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HomeMy WebLinkAboutTransportation Board - Minutes - 04/20/2005MEETING MINUTES of the TRANSPORTATION BOARD April 20, 2005 5:45 p.m. City of Fort Collins -Municipal Building Community Room 215 N. Mason Street FOR REFERENCE: CHAIR: Brent Thordarson 679-2165 VICE CHAIR: Gary Thomas 482-7125 STAFF LIAISON: Mark Jackson 416-2029 ADMIN SUPPORT: Cynthia Cass 224-6058 BOARD MEMBERS PRESENT: Sara Frazier Neil Grigg Jeannette Hallock-Solomon Bruce Henderson Tim Johnson Ed Robert Gary Thomas Brent Thordarson Lee Watkins Kevin Westhuis CITY STAFF: Don Bachman Matt Baker Kathleen Bracke Cynthia Cass Tom Frazier Randy Hensley Mark Jackson Ron Phillips ABSENT: Heather Trantham OTHERS IN ATTENDANCE: APPROVED Regular Meeting Minutes Page 2 of 9 Transportation Board Apri120,2005 1. CALL TO ORDER The meeting was called to order by Chair Thordarson at 5.53 p.m. 2. AGENDA REVIEW There were no changes to the agenda. 3. PUBLIC COMMENT None. 4. APPROVAL OF MINUTES (MARCH 2O05) There was a motion and a second to approve the minutes of March 23, 2005 aspresented. The question was called and the motion carried by a unanimous vote, 10-0. 5. COUNCIL LIAISON REPORT None 6. DISCUSSION/INFORMATIONAL ITEMS a. ELECTION UPDATE— D. Bachman Bachman briefly went over the results from the April election. The board discussed possible reasons why certain measures were passed. b. TRANSIT/DIAL-A-RIDE DEPARTMENT OVERVIEW — T. Frazier Tom Frazier gave an overview of the Transfort/Dial-A-Ride department. Topics of his presentation included ridership numbers from 1997-2004 for Transfort, DAR and FoxTrot. He also talked about expenditures and cost per trip. Lastly, 2005 Transfort/DAR revenues were discussed. Another item to note is that on May 10, the Intergovernmental Agreement negotiations between ASCSU and the City will be discussed. ASCSU wants to change the contract from how it's been done for the past several years. The main reason the issue is going to council has to do with the way that calculations have been done for the past 25 years and the fact that Transfort has basically focused its transit service on the university. Over 50% of service is focused on CSU including taking into consideration their class times and such. In exchange, for the last 25 years, ASCSU has paid a flat amount for that level of service. Now, ASCSU has decided to reduce the contract to just buying individual passes, which means that CSU will not be getting the level of service they've gotten in the past and we need to talk about those philosophies with council. APPROVED Regular Meeting Minutes Page 3 of 9 Transportation Board April 20, 2005 Board comments/auestions: Grigg: Do we sell passes to other categories of customers? T. Frazier: We have a marketing program called PassFort which are sold for $35 a pass. Phillips: In these other cases when we sell the PassFort program, we don't center the service on that business like we do with CSU. So if they want to be treated the same as any other business, we don't know that there's any obligation to center service on campus, which is part of the debate. Frazier mentioned that there is one other source of funding, Job Access, which is basically setup for commuters. The City used to get around $130,000/year. This year the City received $311,000 and is anticipating about $460,000 next year. Henderson: Getting back to the CSU issue, it seems that this would have a huge impact on ridership and I would think that the university would have a huge vested interest in how much that would exacerbate the parking problems they have. Has anyone gone to them to talk about that? With potential projections? Phillips: Yes, we've tried. c. MASON TRANSPORTATION CORRIDOR UPDATE —K. Bracke For the benefit of new members, Bracke explained the history of the Mason Corridor project as well as the current items of interest. The presentation included the following highlights: • MTC — Where we have been • Public participation • What could it look like? • Bike/Ped + Busway • What is BRT? • MTC — Benefits and Who Benefits? • Current Project Status • MTC — Design & Engineering • MTC — Where are we today? • Future for MTC • Phased Implementation • Potential Funding Options • Capital Cost Estimates • Community Investment Examples APPROVED Regular Meeting Minutes Page 4 of 9 Transportation Board April 20,2005 Board comments/Questions: Grigg: Why are some folks opposed to the project? Bracke: I think there are some people in the community that think it's a great idea, but they don't want to pay for it. There might be some elements of the plan, such as the BRT, that people are not comfortable with. Westhuis: Let me relay some of the things that I've heard. The town's not big enough, you can anywhere in 15-20 minutes so why would using MTC be any faster. I don't think it would be. You need to show people what the benefits are. Look down the road. Think bigger. It's not so much what you'll save in travel time today, but several years down the road. This is a great north/south spine in Fort Collins, but what about east/west? Bracke: Good point. Westhuis: Another concept would be how the MTC ties into moving people along the Front Range from Pueblo to Cheyenne. You know, think bigger picture. Bracke: I think those are great ideas. Johnson: I think one of the things in the Master Transportation Plan, if you look 20 years out and at the need for capacity on College for instance; think about 8-10 lanes and where you would have to put them. It would have to take businesses out on either the east or the west side of the street and how much that would cost to do that? What the MTC does is give you an alternative that gets people through the core of the city during those peak capacity times. Westhuis: Also, we had that congestion problem last week on Harmony and I saw that as an opportunity -- if somehow you could capture the pain that people felt last week and tell them that that's what it's going to be in 15 years. Take a snapshot of that and say, "That's the future of Fort Collins!" Use it for publicity. Jackson: You're right. RTD did that in their FastTracks campaign. There was a discussion in which various strategies to get voter support for the project were brought up. Robert asked if there were a way to obtain a copy of the comments that were collected from the failed vote — find out why people did not vote for it last time. At the conclusion of the discussion, Jackson stated that he would like to acknowledge publicly the level of effort that Bracke and her team have gone through in the last three years to keep this project afloat. APPROVED Regular Meeting Minutes Transportation Board April 20, 2005 Page 5 of 9 d. TRANSPORTATION BOARD 2005 WORK PLAN —B. Thordarson Chair Thordarson stated that having a web page dedicated to the Board has been in the Work Plan for some time, but nothing has come of it. He stated that some of the things a page might be good for are to list things on the Board's Work Plan such as some metrics. The board discussed this topic in great detail and in the end decided that more research needs to be done first before launching a site. Jackson suggested that the board have another discussion on metrics, since that type of information would be of the most use to the community. Once the board has that discussion, the next step would be to figure out how to best get it out to the community. Jackson noted that in the meantime, navigating around the fcgov.com/transportation web site is a great way to get information. 7. ACTION ITEMS a. BUILDING ON BASICS (BOB) UPDATE —D. Bachman Bachman distributed several handouts and then gave a PowerPoint presentation. Highlights of the presentation included: • Capital Sales Tax Renewal - November 2005 Election One '/4 cent for capital projects Possible'/4 cent for additional needs • Voter Approved Sales Taxes • Revenue Projections • Preliminary List - 34 Projects - Total Unfunded cost = $229M (2004 $) • Developing Project List - Boards and Commissions input - Staff Input - Combined top priorities • Cultural, Library and Recreation— 12 projects - $132 M • Police-2 projects - $1M • Natural Areas — 1 unfunded project - $5M • Transportation— 19 Projects - $91M unfunded • Tentative Tax Renewal Schedule After the presentation, Bachman reiterated that November 2005 will be the only chance to renew the tax before it expires. The floor was then open for discussion. Board comments/auestions: Robert: How did you balance the need versus essentiality? APPROVED Regular Meeting Minutes Transportation Board April 20, 2005 Page 6 of 9 Bachman: That was one of the scoring categories. I can't describe offhand exactly how we calculated the scoring for each of these, but it was a team of individuals from all these areas who know the city and basically scored each individual project independently and then combined scores. A lot of things fell out very logically. Bachman: If you'll refer to the letter from last November, you need to decide if you want to reiterate that same recommendation to council or if you want to ponder it for a month to see what council does on May 10. Thomas: For the benefit of those of you that weren't here when we went through this last year, the Master Street Plan has $1.1 billion in projects that are listed. We were charged to go over that list and whittle it down to our best $90-$100M. That was not a small thing to do. It took several meetings and several hours to get the list that we submitted to council. I share that with you to say that it is not a simple thing. If we say we want to revisit it, you need to know that it's going to take a lot of work. With that said, if the new board sees things that don't make sense or things that should be on there, then I guess we ought to do the right thing. Thordarson: I think we could start by running down the list and briefly describe what they are so the new members can get an idea of the projects. Robert: I don't think I'm going to be concerned about your list of priorities. What I'm concerned about is how we're going to get there from here. You just can't get there by nickel and diming this every few years through a BOB program. You need $20 more million dollars a year to even approach our Master Street Plan. So to say we're going to pull out 5-6 transportation projects and do this again in a few years... it's an infinite problem. We said in our letter to the City Council that when the budget is developed, essential City services must be fully funded at the expense of non -essential. The bottom line is I think we need to be looking at how we can get out from under this BOB concept and let's get some sound, fiscal management into this city. The BOB thing is a continued effort of a Band-Aid treatment. It's not getting us there and it never will. Other cities, including Colorado Springs, have realized that. We're one of the few that continues to do this. S. Frazier: I agree with that. It seems like as a voter and not as a board member, we're constantly voting on a'/4 cent for different things. Didn't we talk about having somebody from Colorado Springs come and talk to us on how they were successful? Staff agreed to contact the Colorado Springs folks for a future agenda. After more discussion, Chair Thordarson called for a motion. Grigg made a motion to recommend to Council that they go ahead with the cent BOB initiative, but hold off on the additional '/e cent tax in favor of the newer long term comprehensive transportation funding mechanism. The motion was seconded by Johnson. Thordarson asked if it would be okay to make a friendly amendment to the motion to include the phrase: proceeding based on the list that the board already submitted on November 18. Grigg and Johnson accepted. The motion did not pass (9-1). APPROVED Regular Meeting Minutes Transportation Board April 20, 2005 Page 7 of 9 Johnson then made the following motion: The Transportation Board advises City Council to proceed with the % cent sales tax initiative, with the project list as previously submitted. The Transportation Board cautions Council that while any amount of transportation capital is helpful and necessary, what is available from the BOB process is inadequate and we need long term, comprehensive funding mechanisms for transportation needs. Westhuis seconded the motion. The motion carried by a majority vote (10-0). Jackson and Thordarson will coordinate a letter to Council. Bachman said that he will make sure that project descriptions are included in the packets for next month. b. KECHTER/ZIEGLER ROUNDABOUT — M. Baker Baker stated that Transportation staff has completed its analysis of the Ziegler/Kechter intersection and believe that a modern roundabout would be a suitable alternative for the improvement of this intersection and respectfully submit the proposal to the board for review and input. Baker went over the details of the design and all the criteria that the analysis covered. The board had questions about the pedestrian safety of the roundabout considering its location in relation to nearby schools. One suggestion was to place a crossing guard at the roundabout. The board also stressed that there should be safety education in the schools, especially for the high school kids. The board would also suggest an effort in getting the word out to the neighborhoods; a public relations plan. The following motion was made by Grigg: The Transportation Board endorses this roundabout plan subject to development of a youth pedestrian safety education plan. There was a second by Henderson. The motion carried by a unanimous vote (9-0). 8. REPORTS a. BOARD MEMBER REPORTS Grigg: American Public Works Association. APWA released a national traffic signal report card and they assigned traffic signal operations a "D-minus" around the country. Thomas: Loveland Transportation Board Report. They are in the throes of looking at their Master Street Plans and making a recommendation to Council on a prioritized list of projects. They'll have the same problem — funding. They feel that their sales tax is growing so they are perhaps more optimistic about funding than we are. Johnson: Signal at Power Trail. Parks has been doing some upgrades, notably the signal at UP to Power Trail crossing at Drake. They also realigned the trail so they don't have these bad movements by APPROVED Regular Meeting Minutes Transportation Board April 20, 2005 Page 8 of 9 kids getting into the fast Drake traffic. The other good thing about the Power Trail is the prototype runs from Edora Park now to Horsetooth and it will be extended to Golden Meadows this year and then beyond that to Ziegler the following year. Robert: Missing Sign/Light. At the intersection of Main Street and N. Lemay, the City removed a couple of power poles there. Attached to one was a Caution — 30 mph blinking light that's no longer there. Thordarson: Snowstorm. Last Sunday I noticed an interesting phenomenon with the snowstorm. It was blowing from north to south and at some intersections, the snow had filled in the traffic light signals and it obliterated visibility. There was an accident at one of those intersections. I can't say conclusively that it was the cause, but it could have been. I don't know that there's anything to be done about that. Diede: The newer LED lights don't put out that much heat. The older bulbs did and the snow would melt relatively quickly. Liaisons to Other Boards. We were talking about our board's web site earlier tonight and I thought I would mention that for people who are liaisons to other boards, go to their web site, which is set up exactly the same way as ours on fcgov.com and you can get agendas and minutes there. b. STAFF REPORTS Bachman: Mulberry Closure. The final lift will be done on Friday and Mulberry should be reopened on Saturday. N. College Closure. Just to forewarn you, we'll be closing N. College at the BNSF tracks from Sunday at 2 a.m. to Tuesday for repairs. The closure dates were actually chosen by the local businesses. Frazier: Poetry in Motion. On May 11, the board is invited to this event which is sponsored by CSU, Poudre School District and the City. It's a program that matches art from the school district with poems written by individuals of all ages in the community and they are displayed on the buses. It starts at 4 p.m. Next Agenda: • Intro to Transportation Finance • Overview of the US287 south EOS APPROVED Regular Meeting Minutes Transportation Board April 20, 2005 9. OTHER BUSINESS None 10. ADJOURN Chair Thordarson adjourned the meeting at 9:20 p.m. Respectfully submitted, azav Cynthia Cass, Executive Admin Assistant City of Fort Collins — Transportation Services Page 9 of 9