 Good afternoon, Dr. Muskels. Present. Mr. Brennan. Present. Mr. Breyer. Here. All right, so we got a nice little agenda. Number one is the Central Midlands Council of Governments. Will, if you could make a speech. Absolutely. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We are lucky to have the team from the Central Midlands Council of Governments here today. Whitpool is our new executive director. He's going to give a little summary about what the COG does. It's a wonderful regional planning department for wonderful great things. Workforce development, economic development, infrastructure, Reginals are all start that. And then our aging departments here. Senior resources and the Lorry Center, thanks to the leadership of Chairman Bussells, had a new joining of forces. And that is going to go through the COG as well for future fundraising efforts and revenue streams from the state and federal sources. So Whitpool has a long lengthy resume. He was a former town manager from the town of Lexington. We're very fortunate to have him at the helm for the Council of Governments now. And Whit would like to just turn it over to you a quick intro to your team and what they do and how we at the City of Columbia can leverage the wonderful planning y'all have in-house. And for full disclosure, Councilman Brennan is the chairman. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yes, I forgot to mention that. I am chairman of the Fort County Council of Government. Councilman Brown is on the board as well. So good representation. Excellent. Well, thank you for that very kind introduction. As was said, Whitpool, I started at the COG July 1st. So very new. So I'll tell you what I'm going to do. We've gotten done. You'll have to tell me at the next COG board meeting. But we do a lot in the region. So we represent the Richland, Lexington, Newbury, and Fairfield counties in a planning role, but in other roles as well. So I've asked some of the staff to come today to talk a little bit about things that directly impact City of Columbia or the areas around City of Columbia that have to do with economic development to keep into what the purpose of this meeting is. But we also do, as was mentioned, we do a lot with aging. We do a lot with the Ombudsman Program, which goes in and takes a look and makes sure that our seniors in nursing facilities are being cared for well. And they inspect those and investigate complaints. We do economic development. We do GIS. We do a lot with CDBG, especially in some of the smaller areas that aren't able, like the City of Columbia, to manage that for themselves. So we run those. And we provide support for big and small cities. And the counties, of course. But my goal and hope is to create a regional body that where everybody can come together. The COG has as well positioned to be that body where we can get everybody on the same page and try to work through regional issues. So that's the direction that we're heading. And as part of that is coming out and talking to the communities that we represent, which is exactly what the point of being here today is, so that everybody other than just, so that not just the members of the board are aware of what we're doing to help the region, what we're doing to help the City of Columbia and our other member governments. With me today, I've got Reginald Simmons. And he is our Transportation Director. And I've got Gregory Sprouse. He represents planning and economic development. And Tammy Bergen, and she's our workforce representative. So what we're doing to help get people jobs and get people trained so that they're able to do those jobs. So I'm gonna call on Gregory and let him tell you a little bit about what he does. And then we'll switch through the rest of the staff real quick for an update. All right, thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. As Britt said, I manage our local government planning, community and economic development departments. And so a lot of the community development side of things is focused on grant applications, administration for our member governments with a big focus on the community development block grant programs for our non-entitlement communities, Fairfield and Newbury counties. But we also serve as the US Economic Development Administration's designated Economic Development District for the Central Midlands region. And under that designation, one of the primary things that we're responsible for doing is developing and updating a five year comprehensive economic development strategy, which we always call the SEDS document, which is a federal term. And this document is a broad based sort of strategy that is focused on trying to create goals and objectives that are coordinated and in line with the other local and regional economic development initiatives taking place. So we work very hard to ensure when we're developing that plan, which was just most recently adopted by our board in December of last year, that we are coordinating with all of our local governments. But it also, one of the things that it does is it helps set the work program for staff around community and economic development. So a few things that we highlighted as priorities in this most recent plan that we're very interested in working with our local governments on our support for small women minority business enterprises, particularly in our rural areas where existing services are limited, but how that relates to city of Columbia and other of our urban jurisdictions is building those connections between small businesses in those communities and some of the great programs and support services that you have here. On a workforce development side of things, we're very interested in looking at supportive services that reduce barriers to employment, daycare opportunities, access to transportation and those types of things. And we're also interested in helping to build the workforce pipeline for public sector employment opportunities. And so Tammy may tell you a little bit more about one of the things we're working on and trying to create workforce development and training opportunities for water sewer utility workers. And so we've had some great conversations with the city of Columbia staff and other staff of our local utilities. One last thing I'll mention is another area of emphasis we're working on is promoting regional outdoor recreation and tourism opportunities. So looking at ways that we can leverage a lot of our existing assets in the region from a community and economic development perspective and building closer connections between those things. So the low, I'm sure y'all are aware the lower soluta greenway has now been fully funded for implementation from the dam to connect to the three rivers greenway. How does that as an investment relate to other things that are happening in the region, such as the lower Richland tourism plan, the Congaree biosphere region which the Cog is actively engaged with and even some of the efforts in our rural counties like Fairfield County to build on their natural resource assets. So that's from more of a high level planning perspective. A couple other things just economic development related I'll mention is we've been, we work really closely to ensure that the priorities of the Midlands Business Leadership Group are integrated into our comprehensive economic development strategy. And we're actually playing a role in helping to manage the regional gateways project which is looking to create a set of consistent landscape treatments at key gateways around the Columbia area. Eight different locations. The MBLG has raised close to $1.2 million to go towards implementing the first two gateways which are gonna be 302 and Airport Boulevard in Lexington County and the I-77 and Forest Drive interchange in the city of Columbia. So we're working right now with a design firm to create the final designs so that we can put that out for bid with the hopes of having that breaking ground this fall. And then also we just started on an initiative, EDA grant funding opportunity for a regional tech hub designation. And this is actually an effort being led by the South Carolina Department of Commerce that's trying to get this funding from EDA to designate a large part of the state as a tech hub with a focus on alternative energy, grid resilience and that type of thing. And so this could be a really great opportunity to tie into a lot of regional and local economic development initiatives. And then last one other thing I mentioned related is the COG is working to get funding from EPA under their Climate Pollution Reduction Grant Program which is designated money that's coming to the Columbia Metropolitan Statistical Area. And we're working really closely with the city of Columbia staff to get that funding in place so that we can develop a regional climate action plan which is really important from an economic development standpoint as we kind of work towards recruiting industries that put a priority on looking at how we're handling that in the longterm. And then one final thing is we're just, we're really interested in working with our local governments and thinking about scout motors and what that means from a regional perspective. We're starting to talk with a lot of our smaller jurisdictions and counties and everybody asking questions about what this is gonna mean for the longterm. And so if there is a role that the COG can play in helping to coordinate discussions around supporting that initiative and making sure that we're planning for the longterm that's something where we'd be very happy to and interested in doing. So I've introduced Tammy Began our workforce development director. She'll tell you a little bit more about what they're doing. Okay, thanks Gregory. Thank you so much for your time today. Workforce development, what does that actually mean? The short answer is we operate the Department of Labor, US Department of Labor projects that come into the state for employment and training and we cover three counties. So not the full COG area. Newbury County is covered by a different COG. That's the short answer of what we do. So a couple of things that I brought up that are more recent projects that you might be interested in. We have two upcoming fairs, one in September, one in October. September is workforce development month. So we are having our large, sorry, I'm short. Our large-scale job fair is scheduled for September 20th. It'll be at Dutch Square Mall. At this point have a little over 30 employers already registered for that. As you probably are aware, the city has a great number of open vacancies. We invite your HR department to come and join us for that to do some recruiting at that event. Certainly we do that year-round, all the days of the week, all the weeks of the year. And we're happy to help with that at any other point as well, but we'll have a little more publicity around that. Our second fair is in October. It is an apprenticeship fair and it is less designed around trying to connect individual people to a very specific apprenticeship in a hired role right away. What we're working on with that one is really awareness of the different career paths that are available through apprenticeship. A lot of people think of apprenticeship as your traditional plumbers, electricians, that kind of thing becoming an internment. But there are a lot of different careers that are available. So we're working really focused on that and trying to raise awareness of the different career pathways. A lot of ways to get to your long-term career plans that don't necessarily have to go through a four-year college right after high school graduation. There are a lot of different ways you could get there. So that is the purpose for that. We're taking registrations for both of those fairs from employers now. I'd invite the city also to engage with this. Aware that you definitely have two apprenticeship programs and certainly join us for that to help build your pipeline there because that is the purpose of that fair. Next thing, some other questions. So we talk about apprenticeship. So you're right, the traditional concept is plumbers, electricians. So in your definition, so as a welder, a fabricator, so there's really no limitations. So the Department of Labor approves registered apprenticeships and so they're going through the process and looking at an employer's vision of how they want to do that. And so you can bring someone in as a very entry level in high school even, it's youth apprenticeship at that point but teaching some very basic level like blueprint reading for instance in welding. You can do that. And then you're looking at wage progressions as skills are developed. And so they're building them benchmarks for what you're learning along the way. Wage increases as you go along working towards a journeyman kind of idea. Okay, thank you. Those programs are paid by that federal grant that flows through you. Is that correct? So apprenticeship not so much. We operate a lot of programs. The SC works centers that you have one just down the street here. We oversee that and that is paid for through a lot of the program of funds that we have. We also operate programs within that center and that's also paid for with the money that we have. I think what the important thing is that, and I'm not specifically talking about my business but the opportunity with a skill is potentially greater today than at any other time in the history of mankind. Lawyers need people right now. And but it's not just bodies. We're looking for skilled smart labor that it sounds counterintuitive that skilled smart labor is actually working alongside with us to develop the ways to reduce skilled smart labor. So it's not like they were working them their way out of a job or working the company to become much more efficient because we don't have people. So I think it needs to, I'm intrigued. So I'll likely want to sit down with you. Terrific. Thanks. Love to talk to you about it a little more. Another possible way that we could get involved with initiatives that the city already has going on. You have two projects that you're working on right now for your talent pipeline that you work on with the school districts. Richland one and Richland two. I'm guessing that you guys are pretty familiar with it, but basically the idea is there's an application process and students apply for an internship and they work with the city and your staff for a few months in the spring semester of the school year and that's paid. It's very similar to what we call as youth work experience. And so that would be another way that we could talk with your HR department if you're interested in that to continue to build that pipeline in your various departments. And so we'd like to talk to you about that. Our youth work experience in general is 10 weeks of paid employment. We pay for that, but the student would come to you and basically you've agreed to do some mentoring, teaching them a little bit about what it is to work in that environment, allowing them to do career exploration at that same time. Similarly, we have an on the job training program and that is actually for all age groups. So that is in all of our programs, but you would hire someone who might be marginally qualified for the job, you're willing to take a risk on them. And in exchange, we will pay 50% of the wages that you're paying that person as you're training them for us, as opposed to sending them off to school to sit in a classroom and learn, you've agreed to teach them as they're working. And so we pay for the training in that way. So those are two other opportunities for us to integrate. And as they keep uncovering those, we want to get our youth engaged. Sure. So if there's any matching of federal grant programs, please bring it to us. We'd love to follow up with you on that. And the OJT program is not limited to just youth. It's wide open age groups. So we'd love to work with you now. I think it's so important that we really, the world, you have to be much more strategic in the world today. And connecting to dots is a lot harder because the dots just don't seem to be as visible as they used to. So I really do think there's a great opportunity here in the Midlands to really develop this workforce concept. So I definitely want to learn more about that. Wonderful. We're excited to teach you more and we'll help connect those dots. Couple of other quick things. Gregory had mentioned the public utilities pipeline that we're working on. We appreciate the invitation to the informal meeting. And so we're going to try to dig into that and see if we can raise the awareness. We get priority there, right? Absolutely. The biggest problem that we uncovered there, we thought we had a training problem and you guys are doing a great job universally across all the counties. The training is there. It's an awareness situation. And so that's what we're working on. An awareness campaign there. So we're excited about that. Gregory's helped connect some of the folks I know with the folks he knows. And so we're going to try to get some traction going with that this fall. That includes our public works department as well, not just coal and water, just not everything. Is there some data you can share with us that talks about how many placements and the apprenticeship between people and what they do and where they went and all that kind of stuff. I mean, it doesn't have to be, it can be as developed as it is. I don't have anything with me today. That's fine. If you can send us something, I think that'd be great. Sure. Couple of other brief things. New industry assistance. Gregory kind of skirted around the issue of Scout. It's a big situation that we have coming down the pipe. New industry assistance is something that we assist with as workforce development folks. A lot of the things that we personally fund through our money is not available as someone is coming into the area. They have to be established. But one thing that we do, a lot of is connecting dots, as you mentioned, helping introduce new companies to pipelines of people they can hire right away. Hosting hiring events, we can do that. Couple of examples of companies that we've worked with as they were coming in. Amazon, when they came several years ago, a team of us went to Kentucky. Amazon just said to us, we can't really explain what it is we need. You're just gonna have to see it. And so a team of us went and we worked in Kentucky at Amazon for a day. And we worked in all the departments about an hour at a time. We started at 5.30 in the morning and we finished at 5.30 that evening. And then we drove back home. So it was a long day, but we learned a tremendous amount of things. And so we were integrally involved in their hiring process when they first came on. More recently, Mark Anthony Brewing and China Juicy came to the city. So we helped them with their hiring needs, helping them figure out what connections they needed to make. And so we are now into integrally involved in the scout. As you're probably aware, the county has hired a few folks to focus on that. They have started integrating with us. We've been working with the Department of Commerce and their staff that they've dedicated to that project. So we're all kind of working together. We're just not making a lot of traction quite yet, but it's still early. It's a lot of work to be done still. So those are some services that we offer as you have new industries coming in. And then the last thing I'll talk about is companies that you already have here. This is less city focused, but more for your constituents. We have incumbent worker training that we do. This is funded directly through our programs. Companies that need to upgrade the skills of their existing workers can apply to us for funding to upgrade those skills. And so the options are pretty unlimited. We don't have a specific list of training that we do, vendors that you must use. It's a competitive application process. And so the company comes to us with an application telling us what it is they need. Is that business of all sizes? All sizes. It's a sliding scale based on the reimbursement of the training. So basically the company's scheduling the training, paying for the training and then sending us an invoice for that. The amount of reimbursement ranges from 50 to 90% depending on the size of the business. So that's the end of what I had for you. All right. And I'm gonna turn it over to Reginald. Talk to you about infrastructure. Just wanna take a quick moment just kind of pass out this map right here. Thank you. Now the purpose of that map is to reflect what we call our MPO planning boundary. So what I do is manage a program called Coast MPO. Now what that simply means is the Columbia Transportation Study and Metropolitan Planning Organization which simply just means urbanized area planning in terms of federal highways. Our main goal is to look at the map before you, look at that transportation network that you see shaded and yellow and do a needs assessment. Try to figure out what's going on with that transportation system. Try to figure out what the problems are. Try to figure out what we need to do to address those problems. Now in addressing those problems and that needs assessment goes into a document that we called our 2045 Long Range Transportation Plan. It's a document that has a 20 year horizon. We update it every five years and essentially we go through this entire network every five years and try to assess the needs that we need to address. When we come up with a mitigation strategy to address those needs, then we put together a financial plan that goes into a document that we call our Transportation Improvement Program. But most of the time you hear us refer to as TIP. And in transportation planning, we speak in a lot of acronyms so we have to speak in full sentences and have to be reminded of that. When we want to look towards the future and how we want to improve this transportation network, then we do planning studies that Joe will talk about a little bit later on. And we put those documents, we put those projects in the document that we called our Work Program, or officially known as a Unified Planning Work Program, or UPWP. So we do these planning documents. We like to look at the relationship between land use and transportation. As you can see, that is a very big network. And therefore we do not want to look at it too much in a holistic standpoint because based on the size of it, obviously people who may live in Lexington County may not do a lot of traveling in Richmond County and vice versa. So we do sub-area plans such as Columbia East where we look at the relationship between land use and transportation and try to determine what's happening there and what we need to improve in those locations. We're doing the same thing in river banks which is kind of around our office and looking at the edge of city Columbia going up to where Carolina Crossroads comes into Braverville Road. We work with the City of Columbia Pass to do the Walk Byte Columbia study which has been a tremendous success in the efforts that you've used to improve your walking and biking planning for the City of Columbia. And we just did a recent update of that to help expand your bike share program called the Bike Share Expansion Feasibility Study. We work with the City of Columbia in doing streetscape improvements on the South Main Street Project that's going right behind the Capitol where we partnered with the city and USC to get that project completed. I think the kickoff was in February of this year. We've also worked with the City of Columbia in doing pedestrian and street, streetscape enhancement improvements on the Semide Street. So I don't know how successful that was with most people because they complained about not being able to make left turns. But it's been a wonderful project for pedestrians. We're working with the City of Columbia right now on the River Road separation, the Semide Street River Road separation project. And we're going through a process that we're gonna meet on Thursday to begin a process of taking the $40 million that you've raised up to this point, excellent job, and add it into our tip. So eventually that can go into our step. And by doing that, that gives you a tremendous amount of opportunity to raise more funding by saying that it's a regionally significant project that has been recognized by the MPO. So these are just kind of the steps that we take to try to enhance transportation throughout our region. City of Columbia is a central part of that. We appreciate all the help and support that you give us. It's enjoyable to work with your staff and anything that we can do to help, we owe it to the help. Fantastic. Thanks. I will point out this next presentation we're gonna hear about the East Columbia traffic. I think it came from a conversation Reginald I had a couple of years ago about the growth of Garner's Ferry around the Veterans Hospital in Leesburg. So I guess it's important for local governments to have that wish list, and then come see you guys at the cog and then how we can implement that. So this is a perfect segue into how to leverage your participation with the cog and growth corridor, which truly East Columbia is a major growth corridor right now. Thank you all so much. We really appreciate it. Look forward to continuing to do great things with y'all. All right. Thank you. Appreciate it, everybody. I do think you're right though. And Britt brought it up. I mean, I think we're entering into an age of cooperation locally. We probably haven't seen it ever. So I think we all realize that it's not about winners and losers, it's about winners and winners. It comes to the local communities. Absolutely. All right. Let's go into the next section then. All right, you're up. All right. Just control it on my end. Okay. Thank you. All right, well, welcome, Joe. Yeah. Thank y'all for having me here this afternoon. As Reginald mentioned, we're working on the Columbia East traffic improvement area plan. So my name is Joe Robertson. I'm a transportation engineer with Columbia Morning Associates here in Columbia. So our office is right over on Jervais Street next to Adlou Flower. So if y'all are in the area, feel free to stop by and say hello. So as mentioned, the purpose of this study is to look at the Southeast portion of Columbia. It kind of serves as the gateway into the city, figure out what traffic issues exist currently, what growth is known or anticipated, and what issues do we expect to see in the future, and what can we do to get ahead of those? So I'm gonna give a brief presentation on it today. I've got a lot of information to cover, so I'll try to get through it as quickly as I can. But if y'all have any questions throughout, feel free to stop me. Oh boy. Any other way. There we go. I gotta hit the down button, so the up button. All right, so just a quick overview of the project team. As discussed, the CM Cog is the owner of the project and the project manager of being Mr. Reginald Simmons over here. I'm the project manager for the consultant team with Kimley-Horton Associates. Within our team on the consulting side, we've also got Boudreau Group, Ryan Bland is here to represent them. 3oX Engineering is helping us with environmental assessment and data and associates was a subcontractor that we use for data collection to collect our traffic data. So it is a very large study area. The blue outline that you see here kind of encompasses the total study area. It's about 11,000 acres or so, I think a little less than that. Generally bounded by the railroad on the south side, Trotter Road on the far east, Rosewood and Fort Jackson on the north and then Fort Jackson Boulevard and then Fort Jackson itself kind of on the northeast portion. Very big area. As you all know, it includes a lot of residential development and residential growth, commercial shopping areas. We've got the major interchange at Garner's Ferry Road and Interstate 77. Also a lot of churches, parks, schools, the VA medical centers in here, access to Fort Jackson on the north side. You've got McIntyre farther down Garner's Ferry Road. So there's definitely a lot going on. In addition to that, we've also got Gilles Creek running through the western end of the study area. And I think that the blue shaded portion has two separate city council districts. I think both of y'all are here today, which is great. And there's also three county council districts included. So there's a lot of moving parts and a lot of players that we wanna bring to the table. So that's the purpose of today's presentation is to come forward and kind of talk through the early findings that we've come up with. We're kind of wrapping up our phase one where we've looked at existing conditions and some of the known future development that we're anticipating. So at its busiest point along Garner's Ferry Road, which we've kind of focused on since most everything in this blue area feeds onto Garner's Ferry Road. You've got about 50,000 vehicles per day, which is pretty substantial amount. As you know, it's six, seven lanes through there, a lot of turn lanes, business driveways up and down. As you get further into the east end, it kind of transitions to a more rural section with a large grass median, fewer driveways and crossing points across the roadway there. Leesburg Road also has a significant amount of traffic just over 25,000 vehicles per day. So as you can expect, the intersection of those two along with all the traffic on I-77, which I didn't show those volumes here, there's a lot of congestion that folks experience as they're traveling through the area. So our project goals and objectives for this study, what we're hoping to achieve through this is to identify cost-effective solutions both to solve existing and anticipated future issues in the area with all the growth that has been experienced. We want to help minimize congestion, serve other modes of travel, whether that be transit, bicycling or walking, and also improve safety. And as part of achieving that goal, some of the objectives that we're hoping to get out of this is to work with developers and help to encourage mixed use type development and encourage working towards trying to implement some of the transportation projects that we identify through this study. And above and beyond that, work with the city and city staff to see if there's anything from a policy or ordinance standpoint that can work towards supporting those goals and maybe identifying some grant funding sources to help fund projects as well. So I think since y'all are very familiar with the areas, I'm sure you're aware of a lot of these challenges, but I'll highlight a few of them here. There's a lot of crashes along Garner's Ferry Road and in this area in general, which is to be expected with as much congestion and as much traffic as there is, the explosive growth, which we've already mentioned several times. We've got the relocation of the USC Medical School over to Bull Street, which opens up capacity there. We don't know if the VA hospital is going to expand or something else may move into there in the future, which is gonna contribute towards increased traffic and travel times. Also housing availability and affordability, I think was referenced a moment ago and military activity, whether it's folks passing through to Fort Jackson or the National Guard base. So we've worked with two different stakeholder groups to date. We've got our technical working group that we've kicked off the project with. They helped to scope what all the project would include and help define the goals and objectives. So that includes the cog, the consultant team, we've got city and county planning staff, the VA hospital, SCDOT planning and federal highway association. And then we've also got a separate group that includes developer and real estate folks who work in the area that Ryan and his team are coordinating with to gather some of the planned and known development that's occurring and kind of get a pulse on what they see happening in the area. So in that group, we've got Richland County Economic Development, representatives from the VA hospital and then some local folks on the private side, whether they're involved in real estate, transactions or development development. Not listed here, we've also got the airport, Owens Field and also Fort Jackson. We spoke to them as well to get some information. So real quick on safety, you can see this heat map here. This is based on overall frequency of crashes. So as you can imagine, with as much traffic as going through the interchange area, that big yellow hotspot is where the most overall crashes occurred. That's the VA hospital area. That's just south. Yeah, VA is right in here. See the interchange right there. So we looked at years 2020 through 2022. We typically look at a three year window. There was about 1,856 crashes that occurred or were reported during that period. So decent amount for a long corridor that averages out to about 620 crashes per year. There were two fatalities reported, both of them being pedestrian fatalities that occurred during that period. 14 serious injury crashes, about just over 400 other injury crashes, and then the rest were property damage only or fender bender type crashes. As you would imagine with all the congestion, the most common crash type was rear end. A lot of folks rear end in each other in traffic. So that was 45% of the crashes reported. 34% of the crashes were angle, which was the second most common type. That's folks that are either failing to yield the right of way at an intersection, getting in a T-bone type crash, or folks that are coming and going out of driveways along the corridor, which there's a lot of driveways, particularly on the Western end with all the commercial areas. From a crash rate perspective, when you take the number of crashes and normalize it based on the volume going through the intersections, Holbrook Drive and Pine View Road had the highest crash rate. There's a lot of folks that are making left turns coming to and from the residential areas. And I think that light kind of backs folks up from time to time. Atlas Road, as you can imagine, had a decent amount of crashes and then the I-77 ramps had a lot of crashes as well. From a traffic standpoint, we collected count data. And as Reginald mentioned a few minutes ago, we have a lot of acronyms and traffic lingo. So I'm gonna try to work through this, but if you have any specific questions or need me to explain something further, let me know. So we collected AM and PM peak hour turning movement counts. So this is for folks commuting to and from wherever in the morning and then in the afternoon when they're headed back home. So we picked up 12 intersections, primarily along Garner's Ferry Road. We do have the intersection of Rosewood and Beltline included as well. We would have loved to look at a ton more intersections within the study area, but we are limited based on the size of the project and the scope. So with these, level of service is think of it like school grades, A is really good, F is really bad and failing. So in traffic terms, we like to show that in green, green for go, red for stop. So Leesburg Road at Garner's Ferry Road, this is based on existing traffic conditions. That's a big red F as you can imagine with all the traffic going through there. The oranges were fairly bad as well at the I-77 ramps at several locations. The rest of the study area didn't look too, too bad during the peak hours. Certainly if you ask folks. So what is level of service measure? Yeah, so great question. It's based on the delay, the average vehicle experience is going through an intersection. So what this is showing is in seconds. So for intersection five, level of service F in the AM, that's saying that the average driver through that intersection has to wait about 117 seconds to get through there. So almost two minutes. You know, you sit at a light, you see it turn from red to green and then back to red before you can get through and it adds up. And so are these roads owned by the city or DOT or both? I'm sure it's a combination of the mostly DOT. Mostly the DOT. How they played a role at all in this study or project? Yeah, so we, part of our technical working group, we have SCDOT planning involved. And then I've also spoken with some folks over at the district office who, you know, more locally focus on this area. There's certainly going to be involved in more so moving forward as we get into developing recommendations and making sure we're not duplicating anything that, you know, they're planning to do as well. So speaking of recommendations, are some of those recommendations going to be reworking at Leesburg Road, Garner's Ferry Road? Potentially. Area, because it seems to be kind of the bottleneck for all the chaos. Right, yeah. And as you all know, there's a lot of constraints in that area. We've got the VA hospital on one quadrant. You've got the Green Lawn Memorial Cemetery on another quadrant. So you're kind of limited. Unmerging, a lot of, yeah. Yeah, a lot of merging. And you've got, you know, two major roads that both have or need access to I-77. So that's kind of why there's a spaghetti junction for lack of a better term for all the interstate ramps to and from, so. Unfortunately, I travel on Leesburg Road every morning. Oftentimes in the afternoon, taking my daughter to Sandhills. So did they, have they refixed that? For the, for the, for the connection from the interstate ramp. They fixed it. Is that open again? That was something that I, we spoke to DOT about a while back. Cause I know they made that change when they had the I-77. And they put a left-hand lane off of. Right. Leesburg to go on the, but then they closed that road. Yeah, they closed that northbound chute ramp coming off Garner's Ferry. Yeah, so they, they took that away as part of that project. And then I think they were planning to keep it. But upon recent discussions I had with the district, it sounds like they're reverting it back. So through this study, we may see if there's something, you know, I was wondering, I was going to ask, this information, was that when that road was open or closed? This was collected while that was still open. Okay. Yeah. We made, cause we knew that that project was coming down the line. Probably worse. You got a lower F if it was closed. Correct. So maybe an F that you won't be able to overcome. Yeah. Right. So I mean it was, It was a lower F. Like an F, like a worse F. Yeah. Repeat the class. Like a G? Yeah, like a G. Like you're going to be held back. A lower F. You're going to be a third grade. If you get a bad enough F, our modeling software will just give you an error code. I would say that's probably where you were at that point. So I was just curious if, you know, when the data was collected. Yeah. That's a great point. I think, and I'm going to get to the kind of future slide here in a few minutes. And I think when we modeled that, it still had that closed. We haven't changed it since I spoke to SCDOT again. So it's going to show a big F. But if you do drive through here every day, does that seem about right? Does it take you about two minutes to get through there in the morning? It's pretty, you know, well, first of all, and sometimes the way I go there, I get off on Fort Jackson Boulevard. And I get on I-77 for like one exit. Sure. Because I want to avoid it on every. That's all designed around avoiding Garner's Ferry Road completely. So, and then oftentimes I might spend pretty four minutes on the ramp. Right. Yeah. Light tends to make it better unless it's making it worse. Sure. So in normal conditions, it makes it better. But again, you can see that light turned multiple times on the exit ramp. You kind of cringe as you watch it change. There's nothing you can do about it. You get off and you stop immediately. So anyway, so it's challenging. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, we're certainly hoping that we can identify today's issues as well as, you know, the future's issues and see what we can do to help relieve some of that. But it's better than, I'd rather go on Leesburg than Garner's Ferry. Sure. So from a land use perspective kind of touched on this a few minutes ago. This shows the existing land uses that we were able to pull in the early phase of this study. So all of the yellow is residential. All that residential traffic generally feeds to Garner's Ferry Road or Leesburg Road. Along Garner's Ferry, you can see a lot of that orange, which is your more commercial uses. The green kind of pops out as agricultural space. But as we know, a lot of that is starting to turn over towards residential in the future, which we'll show some of that here in a moment. Just to give you a general idea of what it looks like from a colored land use perspective in the study area. So Ryan and his team at Boudreaux through part of the coordination with the developer and real estate advisory group reached out and did interviews with the folks that are part of that group. So we have this map shown here. These yellow shaded in areas show residential development that are either planned or anticipated to be occurring within or just outside the study area. So just through those handful of folks that he spoke to, he identified about 2,500 new single family homes and about 1,000 multifamily units either already approved or in the works within the area. So as you can imagine that many additional residences, we estimate from a traffic standpoint is about another 18,000 or so daily trips. So about 1,800 or so during the peak hour. So the traffic that's already out there is gonna continue to increase as development occurs in Southeast Columbia. There wasn't any specific commercial development that was identified through that search, but it's expected that that's gonna follow as more homes are built. Industrial development, as we know, there's some of that going on outside of the study area, kind of to the Southeast. So that will impact what we're doing as well. In discussion with Fort Jackson, they're anticipated to remain pretty stable. So no major changes there that they let us know about. And with the USC Med School relocating, the VA didn't indicate any current plans to expand onto that campus, but with that new capacity there, I think it's a matter of time before they expand or somebody else moves in. So here's our 2045 future Nobel traffic analysis. You can see a lot more red popping up. We've got some dark red Fs on here. Let's see. A lot of Fs. Yeah. So yeah, a lot of Fs on there. It definitely looks worse. The good news is there's the Atlas Road at Garner Street Road improvements that helped that out a little bit as part of the penny widening project. But yeah, I'll have to go back in and look at the specific ramp that you were talking about to see if we captured that. Yeah. And make sure we got that revised. Oh, in about a week, I'll be driving my daughter's school, so I'll be able to check it out. Yeah, school's about to start back up for sure. So yeah, as expected with that much extra traffic, there's a lot more red on our chart here. So that's kind of where we're at currently. We're moving into the next steps of seeing specifically what needs to be improved from a traffic standpoint. So just some of the opportunities and these kind of tie directly back in to the goal and objectives for the study. We definitely want to try to improve safety, help it become more multimodal friendly through mixed use development and multimodal facilities, whether that's improved transit routes, access to sidewalks, bike trails, things of that nature. Definitely want to improve safety. Access management is going to be a major focus of this study. There's a ton of driveways along Garner's Ferry Road. Some of them may not be needed or necessary. So any opportunity to consolidate or share accesses would be a win. And also with it being the gateway into Columbia from the Southeast, any opportunity for beautification and kind of welcoming gateway features that we can work into this. So does it help if you have a turn arrow at the major roads and then no turn arrows at the minor roads? Yeah, it's really a function of how many folks are making those specific turns. And so... Most of those interest, like when you get on Garner's Ferry, do most of them have left turn arrows or not? In the Walmart? Yeah, certainly the busier intersections do, but yeah, I don't think all of them do. Okay. So just as a quick example, this is a rendering that Boudreau did on a similar study here in town. And this is something that's going to come out of this study as we work towards our recommendations. So this was along Beltline Boulevard. We all know what it looks like today with the Verizon store. So kind of some renderings like this that can help to visualize. It probably won't look exactly like this for Columbia East, but this is just to give you an example of the types of things that we're planning to show in addition to the hard transportation improvements. So the next steps, now that we've spoken to this group and gotten you all up to speed, we're having a public meeting at the end of the month. It's going to be at the Richland Library Southeast Branch. So we've got that scheduled and we're gonna work on getting the word out to everybody so that we'll share that through the cog and probably the city and the county and library is gonna share it. Try to get as many folks to that meeting as we can to get input from the citizens and the public who live and work and drive through this area all the time. Can you make sure at least Will and I have that date? Sure. Yeah, it's August 29th. So. 29. 5 to 7 PM. 5 to 7. Yes, sir. And then in addition to that, we'll have continued technical working group meetings. Also with the developer in real estate meeting, SDOT, we're gonna get them more involved and then resource agencies. So that's working through with utility groups and other groups that may have some additional information on how development could occur in this area to help further guide our recommendations. Purpose and need statements after we've identified or that will help us identify some alternatives and recommendations. And then once we have everything prioritized and wrapped up with a nice list of here's what we think is needed, then we'll circle back up with council and MPO committees to present the final study and recommendations. So a lot of times we, I think in the terms of chicken and eggs, so based on what you've done so far, what do you think the chicken is to help with mobility? Yeah, that's a tough question with all the information that we talked through. And Reginald and I have gone back and forth on this a good bit. I think we can all agree that the answer is probably not, hey, you need to widen Garner's Ferry Road. I agree. So I think we can strike that one from the list. I think there's some intersections that could benefit from turn lanes. Maybe the interchange itself probably needs some reworking but with those constraints we identified, we'll have to get creative with that. Safety improvements, I think just better crosswalks at a lot of locations. There's a lot of good information out there about improving safety for pedestrians and bicyclists, working with Comet on some of the bus stops in the area. There's some good bus stops along here and then there's some other ones where it's just a sign on the side of the road with no sidewalk to it or anything. So I think there's a lot of things that we can do and hopefully recommend through this study to help have a holistic approach to improving the area. Great. Thank you so much. Yeah, I appreciate it. And here's my contact info. So if you have any further questions, feel free to reach out. Thank you. Fantastic, thank you. All right, we got up next. Matt. Hello, everybody. Chairman Brown, Dr. Bussell, Mr. Brennan. It's really good to be here with you tonight this afternoon. Kelsey, excuse me, Kelsey is handing out to you just a little to go with that version of what I'm gonna say just kind of for your records, but it kind of summarizes with what's going on. But first of all, on behalf of the city center partnership slash the main street district, we just wanna thank the city for your long-term partnership. We're now in our 22nd year of working with the city today when we got started. But it's been a great program. You've been with us since the very beginning and that's much appreciated. A lot is going on. Let me start out by telling you some of our recent developments and accomplishments. And then I'll talk a little bit about the future. First of all, one of the most fun projects that we were able to do late last year was the ceiling of lights on the 1600 block, which by the way, fell today, but we're fixing it right now. A couple of strands fell and we're gonna raise it up and tighten it up. And there was a lift truck out there as we walked down the street today. So we are continued to take care of that. Let it fall on me last year. It did not fall on anybody. So that's all good. In fact, we was kind of creative. We saw they had one of the lights tied to the back of a police Tahoe. So that was really great. So, but we do have a lot going on. We have a great staff at the city center partnership main street district. Heather Spires is with us today who's our director of administration and also development. We have Kelsey Bickley, who's our marketing director, who's I guess our newest staff member who's doing just an incredible job with our marketing. And we have Adrian Nelson, our Sergeant Major Adrian Nelson who has been with us almost 20 years now. 18 years and is just doing a great job overseeing our 16 yellow shirt ambassador. So we're very fortunate to have him. Like I say, the biggest thing that's going on right now is residential development. It's incredible. I know that's something my mayor recommend has talked about a lot, how we need to double or triple the amount of rooftops or units downtown. And that really is happening. Just in the last few weeks, the standard now is open with almost 700 young people in the district that kind of bridges the Vista and the main street district. The lady opened up this year, the Palms Ben Arnold's project on assembly street and the Klondike project that Mr. Kason did. And these are all great new projects, which together are bringing in approaching 2,000 more residents just to the area that we're in. So it's gonna have a big impact and a long lasting impact on our area. We're also seeing retail and retail is tied to rooftops. The more residents we get, the more opportunity for retail and restaurants. We have a great new little shop in the 1500 block called Copper Canyon that's opened up this year. Spotted Salamander in the last year opened up a second location on Main Street. The gospel mission just opened up the Hope Shop over on Taylor Street. Cal Tye is just now opening, Taco Sushi opened, Ambrosia Tavern, Taverna opened, Sunrise Cafe just opened a couple of months ago, just down from City Hall, and MOA Korean will open very soon. And that's really significant. In fact, MOA Korean is one where it's actually converting office space to retail. And that's about 6,000 square feet prime ground floor space. So we're really excited about that. And I think the more of that you see, the more exciting our downtown will be. Also, with the help of City Council, and thank you very much for doing that, you gave us some additional money this year which enabled our Yellow Shirt Ambassadors to cross Elmwood Avenue. So we're now covering Elmwood, both sides of Elmwood from Bull Street, essentially down to Lizard Sticket. And that I think is already paying dividends. I haven't had any complaints about it so far and it's noticeably cleaner. So I'm very excited about that. And thank you for that. Social media, I mentioned Kelsey Bickley and the good work that she's doing. Our Instagram audience is growing at a record rate. We have now have 12,000 followers in April and now it's up to almost 13,000 followers. I just sense April. For those of you that know this business, I'm looking at Dr. Bustles because I know she's into it. Our engagement rate's about 4% a month which is really high. The industry average is about one to 2.5%. So we're really doing well with that. And we're excited about that. And Kelsey's doing a great job on that. We do have an electronic newsletter that we send to about 1,400 organizations and people every month. And we have about 500 opens of that and about 70 links to others. So we're excited about that too. So we're really improving our marketing, beefing up the Yellow Shirt Program. We've gone from 12 to 16 ambassadors. And we also, with the help of the community development side of the city, have added an outreach ambassador which should be starting very, very soon. One of Dr. Bustles' task force's recommendations was to have somebody after hours because we found out that after five o'clock really wasn't much outreach. So this person's gonna work from 2 to 11. Is that right, Adrian? Yeah. And so we'll have somebody out there that'll be out there at night working with the Yellow Shirt ambassadors and the Columbia police. But they'll also be able to come in in the afternoon the next day and follow up and help get people where they need to be. So we're excited about that too. Some things that we're looking ahead this year, we are working on expanding the ceiling of lights and we will do it better so it doesn't fall. So we're working on that right now. And hopefully we'll have an announcement on that in the fairly new future because we wanna expand it down Main Street as much as possible. We're also working on our community partners with the goal of increasing density in the district. That's a real goal. We have too many parking lots. We have not enough compact development and we need that in order to get that street level activity, to get that retail and restaurants that we all want. We need to really work on density. So we're working on that. A good example of that is in working with the city on what they're doing in economic development is the new Astral Development which has been announced over around the new name Delhi area. That's a big deal. That's gonna be 200 or so market rate, new apartments, it's actually a mixed use project as I understand it, and really connects the Main Street district to the Bull Street district, which is what we all want, to start connecting these districts. So we're excited about that. From the hospitality perspective, we're also seeing a record number of new hotels. The Moxie Hotel is well underway that Rick Patel is doing, I think scheduled, I think to open up late this year, we'll cross our fingers on that. But we did have a crane on Main Street which caused a little bit of aggravation. I know Missy and others were working hard on that. But in the end, that project's gonna be great and will bring a lot more people to the district. Also had a new historic hotel announced on assembly next to Kola's and the Flutter Wing that they're working on that Miss Patel and months are doing to expand the Hotel Trundle. And now they've just announced another project in the Vista too. So more growth, more hotels, more people in the area. Another challenge that we have and something that we're gonna be working with Ryan Staff and the city council on is the new work from home. I don't think personally, I don't think work from home is going away. Some people think it's a temporary thing. I think that it may go up and down. But I think it's a reality. I think where I think the office market in the future is gonna become more challenging. So we need to do more to make people want to come downtown. There are people that have options. I have a son-in-law that works for Price Waterhouse Coopers on Main Street. Two years, he's been in the office twice and works from home, can come into the office, but doesn't need to, but does come downtown a lot at five o'clock after work. So we're kind of going through this interesting period where people work from home and then come downtown when they wanna get away from home. So rather than having to come downtown to work. So we're sorting through all that, trying to make downtown more attractive and safer and the perception of safety better in the evenings and things to adapt. And hopefully we may even see some more conversions. We've already had some like the Moxie I just mentioned that was converted from office to hospitality. And I think we're gonna see more of that in the future. So it's something we all need to keep our eye on and work on that. And lastly, but looking ahead and not minimalized is our board for the very first time in our organization is actively seeking opportunities to work with our neighbors and the surrounding areas to really build a stronger, more unified city center. We have had some serious discussions with folks in the Vista. We talked to North Main Street about working with them. We've done some small little projects in North Main now like put our planners out on North Main and things help them with the Cornbread Festival and some of those kinds of things. But there's a lot more of that that we can do. And we really believe that it is, I don't know if we're still using one Columbia anymore but we really are one city. And we might have to bring that one back. We might have to. And we really wanna build that city and are reaching out and working with those other groups and with their staffs and with their boards. And I think there's more to come on that. And we may have more things to talk to you about later on that. Another object, I know your city does provide us a great deal of funding through economic development and also through hospitality tax that we use almost all of that for our yellow shirt ambassadors. We spend over a million dollars a year just on that program. But we don't just go out there and walk around. I mean, they really document everything they do. When you see our guys, we saw Rico as we were walking down, leaning up against a building on his phone, they use a proprietary software called the smart system and they record everything they do. So we can go back and tell our supporters and tell our funders what we do, where we do it. Some statistics that might interest you just in the last 12 months from July 1st, 22 to June 30th, 2023, we removed almost 152,000 pounds of trash from the Main Street District. And these are just, you may not realize it because a lot of it happens before you get to work. But at 738 o'clock in the morning, we go out every morning and just pick up whatever's out there and kind of back up the city public work staff on that. So it makes the area look really good. We made over 6,200 business contacts. This means walking in a store, walking into a restaurant, making sure everything's okay. We made almost 2,500 homeless contacts. These mean helping out with homeless people, sometimes moving them along or working with police, but oftentimes just, hey, can we help you with anything? Is what's going on? We provided hospitality assistance over 12,000 times. And this can be as simple as seeing a tourist on the street and where can I get a great steak or where's a good Italian restaurant? But it could also be escorts. So in fact, we give over 2,500 safety escorts. I mean, some of the things we do on an ongoing basis is bring people over from St. Joseph's to the ballet for dance classes. And you'll see every morning like little ducks with our yellow shirts walking the little children across the street. And we just want to do everything we can to make the experience downtown as good as it can be. As good as it can be for the people that live here, for the people that work here, for the people that visit here. So a lot going on downtown, a lot of opportunity. And we want to continue to work. And I want to give a plug to Ryan Coleman and his staff. I think more than ever, I've always worked directly with Ryan, but now we're working more with all his staff on recruitment, on programs that are going on. We met with the prospect just a few days ago and spent all day with them and worked together on that. So I feel very good about that and feel very good about that relationship and what it's gonna bring in the future. So that's all I have and can answer any questions you may have. I was just gonna say that, we appreciate what the city center partnership is and what it does. I think it's an exciting time in Columbia. Matt hit all the hot buttons of cooperation, coordination and really connecting the city together. I mean, I really think this is our chance to look at the city of Columbia. We use the term one Columbia, but really one Columbia and not fighting within the city for who's gonna win and who's gonna lose. So I applaud you for reaching out to these other areas and helping us have this overall strategic vision that I think we're developing to make Columbia great. So thank you for what you do. Well, thank you. Thank you all. Any questions, anybody? I was just gonna mention, as the infrastructure is being put in a South Main Street, maybe there might be some expansion of the one model that you brought to Main Street over there's private investment is gonna start heading that way eventually. Very much like to do that. I have had Jason Kasky from the USC Foundation is on our board of directors and I've had some preliminary conversations with him and we very much like to do that. I really believe Main Street is Main Street and that there's great opportunity there. That's great, yeah, I totally agree. Thanks, Pat. I know I was just to add, as I'm thinking about your areas of focus, as we, you know, one of the things that we talked about in terms of density was also that public space, green space. And so as we start to invest in Findlay Park, really thinking about how we can connect Main Street to Findlay Park to get folks to use that space to dine or to play, I think that's gonna be key because it's gonna be a cultural change to get folks to go take advantage of an urban park, which has been kind of isolated for a while. I totally agree. In fact, I had it on my list to mention. So thank you for mentioning it. Yeah, Findlay Park is a big deal and we're really happy that you've invested as much money as the city has committed to that and planned it and the way that you're going to close it and then reopen it as a grand new park with services in place, I think is a great strategy. So yeah, we, over the next couple of years, why it's under construction, I hope we can have more conversations with that. Absolutely, for sure. Thank you. Thanks Matt, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming. I also love your branding, Kelsey. Yes. Yes. All right, we'll be in line. Thank you. Yeah, Mr. Chairman, before we move on, I wanted to assure you that we had talked and to hear Tammy from Workforce at the talk, talk about the uncertainty of all the communications going on with workforce development. I think it'd be wise for us to reach out to our colleagues at the county, maybe started that development committee there. Sure. To really learn more about how we as a city can team with them to kind of be that clearinghouse for everybody that's doing workforce development out there and really just think of charge. I would love to. And I think it's critical to, you know, the development and the growth of the area and it's increasingly harder to find. I think that's probably everybody. Everybody I talked to says we have openings and you can't find people to find these openings. Yeah, I think the growth of Scalp, the announcement of Scalp is making that happen. And I think it's important for us to, you know, assist Jeff Rubel at the county economic development, however we can with that unified voice. And we start with him to get him to visit. Fantastic. Thank you. Yep, thank you. All right. I'd like to make a motion to enter into executive session discussion of matters relating to the proposed location, expansion or provision of services, encouraging location or expansions of industries and or businesses, other businesses in the area served by the public body pursuant 30-4-78-5, 2221 Divine Street. All right. So I have a motion. Second. Second. All right. The motion is second. All in favor please say aye. Aye. It will take like two minutes break and then we'll hit executive session. Thanks everybody. Thank you.