 I'm going to give a framework, mind you, just spend some time on that. I've got it. Run with it. How about July? Are you going to be? Where are we going to hit the golf course? Oh, I'd love to go by it. Commissioner Kaufman-Govas, Commissioner Johnson, Commissioner Brown, Commissioner Bertrand, Commissioner Oleitnick. Okay, good. We'll begin. We'll start with oral communications. This is any money from public and talk on items that are not on our agenda. Please come on up and tell us your name and we have three minutes to talk. My name is Rebecca Downing and I'm president of the Seacliffe Improvement Association. We are inviting pedestrians, bicyclists, friends, neighbors, and the RTC commissioners to stroll with us to the Aptos Village Green on the morning of August 3, 2019. Our invitation is for you to join us by walking to Aptos Village from Seacliffe to get a street view of the safety challenges pedestrians face when we walk to Aptos Village. We will also invite neighbors from the other parts of Aptos to join us along the way to help create pedestrian safety awareness along their route. Upon arriving in the village, participants will take a quick pedestrian survey, enjoy a snack from one of our event sponsors, New Leaf Community Market, and enter to win prizes from local Aptos Village merchants. The first 100 arrivals will also receive a reusable shopping bag from New Leaf Market. In 2017, we surveyed our members and other Aptos residents and almost 90 percent of them said they would walk to Aptos Village if it was safe. So we will share what we learned from our survey with you to improve pedestrian safety measures for those walking and cycling to and from Aptos Village. Saturday mornings, well, every morning, can be difficult as traffic backs up through Aptos Choke Point on the northbound side of Highway 1. Those who opt to use Soquel Drive through Aptos Village add to the congestion of the locals trying to visit village businesses. Our hope is that this event creates pedestrian safety awareness for all those who drive through Aptos Village. Each of us who walk will take a car off the road. We want drivers to appreciate this by respecting pedestrians and cyclists who take up much less road space than a car. I've brought invitations for each of you and look forward to your RSVP or the full experience. I suggest you start your way, he knows the way. Thank you for your time. Thank you. The invitations too. Party at Zach's. That's what I heard. Welcome. Michael St. with Campaign for Sustainable Transportation and what I'd like to do this morning is to share some other transportation people's things that they do in their cities. I've been doing a lot of travel lately is why I haven't been to too many of these meetings. This is the Tahoeandepth.org remaking of Highway 50, which part of it goes into South Shore. And I'll have to read just some blurbs from one of the articles. There's three in here on their transportation goals. What this will do is turn the old highway alignment through South Shore and the casinos into a two lane main street. The plans today call for better pedestrian and bike infrastructure throughout the area, better transit services, landscaping, treescape amenities, and a pedestrian bridge. The project is planning safety improvements and community amenities such as parks, sidewalks and lighting for the adjacent Rocky Point neighborhood, mainly because that was used instead of the Highway 50, which is four lanes. They would go around and try to go through the residential areas, which we're all having issues with that. Carol Chaplin states that she wants the project not only to improve traffic and transit and pedestrian infrastructure and housing on the South Shore, but also make it easier for people to get out of their cars and enjoy Lake Tahoe. The project can do this, she said, by creating a core area where people can walk out of their hotel room, go to the lake, go to the mountains, go shopping, die and take a walk, or a bike ride, find entertainment, or hop on a bus, never having to use their car. The other two articles are very similar in nature. I'm not going to just read those, but the main theme here is they're trying to get people out of their cars. One of the things that they're not doing in this article is putting in anything that considers any highway widening. So I have three questions for this commission. At what point in time do we stop building infrastructure for single occupancy vehicles? Number two, how bad does it have to get before we initiate and start funding a robust mass transit system? And when will this commission start to help reduce the cause of climate change instead of contributing by widening highways? I want to thank you for your time, and it's nice to be back. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else like to speak? It's okay to go ahead and line up so we know who wants to talk. Good morning. My name is Justin Acton. I'm a lifelong SLV resident, and I'm also the president of the BCBA, the Boulder Creek Business Association. I want to start by applauding Supervisor McPherson, Caltrans, and the RTC on their successful installation of the first RRFB in downtown Boulder Creek. I read through the corridor plan, and I'm very appreciative of all the work that went into that. Thank you, Rachel and Brianna at the RTC for all the outreach that they've done to create such a complete and thorough document. The ball seems like it's starting to move right now, which is very exciting after so many years. Everyone in town is eager to see the improvements that the corridor plan calls for. The reason I'm here today is to... I'm going to interrupt you for a second. This is oral communications about things that are not on the agenda, and it appears you're talking about the Highway 9 corridor. Is there other people that are going to talk on Highway 9 corridor? They're not going to be here, really. How many people are going to talk about Highway 9? Do you want me to finish, then? If there's anyone that's going to speak, I'm going to let you finish, okay? I just want to make clear that this is oral communications. If you have somewhere to go, I can appreciate that. I got to go to work, so I apologize. I'm sorry about that. Finish your conversation, and if everyone else can wait for the Highway 9 section, we'd appreciate that. Sorry, guys. All right, so I am out of role, but anyway, let me finish. Thank you. So I just want to say that there are a lot of projects cited as high priority, including reducing speed and other safety measures. These echo the concerns at all of our town meetings, at all of our mixers, at all of the online community forums. Projects enhancing corridor pedestrian safety via lighting, laddering, RRFBs, and other visibility augmenting devices, they're easy and they're relatively inexpensive. These are particularly needed in Brookdale as well as the 236 and 9 intersections. As everybody knows, Boulder Creek has been constructed along Highway 9. It's all controlled under the authority of Caltrans. For years, the residents, the visitors, and the business community have echoed the same request for improvements to a town that has not had very many meaningful enhancements pretty much in my entire lifetime. Now that we've had the community discussion, the RTC has formed this plan, I'm here really just to encourage Caltrans to find a way to release the brake pedal on the holdups that we've been experiencing on these plans and to figure out a way to work with all these agencies to make our downtown a little bit safer. A great place to start in our opinion is crosswalk ball bouts as well as back-and-parking spaces. These are graded as an A rating project with high performance for ease of implementation. The changes would slow traffic via road dieting, enhance the local economy by allowing additional and much-needed parking spots as well as provide shade tree planters for pedestrian and bike use. We'd like to see a study for a three-way stop at the 9 and Bear Creek intersection to slow cars down as they come into town. The community has done its work in contributing to the corridor plan. The county has facilitated many community discussions. The RTC has put a ton of effort into creating this plan. I feel like now is the time for the governing agency for Caltrans to kind of step up to the plate and figure out a way to break ground and make the corridor safer while helping the downtown businesses and the residents. So anyway, thank you for your time and I'm sorry to go out of order. Thank you, I appreciate your comments. I was one of the women that has to go to work, I heard, that didn't need to speak now and why don't you come up and we're going to let you speak. All right, you're welcome. Thank you. My name is Christine Prailey. I'm a small business owner in Felton, California. I live in Ben Lohman. My business is horse sense education and advocacy and I'm the Santa Cruz County Outreach Coordinator for 4-H. So on behalf of myself, my business and those children that I teach, along with the school children that I teach through charter schools and the Valley's school system, I just want to thank you very much for taking time, energy and due diligence to make sure that our roads are safer for pedestrian bicyclists. They're even mentioning horses here. I'm really grateful for that. So everything that you're doing for everybody so that we can all share the roadway and enjoy the beautiful mountains is really worth the effort. I thank you, again, also Caltrans. They do a lot of hard work and I realize there's reasons for the brake pedals, but when you get through them that it becomes a better product. So again, I just want to thank you all. And I think did you want to show others who are in support of that because you're speaking on behalf of them? Yeah. Is there some supporters that you have for this Highway 9 plan? Oh, absolutely. I want to thank Joni Martin for sending out the email this morning to ask people that can make it to come down. And I believe those people wanted to take a stand. Just if you could just stand up to show that you're supporting it. That would be great. Thank you for your attendance and thank you. Appreciate that. Appreciate it. Thank you. Welcome. Hello. So my name is Tim Onsted and I'm a concerned resident of the La Selva Beach area. I recently moved there from Capitola and when I lived in Capitola, I was really dependent on the bus service since I'm a writer and a college student. I don't have a car and I don't really have the money to have my own car. So I would take the bus everywhere and I would use my student ID for the bus pass, basically. But when I went to La Selva, I was surprised to see that maybe not so much surprise knowing what's on the signs in here, but they had discontinued bus service to La Selva. I don't know if that was a proposition or what it was, but the 54 and the 56 are no longer operating and I know that because the bus stop like markers are still up there, even though there are no buses coming here and it's been three years. So it's like either remove them or reinstate busing and it's become a bit of a grievance. And I know that there's a lot of pleasant walks, but the thing is that I'd rather only walk 10 minutes to the bus stop rather than 20 minutes to the nearest bus stop, which is over in Seascape. Thank you. I'm going to go ahead and respond to that just to try to help you out a little bit. There are a few members that are on this panel that also serve on the Metro Board of Directors and a couple of issues. One is Metro went through some serious budget cuts and that route was one of the routes that needed to be cut in order to continue service to other areas. It's our hope that when funding reappears, we'll be able to restore those routes. Your second item as far as removing the bus stops, it is- It's not so much moving the bus stops, but rather why they're still there if there's no service. That's what I wanted to explain to you is the act of getting a bus stop established someplace, the process to put in that stop and that sign is a long process. And our intention is to try to restore service. So if we were to take those out, we would have to go through that entire process again to get city approval to restore that stop and those poles. So I apologize that it's inconvenient and it does represent the fact that it appears that there might be bus service, but our intent, Metro's intent is to someday restore those routes when funding appears. Thank you very much. I would just add to that. Is that true year round or is it different in the summer and during the school year? I haven't lived for long enough to know. I've only moved just this week. Like literally only last week I moved into the new place from Capitola. So I haven't lived long enough to know. We cut those year round. Okay, it could be that they only have it during the school season. Those are year round cuts, Greg. Okay. Does that help? I know it doesn't solve your bus, but I just want to explain to you what the nature of how that happened. Yeah, yeah, I understand. Thank you. You're welcome. Good morning. Good morning. Keith Otto, 20 year county resident. Back in January, I and others from my community, many others across the county, spoke out against rail north of Watsonville, too costly to implement, too costly to maintain that maintenance being a forever liability, too little benefit. Decisions were made. Even so, as I'm able, I've been trying to follow the happenings here at the RTC. There were some items at the meeting earlier this month, which surprised me. Others gave me hope that there may be some adjustment in the direction of the commission. One commissioner was concerned that millions of dollars of federal funds expected for county road repair could be at risk. Yes, let's fix the local roads. Another commissioner spoke of the time needed to make big decisions, such as the alternatives for transit in the rail corridor. Decisions that were stated to involve scores or $100 million. We don't want to invest in projects that are not going to work, that was stated. Makes sense, although the figure is totally off. Per the corridor study, the cost for transit in the corridor is going to be greater than $300 million. And just a quick comparison, 300 million versus millions, I believe, single digit for local road repair. The priorities there seem obvious to me. There was another commissioner that spoke of the disquiet of residents, just trying to go about their daily lives with difficulties in commutes. Perhaps trying to get to the commission meeting here. Priorities should focus on those individuals. There were concerns about local budgets that were expressed, and that there's not going to be funding for aspirational projects. There was a gentleman from county public works, I believe, that stated, if we're not taking care of what we already have, but rather creating more stuff that we're not sure how we're going to take care of in the future, we think that's the wrong way to go. I completely agree. The bottom line, my ask is that we listen to each other. You folks have been studying this for a long time. There's a lot of good ideas and practicalities here within this group. Let's focus on fixing what we have. Let's avoid liabilities for the future. Let's focus on more of what's practical versus aspirational. Thank you. Thank you for those comments. I was going to say something else about dynamism, but I've run out of time. Come back next meeting. Thank you. Anyone else like to speak in oral communications? We'll go ahead and close oral communications. We'll move on. Is there any additions or deletions to our regular agenda? There's no additions or deletions, but a quick clarification or correction on item 16. The page numbering was often the printed version. It printed 17 instead of 16. The online addition is correct. When you're going through your agenda, if you're flipping pages and you see 17, and we're talking about item 16, that's why. 17-1 is actually 16-1. Yes, but there's another 17-1 for item 17 behind it. Thank you. Then there's just two handouts, one for item 17 and one for item 18. Thank you. It brings us to the consent agenda. These are items we normally deal with in one motion. Is there anybody who would like to pull anything from the consent agenda? Anyone from the public like to comment on anything on the consent agenda? A motion for approval for the consent? There's somebody. Excuse me, I did a second for that. I have a second. Second. Go ahead, sir, for your comment. Yeah, Keith Otto, a 20-year county resident. So with regards to item five, as far as public participation plan, I was very happy to see that there's a number of folks in my community that have been asking about what the particulars are with regards to projects related to the rail corridor in our community, what the process is for that, and how the community might be able to realistically engage and participate to direct projects in a manner which I guess is the most desirable or the least undesirable is the way some would put it. So my ask is in conjunction with this plan that perhaps there's, let's say, a two-page summary of items related to the rail corridor and the process and items where the public may be able to participate within the county. So that could be the items around the RTC and your contractors and consultants, as well as for the county, the public works and the planning commission and whatnot, basically to participate or to speak up at public comment at the end of the process when things are sort of designed and the cement's about to get poured. Obviously, that's way too late. But folks are trying to understand what the different agencies are and what those different points would be for them to participate. And if there could be some sort of summary document, I'm in the county, so that's my personal priority. Obviously, the process would be a little bit different for the city of Santa Cruz or Capitola. But I think that would be beneficial for all, for people to come forward and put forth their perspective. You know, it can get a little bit ugly to put up with a number of us, but at the same time, it's those opinions and perspectives that ultimately lead to better projects and better outcomes and solutions that work better for the wider community. So thank you if you can, you know, do that. Director Rock, can you have a comment? You should look at item 18 on this agenda. You can get the packet for it, which gives you the information online at our website, or you could probably ask our staff person for maybe we have an extra copy of that packet. That lays out a plan, because we're going to spend the next year planning what the public transit aspect of that project will be. And we're working on it today on our agenda is a scope of work which includes public participation. So that's, we're definitely answering your request here. Right. So that is related to the transit piece, but as far as the other aspects of the project, whether that's the freight and whatnot, the trail components. So I mean, I see that and I also saw the items associated with this item, agenda five, I believe. And that's all a good step in the right direction. I think to distill that down a little further would be helpful, at least for the folks that I'm talking to in my community. Let me, Director Preston, do you have anything you want to add to that, anything the RTC has available that might assist this gentleman? I would highly recommend that you get in contact with Shannon Munn's of my office. She's our communication specialist and she can work with you on that. Okay, great. Yeah, and I'll say I've reached out to the county and the details coming back thus far have, in less than robust, I'll just say that. I think you should try this avenue that was just suggested to you, okay. We have a dedicated staff person for public participation and outreach. Thank you. Anyone else like to comment on anything in the consent agenda? Seeing none, I'll bring it back. Sure, yes, do you have a comment? I'm not sure if I'm in the right order here, but I'm hoping. Which item are you wishing to speak on? I'm wishing to speak on 3.36 of the plan. I'm a homeowner on Lazy Woods and this is on the highway nine. This is for a bus stop. Okay, we're not there yet, okay. We're still doing the consent agenda. We get to item, that's item 17. We get to that, you can come up and speak. Thank you for your time. Okay, great. All right, with that, we have a motion and a second on the consent agenda, all in favor? Aye. Opposed? That carries unanimously. Brings us to a regular agenda, which starts with item 13, commissioner's report. Commissioner's report, any oral reports from commissioners? Coffin Gomez. Thank you. Sorry for our tardiness in commuting that highway one. I just wanted to share with you that the emphasis that we've put on when it came to our city council for the budgets for some of these projects, and that was for us to explore further. The funding differences that are needed that that shortfall for the Lee Road project for Watsonville. So we're really pushing that forward to try and move that project along a little further than the timeline that was provided. And the goal is that the staff is gonna look for more funding options that may be available to fix that set the offset so we can get that project moving along. Great, thanks. Any other comments from commissioners? Okay, seeing none. We'll go to item 14, which is our director's report. Hi, I have an oral report today just touching on two quick items. The first one is the regional bike signage project. The county wide bike route signage project is currently in the construction phase. This week, crews are completing the installation of over a hundred signs in the city of Santa Cruz and beginning the installation of signs in the unincorporated county. That'll be followed by work in the various cities. Discretionary funding. At the June 6th RTC meeting, I was directed to meet with stakeholders for input into a proposed process and timeline for the programming of RTC's discretionary funds with the intention to support the distribution of the RSTPX STPG funds by formula basis to the local jurisdictions for the current round of funding. On Monday, I met with the public work directors for the four cities in the county, Santa Cruz Metro representatives were also in attendance. There was a clear understanding that the RTC is still mandated to apportion the STPG RSTPX funds for projects implemented by the cities in the county and other transportation agencies on a fair and equitable basis based upon an annual and updated five year average of allocations. Projects shall be nominated by cities, counties, transit operators and other public transportation agencies through a process that directly involves local government representatives. Projects will still be required to be programmed in the app tip. Distributing the next round of RSTPX STPG funds by formula to the counties and cities will provide a reliable fund source to those jurisdictions for the next three years. There was discussion about the types of projects that recipients jurisdictions may nominate, including major maintenance of the local street network, highway projects, active transportation projects and other non-infrastructure education programs that have traditionally been nominated by the RTC. Local jurisdictions understood that the RTC would no longer be able to fund some of these projects and they may be asked to fund them in the future. Although there was discussion of providing a percentage of the funds to Metro, the public works directors expressed a desire that Metro be funded from other funding sources if possible. There was discussion about using the remaining discretionary fund sources, those other than RSTPX and STPG funds for Metro and other regional projects, including the Harkinsloo project if they are eligible and cannot be funded by other means such as grants or measure D. Since the state transportation improvement program or STIP estimate and guidelines were not yet released, discussion about programming the other discretionary funding was somewhat limited. It was agreed that Metro would assess its needs so that an analysis could be done as to how RTCs should program its remaining discretionary funds. Assuming no RSTPX funds are programmed to Metro, there was consensus among the public works directors that the formula distribution should be done on population with a 5% floor. The floor would benefit Capitola and Scots Valley whose annual share of the funding would not be enough to fund a typical project need. I requested that the public works directors discuss and get concurrence from their CAO and city managers respectively. The group is expected to meet again in a month. I expect to make a recommendation at December 5th RTC meeting. That concludes my report. Thank you. Any questions for the director? Okay, none. Well, I'm just kind of curious about the Metro portion and the funds there. I mean, how much has Metro gotten from these funds? That question was asked at the meeting and it's been asked by various commissioners. It varies year to year. And it's why it's really hard to look at one's funding source in a silo. Often the Metro is funded from the stiff. There have been years where 100% of the stiff needed to go to public transit. And there's years where the stiff had zero money available for public transit. So Metro several years ago received 100% of the funding and so they held off it in future years and deciding how much of the funding that you would get. It's important to also understand that there's been significant changes in the stiff as a result of Senate Bill one. They moved a lot of the transit funding from the stiff to the STA funds. So they now receive a higher percentage or a higher pot from STA funds and the stiff funds estimated lower than it used to be in prior years. So it's really important to understand that it kind of jumps all over the place. So we looked at it at this is a one year round of funding and we really wanted to see what Metro's needs were over the next three years. Three to five years because the stiff estimate is the last two years. Whereas we were looking at the next three years of the RSTPX funds. Thank you. In 25 words, can you explain the difference the acronyms STA and the stiff? I think I don't know that everybody understands them about the availability or just very briefly. Okay, well the stiff is the state transportation improvement program and that was generally set up for the highway system originally but it's available for a lot of different projects including transit. But the CTTC comes out with guidelines on that. The California Transportation Commission. I know there's a lot of acronyms and then there's other funds. The other funding sources are more specific to transit. Just for clarification, I've been meeting with the CEO of Metro and with Mr. Preston trying to work this triangle of funding and the course that we're on, the next meeting which is going to involve the CAOs and city managers, the integral part of this process and I'm actually awaiting the stiff allocations to come out and then with them we'll have all the information that we can I think make a good decision in either August or September to move forward on this. So thank you for all the hard work you've done putting those meetings together. And right after that meeting, the STIP estimate did come out. It was less than expected and it did restrict funding on PTA funds but if Metro's projects are federalized and generally they are, they would be eligible. So but it is less than expected. It's only guaranteed to be 2.6 million and it's in the last three years whereas the RSTP exchange funds which is about 3 million a year would be for this year and the next two. So 100% of the money would be going of the new money programming capacity would be going to the local jurisdictions and those STIP funds that we haven't decided on would be the latter two years and it's important to differentiate between that. Great, good information. Dr. Racken. So is my understanding correct that you're not although you're leaning towards in the end having this be a formula for the cities and the county local road projects, the final decision is not going to be made until we actually know what money is available from the STIP and so we can actually see the full picture. So I understand correctly what you just said. Well I'm not advocating for anything per se. The direction I received was to go that route. So I'm following the direction that I received and working on a formula distribution which will bring back to you in September for you guys to decide. I appreciate that because I think there were two things going on in that motion from our group. Others can correct me if I know properly characterize it but partly it was if the transit district is not completely savaged by this decision then if the money that goes to the local jurisdiction should be by formula and apparently they like it to be by population with a 5% and so forth which is fine but until we know that the transit district has some money left out of all of this I don't think this body wants to sort of make. I don't want to get too far into the weeds because it's not an agenda item but it's on our agenda to come back and discuss that and all the information will be at that September meeting for us to make a decision. And it does include the regional projects too that the local jurisdictions would likely not be willing to fund. Thank you for that report. That concludes your report. Yes. Thank you. It takes us to item 15 which is the Caltrans report. Welcome. Good morning, thank you very much. My name is John Olanek. I'm a planning manager at Caltrans District 5 and glad to be here today and deliver a little bit of an introduction and a report. One thing I'd like to talk about is work zone safety. The construction season has definitely kicked off with a bang as we've all probably noticed this driving on the highways and that's as a result of many things, SB1 funding, plans that have now being implemented for projects but the fact of the matter is there's a lot going on. So, but with that, we last week along with our partner CHP and the Office of Traffic Safety, we kicked off a B work zone alert public awareness campaign imaging shown on the screens here this morning to remind drivers to slow down when going through construction zones and also when passing highway workers. Again, the season is off to a large start. So there's a lot of activity going on. The campaign aims to protect workers from traffic that are literally inches away from the traveled roadway. As Caltrans and our partners also continue to work towards zero deaths, we wanna reduce that in our work zones especially and that's important because in 2018, more than 7,000 work zone collisions happened and of those 7,000, there were 2300 injuries and 46 fatalities of highway workers, both contractors and public workers. So part of this campaign is to help address that and so a question might be what can we all do individually as a communities? Well, certainly when we see work zones, we wanna slow down. When we see maintenance activities or any emergency services on the side of the road, there's the moveover law that's already in place. We wanna do our best to abide by that to move over or slow down and those are just things individually we can do but Caltrans, we're also on our side for our projects working to take it to even the next level. We're kicking off this year some pretty significant enhancements to our work zone protocols and some of our closures. Some of the things we're looking at is to expand some of the time even during our construction work periods. So a lot of times we've craft our work periods to deal with what we feel is probably the best thing we can do for traffic, for seasons but that also takes a lot of time and a lot of exposures for closure set up, for take down. So one of the things we're looking at is if we can expand the work zone period then that puts less days on the road overall less time for set up and closure. That's one thing. Another element that maybe you've noticed already is our work zones are now going to include speed radar speed feedback signs to be complimented with a 10 mile an hour reduction in the speed limit through work zones. So we're really, for a variety of reasons, the most important being the life and safety of our workers and that of the modern public. We're taking whatever steps we can and whatever positive approaches that are available to us to help improve work zone safety. The campaign includes the public awareness billboards. These are not paid children. These are actually family members of high work cow trans employees. And a part of the messaging in our public awareness campaigns is they wanna have their parents come home every night. So that's what I wanted to report on. We wanna encourage all of us as public works agencies and those in the public, maybe some of the public or even contractors working themselves on the road. So a big shout to works on safety kicking off this year. Thank you. That's all I have to report on. Thank you. I think for all of us, we've noticed the repaving of Highway 17, it looks like it's about 95% done. We all greatly appreciate that. But I do notice that you mentioned that they're inches away and at night when I drive through there, it is inches away. So the speed zone, we should all take caution if we're on those roads at night, the work they're trying to do. They're doing a fabulous job, they're almost done. And I'm sure they're all gonna celebrate when they finish it, because it looks very hazardous to me. So thank you for that comment. Any questions? Sure. Yeah, I wanna thank you for Caltrans, the work you've done in the past for District 4. I don't expect you to give an instant analysis on my question. But in the city of Watsonville, Highway 152 does go through there. And then it goes by the high school and this whole thing. And Highway 1 really feeds into Highway 52. How much control does the city actually have when a freeway actually goes through the city? And if they were gonna take four lanes and reduce it down to two lanes, and whether or not they were gonna add roundabouts, Caltrans, what has the ultimate veto power? I suppose the short answer would be yes as the owner operator. But the reality is it starts well before that. Implementation of right sizing of roads, roundabouts, other improvements, that always comes first with a good planning study. And follow that in implementation strategy. And in there is operational analysis. So I know we've been working with the city on those things. Actually we've funded some planning grants to the city to allow them to look at those type of elements. So there are definitely opportunities when those plans are completed to then start discussing implementation. And there's definitely a lot of things at play. The operational thing is important because as I recall, there's a fairly heavy freight movement that uses those highways as well. So those are all the things that are kind of taking into consideration as part of the balance. The next level, what does happen sometimes is an agency, a community will decide that despite maybe what might be negative operational impacts, they still are really interested in these improvements. So there have been occasions, and I believe we have been in conversation with the city of Watsonville for opportunities if the city would like to take ownership under a relinquishment scenario. And so that has occurred in some areas of our district all over the state really. So that's just another one of the alternatives scenarios that could occur. Okay, and then one little more specific, I keep reminding Caltrans that I've talked to your office, they've been very kind. And that would be the enhanced crosswalk at East Beach and Marchion Street right in front of the Watsonville High School. And that's actually on the one way extension of Highway 152, which is Eastlake Avenue. So I think that's still on, it's moving forward. And I think I was told it would be early fall that they're gonna actually start working on it. Do you know that? I hate to put you on the spot because it's a specific one. I have to apologize, I don't know the exact detail of when that would be implemented, but I do recall the conversation and topic. It seems like I recall some correspondence between Caltrans and your office. So we can take that as a follow up to see where that stands. And that has a lot to do with the safety because during school hours, they do have probably close to 1700 students that are crossing that street, not only in the morning going to school, but also at lunch, they have open campus. And then also after school and sports programs in the afternoon. So anyway, that would be part of your safety program. So hopefully we can get that done. Thank you. Any other questions? All right, thank you, Mr. Atlantic for that report. Okay, moves on to item 16, which is a Measure D strategic implementation plan. Mr. Preston. Yes. So in accordance with the Measure D ordinance, the RTC allocates, administers and oversees the expenditure of all measure revenue, which is not directly allocated by formula annually to other agencies consistent with an implementation plan. As stated in the ordinance, the purposes of an implementation plan are to define the scope, cost, and delivery schedule of each expenditure plan project or program, detailed revenue projections and possible financing tools needed to deliver the expenditure plan within the 30 years promised to the voters and describe the risks, critical issues, and opportunities that the RTC as the local transportation authority should address to expeditiously deliver the expenditure plan. The RTC is beginning the process of developing an inaugural strategic implementation plan for measure D revenues by identifying program objectives and goals supported by sound financial objectives. The process is expected to be completed during the upcoming fiscal year of 2019 to 2020. On June 6th, 2019, the RTC authorized the executive director to enter into an agreement with K&N Public Finance, a municipal advisory firm to provide financial advisory services and the planning and analysis related to the development of the measure D SIP. K&N is here today to give you a presentation and included in attendance here today is David Leifer and I had the pleasure of working with David Leifer when I was director of projects and program for the Sonoma County Transportation Authority and he assisted me in the delivery of multiple strategic plans in the past. David serves as manager of K&N and has approximately 30 years of municipal finance experience including five years as an attorney and 24 years as a financial advisor. Also in attendance is Melissa Schick and Melissa has over 15 years of combined public sector and public finance, investment, banking and municipal advisor experience. David, the mic is yours. We have a presentation just so others can see it, we'll put it up on the screen. Okay, good morning. As Guy mentioned, my name is David Leifer. I'm joined today by my colleague, Melissa Schick who's gonna share the presentation with me. We work for K&N Public Finance. We are a municipal advisory firm. We've been retained by the commission to help, as Guy said, with the planning and analysis needs related to the development of a Measure D strategic implementation plan and to advise related to bonding and other sort of borrowing tools. Let's see, just to by way of background about what a municipal advisory firm is, there's a regulatory framework. Congress has regulated our little niche of the world in public finance. They have assigned to firms like ours, a fiduciary duty, which means we are obliged to put our clients' interests ahead of our own. The idea is we are here to provide analysis, objective analysis and advice to support informed and we hope prudent decision making by policy makers. So that's our role and we look forward to, I think this will probably be the first of several occasions when we'll be in front of you to help answer questions and provide briefings over the next several years. By way of background, we've put some logos up of some of the other agencies. Guy mentioned Sonoma. We work with your peers in Monterey and San Benito. I see Santa Barbara's not up there. They're a client. We do strategic planning and bonding assistance with all of these agencies. So we have a lot of experience working with self-help county transportation programs and particularly programs that have inaugural taxes that might be doing bonding for the very first time. The purpose of the presentation today is to do a couple of things. One, we wanna introduce the process by which a strategic implementation plan is developed and what some of its purposes are. We wanna introduce you a little bit to some bonding concepts because bonding is one of the important tools that can be used to deliver projects on an accelerated basis. And then we know there's some interest by the county and others in potentially looking at bonding against the direct allocation shares, not just bonding for regional projects but bonding for potentially local projects. And so at the end of the presentation, I'm gonna introduce that topic and talk to some of the different tools that are available and some potential policies that you as a commission board may wanna consider to guide that process. Okay, so as Guy mentioned, the voters approved an expenditure plan. The expenditure plan we're gonna talk about but it guides the allocation percentages for the expenditure of money. What a strategic implementation plan does is provide a roadmap in a sense to the feasibility of actually delivering projects. Over what period of time can projects be reasonably expected to be delivered? What additional funds, if any, might be needed? What sort of borrowing tools, if any, might be needed to deliver the projects on the schedule that is desired? So there are a number of sort of levers and trade-offs in developing the strategic plan. It's a, but as I say, it's a roadmap and it's gonna get updated regularly. We're gonna talk about that and that process is sort of an iterative process. So here I've outlined what I'd say is sort of the four elements of the plan. We're gonna talk a little bit more about each of these as we go through the presentation but first is the overall framework where we look at what are the projects? What are the construction schedules expected? What's the timing that's desired? Then we're gonna look at the revenue side. How much money do you have? How much growth is there expected to be? That's gonna impact the timing and delivery of projects, of course, which is why it's important to update these plans regularly because we can make forecasts but we need to update that for reality. And then we wanna integrate other information, other outside funding sources that may be available to you to deliver the plan. We're gonna take all that information. We're gonna dump it into a cash flow model. We'll show you a sample in a few pages, just a glorified Excel spreadsheet. Revenues, expenditures, and then we'll see after we drop in all those capital expenditures, where are their shortfalls? We say, okay, we got all these capital expenditures but we're bringing in revenues every year and so we may have some shortfalls. And then we're gonna look at what are the tools to plug those shortfall holes and bonding is one of those tools. Of course, bonding comes at a cost. So what's the trade off with that in terms of the overall delivery of dollars for projects over the 30 year life? So we're gonna do a bonding capacity analysis as part of the process. And then as part of this process, we wanna help you develop some policies related to sort of financial tools, borrowing, inner program borrowing, use of reserves, loans, et cetera. And then finally as part of that is what we're doing today which is providing some workshops or training for the board and for staff and for any other stakeholders that you think are important to be included in the process. Just one last short page on the plan itself. We've sort of talked about the planning process. Now we're gonna talk about the actual strategic implementation plan which will be developed and ultimately approved by your board. Really these six bullets here, sub-bullets are all the things we just talked about but this is what you'll find in the plan. There'll be revenue allocations along the lines of the expenditure plan and we'll look at sales tax revenue forecasts and we have a slide on that to talk about some of the different methodologies that we might wanna use to forecast revenues. Of course there'll be some discussion of the projects themselves and what the timelines are and there could be discussions amongst yourself about the priorities which should be delivered first and why, what sources of leveraged or matching funds are there and then what is the bonding availability to plug any shortfalls and then finally there'll be a discussion in the plan about policies that impact the financial implementation of the plan. Many sales tax agencies provide updates to their plan typically on a biannual basis. It could be more frequently but we wanna accommodate changes in project costs, matching funds, revenue growth, all of these assumptions which will go into the plan become more certain as more time passes and so we would expect that this plan would be updated at least every two years and the plan itself and any updates would be approved and discussed by your board. So what I wanna do now is turn it over to Melissa. She's gonna talk a little bit more about the details that are gonna go into the plan on particularly for regional projects and then I'll pick it up towards the end. Thanks. Good morning, I'm Melissa Schick and pleasure to be here on the screen today is the Measure D expenditure plan. So this is what was put forth before the voters in 2016 and it drives the allocation of Measure D revenues. In this case, there's direct allocations to cities and counties and then there's also regional funding where dollars will be directed to various regional projects. The expenditure plan serves as the primary basis for your strategic plan and so your strategic plan will program projects and revenues within the context of the expenditure plan. So what we'll do in our process is making sure dollars all stay in their appropriate lanes, if you will. In addition, the expenditure plan projected that Measure D will generate approximately 500 million over the life of the tax. That was assuming 17 annual revenues of 17 million in 2016 dollars. So also the strategic plan will look at a realistic forecast of future growth for Measure D. So along those lines, the first thing we'll do with the staff and in the context of preparing for the strategic planning process is look at Measure D revenues and start thinking about realistic assumptions for growth. And that will really be the primary driver for us to estimate future resources available for project delivery. There's various data points we utilize to forecast revenues and this is just one example. We've charted historical taxable sales in Santa Cruz County. You'll see that there's a good amount of volatility of growth in any given year. Just taking a five year look back at growth, it's approximately 4.3%. And then looking at a 20 year horizon, the average annual growth rate is lower at 2.76%. So it's just looking at a lot of various data and indices, also maybe working with local economic development departments and using this information to help us guide the future resources of the Measure D tax. So apologies for a very busy slide, but this is an illustrative example of what a cash flow model may look like for your program. And really the cash flow model establishes the implementation framework for Measure D within the context of your expenditure plan. So what does it do? It forecast annual sale tax available for projects based on a realistic assumption for growth of the revenues. And we put that into the model and you'll see in the blue shaded rows at the top of the illustrative model, we've shown just an example of revenues coming in at the top and then some assumption for growth over time. The other thing a cash flow model does is it starts putting revenues and allocating revenues to their appropriate buckets and funding allocations. So you'll see in the middle of the illustrative model, there's oftentimes a space to allocate revenues to direct allocation programs like you all have in addition to regional project programs. And then within each of those buckets, we look at the cash flow associated with money out to regional direct allocation programs in addition to the projects and the timing of cash flows necessarily to deliver the larger scale regional projects. So there's a couple ways that we look at delivering regional projects and actually a couple of ways just to deliver the larger scale projects. Some is just utilizing PAYGO measure D revenues allocated to that funding bucket. But the drawback with PAYGO is that doesn't necessarily always allow for the acceleration of large scale capital projects and the PAYGO approach may be more applicable to direct allocation funding programs where it's just dollars in and dollars out on an annual basis. The second approach is borrowing, whether in the form of a short-term loan or bonds to help accelerate shovel ready projects and it may help minimize rising infrastructure and construction costs. Really kind of the optimal financing plan will likely involve a mix of both PAYGO funding as well as some borrowing in the form of bonds or loans to deliver your regional projects. So turning back to the cash flow model, again just the same illustrative model but in this instance we've infused proceeds from an example bond issuance in fiscal 2021 to meet cash flow deficits over a three-year period. So you'll see that the ending balance line within this illustrative model shows positive ending balance through fiscal 2023, through some combination of cash flow revenues being able to support the annual projects and in addition to the issuance of bonds. You'll see in fiscal 2324 in this example we've highlighted that ending balance becomes negative again and it would be likely that there would need to be another borrowing at that time or some of the project expenditures would need to be pushed back just because there's not enough annual sales tax revenues to support those projects. So what are some borrowing tools and options to help accelerate projects? And in this context just really speaking of the regional programs, David will speak to local tools but really the primary tool utilized by your peers in the self-help county space is long-term, the issuance of long-term sales tax revenue bonds. There's other options within loan programs with the federal government or the state whether it be TIFIA or iBank loans probably the most efficient tool is a long-term sales tax revenue bond. We've also worked with transportation sales tax agencies that have utilized interim borrowing and that tends to be more with smaller scale projects where a big bond issuance isn't necessary and maybe it's a short-term loan with a bank or we've seen another entity use a county treasury pool or there's also facilities to just have an interim borrowing program where you draw on a line of credit as needed and then take out that interim loan or borrowing with a long-term issuance. So just a couple of things as we work with issuers in thinking about borrowing and how much to borrow and when to borrow. And first and foremost, your borrowing will be driven by your expenditure requirements and that really drives the amount and the timing. So as your regional projects start taking shape and this expenditure needs hit a peak that typically warrants a bond issuance. Those projects actually, in order to issue a bond, really need to have evidence of CEQA compliance as well as the related permitting in place. And then there's also tax law. So an entity like RTC would be issuing tax exempt bonds and in that case tax law requires that after issuing bonds that the expenditure of those bond proceeds take place over a three-year period. So we can't issue bonds and having those proceeds sitting around for a long while, we need to have the projects ready to spend the proceeds. The term of your borrowing will really be driven by two things. First is measure D. You can't issue bonds with a term beyond the term of your tax because those revenues serve as the security of your borrowing. And the second again is our friends at the IRS. They like to know that your borrowing will not exceed the useful life of your project. With larger scale transportation projects that tends not to be an issue. And then the timing of borrowing, as we saw in the previous example of the cash flow model, it tends to be that issuers like yourselves will sequence transactions that really meet the timing needs of certain projects. So it's likely that you wouldn't just do one bond. You could do a couple over a period of seven to 10 years. And then your ability to bond and the amount of your bonding is really, will be constrained by your tax. And your tax, at the time of issuing bonds, you'll need to, we'll need to show to the market that your tax will be sufficient to support the obligation to pay debt service. And we look at the tax within the year your bonds are issued. So your strategic plan will forecast growth over time, growth of revenues, and we'll use that for planning purposes. But when we issue a bond, we really look at your actual sales tax revenues in the year the bonds are issued. We'll also need to look at debt service coverage. So how much measure D revenues are available to support the ongoing debt service on the bonds. And typically we need to show that there'll be revenues over one times that of the debt service. So usually, if you had one and a half million of annual sales tax dollars, your debt service could not exceed that amount. And typically it would be lower, for example, closer to a million. And then interest rates at the time of issuing bonds will also drive your capacity. In a higher interest rate environment, you have lower bonding capacity. David will get into this a little bit more when we're talking about local agency tools and options, but just a brief snapshot of the security pledge and the RTC as the local transportation authority as the entity who is able to leverage the measure D tax. So it's the California department upon issuing the bonds, the California department of tax and administration will then direct the measure D revenues to the bond trustee. And the bond trustee will pay the debt service payments before allocating the revenues back to the RTC. So after issuing bonds, the after the authority would issue bonds, those revenues, the bondholders have first claim on revenues before the revenues coming back to the authority for use on PAYGO projects or direct allocation funding programs. And then this slide 13 just kind of puts numbers around bonding capacity, it's in sizing constraints and this coverage. And the first is coverage within the regional program. So again, the notion of staying in your own lane and making sure that if the regional program issued bonds for a specific project that the debt service would be supported by the regional program allocation. So for example, in fiscal 18, measure D revenues were just slightly above 20 million. And if we were to say allocate all of the regional program share to support annual debt service, that would be approximately 10 million. So the regional program could support a borrowing within its cash flow such that the annual debt service was approximately 10 million annually. The, this, oops, let's go, oops, this way. Oh, sorry, I was gonna go back a page, but thank you. Yeah, oops. That's all right, yeah, sorry about that. This one is what, this is the legal water flow. So this is where all of this is how bondholders and rating agencies look at a bond issuance. So all of the measure D revenues then would support that service to achieve a debt service coverage ratio. So if we go back here, the second box shows that assuming fiscal 18 revenues of just over 20 million. And if the regional program had the annual debt service of 10 million using the 20 million over the 10 million, your legal coverage is two times. So bonds are sized first and foremost to stay within the debt service can be supported by its specific program area, but then there's a legal coverage requirement such that all revenues, the coverage is based on all revenues of the authority. David. Okay, you're all experts on bonding now, I see. So congratulations. Questions now, or are you gonna wait till the end? I'm saying just wait till the end of the presentation. Yeah, and you're gonna hear more about bond if we're happy to answer questions today and we're gonna review these concepts multiple times before you ever issue a bond. I'll just add one comment to what Melissa said and then I'm gonna move on to the local bonding. But the reason why debt service coverage is so important is that sales tax are volatile as you saw. So if you issue a bond today and next year we have the big recession and sales taxes decline, the investor can only look to the sales taxes for security and you are not in a position to increase sales taxes. You can't go out without another vote and just get more money. So obviously from an investor point of view, if you're lending money, you wanna make sure there's a cushion there. So if debt service is X, you want X plus Y in terms of revenue so that if there is volatility and there's a dip and there have been some significant dips at various points, 10, 20% over one or two years, that there's still adequate money there to pay the bond and that's the whole idea of coverage. And it's gonna become important when we talk about bonding at the local level because of the different amounts of coverage that might be needed for that as well. But that's the whole idea is that there's financial, there's cushion when you issue the bond to protect the investor because this is not a situation like a county or a city wastewater enterprise or water enterprise where you can raise rates and generate more revenue the next year if there's a dip in delivery of water supplies as an example. That's one point I wanted to make. Yeah, I know there's gonna be some questions about all that bonding and we'll get to it. The other thing I just wanna reiterate that Melissa mentioned is this idea that money needs to be expended within three years generally, there's gotta be, when you borrow it in order to use the tax exemption which is favorable, there's an expectation that you have projects that are ready and that the money will be spent in three years which is why often there's multiple bonds that need to be issued as she mentioned over the course of 10 years or a longer term program. Okay, so what I wanted to do now is sort of, we've talked about bonding at the regional level and we're gonna talk a little bit about bonding at the local level and before I get into these slides just to comment about why, why was this even a topic? For many, many years I would say there wasn't a lot of interest in this topic. Most programs where there was a pass through or a direct allocation, it's not uncommon. The local agencies did not use bonding because they really needed the money for road maintenance on an annual basis and so the money would come in annually so that if they bonded for a bigger project they wouldn't have the sales taxes available annually because they'd be going to pay off the bond. So that was sort of the traditional working model and it still probably is for a majority of agencies but recently we've definitely seen more interest in this. I think it's for a couple of reasons. One is the obvious backlog of road maintenance projects that have accumulated over a dearth of funding availability for many, many years. I think that's one. I think two, now with SB1 there is more money around coming to cities and the unincorporated area of the county to address maintenance issues and so maybe that frees up a little bit more flexibility to use other monies like the self-help sales tax to tackle some of your larger projects at the local level so there's probably interest there and then of course Melissa talked on page seven about some of the reasons for bonding. Minimizing construction cost growth. If you're seeing large escalations and inflation on the construction side you wanna get projects delivered now then that's a reasonable tool using a bond to accelerate the delivery before those costs go up. Keep in mind of course that there is a cost to borrowing as well. There's an interest cost and so if those two were awash, if your construction costs and your interest costs were awash you're not necessarily saving money by issuing the bond. You're still delivering the project sooner which might be an important policy objective but it may not be economic. On the other hand if inflation on construction is going up at seven, 10% a year and the cost of borrowing is at 3% then obviously there might be an economic benefit to bonding so those are all the trade offs but bonding isn't free. It's just something we all need to keep in mind and so every dollar that goes to pay off interest on a bond is $1 less for project costs out of your sales taxes and sales taxes will be a finite amount so we believe bonding is really an important tool but we try and minimize it as well. As Melissa mentioned earlier we want to optimize the amount of dollars that you can use just straight up pay as you go because there's no cost to those dollars and then the amount of bond proceeds and so every strategic plan at the regional level and I'm sure your own plans when you put your local hats on will do the same optimizing dollars for pay go versus dollars for debt service. Okay, with that said let's talk about local agency options to accelerate the delivery of these direct allocation projects and against your direct allocation shares. So Melissa made one really important point, well among many and that is that under the Measure D ordinance it's really only the RTC in their role as the local transportation authority that has the authorization, the legal authorization to issue sales tax revenue bonds secured by Measure D. So per the ordinance only this agency can issue bonds, sales tax revenue bonds secured by the sales taxes, okay? And that's typically for regional projects though the authority can issue for local projects as well we're gonna talk about that. But that does not mean that local agencies, cities and the county have no tools available to them to issue bonds and to accelerate their delivery of projects with the sales taxes. It just means they can't use that tool but there are other tools that can be used and we're gonna talk first about those and then I'm gonna talk about how you also can come together through the authority and have the authority be the issuer of bonds. But the tools, the first tool I wanna talk about briefly is interprogram loans. That's one tool that doesn't involve bonding and may be appropriate for a smaller shorter term need by an agency that's maybe too small to bond. It's not worth the cost, the overhead, the administrative hassle of issuing a bond. So we'll talk a little bit about that. Then we're gonna talk about these options I mentioned for the local agencies to issue some sort of bond. It's not the same bond that the authority can issue. And then finally the sales tax revenue bond which can be issued by the authority and it could be issued on behalf of local agencies using the direct allocation share as the security for the debt service. So those are the three buckets of local agency options. This first is the interprogram loan. We know that the expenditure, excuse me, the expenditure plan sets forth various program areas. Some of which may have projects that are ready to roll and some which don't. So there's, as you can imagine, hey, if I'm ready to go and you're not, let's cut a deal. Let me borrow a little bit of your share, deliver my project over the next three to five years and I'll pay you back from my share over time. That's doable, it has been done. It may be more likely that a local agency that has a shovel ready project is going to borrow from the regional project that allocation because the regional projects may have a longer term horizon through CEQA and planning and getting matching funds. And so some of that money just may be accumulating and that may make more sense than doing interprogram loans from each of you. But this is all possible. It's one of the areas where I believe we wanna work with staff and your board to develop some policies. When would interprogram loans be permissible? At what interest rate would the borrowing be repaid back? Would there be the ability if it's borrowing from a regional program for the RTC to directly intercept the funds of the local agency that borrowed the money to repay the loan? All of these things I think are important. Considerations we've listed, I just mentioned most of those, the interest rate, timing and flexibility constraints. Obviously we don't wanna impinge another program's ability to deliver their projects. And so what kinds of protections are we gonna apply to ensure the overall equity of the program allocation? So we can address interprogram loans in the policy section of the strategic implementation plan. And we can have a conversation around that. And we did that in Sonoma and we have some policies from Sonoma that we can use as a starting point but there's others as well, okay? All right, so now we move on to the idea of local agency bonds. So these would be bonds that are issued by a city or the county, not by the authority. And so what I've said here is that local agencies can basically, there's two types of bonds that you could issue. And I don't wanna go too far into the weeds here but I'll keep it at the high level. First, and many of you are probably familiar with this are general fund-backed obligations, a lease revenue bond or a certificate of participation. So every city and the county has the authority under the state constitution and under governing law to enter into leases and to enter into contingent obligations which is what a lease bond is, to fund projects. And so what one could do is issue a COP for X millions of dollars sized carefully so that your share of the direct allocation dollars would be adequate to pay that debt service. So you wouldn't have to impinge on other monies of your general fund to pay that debt service. Keep in mind, you would be taking the risk. However, if the sales tax is declined, the general fund is still on the hook to make that debt service. So you probably would want to size a little of your own coverage or your own cushion into that bond to make sure that if there was a decline, you're not dipping into other of your general fund sources of revenue. But this is totally something you can do. And it's not technically secured by the sales tax revenue bond. It's just you're gonna get whatever amount of money you get from your direct allocation and you size your bond carefully enough to allow you to be comfortable that the revenues will be there to make the debt service. We'll talk a little bit about the pros and cons. One of the cons, if you will, of a COP or a lease revenue bond is you need to have a piece of real property. You are leasing a piece of real property in administration center, city hall, jail, courthouse, fire station, all of these are real property. Water treatment plant, very good. So I think some of you are familiar with this tool already but that can be done. And I've worked, I've been in front of many city and county councils and boards talking about this tool. And we'd be happy to talk to yours councils and boards if necessary. Okay, so that's step one is a COP. You might say, well, I don't wanna do that. I don't wanna pledge the general fund. Is there anything I can do to not pledge the general fund? But I know, but issue it at the local level, not through the authority. Yes, there is a tool that we call an installment purchase revenue bond or installment purchase revenue COP which could be structured so it's secured solely by your direct allocation revenues. Let's just say your agency is getting a million dollars a year on direct allocation. You think, you obviously don't know because of growth and volatility, you don't know but you think you're getting this amount of money. You could structure a bond that pledges your share. Okay, that's not technically a sales tax revenue bond which again only the authority has the authority to issue or the commission but could be secured by your share. Of course, the market is going to require that same cushion if not more that they would require of an authority issued regional bond. So if you're getting a million dollars a year, you probably only wanna have debt service that's six, 700,000 a year so that there's a cushion in case your share drops. There's still money there because there's no general fund pledge behind it. That's one point. The second point is if you remember back on Melissa's slide with that waterfall when the authority, which is you obviously in your hat as the authority issues a bond for the regional program, all of the revenues are pledged to the investor. Okay, now we would size that bond carefully as Melissa said, just to the regional program's share of revenue. So if the regional program again gets 50% of the revenue, we wouldn't size the debt service to more than 50% but the investor knows that all of the revenues are there to repay the bond. So effectively any bond that is issued at the local level secured by your share through this installment purchase revenue cop is effectively a subordinate bond to any bonds that are issued by the authority. That's not prohibitive. It doesn't mean it can't be done. There might be a slightly higher cost of funds and it needs to be coordinated with the regional level. The disclosure to the market is super important. It needs to indicate to the market that this is not an authority bond, that it's effectively subordinate. And this is important. We saw this at TAMC where the advisor to TAMC in Monterey. I think the city of Salinas was issuing a local installment purchase revenue cop. They shared the documents with staff at TAMC. They shared it with us. The disclosure was not appropriate. We got on the phone with the underwriter with the bond council. They of course agreed once we pointed out why and they had to really change their rating presentation and their official statement. It affected their rating not terribly but it was important to be clear of the priority of revenue. So I believe at the end, we're gonna talk about policies. Any type of issuance at a local level that doesn't involve the authority should at least be coordinated with authority. Include the authority staff. Make sure that we and any lawyers that work for the authority are at least working cooperatively to make sure that we don't trip over each other and do something which would impinge or run counter to the ordinance. So I've sort of laid out the two ideas. Why a cop versus an installment purchase revenue bond? A general fund cop, we talked about the negatives. Pledge of the general fund, pledge of real property. The positive on it is that you could issue more. You could issue at one times coverage. If you're bringing in a million dollars a year, you think you could issue a bond secured size to a million dollars a year of debt service because the general fund's taking the risk that revenues might drop. So that's one reason why you might think about that tool versus a different tool, you have more bonding capacity. On the other hand, the installment purchase revenue cop, the positive there of course, is that it would be secured only by your share of revenues and therefore you're gonna have to build more cushion in. So that's the positive and the negative. So it's doable with some coordination and the appropriate approach to education and disclosure. Third and finally, what about bonds that the authority issues, but on behalf of direct allocation projects, Melissa talked a lot about authority issue bonds for the regional projects, which are very important and I presume that'll be the focus of the strategic plan. But each of your agencies working with your public works directors and your own governing boards will be talking about whether you want to bond or not. So let me just talk for a minute about that and then I'll wrap and you can ask your questions. If the commission were to issue sales tax bonds on behalf of the direct allocation programs, there are a couple of important considerations. One, we might run out of coverage for the authority wide project if every single agency were to come and say hey yeah, we want a bond against our share which is unlikely, I'll grant you that, but it's possible. If each of your government entities said yeah, we want a bond and so the authority said okay, well let's look at that. We know we want a bond for some regional projects and we want a bond for each of the local projects and we generally want to get a good rating and a good interest rate and so we need to have some cushion. There isn't enough cushion to go around possibly and still get to the level of cushion we think would get you the highest rating. Let's just say 1.5 times coverage. In this box, this is a variation on Melissa's boxes. Here you got the 20 million a year, we're just saying let's just say those are the revenues at the time you issue your bond. Your regional program allocation, let's just say you bonded against the full regional, that's 10 million of debt service. Let's just say you bonded against the full city county direct allocation share which is about 27% so that's another 5.5 million. So you're up above 15 million of annual debt service against 20 million of revenues so now your overall coverage is down to 1.3 times instead of say 1.5 times. It's just an illustrative model. There's still coverage there because there's some other programs like transit and bike ped and other things that aren't being bonded against in this example. So we just have to be more careful if that's the approach and adopt some policies about how the locals could issue bonds through the authority and I'm gonna talk about that in a second what those policies are. So it's doable and it may make sense to do that also at the same time that the authority is issuing bonds for the regional project to achieve some economies of scale not duplicate cost of issuance, save some money basically for everybody involved. So this slide's a little messy. We've really talked about it all but pros and cons you can take this with you. You can call us and ask us questions later if you have them with your various staffs but we've laid out some pros and cons for each of the three options. We've got the general fund lease which presumably gives you greater bonding capacity and maybe a lower interest cost depending on the rating of your general fund but it pledges the general fund and ties up an asset. It's a pro and con. The local agency installment purchase cop protects the general fund, no need for an asset but probably a new credit. So a little bit more work involved in establishing the credit. It's more complicated credit. It's gonna probably have a lower rating, a higher interest cost because it is effectively a subordinate obligation to authority bonds and you'll have lower bonding capacity because you need to build in that financial cushion. And then finally the authority issued bond that we talked about also protecting the general fund and not requiring an asset and could have economies of scale when you do it all together with the authority bond but those probably on a policy basis we'd probably say the best course of action is to say yeah, the authority can issue bonds for the direct allocation share but maybe those should be on a subordinate basis to any authority issued bonds for regional projects and so there's still maybe a little bonding capacity constraint there and possibly slightly higher cost of funds as a result of the subordinate lien. Though of course interest rates are super low right now so even out of subordinate lien that might still be super cost effective. So I'm gonna finish this last page. Sorry, I'm going so long. Page 20, these are some of the policies that we might consider working with staff and your board ultimately around local agency bonding. Clearly local agency bonding should be coordinated with staff at a minimum through the evaluation and implementation stages and inter program loans of course necessarily involve the authority. We need to develop some policies around inter program loans. When, how much, how does it get repaid? Bonds issued by the authority themselves. We would need to just discuss how to preserve the coverage for all players especially for the regional program. So we might require debt service coverage for the local programs or subordinate liens, et cetera. And then, yeah, we probably wanna talk about installment purchase revenue cops issued by the city or the county making clear that they're gonna have a subordinate claim on sales taxes generally and that needs to be disclosed appropriately in the various disclosure documents. So I'm gonna end there, I know it was a mouthful but I hope you found this helpful and Melissa and I are both available for questions. Thank you, David and Melissa and I'm sure you stimulated some questions. I'll begin with Commissioner McPherson here. Yeah, thank you for your detailed presentation. Very well understood as best it can be. And first of all, I wanna thank the voters of Santa Cruz County for approving measure D. We wouldn't be having this discussion if you wouldn't have approved that by more than a two-thirds margin. So thank each and every one of you. The first page there, well, in measure D, it said that 30% would go to local roads and you, I've seen that the neighborhood projects include the, there's 27% and then there's 3% for neighborhood projects, Highway 9 and Highway 17. So those are the two specified but that's where that 30% is made up. I wanna make that clear because I know that was an important, when we were on the campaign, the biggest percentage is gonna go to local roads and so those are inclusive in that. So that's just for me to clear my conscience, I guess. Yeah, but that's our understanding as well. And another thing that we really pushed is that Santa Cruz County would be one of a few in the state, I believe now, to be a self-help county. And that means that the state recognizes you're helping yourself with your transportation issues. So we will put a line item in here for self-help counties. And as I remember, it was 200 or $300 million total. And for this county, I think it was gonna be in the neighborhood of about $200,000 or $300,000 a year. Is that about right? So I think you're talking about a portion of Senate Bill 1 which is the local partnership program funding. And that was put into Senate Bill 1 to be an incentive for local entities to tax themselves. So there's been a lot of debate on that program recently. Right now, in the previous cycle of programming, 50% of it was done by formula and we were receiving about 300,000 a year. And then the other 50% was competitive. There's been some discussion about changing that to provide more by formula as opposed to by competitive basis. I've actually been trying to push more for competitive because smaller counties can't do a lot with $300,000 a year when you're talking about some very, very large projects. And we're working on a compromise that would provide a higher percentage by formula but a special bucket for smaller counties to compete for. And we think that overall that would actually provide opportunities to bring more money to the region. Thank you. Thank you for your effort. We continue pushing and pressing for that. And it's just another benefit of Measure D and I just want to assure the voters also that included in that as an oversight committee. So we have an updated annual report of how we're spending our money so people can be assured that we're doing what we said we do. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Rodkin. First of all, thank you for your presentation. I've been in local government and regional groups like this for over 30 years. That's the clearest presentation really on how bonds work and what the considerations are I've heard all that time. Great, thank you. And I don't want my questions to sound like I'm against doing bonding. They may end up sounding like that's not the point because it weren't for bonding. City of Santa Cruz wouldn't have a water treatment plan a sewage treatment plan. Our roads wouldn't be paved. They all depended on bonding that we've done over the years. So my first question is, can you give, did I understand correctly that the cushion you need generally for the bond market is about 1.5, in other words, like an effect of 150%. You need to. Yeah, it's like a third extra. It's a third extra. I mean, that's a working assumption. One thing to note, sales tax revenue bonds are viewed favorably by the market. It's a good credit. The ratings that you get, the higher the rating, the lower the interest cost, right? The lower the borrowing cost. And so the higher the coverage factor, that will impact the higher rating. So 1.5 we think is consistent with a sort of double A category rating. It's a very positive rating. It could be done, a bond could be done at a lower coverage, maybe one and a quarter, but it wouldn't be as favorable. So what we see here is that since on a regional basis you're only gonna bond against 50% at most and probably not even that, but at most. So effectively there's two times coverage for the regional bond. So there's no reason to drop down to 1.25 and get a lower rating. At the local level, then we start to look at what are the trade-offs? Maybe a lower rating is better because you get more money, we could talk about it. But yes, that's our working assumption. And again, for the general public about this, when you think of a recession, most people are thinking there's nothing, the bottom drop down. But in fact, this is the 1.5 number, something is on the level of the worst recessions even like the five year one we just had recently, they don't take more than 50% of the tax money. Yeah, I mean, we've seen 10, 20% declines, but. And you give us a ballpark figure for what the borrowing costs are for a bond and was including the setup, establishing the bond as well as the interest rate you're paying. What percentage of the money that you're getting from measure D? Let's say, for the sake of argument, we bonded 50% of it. I'm not gonna do that. Yeah, it's a big number. What percentage of that would be going down? I can't answer that one. I didn't think. I might try to really answer that one. Your term of the tax is 30 years and remember the tax has been going now for a couple years. So let's for the moment assume you're gonna issue 25 year bonds. Just yesterday we were in the market with approximately a 25 year issuance and it was high A, low, double A rated and the interest rate all in cost of borrowing on that was 3.06%. So we're at an incredibly low interest rates right now for planning purposes. We often use a higher estimate for debt service costs. And then you wanna talk just briefly about the cost of issuance, the actual consultant costs, et cetera. Yeah, so your cost of issuance is one payments to consultants, advisors in the form of municipal advisors and legal advisors and then just ancillary cost bond trustees and rating agencies. And then there's also a payment to an underwriter whether they're purchasing your bond or negotiating the sale of the bond and that's in the form of what is called an underwriter's discount and that tends to be paid on a dollar per bond basis. So if you have a bigger offering, you have a larger payment to the underwriter whereas the consultant fees are just fixed fees. And on any given transaction they end anywhere. Yeah, on average 300,000 in terms of all of the consultant fees. One last question. If we were to issue a bond for city of Watsonville and we talked about this for that was gonna be based primarily on their share that they were guaranteed by the formula that we worked out. But in the end, we're gonna, it's not gonna be their general fund but we're gonna take the ultimate responsibility if things go badly and so forth. So who's we? The authority, the RTC. And so we're putting the entire 500 million bucks at risk. Even though again, I don't think it's all at risk but legally it is. How often are general authorities willing to do that for local governments? I'm trying to get some sense of whether that would be like extremely generous and never heard of before or something that's done every day. I don't have any idea about that. Yeah, I haven't seen it done very often. I saw it in Napa County when they had a flood tax and we were the advisor and we did allow bonding against some local shares but we had a policy adopted by the, it was a flood protection authority that the bonds be on a subordinate lean basis to any bonds by the regional issued at the regional level. So that, I guess the answer is it wouldn't be done without protections for the priority project at the regional level and the bonding ability at the regional level and protections for other local agencies because you're pledging everybody else's share as well. So there would have to be a sizable coverage factor to really protect against declines in revenues, I think is the way it would work. But as Melissa said, that's the only occasion I can think of it. And if the bond holders are, they're being put in the second or third position for getting the money if everything falls apart, they're gonna wanna hire interest rate on their bonds, obviously. Yeah, yeah. My question is, again, that was a really excellent question. You seem like you understand it well. Commissioner Cap. You bet. Actually, I won't repeat a lot of that. The interest rate and everything and how much we pay, is there an actual figure like 5%, 7%, kind of like a home loan or whatever like that is, is there a percentage? Is it 20%? For the interest rate, as Melissa said on this recent deal we did, it was 3% or 25 year money in the current market for a reasonably well rated entity. So again, by time you're ready to issue, it could be a year from now, it could be two years from now, we'll see where rates go. We're at a historically low level, but I've been saying we were at a historically low level for about five years and we're still there. And all of the events that are happening nationally and internationally seem to be keeping interest rates low given all of the volatility. Okay, and then I know you're the messengers and all that, as far as the Measure D money, we're spending how much on consulting with K&M? Right now, to assist in the strategic planning process, we charge on an hourly basis. Our rates are in the 300 to three and a quarter an hour for the two of us, I think if I remember correctly. And so it's a time and materials basis at the moment. If we were to assist you in a bond transaction, our typical approach is a fixed transaction fee, which gets paid from the bond proceeds, typically in the range of $100,000 or less, something in that level, yeah. And the reasoning I guess for the bonds is when Measure D was passed, that was before now the federal highway money that's being withheld for the freeways, that affects Caltrans and it affects us approximately about eight million probably or more in Santa Cruz County that we had spent on emergency repairs. So the public, I guess, that asked me, they expect that once Measure D passed that we were gonna be shovel ready and be able to go full bore because we were gonna use leverage and matching funds from the state or federal. Somehow we're not hearing that. And that's my concern. What I'm seeing here is the money that we're bringing in for Measure D should be for leverage and also matching funds from the state and fed. And then if we're not getting it, we're going down a path of borrowing and borrowing with this money. So, am I mistaken? It's kind of depressing in a way. Somebody have an answer? I think we're reasonable where we are. Yeah, remember we passed Measure D because we could not count on revenues from the state and federal government. And so we wanted to become a self-help county. So we would have access to funds. And what we are talking about in this presentation is to leverage these funds to potentially accelerate the use of the money to do the projects now rather than waiting to do them all over a 30 year period. And what is being presented here is options for how that could be done. We in the end will choose whether we wanna do that acceleration and at what level and for what kind of projects. But there will be policies. But Measure D without a doubt provides critical resources for us to do road repair on projects that we're doing now. In the county of Santa Cruz, we're gonna be having $2.9 million in this year's budget on road repair that we did not have prior to the passage of Measure D. And that represents probably a twofold increase on what we were spending on roads in 2016. So it's a big increase. And now we're just figuring out how to potentially borrow off of it in the future to get the projects done sooner. Okay, and I guess that's my point. Maybe I'm the only one mistaken here is if we have like 2.5 or 3 million coming in in a year, are we getting matching funds or is the leverage getting us another let's say 2.5 or 3 million from the state or federal government because that's what the public that I talked to was looking at. Are we actually getting that matching funds or leverage that we were talking about? We are eligible for additional funds from the state as our director just pointed out. There's a discussion about how much is gonna be by formula and how much will be in competition. Those of us who campaigned in favor of Measure D understood that when we were out talking to the public that we were gonna be able to use this money as leverage and that we would be able to access additional funds. Right, and have we received any leverage money? So we're in the first cycle of the SB1 program, which is really our best opportunity to leverage funds. We didn't have a lot of regional projects ready. Now I'm speaking mainly about regional projects because those are projects that I have control over and that I can actually submit applications for. Local jurisdictions can certainly submit their own applications for leveraging funds too. I don't think it's an either or situation where we're looking at bonding and paying for the project versus asking for grant money to pay for the project. I think it's a combination of both and there's a sweet spot that we have to kind of reach. It takes a while to get projects, big projects ready for construction. Sometimes it can take five to 10 years to get a big highway project ready for construction. There's a planning phase. There's an environmental phase. There's the need to acquire right away and to do final design before you get to construction and then you actually have to construct the project. One of the things that K&N clearly emphasized today is the need to have secret clearance before you can issue bonds. So I'm trying to get as many projects out with pay go capacity to get environmental clearance. So that would be now putting me in position to bond. I'm gonna be looking at the horizon saying can these projects expend these funds in three years? And then I'm gonna try to see what my need is. How much money do I need? Should it all come from grants or should it come from a combination of the measure funds and the grant funds? The grant funding application process and the guidelines are still being formulated. But what I've seen is a desire to have the teeth in the game for us to put some of our money on it so they'll put more of their money on it. So we're going to be doing an analysis as we put together the strategic plan to say where's our sweet spot? Should we put 10 million of bond money on this project for construction and asked for 30 from the solutions to congested corridor pod? And that would be a fully funded project. Do we think that that will compete well and give us the best opportunity to get the grant? I could say, well, I'm not gonna put any of my measure money on it. I'm gonna go for all the grant funds, but that could be risky. I may not get the grant funds. So it's going to be a combination of looking at all of our opportunities, but we're too early in the game to really measure what we've obtained thus far. Cycle two of solutions to congested corridors is coming towards the end of this year. That's why I'm working hardly. That's why K&N is here today. We're trying to get ourselves in the best position to leverage funds by using a combination of measure D and grant funds. And I appreciate that. It kind of makes it clear. It is risky. What we're doing here is we got to be very careful. I just, I want to see us spend the money wisely and actually be shovel ready and get projects moving actually. The only concern I have is I hope 10 or 15 or 20 years from now, we don't have to try to pass a tax to pay off the debt from our debt from measure D. I want us to spend the money wisely and not have this debt that we're going to have to pass another bond or pass another, you know. Thank you for those comments. Yeah, what we're trying to do today, Greg, is we're trying to get an understanding of how bonds work. I'm sorry, this is a lesson for all of us on how bonds work. We're not spending any money today. We're just taking the time to get educated on bonds. So Commissioner Dills. Yes, thank you for the great presentation also. I have a few questions. Sure. First, does the, do we already have a reserve policy and a debt policy that you'll be building upon? Does the RTC have such those documents? So we don't be on what's in the measure itself and that's one of the strategic implementation plan is to put that actually in policy and give you guys an opportunity to decide how you guys want to approach financing for these projects. I also want to emphasize too, because there's been a lot of discussion about, you know, the economy turning downward and how much risk we're taking. When I was at Sonoma, we issued our first revenue bonds in 2008, right about at the beginning of the recession. We did fine. We continued to deliver environmental documents. We didn't slow down. We watched interest rates go down. We watched the cost of labor go down and we were actually able to deliver more projects by bonding. We never had an issue with coverage. We had great coverage and safeguards put in. We had a debt reserve fund as one of our policies. We don't want that to be too high because that limits your ability to deliver projects and that's money just sitting in the bank and there's also additional insurance that you can take out to ensure that, you know, you don't get yourself in trouble. But we got through the great recession delivering most of our projects and being able to pay our debt service. And my next question, thanks for addressing the recession issue because obviously they come and go and when you're looking at long-term trends, I recognize you've seen that. But I'm wondering about maybe the more recent trend of brick and mortar and what that, I know you don't have a crystal ball, but you know, long-term, is that a real issue for us in terms of security for bonds that we might issue? Any thoughts on that? So you're talking about brick and mortar sales tax revenues versus on the movement to online. Right, and so yeah, that overall, you're right, a lot of it's just shifted to online. But because of that, it may not, we may not get the sales taxes here in our locality depending on I guess where it's coming from. But any thoughts on that general trend and how it may affect our long-term sales tax trend? Yeah, I was just gonna, there was a recent, was it late 2018, ruling it's the way fair decision with regard to the collection of sales tax revenues from online purchases. So the hope is that while some of the online sales tax maybe have escaped the county historically, that now that decision will help insulate the sales tax within the county. So if I were a county resident purchasing an item from a vendor online in Oregon, that entity would need to charge my local sales tax on that product, so in remit. And so the hope is that that decision will help protect the sales tax revenues on a local basis. It still needs to be administered state by state, I think. There's a lot more to come on that. But it's an important point, we've been talking about internet sales for a while. You know, I think ultimately in the strategic implementation plan, you wanna be more conservative about your growth assumption. You know, under promise and over-deliver is generally a better course than the inverse. Spoken like a true finance person. My next question is, and I know we're talking about bonds and debt, but we're talking about sales taxes and as being the primary source of how we pay back these bonds. And I'm wondering if we're contemplating a new sales tax. I know there are lots of questions out there still about how much we're gonna get in grants versus what we're gonna get in existing tax. But is that part of the discussion? I'm asking partly because I spoke with the previous executive director, but I'm gonna ask you this question about that possibility. And so I just wanted to see if we are contemplating that, if that's part of this strategic plan that we may need to do a new sales tax. We're contemplating a class on bonds right now is all we're doing. We're not contemplating any additional funds. There's no hidden agenda here. This is pretty much an education on bonding. Thanks. I just wanna see it coming. That's all. My next question. Okay, go ahead. Is on the COP, at least revenue bonds you mentioned, and the fact that security would be real estate for local jurisdiction if we were, from the city, city of Scott's Valley, if we were doing our own COP. I remember way back, San Cruz County, when they did some COP's, they actually used the roads themselves as security. I know that's unusual. Is that a possibility? Or do we actually literally need a building? Well, we've talked about that. It's less than ideal. We don't see it very frequently. It's not considered an essential asset in a sense. And that's part of the security and at least an investor wants to make sure you're not gonna walk away from your admin building. You might, what does it mean to even walk away from a road? I wouldn't say it can't be done. It's something we could look at, but it's definitely irregular. Nasty, I say a nasty. Better with the parking lot. Yeah, right? Which might mean a higher interest rate on the bonds if there's some complexity. I'm sure of it, yeah. And my last question. You mentioned alternative ways that we could fund for cities that say our share of projects. If we had the money and we don't have surplus of money, but if we found ourselves with cash as a city to cover our share of local project costs, could we use our own internal borrowing and repay that with the tax dollars as they come in later? Whether they were, I guess that may, could come in I guess either as tax dollars or as bond proceeds, but any issue with paying ourselves back, we funded our own money and did a large project all at once. That's gonna hold as a security, the money you get from the RTC, is that the question? We're not even going that formally, but just saying that if we decided to do a project all at once and it fit the definition where we could spend the money on for our local shares that comes to us, could we use the money that comes in later? You saying to repay a bond? We're not going to pay ourselves back. If you use cash for a project, if we use cash, it's probably simpler if I don't bring the bonds into it. Yeah, I'll leave the bonds out of that. Because we just bring the money coming in, so that's probably not a bond issue, but any... I think it depends on, as long as it's consistent with the expenditure plan, the ordinance, right? I mean, that's the use of sales tax dollars that's dictated by that. So we just comply the ordinance. Okay, thank you. That's all my questions. And I just want to follow up just to be clear. When we didn't get into all the elements of bonding, but bonds can be repaid early after a period of time, and that's a consideration as well. If you have excess dollars, you want to pay off your bonds early, that's a possibility. Thanks for adding that, that may be a future question. Commissioner Kaufman-Gomens. Yeah, somewhat that question. Let's see, the bond rating. Let's talk a little bit about that because there's an application process in order for us to be able to get rated somehow. I don't know the cost, the timing, the variance of the rate. Can you discuss that a little bit about applying and getting yourself rated? Sure. And just for my edification, are we talking about for a local agency bond or for the regional bond or just generally? Well, the discussion is about the regional bond. So let's talk about this agency as a whole and what that process would look like. So one of the things that the rating agency's rate is an actual deal or a document. So you need documentation. So one wouldn't typically go and get a rating until they're in the process of issuing a bond. The bond issuance process from sort of start to finish typically for maybe six months for a first time issuer. So we're a ways away from that, but once the legal documents have been prepared, which set forth some of the terms we've talked about, the coverage and the term of the bond and the repayment structure, all of that is set forth in a legal document. Then there is a disclosure document which discloses to the market all of the economy that supports the sales tax and any other risks, any litigation that's happening that might impinge on the tax, the decisions like the way fair and other things. All of that goes into a prospectus. At that point, then we go to the rating agency and we say, here's our story. We want to borrow $25 million. It's gonna have coverage of at least X. We've got all these legal protections built in and covenants. Here's our economy. Here's our collections history since 2016. We tell a story, the best story we can. And at that point, we get a rating. But would there be, I don't know. Cost or? Well, the difference in going out and getting our own rating versus some of the other bond options that are in here. I mean, if we're dealing with a quarter, a half a percent, a quarter of a percent, is it really important to do or to go that approach versus another? I don't know cost effective wise. If it's wise for us to go and spend all that for whatever the savings may be. Well, I guess if I understand the question correctly, if the authority goes for a rating, we expect the rating to be high given this type of security structure and the likelihood of the coverage factor that we're talking about. So I think we think in the low double A, something like that, and it was reasonable to expect perhaps. If the city of Watsonville were to go and issue a local bond secured by just your share of the sales taxes, it very well could be less. You're in a much less economically diverse area. The economy there may be impacted by a recession differently. So that's one factor that the regional rating is like, could be higher than the local ratings, although you each have your own entities with your own characteristics. So I don't know if that answers the question. I might be missing it. Well, I think that I'm just looking at the regional basis versus some of the other terms of the other bond options that were available. It's, we obviously wanna go with the most competitive lowest rate possible so we can leverage that as far as we possibly can. And the duration of the bonds, is it necessary that we don't have to have the duration of the life of the tax either? No, of course not. A five-year bond or a 10-year bond as well. And again, no pre-payment penalties for payoff early for any reason other than upfront fees that we won't. Well, so that, I mean, you're getting into the details and your advisor, if you're doing a local bond, you could work with us as an advisor or another firm, certainly. Certain types of publicly sold bonds do have a pre-payment penalty. Other types of private placements, maybe with your local bank, might not. That really, you're getting into another level of detail. I think if you were to issue bonds through the regional authority, it probably makes sense to try and get a sense of who's interested in issuing and when and try and team up and create some efficiencies. You do one issuance, we don't wanna do five little issuances and pay all the same fees five times. Duplicate. Yeah, so there's efficiencies, I think that could be achieved. Thank you. Mr. Leopold. I'll try to keep my remarks short. I appreciate the presentation, it was very helpful. I think my questions are more directed to Mr. Preston. You know, the county faces some unique circumstances. When measure D passed in November of 16, it was before $130 million worth of damage to our infrastructure in February of 2017. And now we were faced with a federal administration who is making it very hard for us to access federal disaster dollars that we're entitled to. And so the idea of bonding off our share has gained a lot more traction at the county. In your experience in Sonoma County, was there bonding on local roads, did entities bond off of their portion different from everybody else? The locals were asked about their interest in bonding and they were not interested in bonding. They wanted a steady flow of revenue for maintenance and transit. They also, for their project funds, did not want to bond. The only exception was when SMART, the Sonoma Marine Area Rail Transit, did pass their sales tax measure and they did so concurrent with passing CEQA for that project. They did bond and we did a combination bond with the regional projects for the highway bucket with the SMART program so they could repair grade crossings, which was allowed under their bonding. It was a very similar situation with measure D and 8% rail preservation. We can do certain preservation projects but we can't implement rail. When they pass their own sales tax measure for that and I believe they bonded off of that too. But the regional projects, the direct allocation projects for maintenance and transit showed no interest in bonding. Well, I think that it might be different here given the different circumstances that we have here. And maybe, I don't know whether you could answer this or they can, I'm assuming that we're gonna want to bond for the regional projects because they may be the ones most likely the highway project or something like that, which requires a lot of money at one time. Could you bond for a regional project and one jurisdiction together or do you have to do that separately? Yes. You could. I think the biggest issue is the term of the payback and the life of the projects. So I know that the highway projects, for example, have 50 hundred year of lifespan, no problem bonding over that period of time. So I'd have to know what the projects really are. I mean, if they're five year maintenance projects and the longest term I can go with seven years, I would have to talk to David about how could I structure a bond that I want to issue for 30 years with a project that I can only bond for seven. Yeah, that's a really good point. Thank you. There's a relationship requirement under the tax law about the average life of your bonds and the average life of your project and the useful life and they do need to be in relationship. One can be 125% of the other, but not more. Well, just so that we're not too deep in the weeds, I feel confident with the leadership, Mr. Preston, has experience in putting together these strategic plans. One of the reasons we hired him is because of that experience and his presentation does that that would be useful for project like ours. And so I feel very confident in that. I think we were gonna, unlike the previous county, there's probably gonna be some bonding here and to be thinking about that as we build this strategic plan will be important and we will have to have a lot more conversation with our public work staff and our board and everything else to figure out exactly what we wanna do, but I think we should be prepared for that. That's why we're here today. Thank you for the presentation. We'll consider that on the table, okay. Commissioner Brown? Thank you for the presentation. I'll echo Commissioner Rock in statement about this, although my history of hearing these kinds of presentations is much more limited than his. It was really understandable and so I appreciate for novices like myself really being able to get into this. I don't think I have any other questions. I think most of them have been answered. I would say just to echo the desire to find a way and space to have this conversation about how it is that local jurisdictions who may express an interest in bonding. I know at least the county has and others may come to have that conversation as we proceed. So I'll just leave it at that. Thank you. Commissioner? Sure. Thank you for your presentation. I look forward to seeing the actual scenarios and then we can really look at the numbers and the trade-offs. But as conceptual, I thought it was helpful to go over this. I will say from my perspective, it's extremely important that local jurisdictions in this case, particularly the county, have the opportunity to bond. First, interest rates are extremely low and our credit rating is extremely high. We will not be able to borrow money at these rates anytime in the near future. And so this is an opportunity. And then the most important piece is that given the state of our roads, interim repairs can extend the lifespan. And so we can wait for these monies to come in. And in five years, every road will cost three times as much to repair. And so the more we can preventative work we can do or interim work we can do, the more money we save. And right now the money is accessible and inexpensive. And so we need to move quickly on this as quickly as we can in order to access these funds in my opinion. Can I make one follow up comment to that? Absolutely. Very brief. Just a reminder that all of the considerations we talked about early on on the regional program apply for the local program bonding. So having SQL ready, having an expectation that you'll expend the money within three years for tax exempt bonds, those are all the same requirements that'll help dictate when you're ready, I guess. Yeah. Thank you. Commissioner Mulherr. Commissioner Gonzalez. First of all, I want to thank you for the presentation. And again, thank you for bringing this. It's been very educational for me. I'm the novice person over here, everyone's a senior to me. So this has been really an educational process for me. So thank you. Commissioner Rock, can you have a follow up? Great. Comment. I just wanted to respond to a concern that Greg Capet had raised that you're spending some of the money on interest and setting up the bond and so forth. But it's not just that you accelerate the projects. They happen sooner and people see them now instead of having to wait 20 years for them to happen. But it's the fact that the construction costs go so consistently up every year, I mean they go up and down, but over a trend. If you're paying three to, let's say even 4% with the initial cost to issue the bond against the fact that if you wait another year for the project it's gonna be 7% to 10% more expensive to do it. It's a fiscally responsible thing to do as well as giving people something earlier. So you gotta look at both of those issues, I think. To trade off with inflation. Yeah, no, exactly, I think it's kind of critical to address that. If it were just money coming out and people were happier because they got the projects earlier it might not be fiscally responsible, but we're actually saving money when you spend the money earlier rather than wait and plus the maintenance issue that Ryan raised. Well that was why I asked the interest rate. If the interest rate was let's say 10% or something then we're losing money, but in this case we're keeping up with inflation. Okay, great. Okay, thank you. I'm gonna open up to the public to see if they have any questions. Anyone from the public like to come up and have a comment or question? Okay, great. This item was information only and it was a boatload of information. We appreciate your time for coming here and enlightening us and I'm sure we'll be having further conversations down the road. Thank you very much. Okay, we go on to item 17. This is the Highway 9 Santa Rosa Valley Complete Street Corridor Program. Either way, either way, you know, it's probably that's... Commissioner McPherson has a few comments before you start, so I'm just gonna allow him to make those. First of all, I just wanna frame the conversation on this Highway 9 Corridor plan. Before we, this is kind of, we usually listen to the presentation, but I just wanna get a framework of where we are and who we're working with and the partners that we have in this. And the long haul we have taken to get to this point. And I really wanna thank everybody for developing this plan. Each of the agencies that are involved really can't be thanked enough. It's been a tremendous cooperative effort, especially from Caltrans. I wanna thank you for your funding. They're funding of this study and buying all of us to your table to develop this first master plan for transportation for Highway 9. This is gonna take a couple minutes and I just don't wanna miss any points because this has been a long haul. The Regional Transportation Commission staff, Rachel on down or up or whatever, your passion and hard work were evident throughout this process. I can't thank you enough. And the County Public Works staff has been really very instrumental in getting us to where we are today. And specifically just some sentiments of Valley residents and community groups. In particular, the Boulder Creek Business Association who we heard from earlier, Santa Rosa Valley Chamber of Commerce, the Valley Women's Club and the Santa Rosa Valley School District. Personally, I've been talking with this community since 1913 after first being elected. And we... 2013. 2013. Well, I'm getting older. Yeah, I'm glad. You are one of the senior members. I'm one of the senior members. I know. Okay. Here we go. And early on, Caltrans came along when we had a metro bus that... And the metro has been very much involved in this as well. To just look at the needs of Highway 9, a special avenue that... And it's for serving the Santa Rosa Valley and all its surrounding residents there. Now after more than two years that Caltrans is and RTC has taken to develop this, I would just want to emphasize the one big theme is safety. Safety for pedestrians, cyclists, motorists, and yes, we've even heard horses this morning. But after the February accident that took Josh Howard from his family and friends, safety has become an even more profound theme. My thanks go to also Assemblyman Mark Stone who hosted a meeting with me on April 18th with Congress members Anna Eshoo and Jimmy Panetta, present to ask Caltrans, the RTC and County Public Works what we could do to address these safety concerns. The Santa Rosa Valley makes up the biggest part of my fifth district and is the only area in the county that has a state highway serving as a main street to four town centers. Sheldon, Ben Lohman, Brookdale, and Bola Creek. The regulations that historically apply to state highways may not be a great fit for this rural community served by this Highway 9. And that's one of the many reasons this plan is so important. It's a recognition of the iconic Santa Rosa Valley and the unique conditions of the main street for those communities Highway 9. Santa Rosa Valley residents are interested in slower vehicles, safer walkability, better cycling opportunities, well-conceived disaster preparedness and relieving congestion at choke points, at the SOV school entrances, Graham Hill Road and Bear Creek Road in particular. It's critically important that projects to improve Highway 9 increase the safety for all users becoming more reliable for first responders and bolster safe exiting in case of an emergency, which have really come to light, as we know in the recent fire disasters that we've experienced in California. The Valley has the highest rainfall and wildfire risk of any population center within Santa Cruz County year after year. And so there's no doubt that future holds more frequent and tense flooding, slides, road damage and loss due to fire. After the April 18th meeting we had, I requested Caltrans and the RTC to give an update during today's meeting regarding the status of their discussions on safety projects and improvement along Highway 9. I wanna thank again Caltrans for its response in their letter dated June 19th to the RTC Executive Director Guy Preston. After initially screening all 175 project suggestions identified in the draft Highway 9 plan, Caltrans indicated their next steps in collaboration with the RTC to take ownership in delivering feasible solutions sooner rather than later. They have given us a sense of their process to analyze other projects that need further review. The Caltrans response demonstrates a concrete action that I'm very appreciative of for the communication to the community of Santa Rosa Valley. The Highway 9 plan makes clear there will be numerous public agencies involved in implementation of many of these projects, including us, the RTC, County Public Works and the Santa Rosa Valley School District, among others. But the central agency is Caltrans. Nothing will happen along Highway 9 without Caltrans as the primary party. We all have a seat at the Caltrans table, but it is their process and regulatory framework that will dictate the progress that is made on any of these projects. I have heard from many Santa Rosa Valley residents who believe that Caltrans process is lacking in both innovation and sense of urgency to get projects built. I empathize with the frustration. I also understand that if we wanna get projects built, we must work with Caltrans in this process. As for myself, I will continue to press for progress and work collaboratively with Caltrans and other agencies involved for projects to get built. Projects need to be, progress needs to be visible and timely if we're to fulfill the responsibilities of public officials and make Highway 9 safer for the community it serves. Regarding the speed limits, speed limits came up time and again, during the public input process that are highlighted as an issue in this plan, the traditional guidelines set the speed limits of her state highways that act as main streets for rural communities need reconsideration. I know that the California legislature passed Assembly Bill 2363 to establish a zero traffic fatalities task force to reconsider the methodology for setting speed limits. The task force recommendation are coming in 2020. I will be advocating that the task force find ways to lower speed limits on highways that act as main streets for small town centers. The speed limits in the town centers are not posted the same as the plan indicates. Fulton and Boulder Creek are posted at 25, Ben Lohman and Brookdale are posted at 30. I hope we can get some consistency in that. And I thank you for the opportunity to establish the framework and how far we've come. It takes time and I know people can get frustrated with the timeline, but I wanted to assure you that Caltrans has been cooperative in this venture and I look to the fulfillment of really implementing really reasonable Highway 9 corridor plan. So thank you for your time. Thank you for that background, Commissioner McPherson. That's important that we all understand that. And with that, Brianna, why don't you take us through what's in front of us, okay? Okay, good morning, Brianna Goodman, RTC planner and San Lorenzo Valley resident. The Highway 9 San Lorenzo Valley complete streets corridor plan team has worked with the community, supervisor McPherson's office, Caltrans, the County of Santa Cruz and Metro to develop the complete streets plan for Highway 9 and SLV. Plan area includes the corridor from Henry Cal State Park and Fulton to north of Boulder Creek. It is focused on Highway 9, but also on Highway 236 and connecting County roads. The plan identifies, evaluates and prioritizes complete streets concepts that improve safety, access to schools, businesses and bus stops, and traffic operations for users of all modes of transportation. Plan affects the community's vision and priorities for the corridor. They include corridor-wide recommendations and designs, 28 location-specific recommendations, including maintenance, walking, biking, traffic flow, transit and safety projects, as well as the short, middle and longer-term implementation options. This is a community-based plan and the plan process includes extensive outreach to the SLV community. In incorporates, input we've received since 1913, and 2013, most recently, after publication of the draft plan in January, the project team solicited public input through emails to stakeholders and interested community members, two well-attended open houses, an online survey, news releases and articles, neighborhood social media groups, community calendars, flyers, RTC committee meetings, and a public hearing at the February RTC meeting. This feedback resulted in modifications to the scope of some of the identified projects and concepts in chapters two and three, and this included addition of new components, as well as changes to the proposed implementation and chiming in chapter four for several of the projects. Summary of comments received is included in your attachment number three of your agenda. Comments received after the public comment deadline have been included as a handout. Summary of significant edits to the document has included in agenda attachment two. It should be mentioned that this is a corridor plan planning document to be used as a stepping stone to prioritize projects for more detailed feasibility analysis before being approved for implementation. This document is not itself a final implementation plan. Bringing complete streets improvements to the SLV Highway 9 corridor faces a variety of constraints. Some are physical, such as right-of-way widths between private property and town centers, and right-of-way widths between slopes, trees, retaining walls, and other terrain features between the towns. Some constraints are financial, such as the availability of state, federal, and local funding for construction and maintenance of these projects. These constraints create a need to prioritize improvement projects, which is the primary goal of this plan. Please see page four of the executive summary in your agenda packet that's attachment one, page 17-7, and chapter four of the document for the results of this project prioritization exercise. Implementation is already underway. Last summer, RTC staff secured an H-SIP grant to fund safety enhancements to five SLV crosswalks identified in the plan. Caltrans has already been investigating which project concepts could be integrated into near-term shop projects, as well as which suggestions and concepts they recommend county public works implement via encouragement permits. We also received strong collaboration on the plan from county public works who are planning to install signage, alerting pedestrians and cyclists to alternative routes on county-maintained roads between the SLV schools, campus, and Felton this summer, when they will also improve the existing crosswalk at Felton Empire Road and Cooper Street. RTC, Caltrans, and county public work staff will continue to pursue funding opportunities for priority projects in the plan. On June 6th, the commission-programmed Measure D funds as part of the five-year plan. In this one million for San Lorenzo Valley safe routes to schools, funding pre-construction and grant match to add pathways to the SLV schools campus, 250,000 for preliminary scope and engineering documents for near-term projects. RTC, Caltrans, and county public works will use funds to conduct more detailed analysis, including cost estimates, engineering, feasibility analysis, and to help prepare applications and secure funds for some of the projects we identified as short-term priorities. RTC staff will return to the commission for approval to use additional Measure D funds to leverage funding as needed, but given the large list of priorities, we estimate $100 to $200 million worth of projects total. Implementing agencies will be looking to maximize all funding options. The project team would like to thank Supervisor McPherson's office, Caltrans, the County of Santa Cruz, Metro, and especially the San Lorenzo Valley community for all their excellent assistance in the creation of this Complete Streets Corridor Plan. If the board has any final edits, we will incorporate them into the document before it goes to print. Let staff know if you would like a hard copy of the final bound document. Staff suggest that the project list remain a living document so that feedback from the public, Caltrans, and other stakeholders can be added to the identified project list that's Appendix B over time. Staff recommends that the commission accept the plan, request that Caltrans and the County of Santa Cruz accept the plan, and also work in partnership with the RTC to implement priority projects and concepts, and authorize staff to negotiate funding and co-op agreements with Caltrans and the County, as may be necessary to facilitate implementation. Thank you. Thank you for that presentation, Brianna. Any questions for Ms. Goodman? I just want to thank Brianna, especially too. I mentioned Rachel, but she's been on all of you. Teamwork. Teamwork. Any questions? OK, we'll go ahead and open up to the public. Any questions of the public? Comments? Come on up. Anything you want to say? Yeah, welcome, three minutes. I guess life all comes down to timing. Good morning. Just want to say that we support all the improvements that are going to take place on Highway 9. I voted yes on Measure D. Back in March, when I reviewed the plan, I'd realized that a bus stop was going to be relocated, which is about 400 feet from my property, directly onto my property, not just on my property, but into my property, which would destroy all my fencing, my gardening, my irrigation, all of my security systems and everything that I put in place. That's just for me as a personal homeowner. So I reached out to Rachel. She provided me some guidance on what to do. She suggested that I come up with two different alternate sites for a bus stop, which I did provide. And so I created a 30-page document to have everything to show that putting a bus stop on the corner of Lazy Woods and Highway 9 would be very, very destructive, not only to myself, but dangerous into the safety of not only the commuters in Highway 9, but especially to all the residents of Lazy Woods itself. So I went ahead and reached out to all my neighbors and gathered a petition of 33 signatures, all opposing the bus stop being placed on the corner of Highway 9 in Lazy Woods. We have fire hydrants there. So first responders would be eliminated if you have a bus that's parked right there. All of the residents that live on the Lazy Woods cul-de-sac, they all turn left onto Highway 9 going south towards Santa Cruz. Having a bus sitting right there on the property would be able to limiting the view of people being able to look out to the right to see the oncoming traffic. So I propose an alternate bus stop since Rachel said that the main thing is to be able to have folks from, especially students, from the east side of the highway or the northbound side of the highway to be able to have access to the other side of the highway going to the high school. So I propose another bus stop that was 150 feet down that's closer to that particular crosswalk and also a stoplight to be put on El Sollo Heights with a walkway to go up El Sollo Heights to allow the students to be able to walk rather than having to trespass through the church property. So I wanted to make this known that if there is a bus stop, we really would not, all of us, not just myself, but all the residents that I represented in Lazy Woods would not want to have that place there but place somewhere else. So Rachel was able to reach out to Kimley and Horn and ask them to redraft and I just reviewed the redrafting. The original redrafting was item 3.34. That was the diagram which is for project number 11. Project number 11, which is a diagram 3.38, does state add a shelter to the transit, relocate bus stop closer to crosswalk and El Sollo Heights as to where the original one said, relocate existing bus stop to the northeast corner of Lazy Woods Road and add a bus stop shelter. In the diagram, it still points to the corner of Lazy Woods on 3.38. So that's still concerning to me. I wanna make sure there is no future misconceptions about what that could be. So I understand my time is up and I'm not sure of the protocols of this council but I'd like to be able to submit this document so that it is on record myself but all the residents of Lazy Woods, all 36 of us really would oppose having a bus stop there but we do support all the improvements on Highway 9. So thank you for your time. Thanks for your comments. Can we get an electronic version of that from the staff? Not today, are you at some point? Yes. You have a clarification point for me to add to that. Yeah, just to add to that in the staff report there's a link to our website and every single comment, including that 30 page document that we received from the public during the not only during the official public comment period but after the official comment period are all posted on the project website. Thank you for that. I don't see anything else. Next speaker. Let's look it up. Hi, my name's Joanie Martin and I'm a resident of San Lorenzo Valley for almost 30 years now. I raised a couple of kids there. I live in Felton near the schools and my children have been frequent pedestrians between the schools and downtown Felton. Our entire family has biked and walked Highway 9 and I appreciate that action is finally being taken on this. I think it's tragic that it took a death to seemingly really grease the wheels to increase the speed with which this is happening. I'm gonna try to just give you a couple of my very specific local comments and then I also, if I can, I'd like to speak on behalf of a mom who came with her toddler and had to leave. So we'll see if I have enough time for that. My very specific comments are that I appreciate that a short-term solution that we need in order to get people off of the narrowest, most dangerous part of Highway 9 right now is to increase awareness of two bypass alternate routes that people can take. One is off of Fall Creek Drive and one is off of Clearview Avenue and I understand County Public Works has agreed to put signs at their point that they can do that on those roads. Unfortunately, those signs are gonna be far enough off of Highway 9 that it almost is just a symbolic act because if someone doesn't already know to take that route, if they're coming down Highway 9, they're not gonna see them, I don't think, where we were shown that the signs would be placed. So that would be the first thing, a little local knowledge I'd like to share with you is that it would be a much better improvement to have a sign approved by Caltrans to be actually at Highway 9 saying, take the Clearview route, take the Fall Creek route as an alternate. The other thing I'd like to say about those two alternate routes is, of course, that they are really short-term interim solutions that the real solution we need is the widening of the shoulder there because people are always gonna take the most direct path. They're gonna have that inclination, cyclists who aren't local to the community, even families that don't just live in our neighborhoods that Clearview and Fall Creek go up to, typically aren't aware of those bypass routes. So the widening of the shoulder is really the key improvement that we need. So thank you for considering the signage to the bypass routes, but, and let's get that done quickly, as quickly as possible. I feel like that should have been done months ago after Josh's tragic accident. Now if I can, I'd like to share the comments of Leah Samuels who came here with a toddler and waited for about an hour and a half till she had to leave to get her three-year-old from preschool. She recently moved to Felton and had heard about the dangers of Highway 9 and hoped that they were overrated. She decided to attend by foot a local festivity and went with her three-year-old daughter and she said it was terrifying and that they were nearly hit twice on the way to the local festival. And so she would like to urge the prioritization of this because environmentally we need people out of our cars, we need people walking and biking for the health and independence of our children. We want that to happen and it needs to be able to be done safely. So thank you very much. Thank you for those comments. Welcome. My name's Kelly Howard. I'm Josh's mom. So forgive me that I'm gonna be typical. I know this has been going on for about 11 years and I didn't know that until my son was killed. And I know there has to be numbers to get action. He's a person and he's mine. And I know that thing can change what happened and we can't bring him back. But I want to prevent another family feeling this pain every day that me and his family feel. It's horrific. It will never go away. And I still see Highway 9 in the area that he was killed the same as it was and almost strips curbing something that's minimal could have prevented the vehicle from just going over the line. Environmentally California Environmental Quality Act. It's on the line. I don't know that it's de minimis or what but it just seems that something could be done. And I appreciate the signage that is gonna deter the children to go up and a safer route. But like Johnny said, they're gonna do the quickest way. And I really think Caltrans needs to do to help and save lives. I don't want any more numbers. I don't want numbers to help move this forward. Oh, she's not a number. He's my son. I'm sorry. I need to see change, please. Thank you. Thank you. This commission truly regrets your loss and we appreciate you taking the time to make this presentation. Thank you very much. Thank you, commissioners. I am Brian Largay. I'm a resident of Felton. Highway 9 is broken like our hearts are broken. Hundreds of residents along this section of road drive to the highway, drive to the grocery store, to the pool, even though they could walk there easily. Many of us have no choice because we can't drive or our parents need to work or because we're dedicated to climate solutions. Hundreds of kids could easily walk to school. Parents won't let them. They give them body armor in the shape of a car. All those extra trips make for traffic nightmares and the frustrated drivers make it even less safe. If a Caltrans crew had to walk the route to school, the engineer would determine that a dangerous condition exists or perhaps an imminent hazard. The risks to the Caltrans crew would be unacceptable. They would close the lane. A kid walking to school is subjected to those conditions for perhaps eight to 40 hours a year. Our complete streets law calls for safe mobility for all users, including bicyclists and pedestrians. Since 2008, when complete streets was passed, US pedestrian fatalities have increased 41%. Conditions have changed. Smartphones or legal marijuana or longer commutes. For those who walk or ride, that body armor looks a lot like a weapon. Unless the RTC leads, nothing will change. After Josh died, Supervisor McPherson and Assembly Member Stone, as we heard, met with Caltrans. They ask for simple actions now. Signage, striping to direct kids to safer routes, easily accessible. In your packet, Caltrans shares a timeline for safety improvements of 2026. I hope I read that wrong. Highway nine has 30% of the vehicle trips of Highway 17, 20% of Mid County Highway one. Those roads receive vastly greater investment in safety. 10% of the county lives in the San Lorenzo Valley, far less than 10% of RTC funds are invested in the Valley. Measure D was a nail biter and our votes put it over the top. We need the RTC to drive the process forward. Please embrace this work. That's the only way to get this mess fixed before we lose more members of our community. Thank you for those comments. Welcome. Good morning. I'm Josh's stepfather. I just wanted to thank Bruce. Sounds like you've been doing a lot of hard work on the issue. Highway nine is so dangerous. One of the hardest parts since the accident is continuing to drive up, and now Highway nine and seeing the kids walk up and down. There will be another tragedy if something doesn't get done. So I just want to make this brief. I just urge you to do whatever you can to work with Caltrans, Caltrans work with RTC. So some improvements, you can see some improvements been made. I mean, everything's on paper right now till the matching gets taken on the roads. We haven't done anything. We don't want to wait for another tragedy to happen to push it even more. Thank you. Thank you. Morning, my name is Jean Radcliffe. I live in Felton and I'm here for two things. Specifically, I live in Felton and we walk on Highway nine. I don't have children. I do have an elderly mother who walked from our home down to the restaurant on Highway nine without supervision unbeknownst to me. And I was terrified because she was walking on a narrow pathway, very poorly lit. And fortunately, nothing happened to her. But I feel the same way that a parent would feel about a child walking that same route. Really terrifying. We do try to walk. We know the back ways because we're locals. We know how to get down to the ice cream without going on Highway nine. But it is longer and I totally endorse what my neighbors have said. My second comment is I served as a planning commissioner for many years in Southern California and I was involved in several very large, long-term planning projects with Caltrans. And it was a different district and every district has its own culture. But I will say that Caltrans, despite local impact, insisted on prioritizing car traffic over everything. I lived in San Juan Capestrana, which has a very large pedestrian community. And despite testimony repeated input from the community, they never took into account the local importance of pedestrian traffic with the result that we had some very badly designed freeway improvements that actually increased the likelihood of pedestrian accidents. That's not going to happen here because frankly, I don't think nine could get any more dangerous for pedestrians than it is currently. I really don't think it could. But I will say that I'm glad that Caltrans is engaged with everybody, but we need to make sure that local priorities are communicated. And then it's not just how many cars can we move per hour because I think that's the default for Caltrans. That's your job is to move cars. But it is our main street and there are families and our kids and frankly, tourists. It looks like a cute little town. You're walking from boutique to restaurant and you have no idea that you're walking along a straight highway with 18 inches of clearance on your way to the cafe or whatever's you're going to. I think it's clearly a high priority and anything that can be done to speed the process up as previous speakers have mentioned is important, but also keeping the focus on the most vulnerable sector of the public. And that would be pedestrians. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Donna Zeal. I'm a 48 year resident of the San Lorenzo Valley and for many years I served as Mark Stone's alternate on the RTC when he was supervisor. So I have some sense about the planning process and the various funding streams that come into the process. I want to support the fast tracking of the improvements as everyone else has spoken about. And I think what motivated me to be here today more than anything else is that I was in my car as they were performing CPR on Josh. And I watch that and I don't want to ever watch that again. Please, please act quickly on this. Thank you. Thank you, welcome. Hi, my name is Audrey Johnson and I've owned a home on Highway 9 in Felton for 25 years. I plan on going to work today. I raised four amazing kids who attended SLV schools from preschool through graduation. They would often walk home or bike home from school but with the current dangers I would never consider that a safe option. Four years ago my son David was hit by a truck in front of Henry Cowell on Highway 9 which threw him over the guardrail and as I sat with him and we came to the realization that his leg was not gonna make it. I'm thankful every day that he made it but it's been an ordeal and Highway 9 is so dangerous and something has to be done. My home and adjacent property are clearly identified and pictured in various RTC documents as a primary challenge yet no one has ever reached out to me regarding this. You can see my property on the priority projects three dash 21, 28, 27, 28 and 29 and appendix F page seven. The road sides that are usable by pedestrians are often zero in some of these things it says less than three feet of a shoulder but it's more like three inches maybe. There's landscaping issues that aren't maintained by Caltrans. There's water pools and Caltrans knows or has known for years and years that that's an issue and yet it hasn't been resolved and it makes it so that people actually have to walk into Highway 9 into the road to get around it. When on trash days when we're required to put our bins out on the street there is no path. You have to walk into the street or kids will run and dash through my private driveway and I'm happy to see that happen. I never yell at them to stop. I always allow them to walk through my property. The intersection there, there's three southbound and one northbound lanes. And what happens is that people are constantly there's no way to cross. There's like three crosswalks so there's no way to cross the one side of the road and that means people are constantly playing a life and death game off frugger running through moving traffic on the stretch of road in front of my house resulting in countless close calls. The accident that resulted in Josh's death occurred in front of my house. I actually was on my patio and heard it happen. I didn't know at the time but I learned later what happened. It happens all the time and so I'm sort of immune to it. But I just wanna impress on you today how critical it is and how precarious the current situation is along the highway nine corridor and urge you to prioritize the aspects of this project that will make it safe for the pedestrians most of whom are kids to get from the SLE campuses to downtown Felton. Thank you for sharing with us. My name is Gabrielle Brick. I live and work in Felton. I live off of San Lorenzo near the Bigfoot Museum and I'm certainly in favor of all of the crosswalk improvements between there. I work at San Lorenzo Valley Elementary School where I teach second grade and that's one of the biggest reasons I'm here is I'm asking you to expedite the changes to the intersection to change the flow of traffic into and out of the tri-campus area specifically where there is no light in front of my elementary school. I am the teacher who more than anybody else has parking lot duty after school and I'm the person who stands in the parking lot with a stop sign like a Caltrans worker directing traffic. We have two lanes that enter our school parking lot. One of which is for people picking up curbside where we have one and a half parking spaces for curbside pickup. The other lane has school buses and we have about 250, 300 kids between grades one through three being dismissed at 215 as well as a few hundred more middle school students being dismissed at 220. And I am directing traffic from people leaving curbside pickup to people entering the parking lot searching for a parking space. That is there's only one lane for people to exit or find parking. Sometimes people are backing up in addition to all that and there's pedestrians trying to get to their cars. So it is all I can do to keep chaos at bay and my understanding is that the reason our parking lot hasn't been redesigned is that there's a multi-jurisdictional process that has to happen involving Caltrans. So I'm asking you to expedite that. I think if you look at the volume of people that not only does our school parking lot serve on a daily basis, but the number of people that are impacted in terms of traffic backing up far up highway nine because nobody's going anywhere in our parking lot to be able to turn right for a southbound to enter or turning left into our parking lot. I've worked at many schools, summer school teacher in Cupertino as well as in Live Oak School District and I can't think of a more poorly designed parking lot. I don't know if there's ever a traffic study done when the two of our four elementary schools were closed more than 12 years ago, but for the number of kids that were serving, it's egregious. And so I'm asking you to change that as soon as possible and appreciate the work that Supervisor McPherson has done with our school district to identify these issues as well as just say that I happen to be about five cars behind when Josh was killed. And I'm so glad I didn't see anything because it's profoundly disturbing, but I'm not at all surprised that it happened and I fear when a child or an adult is injured or killed in our school parking lot. Thank you. Thank you. Hello everyone. My name's Christopher Holmes. I live in Felton. I've been there since 2005. Here to support this project, I have a 12 year old and a 10 year old that both go to SLV. I'm one of those people that put a steel cage around my kids to go to school and come back. I'm reluctant to let them walk even from school to Fall Creek just because it's a little bit wonky in terms of the protection that they have. But I encourage all of you to really go over there, take a walk yourself. There's nothing like being there in person and seeing the situation and getting a handle on it mentally so that you could put yourself in our shoes and decide whether you'd let your children walk there and what might be done to solve the problem. So I'd encourage you to please expedite the project and take everybody's comments into consideration. I represent all the people that couldn't be here today with kids my age that go to SLV. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Hi, my name is Jim Helmer. I'm a 68 year resident of Ben Lohman. And those of you that know me, you know I am passionate about traffic safety. I spent 11 years in these council chambers working for the city of Santa Cruz, implementing plans like livable streets, residential preferred parking permits. And I personally wrote the city's first master bicycle master plan, which has laid the foundation for the largest bike plan in the county. Following Santa Cruz, I worked 21 years for the city of San Jose, still living in Ben Lohman. And I developed the traffic calming plan and policy. I implemented the street smarts, public education and awareness program in San Jose. It warms my heart to see that city of Santa Cruz has adopted that plan, which the state office of traffic safety grant allowed cities to adopt this plan. And now it's in full force in Santa Cruz. More recently, I wrote the complete streets plan for the smallest city in the Bay Area, Moni Sereno. So call it livable streets, traffic calming or complete streets, it's all the same. You've heard it. In the 90s, the federal law changed, allowing transportation commissions to make decisions on about 70% of the federal gas tax for local and regional planning and projects. However, state transportation agencies primarily retained responsibilities for all maintenance and all operations. So we have split responsibilities, as we've heard today. Activities like ditch cleaning, paving, striping, stop sign analysis, traffic signal timing. Those are maintenance and operations. Those should be low hanging fruit items. They should move quickly. So this plan is a blueprint for the future. Let's try to look forward. I came here today to talk a lot about how we could marry the shop program, the bridge restoration, the bridge replacement, culvert replacement programs to this plan. I don't have to say that. It's in the letter. The dates are way too far out, but we can work to move those up. So let's marry the shop, maintenance, bridge and culvert plans to this plan. On my way here today, I counted 11 retaining walls between Bendelman and Felton. Some as low as two feet high at the bus stop to Park Avenue and El Soil Heights. Some as high as 20 feet at the traffic signal at Glen Arbor Road. I also saw two areas where water is still oozing out of the mountains. May I have just a little more? Still oozing out of the mountains. One right near El Soil Heights curve and the other one tragically where we've heard people testifying today about the death. It's unacceptable to be having moss and algae out in our driving lanes in July. Marrying the shop program is a win-win-win. Well, better pavement, safer walking and cycling, wider shoulders and fewer fixed object collisions. If you looked at chart 2.7 in this report, the fixed object collisions added to the pedestrian injuries outweigh by far the vehicle-to-vehicle collisions. That's not good. We have cars running off the road hitting fixed objects like redwood trees, utility poles, fences, and guardrails and sometimes people. So in closing, I would just like to say that I would like to see some of those innovative bonding and general fund reserve type programs complement the local streets that are included in this plan. In Ben Lohman, we, for seven years, we've been talking about a walking path on Glen Arbor Road for two blocks. That's in this plan. So let's marry it to the other priorities. And then finally, I personally spent probably more time than the consultants on the campus plan. My drawing is in the study. It's looked at and called the Long Range Alternative. However, I will tell you that the proposals in the plan that call for two right-turn pockets, that's not a 20-year solution. That's not a 30-year solution. It's not even a solution to the problems described by the young lady. We need to re-engineer the whole campus entrance and the walkway systems from there to Felton. Thank you very much. Thank you for sharing. My name is Tom Fredericks. And the only thing I wanted to add is as I listened to, first of all, it's not surprising to me there's so many people from Felton because that's where I think the most urgent need is for something to be done. And as I was listening to others describe the, you know, with deep emotion, their own experience of this segment, I realized that the commissioners, very few of you probably have a picture of this. And the only thing I wanted to add then in order to help fill out that picture is that when people refer to the school or to the SLV campus, it is a campus. It's literally where every student in the valley goes to school. It's preschool, it's elementary school, it's middle school, and it's high school, all in one spot, one mile, less than a mile from downtown Felton. And anybody, like my daughter, we live in the, where my daughter could have walked to school every day. She's 20 years old now, but I would never let her do that. I tried to bike a couple summers ago to use the pool. I thought, you know, I'm a mile away. I'll take a bike. I did it once. You know, it's just not worth it. So I wanted to just make sure you understood for the people who don't have a picture of this, that this campus is the school campus in the entire San Lorenzo Valley. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else from the public like to address this topic? Go ahead and close the public comment, bring it back for discussion and recommendation. I just wanna thank everybody who showed up and to mention that aside from that stretch that where the tragedy happened to Josh Howard, that a key component of all this is the school campus that really houses everybody from kindergarten through high school. So there's a couple thousand kids there, I think, or teachers and staff. It is part and integral part of how we correct this, because in the morning it's like a parking lot and in the afternoon it's like a parking lot on highway nine and it can lead to a lot of frustration. And so that will be addressed. It's gonna be a long-term project with a cooperative effort again from Caltrans RTC, the county and the school district, but it's on the radar and I hope it can be done as quickly as possible. Realistically, it's probably three or four or five years away, but I just, I think it's something that we, it is included in the plan and I want everybody to be clear on that. And I can't tell, again, everybody, how much I appreciate us getting this together and having this as a special item on the agenda. And when the time comes, I'd like to move the recommended actions, but I think there might be some more comments. You can go to make that motion now. Make the motion to approve the recommended actions. Second the motion. Second by Kaufman-Gromas and do you have a comment? I do. I'd like to make sure that the public has that timeline, that they see where it's going and how we've achieved getting to that goal. And again, this one, I don't know if it's like a full 30 year of the life of the bond, if this were to be part of a project that's feasible for that in the overall RTC bond feasibility, so that we can do some things that are priority on things like this, especially life-saving projects that need to take place. And the other recommendation too is when these come up, it would be good for us to have a visual of this plan that, because we're not all familiar with the location, but as they describe some of these streets, then we can actually visualize that in the presentation. Mr. Rodkin. First, I want to appreciate the members of the public that testified to us on this issue. I think their passion is well justified by the reality of what's going on. It's probably evidence that I'm too long in local government that I understand why it might take three or four years to do a permanent fix, even five years to do a permanent fix of this problem in that one mile between Granthill Road and Highway 9 and the schools. I understand that. Most members of the public don't. The environmental work, you have to go through the studies, the engineering work, all of that. But I don't have any patience for the idea that we can't do the short-term things. And I'm not a traffic engineer, but bots dots along the stripe of the road at least so that there's some rumble strip or something that people run into it. The signage that tells kids not that they're all gonna take advantage of it as people, I think correctly point out, but that would give people an alternative to walking along. And I've been up there, I assume other members have, people said that we hadn't seen it. A lot of us have actually been up there and seen it. Why those aren't being done by now is not understandable to me. I really don't get it. I understand statewide bureaucracies or district-wide bureaucracies in Caltrans are difficult to work with, funding issues and so forth. But I know that the county and RTC would step up with the money to make these short-term. I mean, it's a trivial amount of money for the things we're talking about. Signage and bots dots on the road and there may be a number of other small-term things. And as I said, I'm willing to be patient even though the public may not appreciate it why it's the permanent fix. Because there's right-of-way issues. You need more space to make it a permanent fix here. Expensive engineering stuff to move that retain wall by property, et cetera. I get that, but I don't get it why we're not doing the short-term stuff next week. I just don't get it. Mr. Brown. Yeah, I just wanna really echo that and put an exclamation, double exclamation mark at the end of it. I mean, well put, I don't understand it either. I do think that obviously the longer term, the shoulders and all of that work is gonna take time. But these things, and again, maybe I, now that you've said it, Commissioner Rock, and I'll echo it because I don't understand exactly how much time all of these things take and what the hold-ups are, but it would be really helpful to know, and I'd like to try to see what we can do at this level to kind of move those things forward. I appreciate that our staff has reached out and talked about the, and tried to address the signage issue and other items, but could we get a report back or something to give us a sense of when this is gonna, we can expect this to move even the short-term things especially because the longer term is gonna take up to five years. Any other comments? Right here. Go ahead, Dr. Liu. Well, I just wanna thank everybody for sharing the testimony. It was powerful testimony about an incredibly tragic circumstance, and I think that all the speakers highlighted that the likelihood of more tragedy unless something's done, and it really hit me emotionally, and I appreciate people taking the time to share that with us. It's important for us. I think it would be incumbent upon our Caltrans representative at our regular meetings to give us some update about these short-term efforts because I'm not sure it's an RTC funding or staff issue, but it's a Caltrans. It's their road. And so to the extent that our Caltrans representative could be prepared to talk about how we could get some of these short-terms, the questions of signage and whether it be rumble strips or bot dots or whatever that is, it would just be really helpful that when we come back here in August that we have some report about getting those things done and giving some impression to us that there's a fire to get the larger pieces done. I appreciate the work of my colleague, Supervisor McPherson, who's been really committed to focusing on these issues and fighting to secure funding to deal with pedestrian issues. And I'm glad that we included money in Measure D to do just that. And the public has said that they want that. We want that. And Caltrans plays a big role here. And I think it would be really helpful. I'm the representative here today. I don't wanna put completely on the spot because he's not our regular representative here. We usually see Aileen Lowe. But I think it would be really helpful at our meeting in August to get an update about that. Could I just say just a clarifying point. I recognize when I made my comments, I didn't mean to suggest that this is the RTC's responsibility primarily or solely, but just wanted to say like, if there's anything we can do to help facilitate that. And yes, it would be really cool to get a report about progress from Caltrans. Mr. Shrunkins-Alves. Yeah, I'm really appreciative of everybody that came today and spoke. I just have a question and a comment and maybe a suggestion at the same time looking at these conditions and the time that it's gonna be taken to make these improvements. And I'm wondering, is there any way that the school district or our agency also and the county can join forces and somehow get some sort of small transportation for these kids that are walking at that time to safely transport them from a safe point in Felton to the school without them having to walk that dangerous section of the road for that timeframe. I mean, I don't know if that's doable or if it can be done. But I mean, personally, I think the safety of the children throughout the county is important. And so I think that's what we have to look at first is how can we get our kids safely to the destination that they need to get to if they need to walk and they have no other mode of transportation and how can we supply that? Before I call for the vote, I just wanna acknowledge two things which I think the board shares in common. And that is, in my opinion of how government's supposed to work, this is the way that the public is supposed to come and present to government. I commend you on your presentation, your factualness, your respect and the passion that was involved here. And I think because of that, you've motivated this body to try to do whatever possible. And I wish we could see more of that in public government interactions. And with that, I think just professionally, I think what I'd like to do is just direct staff to take this challenge on, to interact with Caltrans, see if there is such a thing as some low-hanging fruit here that we can't acquire and come back to us, put this on a future agenda about some things that we might be able to do. And if we need to do something to budget money to accommodate some of this, have something surely we can discuss at a later date. So can we do that? Did you have a comment? I don't wanna cut you out of this and we don't wanna put you on the spot either. Thank you. And my silence is not for wanting to comment, but I definitely wanted to yield to everyone. So appreciate that. And as all have expressed, we've worked well together in this study and we're right at the point of implementation. So by your action today and approving this report and all the good work that RTC staff and the tremendous amount of support from the community from the very beginning, from the bus ride, for that effort, that's this is the step we need to be at. And so we thank you for that. And our recent correspondence kind of outlined some of the longer term implementation strategies, but the key is implementation. And there definitely are some very short term implementation things as well that we're in communication with county staff right now about doing. So thank you for the priorities put on this and we were glad to be able to fund the study and we're definitely right here as the partner for the different steps and the different levels of implementation. We're gonna invite RTC staff to participate in all of our project development teams regarding things highway nine. Actually, this effort, well, and actually I'll back up a huge thanks as well for the, you know, without the measure D, you know, a lot of these conversations we wouldn't even be able to get to have as well. So that's a tremendous benefit to be able to move forward to these next steps. So we appreciate all the steps that are now falling in the place while we're taking, while we're trying to measure, you know, analysis of each proposal and we've gone through them all and we've been able to see, you know, which ones, in fact, that's kind of part of the implementation strategy or finding out which one of these projects are ones that can be put in immediately, put in midterm, put in longterm and where they fit, where they fit within our programs to be able to implement the bigger projects as Mr. Helmer has provided, that restructuring of the campus locations, that's another one of those that is gonna fit into our overall cost scope and schedule, larger big picture project implementation plan. So we're right, we're reading to be and your action today supports that. And it also solidifies what the community's values are because part of the concern in some of these plans are there might be proposals that have direct impact to certain property owners. We heard a few of that today. And so by your action and more or less endorsing what this plan says that gives us the ability now to go forward and work with the agencies to implement. Thanks for sharing those comments. Appreciate it. Well, with that, it's time for this body to take. I just want, you know, to this low hanging fruit is referenced. I think we're there really. We know some of the things that could happen. Maybe we should, I could direct the staff with Caltrans just to give us a report on what those projects or what might be. I don't know if August is reasonable or September but I'd like to do it quickly. Well, I asked actually for it to be today. That was the portion of the Caltrans letter that I immediately picked up the phone and said, we need to be prepared to start to answer these questions. I've received very strong cooperation with Caltrans. I have worked with these problems in the past and the level of attention that Caltrans is giving to Highway 9 is greater than I've seen before. I've received assurances from the Caltrans District 5 director, Tim Gummins, that they're thinking outside of the box and they actually are planning on implementing some of these things. They just weren't quite ready at this meeting yet but they will continue to receive phone calls from me, emails from me, meetings with me until we figure out a way to get some of this low hanging fruit off the table, implemented and then working towards some long-range solutions. Thank you. Well, let's begin the process and we have a motion and a second. So all in favor? Aye. Opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Let's get some work done. Thank you very much for your attendance today and your patience for staying to the afternoon. Okay, it takes us to item 18. This is an Alternatives Analysis for High Capacity Public Trance on the RIOA Scope of Work Request. Oh, no, this is your agenda. Good afternoon, commissioners. Ginger Dicar, I'm a senior transportation planner here at RTC staff. My item on the agenda today is to discuss the scope of work for the Alternatives Analysis of High Capacity Public Transit on the rail right-of-way. Unified Corridor Investment Study completed in January 2019, contained a performance-based planning approach utilizing a triple bottom-line framework of sustainability, economy, environment and equity. The outcome from the Unified Corridor Investment Study was to, number one, protect the rail right-of-way for a high capacity public transit service next to a bicycle and pedestrian trail and continue to consider passenger rail service on the rail right-of-way consistent with Proposition 116 requirements. The second was to work jointly with Santa Cruz Metropolitan Transit District to develop a scope of work for additional analysis of high capacity public transit alternatives on the Santa Cruz Branch rail line, including their cost operations and funding plans and a plan to protect Metro's current funding sources. RTC staff has been working closely with Metro over the last few months to develop a scope of work for consultant services to perform the alternatives analysis and develop a business plan for high capacity public transit on the rail right-of-way. RTC staff is here today to get your input. Metro staff will be going to their board of directors for review and input on the scope of work for the alternatives analysis tomorrow, June 28th. The alternatives analysis will evaluate various options for transit that advance the sustainability and triple bottom line economy, equity and environment. There have been numerous comments from members of the community that have been received after the packet from this meeting was became available expressing concern that the scope of work for the consultant does not include a triple bottom line analysis to evaluate environment and equity in addition to cost. I want to assure all the alternatives analysis will very much consider the benefits of the alternatives in terms of economy, environment and equity. They are part of the RTC planning goals that are referenced in task 3.1. It'll be easy to include additional language in the scope of work for the request for a proposal to make this clearer. The first step in the alternatives analysis will be to solicit input from the public on the criteria and performance measures that will be used to compare the various alternatives. But this discussion is just beginning. This is just the very first step along a detailed process. The RTC for at least the last 10 years has been taking an approach to decision making that includes a triple bottom line analysis. It's part of the three E's or the environment, equity and economy of the policies that are developed in the regional transportation plan. In reading the comments I was actually heartened to hear that community members very much see the value in the triple bottom line analysis that they want this type of analysis to continue. And that is very much the intent of this project. The tasks in the scope of work include develop a public and stakeholder outreach plan and implement it, identify the goals and objectives and determine the screening criteria and performance measures for evaluating the alternatives. Develop the alternatives to evaluate and conduct value engineering to further define the alternatives. Compare alternatives based on performance measure analysis including transit travel time, cost, vehicle miles traveled, greenhouse gas emissions, service to disadvantaged communities and equity, social equity. Identify the preferred alternative and document the alternative analysis in a report. And develop a business plan that includes a funding strategy for the preferred alternative and assesses metro funding through 2045. The timeline for the alternatives analysis or proposed timeline is next week to release the request proposals for alternatives analysis in August will be the deadline for the proposals to be submitted. The project team will be evaluating and choosing a consultant to perform the work. And on September 5th, we plan to provide this recommendation to the commission on a consultant contract. At that time, there will be an improved scope of work that we'll have worked with the consultant that we choose to work with based on the various proposals that are received. And in December 2020, the final alternatives analysis report. So with that, the RTC staff recommendation is that the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission review and provide input on the draft scope of work for the alternatives analysis to be released in the request for proposals for consultant services. Thank you. Thank you for that presentation. Is there any questions, Ms. Ticard? Mr. Leopold. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the presentation. And I strongly support this triple bottom line analysis. As I look at the questions in here, it doesn't seem to capture that completely around, I mean, outside the one bullet point about key climate vulnerabilities. It looks like all the measures would, are, you know, monetary, more economic. And I'm concerned that the strategy which we have used looking at this triple bottom line has helped us make so many of these decisions. Are you saying that in this scope, we would, you're suggesting not seeing it, but in the eventual analysis that we would be taking a look at all those things and how is that backed up by what we have in front of us? I feel it's always tricky to have a balance in the scope of work that you put out in the release for proposals because you're trying to get these consultants that have expertise in working on these types of projects from various different communities to lend a hand towards developing the detail task that will be performed in this project. So you wanna give enough information so that you give them the sense from the project team what level of detail we're looking at, but you don't wanna align every single thing up necessarily because it's gonna be a process between the project team, the consultant team. And obviously we have many opportunities that we need to take go to the public, the others commission, the RTC advisory committees, the stakeholders to develop all of these. And then where I see the triple bottom line comes in and developing the performance measures. Again, in this task 3.1 it states that we will be following regional, local, state, federal planning guidelines and goals. We have those developed. The triple bottom line is a part of that. I am more than happy to revise the scope introduction or elsewhere to make sure that's included. And I appreciate that and I value the work that you put in. I know you put a lot of work in the RTP and you obviously looked at this as part of the unified quarter strategy, but we're partnering with another agency which hasn't talked about that. Not to say that they don't believe in it. Because it's not in here, it's hard to know whether that is a shared interest and whether those measures would be included. That's the part that it's, as a public document, it doesn't capture that. And I think it's important for us to be clear as this process goes through that we're gonna be looking at a broad range of issues. So I'm sure there'll be other comments, but it may be something to consider before we send it out. Mr. Abram. Yeah, I would concur with that and also just say that I think an additional reason for making that clear early on is because I think it will benefit us in terms of the public engagement that we do get moving forward to actually, rather than hearing over and over what's missing to actually be receiving comments that are addressed more towards what we do wanna see. And just, I guess, making that clear upfront and for all of the reasons that Commissioner Leopold stated, it seems like it is worth spending a little more time on that before the scope of work is released. Are there questions? Commissioner Kaufman comments. Yes, thank you. One of the, actually, I concur with the opinions that we have here in terms of making sure that we have a robust scope that we need here so that we don't have to reinvent afterwards, because obviously we're all trying to get to a conclusion and if we find out in the conclusion that we didn't include everything that we should have in the study, I wanna make sure that we're really there. And the concern that I had with the last study that was performed was the type of outreach and making sure that we're getting to the population that we're looking to represent here. We've had the disadvantaged community and we're not effectively reaching out to them and we need to do better. We need to do better with finding out where they're at, where we can get to them, flexibility of the types, because the community room in Watsonville, if we get anybody, half of it or two thirds of it are not even from Watsonville anyway. So we really need to make sure that when we're putting these together that we're engaging in the community that we're intended the outreach to be happening from. You know, there's a cultural aspect that's much different South County than it is mid and even North County. And that matters and I think that we're missing that. Nobody wants to show up at a six o'clock meeting when it takes them an hour and 20 minutes to get home. So we have to figure a better way of that communication and that dialogue. And again, disadvantaged community on that opportunity, cultural there as well. And just making sure that those stakeholders, that that part of the equity is being looked at, considered, you know, we get a lot of people that are really proactive one way or the other on bicycles and the committees and organizations. But these are folks that don't, they don't come out to the community room for discussion, but we'll have that kind of impact. And so we need to make sure that that representation happens. Thank you. Commissioner Rodkin. So my comments go along the same lines as the ones that you just heard. I'm speaking of that sort of general level of consideration. First of all, I do appreciate the work staff put into this. And what's positive about it is the economic analysis in the scope that I think is very well done and doesn't need much modification. Any, from my point of view, any modification. Just to express a general concern to make this move more towards, you know, where we're going to go with this, I'm not comfortable either, you know, sort of just, I'm certainly not comfortable just approving that as it is now and say, fine, it's done. I'm also not comfortable just directing staff in a vague way. Hey, could you buff, could you beef up? That maybe that's not the right word of the vegan community here, but, but you know, to strengthen the analysis of the environmental issues and the underserved communities question. In all of it, we spent almost two years, well over a year trying to figure out that we wanted a public transit option on this corridor. And there's still people coming to our meetings and writing the emails, you know, have not accepted the fact that we made a unanimous decision about that. I don't like the idea of putting stuff off, but I also find that if you write a scope of work and then it's not what you want it to be, you'll pay for it in the long run. You'll have to go back and redo pieces. And when you're finally done with it, people won't trust the product and they're gonna sort of go and you know, think you didn't do this right. So I'm not gonna make a motion, but I'm certainly inclined towards doing something more than just have vague direction to staff to like strengthen that part of it. I think it's gonna take us more time to for us to be clear about what's missing. I'm sure staff can help us do that by coming back and suggesting language that we could then look at. And that's what I feel a lot more comfortable with. So without making a motion, I just wanna express my concern is, you know, people say we want this stuff yesterday and we want it done quickly, but I want it done right. And I think this is such an important project that's gonna last for decades for this community that it's worth taking the time to make sure the scope of work for something we're gonna spend easily over a hundred million dollars on, we should take the time necessary to do it right. So I'm prepared to see this put off with clear instructions on what we want to come back looking like, but I'm not gonna make that motion at this point. Any other questions before I open it up to the public? Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and open up to the public. Anybody from the public like to address this topic? Don't be afraid to be first. Yeah. Good afternoon, I'm Brett Garrett. I'm part of Santa Cruz PRT and I wanna thank Commissioner Rodkin for his comments, encouraging more explicit instructions to care for the environment and the climate. Both the city and the County of Santa Cruz have declared a climate emergency. As we know, the city of New York has just joined in declaring a climate emergency. And I wanna say, I think it's critical for the scope of work to include studying our best options for dealing with climate change, including mitigation and adaptation. I'm often advocating for an elevated personal rapid transit system, PRT, also known as an automated transit network, ATN. PRT can reduce carbon emissions both by making transit more efficient and by encouraging more people to use transit. It makes transit more efficient by being lighter than an electric car, fewer empty seats traveling with less weight per empty seat traveling up and down our County. And it travels at a uniform speed instead of a lot of stopping and starting. So it just, it's more efficient. And people using the system experience less weighting and it's more convenient, more comfortable. And it's fun, you get great views by being in an elevated vehicle and looking at the scenery. And I also think the rail trail will be more pleasant to use if the transit is overhead instead of right next to the trail. So I had a couple of specific suggestions for the scope of work. One, we're throwing around the phrase high capacity public transit. I don't think we've defined what we mean by high capacity. I think many people would interpret high capacity to mean something like BART or Caltrain. We might wanna say something like appropriate capacity or define what capacity we want. And I'd strongly encourage to define the capacity in terms of passengers per hour, which is very different from passengers per vehicle. You can accomplish a very effective transportation system with very small pod cars. It doesn't require a lot of vehicles to carry a lot of passengers per hour. I also wanna encourage in task 2.1 to cite some citizen provided studies. Santa Cruz PRT engaged PRT consulting for a study that is linked in the paper that I sent around showing that an elevated automated transit network could provide superior results for the criteria that were established in the UCS. And yeah, I'm running out of time, but I just wanna also encourage the triple bottled line and stating that explicitly as people have talked about. The climate is crucial. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good afternoon now. Good afternoon. My name is Robert Arco. I'm a Santa Cruz resident, last 10 years. Not been before this body before. Witnessing what I saw this morning, I wanna thank you for what's an impressive process, a very critical process for a community. I'm here already comforted by the discussion around this topic to amend the scope of work. As a professional designer, I have witnessed that the values and specific criteria in the scope of work document drive and in fact, waterfall throughout the project. And so getting it right in the beginning is the right thing to do. So specifically around the ecological and equitable issues. It's clear while I got involved and interested in the rail shuttle project as a cyclist that this is not a short-term project. This is a legacy project that I'll probably time out on the benefits. But my, as we're doing this for the future, let's make it worthy of future generations and do the right process to get to that goal. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome. Hello, my name is Diane Dreyer. I'm a resident of the county. I was gonna make my own statement today but I'm going to read a statement from Bruce Sawhill who had to leave at noon today. So this is Bruce's statement. And mine is similar and I agree with him. He says, I know it's easy to get impatient with studies and just say let's build something already. The rail corridor is the great transportation opportunity of our generation and perhaps another generation or two besides. It's worth taking some time to get it right. What I'd like to talk about is paying for it. We've already had a rail feasibility study completed several years ago and producing encouraging results for the viability of a well-designed trail system in our county. Though it was a cursory study built around dated technology. Then we had a unified corridors investment study not specifically about the rail corridor but including it. It also produced encouraging results around rail service combined with positive but weaker results about BRT service on the rail line. This brings us to the alternatives analysis to be discussed today. It is going to look at rail or BRT service on the rail corridor. This study will cost money. Money which will come primarily from Measure D. It seems very likely to me that whatever happens on the rail line will be run by Metro because we're a small county and there's no reason for multiple transportation agencies. In the original formulation of Measure D, the rail line was to get 20% of proceeds and Metro about 15. After a lot of horse trading, the rail line got whittled all the way down to 8% and Metro share grew slightly. I propose that the funding of this study be shared by Metro and the RTC's Measure D funds. It is a study that involves both bus and rail alternatives and even the rail alternative will be considered in concert with coordinated bus service. Both groups need to have skin in the game for this important study that has such long reaching consequences. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Jessica Evans and I live in Santa Cruz on the Lower West Side. I just have a few brief comments on the proposal for this scope for the alternatives analysis. I'm looking at task 3.1, develop goals criteria and performance measures and just a little bit concerned that leaving that whole piece so much kind of to the consultant is a bit of a, could be a mistake, that as a community, it's important that we come together and develop some goals, criteria and performance measures and that we then give those to the consultants, put those out for bid and say, who, which of you is gonna do the best job with these goals, criteria and performance measures because we have our own ideas in this community about what is important and we may end up with a whole lot of bids or a whole lot, we could potentially even end up with a study that doesn't really address what it is that we want. I mean, I hope that wouldn't happen but I feel like that there is some concern that certain components of our community haven't been effectively reached out to, even up until now, even with all the public process that we've had. So I would like to see a little bit more public process go into setting up the criteria for putting this out there for bid, if that makes sense. And then I'm looking at your bullet points here, transit ridership, transit travel time, vehicle miles traveled and associated greenhouse gas emissions. Just specifically, I feel like vehicle miles traveled is a really narrow way to look at greenhouse gas emissions. I'd like to see greenhouse gas emissions tied to individual people, people miles traveled. So for every person who moves down the corridor, how much greenhouse gases are emitted, not looking at vehicle miles. And I also would like to see, I hope that this would end up in there, but I would like to see some direct assessment of bicycle capacity as part of this alternative's analysis because I feel like we talk about the last mile issue a lot and I have a vision that a lot of people would like to be able to bring their bike onto a transit vehicle with them and then get off at the other end and go where they're going. Thank you, you need to wrap up. Yep, so that's all I had to say actually, but I encourage you to take your time and get it right. Thanks. Good afternoon, commissioners. I'm David Van Brink, a 31 year resident of the west side of Santa Cruz. As a citizen, I appreciate the depth and thoroughness of the investigation and analysis that has gone on so far. And I think this is the first time that I'll be testifying to say, please, please wait about something. There's an old business joke. We lose money on every sale, but we make up for it in volume. Of course, in business, this is a mode of failure. The objectives listed here seem largely concerned with affordability. And if we're looking to be ultimately affordable, we probably shouldn't do public transit at all. So what we'd like to see more in the alternatives analysis is some questions like which alternative will protect the continuity of the corridor right-of-way? Which will best accommodate and encourage active transportation users? Which will help get the rail trail built fastest? Which will best facilitate moving people out of cars and onto public transit as choice writers definitely have some preferences on that that the choice can help rid them out of their cars? Which would use the least amount of energy per passenger mile? And other factors not yet identified. So please continue to seek public input to appropriately scope the alternatives analysis to cover it as broadly as possible. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon, commissioners. My name is Soledine Sale. I'm a 50-year county resident and a retired risk manager. After decades of work, the RTC is about to commission the alternatives analysis leading to the determination of the best use of the rail corridor. The final form of the scope of work for the consultant is absolutely critical to the ultimate success of what will be a huge transportation project, one that will affect transportation planning for at least the next 25 years. I believe there's no reason to feel rushed regarding approval of the initially proposed scope of work. There's no significant opposition to the project, so it's absolutely proper to take a month or two to solicit public comment on the scope of work. While staff evidently concurs with commenters' views regarding the importance of clearly incorporating the triple bottom line, I believe this needs to be foundational as opposed to being a handshake add-on developed with a consultant. At the least, the environmental and social justice effects must specifically be strengthened and clarified in the scope of work and introduction so that they more accurately reflect the values of our community. While no one thinks this is just another RFP, it is worth remembering that when setting sail for a distant port, failing to set the proper course at the beginning means arriving at something other than the desired destination. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon, commissioners. Casey Beyer from the Santa Cruz County Chamber of Commerce. And a strong advocate for MSRD, as all you know. I review this scoping, and I wanna thank the staff for doing a great job, except they missed one major, major point, public input. I know that so scoping is to set the stage and then you go out and you hire a contractor to help facilitate the community spirit of the organization. I don't think you did a good job in this particular regard, and I would encourage you to take a look at that before you actually initiate it. I'd like the comments from some of the commissioners about maybe amending the scope of work before you take it to the Metro tomorrow. And I think I would encourage you to take that step. Thank you. Good afternoon, Chair Batroff and commissioners. My name's Mark Masidi-Miller. I'm a 30-something year resident of the city and county, and also a professional civil engineer who spent his life as a consultant. And I think you've heard the comments from others. There's some things missing from this proposal, this RFP. It doesn't set the right tone for the work that needs to be done. And as a consultant, I can tell you that that task 3.1 that Ginger was referring to, that list, that's the thing that you're emphasizing, right? You want these 14 things really looked at. Well, one of those is about the environment. One of those is about social equity. So as a consultant, you're gonna go, oh, okay, I'm putting together a business plan and I need to pay a little bit of attention to the environment, a little bit of attention to social equity, but this is the main focus of my work. And that's the proposal you're gonna get back. And that's not okay. The essential piece of work here is that those three elements, the economy, equity, and the environment, get equal footing. And this RFP does not communicate that. So you might think, well, we need to get moving. And I think that's a legitimate thing. I wanna get moving. I like getting stuff done. I've spent my whole career getting stuff done. That's what I do. But in this case, if you think you're gonna save time by pushing ahead now, I think you're likely to see that you're actually gonna be delayed because the consultant's gonna come back and he's gonna say, well, gee, I met with the public and wow, this scope's blowing up. I got all this additional work. I gotta figure out how to get that work done. I gotta hire more consultants to help me do the environmental piece and do the equity piece. And you're gonna have with months and months of delay and lots and lots of additional cost. So let's get this right. Let's set the tone today before we solicit RFPs and let's get the kind of study we really want to make the most important decision this body will ever make about transportation in our county. What we're talking about is the kind of transportation that's gonna serve our community for the next 30 years or 50 years, maybe longer, and it's gonna cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Let's get this right. Another month or two here, not gonna make any difference at all, but getting the right answer will make all the difference. Thank you. Thank you. Hello, Keith Otto. The one additional item that I would add would be when the results of the study come back, is there enough budget and time and effort to be able to respond to the public comments and questions recall with the corridor study, right? That was an item that came back to you to fund additional efforts there. You know, there's one person that's missing here from the audience today, most notably, and that's Brian Peoples from Trail Now. But fear not, he has sent me his comments for me to read into the record. So from Brian Peoples' Trail Now on item 18 here before you, transportation design for how best to use the Santa Cruz coastal corridor should be based on maximum utilization of the corridor for transit. Based on the corridor study, the maximum utilization of the corridor is operating as a trail designed for transportation. Using the corridor as a trail showed there'd be five times more users than a train or a bus. In addition to the type of transit on the corridor, the analysis should include when will it be used for transit. Waiting decades for a coastal corridor for transportation is a major issue. Our community needs to use the corridor now for alternatives to Highway One. We ask that the study not be exclusive to publicly operated transit solutions, but look at new types of transit solutions that are being created with technology advancements. Designed as transportation trail, the study should include the use of pedicabs, rickshaws, jump bikes, Uber type services. In addition to the type of transit, we ask how segments of the corridor could be upgraded to make transit more effective. For example, converting the corridor into an asphalt path for active transportation could include under and overpasses at key corridor road crossing, such as 41st, 17th, and 7th. That will make the corridor a more effective transit solution and it's affordable for our community. Such under or overpasses would not be economically possible for a multi-ton transit vehicle, a train or a bus, but it is possible for active transit solutions. Thank you. Thank you. Any other comments from the public? Go ahead and close the public. Bring it back for discussion. Commissioner Rodkin. Two points. First time, pleased to see that Brian Peebles still thinks that we should go back to a trail only plan despite our unanimous decision. Some things never change, even when he's not here. The one concern that I have- It's hard for people to hear you, Mike. Gotta get closer to that, Mike. I think- It might be that, Mike, or that. No, it's not, I guess. Is that working now? No, it's just closeness. Proximity, yeah. Okay, so I don't know whether we can determine this short of court cases taking decades that end up at the US Supreme Court, but somehow the scope of work needs to give us some, have the consultant, give us some partial answers at least to how likely would a, something that does not involve rail coverage leave us having to rebuy half of the corridor. I mean, again, whether we can find that out short of that kind of long-term lots of expenses, but some more information about it. I have no idea at this point how much of that right-of-way we own outright versus how much of it is a sort of passage over based on the rail stuff signed in the 1880s. And I don't know that we can get definitive answers to it, but I feel a lot more comfortable looking at alternatives knowing that some of them that we're studying don't involve rail. They involve, whether it's bus rapid transit or PRT or whatever the other options are, or perhaps part of the service being on rail and partly not on rail or whatever. I think that needs to be strengthened in the scope explicitly that that's something that they're gonna give us at least some better sense of what the answer to that question is. I'll wait for a motion to hear from other people, but I'm prepared to offer a motion that we do put this off if that seems to be the sentiment of the group, which I think we're leaning towards. We'll see. I don't think he made a motion. He was kind of fishing. That was a fishing expedition. I think we're gonna wait for maybe some comments from others and then maybe someone will follow up with the motion. Commissioner Muller, I haven't heard from you all day. Go ahead. Thank you very much. So one thing that I heard a lot of people talk about sort of our process for the UCIS and one person referenced that we had to go back to our consultant with extra funding to answer some of the outstanding questions that we had and they're right. And I would echo that concern. Also for me, missing from the UCIS was a discussion of opportunity cost. So transportation funding is a zero sum game, right? You can spend your money on this or you can spend your money on that, but you can't spend it on both. There's a finite amount of funding available for transportation projects, whether it's capital or operations. What I would like to see discussed in this document then is if we use this money for this project, we won't be able to use this money for all of these projects. So for example, the surface transportation block grant, STBG, we've been talking a lot about this over the past couple of months. That money can be used for transit capital projects or it can be used for federal aid, local streets and roads. So if we use the STBG money for transit capital projects, we would not be able to use it for local streets and roads. So I would like to see discussion of situations like that where our funding priorities, as listed in the 2040 RTP, would come in conflict. And so we can make a better decision about how we're spending the money. I realize that this is gonna be a huge digression as well. But one of my other frustrations with the UCS was that we were presented with a preferred alternative. And it wasn't our preferred alternative, it was a combination of staff and consultants preferences based on the sort of the environment that we established at the beginning. They came back to us with a preferred alternative. I would like for us, or rather the commission, to establish the preferred alternative and for the process to be interrupted, say around step six, where the commission is presented with a menu of options with all the various metrics that we've defined in the performance measures. And then we discuss at the commission in a public meeting which of those performance measures are most important to us and then decide what our preferred project is. And then proceed with the process. So step task seven then would proceed with you know, the whatever your analysis reports and the more public input and the administrative draft. All those things would proceed after the commission decides upon a preferred alternative. I don't know, hopefully I've made that clear enough, but a lot of my frustration with the UCS was that we, the commission didn't hash out project versus project what we would like to have seen in our scenario. I would like for us to have a menu of projects to discuss and weigh the various metrics against each other. And I'll underscore this here and this is of course gonna be unpopular but this is not a technical decision that we're being presented here. The analysis and the reports and everything sort of give you the main of a technical decision but it's ultimately a political decision. And we're gonna make that decision based on our values, how we value the various metrics that are put forth here but also based on the constituencies that we represent. And so it makes more sense to me to have the decision fall with the commission to address these sort of political metrics that can't be defined in a technical process. Is that a motion? No, I'm hoping that that could be included in, I'll make a motion but there are plenty of people who talk. And we'll keep having discussion, Commissioner Leopold. Thank you, Chair, I appreciate the testimony. I think this process is a good, we're off to a good start. I don't wanna knock what's gone on. I really appreciate the efforts by Mr. Preston and Mr. Clifford at the Metro and staff to try to work on a document where these two agencies are working together on a critical transportation decision. And so that part is very good. And this is an RFP for consultants. So I don't see this as like a major public process. So for those who thought that there should be a public process to figure out the RFP to get the consultant, I'm not willing to go there. I think that this commission has shown its interest and its effort to try to do outreach into the community. And where we have fallen short, we should continue to strive to be better. But we can say that we have engaged loads more people, hundreds of more people in the decision-making or in the process than we did five years ago or 10 years ago. There's a lot more people involved. And in this alternative analysis, there's gonna be a lot of people involved. We don't need it before the RFP, but there's gonna be people involved with this effort. I do think that because this is a partnership effort that we need to explicitly state the frame in which we look at things, and talking about the triple bottom line and ensuring that whatever consultant looks at this understands that we're gonna be looking at decisions through a prism, I think that will be helpful. I don't have specific language, but I think that that could be incorporated. I thought that Ms. Dicard did a good job in her presentation to us talking more about it that wasn't reflected in the actual document. So I think there's something there that could be something that could be added. My colleagues have made some additional suggestions about the question of ownership, easement, and that's a constant and ongoing decision. There may be some of it that we don't want in a public document. You have to figure out, I'm gonna leave it, I would say leave it to staff to figure out that part of it. Obviously, if we choose an alternative, that means we lose the corridor. It's a game-ender, right? I mean, you have to figure that out, but I also don't wanna tip our hands in a way that would be sensitive. To my colleague, Mr. Mohoran, every decision we make is political. We are politicians. And I don't feel constrained by getting expert opinions. I feel informed by getting expert opinions. And so I think there's an appropriate place to say we would like to know more with these kind of factors, but I do wanna also look to transportation experts to give us some good information for the ultimate decision we make. The decision we make is ours. And if we don't like a recommendation, we've all voted against staff recommendations. We've all changed staff recommendations. We've all suggested alternatives to staff recommendations. That's part and parcel of what we do. And it's what we will continue to do. And I wanna benefit from the transit knowledge that's out there, whether it be from the RTC staff or the Metro staff. I think that it helped me make an informed decision. But it doesn't mean that we shouldn't make sure that at the appropriate points they come back and we can express kind of what the things that we're seeing in this process. I do think we shouldn't go forward with this at this meeting and I think if it's possible to come back at our August meeting and I'll look to staff to see whether that's a crazy idea or not to come back with us at an August meeting. So you've had some discussion with Metro. We could hopefully then at the beginning of the month take a vote on it. And then there's three weeks later that they would take a vote on it at their regularly scheduled meeting. This happens to be, it's weird that the RTC is meeting on Thursday in the Metro. That's not usually on Friday. That's not something we usually do, but we're in a strange month and so strange things are happening. So my motion would be to continue this item to our August meeting, unless the staff tells me that they can't do this by August, to incorporate the triple bottom line elements based on the conversation and testimony that we've received and come back to us in August with hopefully something that we can get out. So I definitely think that's doable. There's some challenges, of course, associated with that. We've got some staff vacations, some critical staff vacations that have been scheduled around this current schedule, such that they would be on vacation while the consultants were working and then come back and have the proposals available to us. But I do think it can be done. I think I can handle this with some input from staff, I will be here. I do want to really express my gratitude to the public for the amount of input that they've provided and their desire to have a lot of public input in this. And I think Commissioner Leopold brought up a very good point. It's actually very unusual for us to bring a scope of services for public input and involve the public in actually preparing the scope of services. The fact that we did so and brought it to this commission before releasing it was because we understood the level of input and concern by the public regarding this subject. So we put it out there. It was also very challenging to work with Metro to come up with the scope of services. Metro was very focused on the bottom line and what it would do to their operations and we went back and forth on a lot of the bulleted points that they wanted to have included in the scope of services to the extent that we probably could have done a better job of making sure we didn't not properly wait the triple bottom line concept. We heard the public by the amount of comments that we received before this meeting so that we were prepared to address that issue. It's important to note that the list included in task 3.1 was for demonstration purposes only. It was not meant to be a final list of performance measures. There is a specific task to develop a public and stakeholder outreach plan and that the performance measures that the consultant comes up with goes to the RTC and Metro boards as part of task 5.4. So they were very much involved. Task 5.3 was to include the public and then the additional task and task 7 was also to go back out to the public and also to the board. So we very much were emphasizing public participation and will continue to do so but I have absolutely no problem with taking the additional time to try to refine the scope of services to address the comments that were received today. Before I take a second, just could you go ahead and repeat your motion so I'm clear? Yeah. Thank you. So Yacenia, we'll be very happy with that too. That we continue this item till August to incorporate language based on the conversation we've had here focusing on the triple bottom lines. So I will second that and I'll also well maybe I'll give people a moment to come but if we're gonna continue an item and we're gonna have this discussion again, then unless it's going to the work that's gonna occur between now and then people should really focus on just that aspect because that's all we're really voting on right now. And so given the hour and the time we should, if we're gonna have an entirely new discussion about this item in two months, let's not do it twice. I think we have a motion that incorporates the comments we've already had and we don't need, I don't feel the need for any other comments unless somebody feels like they have one that's imperative. Dr. Rod... I just wanna say if anybody objects to the comments that others made, they need to say something because for example, when I talk about the right away issue, I accept John's whoever made the comment back that we don't want to do stuff that's gonna put us in legal jeopardy. But if that's fine with everybody, I have nothing else to say about it. But someone should speak up if they think that's a terrible idea. I think the motion from Commissioner Wood was an overview to allow the comments that were made, all inclusive to deliver a better project that we could vote on. Yeah, I think that it's important though that I'm just wondering if another month, we heard about the public input, they wanted more of that. I just wanna make sure everybody spreads the word that this is where we're headed, we're delayed this, but get your public input. You just did, you just gave fair warning, all right? Yeah, Senate to 19-13. Any other comments? With that, all in favor? Aye. Opposed? Carries unanimously, thank you very much. Okay, item 19 from the other side of the country are our legal representative federal legislative update. Chris, how are you? I'm fine, thanks. Welcome back, share a while. Okay, it's one, yeah, I wanna call. Thank you, commissioners. I was told I needed to make my 60 slide PowerPoint down to 40, so I will try my best. Thank you for having me, Mr. Preston. Thank you for having me as well today too. I do try to keep up with the monthly packets for your meeting to see how things are going on, but it's great to be here and to actually kind of see what's going on and see the interaction with the public and you folks as well. And I do have a memo in the packet that kind of outlines kind of my federal update is to kind of where things stand right now. I'll hit a couple of highlights, but I also did wanna mention a couple of things that kind of came by my mind throughout the discussion, particularly on the finance deal and the bonding. And Commissioner Caput, you talked about measure D and leveraging and things like that. Mr. Preston did a nice job of sort of outlining sort of the benefits of that. I'll give you sort of a real world example on the federal level. There's a very, very popular program called BUILD. Used to be called Tiger at the Department of Transportation. It's about a billion dollar a year, super competitive grant program. Statutorily, the local match is 20%. If you were to submit an application with a 20% match, there is no way you will get funded. Everybody is over matching, and particularly this administration likes to see more local contributions to their grant applications. And so having something like measure D funds to kind of fall back on to do that sort of over match would be really important. I'd also mention on the sort of the bonding side, a couple of programs that the KNM folks mentioned, sort of alphabet soup stuff, but TIFIA is a loan program at the Department of Transportation. It does large scale road and transit projects, and then there's the RIF program at the Federal Railroad Administration, which also is a loan program for kind of capital projects related to rail improvements. Both of those have been underutilized in recent years, and not just in recent years, since they were created in the last decade or so. They're tough programs to kind of get through the process of, and so the Department of Transportation hasn't used nearly as much of the loan authority that it has with that program. So that's kind of food for thought. Final bonding thing too, and probably a lot of you folks, the electeds on this understand that, back in 2017, the tax exempt status of musical bonds was very, very much in question. It was gonna be used as something to pay for the individual and corporate tax cuts in that 2017 tax bill. Local elected officials really fought hard to save that, and it remains intact, so. So I'll move along. One of the things that, since President Trump was elected, that he has been talking about, and others in this sort of transportation industry have been talking about, it's a possibility of an infrastructure package. President, during the campaign, spoke of a big, beautiful infrastructure package. Lots of folks thought that maybe this was something that the President could work with Democrats on. That has not been the case. I would probably declare an infrastructure package, at least right now, is kind of dead as a doornail. Not gonna happen until a next administration, be it President Trump being re-elected or somebody else. I don't think it ever had a significant chance. You kind of, in Congress, have to be in the top one or two priorities of a President. Very rarely do they get to number three. Right now, the President is very concerned about the border. He's also concerned about trade. Infrastructure is not crept into his priority. On the other hand, also getting an infrastructure package through the Republican Senate. Lots of Republican senators were wary of adding to the deficit, and an infrastructure package would probably have resulted in that. So probably, I would say in 2021, we'll do a reset on this and maybe start all over again, but for now, not so much. However, I will say that in the last couple of years, with regard to the Department of Transportation's budget, we've seen sort of something of a mini stimulus in there. You probably have seen lots of the President's recommendations. His budget each year proposes some pretty deep cuts to programs all across the board, but also with the Department of Transportation. Congress, in a very bipartisan way, has rejected those proposed cuts for the last few years and will likely continue to do that. And so we've seen increases in lots of programs having to do with both highways, rail, and transit. And so that's been a positive. I think that in FY18 and FY19 each, there was about $10 billion in additional funding kind of spread across highway, rail, transit programs. And so that's been a positive. I will caution that what we need to do in order to continue that train rolling in FY20 and 21 is to get a budget deal between the President and Congress. Right now, there are very, very tight overall budget caps on overall federal spending. In 2011, Congress and the Obama Administration came to an agreement on a deficit reduction package. It was a 10-year package that set some very tight overall spending levels in order to get $1.5 trillion in savings. We're in the out years of that budget agreement and the caps are super tight. Congress and the President have lifted those caps for FY18 and 19. For FY20 and 21, it's getting a little more dicey. The President expressed regret that he lifted those caps last time around. And it's probably going to use them as leverage for things like his trade, his Mexico-Canada trade agreement, and potentially for border wall funding. So that we may be into the fall and into early next year on these budget battles. If we are to prevail and the caps are lifted, it's going to look pretty good. We're going to get these small increases that we've been getting for the last few years. If not, probably about at least a 10% across the board cut to programs as they currently exist. And again, not just in transportation, but across the board. I might mention too that the next kind of transportation infrastructure package may come in the form of a multi-year reauthorization of highway and transit funds. The alphabet soup we are dealing with right now, they call it the FAST Act. It's an acronym for something. But that's a five-year bill that was approved by Congress in 2015. And it authorizes the federal gas tax funds to go into the Highway Trust Fund and to be spent on highway and transit programs. It expires at the end of 2020. And so that could be a potential vehicle for infrastructure. Again, it won't be called a straight infrastructure package, but if Congress and the president can come to an agreement on how to fund increases to those programs, you could probably consider that to be an infrastructure package. It's going to be hard to come up with those revenues. We haven't increased the federal gasoline tax in 30 years. It stands at about 18.3 cents per gallon. And Congress has not been willing to increase it in the past. Just to, if we were to do a five-year reauthorization of the FAST Act in 2020 because of a slowdown in gas tax money going into the Highway Trust Fund, we'd need an additional $100 billion just to stay where we are right now. So it's going to be very, very difficult. I would not expect in 2020 to see a reauthorization of the FAST Act. It's an election year. Making members vote on a gas tax increase in an election year is probably not going to happen. So we'll see small extensions of it. But hopefully, eventually people will kind of get together on some sort of funding vehicle to fund this program. And then finally, I would mention the something that's been mentioned a couple of times throughout this meeting and that is the idea of reimbursement from the Federal Highway Administration for storm damages to County roads. And I know every one of the county supervisors has been really active in trying to turn this around. It's been very frustrating to get the attention of the Federal Highway Administration to our plight and to start to provide extensions that we need to get these projects into construction. The congressional delegation has been working very hard on both on a legislative and administrative basis trying to push FHWA to reverse their policies right now of rejecting these extensions. We're also have kind of a two-pronged approach legislatively to do this. One is to, on a long-term basis, change the laws. Right now it's just virtually impossible to get a road project into construction within two years, given all the planning and environmental work that's needed for that. So trying to change the law and that FAST Act reauthorization, but also in the short term, we've got reimbursements for 2016 and 2017 storms that have to come and they've got to come quicker than this FAST Act will go. So we're also trying legislatively to include language in whatever bill is moving that would prevent FHWA from essentially implementing this two-year rule. So again, like I said, Congresswoman Eshu, Congressman Panetta have been really on the front lines trying to help out with this. We've sort of through the California State Association of Counties kind of stretched this out to lots of other counties in California that are experiencing the same thing. And so particularly Congressman Jared Huffman, Congressman John Garamendi have been really, really helpful on a legislative basis trying to push this through. The real difficulty is unfortunately when you have gridlock in Congress, there is no vehicle that attached the language on too. Nothing's passing besides judicial appointments in the Senate. And so finding that vehicle has been very, very difficult and frustrating for us. We continue to work on it. We're trying to get as many partners as we can. Supervisor Friend is running a resolution through the National Association of Counties that their annual meeting next year. So maybe we can get sort of national organizations involved in it. Like I said, CSAC has been very involved as well too. County Public Works is working kind of 24-7 on that. So those were the main things. I'm happy to answer any questions that you guys might have. Thanks. Any questions for Chris? Well, let me just say that I appreciate your work. I appreciate your help in getting the language in a bill that passed the House about the Federal Highway. It's disappointing that we have a level of dysfunction that basic pieces, almost everything you identified here is a basic piece of government that can happen in Washington given the atmosphere. And even though the President said on the night of his victory, the only issue he talked about in his victory speech was infrastructure, it's hard to believe that the best we can hope is a future administration, whether it be his, God help us, or another administration that will get to it when the needs are so clear in our community and throughout the country. I don't think that there's a likelihood of a gas tax passing even after the election. There's very, the sides seem to have hardened. And I look forward to the day that one day we have a working legislature again in Washington. It's frustrating for us, for someone who's there day after day, it's gotta be hard. So thank you for your work. Sure, it's been frustrating. And I think we've talked about this before but I always feel like you talk to individual members from both parties and they understand that probably the gas tax is really the only way to sort of fund these programs right now. The vehicle miles traveled stuff is not quite fully baked yet. And so I always think that the best time for a gas tax increase, everybody joins hands, the farthest away you can get from election and just bite the bullet and jump off the cliff together. So hasn't happened yet. Mr. McPherson. Yeah, just to give some perspective of how serious this is for Santa Cruz County. I think of the 16, 17 storms that we in Santa Cruz County had half of the damage storm-related damage statewide to our transportation network. And for the county itself, we've this year, we just completed our budget session and we found a way, a different way to do it we're covering some of the about five million, six million dollars worth of repairs that need to be done that were promised but haven't come forward from the federal government. And more longer term, we're looking at damages up to 35 million dollars. So it's huge for Santa Cruz County. I appreciate your work and the work of all of our local Congress members, Eshu and Panetta as well as Ghira Mindy and Huffman and the County State Association of California State Association of Counties that I'm on the board of and the executive committee that we have really made it a statewide push because there's other counties, albeit less severely impacted than Santa Cruz County that are very much on board to try to make this happen. So we're trying to do a unified effort but it's a long haul. But thank you for your work back in Washington, D.C. And even though you're late in making your presentation it's probably better than being back there right now at that time. I'm getting alerts on my phone about heat index, emergencies and stuff. It's very nice to be here. But Commissioner McPherson, every community in the country is gonna have a disaster at some point, right? And so you would think that Congress and the federal government would be able to look at this in a way that is reasonable. I'm sure they're finding a way in Alabama to grant the extensions. Commissioner Rodkin. Two things real quickly. First of all, it's really shocking about the gas tax when it's 18 cents and that's a swing that happens three times as much every summer or five times as much every summer. That somehow that Congress doesn't have the courage to raise it, double it would not be have any significant impact, doubling it would not have any impact on the price of gas compared to what people see every year in terms of swings. The other comment is just to thank Chris for his work for us in Washington. I've been on several trips to DC from the city, from the transit district and from the RTC in the past where he's represented us and he just does really fine work for us. It's impressive how much he knows about the Congress and the various views people have and takes us basically to communicate and think effectively with the people that can make a difference. And if it's anything can be moved, this would be the person I want represented me there to make it happen. But my God, it's not work I would do. Thank you. Commissioner Brown. Just want to appreciate your work as well and also given the fact that every year's an election year these days, it must be even more challenging to think about that moment in time when it might be possible to move something like this. So thank you and thanks for the report. Certainly, it does seem like it's sort of the day after an election, the next two year cycle, particularly in the House starts again. Other comments? Chris, thank you for what you do and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. Thank you, sir. I'll try to do better. All right, brings us to item 20. This is the Capitola Tresol Feasibility Study Update. Sarah, welcome. Thank you. Thanks, Ed. Try to keep it brief. So today I'm here to give you an update on the Capitola Tresol Feasibility Study. This came about about a year ago as part of the adoption of the 2018 measure D5 year plan of projects, a member of the community requested this study be conducted to evaluate replacement or modification to the Capitola Tresol or the bridges that make up the Capitola Tresol to include both transit and trail on the bridge. Since that time, South has been waiting on the Unified Corridor Study to define what the long-term future use of the corridor would be. And then as you remember earlier this year, we were directed to connect this alternatives analysis to further develop what type of transit is gonna be on the line. And so the Feasibility Study for the Capitola Tresol, it really makes sense to wait until we have a better, more clear understanding of what the long-term future use of the corridor is. That way we don't waste funds and resources on developing a Feasibility Study for something that's already being developed as part of the alternatives analysis. So we've also been working on the bridge inspections. As you guys recall, we have developed a on-call list of engineering consultants and we conducted the bridge inspections and load ratings as a task order under that on-call. They finished the bridge inspections but the load ratings are still being worked on and we're still waiting a final report to come out. But we got some preliminary information back we're in the process of reviewing that. And the outcome of those inspections is there are three out of the five bridges that make up the Tresol that need some repair. And so we're gonna work on putting together a plan to get those up and running. But in terms of the longer-term Feasibility Study project that is, it really needs to wait until the completion of this alternatives analysis. And so with that, I would like to request that we shift the $50,000 that was allocated for this next fiscal year to the following fiscal year that's gonna line up with the completion of the alternatives analysis. Any questions? I know everybody's ready. Believe me. You haven't been to our council. No, you haven't been to our council meetings, I guess. I think that there was one comment that I'm hearing out there is the historical value of the Tresol. I just wanna know if that's gonna be at all something that's gonna be brought up when this comes through on looking at that. And I mean, I don't know how realistic, unrealistic it really is, but as long as there's a box check that there was something that was mentioned about its historical value on its use, no use if it's even considered within the realm of something that can be determined and has restrictive uses as a result of it being classified that way, just as long as we have the box checked to sort of have something mentioned about that. Absolutely, so when that project moves forward, that's definitely part of the, both the feasibility study and the CEQA analysis will consider that it's not just a plain old bridge that you can go out and spend a minimal amount of money replacing with the concrete structure, it's something that really somewhat defines the community and we're aware of that and we'll take that into consideration. This is, it's gonna drive the cost up, but. Well, I mean, if there is none and it needs to come down and be replaced with something that's gonna be actually usable that the community needs and then that's a whole different story. I just wanna make sure that we don't have that become an issue that we didn't have that into the process of consideration and that there is something left mentioned about that because honestly, with the number of bridges that you have there and the disrepair of things that really, you can't weld on rotted, rusted iron. So there's definitely gonna have to be a replacement so it may have no value at all to do that but I just don't want somebody to come along and say I'm gonna slap a lawsuit because it's a historical value and then none of the community gets its use and I just wanna be sure that we've got it all covered, cover all of our basis, right? It sounds like Sarah has a plan. Okay, and I'm comfortable with that. Any other questions? Let me open up to the public. Anybody in the public wanna comment on the trestle? Yes, sir. Keith Otto with another comment from Brian Peoples Trail Now regarding this item, item 20, the preliminary analysis of the capital of trestle and other timber trestles along the coastal corridor show that it's not practical to believe that these trestles could accommodate a multi-ton transit vehicle traveling 45 miles an hour. The timber trestles are historical landmarks for our community and will challenge any plans to destroy the trestle and replace them with concrete bridges to accommodate heavy transit vehicles. Using the coastal corridor for active transportation modes will allow the timber trestles to remain and provide transit solution today for our community. Thank you. Thank you. Any other comments? I'll bring it back. I have a motion by Rodkins, second by Gonzalez. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Motion carries unanimously. And we're adjourned. Our next meeting will be August 1st in Scots Valley TPW meeting on August 15th. Thank you. He started the makeup, bro, the time's up. I'm like. No, Joe. Joe, I was off. Go this way, you know?