Rural Transportation Advisory Committee Meeting   11/18/2025

All right.

Chaganidins.

Yeah.

Where am I?

Todd said he may or may not be joining us, but Alex is there.

So I think we could probably

All right.

Well, our first matter of business is the election of officers.

And I know we talked a little bit about last meeting.

As I said last time, I'm happy to stay on as chair unless somebody else would like to take the role.

That means that I nominate myself for the chair.

All those in favor say aye.

All those opposed?

Excellent.

Well, thank you.

Congratulations, everybody.

I'm happy to serve for the seventh year, I guess.

Great.

We'll continue keeping the good thing happening.

I am now looking for a vice chair.

I have a motion that Dylan Bishop is the vice chairman of TJPDC RTAC.

Do I get a second?

Second.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

All those opposed?

Thank you guys.

Thanks, Jim, for making that happen.

All right, so the approval of the minutes will start with June.

Does anybody have any comments for the minutes in June?

Because they might need a moment to read them.

I motion to approve the June minutes with a slight change to my comment in the SMART SCALE.

Louisa County is in support of the change if it benefits the region.

I believe that's what I said.

Would that change?

I'm looking for a second.

Second.

All those in favor of approving the June 17, 2025 minutes?

Say aye.

Aye.

All those opposed?

It passes.

August 19th meeting.

Any comments?

Does anybody have time to read them?

All right.

I motion to approve the August 19, 2025 minutes.

Can I get a second?

Second.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

All those opposed?

Excellent work.

We're flying through.

Oh, yeah, we're only motion officers at one of us.

Are there any housekeeping items?

I don't see any public online.

Our guests are our speakers here today.

When is our next meeting?

That is correct.

So the next meeting will be, and we are switching the time of the month we're meeting starting in February, and that will extend into May.

So we will be meeting on Tuesday, February 3.

And as we had discussed, I believe in June and in August,

We were going to make that meeting virtual in case there was potential weather since that's our main winter meeting and we are allowed due to their remote meeting policies to have

and all virtual meetings.

Feeling there weren't going to be objections to that either, but.

And at the February meeting, just a heads up, we will have the rural work plan and some additional steps on the rural needs assessment that we're going to talk about later today.

I imagine we will be.

I imagine this is the last meeting that we probably won't be talking extensively about SMART SCALE for quite some time.

Excellent.

All right.

Well, I'm looking forward to our guest presentation from DRPT.

Looks like it's up there.

Share the screen.

So while that's getting set up, it's afternoon, right?

Yeah.

I never know what time of day it is.

So good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Grant Sparks.

I'm the director of statewide transit programs for the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation.

I appreciate the chair's comment about trains.

We too love trains.

This conversation today is not going to be about trains.

It's going to be about buses, specifically buses and transit in our rural areas in Virginia.

So something, and also I want to say thanks to TJPDC for inviting us to present today.

And also I don't want to forget that Katie Miller has joined us.

She is the

Program Manager for both Jaunt and Charlottesville Area Transit from DRPT.

So this presentation today is really going to be about not a really good news story here.

This is regarding a funding stream that is really critical to rural transit in Virginia.

I mean, it's our federal funding stream, which had for years we had enjoyed a

A significant balance on our, it's our rural 53 section 5311 fighting program.

And we've enjoyed a good balance with that program for a number of years.

Unfortunately, though, that money is not going as far as it used to for a number of reasons, which I'm going to describe.

But we have some tough decisions that we have to make in the next year.

So I'll give you guys, I'll start off by just giving you a quick overview of kind of the landscape of rural transit as it is today and kind of present the issue at hand as it relates to funding.

I'll go over just like a high level strategy scope and some objectives.

So we created, I think it was in March or April of this calendar year, we identified the problem and hired some consultants to help us think through

How to address this funding issue.

So I'll kind of give you guys an idea of what that project looks like.

Go over a peer state review.

We did talk to a number of other states and how they administered their Section 5311 program.

Go over some of the proposed strategies, funding strategies that we came up with, and then go over the next steps.

I also do acknowledge that not everyone in the room thinks about transit every day.

Jason might be the exception here.

The slides that we've created, we've done a number of these meetings across the Commonwealth and we put more information in the slides so you guys can kind of take it back and really think through the content.

I'm going to give you more of a high level overview.

I'm not going to just like read the slides or anything.

So I'm going to blow through these fairly quick, but please, we can just keep this informal.

If you have questions, comments, just stop me and we can chat it out.

So first, just an overview of our program as it is today.

So I mentioned that the Section 5311 program is from the Federal Transit Administration and it flows through the Department of Rail and Public Transportation, so my agency.

We currently have 21 agencies in Virginia that get this funding.

And it's used to support operations and capital purchases.

And as you all probably know, rural transit in Virginia comes in many different forms.

It could be fixed route bus service.

It could be deviated fixed route bus service, which is a little bit more flexible.

It could be your traditional demand response service, so like dial-a-ride or van services.

as well as Inner City Bus Service, which is currently the Virginia Breeze here in Virginia.

So I mentioned that we're facing some new pressures with this funding to kind of give you guys a history of what happened here.

Again, we enjoyed a very good balance for a number of years in our 5311 program.

And really in 2020, 2021,

Some things started to change and we realize this now looking back but our funding situation was really crowded and distorted by the special one-time revenues that we got as part of the COVID-19 pandemic.

DRBT received through special 5311 funding a bunch of CARES, ARPA,

some CRRSAA funding as well.

We pushed it out to all of our rural transit providers, those 21 providers that I mentioned.

And that was great.

That was special one-time revenues on top of what we receive every year from the Federal Transit Administration.

So that was one thing that happened and all those funds have now dried up.

We also, in 2020, we saw a census change.

So two of our

previously urban transit providers flipped to rural providers.

And this almost never happens, but the way that the census methodology changed in 2020, it flipped the city of Suffolk and their transit service to rural, as well as the city of Radford and their transit service to rural.

And so we had to absorb those two transit agencies into our rural program, putting more stress on the 5311 funding

and I mentioned here we ended up the formula for 5311 includes it's mostly population based and so we did get because we picked up the areas in Suffolk and Radford and their population we got a little bit more federal money from FTA the following year but it really wasn't enough to fully absorb those two transit agencies.

Additionally, costs have gone up in the transitive industry significantly.

It was really starting with the pandemic.

The vehicle costs in particular just skyrocketed.

Depending on the vehicle type, we've seen anywhere between the low end, like 20% increases to like 60 to 70% increases on very expensive vehicles.

So on the capital side, that was a huge issue.

and then also operating costs went up as well in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, mostly due to labor increases.

And then also this is kind of a good thing, but it has stressed our rural program is that there has been really a renaissance.

It started like probably 10 years ago, but a lot of historically, I'd even say resistant

communities in our rural areas to transit and have really started to see the benefits of public transit in their rural areas.

And so we've been helping them over the years get some service up and running.

And we've been so successful that like when you're dealing with a finite amount of funds, the money just doesn't go as far for supporting 21 agencies as opposed to 16, 17 agencies.

So all of these forces combined have led to a fiscal issue

which is the 50, we call it the 5311 funding shortfall.

So to give you an idea of today in terms of dollars, how much money we provide, so this table at the bottom, if you could focus on this, we in FY24, we'll start in that column, we had a total of $54.1 million in federal funding

to allocate to our rural transit agencies.

That's that first row.

The second row down is the total amount that we obligated, so we put on actual projects to our rural transit agencies that then left us $18 million to carry over into the next year.

So moving left to right here, you look at FY 25, same rows there, we had $43 million

to play with.

We put out $33 million in projects, leaving us a $9 million carryover.

You can kind of see the trend on that bottom row, but the carryover is going down significantly.

And that's where we noticed, hold on, we're going to run out of that carryover money.

And we're basically going to be on a year-to-year basis with our 5311 funding very soon.

And so we're projecting, I'll get to this in a little bit, we're projecting that that very soon is going to really be FY28.

Hey, Grant.

On the bottom says that the federal capital match rate was changed to 28%.

It was 80%.

So I'm going to go over that in just a second, but we had to basically for a capital rural project, so a bus, right?

If John applied for a bus, we would in a normal year, we would put 80% 5311 funding.

That's federal funding.

We would add 16% state on top of that.

So DRPT would provide 96% total to jump for that bus.

We could no longer afford those match rates beginning FY26.

So we actually changed it from a heavy federal with a little bit of state sprinkled on top to a heavy state with a little federal sprinkled on top.

So I'm just stretching the monies a little bit further.

Good question though.

So this is still like kind of the same data from the previous slide, but it shows it just in a different

format, I guess, with bar charts.

You can just see those lighter blue.

That's the carryover revenue.

And so you can see that year over year, that carryover revenue is going down because we're eating into it every year.

The dark blue is the new federal funding that we get every year.

And so that is pretty steady.

And we're still projecting that the new federal funding is going to be steady moving into the future.

It's just that carryover money

is going down and shrinking.

And the green kind of line in there is what we are projecting to be the need.

So you can see starting in FY28 really is when we see a significant deficit where there are more needs than we have revenues available.

And that was, this is operating and capital needs combined in our rural agencies.

This is just operating.

So this actually really blew us away when we did this analysis was that if we put every federal dollar that we had in 5311 funding just to operating, so no capital at all, we still wouldn't even be meeting the operating needs of our rural transit agencies.

So, as I mentioned, in FY 27, we are projecting that we're still going to be able to keep our rural transit agencies whole.

We're going to have to do some of that match rate changing that I just mentioned based on Sandy's comment.

But really in 28 and beyond, that's when we're going to have to make those tough decisions and we're not going to be able to sustain this anymore.

So we're really planning for all possibilities.

There's also federal authorization at the federal level.

These programs could look different.

Our state funding programs could potentially look different with the new administration.

But we wanted to kind of set up some groundwork moving into the next couple of years to plan for all possibilities.

So in terms of this study that we did, I'm going to hit this very quickly.

Just we have identified four objectives.

Again, we started this earlier in the calendar year.

We wanted to set some goals and priorities for our rural transit program, just some high level goals.

We wanted to understand what the drivers of the cost increases were in our rural transit program and potentially identify some cost control methods to adopt.

The big one on objective three was to define how we would prioritize the allocation of limited 5311 funding to rural areas based on the goals and priorities identified.

and then also identify some potential long-term funding strategies for how we can remedy any future shortcomings.

So as part of this study or planning effort, we created a rural strategy advisory group.

We did not want to do this in a vacuum.

We always appreciate the feedback and partnership from our rural transit agencies.

So we asked a number of them to be part of our advisory group.

Mike Murphy from John was a part of that effort.

And we met, I want to say five or six times to kind of go over some of the findings from the study.

But I just want to mention that this was not just a DRPT effort.

It was really a partnership between us and some of our stakeholders.

And then this is just the project timeline.

Again, we hired

Arkane Kay was our lead consultant as part of this effort and it's really taken us most of the calendar year to get to where we are now and you can see there down at the bottom that the final report is due to us this month so we will be publishing that and our recommendations moving forward.

All right, so I mentioned earlier a peer state review.

This was a very interesting component of the study

was talking to other states and how they administered their 5311 program.

What we found was that pretty much everybody did things differently.

The key findings here were that some states had a formula approach.

It wasn't really discretionary based.

It was a set established formula for distributing 5311 funding.

Some states only use 5311 funding for capital.

Some only use it for operating.

In Virginia, we do it for both.

Some states are able to tap into some funding, such as the 5339 funding, which we do receive, but we reserve that right now for our small urban transit agencies, such as CAT.

5310 funding as well is used to support rural transit.

I mentioned here flexible federal funding.

This is money that flows through the DOT.

In most states, the transit funding that comes from FTA goes to the DOT because there is no DRPT equipment in both states.

And so there's some benefits in doing that, but also some disadvantages.

But we did indicate that.

The big takeaway from our peer state review though is at the very bottom.

and that was that our local match rates, so the obligation from the actual rural providers is much lower than everywhere else.

And we're pretty confident that it's in the entire country, that our local match rates are as low as they get.

So what that means for a capital project, again, I mentioned it earlier, but we have provided 96% combination of federal and state funding

to our rural transit agencies, leaving a 4% local match for capital projects.

On the operating side, it's a little bit more confusing.

When you combine the federal and the state money, it comes to roughly a 20 to 30% local match.

So definitely higher on that side of the spectrum.

But still, even with that, it's the most competitive rates that we have seen across the country.

Okay, so now I'm going to just go dive right into some of these proposed strategies.

Start with some funding strategies.

I'm just going to just get right into it.

We identified three high level funding strategies to use or to help with this issue.

The first one is that we could potentially seek a CTB policy change to allow for an increased

met state match on capital projects for our rural transit agencies.

So current CTV policy only allows us to go up to 68% state.

And so I mentioned in FY26, we went 68% state, 28% federal, 4% local.

We always want to try to preserve that 4% local.

But we're really the 68% is the max that we can go on the state side with our funding because the CT currency to be policy.

So we're trying to potentially see if there's an appetite for raising that 68% to possibly 90% is maybe within reason.

Because if there's no federal funding at all per capital,

then that would at least leave our rural transit agencies with a 10% local edge.

The second funding strategy here, this is kind of a wonky one.

Federal regs require that of the annual 5311 apportionment to each state, the states use at least 15% for inner city bus service.

And so we have used that 15% starting in 2017

to support the Virginia Breeze.

I don't know if you guys know about the Virginia Breeze, it's the state's inner city bus service.

But there's also some guidance on the regs that allow us to seek a waiver on using that 15% for inner city bus if the governor writes a letter to FTA indicating that all the needs have been met for inner city bus service across the economy.

So we would have to basically fund the Virginia Breeze with a separate funding source

and then that would free up potentially 15% of our revenues to use for our real transit agencies.

So that is a possibility.

And then the third one here is to tap into those other funding sources coming from the federal government.

5339 is definitely in play, flexible STP, which VDOT controls as well as other Federal Highway Administration funds.

All right, so now getting into some program management strategies, and we really focused, I'm gonna just kind of breeze ahead here.

We really focused most of our attention in this effort on these strategies, and we boiled them down to three kind of primary issues that we had to figure out where we wanted to go.

So strategy one was focused on just how do we prioritize limited 5311 funding.

Option one is do we want to prioritize all of it to operating and fund all of our operating needs before we move any over to capital?

That's essentially what we're doing today.

Or do we want to intentionally reserve some of it for capital, which means that we're not going to be able to fund all the operating needs.

And so we took this to that advisory group.

We took this to our rural transit agencies.

and the consensus, I think everyone agreed really, that we need to prioritize operating before we can even think about capital.

The rationale being, I think all of our rural transit agencies were kind of reading between the lines here, was that if the local match obligation is going to be going up, it's way easier to ask local funders for capital as opposed to operating.

and so they wanted us to push it all to operating, all these federal funds to operating because they think there might be an easier conversation to ask for more local funding for capital projects.

Strategy two, this focuses specifically on operating.

And so option one, this is like how we allocate 5311 operating to our rural transit agencies.

So option one is again what we've been doing

to date is every transit agency in our rural areas submits a budget, a proposed budget to us annually.

It's part of their application to us.

And we look at the budgets, make sure that they're not going up 30, 40%, no crazy increases.

But if everything checks out, we basically take a million dollar budget, for example, let's say Jaunt submitted a $1 million budget

We would give them, it's just easy math, divide by two and we would give them a $500,000 5311 operating grade.

So that's our budget-based approach.

But in an environment where the funding's not going as far and we probably can't meet everybody at 50% anymore, we identified this as being a not very predictable option moving forward because hypothetically in FY28,

Everybody could submit their operating budgets to us and we put them all together and we realized we can't meet everybody at 50%.

We can only meet everybody at 45%, hypothetically.

Our transit agencies won't know that until the draft SIP is published, which is in April of every year.

So they go through their budgeting process in the winter and the late winter, early spring, only to be told

the release of the SIF in April, oh you're getting less this time, go redo your budget.

So that's, we can still do that, less predictable though.

Option two is that we move from a budget-based approach to a formula-based approach.

So we know generally speaking how much 5311 funding we're getting every year.

It's like a 2% growth mostly year over year.

If we come up with a predetermined formula

and we're using all the 5311 funds that come into Virginia for operating.

We could actually project out in four or five years into the future what John's gonna get, what Blackstone's gonna get, what radar's gonna get, all of our rural transit providers.

So this took a while for everybody I think to really fully understand because we have a formula for our state operating funds and it is messy because everybody

either performs well or doesn't perform well in the formula.

There's always this fight over the factors that go into the formula.

If we go to this approach, and I'll just go ahead and say that everybody wanted option two was to do the formula.

What we don't want to have happen is find ourselves in a situation where the formula is convoluted.

Everybody's fighting every year about the factors that go into the formula.

If we're going to move to this approach, we definitely want everybody to be on board with what measures and how the formula is created.

So this was probably the biggest takeaway from our efforts.

But on the capital side, this is also a big one, knowing that we're kind of moving towards a full operating program for our 5,311 funds, what do we do for capital?

And so the options that we presented to our agencies was what is preferred?

A 10% local match for capital or a 20% local match for capital?

I mean, obviously everybody wants a lower local match.

The downside to doing a 10%, though, is that we just won't be able to fund as many projects.

So if we are funding 90% of every capital project, there's just not as much money to go around.

as opposed to we funded 80% of every capital project.

But everybody did say that trying to generate 20% local match for a capital project is going to be incredibly challenging.

I mean, going from 4% to 10% is one thing.

Going from 4% to 20% is just probably too much to swallow.

And I mentioned earlier, we also did look at cost mitigation strategies.

None of these were really move the needle that much.

We could put a year over year growth cap, like if we did a formula for operating and we could put a growth cap that nobody can get more than say 5% of what they received the previous year, cap it in any spillover money and we just redistribute it through the formula.

That is an option for growth capping.

We also identified our demonstration, our merit demonstration funding program as a good option for like expanded services in our rural areas to hit that program as opposed to our 5311 program kind of eases them into federal funding.

So that's another way to kind of mitigate costs a little bit.

And then also we could make certain operating costs ineligible for 5311

could be administrative expenses, really anything.

That one did not gain a whole lot of traction, but it's something that we can potentially look at in the future.

And then to just close it out here, we are looking very carefully at extending the useful life on certain vehicle types.

This would help our capital program

I won't go into all the details here, but some of the smaller buses in Virginia have a four-year useful life.

I feel like we've been pretty generous.

The industry standard is five.

So we will replace these buses as early as at the four-year mark.

But we're moving that likely to five years to just extend the life cycle of those vehicles a little bit longer.

And then the number two here is we really need to make more progress on cooperative procurements.

The 21 transit agencies in our rural areas today, a lot of times they're buying the same things and they're buying them individually.

And so we're trying to leverage the purchasing power of the collective.

And if the state can take on the procurement burden to say, do cameras or real time vehicle tracking,

or microtransit technology, whatever it is, that could reduce costs for everyone, which is obviously a win-win.

So in terms of next steps, I mentioned we got a final report that's due to us here this month.

We're also gonna be providing all of our rural transit agencies with a one-page briefing document so that they can take that document to local funders.

And the plan as of today, we need to brief up the new administration that comes in on this effort.

But the plan as of today is to pursue a formula-based allocation of 5311 operating starting in calendar year 2026.

So we would get started on what the formula looks like in the coming months.

We're also going to be pursuing a CTP policy change to increase the state match on rural capital projects

From 68%, we're probably going to shoot for 90%.

But again, we got to brief the administration and see where they want to land with that.

We're definitely going to be modifying the useful life of those certain vehicle types from four years to five years.

And I didn't mention this earlier, but one thing we've also done in the last four to five years was to be very aggressive with submitting FTA discretionary applications.

to basically offset what would otherwise be 5311 funded capital projects.

These discretionary programs are pretty well funded.

They are very competitive, but if we're not gonna get the money, then it's gonna go to some other state.

So we've been submitting an application every year for the last four or five years, and we have been successful.

We have one pending right now for I think seven or $8 million, so we're hopeful of that.

So that, I'm sorry, that was a lot of technical stuff.

I have a brief question for those of us that don't feel in transit every day, and it could be Jason that can answer it just as eagerly.

So you have federal funding source, you have state funding source,

Local funding source right now is mostly comprised of the government contributions.

And the majority of services no longer have a fee base for the rider, correct?

We're currently fair and free and we hope to remain so.

Okay.

And then for those of us that can't remember, there is an issue with fees.

You can collect fees, which brings in revenue, but some studies have shown

Yeah.

And those fair revenues cannot be treated as local match either.

They have to come off the top before you submit any reimbursements.

Well, I mean, I've got good news for everybody.

So as you increase the state funding, what are the sources for the state funding matches that you're providing?

State money that we receive all comes through the Commonwealth Mass Transit Fund, the CMTF, which is

I can't remember the percentage of the Transportation Trust Fund.

So what are the trends in the state funding?

Yeah, I mean, so the way we do state operating is just by formula distribution.

And we actually push that money out to our transit agencies and install it.

So they're not submitting reimbursements for that money.

We're just giving it to them in cash infusions.

So we can't really see statewide what the trends are for operating costs.

All we have are our rural transit agencies that actually submit reimbursements for 5311 operating.

But on the capital side, we do get reimbursement requests from every transit agency in the state.

And it is crazy how much the, pretty much across the board, whether it's IT equipment,

Cameras, vehicles, even construction projects are insane.

You probably know the costs were increasing there.

It's literally everything, which is scary.

But we think that the cooperative procurements might be a good solution to that.

We already do a vehicle contract.

We have multiple vehicle contracts that all of our transit agencies purchase off of.

We have very competitive rates for vehicles compared to the rest of the country.

Great.

I just want to voice our appreciation for the partnership and dealing with this fiscal cliff.

I know Murphy's been involved with talks with you and I've seen this a couple of times and every time it's another little takeaway.

So I appreciate it.

And we've been, just so people know here, given John's history and that most of our buses are purchased with 5311, but we're also doing urban service.

We got dinged for a few years there for the commingling, and we actually had to, like, our local match was 25, 30?

It really hurt.

And so as a result of that, there was a few years where we didn't buy buses.

Interesting lesson from that, because now we're dealing with a little older fleet, our maintenance costs are going up.

We're having to do more engines and transmissions than just like routine maintenance.

And that's, that's the hidden costs of actually extending the life of the fleet.

It's there.

It's just reality.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

There's all these strategies.

I mean, you know, it's, it's being creative and thinking about how to stretch the dollar and move things around like the breeze.

I mean, it's all really well intentioned.

With the cliff going on, I know you touched on it a little bit with Spanbaker now being the governor, but is it something that DRPT plans to go to the GAA to present this, being like, we have three years before it's crunch time, essentially, and we're going to figure something out, but it's not going to be pretty.

The way that we engage with the GA is like we have to be careful because we can't lobby the GA. We are at the will of the administration and their priorities.

And the fact that we haven't even had a conversation yet with the Spanberger camp about this issue, we don't know where they stand yet.

And so if we get to January and we have a conversation with them,

and they're like, yeah, we need to take you on the road and like tell the DA or whoever else what's going on with this to come up with some solutions.

But yeah, all of our partners though can start having those conversations.

And so the Virginia Transportation Association, Community Transportation Association of Virginia,

Okay.

Related to that, what are the revenue sources?

I mean, is there a revenue source or is this just a general fund dollars that would go into these?

On the federal side.

You mentioned a transportation fund.

What is that?

The transportation trust fund.

So that's mostly gas taxes.

And that VDOT, we share that with VDOT.

So that's a big trust fund.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Seriously.

And with costs going up, it's definitely not going as far as it used to.

But yeah, I mean, that's the state funding source.

And again, we get our code.

the Commonwealth Mass Transit Fund or CMTF just gets a portion of that Transportation Trust Fund.

So as the TTF grows, we grow with it.

If it doesn't grow or it shrinks, then we shrink or don't grow with it as well.

But there's no other funding.

There is nothing else.

That is every dollar that we get.

It pays for my salary too.

We take admin off the top of the CMTF.

Just another big cost in terms of labor or operating is like healthcare going through the roof.

Like we had to, we had 100 employees and last year, I mean, it was like went up 75%.

We had to renegotiate and change to get it out to like an increase of 25%.

If you were to exercise the option of

you know, writing the letter from the governor in reference to the inner city bus services.

So we have some ideas.

We've been talking about that internally.

We have our transit ridership incentive program, which is one of the like from the Commonwealth Mass Transit Fund that then gets broken out into like operating capital transit ridership incentive program.

There's like WAMATA gets a bucket.

Virginia Railway Express gets a bucket.

There's all sorts of buckets down there.

But

The Transit Ridership Incentive Program might be an option for that.

Beyond that, I'm not sure.

I think the biggest risk with doing that option is that we're kind of at the will of the governor.

And because in Virginia you get a different governor every four years, like the Spanberger administration might be great writing a letter for us annually to FTA, but future administrations might not want to do that for whatever reason.

and then we're right back to where we were.

So there are cost issues everywhere.

Oh yeah.

WMATA, there is a huge study going on right now.

They're actually wrapping up and they're,

I'm going to be looking at some legislation in the upcoming session to help permanent funding.

Permanent funding, intention for WMATA, my understanding is that the idea would be to get more money to the Commonwealth Mass Transit Fund so that everyone would potentially benefit from this.

What that legislation looks like and the probability that it moves forward, I have no idea.

But the irony about this issue is that

It looks like for capital projects in rural areas, we're going to be going almost entirely state and local funding, but no federal funding.

When we increase the state funding on a rural capital project, that reduces the amount of state funding for our urban capital projects.

So it's just going to put way more pressure on our capital program as a whole, as our match rates go up on the rural side.

Yeah, so great question.

So what we're thinking right now in terms of a formula is that it would probably be a combination of

Hours, revenue hours, revenue miles, could include ridership, could include cost.

These are factors that we already collect this data from all of our transit agencies.

So to do a formula would be super simple.

We already have the data.

So where is this one?

So number two here, demonstration grant funding.

I didn't spend a whole lot of time on this, but Merit Demo is a pure state funded program with a very, it's an 80% state funded program with 20% local match on operating expenses.

So this is a very good match rate program.

And if any new service, rural or urban, comes up, we want to fund it through the demo program, look at the data, make service tweaks.

We could keep it in demo.

We have some that are going on four years in the demo program.

One of them needs to come into the 5311 program.

We're waiting to wrap this study up.

So we've had them in there for a while.

But this is kind of the sandbox program

that we have a decent amount of funding in it.

And we can kind of leave those expanded and new services in there until we're ready to move them over to 50 families.

That's where we've been working with them on.

Yeah.

So is consolidation of different, because I know we're doing core stuff here, is consolidation of different rural and granular agencies an option to, I guess, offset some of the funding that's not going to be available?

If you have, you know,

You can have one director too, you know, that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

I mean, that hasn't really come up as a serious consideration.

I think we've always taken the approach of like those types of decisions are local decisions.

We don't want to get involved in consolidation whatsoever.

But also something to remember is that like these rural agencies are

Pretty far apart.

I mean, I guess John does connect with some of our other rural providers, but they're based out of areas way far away.

So to consolidate and actually make an impact on our funding, it's going to be pretty hard.

What percentage of Virginians are you serving?

That is a great question.

And you may not have that figure.

We do have that figure.

I can actually get it while you guys conclude the rest of your meeting.

We have a platform where we can pull up all of our rural

And I mean, and that's a picture paints a thousand words, right?

So, I mean, it's just being curious to see, and it's not a lot of money.

I mean, it is a lot of money, but compared to other programs that are in throughout the state,

how far that money is going.

And then, you know, how much more you're asking.

You're thinking like a per capita.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I guess what we would, what I would need to figure out is like, what's the catchment?

Like how far out are we doing?

Like a buffer of like three quarters of a mile, half a mile, three miles.

if you have it, if not, check it.

Well, it was an excellent presentation simply by the fact that we had a lot of questions afterwards.

But thank you for your time and coming all the way out here.

We enjoyed it and wish you the best of luck.

Great.

Thank you.

Absolutely.

And again, this is mostly just a placeholder of always having to place on these agendas for VDOT to provide us any updates that they have.

I know Carson met with all of the folks in their region to discuss SMART SCALE, but unfortunately he wasn't able to make the meeting today, so I'm sure that will come up in more detail.

Yeah, I mean, we don't have extensive updates, but we do.

I think the biggest thing is that the TJPDC

You'll get an update later.

The new SMART SCALE technical guide should be up at some point in December.

I believe that would be sent out a survey request that you all get a survey about SMART SCALE, those of you who work in the portal.

So if, I don't know what the deadline was for that, but if you haven't done it already, go ahead and take the surveys to give them some feedback.

For the projects in the Culpeper District that are recent missions, we've started to coordinate with our design engineering department to try to go ahead and start getting some of those documents in place.

But the big consideration that we're all talking about is of course funding.

So we're looking at probably in the district grant program, probably somewhere around the same amount as in the previous cycle, which is about

$68 billion, I believe, if I'm imagining of an art player, $66 million.

So we're really trying to focus on identifying projects where there are high statewide identified needs, which corresponds to a high likelihood of getting scores and focusing on how we can prepare the most competitive applications possible to set everybody up to have their opportunity to be successful.

The only thing is OIP has updated the V-Trans needs and they posted the 2023 needs, I think, to the website.

So those are, those are active.

If you want to go in and look at those, I don't think it's taken into consideration the change in the area type for the TJPDC.

So that's something that they'll have to go through and revise for our region which hasn't been done yet.

They typically don't.

This is the first time from the last prioritization in 2023 was the last time they've done it since they first came out with it.

So it was 2019 and then 2023.

Anybody have any questions for VDOT?

Thank you, Sandy and Chuck.

Appreciate it.

Well, I think the one they're referring to is item number seven, which we can just, you know, scooch the water and roll into it.

And that is that the CTB on the December agenda does have

our SMART SCALE area type change listed.

We were just so relieved to have it on an agenda that we could see and to know that it was coming.

Thank you again to all of the localities.

I know that we had a lot of touch points both with staff and administration and even board of supervisors to make sure that everyone was on board with pursuing that change.

So thank you all again for that.

And thank you VDOT for presenting it to us as a very viable option that many of you guys could benefit from.

All right, and then backing up to number six is also me.

So we in the FY26 Rural Work Program set out to do with a discussion that came out of our February meeting last year of looking at a rural transportation needs assessment.

We have a lot of newer staff here at TJPDC.

and going through and really understanding what the needs of our rural jurisdictions are when it comes to transportation and planning was something that we really found was very important and valuable.

We kind of uncovered a lot of different things in that discussion in February and so made that one of our main focus items for this fiscal year.

So we have been working diligently through that process.

Logan, who is virtual and online here,

Did the plan identifying or identified all of the plans and then reviewed them for the memo that was sent out as part of this packet.

And then that memo was also sent with an email to you guys this morning with a survey.

So we just really wanted to update you on the process, have it as an item here in case you wanted to have any discussion about the memo since you've had a little bit of time to look at it.

and then remind you that that survey is there and that we really look forward to getting feedback from you, the planners in these areas as to things that are priorities to you, things that are challenges.

This is a great way for us to take the funds for our rural transportation program here, look at what we can do as support in our upcoming work programs for the next several years.

So that's really kind of where we see this

Moving forward that can be beneficial for everyone.

In addition, once we have the survey completed, because a survey can only capture so much, we do want to have sit down one on one discussions just to make sure that we are truly understanding the needs and that we can get some more clarity and make sure that we have a good point for moving forward.

And then as I mentioned before, we'll have a work program for you guys to review at the February meeting.

So

I'm happy to pull up the plan review memo if we want to have any discussion about it, if you have any questions for Logan.

I will say real quick before I do that, Jason brought up an excellent point.

We inadvertently and accidentally left off the jaunt role needs plan that they did just this past year.

I joked with him, no worries, we forgot a couple of our own plans on the first roundabout too.

That's what happens when you have new staff.

We had to think about, wait a second, didn't we do something that might apply?

So we will be looking at that in depth as well for each locality and pulling out anything that looks like it needs to be added there.

So that one is noted.

But one of the big things in reviewing it, and this is a question in the survey, spoiler alert, is making sure that we did capture

So the deadline for everybody is December 5th, right?

That is an excellent, excellent question.

So I think what we would prefer is one cohesive response.

However,

We would love it if you want to discuss this internally and just submit one response.

Does that make sense?

So it can be many voices.

We want you to have a discussion.

We want you to really think through it, which is why we gave you a little bit of time.

And I know Thanksgiving is thrown in there, but one answer per jurisdiction, if possible, will just kind of keep things a little bit cleaner and more simpler as we go into analyze those.

Well, I don't know if this is a question or more of a general comment, but I've had a chance to advance that line.

And yes, we have the, for Fluvanna and Louisa, for example, we have the Zionists Crossword Gateway, which is one of those.

That was the one we forgot.

That is a very recent plan for a search section of the county.

And then we have some older plans, like you mentioned earlier, there's been a lot of changes to have at TJPDC.

for localities have changed that too.

There could be plans if you're pulling from 2007 where maybe one individual is still up in the department and there's anything about it.

So there's a focus when you're reviewing these mainly on the current plan, the most current plans, or you're trying to get that information from us.

Yes.

We try to go back.

10 years kind of as the cutoff unless there was something you know possibly 15 that was really relevant but we tried to keep it within about a 10-year range just because

We did want it to be whatever the local priorities and focus and the most recent of those were.

And that made an interesting mix because many of you are in various states of comp plan updates.

So that kind of initially Albemarle who just finished theirs, but when we started it,

We didn't have that draft yet so we went with the old one and then by the time we got towards the end it was like oh wait just kidding now this one's ready we can go in and look at that so you know if there is something that is older than just that 10-year mark but you think is particularly relevant and we missed it we are happy to take a look at that especially if there are things in there that are still viable priorities for the locality.

Gotcha.

Yeah, we kind of had to put a little bit of a stopping point, otherwise it was going to be a never ending process.

And I applaud Logan for sifting through all of those.

He came back to us with lots of questions as he was working through it.

And we all learned a lot just going through this stage alone of the process.

And then thank you to Sarah Simba, who was also part of that team.

She helped us put together the survey that you guys got.

Yes, yes, it was a lot.

So we did talk about that a little bit.

We did look at some of them.

If that is something

that someone feels strongly about, we are certainly happy to add something like that, absolutely.

Yeah, it's not just restricted.

and Fluvanna is in the process of part of theirs.

So yeah, so it was a really interesting timeline.

Well, thank you very much.

Yeah.

Wonderful, yes.

And so that is the other thing is now that we've got the survey kicked off,

We will, or I will be reaching out to schedule those one-on-one discussions.

And I say one-on-one, it can be with full staff, but you know, we wanted to have, you know, be able to, like I said, really dig into those survey results and the memo and make sure that we have a clear understanding of what's there and what has potentially changed.

Because again, many of those plans, like you said, are a little bit older and we all know that priorities, funding, and everything else can change like that.

I was thinking for some reason we're always looking for topics, right?

Perhaps later next year we can get a

best practices from all the research that we've collected or common issues that we're receiving and maybe have a 30-minute conversation about what we've learned out of the survey.

Not all of us are diving into each other's ordinances.

Not all of us were doing a planning to develop better thinking.

Was it a three-lane ride away?

And like I said, this has been very illuminating and a really great learning process for all of us here on staff as well.

So I appreciate everyone's willingness to jump in on this project, but I feel like

We can all do better as a better board if we understand what's going on.

And then when they come out, because we're in the middle of our plant survey, we really want to talk about that later.

I love that thought too.

I'm taking survey question things.

You know how they're interview, survey, interview, interview, question things?

Maybe we should all be required to turn in our comprehensive plans.

for my research and letting y'all read through.

That is a good idea.

I like that having a bit, I mean, that makes sense.

The whole idea is that, you know, we are here to support our localities and, you know, if resources and developing resources like that is something that is going to be beneficial, you know, that's a role when we can that we want to play.

Jan, you've been real quiet.

It's quiet today.

I'm tapping.

I couldn't pass it on.

I'll be eliminated by Jason.

OK. Let's see.

I did want to also mention, so at your last meeting you all received an update on the conclusion of Move Safely Blue Ridge, our comprehensive safety action plan.

We have submitted the final reimbursement request for that, now we just have a handful of final reports to submit.

But a memo did go out on Monday to the CAOs of each of your rural jurisdictions coming from Christine Jacobs, basically just trying to gauge interest and if anybody is interested in applying for implementation funding for State Streets and Roads for All.

We anticipate that notice of funding opportunity to drop in March 2026.

And so that would come with a 20% local match requirement, but approximately a billion dollars in funds that could be available to do some of the projects that are identified and safely bridge.

So if you all are interested, let us know.

We're happy to partner with you, whether that's getting your application materials together.

The PDC is also interested.

We could do a bundled application.

We've seen a couple peer agencies that have submitted group applications for multiple jurisdictions, whether those are systemic improvements, spot improvements, or the PDC or the Council of Governments is the administrator of that.

So we could take that burden off your plate as well.

So you all are interested.

I appreciate you bringing that up.

I remember seeing that email.

Is it possible in the one-on-ones that you're planning to have probably in December or January that you bring that up, which could be powers that be that don't forget the email we sent you the week before Thanksgiving.

But I figured because y'all have those one-on-ones, that's probably a topic idea to have with them.

And then Gretchen did mention, we do have some upcoming renovations.

That's exciting.

The commission approved starting those renovations, I believe beginning of January, January 5th.

So for about six weeks, maybe a little bit more, our offices will actually be closed and under renovation.

So you guys already have a virtual meeting on the calendar.

New carpet, new panel flooring out there.

My kitchen's going to look different.

I can start.

Interesting things in Greene, transportation related.

We are in the midst of local administration of the SMART SCALE round two project.

We have Kimmy Horn working as our representative with their experience doing

State and SMART SCALE projects.

It's an interesting project because if any of us remember round two, the rules weren't quite as well, well, the lessons weren't learned then.

And we've learned that it's important to learn lessons.

So there's been a lot of fits and starts on this project.

Now that we're really going through it, we've identified that some things that probably should have happened a long time ago never did.

There's been some changes.

So the project start time, we're working through all of the initial stages that actually get to a public hearing and going to bed and we're identifying things that we need to have the scope throughout that.

And so

It'll be quite interesting because it's an important project for the 29 corridor.

It's a very important project for Greene.

It may likely need some additional interest from the state funding sources.

So I'll keep you updated.

And even though Kimley Horn is doing a lion's share of the work, it still takes quite a bit of staff time just to keep track of it.

A secondary thing from there, just of interest, Greene County had a buy-write development in Stanardsville.

So, Stanardsville has a bypass and then the main street, the former main street, is now Business 33 and it creates that horseshoe.

Well, the buy-write development is in the interior of that horseshoe.

The bypass highway is limited access highway.

The applicant offered and is willing to and wants to build a entrance onto the limited access highway and pay for it.

Without it, it would create about a half mile backup on Main Street.

The board of supervisors chose to

not support resolution, which is typically a checklist item that CTP needs to approve a bypass or limited access opening.

And so after about almost a year of time, it's gone through the process and CTP last Monday approved pretty much without discussion to

It would be east, about halfway, it's about

You know, maybe not quite halfway, a little less than about 40% of the way between SEL and Swift Room.

So that opening there, and it'll be, it won't be a full access because we know our participants don't like full access intersections if we can avoid them.

So it'll be a right out, right in, right out, and they'll extend the lane, turn lane at SEL and have a U-turn movement.

there.

And just for your knowledge, about 57% of the employees in Greene County drive south to Albemarle and Charlottesville for work.

So a significant number of the people that live there will make the U-turn to go back east to get to 29th.

Thank you.

And also, like I said, we have a full draft at this point, so

Getting closer to the end, but some of the hot topics, of course, are short-term rentals and lot area sizes.

But for purposes of this group, I guess we are adding three overlay districts, so we have a village overlay and the areas we've identified.

We're going to have a Route 29 corridor overlay and a Route 151 corridor overlay.

And that's to address things like setbacks, signage, access management, interconnectivity,

about higher performance standards, stuff like that.

So I think that would be a good thing.

And the idea is to incentivize and promote it in the Route 29 corridor and away from Route 151.

Got my new planner.

He's been amazing.

We got a new board member starts in January, which means I'll likely have a new planning commission member.

So that means for me, within the last year, I've had a whole planning commission turnover.

Number one.

So that's been a struggle, you know, also with my budget to get them all trained up and everything like that.

So I think Virginia A.P.A.

has planning commissioner trainings that they give us along by Will Cockrell and stuff.

Yeah, those are the ones.

It's just 7.50 o'clock in the hotel, and lights, and mileage.

Oh yeah, we had a great turnout.

There were a lot of really good sessions on AI.

We had a session where we had representatives from different state agencies come and talk about funding streams.

that are available, well-known about.

If you're looking to the town of Benton, they've done some really amazing things with partnerships and combining different funding streams.

That's a really good case study.

We had a session on housing, affordable housing.

There's in Marion, a really good program.

Yeah.

I can't recommend it enough.

You know, folks, it's in October every year.

We've got some new leadership.

I'm the most present on that as well.

We have a new website this year.

So we're looking at

Expanding the resources we have available like webinars and stuff throughout the year.

So I would expect some, even a blast of some.

Thank you.

We've been busy, Louisa County.

We have recently hired an agricultural development and land conservation coordinator.

So we're looking forward to having that individual

work on that.

There'll be more information coming.

We're really, really excited about it.

I think we have a lot of support from the community on that hire.

What is their intended purpose?

To provide options to the Board of Supervisors to protect the rural character and land of Louisa County as we continue to experience development pressure.

Conservation, what was the first part of the agriculture conservation?

Preservation Coordinator.

Oh, okay.

I'm sure this person's aware of that, but that reminded me, I wanted to say too, the American Farmland Trust just last month put out the planning for agriculture in Virginia to live kids.

So I'm looking forward to going through that, and they've been working on that for quite a while.

So we've had this new position for about a month.

and there will be more information as this moves forward.

So that's really exciting.

And then we launched our comprehensive plan survey.

So if you're a Louisa County resident, please go online and fill that out.

Happy to hear from you.

And then we'll be hopefully taking the comp plan on the road.

We're sorting that out at the moment.

and I'll turn it over to, nice.

If you've never heard of the PBS show, Ties in the Heartland, they did an episode recently that was about rural planning and it focused on Stanton a lot and the rural planning caucus they came and filmed at our conference last year and some of our meetings but it was really really well done.

I sent it

I would recommend sending it to your board and your planning commission members.

Sorry.

There you go.

You're good.

We're out of tables.

Albemarle will just finish our comp plan.

We have a small, pretty different, before we start tackling Wilson World plans.

So that's the big thing that happened.

And then we have four different studies through VDOT happening right now.

The one with the 5th Street Interchange Pipeline public survey is out right now.

I said it to my friends just now.

I was like, hey guys, you should do this.

So we have a lot of that going on.

That's our main two things right now that we have plans adopted.

and we're starting to already eye SMART SCALE and revenue sharing projects in the future.

Question for Grant.

So we have the draft from our consultants, but we want to make some tweaks to it.

And the guy, you know, Dan,

He's the one that's going to make tweaks to it.

He just got back from a three week vacation in Africa.

So he's having a lot on his plate right now, but it's pretty soon.

So it's going to really help us to communicate to localities what the situation is, as well as we can communicate it to our fellow planners at FAPPA and stuff like that.

OK, Jaunt is, so Mike Murphy, our CEO, gave a presentation.

City Council last night, so that's probably the best sort of State of the John Union speech.

Of our ridership, we serve about 20,000 rides a month.

20% of those, 26% of those are commuter bus, 73, 75% of the bad response.

And of that 75% of bad response, 56%.

are 88, which is the city of Charlottesville that we do on behalf of CAT.

So if you want to see this recorded city council presentation last night, probably about 15 minutes.

He goes first, so it's easy to find him if you're interested.

A couple other things we're working on.

We do have, this is important for Greene,

We did get a demonstration grant to pilot mobility on demand software as a service.

We just last week, we signed a contract with Fia, which is the software provider, to do that for our ADA service in the city of Charlottesville and for Greene County.

So we have money for that and we're hoping that

We also applied for, and we're in the final negotiation stages, we applied for an RTAC grant.

RTAC is Rural Transportation Offensive Program, Assistance Program.

They have a community rides grant program that can get up to a hundred thousand.

They called us for short lists.

They wanted to interview us.

They liked the project.

So the concept is either or, we'd either extend our 29 North connect commuter route all the way up to Greene or

depending on what's more efficient.

So we don't disrupt that service or we just do a dedicated commuter route to Greene.

Right now we have these link services where we have a bus coming in a couple of times.

We added midday, which was a request, which was a request we hear a lot.

I'll get to that in a second.

But the concept there is if you put 29 North, some kind of connect service, the services, maybe it goes to the Walmart, maybe it goes all the way to Sandersville.

I don't know.

That would be a commuter bus into downtown Charlottesville, UVA, Martha Jeff.

We know that there's demand.

University of Virginia is very interested in that.

They're a supporting partner on that grant application, as well as the TJPDC people working closely with.

And they support it.

And our friends at DRPT also encouraged us to do this.

It's been a good partnership.

We asked for $100,000.

And the concept there was we would do

You know, there's planning and prep that needs to go into it.

There's outreach and marketing, so people know this is coming, right?

So there'd be a phase of that.

And then we'd kick into operations sometime.

It's a 12 month grant, so it'd be January up to December calendar year.

So maybe like the fiscal year 27 starts July 1st.

We'd maybe shoot for July 1st operations, something like that.

We'll see how it goes.

They wanted to see if we could do it for 50,000.

And we said, well,

Maybe.

We said we don't like that.

So they're going to come back.

They're trying to stretch their dollar.

They have a lot of applications.

And so they're going to see if they can ever want to reduce a little bit to spread the wealth out a little bit more.

So we'll see what they come back with.

Robin, their executive director, really liked the whole concept.

I mean, think about it.

You have a commuter route that's supported by Mobility On Demand is like a deal.

So you have all those last minute trips

and we can get rid of some of those link services which are sort of underutilized and people complain about a lot because they don't get their times and their needs and so it would be a drastically different transit picture for Greene County.

It might fit into a priority to the board.

They've entered into an agreement with the private organizations who have

UVA Mobile Medical Clinic, but I don't really think that Greene County is severely lacking in medical services.

We could always use more, but we're 15 minutes away from some of the best medical doctors and services in the country.

And so I think the more efficient, accurate solution it is

Do you know, so the biggest user of our connect services is Crozet or 29 North and UVA is, I mean, if you look at the stops where people are getting off, that's either the medical centers or UVA, treasury stops along the Browns.

And we've been working with Scott and their university transportation, UTS,

They have a whole commuter ban management program called Wahoo Commute or something.

They're giving people incentives.

If they take the bus, they'll give up their parking pass.

Anyway, so there's that.

I think there's great potential to increase our regional rural commuter services across the board.

And Greene County system is so logical.

I mean, you don't have an idea of where all the UVA employees live, and that would be a UVA thing probably, right?

No, not specifically.

60, well, over 60% of our population is right on 29 and 2933 intersections and so on.

So the other thing I wanted to mention, sorry I'm taking up time.

I think I missed the last meeting, so some of these things I want to make sure I get.

We did a survey in July, a community survey,

It's on our website.

I just posted it to the socials and the website.

It's available up there.

I can even, if you want, I can present it at some future meeting if there's time, if there's interest, but you can also just go take a look into yourself.

Basically the takeaways are, there's some places we can do better at like scheduling and dispatch.

There's a bit of reservation hold times.

People complained about what they do.

The winner of the surveys are drivers.

People love our drivers.

One thing we heard a lot about was the need for midday service.

For example, for Louisa, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we have a bus that comes in at 8 AM and then a bus that goes out at 3.

And so if you come for a morning meeting, you're sort of hanging out, waiting to get your return trip is kind of a thing, right?

What we'd like to do, and here's where we might apply for some grants, for service extensions, Sandy, you're talking about.

either for Fluvanna and or Louisa because they don't serve all the days.

But of the days we do serve, we can maybe say move the 3 o'clock bus to a 5 o'clock bus and add a 1 p.m. service.

So add a midday service and push it out there.

So that kind of thinks that there'll be proof of concept for that.

We do need to get, if it is a demo grant, we do need to raise 40% match, which I've been strategizing Mike and TJPDC about.

We have some solutions.

50th anniversary this year, 50 years ago in September, we served our first six rides.

So we're sort of celebrating that.

We have a communications firm that we're working with

helped push the word out and also we're doing some rebranding and choosing colors and fonts and fun stuff like that.

And yeah, we're going to be going through a full replacement of our software the next, hopefully the next few years.

That's going to be a big, huge change.

Right now we're operating in a SIMPS scheduling and dispatch software that's just, it's a dinosaur.

It's like 25 years old.

I mean, if you just look at it, it looks like, you know,

Word for word, 5.1.

That's got to change.

If we're going to be anywhere in the current century, we need to update that.

And we have secured money for that, too, from the state, $1.5 million to take that on.

So big changes ahead.

Jason, I do have one question.

Yeah, I know we did an origin destination analysis where we did the consultant studied it and recommended it.

There's a history of transit in Greene County.

We took it over, but there used to be a dialer on it.

So essentially we're going back to the future.

We're going back to that, right?

And I think we can cover, if you look, there's a couple little

origins and destinations up in the mountains.

Forget the little tiny towns up there.

Anyway, but the most of it's between the bedroom community that's right on the beyond the Albemarle border, Rutgersville area and then Sandersville.

There's a lot back and forth.

I think people are going to love it.

You know, I'm really curious to see what happens.

and then we'll see the proof of concept there.

It's successful.

And exciting to hear about the potential of some commuter routes, which gives people additional options beyond carpooling and, you know, folks who would take those commuter routes

would still qualify for the Ride Home Rewards program, formerly known as Guaranteed Ride Home.

So, you know, those services would still be definitely applicable and can hopefully help with marketing.

Yeah, we need to definitely work on marketing.

People know that it's there.

You just build it.

No one knows about it.

Exactly.

And hopefully,

Ah, yes.

Okay.

That's good news.

Well, thank you, Fluvanna.

Anybody else online like to add into the roundtable?

I do have an updated figure for you.

Yeah.

Good number.

Well, thank you.

Thank them for giving us the number.

All right.

I motion to adjourn again.

All those in favor say aye.

All those opposed.