload the full long-range transportation plan for anybody that was going to provide that.

You can just upload the page and the plan that shows that your project is listed.

If you need help getting that, let us know.

And if that's incorrect, give it to Chuck.

No, that's a good point.

Yeah, you just have to note the reference and upload the specific page in the document where it's referenced is all that you would need to provide.

And that holds true for like the rural long-range plan,

Any other questions for SMART SCALE or are we all just working on it?

All right, I guess we can move into updates.

I'll go first only because I don't have much other than we have our first planning commission meeting tomorrow since January.

We have five public hearings.

So we've got all of our distancing set up and interested to see how that plays out.

I'll go next.

The Board of Supervisors is having a work session next week to discuss and update the zoning ordinance so it would incorporate some of the things from our 2040 comprehensive plan.

We're picking this back up.

It kind of was put on hold a little bit because of COVID-19.

So that's exciting.

That work session's next week.

We've had three solar projects in the county in public hearing.

Two of them have been pushed up to the Board of Supervisors for August 3rd.

One of them's still in Planning Commission.

Sure.

We, excuse me, at our last planning commission meeting,

Last week, we've, as Tom was saying, we've presented or requested to do a zoning text amendment for all the new solar energy facilities, utility scale ones mainly, to waiting, after all the legislative session stuff was passed July 1st.

So we'll be writing a zoning ordinance amendment for having those.

Mainly utility-scale solar facilities so that we can have new cases coming through this fall, late fall, early winter.

Brad's been doing some other things with the Agricultural and Forestry District, things that really started up again since 2012 and he's been real active with that.

Had two cases on it.

Ours is very similar to the land use program for taxation.

but it's the Ag Forrester District State Program.

So he's been doing a lot with that.

Brad, you're on the line.

Nope.

Yeah, it's been, feels like it got busier the last couple months, which is always a good thing.

I'm just kind of looking over notes here.

The thing that's just been on the radar 100% has been just getting SMART SCALE applications ready.

We have the county we're submitting for and then

TJPDC, you guys are submitting five for us.

One of them is in the, or two of them, we have the Frays Mill, Link Station, ARCA, intersection improvements up there, and then in the rural area as well as a park and ride out by Crozet off 64.

So the PDC is submitting that for us.

And then we just had got our secondary six-year plan, rural paving process, all that approved, some new rural roads.

It's always a hot topic in our moral county.

And we're still waiting to hear back for some potential funding through some TA grants and revenue sharing grants, but I know that's kind of,

on hold and unsure when we're going to hear about those.

And then we do have a lot of

Kind of planning efforts with Crozet Master Plan is in the process, so the transportation is a hot topic there.

Just like Jessica was covering just for the small towns, the inventory, so we're able to use our data, our One Map data on existing infrastructure, work with Parks and Rec on their trail.

Existing trails and some potential future connections that would be transportation and or recreation use.

So it's cool to see that process, see it come together like that.

Finishing up a Fifth Street corridor study.

I mean, again, that's not rural area, but you know, that's going to be finishing up soon.

And I'm just

That's basically to sum up everything that's kind of going on.

We have a lot of local development projects, but again, that's in our development areas.

And then I'm always dealing with some speed concerns, traffic calming.

That's what everybody wants to initiate in their subdivisions.

And so that is a hot topic.

and always dealing with working with Albemarle County Police Department.

Just being able to kind of take our appropriate steps in that process of evaluating speed concerns and seeing if steps towards traffic calming and official traffic calming process through VDOT, you know, so we get on average one, two, three times, three separate road complaints a week trying to initiate that process or at least share their concerns with us.

Thanks, Dan.

Sure.

Impacts the study that Sandy was talking about.

We've had a lot of activity, some already approved, some coming forward on the 29 South portion or the Southern portion of 29 in Greene County.

We had a senior residential apartment complex that was approved.

It's an independent living apartment complex, 120 units.

We have 165 townhomes that were approved.

And we have two applications, one for the area near the sheets that many people refer to as the moonscape.

It's a big empty area.

We have a PUD that's going to be starting through the pre-application process for a mixed-use town center there.

And then we have a commercial slash residential.

It's a pretty hilly piece of property right on the Greene County Albemarle

Line near the old Windmill store and they're asking for a rezoning because the back of the parcel has a ravine and has some significant challenges and they want to split that off and build a few single family homes and connect that into a commercial development to have a side-by-side mixed use development there rather than having it what's currently all zone commercial.

Nothing big going on at Jaunt.

We've just been trying to weather the storm as best we can.

I mean, the biggest update we have is that one of our technology vendors announced on Friday that they just got purchased by Uber.

So we are trying to figure out what that is gonna mean for our future.

But yeah, otherwise we're starting to see an increase in calls.

Most of our staff are still working from home, but soon we're gonna need to have more reservationists at least in the office to field the growing number of calls.

So that just leaves our VDOT folks at David.

Yeah, I've got the Zion's Crossroads study that we're continuing to work on.

Should have some updated, the existing conditions report and that kind of stuff available.

And we're probably going to move forward with a stakeholders group meeting next couple of weeks.

So we'll need to schedule that.

SMART SCALE seems to be the hottest topic right now, wrapping up all of the studies and the sketches and the cost estimates on all the projects.

So more to come on that, hopefully in the next week or so.

And kind of echoing Chuck a little bit, so SMART SCALE, we're pretty tied up in that, just getting out information to applicants with regards to what they need and cost estimate schedules, all that good stuff.

I did think it was interesting that a couple of you guys brought up solar farms.

And so with solar farms, we have one applicant that has an 800-acre conceptual site plan for a new solar farm that's going to be going in with direct access to one of their projects.

It kind of prompted a discussion in central office and you know if there should be included in economic development scores and you know how they would go about scoring those under the economic development guidelines.

So they're going to be discussing that this week and you know it's kind of interesting with all the new solar farms popping up that you know we should take a closer look at that and SMART SCALE as well.

David, can you keep us on the loop on what happens out of that meeting?

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

You know, myself and a couple of other planners think they should be included because they do induce employment and, you know, they have economic development benefits as well.

I think we covered everything in our project updates.

One thing I will mention, I was thinking about it as Douglas was talking about this.

One thing I do want to make sure that we're doing is incorporating

A lot of the transportation specifically along the trails with some of our other planning efforts.

Probably again, it might not be till later this fall, we're going to be doing a rural Ravana corridor project to sort of look at uses along the parts of the Ravana River south of

the urbanized area that we're looking at right now as part of a planning project through Fluvanna County.

So I think there are some opportunities to start making some of those integrations at that point.

I'm trying to think if there's anything else that would be particularly relevant to you all.

All right.

Well, thank you everybody.

All right.

And any other items before we close out?

I appreciate everybody's time.

Like I said, Dylan, Sandy, David and I are going to stay on to chat about Nelson's SMART SCALE.

But everybody else, I hope the rest of your week goes well.

Thanks.

Bye.

Thanks, everyone.

Have a good month.

Bye-bye.