Regional Transit Partnership (2017-2025) Meeting   8/22/2024

That's a great, it would be awesome.

But good on them for being good partners and you know, really sharing.

Oh, I would love one.

Oh, yeah, I'll bring more.

I'm a bad boy.

No, no, no.

I have one.

Were they both there?

Oh, thank you.

You sure can.

I might have an extra one.

Oh, in fact, there's a whole pile of them.

I like this poster.

We do.

Yes.

And we have, let me just make sure, so we have... No, five.

Our quorum's five, that was six.

Okay, so we're good.

So I'm going to call the original president of the partnership meeting to order.

That's Scott, right?

Yeah, Scott, Brian, Diantha, and Natalie.

We're five.

OK. All right.

I thought when you pointed, I so apologize.

No.

That's OK.

Mike, you don't count.

Our first item of business will be to invite Mike Pruitt to join us.

Yes, my name's Mike Pruitt.

Thank you.

So with that, I will entertain a motion to invite Mike to join our meeting.

So moved.

All right, is there a second?

Second.

Second by Natalie.

And I think the motion was aye.

Yes, sir.

OK, Scott, there you go.

I'm sorry, so who made the motion?

We're good, yeah.

Ms. Oschrin?

Yes.

We're voting to accept Mike into the meeting.

Are we not confused?

Okay, maybe I'm confused.

Oh, okay.

Here.

Okay.

Okay.

Yes.

And I'm not going to call on Mr. Pruitt because he is great.

Ms. Miller is not here.

Mr. Parker?

So Mike, I believe you have been accepted into the meeting.

Welcome.

And with that, let's do our introductions.

And we'll start as we normally do and go around the table.

Thank you.

Hi.

Great.

And welcome.

Thank you.

Because you're new for us.

Although we know you.

Scott Silsdorf, Director of Parking and Transportation at UVA.

Natalie Oschrin, also Charlottesville City Council.

Peter Krebs from the Piedmont Environmental Council.

I'm Matthew Reagan.

Great.

Welcome to have you here.

Yeah.

And behind me?

My name is Peter Beckety.

Great.

Well, welcome.

Thank you.

All right.

So with that, our next agenda item,

approval of our agenda, I would entertain a motion to approve the agenda.

I move for approval of the agenda.

So Brian's made the motion, and is there a second?

Second.

Second by, great.

Ms. Oschrin?

Yes.

Ms. McKeel?

Yes.

Mr. Parker is not here, right?

All right, so we have an agenda.

Next item are our draft meeting, I'm sorry, meeting minutes from June the 27th because, of course, we did not meet in July.

So the last seven minutes is from June and I have

If you look at the minutes on the first page, Mrs. McKeel noted that this is the last meeting for Hal Morgan and that Jamie Gellner will be taking his place on the committee.

That needs to be corrected to read.

Let me find it here.

Mrs. McKeel noted that this is the last meeting for Hal Morgan and that Randy Parker will be taking his place on the committee.

So unless there are any other comments about the minutes, I would entertain a motion to approve the minutes as amended.

So moved.

So motion for Brian and a second for Natalie.

Ms. Oschrin?

Yes.

Ms. McKeel?

Yes.

Mr. Decampo-Lopez.

Aye.

Yes.

Great, thank you.

We're making progress here.

Our next item is election of officers.

We were really, we must admit we were supposed to do this in July, but we didn't have a meeting in July.

So it's on the agenda for today.

It's a little awkward for me to be running a meeting for the election of officers.

Yeah, I would move to keep the same leadership that we have now, you as chair and Ms. Oschrin as vice chair.

Particularly, and I would thank you for one reason, you've done a great job.

And so we have a motion, and I guess I can do it as one motion, but I wanted to say we have a nomination for myself as chair and Natalie for vice chair, but I want to make sure that there are no other motions or folks that would like to toss their name into the room.

Anybody?

All right, can we do that with one motion?

I think we could, don't you?

So we have a motion.

And is there a second?

Second.

Welcome.

Good to see you.

Glad you joined us.

Sorry I'm late.

So Brian made the motion.

OK. And we have a second for Randy.

Yeah.

All right.

Ms. Oschrin?

Yes.

Ms. McKeel?

Yes.

Mr. Parker?

Yes.

Mr. de Campo Lopez?

Aye.

Aye.

All right.

So we thank you very much for your making progress.

And Ellie and I appreciate the support.

And I want to swing back, because Randy just arrived.

We had our introduction.

But you have been a member of this committee before, and you're back.

So introduce yourself.

I'm here as the job role representative on the job board.

And I live in Louisa County.

I'm a mostly retired attorney.

It's always nice to have an attorney.

We only have a couple of attorneys.

And I was here at the beginning.

Yeah, you were.

For about five years.

Yes, you were.

I know everybody is so happy, so welcome.

Thank you.

Absolutely.

All right, next item on the agenda is public comment.

Listen, do we have anything to sign up for comment from the public?

If anybody from the public would like to speak, you can raise your hand here, or you can raise your hand in the Zoom meeting.

And I don't see anybody.

Probably during the updates.

Okay.

Yep.

That seemed more smooth, but didn't want to make.

That's what I thought.

That's good to know that you have some of that.

That's great.

All right, so we don't have anybody from the public.

No.

All right.

So I know we're all excited for this next agenda item.

Anyway, she's excited.

We're going to be talking about the CARTA work group update on the fan and room chambers.

So we're getting the screen shared.

Do you have a clicker or do you want me to stand up there?

I can stand up here.

I have notes pages so bear with me.

Thank you Ms. McKeel.

I appreciate the opportunity to be here to come and talk about

regional transit authorities and the possibility for regional transit authority in Charlottesville Albemarle.

I'm going to provide this presentation today, but it is important to point out that this is really the work of a committee that has worked together that includes Ben Chambers with the city of Charlottesville as well as Christine Jacobs and Lucinda Shannon with the TJPDC.

We have met regularly since about March, about every two weeks as we've talked about the

the value, the formation of what a regional transit authority would look like.

So here's a brief agenda about what we're going to talk about, a little bit of background slides.

Some of this is a bit repetitive from what we did at the last meeting, but I just wanted to bring everybody up to speed.

We'll also talk a bit about the structure of regional transit authority, a little bit of information about some of the outreach that we've done.

We have some key takeaways and then a next step

and I'll preview that to the board and what we'd ask the RTP to consider at the end is a recommendation to endorse the formation of a regional transit authority.

And I just want to remind Mike, just make sure you put up your hand, Mike, if you have a question.

We'll speak about that, but it is important to point out that there is a joint city-county meeting of our two governing boards and we are planning, we believe at that meeting we'll do a presentation about a regional transit authority.

So we would like to, if this group is interested in moving forward with

Great question.

So just a little bit about the history.

Many of you probably know this, but just for the sake of putting it all in one concise place, we want to provide a little bit of information about the background.

The conversation about a regional transit authority has been taking place in this area for probably 15 or more years.

The earliest reference that we can find dates back to 2008 when a study was done called the Charlottesville-Albemarle Regional Transit Authority Report and that study sort of explored the coordination of an authority which was really intended to promote the development of regional transit services and to help those in the area with attractive alternatives to driving when roadways were becoming more and more congested.

Fast forward to 2009.

2009 was an important moment because the General Assembly passed legislation which provided for enabling legislation for the formation of a regional transit authority.

As we've talked about in the past, key legislation because it allowed us to create the authority but what was lacking was a revenue generating clause.

that legislation allowed authority to exist but did not provide for a means to earn the authority.

In 2016, it was discussed again.

There was a study done, a regional coordination study, which really looked at the question of regional transit.

It was intended to really identify opportunities to improve communication, coordination, and collaboration on transit matters.

The study resulted in a recommendation to form the Regional Transit Partnership, which is where we are today.

It was identified in that study that the Regional Transit Partnership was intended to serve as a precursor to an authority.

Two other studies to remind the board about, to remind this partnership about, is in 2022, there was a Regional Transit Vision Plan.

This was a pretty important document.

This document really talked about

What this community anticipated, what this community desired would be the vision for transit, how transit would be provided.

And they wanted to ensure that it was provided in an efficient, equitable, and effective way.

It laid out a clear vision.

This visioning plan also identified short-term, long-term, and extended long-term actions that the community could take to achieve this vision for transit.

One of the first steps that was identified in that study was to initiate a transit governance study.

And the governance study was intended to look at the governance structure as well as revenue opportunities that might exist.

So then in 2024,

Yes, ma'am?

I'm just going to point out that these studies are on our website, I believe, if anyone's interested in going there.

That's exactly right.

They're all on the TJPDC website.

I think it's under regional transit planning.

Great source.

2024 is probably actually 2023, 2024.

The TJPDC worked with communities and stakeholders and did the transit governance study, which in the end recommended that CARTA,

and we'll talk a little bit about what CARTA, but recommended that the community pursue the activating a regional transit authority.

The idea was to create an authority where we could collectively look at and address transit needs in the community and also at some point in the future to pursue collective action on a dedicated revenue source.

That study also talked about the need for the city of Charlottesville and Albemarle to be the first two partners in CARTA, which is mimicked in the legislation.

The study identified some steps that would be taken.

There would be a small group selected to work on developing bylaws, talking about work plans and identifying budgets.

And I would just add so everybody knows that

The General Assembly determined that Charlottesville and Albemarle has to establish the authority.

So we don't want anybody to think that we were excluding John or Greene County or Fluganda or any of the surrounding areas.

legislation is clear that the two, the two, Charlottesville and Albemarle have to come together to enact the authority.

There is opportunity and we would welcome the opportunity from participation from the four surrounding counties.

but it has to be the city of Charlottesville and Albemarle that have to enact it.

In the University of Virginia.

Well, in the University of Virginia, we'll talk a little bit, we'll talk to Scott.

He comes in, you'll see a little later on, they can be designated as a partner but really a non-voting member of the board.

And it's important to point out that all of that is grounded in, I brought a copy of it, in the legislation

that had very specific language about who would be a member of the authority.

All of that is laid out in the legislation.

And I think it goes back to an OA.

There were a lot of these authorities being formed across the state.

And I will say this as a comment.

If you think about the economy in OA, we were in a recession.

And what happened was we had the legislation that really had no money.

But we're back here today, so thank you, ma'am.

And what we wanted to talk about is really what would be the role of an authority.

I think sometimes we get a couple questions about what would be the role of authority.

So what we have done is we put in four different buckets.

There's a first, the general bucket, the general bucket of that the authority could serve as this collaborative multi-jurisdictional entity where problems could be, transit problems could be addressed and solved.

It would be the forum for carrying out sort of regional training and planning efforts and an opportunity to work through difficult decisions.

Everybody's sitting around the table rolling up their sleeves working out issues.

So a place where a regional body could help to identify transit priorities and then provide some oversight on some of the programs that are some of the transit as well as the congestion management mitigation programs that would exist.

There's a bucket about planning.

We've heard a lot about and the transit governance studies talked a lot about planning and how important transit planning is and that would be an important role for the transit authority would be to prepare transit plans for all or portion, I'm sorry there's a little typo on my slide, in the area long-range transit planning and well as an opportunity to look at service expansion, excuse me, and alternatives.

Two other buckets, funding, right?

You can plan all the great services, but you need money to run these services.

And so the transit authority could really, could serve with identifying designated revenue as a vehicle for administering, collecting dedicated revenue.

It could also be an authority that would look at what funding formulas look like, right?

How money is allocated.

And finally, one of the most important partners, the two most important partners that we probably have related to transit are the state and federal governments.

And so the transit authority can play a really important role on that regional basis.

It could be an advocate for transit needs to the federal and state government.

and collectively I think that's important to point out that the region coming together and collectively talking to the state and federal government is an important role for an authority to do.

We all go, we all talk to and talk about why these services are important to our region.

It could recommend transit priorities and then finally apply for grants.

Grants for service expansions to both the federal and the state government.

We've talked a lot about benefits.

We see as our group a number of benefits.

We've listed some of them on the screen and a lot of these are benefits related to planning efforts.

I just want to call out a couple of them.

The idea that seamless connectivity, the opportunity to look across the region and across the location.

to figure out how we can move people where people need to go.

If you look at it related to economic development, it is a tool to increase mobility, to provide linkages and access to commercial and job centers, health care and education.

It's an opportunity to attract investment.

A well-planned and well-integrated system is really attractive for those that want to provide funding.

and then finally as it relates to data.

The idea of sharing data provides for improved decision making and it helps us to understand where best to put limited resources and we can leverage some technology to provide improved service as well as customer service.

So the work is to date and we've shared much of this with this group before.

We as a group of our work team, we've engaged with localities, with their staffs and the UVA leadership

to gain an understanding of transit needs.

We've engaged with the transit service providers to hear about existing plans, how they align with needs, and coordination between jurisdictions and services.

We even, I think our last visit, we spent probably two hours, Lucinda and Ben and I spent some time with DRPT, went to Richmond and spoke with SAB and DRPT to really understand what they would hope and they would see would be the value of a regional transit authority.

So they're supportive?

They're very supportive.

And we have spent some time talking about work plans.

I have a question.

As you were talking about the role of the authority, refreshing your minds regarding the studies that were developed in recent years related to this topic.

Of all of us, sometimes I got confused and I refer to the RDP as Regional Transportation Partnership and its Traded Partnership.

And as you were talking about all of that, I cannot

in which way is this authority will engage with transportation topics other than transit or not?

And that is a great question.

What we have looked at is a transit authority.

When you look at other examples across the Commonwealth of Virginia, many of them are transportation authorities.

The one in Richmond, the one in Northern Virginia,

and they look at both transit but transportation, big dollar, high dollar projects.

Road construction, multi-modal paths, capital kinds of instructions are not at this point.

You're going to see later on,

share a little bit that one of the to-dos for this group when the RTA, if the RTA is formed, one of the to-dos may be to look at that legislation and understand are there different asks for the General Assembly and what might those be.

But that's a great question.

Right, yeah.

So again, just to point out, Supervisor McKeel mentioned that there was 2009 legislation that passed that talked about the creation of the transit authority.

It identified powers of what our transit authority could do.

It talked about who the initial members were.

The initial members were clearly specified as the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County.

It identified their

Right, and we also met with Kat and with John as well in DRPT.

So I just wanted to quickly go through the bylaws.

It's important to point this out about the bylaws.

The bylaws themselves would be adopted by the transit authority.

But we felt it was important to go ahead and have a draft set of bylaws so there would be sort of a basis or a starting point

Much of this work for these bylaws is really copied from other transit transportation authorities that exist across the state.

And if you did an analysis of those bylaws from those agencies, they are very much alike.

And so we chose not to reinvent the wheel, right, and did a lot of copying and pasting related to our transit authority.

Again, let's just talk about that.

These draft bylaws identify that the initial members of the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County, that Louvanna, Green, Louisa, and Nelson, as well as private non-partners, they may join.

That the board of directors would be composed of two members of the Albemarle County supervisors, two members of the Charlottesville City Council, one member of the governing body of each of those jurisdictions that join.

Green, I should have said those in order, Fluvanna, Green, Louisa, and Nelson.

It provides for up to four non-voting members or non-voting directors representing the interests of agencies or institutions in the region.

If the University of Virginia wanted to participate, that role as a non-voting member at this point would be where the University of Virginia would participate.

It could be others,

The legislation, let me just read you exactly what the legislation says.

It identifies for non-movement and it says public transportation agencies serving such counties may join the authority is how it defines it.

I know you mentioned that a lot of this language came from other regional transit authorities.

You know, I'll say this.

I think that some of those, the College of the University was not as large of a presence in the community

Northern Virginia, in the Tidewater area.

So just to be clear on this topic, Ann, when the partnership was first established, our partnership, UVA was at the table with what was a non-voting member.

We went back and changed.

I changed our bylaws and they are now avoiding number of the partnership.

That could happen with the authority at some point if we chose to.

Yes, ma'am.

And the way we see that as occurring is you'll see it relates back to this conversation about transit versus transportation.

When the authority is created, if the authority is created,

Right, and we could provide some information for the authority when the time came to talk about the makeup of some of those other authorities around the state.

When we talked about it, we believed fall may be the opportunity to begin to talk to the governing boards about this.

I guess that an important part of my question is as soon as the governing boards sit in county, show desire to approve that creation of the RTA, that's it, right?

And just to clarify, forming the authority with the city and the county does not require any activity from the general assembly.

The next trick though is going to be the funding.

I don't know if we'll have a ducks in a row to be able to make that application in this coming general assembly.

Mr.

Crew, yes, Mike.

Mike, we can't hear you, dear.

Can you hear me?

Can you hear me?

OK.

So this might be premature, but I know, I mean, the RTA is going to exist in a substantial capacity for quite a while before it's actually doing all the fun stuff that takes money.

So when we're talking about potentially forming it up as early as this fall,

in like a notional capacity.

Are we going to start incurring any kind of costs either to the the TJPDC for staffing or things that would require contributions from the locality?

Yeah, since we will be sunsetting one and starting the other, we'll continue to use the existing funding that we're already receiving from the city and county for the RTE, for staffing for the RTA in the short term.

It would then, the RTA would then need to be developing an annual budget to determine what they need if they need to hire staff.

And I think there could be an overlap between, and so

That's kind of what I'm driving at.

We don't believe so on the analysis that we've done because we are now also getting a lot of staff support from Charlottesville and Albemarle.

For example, Ann and Dan.

Right.

Great question, Mike.

Some more information in the bylaws, the bylaws talk about officers, chairs and vice chairs, terms of office for the officers, a year, talks about having regular meetings and special meetings, everything that you would imagine that an organization that is stood up would need in their bylaws.

And we envisioned, our work group envisioned that at the onset we would need sort of two committees, a finance committee,

to talk about issues around budget and financial policies.

Also a technical committee where we would bring in staff members from the localities and from DRPT, VDOT to help review and comment as we talk about planning, projects, and programs, private organization, all those things transit

The idea is this technical committee would provide information to the board of the RTA on which the board can make a decision.

Additionally, the bylaws provide that there could be an executive director when the time comes.

It talks about how you create the bylaws, how you amend the bylaws.

So Ann, if once the authority is established, maybe not with funding but just the authority and there's a, we're working on the work of the authority to get to the point where maybe we have some funding because we have to go to Richmond for funding.

We have to ask permission for Richmond.

Having said that, the Finance Committee, Technical Committee,

Those points do not have to go back to Richmond for approval.

Everything that I just got over in the bylaws is actions that can be done locally that do not require acts of the General Assembly.

Changing the makeup of the group, changing revenue options, those would have to go back to the General Assembly.

As we mentioned, we've done some engagement, we've hit the road, we've been to Richmond, we've been to the counties.

Some of the information we learned is there, we heard a lot of interest from the localities about learning more about regional transit needs and ways to address those needs.

We heard from the group that there was an understanding that some planning work really needed to be done before we could really explore dedicated remnants.

We have to understand what the ask is.

There were opportunities for some short-term improvements to services.

DRPT, we had a very gracious welcome from DRPT.

They spent two and a half hours with us on a Friday afternoon and they talked about demonstration as well as trip grants and the opportunity to apply for those grants.

We heard across the board that the localities were very interested in Charlottesville and the county moving forward with setting up CARTA.

The counties want to see how it goes.

They want to see how it goes.

But they did acknowledge that this region really needed a vehicle to tackle some of the hard decisions that were in front of us related to transit.

Ben and Christine and Lucinda and I, we thought, you know, we need to help the group understand what a kickoff for Carter would look like.

And apparently the wording is a little, I see Christine squinting.

I'm sorry, I thought I made that large enough.

And we put that word back in those four buckets that we talked about earlier.

Generally, the Carter board would need to be appointed.

The governing boards would need to appoint the Carter board.

The board would need to approve the bylaws, elect a chair and a vice chair, and designate committees.

The Carter board would need to continue to outreach.

That outreach has been really

has been really valuable to the localities, to the partner agencies, and so it would be very important to continue that outreach.

We heard from those counties, come back and talk to us, let us know how things are going, let us know where you are.

So that would be under general activities of the Carter Board.

Planning wise, it's an opportunity to talk about setting regional transit goals,

considering the improvements in transit services as well as customer service.

Funding, this goes to Mr. Pruitt's question.

Once CARTA is formed, we would need to prepare a budget.

We would need to evaluate staff and funding requirements, look at grant applications that might be for service expansions and enhancements that might be available, and then begin to talk about what revenue might look like.

When and when?

What kind of revenue?

When's the right time to pursue revenue?

And finally, as it relates to our state and federal partners, continue to advocate for the transit needs of our region, continue to recommend and talk with those federal and state partners about priorities, explore grants, and then possibly as we go forward, begin to develop a set of

And I don't want to speak for Brian, but I do think that when we've talked in the past about this, some of this is getting to where we think it's going to take more than one General Assembly session and maybe more than one year because there's a lot to do and a lot of it is dependent on the General Assembly.

and we have to be prepared to go to them with the right ask.

And just a couple of things to point out.

The RTP, the move to create the RTP as I acknowledged at the beginning was an important move.

and it was acknowledged back in 2016, 2017 when the RTP was created that it was intended to be a precursor to a red regional transit authority.

The idea was to begin to get people around the table, to regionally talk about transit needs.

That was an important move.

At this point, we're to a point where the general assembly as well as localities that are not yet buying in also want to see a transit authority get some traction.

they want to see the authority do some work related to transit to ensure that before they broadly expand authority, broadly provide for revenue that the transit authority is ready to tackle some of these tough issues.

I have a couple of key takeaways on this slide and then one more slide after that and that is just that we all know that this region has some really interesting transit needs

to both urban and rural areas and this region is served by multiple transit partners.

Investment in transit is warranted because localities seek improvement and they seek improvements in quality of life.

Transit's important.

For more than 15 years, this community has talked about what does regional transit governance look like.

We've talked about RTPs being the beginning and we're to a point where we're evolving RTP to an RTA.

That's hard to say but that's, you know.

CARTA, standing up CARTA can serve as a venue for decisions about transit needs and service provision and it can be the first step, first big step to talking about solving those regional transit needs.

But legislation, while not perfect,

possesses sort of the fundamentals that are needed to create this regional transit authority.

And then finally, our group would just recommend that the regional transit partnership endorse the creation of the Charlottesville, Albemarle regional transit authority.

are the main differences in the abilities of that authority with respect to the RTP.

Immediately, like when raising the authority, but before the authority having budget capacities to secure

I think that's a great question.

I'm going to kick off and then I'm going to look at Christine and Lucinda to join as well.

I think this, I think that partnership brings people to the table voluntarily.

Authority gives people a designated seat at the table to really talk about transit.

What is not in here, I'll be real frank,

is anything related to direct oversight over transit agencies.

That is not in here.

That is where at times the discussion of authority has gotten off track.

We believe that, and we chatted a little bit about this at the last meeting, that the intent of this is to create, these are Christine's words, to create an authority with a little A.

meaning people sit around the table, we collectively make decisions about transit, we create a shared vision that we then can go to the General Assembly to ask for support to raise revenue to fund transit.

I think in the end we're not going to see a 180, 150, whatever that clearly technology is not my port

Right, a fiscal body to really help to make transit decisions.

To answer my second question, we need that one.

I'll check that one off.

Mr. Pruitt, how's your mic?

Yeah.

And Mr. Pruitt, we are we are working through with city and county legal attorney's offices the final edits and changes on those bylaws.

So I don't want to say I'm

I mean, my hope would be that we would be able to do like the ACRJ or the Ravana or, you know, something that can go do stuff.

I think for me, the early questions that we'll have, you know, where does CAP reside?

Does it stay with the city as it is now?

probably will be, but how would that relationship work between CAD and authority?

Those sorts of things I think are what, maybe the RTA, all that they do is they just make sort of high level decisions about policy or whatever and become a funnel for money or a way to get additional funding opportunities

and Kat continues to do its own thing.

And that's what's going to take some time to figure all of that out.

And some of it needs general assembly permission, some of it doesn't.

But it certainly is true in our community.

We have existing authorities in the city and in the county and they can take on debt themselves.

without impacting the death in the city and county, respectively.

We don't know where we're going to end up with this authority.

But we do know that transit is not inexpensive.

And we can't keep paying for our transit out of our operational funds if we expect to really have a robust transit system.

I was just gonna say I mentioned this because, I mean, that was kind of my exact thought.

If there was some kind of legal disability imposed on the RTA by the enabling legislation, that would be an issue because like, such a big advantage that we get from our other authorities, our service authorities, our jail authority, is that we can do these major kind of capital improvement plans without carrying

Going into February I asked him a question and he's told about little As and big As and I asked about them in June.

This still reads like big A to me.

And when we have elected officials from both places talking about taking control of operations or I heard Mr. Pruitt say something about when does the fun part come when we take the money.

right, or Mr. Pinkston referenced, you know, will the RTA run cap and therefore jaunt?

When we're responding to a board and stockholders and jurisdictions who will not be part of the RTA, that's pretty complex.

It's a, it's a

big hairy audacious, whatever those things are.

And so I made curious about how you bring the idea about having CARTA forward to a joint meeting with the council and the board to stand something up when

the long-term vision and charge is not clearly defined.

And when I see things even in the 25-26 plan about applying for grants, is that imagining that Carta would ask for DRPT money instead of John?

Because they've got some other kind of grant.

There are many questions that this raises that are not

years away in the way I look at it.

I mean, there's grant applications due to DRBT in less than six months.

So in theory, the card exists by then.

Do you imagine that you would be asking for all the local dollars?

So there are things like that that have real operational impacts that make it problematic for me to imagine, how are you going

That's fair.

Yeah, I just wanted to say there are a number of models that are out there.

What we've got with that, I assume, is the majority of the Virginia model.

But there are models all across the country that allow for,

And then at that point, Control is a partner because they are spending their money to get the additional services that they want without having to collapse.

But eventually, I assume we all know that the region will function better if the organizations were sharing resources at that point in time, somewhere down the line.

because I think what we're all struggling to get everything drives.

And we can see, I would say Scott too, we're all in that bucket where we're trying to keep what we got, incentivize them to stay, and that number continues to ratchet up and it has an impact on

our ATU member over there, he likes that because I mean the drivers can pay more.

But what I would say is the more resources we can share, the more we store, the better the coverage model we can run and the more frequency we can provide and ensure holes in our system.

And we can be like that one-two punch in getting the systems that we really want.

But that doesn't, in my mind that doesn't negate the fact

That little A, big A, whatever you want to call it.

Get the money, you can make a decision after you get the money about how to be distributed.

Right, and that's what Brian and I were alluding to.

That's correct.

So it's wild.

They were lobbying in Richmond for a restaurant.

To some degree, I guess, I think your point is good.

I will say there's a little chicken and eggish, you know, just because I'm not sure we can make all the decisions that

rightfully for pointing out we're going to have to be assessed until we have a little more information, until we get clear at the level of the two jurisdictions, those two boards and councils that, yeah, we really want to do this.

And these are some of the things that might be entailed by that.

But I think it will be a necessity somewhat of open-ended and I would say modest.

in terms of what we want to do in the first couple of years just because, by necessity, we don't want to break something that's working.

And I don't know enough about if I had Ben Chambers behind me.

I just asked him what he thinks.

He's not here for that.

I know, on this wall.

please don't take any of this to the bank or any other place.

My sense is that John is a different kind of beast in the work that you do and the things that you do and the structure that you have in terms of your stock ownership and you're your own little authority, you're your own corporation as I understand it.

I would think like trying to take over what you do, not to use a military metaphor, but to sort of like fully integrate what you're doing within the larger effort.

I think that would be a really long conversation because what you do is so specialized and unique in a way where your government is so unique.

So I would think that would be

I would just say, you are a non-quantity.

This community of people have a lot of faith and trust in you.

We want you to be a part of this.

And how that plays out, we don't know.

But we certainly would like you under that umbrella.

I'd appreciate it.

while my example is John specific and I do particularly, I do right now sit on the seat with John.

I'm also taking the perspective of 25 years in government, right, and one of the things I point out in February is you don't want to predispose people in the initial conversations in a way where thinking about the dollars and the impact on the general fund

causes them to think that this is a poor idea, right?

And so part of what I think isn't totally articulated and thought out isn't about, you know, A's that are big or little and what it means to cap or jog or any other provider out there.

It is, you know, there are many different kinds of funding streams that, you know, when we got that first draft I said, you know,

You're going to put a public report out there that says, what happens when we take $0.10 of the thing?

I mean, you'll kill it before anybody has a discussion about it.

But when we start talking about these averages that are in the report that got posted on the website, that imagines it as new dollars.

Have we talked in the room at all about, what's the communication strategy for board and council and for the public to hear?

Because I think board and council have heard a lot about this.

The city and county are already investing over $15 million a year in transit now.

So is this new money on top of that?

Because it's written that way.

I don't know that I've ever heard that discussion, but maybe it happened before January when I was here.

And I'm not part of the small group, and I don't mean to be.

I'm just curious about what would the presentation say if one of your

What about the investments we already make that are, you know, minimum, what, just under seven million dollars in Albemarle County, about the same in the city for this year, but that's kind of camouflaged with federal funds from ARPA cares, etc.

Yeah, I guess I would say that there would just need to be a realization that

open-mindedness or curiosity or imagination about what those things could look like.

In some of this I think we're going to have to like have this conversation in public with and it's going to be because open meeting requirements and because it's the right thing to do it's going to be like we're going to you know we'll make a list frankly of the things

I will say this, I think there's more

I think there's more, at least in the city, there's more appetite to do bigger things and spend more money on transit than there has been ever.

And I would say that's true.

Certainly when we look at our urban right now, we're very different because we have the rural area and we have the urban area.

And I would think that's true to some degree for us as well.

The realization is Council stepped up last year in their strategic plan and identified transit as one of their nine major categories that they want to focus on.

And I would see investments that are, maybe they go ahead before or maybe they're redirected or re-imagined.

Right.

How does that go into the larger CARTA?

And I assume that the larger CARTA, what you're doing really holds into the effect of the studies that CARTA, I mean that TJPBC has done.

So you're making the infrastructure improvements

Those are all things that are already noted in all of our plans.

I don't think there's anything that's counter.

Not at all.

It did not.

What the governance study did, it's actually a really good read for is it identified communities that were similar and it talked about all these different models.

But the governance study never weighed in.

And I don't think we have never had a conversation about what is the right model for transit service provision.

The idea of Cardo was really to focus on broader long range.

What's the vision for transit?

How do we need to execute and deliver upon a vision?

Not necessarily who's going to provide those services, but how do we achieve the vision?

And to be frank, the missing link was revenue.

And part of that goes back to that 2022 vision study that was done that talked about this broad vision as well as this constrained vision.

I will think it will, when these conversations start to happen more, say when the cargo is stood up, just naturally it will become a lot of conversations about what is the best model.

And that may be one of those some months after CARTA stands up, if CARTA stands up and

the board is appointed beginning to talk about what's our preferred model, right?

What's our preferred model?

What does that look like?

How do we get there?

What does that all look like?

But now when we talked about, when the work team talked about it, we did not tackle that preferred model.

And I wanna say that to Mike.

There's been no conversation about specific service delivery as much as it is about

doing what the study says and that is enabling this legislation, enacting this legislation.

I would say that part of the work that Ann, Jacinda, Christine, and Ben have been doing is an iterative process.

So we will really be thinking about

putting this together, what Carter looks like today when we stand it up may look totally different in years because it evolves and it's supposed to.

The truth in putting them that, Garland, is you look at how our microcad has been accepted in Albemarle County.

People are hungry for transit.

It's just so fast stuff.

So when you come back on the 17th, you're going to be talking to people who haven't been following this as closely as this group has had, has followed it, really.

And I think this last piece is something that's really important and people are really going to be interested in.

So I would suggest within the presentation, including two things.

Number one is like talking about the implications for funding sources, right?

Like we have no idea where funding would go, but this

does open new spigots of funding coming in.

So that's one thing.

And it's a reasonable thing to ask, will the county have to spend more?

Will the county not have to spend any more money?

Great questions.

And there may not actually be answers, but those are gonna be obvious questions.

And the other one is to just, we had a whole bunch of discussion about when the timings of stuff is.

like laying that out within the presentation like hey we're gonna go to the General Assembly, they'll probably say don't have time for you, you're not on the agenda, we'll come back in 2026 etc.

And I think it's fair to say we all know because we're all we live in that world and it's going to be dependent on the flavor of the General Assembly too.

Yeah.

We've done that.

Since then.

And of course, it does call for lots more availability, frequency, et cetera, hours of the day, days of the week, of course.

It could be a real game changer for the kinds of activities that their residents clearly want but are not available now because of the current budget constraints.

And just one tiny point I would say, in the version of Bylaws that was sent out when I read them on Adobe, I see all Ben Chambers' comments.

You probably want to not do that often in the public, but I would say that his last comment is something I would have brought today, which is it reads like the two members of council and board can bind their elected bodies to a budget decision.

and Ben wisely points out that I don't know that two people can do this for their whole body.

So I would look at that from a language perspective, because it still reads that way to me.

And so we'll make sure that you don't.

We drafted the bylaws.

So Mike I really appreciate your comments and your thoughts because you really are getting to the practical and that has to be considered you know what am I doing with my budget over the next couple of years and and that's really I know we all appreciate that

I was going to say my thought was that I just was going to follow that up.

I said we need to get that on the agenda because that would be a good topic, an agenda for us now that it's completed and maybe, I don't know if we can, but we can look at maybe September for that.

That would be a great agenda.

Sam has asked me to come on the next champagne trip, and then November is Thanksgiving, December is Christmas, so I don't know when the ideal spot is, but I do think it's really important, and we are

What I would call the 98% completion on our microtransit study, which has an implementation recommended.

We have several things we'd like to bring to this group.

That's great.

If it's still a group interview.

So the recommendation is today that the Regional Transit Partnership endures the creation of the Charlottesville-Albemarle Regional Transit Authority.

And we would be endorsing that creation, right?

You don't have all the details or you don't have all the answers, but that's what will lead us down the road to getting the authority established so that we can more start working on the details.

And so that's the task for our meeting today.

And then we can go into the meeting, the joint meeting, to be honest with you Ann, and say to the city and the county and UVA,

The Regional Transit Partnership has endorsed this.

I move that this board endorse the creation

Mike is seconded.

Yes.

Mr. Pinkston?

Yes.

Ms. Oschrin?

Yes.

Ms. McKeel?

Yes.

Mr. Pruitt?

Aye.

Mr. Parker?

Yes.

Mr. de Campo Lopez?

Mr. Silsdorf.

Right.

Thank you.

We can say it with you now.

Thank you.

And with that, I'm conscious of our time, as always.

Do you want to do that or do you want to punt to stay on

Albemarle County

From public schools, Jamie Gellner is not here today because they're starting school.

And she said there is no way that I can be out of the office, you know, today.

She called and said, I apologize, Diantha, but she said, I will be sure to be at the next one.

And she said, I can't even let my designee go, because she said, we're just crunched.

I saw on the news that they actually have all of us currently?

Yes, they do.

They're excited.

Now, as you know, next month, they'll be down one or two, because that's the world's worst.

We are not, we've got everything covered.

I was going to say, that's a perfect set.

So go right ahead.

On the pupil side, first time since I've been here, we started the school year, there was no one on our wait list.

So we put all the kids that were

My team is doing a yoga job over there and it's been rough.

We've had some folks out because our numbers are always low when people are out.

That puts pressure and we've actually had to loan some transit drivers to people to go over some of those gaps.

On the transit side though, the next trip to Champaign has been locked in.

Mike is going, I think I've heard of Scott.

So definitely no October meeting.

We wanted to try to move, but we got, and we're still waiting on confirmation from

County Manager.

Jeff's going.

Jeff's going.

And Jamie's going.

And Jeff is going, I mean, I'm sorry.

Jamie's going from Elmore High Public Schools.

So Matt designated her to go.

Yes.

Just to highlight, it's a quick 36 hour basically on the ground.

We fly in.

You basically have dinner, depending on what time you get there.

The next day is all the activities are the next day.

There's a meeting with the organization, NTD.

It's a talking session a couple of hours.

Then we do a tour of their facilities, and then they finish up at their facility with their presentation.

It breaks down the numbers.

And then the next morning, we fly out because of the way it is.

We meet early in the morning.

about 4.30 to get to TSA.

And then we're back on the platforms.

And so it is really quick, but it is a really impactful trip.

There are some really wonderfully innovative ones there.

The technology that we've been talking about is real.

They are making it work.

They are teaching

how they're making it work and they're actually adding to their numbers based on the research they provided.

I'm sorry, hydrogen.

So they decided not to do any battery electric until the battery length expands.

That was their concern.

And since they've been using hydrogen, it's one fill up.

They go all day, fill up the next day.

So it's basically like filling up on a diesel bus.

And there was concerns, and he said he's heard a lot of concerns about the safety aspect.

He said that hydrogen is so light, it goes up.

It goes up, so it goes away.

It's actually safer than anything else.

Just don't put it in the zeppelin.

That's right, as long as you don't put it in the zeppelin.

That's right, it's the cover of a party.

But the fascinating thing is that they're making their own pirates.

It is just a really, it's a wonderful trip.

And just as a side, it is a good model for a regional system.

Two cities, a university, they provide transportation for middle school and high school students.

And their university is 55,000, which is a much bigger system than UVA.

They've been doing this, and this is just not the first year they've done this.

It is, yeah.

And no glitter, but that's all over the top.

But really great, so I'm thrilled that folks are able to go, and it's really exciting.

So we actually potentially gonna have a presentation on the 17th.

Oh, 17th, that's right.

About the Illinois trip?

Right.

Oh, that'd be great.

That'd be great.

So it's a matter of when we go back there, we can figure out the timing.

When he can come.

When he can come.

How would he love our vineyards?

We'll put them on a bus.

But really, it's really exciting that that many people are getting to go.

All right, so what else do you have then, Burm?

That's it.

Oh, OK. All right.

I don't know if I can compete with that.

I'm so excited.

Since that time, I think it's public knowledge, we have applied, at the announcement, we applied for an FTA grant.

We were not successful getting the no-low funding.

So we're sort of in a regroup and look at where we are.

Okay, so we had a really, and we see it,

It's a cute little bus called an E-gest zero emission battery electric bus.

It's a low floor, it's 20 feet long, so it fits in a parking space, but it can carry up to 20 people.

As long as they're good friends.

Some standing, yes.

So we had, because we finally got our DC chargers fully installed and functioning, we were able to keep it on grounds for two weeks.

And so it was a, we put it at those pace

The definition really is, you've probably all seen it, UTS at times, off peak periods, late at night, et cetera, we don't think you'd be driving a 35 foot diesel bus with five people on it.

That would be a nice supplement to be able to flip this out and to use the smaller vehicle.

We cannot just put a little fog in.

So one of the areas that we need transit, or have needed transit, is Old Abbey Road.

And the problem is we have two railroad bridges that the buses can't get under.

That was one.

Is anybody else going to the Zero Vision Bus Conference?

We missed our lunch lately.

Allison, myself, and one of our junior staff members are going to go to the Zero Vision Bus Conference, which they've been putting on for a number of years.

101 course is an extra fee the first day, but to get the basics.

And then the last update I'll have is just to kind of in the theme of we are thankfully fully staffed and looking good for all of our services and operations.

Oh, the other one is we're not quite there 100% yet, but we're rolling out some technological enhancements.

We've done the update with Translo.

Hopefully they'll actually start to show capacity later this semester.

Now you can track it on Transco, but we'll actually say, you know, frowny face, happy face, or meh for whether you're standing or not on the buses, which will be great for the students.

And then also new passenger counters.

That's cool.

I like your install one.

We'll do that over and over again.

Let's see.

Last week, I was asked to present the disability commission of the General Assembly to talk about paratransit.

and I did a bit of coordination with DRPT ahead of time after I created my presentation.

Former city county person, Amy Lawfors, chairing the commission.

And they did make a consensus bill.

I was there to take several of our recommendations forward.

at the end of the year for study by DRPT and budgeting that, which is good.

We had a conference in town just since we've been here at CTAB.

And for us, there are a couple of opportunities in the software realm that are

really interesting and some free things that are out there.

One is of course a big picture planning remix which everybody can access for free.

But the other is through our insurance provider we could add an incredible amount of tracking and functionality

that doesn't exist today totally free as well because they think it drives safer driving behaviors from the operators.

So that's really exciting.

As I mentioned before, we have completed the rural transit needs assessment, which is great.

Certainly calls for lots more of the same and some new things.

We're really close on finalizing

I've been torturing Brown's friend Randy Farwell for quite a long time now with changes.

And I will say that there are some really interesting impacts for us to pilot microtransit, I hope, within the next 12 months because there's a really sound case for it to articulate in the study.

I think it's also

practical and operationally doable, which is always a plus.

I may have said it before, I am less excited about what the battery electric vehicle implementation study

that I inherited says, which is basically without a lot of in route charging and if you're not able to buy more buses than you have today, then you can only electrify about 26% of your fleet.

That tells you a bit about what Champaign-Urbana is experiencing and going towards hydrogen because of the charge and the vehicles.

There's certainly a lot of action with the completion of all these studies for John.

Other than that, we have a couple of business items coming up shortly.

I need to train the board on FOIA because there's some changes and of course related to that is there's a

A new take on what it means to participate remotely, that we need to not do policy often.

This group will assume the policy that is approved by the commission would be sent to everybody by email and on the next agenda.

We just talked about that this afternoon.

So is that it, Mark?

So Garland and his friend are going to share their text.

I've been watching their texting back and forth.

It's fascinating.

We want all that.

The expression on Garland's face has been interesting.

I'm just teasing you there.

All right.

Having said that, Katie from DRPT couldn't join us today.

So we don't have a DRP report.

But you know, Brian, do you want to add anything?

Because you were at the conference

Great speech.

Well, Lucinda asked me to step in, I guess, and talk about a regional transit vision, I guess.

And I set up some time at a fair.

I'm not their executive director, but basically the chair of their board, the person who was building all of their complex out of, I think, Blacksburg.

That's right.

Anyway, and so just to get a sense of what would be helpful, they called it a keynote, which I thought was a little scary.

A little bit scary, but like a little ostentatious.

It was just basically,

But a lot of people from DRPT were there, so it was really nice for them to hear about the work that we're doing here.

So is it podcast or taker?

And I think the effectiveness of his speech was that over time, collectively, the group can move the ball down the court.

And the importance, I'm sure, of just getting together and talking.

Because what I've found is, or I've found over the years, is that the transit provider update

Lots of the sharing of an update to this room have been more impactful sometimes than some of the other items we've dealt with.

It's just getting people around the table and listening and sharing information.

It's critical.

Very nice, very nice.

But anyway, it's all good.

So I think we're done except for staff updates.

So are there any staff updates?

Oh, I'm sorry.

Yeah, so this will be fast.

So the Piedmont Mobility Alliance, which is city, county, UVA, both hospitals, many different organizations, we're all about regional collaboration,

We're taking it to the next notch next week by having a joint social with our counterparts from the Shenandoah Valley, which is the Shenandoah Valley Bicycle Coalition.

They also do pedestrian stuff, interestingly enough.

And so that's going to be a tour of Waynesboro's new park Thursday, August 29th.

That's the type of thing I'd really say more to the policy board, but it's a little late to make that announcement on Wednesday.

So next Thursday, August 29th in Sunset Park in Waynesboro and

The thing that I'm most excited about is in Waynesboro, their parks planner acts sort of like Chris Ginsick does here where he does transportation planning too.

Yeah, and flyers by the door.

That's fine.

And I did, you did ask for that earlier and I was about to forget.

Yeah, all good.

Any other updates or other business?

I don't have any other thing to say.

It does sound like from your calendars that we're not going to have a meeting in October.

but we will have a September meeting.

So our next meeting is September the 26th, 2024, same place, same time.

No, no, it's okay.

I just want to share a few thoughts that I thought is relevant to this meeting.

So after asking your question of the difference between RTP and RTA, I was digesting what you said and thinking a little bit and I thought that one thing that's important to

and the difference, even though they might work great in very similar ways at the beginning, the RTP was, my understanding, always perceived as something temporary, a transition.

So that adds to the lack of credibility, perhaps in terms of columns and all that, right?

On the RTP, I believe it's much more kind of long-term,

I think that's something very important to think about and I like that.

The other thing that I just want to share quickly is that for a moment, Mr. Pinkston, you mentioned that jump operates somehow

It was created by the TJPDC in the late 80s.

So it was always created to be a two-point collaboration for transportation needs and et cetera.

As a matter of fact, the shareholders of JUMP are the CEO of the overall government

I just need to make a friendly amendment since at some point we'll have to publicize that John turns 50 next year and so it is actually the first, you know, the beginnings of John is 1975.

It's okay.