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HomeMy WebLinkAboutTransportation Board - Minutes - 12/14/2001BOARD MEMBI Dan Gould Neil Grigg Bruce Henderson Tim Johnson Tom Kramer Brad Miller Christophe Ricord Brent Thordarson Heather Trantham REGULAR MEETING MINUTES of the TRANSPORTATION BOARD December 14, 2001 5:45 p.m. City of Fort Collins - Community Room 215 N. Mason Street FOR REFERENCE: CHAIR: Christophe Ricord 472.8769 VICE CHAIR: Dan Gould 482.1074 STAFF LIAISON: Don Bachman 224.6049 ADMIN SUPPORT: Cynthia Scott 224.6058 PRESENT: CITY STAFF IN ATTENDANCE: Don Bachman Matt Baker Gary Diede Randy Hensley Diane Jones Cam McNair Ron Phillips Cynthia Scott GUESTS IN ATTENDANCE: Sally Craig Cliff Davidson Council Liaison Kurt Kastein ABSENT: Ray Moe Steve Yeldell Transportation Board DRAFT Regular Meeting Minutes December 19, 2001 Page 2 Lwe"Mil W CIZ1 ; 1 Chair Ricord called the meeting to order at 5:55 p.m. 2. PUBLIC COMMENT None. 3. APPROVAL OF MINUTES There was a motion and a second to approve the November 14, 2001 Transportation Board minutes as presented The motion carried by a unanimous vote. 4. INTRODUCTIONS New Board Member Neil Grigg was introduced and spoke about why he was interested in being a member of the board. 5. COUNCIL LIAISON REPORT None. 6. DISCUSSION ITEMS a) TRANSPORTATION CAPITAL FUNDING — JoneslXastein Mr. Kastein said that the goal tonight is to introduce the topic of transportation capital financing. He stated that he and Council Member Bertschy are part of a new council committee formed to look at this particular topic. There is a sunset of approximately a year. The committee is to work with the City Manager in preparing recommendations to identify a stable funding source for the City's transportation capital needs. Mr. Kastein added that the goal of the committee is to create a strategy that ensures that funds will be available on an on -going basis for a significant portion of the City's needs for transportation capital projects, including road improvements and expansions, bicycle and pedestrian facilities, transit facilities and other enhancements to the transportation system. The committee will be exploring in more depth: • The planning horizon (timeframe) for transportation capital • Ways to sort and prioritize transportation capital needs • A "reasonable" ongoing level of capital funding, e.g., can we reasonably expect and establish a funding mechanism(s) to annually finance $1 OM, $25M, $40M of transportation capital improvements? • A full -range of public and private funding sources for financing transportation capital • The relationship of capital expansion to ongoing maintenance and operating requirements Mr. Kastein said that he and Mr. Bertschy will meet again to have a brainstorming session with the board and more details will be forth coming. He expressed that this is an important issue and that a solution must be found. Transportation Board DRAFT Regular Meeting Minutes December 19, 2001 Page 3 The presentation by Ms. Jones was entitled "Transportation Funding 101" and covered the following highlights: • Transportation Funding Needs/ Resources and Gaps - Operations and Maintenance - Capital Projects • 10-year Needs in Transportation Capital - What creates the needs? Potential Funding Sources Process The board thanked Ms. Jones for her presentation and her time with the board. b. RURAL TRANSPORTATION AUTHORITY — Davidson Mr. Davidson introduced himself as the Executive Director of the North Front Range Transportation & Air Quality Planning Council. Margie Joy was introduced. She is the SMARTTrips regional manager and has been involved in the RTA campaign to date. One of the next steps in the process is having the policy committee appoint a steering committee from throughout the North Front Range region. There will be vaned community interests from all sides of the spectrum asked to come together and help direct the activities of this campaign. The policy committee (PC) is just now getting started and has been working on a vision statement. Mr. Davidson stated that the key emphasis of the proposed RTA would be to emphasize those connections between the various committees within the NFR. Those connections are both infrastructure and service so it isn't just about how much asphalt is out there, rather, actual transit services, potential rail and that sort of thing. It is also important to provide safer connections and increase not only the safety of the travel, but increase mobility. The vision statement thus far is something like this: The proposed RTA will generate some added revenues, fund the shortfalls along with a wide -range of potential solutions, transportation alternatives and also provide more resources for a long-range regional multi -modal transportation system. Some of the goals the PC has identified so far are: - This RTA will be designed to meet regional needs - Focus on connectivity - Improvement will be based on regional benefit Davidson discussed the process that needs to take place based on RTA laws. Transportation Board DRAFT Regular Meeting Minutes December 19, 2001 Page 4 There was a brief general discussion at the end of the presentation. No process for choosing steering committee members has been decided yet. The board thanked Mr. Davidson for his presentation and time and look forward to continued updates. 7. ACTION ITEMS None. S. REPORTS a) BOARD MEMBER REPORTS Thordarson: Denver Field Trip. Recently took afield trip to Denver. Noted extensive shoulder work going on at I-25 just north of SH 7. Heard on radio tonight that they just broke ground on the widening of I-25 at SH 52. Sounds like 6-lanes for a number of miles. Henderson: Street Closure? Read of the closure of Taft Hill and the article also mentioned that Dunbar is going to have restricted access. The question is, since Dunbar provides access to Rocky Mountain High School, will that access still be open to RMHS? Phillips explained the closure and how traffic will be diverted. Henderson noted that with teen-age drivers, this should be interesting. Johnson: I-25 Corridor Vote. The proposal passed 4-3. It was quite a community discussion. Ricord: Thank You. The follow-up memo from questions the board had last month was very helpful. Thank you. SH14/E. Mulberry Corridor CAC Meeting Report. The CAC met a few weeks ago. One of the topics was SH 14 and some entryway or gateway into Fort Collins. A consultant from EDAW did an excellent presentation. One question is whether or not the airport is going to continue to be there. The scenario will be different obviously. Pete Wray is doing an excellent job and is very professional. Kudos to the Advanced Planning Department. RTA Steering Committee. Inquired if anyone on board was interested in participating in the steering committee for the RTA. Henderson and Johnson indicated interest. More info on time commitment is needed before they can definitely say. Chair Ricord will contact Kastein and let him know. b) STAFF REPORTS Phillips: Truck Mobility Study. City Council acted in accordance with the Board's recommendation on the Truck Mobility Study last night. Chair Ricord reported that the adopted Plan does not use additional funding for anymore studies. It will use the rest of the funds currently in the coffers for non - route based strategies. Everybody at the meeting supports non -route based strategies. There was no dissent from that idea at all. Transportation Board DRAFT Regular Meeting Minutes December 19, 2001 Page 5 Diede: Bike/ped Bridge on E. Mulberry. The bridge along Mulberry on the south side is up! Staff is hoping to have it completed by Christmas. McNair: Streets Open! All Cone Zone projects are complete except Taft Hill. 9. OTHER BUSINESS None 10. ADJOURN Chair Ricord adjourned the meeting at 8:30 p.m. Respectfully submitted, QJ &9--il Cynthia Scott Executive Administrative Assistant 6. DISCUSSION ITEMS a) TRANSPORTATION CAPITAL FUNDING — Jones/Kastein Mr. Kastein said that the goal tonight is to introduce the topic of transportation capital financing. He stated that he and Council Member Bertschy are part of a new council committee formed to look at this particular topic. There is a sunset of approximately a year. The committee is to work with the City Manager in preparing recommendations to identify a stable funding source for the City's transportation capital needs. Mr. Kastein added that the goal of the committee is to create a strategy that ensures that funds will be available on an on -going basis for a significant portion of the City's needs for transportation capital projects, including road improvements and expansions, bicycle and pedestrian facilities, transit facilities and other enhancements to the transportation system. The committee will be exploring in more depth: • The planning horizon (timeframe) for transportation capital • Ways to sort and prioritize transportation capital needs • A "reasonable" ongoing level of capital funding, e.g., can we reasonably expect and establish a funding mechanism(s) to annually finance $1 OM, $25M, $40M of transportation capital improvements? • A full -range of public and private funding sources for financing transportation capital • The relationship of capital expansion to ongoing maintenance and operating requirements Mr. Kastein said that he and Mr. Bertschy will meet again to have a brainstorming session with the board and more details will be forth coming. He reiterated that this is an important issue and that a solution must be found. The presentation by Ms. Jones was entitled "Transportation Funding 101" and covered the following highlights: • Transportation Funding Needs/ Resources and Gaps - Operations and Maintenance - Capital Projects - Transit 10-year Needs in Transportation Capital What creates the needs? Potential Funding Sources Process Ms. Jones ended her presentation by stating that what Mr. Bertschy and Mr. Kastein asked John and staff to do is that in order to get a really good handle on this and jump to solutions, we need to really understand what we're dealing with first. In other words, to build a good foundation of where we are. Transportation Board Minutes Excerpt — Funding Discussion December 19, 2001 Page 2 The floor was opened for discussion: Gould. On your Power Point presentation with the potential funding sources, do you mean to rule out for instance the special service fee by just having fees on your oversizing? Jones: No. At this point, those were just illustrative and not comprehensive or exhausting. Everything is under consideration. Gould. I appreciate the way that this has to be organized and the way these different concepts have to be separated out. To me it is always a dilemma when you decide to split up capital costs, you're confronted with a problem where you're in increasing parts of town where congestion is increasing, yet the actual ability to expand physical ... has an upper limit. There is not room for extra lanes or whatever so the capacity is maxed out. Congestion is increasing because of this growth and so forth. It seems to me that there needs to be something that addresses transit as if it was capital investment because if ultimately what we're interested in is mobility as congestion increased and fiscal capacity reaches its limit, then the way to maintain mobility is to offset extra lanes by transit. By high quality, high service level transit. It seems like it would be advantageous to get out of this category constraint by converting high quality transit services into equivalent lane additions. It's like buying extra lanes by increasing capacity. I would hope that somehow that dilemma could be addressed. Phillips: That is exactly the concept we're trying to use with the Mason Street Transportation Corridor (MSTC). Our transit "eggs" are in the MSTC basket over the next 5 years. We're seeking a considerable amount of federal funding for that. If we're successful, it will take us to the next level of transit services. As I see it, that's kind of where we are with that issue. If we're successful there, that will become kind of the proving ground for this theory. Gould: The theory with MSTC is a one-time unique situation because it is possible that to make it happen it really is a capital expense, whereas on the other corridors where there really isn't a possibility for physical infrastructure expansion, then transit will most likely be an Operational expense. To me, although I appreciate what you're saying, it seems like out into the future and looking at more problems as they occur along Prospect for instance, it's too bad that we can't call a certain amount of transit operations — capital. Phillips: I think that eventually we'll be able to do that, but first we need to prove the case through this project. Gould: The last thing and fairly radical thing, and also my continuing obsession with transit, is that it would really be nice if we could invent a way that those people in the community that actually see public transportation as an important part of the evolution of our city could be able to pay for it voluntarily in the same way that those members of the community that see as renewable energy in the form of wind energy being a worthwhile investment for a long-term sustainability and actually they are willing to pay for it through a surge charge. Could there be a mechanism where that same kind of wind energy utility could be called a public transportation kind of utility? So that those people in the community who can see its benefits both in terms of creating an affordable city for a number of people Transportation Board Minutes Excerpt — Funding Discussion December 19, 2001 Page 3 from all different income groups and the ability to have a sustainable transportation system could just begin to demonstrate that voluntarily. Jones: That is one of the ideas that can be worked on. I do think that Bill and Kurt are very open and they want to hear ideas and they are also interested in translating those into some very practical approaches. Trantham: Do deficiencies decrease over time -- will we ever be able to make progress on this? Jones: I think there will always be some deficiencies. Part of that is a resource issue. I don't see that we'll ever have enough resources. That is my intuitive feeling on it. Ricord: In the memo, the second bullet talks about ways to sort and prioritize transportation capital needs. Can you talk a little about the mechanism or the discussion about the mechanism of how the prioritization process happens? Phillips: We've had different processes. You may remember when we were working with TFAC, the City Manager's Transportation Funding Advisory Committee, there was a sub -committee of the Transportation Board that was working along with them. The Board at that point in time and previous to that during the Building Community Choices (BCC) funding process, you might recall we had a number of $350-360M worth of projects that we went through and prioritized down to $90 M or so. We then said that was way too much, knowing we wouldn't get that much money out of BCC so there was then another process. In that process, we took that down to about $33-35M and that's what was actually submitted along with every other board and commission and whoever else was putting projects in the mill and out of the negotiated process, we ended up with about $24M out the $33M that was part of the ballot measure. That process is just one way. The latest process that is being used at the staff level is to update the information that we had from BCC, add to that and try to put total build -out of the transportation system, including transit, bikes, peds, streets etc. and then there was a prioritization process of using every aspect of transportation which came to five projects. McNair stated that it was a more subjective process based on staff input and our experiences of where the deficiencies are and where the monies should be applied. Traffic had their list of what they thought was most important in terms of the signal system and intersection improvements and Streets and Engineering had their lists. We brainstormed those at the staff level and rolled out this much more subjective process. Phillips then provided more information on the process. Jones: One mechanism we're looking at is well defined. You have your needs, they flow into a master plan and then your projects flow out of that by whatever sequence. That is pretty well defined and I go back to the Utilities. Again, you have needs that flow into the master plans and there are several. Transportation Board Minutes Excerpt — Funding Discussion December 19, 2001 Page 4 The Plan could be Parks and Recreation, Transportation or something else and then you try to put those into the mix, try to define what the projects are and frankly, when you've got a political process, that complicates it. We try to look at these at the macro level and make some assessments of how it is we want to set priorities and we talk about what groups will have input as well as how is it that we want to go about it. Grigg: I've noticed in a lot of Public Works magazines they will highlight cities for best practices of different things and I wondered if there would be some places that would have something for us to look at. Jones: In addition to the work that's going on with this piece, we have another team that is looking at the general ... planning process for the city and one of the things that they are looking at is this whole arena of prioritization. They are looking at best practices, at what other communities do and how they handle that in light of increasing competition and the increasing complexity of the needs. We'd like to see what other folks are doing. That is a piece of our work that is going in parallel with this piece of work. Ricord: On page 4 of the presentation where you talk about what creates the needs and since we just had some kind of numerical analyses on page 3 that uses a pie chart, I wonder if it is possible to give kind of a quantitative analysis of both deficiencies and demand increases. Is it possible to break those out so that we have kind of a sense numerically of what portion of the whole each of those are? I can see that it may be difficult to quantify that, but if you look at it in terms of dollars, that may be possible to do that. Phillips: I think it's possible, but I'm not sure how beneficial it would be. We can take a look at it though. On the Pavement Management side, this issue was forced by two factors. One being inflation and the cost of doing street construction. The second element is growth in street miles. We broke that down into two figures and they were close to 50%. We came up the fact that we need 6 '/z % per year growth for the Pavement Management budget to keep up with the need. I think that in the area of capital, it's not that easy to quantify. Johnson: Does the number of $400M include interchanges? Phillips: I'm not sure. Our total needs include interchanges, but I don't think there are any in the first two years. Johnson: I would encourage that you look at the excise tax as well. Phillips: It is in there under Sales and Use taxes as a sub part, I believe. The board thanked Ms. Jones for her presentation and her time with the board.