Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAboutParking Advisory Board - Minutes - 06/13/2016MINUTES of the CITY OF FORT COLLINS PARKING ADVISORY BOARD June 13, 2016 5:30 p.m. 215 North Mason – Community Room Fort Collins, CO 80524 FOR REFERENCE: Chair: Susan Kirkpatrick Vice Chair: Holly Wright Staff Liaison: Kurt Ravenschlag 221-6386 Administrative Support: Melissa Brooks 224-6161 BOARD MEMBERS PRESENT: CITY STAFF PRESENT: Susan Kirkpatrick, Chair Craig Dubin, Transfort, Communications & Admin Manager Holly Wright, Vice Chair Melissa Brooks, Transfort, Administrative Aide George Newman Cameron Gloss, CDNS, Planning Manager Nora Hill Kyle Lambrecht, Engineering, Civil Engineer II Steve Schroyer Aaron Iverson, FC Moves, Sr. Transportation Planner Stephanie Napoleon Timothy Wilder, Transfort, Service Development Manager Bob Criswell Michael Short ABSENT: OTHERS IN ATTENDANCE Councilmember Kristin Stephens 1. CALL TO ORDER Chair, Kirkpatrick called the meeting to order at 5:30 2. WELCOME AND INTRODUCTIONS 3. AGENDA REVIEW 4. APPROVAL OF MINUTES Wright moves to accept May meeting minutes and Schroyer seconds. The minutes were approved unanimously. 5. COUNCIL LIAISON REPORT *DRAFT* Meeting Minutes June 13, 2016 Page 2 Kirkpatrick: Kristen Stephens is not able to attend PAB meetings because of a reoccurring pervious engagement. 6. PUBLIC COMMENT No public in attendance to comment. 7. DISSUCSION ITEMS A. Review Budgeting for Outcome Offers Gloss: Budgeting for Outcomes is a competitive budget process in which the City takes a free market approached. Each department competes for the budget and submits core offers, which is the base level of services each department supplies. Enhancement offers are additional, unique and innovative offers that the department would like to start providing. There is a filtering process that starts with the Results Teams and their different topical areas, like Economic Health. These results teams contain employees from different City departments and a few citizens. They vet the offers that come in. The offers are synced. What they look at is the problem, what is the type of services, what resources will it take and how does the offer tie into the City’s Strategic Plan. Then a line is basically drawn anything above the line gets funded anything below the line does not get funded. Then the City Manager and City Administration will give those recommendations to Council. Council are the ultimate decision makers. Sometimes Council will want to see recommended offers that are below the line to get funded. That is the overview of how BFO works. Kirkpatrick: Tell us about the timing. Gloss: Through the summer it goes through rounds within the groups then by August it goes to City administration and then on to Council. Kirkpatrick: The deadline is the 19 th of August. This gives the public, boards and commissions a chance to weigh in. This is the open moment. There are decisions that can be influenced and the lines have not been drawn yet. Gloss: We do know how much money is budgeted and what the ceiling is. Kirkpatrick: It is a two year budget for 2017-18. Dubin: Council will have two readings. The first will allow for public comment and during the second reading it will be ratified. Kirkpatrick: There is a requirement in the City Charter that the budget has to be balanced and completed by the end of the calendar year. Hill: How are they ranked? Gloss: Based on the Strategic Plan and how well it fits into the plan. Kirkpatrick: The color coding is green for enhancements and blue for core offers. Enhancement Offers: Engineering, FC Moves Transfort & CDNS 1.8: Willow Street Parking, Kyle Lambrecht, Engineering Lambrecht: The project was started in a design report in conjunction with the Downtown Development Authority. We are looking at improvements along Willow Street from Union Pacific Rail Road, east of College Avenue to east of the Linden Street intersection. We are looking to do multimodal urban design, utilities and parking improvements. The offer was included in BOB 2.0, Building on Basics tax initiative, so it was fully funded. In 2018, we receive design funding in 2019 we receive the rest of the funding for construction. The offer is for $700,000 which is to finish the design process. One of the project goals is to maximize *DRAFT* Meeting Minutes June 13, 2016 Page 3 parking. Right now 19 spots were added and a total of 87 will be added once the project is constructed. We are committed to working with current business. There will be some spots that have to be removed because of existing driveway but will be relocated. The parking will be outside diagonal. This meets PFA standards to drive in the middle of the road and give PFA the ability to extend outriggers. It doesn’t prohibit right in right out to business. If there was center parking you couldn’t take a left into a business and deliveries can park in the middle of the road and would not back up traffic, similar to Linden, Jefferson and Walnut. This will also create a buffer for pedestrians. Schroyer: $700,000 seems like a lot to me to have it designed. This is phenomenal for the entire area though. Lambrecht: It will tie in a multimodal connection from the River District to Old Town. There are street oversized development obligations. Kirkpatrick: BOB 2.0, the public votes on the set of projects and is only implemented when there is cash. It is a pay as you go program as opposed to a debt. Lambrecht: The $700,000 includes looking at utility details, significant storm drainage, water line relocations, and electrical relocation. Most will be related to the urban designs like beautification. We go through a request for proposal to find a designer and the City manages the design vendor. Not sure if it was cost all $700,000, but could come back to give you an update of the final costs. Kirkpatrick: Do we have a motion to recommend this project? Shroyer motions and Wright seconds. Wright: Since this goes to Linden Street when Old Elk is built it would make sense that the design feature would extend down to Lincoln. Lambrecht: It doesn’t make sense to not design this holistically and not have the River District in the back of our mind. Kirkpatrick: All those in favor- this project was unanimously approved to be support by the PAB. 3.17 Trip Reduction and Efficiency Program, Aaron Iverson, FC Moves Iverson: This offer is about Travel Demand Management (TDM) to create a program that looks at trip efficiency in a comprehensive way to reduce travel demand on our streets which helps with reducing the parking demand. This is the missing link in some of the efforts that the City is focused on. As the offer is written it is structured as a contract with an outside firm to run the program with City staff to manage the vendor. Look at it how we launched the bike share, an outside vendor is running the program. The cost of $250,000 each year, was settled on by researching communities of same size, demographics and universities, it ranged from $100,000 to over a million depending on the community. There is a lot to TDM, basic categories are improving options of bikes and buses, like with transit passes, encouraging companies to have showers and bike parking at their locations. Implementing different policies like land use that incentives someone to carpool instead of using a single occupancy vehicle. The offer is to bring this into a single program that creates different incentives to encourage employers to adopt these programs and education efforts as well. We found that education and outreach was effective with the FC Bikes program. Wright: Where it says technology applications including program for mobile devices, does it tie into our Downtown Plan of putting the sensors? Iverson: Yes, it would supply real time parking information. *DRAFT* Meeting Minutes June 13, 2016 Page 4 Newman: The $250,000 is for a contract to be written with a 3 rd party. In 2019 if the City decided not to fund it, it would end? Iverson: Yes it would end. There is no plan to bring this in house. It was the executive decision to take this approach and there was sensitivity about if it would require new City employees. In theory every program is up for renew every two years. We would have to seek funding no matter what. Criswall: What will the money be spent on? Iverson: Some of the other programs I looked at did a lot of education efforts. We would probably use the money to grow the Smart Trips Program. We would use the money for outreach efforts with employers to create a menu of what they could do with their employees, like transit passes, create flex schedules with employees, developing facilities to encourage the alternative trips. Criswall: Would the City help fund the business to build showers or is it up to the business to fund it. Iverson: The City would encourage businesses to build their own. Kirkpatrick: In our recommendation to Council regarding the Downtown Plan parking elements, we recommend TDM. This is critical to one of the recommendations that we have made. This looks different from what we agreed. Working with employers and many of the trips are small business that already have flex schedules with no shower possibilities. Is this realistic approach, how does this work with small businesses? Iverson: There needs to be more flexible concepts, whether it is transit oriented and incentives transit passes. The other side is the parking management side, being able to manage this resource and how to make that available to employees and visitors of Downtown. Pricing parking correctly would help people make the choice to cheaper or easier; I don’t know exactly what the answer is with smaller employers and would have to be looked at more deeply. Kirkpatrick: What does success look like to you in this program? Iverson: We would see a reduction in trips of 15 - 30% and a reduction of 10 - 15% in parking demand. Schroyer: I think this is the cart before the horse. If it is going to collect and monitor data I am all for that. I am not for trying to come up with innovative trips and parking demand solutions until we figure out what we doing with parking downtown. Wright: If we can increase charging stations and have an app tied into it, that would be a positive because of the Climate Action Plan. If that is a part of this I am in favor. Also promoting FC Bikes and alternative transportation is a positive thing. Newman: Is this hiring one or two people who would be dedicated to this over a year, on this project only. Do you identify this company ahead of time and what it would cost so you know how much to ask for in the offer? Iverson: We would find a contractor that could dedicate resources, to make it effective it would have to be someone in Fort Collins. Not sure what that would look like yet. The company has not been identified. I looked at peer communities and went with the mid-range. This seemed like a reasonable place to start and it could grow or shrink. Over the next few years we can look at what is working and what is not. There is a pretty large range of elements for this program. Fort Collins is unique because we already have many parts in place. There will be some learning curve here. Short: This is how you get local businesses to buy in and offer resources that they wouldn’t have on an individual basis. It seems to be better executed in house. *DRAFT* Meeting Minutes June 13, 2016 Page 5 Napoleon: In your research, how do you incentives businesses to promote alternative modes. Right now the parking garage is not a huge expense. How do you get a shower in businesses, it seems like a major cost. Iverson: Increasing parking costs and as they look for the alternative, employers can give them transit passes. If we still have cheap parking other programs are less likely to be effective. There are some communities that use the money to create grant opportunities to add facilities. Schroyer: I see this coming after paid on street parking. Kirkpatrick: I am not comfortable with this outline. I think that TDM is a critical element of parking management. This approach is weak. I agree with Mike that this has on going interests that we would be much better served by dedicated resources and strategies that may role out more carefully in conjunction with other things going on. This approach using a third party that may or may not communicate with other elements that are important right now of the Downtown Plan does not have my support. These comments will be reflected in the letter to Council. 78.5 City Plan, Transportation Master Plan and Transit Operating Plan, Cameron Gloss, Community Development & Neighborhood Services Gloss: This is a joint offer to combine three important plans, take the Land Use Plan, Transportation Master Plan and Transit Operating Plan and having a public process that is synchronized, so that we are looking at the interrelationship between land use and transportation. We talked to this board about the update to the City Plan and as we have framed it, we had the 97 plan that was a complete rewrite of the City Plan and we were thinking that all the changes that have happen that we have had a very successful plan. However, many things have changed and this is an opportunity to look strategically at the next 20 years at this relationship of land use and transportation and how we maximize our investment and how do we overcome friction we have had with development. We had this notion that we will become a denser city but when we try to do that we have had parts of town where we have had disagreements, how this is going to happen and where. We have found with some of the regional issues if we don’t address them now we will export growth to other community. That is not a good thing; it increases the impact to our transportation system recovering the cost. That is why we have this unified approach on the transit side; one challenge is that we have had great success with MAX, also a lot of interest tying into MAX. How do we maximize the investment with more cross connections? In 97 we talked generally about transit and a dream, now the dream is a reality with MAX. We haven’t gotten to the next level of evolution. All three together is about 1.4 million and we will rewrite City Plan. We will look at how effective we have been and this one thing we have talked to the Planning and Zoning Board about essentially coming up with a report card. We have been doing monitoring over the years, there were some areas we are doing great, then there has been fails, and then just okay. Trying to look at very strategically what is really broken to focus our attention on. I think if we hear from the development community and the same thing from citizens, certain themes come up over and over again. Kirkpatrick: Where is the parking element, what role does this board play in this? Wilder: We still have the Downtown Parking Plan. This would be an element of that. There is a separate discussion about a city wide parking plan. That would be way to introduce a specific parking element besides principles and polices that we have. A plan separate to this effort. That is not included in this effort. *DRAFT* Meeting Minutes June 13, 2016 Page 6 Gloss: It is not included, but something that might come up at Council, is that parking is a larger comprehensive strategy for land use. You cannot divorce the two. Some people want to make this discussion all about parking management that is not what this is about. It is about something much larger, an effective vibrant livable downtown and parking is one element. Parking management has so many elements that contribute to it whether it is TDM, on street facilities, parking garages, what private developers provide on their sites, they are all interrelated. Looking at the city over all, parking is something we need to spend more time managing not just in the downtown. Wright: On this enhancement number 4, pertains to us. Mobility, transportation options and accessibility are increasingly important for people of all ages and abilities. Advances in demand management and the integration of parking as a transportation asset provide new tools for transportation planning applications. This effort helps to direct resources into programs and infrastructure projects while decreasing dependence on motor vehicles. We talked about different things happening around town like the stadium. I think that considering infrastructure projects and trying to move people around. As the city grows and infill happens there is opportunity, this is how I look at this enhancement, that we can fix somethings. If we can get ahead of that as money comes available it is important. Gloss: You are going to start to see parking management types of challenges as we continue to intensify. Right now there are a lot of surface lots and that is not what we want. As that develops more there is going to be tough questions about how to manage parking. Kirkpatrick: What is the sense of the board on this one? Short: I am glad to see that the numbers were not too low. A year ago there was discussion about this and the numbers were about half. Gloss: You have to remember that it is including all three plans. Denver is going through the same exercise right now. They are working on combining five of their plans. Shroyer: It will be urban related with the amount of land in the area. You work will be cut out for you. Kirkpatrick: This one offer is smooth sailing for us. 67.8 Downtown Shuttle, Timothy Wilder, Transfort/Parking Wilder: As long as we have had the Strategic Plan this idea surfaces as part of this effort. This is an idea to move people downtown outside of Transfort’s normal routing. This idea has grown new life since the planning effort that is out there; Woodward and student housing project on the north east corner of Lincoln and Lemay. The idea of circulating around to the different parking structures and the idea of connecting to CSU is very appealing. MAX does connect to CSU on the east side of campus. We do have a lot of interest in connecting the Lory Student Center to downtown. We are hoping to gain interest from private sectors, namely the student housing, which usually does their own shuttle and hope that they will partner with Transfort to pay for part of that shuttle. Newman: How much of the revenue would offset the expenditures? Wilder: Typically our revenue recovery is about 15%, but it really depends on the route we are talking about and what you count. CSU and ASCU pay Transfort for services and part of that agreement is that they can ride Transfort for free, so it is difficult to calculate that. Generally it is 15%. Many downtown circulators operate for free because of quick stops and movement of many people like the 16 th Street Mall. Newman: Have you looked at what this might do to cannibalize fares for the rest of Transfort? *DRAFT* Meeting Minutes June 13, 2016 Page 7 Wilder: I don’t think that is our primary concern, taking about fares from other routes, the service we see it as growing ridership as a whole. It has a distinct market and area it is serving. The routes that could develop efficiencies are Route 5, which goes down Lemay Ave. and Route 14 which both use Lincoln Ave. We would be providing better service to these current routes. Kirkpatrick: Is this offer scalable? Wilder: I don’t know what the offer says; I would say it is limited scalability, in more of the span of service. I am concern that it shows 30 minute service which I think is insufficient to provide the right level we need for a downtown circulator. Ideally we would try to provide peak service when possible. Kirkpatrick: What does this have to do with parking? Wilder: The main point is the circulation in terms of between structures and the impact of reducing the parking element. Kirkpatrick: Tourist could come to Odell’s get on the bus and come back into town. Wilder: Woodward has talked about workers coming downtown for lunch and the out of town visitors. Schroyer: This is an implementation of the other one we didn’t like of trip reduction and efficiency program. I can touch and feel this, makes me happy. Wilder: We do have late night routes, Green and Gold that operate until 2:00 am. One route is very successful the other not. We are recommending cutting that route. Napoleon: This is a good alternative since we have a limited amount of cabs. Newman: I am more concerned with the 30 minute service. Wilder: That is a basic level of service and when we talk about sufficient levels of getting riders on a route without having to look at a schedule is about 15 minutes, 10 minutes is better. We would like to achieve that, but it is a big cost element. That is where we look at the base and build off of the base with partnerships and see if we can get that to a higher level of service. Newman: You are asking for us to support something that might not work. Explain how you would go from a base to something that would. Wilder: I have started an effort to reach out to the business namely the student housing project to see if they would be willing to partner to offset their cost of a shuttle service to put that money in a viable route that the City would help to operate and to partner in terms of financial resources. 67.11 Transfort Sunday Service, Timothy Wilder, Transfort/Parking Wilder: This has been proposed now for the third cycle. This includes MAX it would operate 20 minutes service on Sundays. This would fill a gap that our community has for mobility options on Sunday. Our number one request from the public is to provide Sunday service. We are hearing this from a couple of different markets; one is workers needing to get to work on Sundays and visitors coming to Fort Collins. It is a pricey offer; part of the reason is that once you get into an additional day we need additional support staff to be brought on board, like Dispatch, Road Supervisors, and other support services to make this operate effectively. It could be saleable down just to MAX. The span of service is 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Criswall: Is the 1.4 million annual amounts for all bus service or MAX only. Wilder: That includes the other routes too. It is basically the routes that now operate on Saturday today. It would be mimicked for Sunday service. It includes maintenance, fuel and the additional support services. *DRAFT* Meeting Minutes June 13, 2016 Page 8 Schroyer: Is there a threshold if you don’t get enough riders you would suspense the service and the funds? Wilder: This is a little different. Typically we would have productivity standards of 20 passengers per hour but given that once you go to a Sunday, the ridership productivity goes down. There would be a base line. If the appropriated funds were on a smaller scale and it did not meet standards, they would absorb and get reallocated. For this it would have to be reanalyzed at the next budget cycle because it is a big item. Kirkpatrick: Do you have any sense that one is being suggested? Wilder: I am not privy to that. Schroyer: The biggest impact is the circulator on employees. To figure out an incentive program instead of going to college guys, look at downtown businesses. There is more there than on Sundays. Criswell: I can’t say which would be more beneficial. Wilder: One is providing a gap that we currently have. Most systems do provide Sunday services. We are now at the point that we are a big enough community Sunday makes sense. The circulator makes sense and serves a different market. I couldn’t advise you on which one is more important. Criswell: If Woodward does not operate on weekends, would they be open to letting their parking lot be used for the circulator to get people downtown? Wilder: It is leverage to use during the discussions. I have nothing to come forward with. If the offer is funded, I could go to them and say that we have funding and allows some negotiations. Kirkpatrick: If we were to say we were supportive of these offers but want to raise concerns of the frequency of the shuttle to see if it is effective we recommend that it be more frequent than less. These two elements are really part of the TDM and the ability to do public private partnerships. We stress those pieces as part of our ongoing effort to achieve outcomes. Criswell: My main concern about the shuttle is the limitations. If it is so limited it won’t work. If you increased it to 10 to 15 minutes it might work. I am afraid that every 30 minutes will not be attractive to people. Wright: There is an opportunity to work with business and extra funding could come from them and lessen the time to a reasonable amount. Kirkpatrick: Could we indicate the concern that if the resources were adequate and specifically to increase the frequency would be our recommendation. Wilder: if you reduce the length of the route it could increase the frequency. That is another way to look at that. The estimate is based on current service. The primary cost is the operators. Hill: The shuttle is great but Sunday is better. I have seen tourist standing at MAX stations on Sundays. Kirkpatrick: We can make a strong recommendation on both items for separate reasons. That is what we should do. Short: We should call out our endorsement of the 10 Transfort routes will make that offer viable. If you only have MAX you will lose the effectiveness of the offer. The memo to Council is tabled, we do have the outlined. In our packet, Kurt sent a RP3 evaluation based on our discussion last month. *DRAFT* Meeting Minutes June 13, 2016 Page 9 Ongoing & Enhancement Offers: Parking Services, Kurt Ravenschlag  73.1 Parking Services  73.2 Fire House Ally Structure  73.3 Capital Equipment  73.6 Capital Repair and Maintenance  **Due to Kurt Ravenschlag not being able to attend the June PAB meeting, Parking Services’ core and enhancement offers will be discussed at the July 11 PAB meeting.** 8. ACTION ITEMS A. Memo to Fort Collins City Council Supporting BFO Offers This action item is tabled until the July 13 PAB meeting. B. Residential Parking Permit Program Evaluation for City Council Schroyer: I went to the Old Town West public meeting. I think there is about 50% for it and 50% against it. It raised some questions as well. The tax question came up, I pay taxes, why can’t I park in front of my house, and well it is a public street. Then Otterbox created a problem, why are they not fixing the problem? We started to monitor ourselves since that meeting, we have roughly 13 buildings, 204,000 square feet of space, 587 employees, 364 off street parking spaces. We walked the neighborhood four times and saw six Otterbox stickers in the neighborhoods in question. Massive amounts of the people are going to the county building. I dare for anyone to compare 62% of any large employer like us to provide that many parking spaces. This got me revaluating this neighborhood plan. A lot of them are students getting their skateboard or bike out and going straight south towards the university. I don’t know how I feel about the RP3 program now; I think the closer you get to campus and Old Town you have more problems, but to say it is one individual employer is far fetch. They wanted another meeting with a represented of Blue Ocean. We pay a lot of taxes and control two 2800 linear feet of frontage of our building of which is public parking. People are parking on that block and walking to Old Town. Wilder: We probably won’t suggest another meeting; we don’t think it would achieve the objectives that most people thought it would. Also CSU announced that they are changing rates for parking and making it cheaper for the research lot and this will help in terms of this issue. We are doing a reduction of the area based on things we have heard. We will let the neighbors decide if an RP3 program in their neighborhood is right for them. Wright: Because occupancy rates have dropped have you considered where RP3 have been implemented, and the push out. Reduce the price of permits and bring people closer to the university. Kirkpatrick: We have the report Kurt provided, Steve are you saying that you do not agree with the way the report is written? Schroyer: I don’t know I will go back and read it. Kirkpatrick: All we are doing is communicating to Council the status of the program. One good thing of the report is about how the RP3 program has been changed since it has been introduced. The report just summarizes the changes. *DRAFT* Meeting Minutes June 13, 2016 Page 10 Wilder: The presentation to Old Town West meeting, the petition of 10 signatures and the other big change is the vote with a minimum of 50% participation. Guess permits are different and the two hour limit. Permit passes sold at CSU and the on line permit purchases. Kirkpatrick: We are not saying it is perfect, it is an update and that we are watching it and that our board is an appropriate place for policy level questions to come to. If for example, staff said we should use linear feet as a basis for permit for commercial areas we can talk about what that implies. Council deserves an update from citizens not just staff, not that it is a done deal. We can table it until next month, motion to table? Schroyer: I would rather wait until next month when Kurt is here. Schroyer motions and Wright seconds to table the RP3 evaluation until July. C. BOARD REPORT Wright: I went to the Super Issues Meeting on June 1. That is why I sent out the email about going to the Council work session. Susan said she planned to go. Seth is going to give a presentation about pilot parking program. Just to get some kind of impression of how Council feels about this. Kirkpatrick: I have planned to attend. There have been some interests in the difference between our recommendation and staff’s recommendation. I have talked to a couple of Councilmembers about the difference between what we suggest what to do. The Downtown Business Association asked me to come and talk to them and I did. They sent a letter to Council in support of our recommendation. Wright: The Super Issues Meeting was also talking about Budgeting for Outcomes and how we can make recommendations to City Council. That is why I started to read all of them. I think all of the offers we talked about today affect congestion and parking. If we could in encourage alternative modes of transportation and efficiency, whether it deals with parking directly or the flow of people around town, I think we should look at it. Newman: A person from the Transportation Board come to our meeting in February and suggested that we should attend their meeting if it makes sense. Maybe as a board we decide who would attend their monthly meetings. Kirkpatrick: We have the opportunity to invite someone, not to participate. Should we find out when the Transportation Board meets. Dubin: They meet the third Wednesday of every month at 6:00 pm. Kirkpatrick: You can attend freely if you wish. These boards and commission meetings are open to the public. D. STAFF LIAISON REPORT Short: My experience of when I went in to get a parking pass. I asked to get one and they asked about evidence of where I live and registration of my specific vehicle. I don’t want to register one vehicle I want to register a vehicle. If you want to park three vehicles, not at the same time, you have to register three vehicles. It seem overly restrictive to me. When I asked why the lady said because of the scanning system. Dubin: The technology that we us is license plate recognition. This is where the registration stems from and in order for us to recognize that the vehicle can be there the LPR needs to be able to recognize the license plate. Short: Wish list should be I can register all vehicles and be able to put anyone on the street. *DRAFT* Meeting Minutes June 13, 2016 Page 11 Dubin: I don’t know if the program is able to do that. I will take that information back and talk to our vendor. 10. OTHER BUSINESS None 11. ADJOURN The meeting was concluded at 7:35 pm Respectfully submitted, Melissa Brooks Administrative Aide Transfort