 Good morning everyone. Welcome to Commuting Solutions 7th Annual Sustainable Transportation Summit. We hope you all had a chance to enjoy some delicious breakfast and do some networking before today's event. I'm Erin Fosdick and I'm the president and CEO of the Longmont Economic Development Partnership. I'm also a member of the Commuting Solutions Board of Directors. A big thanks to everyone for joining us as we dive into this year's theme of transportation innovations bringing people together. I want to thank the Longmont Museum and Cultural Center for hosting us today. Also want to take a moment to point out that any great event isn't complete without some technical difficulties. So you might notice a small screen. We had hoped to have the larger screen down but technology is not cooperating. So this might be a good opportunity to move to one of the front seats if you're having trouble seeing the screen because we will be using that a little bit later. Here in Colorado most of us are guilty of driving single occupant vehicles. Our days are really packed with responsibilities we need to get to work. We have other duties that we need to accomplish and sometimes the car is the most efficient way to do that. What if there was another more environmentally friendly option and a reasonably convenient option that allowed us to spend our travel time and our commute time as we pleased. Instead of battling the dreaded front range traffic that I know many of us battled this morning getting here. An option that connected employees and residents to the places that they needed and wanted to be while also helping support placemaking and vibrant urban centers and corridors. The greenhouse gas effect of gas emissions per kilometer of railway transit is up to 80% less than cars. Today on road transportation is the second largest controllable cause of ozone air pollution behind only the oil and gas sector. During today's event we're going to dive into the possibility of a dramatically improved transit options that provide opportunities for developing sustainable and resilient communities. We're going to learn from experts and policy leaders who are going to discuss how transportation innovations can change our environments day to day and bring people together. We wouldn't be able to host this summit without the generous support of the commuting solution sponsors so I want to take just a minute to recognize our 2023 presenting sponsors. Boulder County, the city and county of Broomfield and the city of Boulder. I'd also like to thank our gold sponsors, Colorado Transportation Investment Office, RTD, the Northwest Chamber Alliance, Google, Sterling Bay and Elevation Credit Union. Finally a big thanks to our silver and non-profit sponsors. Commuting Solutions really appreciates your support. For 25 years Commuting Solutions has been a strong advocate for multimodal planning and an advocate for the expansion of transit in our region. We're grateful to have the opportunity to advocate for the Northwest Metro region in this capacity so that we can work to create even more attractive and accessible region that helps us bring businesses and residents and also helps reduce our impact on climate. Through our partnership with the Northwest Mayors and Commissioners Coalition, which represents the nine jurisdictions in our region, we've supported the implementation of rail for more than 20 years. Through our collective efforts and really through our persistence we've been successful in achieving amazing regional investments together. Full implementation of Northwest Rail is promised to our region and it's a long-standing commitment that we still need to fulfill. We're really appreciative of the RTD Board's commitment to fund the Peak Service Northwest Rail study to explore starting the service by operating three morning and afternoon trains from Longmont to Denver. We're also incredibly excited about the prospect of bringing together Northwest Rail service implementation with the possibility of front-range passenger rail. Recognizing that the BNSF alignment is being considered as a corridor alignment, we will continue to be a strong supporter of this approach at the federal, state, regional and local level. And I think it's a really, really exciting time for us to be expanding rail in Colorado. Our state has also started conversations about tying land use and development with transportation investments to address climate. During the 2023 legislative season this was creating some political divides, but we anticipate that these important conversations are going to continue into the next legislative session. We're pleased today to have brought two expert speakers from Washington and Oregon who have implemented similar legislation in their respective states and are going to demonstrate the possibilities for us. We hope you learn a lot during the event today and are inspired by the opportunities that lie ahead for Colorado. With that I'm pleased to introduce our first speaker, Congressman Jonah Goose, Colorado's second district representative in the U.S. House. Congressman Goose is the chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee. He serves on the Rules Committee and Natural Resources and Judiciary Committee and is the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Federal Lands. We're thrilled to have him join us today. Please join me in welcoming Congressman Goose. Good morning. Thank you first and foremost for that very kind introduction. A warm welcome. The work that Erin and the folks at the Longmont Economic Development Partnership are doing every day to support our community here in Longmont is certainly much appreciated. We're grateful to you and I know our families, our workers, and perhaps most importantly our small businesses in this community are very grateful for your efforts. I also want to thank the executive director, she's way in the back, of course, running the show as usual. Let's give her a round of applause to all of her hard work. She's been a great partner, a great friend to our office, and it's been a real privilege to be able to work with her these last few years on some really important projects, which I'll talk a bit about. I thought that perhaps kind of framing the conversation for today, understanding the distinguished group of speakers and panelists that you'll hear from. Of course, Boulder County Commissioner Claire Levy who's doing a phenomenal job and your wonderful representatives that you've brought from different parts of the country, US DOT and experts in their respective fields, that I might just be able to frame the conversation a bit. And as I think about the work that this fine group of individuals is called to do, in my view it requires two things, perseverance and partnership. And I was just talking to one of your board members about those two qualities and I'll explain why. First, I mean, I know I'm preaching to the choir, but there was a recent article in the Denver Post which is three days ago that polled Coloradans from across our state. And without fail, one of the top issues that percolated to the very top for folks concerned about their daily lives was traffic and transportation infrastructure, being one of the top concerns that every Coloradans feels and experiences, whether they live in Colorado Springs, Southern Colorado or up here in Northern Colorado. And with our state's population growing each year, we know that this issue is going to only increase in prevalence. I've lived in Colorado for 35, 34 years since I was five years old and the state has changed dramatically over that period of time. Population growth has been exponential. It has taxed the infrastructure of our state and it is clear that we are at a crossroads and an inflection point where we now need to make some tough choices. But there are great opportunities as well if we're willing to build the partnerships that are necessary and if we're willing to persevere, to be persistent in that partnership. Let me give you a couple of examples. First, in the last year we have seen millions of dollars brought to bear across our state and across the country as a result of the bipartisan infrastructure law. That law is the most significant investment in our nation's infrastructure since the days of Dwight Eisenhower and the modern highway system was first conceived of before many of us were alive. I'm not going to say who was alive or not alive back then, but a law that is having a dramatic impact on our state. And it is by virtue of the fact that we built a partnership in the United States Congress across party lines and that the president was persistent in making the case that it was time for our country to make a generational investment in infrastructure. And that meant, yes, multimodal. It meant broadband infrastructure, infrastructure of all types. That ultimately is what was necessary to get it across the finish line. And it is having real impacts in our state. The best example, of course, is the $25 million raise grant that we were able, with your help, to secure for Highway 119. It's a big deal. And for me, it's a great example of those two qualities, partnership and perseverance. With respect to the former, most of the raise grant proposals that our offices worked on in the past, and I think most members of our delegation have historically participated in, are usually from one jurisdiction. It's rare that you have a grant proposal like the Highway 119 grant proposal, where it's necessary to develop connections across multiple jurisdictions. The Boulder County Commissioners, the City of Longmont, the City of Boulder, RTD, Northwest Mayors, City and County of Broomfield, everyone, all in on one vision. It is also rare to have a level of persistence that we saw from this particular coalition, because of course many of you in this room, in this ballroom worked, or auditorium rather, worked on this particular grant and know full well that it took us a couple of tries. But we were persistent in our advocacy. I was, many of you know, I have a five-year-old daughter and a three-month-old son, so to the extent that I sound a little bit tired, it's because I was on baby duty last night, so drinking a lot of coffee this morning, because he was up quite a bit. But a few months ago, two months ago, right after he was born, we finally had sort of our first day out where we could take Joshua, our son. And so we were driving up to Lyons. They have a wonderful park up there that Natalie, our daughter, loves. And as we were driving up, my wife and I and the kids, I got a call. And it was from an unavailable number, so I knew it was either a telemarketer or someone important from Washington, D.C. And Andrea said, you know, don't answer the phone. I've got to answer the phone. It was a Sunday, so I answered the phone. And she could tell, and I was talking to somebody important, and she could see this huge smile on my face. I'm sure she's thinking, like, oh, this must be, you know, maybe it's the Vice President calling, right? And as I get off the phone, I was like, why are you smiling so much? Why are you so excited? Well, we just got this raise grant that it was Secretary Buttigieg calling to say that this raise grant would be approved for the Highway 119 project. That's why you're smiling, not that Andrea, my wife, doesn't care deeply about Highway 119. But for me, it was a big deal. And the reason, in addition to the fact that it's going to have a real impact for the better for generations to come, is because of the persistence that it required of this community of folks who continually made the case to our office, made the case to officials back at US DOT in Washington that this was a priority worth investing in. And that level of persistence, that level of partnership is what was necessary to get it across the finish line. There are more opportunities to come. We're going to talk a lot, or I believe you all will be talking a lot today, about rail. We've called on the Department of Transportation in Washington to include Colorado's Front Range Passenger Rail Project in the Federal Rail Administration's newly constructed Corridor Identification and Development Program, which is a program that was created as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. I know that we have representatives from Amtrak who have joined us here today. It's another example, a game changer that will require partnership and persistence. And this community certainly knows a lot about those two qualities, those two skills that I think are required of us to tackle these big challenges that face us ahead. So know that you'll have a partner in our office, that we will continue to be a champion for this community and for the multimodal transportation needs that the community is going to require, so that ultimately our children collectively have a wonderful community that they inherit, where they can live their dreams and raise their families, start their businesses, and more. And as long as we apply perseverance and partnership, I'm confident we'll be able to do all that and more. So thank you all for all that you do, thank you for all that I know you'll continue to do, and let us know how we can be of help. Have a great morning. Thank you so much, Congressman Ngoos, for taking some time to speak with us today, and thanks for your continued support and persistence in supporting our region. Now I'm pleased to introduce our next speaker, Mayor Joan Peck, who's going to provide a brief welcome message to all of our guests. Mayor Peck was elected as Longmont's mayor in 2021 after serving as a council member for six years. She's lived in Longmont for nearly 46 years and is really a tireless champion for Longmont. Her policy focuses include transportation innovation and climate protection. Please join me in welcoming Mayor Joan Peck. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming to the Seventh Sustainable Transportation Summit, and welcome to our incredible museum and city. We're so pleased to have you attending this summit in our community, and we appreciate commuting solutions and the Longmont City, I'm sorry, for making this event possible. I am not really a great speaker, so hang in there with me. Transportation and the vision of rail and Highway 119 serving Longmont and all of the municipalities on the Northwest Corridor is a topic that I and the Longmont City councils have been pursuing for years. We can't wait for the rest of the region to be connected to Longmont. It's incredibly important for us as the second largest city in Boulder County to be part of making the vision of rail a reality. I'm also a member of the Front Range Passenger Rail District Board, and I'm eager to advance this significant investment for Colorado. It is my belief that if it was not for the support of our governor, Jared Pullis and Congressman Ngoose, advocating for both the fast tracks Northwest Corridor and the Front Range Passenger Rail District, Longmont would still be in a discussion with RTD as an investment that is unattainable. We're proud to be working with the Northwest Mayors and Commissioners Coalition to create solutions at a federal and state level to heighten our advocacy efforts, and we appreciate the support of our congressional members for their support of passenger rail service to Colorado. We hope you have a productive and enjoyable moment at today's events, and thank you for being here and for your interest to advance rail and transportation for our region. Enjoy the day and the rest of the summit. Thank you, Mayor Peck, for that welcome message, and thanks for all your support for Longmont and the Northwest region. Now I'd like to introduce our next speaker, Chris McShane, commuting solutions board chairperson. Chris is a senior vice president and private banker at InBank. Please join me in welcoming Chris. Hi, good morning everybody, and thank you for being here today. Rail has been a long-standing commitment to our region through the RTD Fast Tracks ballot issue. Metro Denver voters approved back in 2004, and while those first six miles started service about five years ago, connecting Denver Union Station to Westminster Station, the rest of that 40-mile corridor has not moved forward and would not for several decades unless we identify new funding, new partnership, and pursue new vision. We're excited to have convened many stakeholders who are intimately involved with the exploration of expanding passenger rail service in Colorado. To that end, there's an exciting opportunity that I think we all should support enthusiastically, and that is the creation of front-range passenger rail. Concurrently, as you'll hear from Ms. Johnson, the RTD is exploring peak service Northwest Rail that would provide a few trips in the AM afternoon to start the passenger rail service between Denver Union Station and Longmont. We at Commuting Solutions envision a reality where there is a partnership between front-range passenger rail, RTD, Amtrak, and the Colorado Department of Transportation where both inter-regional and regional service is provided to our communities along the Northwest Rail corridor. Would that not be an amazing accomplishment for our region? We can be optimistic about making this vision a reality as today we will learn about how the state of Washington successfully implemented a similar approach. We are also excited to share insights into Oregon's transportation and how land use legislation can serve as a conversation starter, specifically as it relates to Colorado's Senate Bill 213 discussion. This is an exciting time to be imagining these bold possibilities for Colorado. Together we should think beyond what we have experienced thus far and to bring forth what, and to have a vision to bring forth what previously may have seemed impossible. So thank you all for being here again today. Thank you, Chris, for that welcome message and thanks for your continued leadership with Commuting Solutions. Now it's my pleasure to introduce the keynote speaker of the Seventh Annual Sustainable Transportation Summit. Julie Meredith serves the Washington Department of Transportation as the Assistant Secretary of Urban Mobility Access and Mega Programs. Julie has been with WASHDOT for more than 30 years. In her current role, she oversees transportation investments of more than $6 billion, bridge and highway tolling, transportation planning, and regional transit coordination. Within these groups, her portfolio includes designing and constructing mega programs, operating complex toll roads, and planning integrated transportation systems, coordinating with regional transit agencies. All with a vision to lead the transformation of mobility and support the agency's goal to build a resilient transportation system that is safe, sound, and smart. We are thrilled to have Julie join us from Seattle for this event. We'll have about 10 minutes after the presentation for audience question and answers, so please stick around for that and think about what questions you have for Julie. So with an eye towards future sustainable transportation in Colorado, there's so much to learn from the innovative transportation efforts being undertaken in Washington. Please join me in welcoming Julie to the stage. I was worried I wasn't going to be able to see, but it's really bright, so. I'm so glad to be here. She said my name is Julie Meredith, and Congressman Ngoose sort of took my thunder because what you're going to hear a lot about for me is partnership and perseverance is also a good word. So thanks for having me here. I'm going to share what we've been doing in transportation. There's a lot of land use and transit coordination that Washington State is doing, specifically where I work in the Puget Sound region where a few of our major metropolitan areas are located, including Seattle and Bellevue. I can't see the slides, but in 2022, we at Wash Dot combined our offices of urban mobility and access divisions, which includes the management of mobility, our planning organization, with our regional transit coordination division and our toll divisions. With the large-scale transportation programs called our mega programs, these divisions and programs together are responsible for planning and delivery of some of the largest and most complex transportation efforts that Washington State has ever undertaken. As an organization, we look at all phases from planning and design through construction with the vision forward on how people travel now and how they will travel in the future so that we can support our economy, mobility and the quality of life of Washingtonians. One of our key strengths is our focus on partnerships. Through strong partnerships, we're better able to plan, finance, design, construct and operate the multimodal corridors and integrated systems. Both the regional transit coordination division and our management and mobility divisions are located in the same organization in Puget Sound so that we can better partnership with the partners we need to, those at the planning organizations in those locations. The central Puget Sound region, which as I said includes Seattle, Bellevue and areas to the north, south and east and if I could see the slide, it would be an orange on the map. It has a current population of over 4 million people and is expected to grow by another 1.8 million by 2050. One of the things that's really set the stage for coordinating transportation, land use and transit planning in the region in Washington State's Growth Management Act. This act requires all cities and counties in the Puget Sound to adopt comprehensive plans to manage their growth over the next 20 years. Cities and counties are currently in the process of updating their comprehensive plans. They have a deadline for completing their plans by December of 2024 and they will look to manage the growth from 2024 to 2044. The Growth Management Act requires that they conduct an update every 10 years so they will complete their updates at the end of next year and will be required to complete another one in December of 2034, which as we know is a blink of an eye in transportation. Cities and counties are specifically required to include elements in their plan for land use, transportation, housing, capital facilities and utilities, all which must be supportive of and consistent with each other. There are more recent requirements for comprehensive plans to include climate change and resilience considerations. This Growth Management Framework gives all local, regional and state agencies a clear picture of what's being planned in each community. It also gives WASHDOT the opportunity to engage early in the planning process and partner with agencies to work towards common goals. One of the things that's unique in our partnership and coordination with local agencies in the Puget Sound is that we are all agreeing to work towards a regional, agreed to vision where population and growth will occur. The regional municipal planning organization, the Puget Sound Regional Council, from now on I'm going to call PSRC, has adopted the regional growth strategy and this strategy takes a step further than GMA, the Growth Management Act requires. It directs growth to go within higher density areas in high capacity transit stations. The overall goal of this strategy is to link growth and development with high capacity transit investments in the region providing a more multimodal travel option shed. We have fostered a strong partnership with our regional transit agency partner, Sound Transit. Sound Transit is the regional authority for the area responsible for planning, implementing, constructing, operating high capacity transit in the region including bus rapid transit, light rail transit and a heavy rail transit that operates in the north south in the vicinity. As an agency Sound Transit is in a period of significant planning and growth. On the left side of the side you can see their current light rail system which is about 20 miles and on the right side is their expanded system more than tripling to 60 miles worth of light rail and a parallel BRT system on the east side. There will be over 100 bus rapid transit and light rail stations either on to or adjacent to wash-off facilities in the future. The regional transit coordination division works closely with Sound Transit to advance multimodal transportation and partnership both in planning and informing agreements for operation and maintenance alongside wash-offs facilities and I should say that the expansion that Sound Transit is undertaking requires a strong partnership and it reflects a 40 to 50 billion dollar investment in the system. Just an example of a strong partnership we have with Sound Transit, as some of you know working in transportation many of us are experiencing increased costs across the corridors higher than estimated contractor proposals. Can I help you? Oh no, I don't need to see it. Thank you. On a recent project we had a project that was included bus rapid transit which is Sound Transit's component in conjunction with the development of our express toll lane systems on Interstate 405. We shared the cost of the program 80% being paid for by Washington State DOT 20% by Sound Transit. The bids came in significantly higher than either agency anticipated. Wash-off and Sound Transit needed to work together to determine what the next steps were, how to make decisions in a timely fashion to meet the contractor contract dates. In addition, we had very different governance structures to work through. It was only because of our strong partnership that we were able to coordinate decisions in a timely manner and agreed to move forward to execute that contract. So as a result, you'll see express toll lanes and the bus rapid transit system meet the goals and deliver on time for the citizens. In addition to supporting the regional growth strategy through our partnership with Sound Transit, we also partnership with the Puget Sound Regional Council through our management division. The management of mobility division reviews local plans in King and Snohomish counties to the most populated counties in the region. Reviewing the plans allows us to provide comments and influence. So we look for project consistency between WashDOT and the local agencies. We look for complete streets. How did they address climate change and equity? And we make sure that they have a robust engagement plan so that everyone can contribute early in the planning process. Well, this is one of the primary ways we have. It gives us an opportunity to provide input on land use. We are limited at Washington State DOT because we do not have formal authority to approve or deny the plans. So again, it's through the strong partnerships that we have that we can influence the process. Some of the examples I'm going to offer on this, an example in Spokane, Washington, which is on the east side of our state. The city had annexed a rural area way back in 1981 and as the annex process they offered and planned to build promised arterial streets. After development and with even more housing proposed and without building the arterial streets they had planned, safety issues were identified where the local community was really having issues accessing WashDOT system. Safety improvements were needed. Rather than the 40 million dollar arterial improvements that were necessary and identified up front but never built a 500 million dollar interchange was proposed by the local jurisdiction. WashDOT in response and after much consideration and discussion proposed potential median closures along the State Highway if any more development was approved and this allowed us to gain a seat at the land use table and we were able to partner with land use groups and the city for a more reasonable and measured build out plan. And this is an example where the citizens share a higher cost that could have been avoided had transportation considerations and more involved up front in the land use decisions. Another example which is a more recent example of an impuget sound is where local municipalities proposing a future land use change, a change to the vision that we've all agreed to meaning the proposed growth that they would like is outside the current growth boundary. In addition to concerns that WashDOT has about it varying from the agreed to vision it has the potential to impact our facilities that directly border the change. We are currently constructing an interchange more than 200 million which was a supported investment by the local community and in a very desirable upgrade to the interchange that if the city is successful in changing the boundary we will be making the interchange potentially obsolete by the time they do the change in the growth. This is something that I'm watching very closely and that really shows why alignment with the regional growth strategy is critical for all parties. It emphasizes the importance of a regional growth strategy because without it the pattern that I just described would be more common. Not all of our coordination review the land use plans is to correct something that we see going wrong. Through land use review we are able to work with the agencies to influence the policy decisions that impact travel choice and the travel experience. Review and provide comment letters on growth alternatives that the cities are considering as part of the environmental impact statement processes and in this role we identify and support the alternatives that is most closely aligned with WashDOT's transportation goals. As an agency we see several additional ways to advance the integration of land use and transportation decision making. Roger Millar our secretary of transportation at WashDOT is committed to changing the future of mobility and is a leader in the country in many of these things that I'm going to talk about. He is advocated that transportation needs to be in the land use business. Transportation and land use is tied to housing decisions because having to travel long distances to find affordable housing becomes an affordable housing and transportation issue. Being able to live and work near transit centers allows people to grow personally and professionally without being stuck on our interstate for many hours. Developments and expansion without transportation involvement often leads to more expensive fixes for WashDOT and our customers after the fact. And we need to make it easier and safe to shift to shorter trips and partners with cities and counties up front on these goals. We see the single most impactful way to influence vehicle miles traveled is to make smart land use decisions. Transit and bicycling enhancements and other strategies do play a role but none affect vehicle miles traveled as much as land use. We can grow the economy for example when that means that people have to live further and further from where they work becomes a problem. Another key factor we have the zoning. Housing is not affordable across Washington State and nationally we know that this is a trend and land use decisions play an important factor. Too much land is limited to just single family housing. Some people cannot afford to live near the activities and the work that they need to participate in. They live further and further away and are often forced to drive as opposed to riding transit, walking, bicycling, any other mode. It's not equitable and it creates more traffic and more pollution. These are the trends that we see as a transportation agency where we being forced to address the land use problem through transportation systems. In addition to opportunities for better connecting land use and transportation planning we are incorporating resilience and equity into our planning and decision making. As an agency our strategic plan provides the vision, mission and values that guide our decision making. The plan is focused on three key areas. Resilience, workforce development, diversity, equity and inclusion and as you can see these goals overlap each other. Each one bleeds into the other one and it's important to note that they work together. For this day I'm going to talk about resilience and equity which are embedded in our future planning. We've defined resilience as the ability to prepare for and adapt to changing conditions and withstand and recover rapidly from disruptions. For our agency that means being prepared for anything that comes our way. Disruptions of any kind that affect the movement of people and goods throughout our state. In Secretary Moulin's words a resilient transportation system also needs to be safe, sound and smart. Our resilience goal states that we will plan and or invest resources to improve our ability to mitigate, prepare for, respond to emergencies, combat climate change and build a transportation system that provides equitable services, improves multimodal access and supports Washington's long-term resilience. And if anybody looks that up we borrowed heavily from FHWA on that as well. We take good ideas. We want to reduce our transportation systems contribution to climate change and as you heard here today transportation is one of the major contributors to our state's greenhouse gas emissions almost 50%. We also want to proactively build, operate and maintain a transportation system that can withstand the effects of climate change and be an equitable system that all can access. With this goal in mind we are thinking about resilience as we look at our system and applying safe, sound and smart principles to our expansion considerations. This includes new systems and technologies ramp meters, express toll lanes other options to explore like what happens when automated vehicles are out what happens to the notion of mobility as a service what about other modes like bicycling and walking and at a multi-regional level this means thinking about crossing modes including highways, exploring high speed rail and incremental improvements to Amtrak. What about aviation? Thinking about all those modes this is the thinking that led to the Cascadia high speed rail and I-5 program. The Cascadia mega region connecting metropolitan Portland the greater Seattle area metropolitan Vancouver British Columbia these areas have experienced significant growth in recent years with more than 3 million people that have to move into the region in the next 30 years in more than 30% increase our regional leaders have an opportunity to choose how they respond to this growth. We are collaborating with the state of Oregon the province of British Columbia the private sector and regional partners to explore how high speed, high capacity corridor can better connect the Cascadia mega region high speed rail along with other investments in transportation can have significant potential to link the metropolitan areas of Portland Seattle and Vancouver British Columbia and to transform our region and make it more resilient. Last year Washed Out started to work and begin a master plan for the I-5 corridor from Canada to Oregon at the same time the ultra high speed ground transportation study and the process of submitting a grant application for federal funding to advance planning and engineering work for a high speed rail connection between the areas of Portland and Vancouver. We see an opportunity to integrate these two planning efforts into one program the program will work closely with Washed Out's aviation division to understand how air mobility can play a role in supporting future mobility within our state. This is the first time in my 30 plus year career that we have been looking at all these modes together in agency and it will require an even stronger partnership with our local state and federal partners as well as our tribes the communities we serve and private industry. I look at it as how do we keep I-5 resilient it is a backbone of our state and how do we preserve it and grow it to be the asset it can be while we look to the next 75 and 100 years and how can we support our economy mobility and maintain or improve our quality of life. The engagement will be coordinated effort we will work closely with our municipal planning organizations and our local communities to talk about what kind of future they want in the role that land use planning will have in that. Sound Transit will also be closely involved in planning for multimodal connections. We are being challenged to think long term and deliver on the state's transportation investments but in order to plan the future we need to think bold now. It's an incredible opportunity to advance our goals to think of sustainable growth to be resilient and have equitable engagement I know it's going to be a challenge it's the thing that keeps me going here at Wash Shot and I'm looking forward to the challenge so thank you again for inviting me here it's been great to hear and perseverance is what it's going to take for all of us to bring these things to fruition so thank you. Thank you so much for that inspiration it's great to see that you're doing so much in Washington we have some time for questions we can use a microphone if needed but if you can just raise your hand questions for Julie we'll have about 10 to 15 minutes and if you don't have questions I have questions but I want to make sure we give the audience time yes we'll see if we can hear you in the back you know it's really in its early stages but we're looking at high speed rail or up to high speed rail so up to 250 miles an hour and I will say we are a long way from decisions on high speed rail this is the very beginning but it's so exciting to be here and it will advance if we're a successful through the federal grant program so we're looking forward to those decisions which would happen later this year you know it's Amtrak I believe it's diesel but it's not it's not in my way so much it is Amtrak, yep you came from smart growth America yep it's a great question because we have never done planning in consideration of air mobility before but Washington state is looking at significant growth in air travel and our airports are struggling to meet those needs so we're going to be looking at how how does air mobility serve say within the state of Washington and how does a light rail system how does a high speed rail system how do those partner with each other so that they we can make the most of the investments so we don't overlap and what does that mean for the footprint so we want to make smart choices about where we apply our funds we also want to make smart choices for climate change so we want to make multimodal connections easier for everyone and you can tell that the footprint in an airport is very significant so how do we serve and make the most out of those connections we don't have any formal governance with those partnerships but I'll say sound transit started as an agency in 1996 and you know how do you have a partnership and not overlap I think for the first five years as an agency we had a lot of troubles with sound transit for quite a while we had to learn to work with FTA as the Washington State DOT that was news to us that there was another federal agency out there so we worked it took a few years to figure out how to work with FTA and FHWA but I will say that our staff can converse now with sound transit about the needs for light rail and what their footprint is they can talk to us now about what we need to make our systems function and I'll say that doesn't mean we agree that doesn't mean we just all sing on the same sheet all the time but I think we can have really good conversations and we both know and understand the other side that's a partnership and when we have a shared vision our leadership is really supportive of light rail in the area we're really supportive of transit and that makes my job easy when we need to partner which system so sound transit is funded through a tax in the Puget Sound region so they have a sales tax for them and it's funded up to I think it's between 40 and 50 billion to expand the system out when high speed rail that I was talking about we applied for two grants we don't know until the end of the year whether we were successful fingers crossed that we're going to be able to be successful through that process did I answer your question? you work for CDOT so WASH probably like CDOT is broken up into six regions those regions do planning they do maintenance they do capital delivery and when something happens the focus is on that something if there's a slide all the geotechs are over there fixing the slide if there's a bridge issue they're right there maintenance and preservation take first front operations take first front that perseverance it takes to deliver a mega program you've got to be singular focused on just the delivery runoff and do the past clearing because you've got to do your work on the mega program so by having a team that's simply focused on the delivery of the program that's what it takes to deliver those systems so on the program you'll see the SR520 bridge replacement HOV project I started that program in 2003 when they passed a transportation package it took probably six or seven years since 2003 for us to get a half a yes on that project and it was to replace a bridge that was vulnerable it really needed to be addressed so it's with that singular focus that it takes to gain how to get to yes and then to implement it so those projects that were listed as mega projects 520 is a $5 billion program 405 is a $3 billion program the gateway project is another $3 billion I mean these are significant investments in the system that address either seismic vulnerability needs 520 was a wind weather seismic vulnerability need they all include multimodal features or heavily transit features or the gateway program is connected to our ports for our economy and all of our mega programs include a portion of tolling or express tolling as part of them so we're trying to do the look forward to the future I think we have one more question that I saw Washington state just passed the HEAL Act and the PAIR Act both have equity portions of it so we'll be looking at all the investments we do through an effort which we just we're just beginning that today we were required to update our strategic plans which I was a part of I was part of updating it for resilience on the goal we had other teams who updated it for diversity equity and inclusion and workforce but we updated it for EJ in January so that we have that throughout our system I will say that one of the things we've been doing at Washington fast is looking at our hiring practices so we make sure that we we look at the candidates we got we looked at made sure we did outreach as a broad as we could be I will say we struggle to get candidates senior level candidates that meet our diversity and equity standards we're far more successful when we're getting less experienced candidates through the door so the young people that come to us are actually helping us be more diverse which helps I think in our thinking process going forward so all our investments starting this year over I'm going to get this wrong but it's over a million dollars we'll need to go through an equity assessment to see how we do how we meet the goals of the state and we also have an outreach plan that talks about how we do equity engagement so on State Route 167 we did a new master plan for that corridor and we put together a specific group that looked at equity in communities equity in access equity in the neighborhoods so we specifically took all our ideas to that group and we said where do we have gaps so they helped us define it another thing we've been doing is it's a challenge for everybody to get to the table so there are opportunities for us to help fund their time at the table we take that chance too so we're trying everything to get everybody's voice at the table to give us input thank you so much Julie for sharing your experience on these important topics and thanks so much to the audience for your thoughtful questions that was really great the good news is we have a break now everyone can get up and stretch we have a snack out in the swan atrium this is where you had breakfast we do ask that you be mindful of the time we'll start back in about 15 minutes so please be back in your seats at 945 you'll just walk right out the door here take the time that you need to refresh say hi to your colleagues and we'll meet back here in 15 minutes I think the bright light on my face is our cue to go ahead and get started again so thank you for coming back after that break I hope you had a chance to enjoy some networking, some refreshments I'm really pleased to introduce the next portion of our event the expert panel the panel will be led by our moderator Boulder County Commissioner Claire Levy Commissioner Levy was elected to the Board of County Commissioners in 2020 in 2023 Commissioner Levy serves as the chair of the Board of her other leadership roles includes serving on the Board of Directors for the Denver Regional Council of Governments serving as a member of the Northwest Mayors and Commissioners Coalition and serving on the Board of Directors for the Front Range Passenger Rail District please join me in warmly welcoming Commissioner Levy well hello and welcome I'm really thrilled to be able to moderate this amazing panel that we have here Erin said in her introduction I'm Boulder County Commissioner Claire Levy and as chair of the Board of County Commissioners and as our representative to the Northwest MCC and also a member of the Board of Directors of the Front Range Passenger Rail District so putting all of those together you can see that I'm spending a lot of time on both local and regional transportation issues and I'm very passionate about delivering Passenger Rail for our Northwest region and pleased to serve as the moderator for today's panel we're excited to convene stakeholders this morning to discuss the future of Intercity Passenger Rail in Colorado and specifically along the Front Range I would like to thank everyone for your participation today and in advance I'll thank our expert panel for their contribution to the discussion so to start our expert panel portion of today's event we'll just take a few minutes for each panelist to just quickly introduce themselves with your name and your title and we'll start with John Putnam who currently doesn't have a title but you can tell us what your former title was thank you Claire as Claire mentioned I am John Putnam I'm just going to go by transportation geek right now I am between positions most recently I was general counsel of the United States Department of Transportation before that I was environmental programs director for the state and then before then it had a couple decades of service working with states and local governments on transportation environmental issues thanks John David Good morning my name is David Singer I'm the director of transportation my title is assistant director for passenger rail I've been with CDOT for 20 years and I've worked on quarter development U.S. 36 when I first got started and moved on to the I-70 mountain quarter so always kind of drawn to exciting complex quarter projects great thank you David Debra so first and foremost thank you very much to commuting solutions for the opportunity to engage with you I'm very passionate about my name is Debra Johnson my functional title is the general manager and CEO of the regional transportation district but I like to qualify myself as a person in the people business recognizing the public transport unleashes people from their limitations and provides access to opportunities I've been in the public transportation arena now going into my 32nd year I've had the opportunity to work in a myriad of different communities across the country ranging from as well as Southern California now here in the Metropolitan Denver region and this is the 7th transit agency for which I work and I pride myself on being the voice of the voiceless bringing the voice from the bus stop into the boardroom which we'll pretend this is one and we'll speak about that today so thank you very kindly for the opportunity thank you very much Debra and Dennis alright good morning everyone and I'd also like to thank commuting solutions for having me here and putting this forum together I am executive vice president of strategy and planning for Amtrak and been Amtrak for about six years spent a lot of time in my career in transportation I was in the airline business for a long time and then did a sojourn in telecom for a few years before coming back to transportation and though I work at our headquarters in Washington DC that's actually home away from home I actually live in Colorado so I've got my own personal bested interest in seeing front-page passenger rail come to fruition okay thank you to all and I do want to acknowledge also that the general manager of the front-page passenger rail district is here with us Andy Karzian so talk to Andy if you have detailed questions about front-page passenger rail district so I'm going to start by just providing some background some context for the discussion that we're going to have for folks who have not been here in the front range with us for the last 20 years or so so in 2004 the RTD fast tracks ballot issue was approved by the voters to provide funding for light rail, commuter rail and bus rapid transit service in the Denver region but full realization of this plan has stalled over the last 15 years building on fast tracks Colorado has taken successive steps to advance passenger rail in our state in 2009 the division of transit and rail was created within CDOT and in 2017 the southwest chief and front-range passenger rail commission formed to continue efforts to preserve and advance Amtrak's southwest chief service in Colorado and to lead efforts to develop new intercity passenger rail service to serve the I-25 corridor in the last few years federal and state opportunities have breathed new life into the goal of substantial passenger rail expansion in Colorado and in 2021 the Colorado legislature took a historic step creating the front-range passenger rail district and it serves as the successor to the southwest chief and front-range passenger rail commission so the district is a new local government it is a special district and it's the largest special district in Colorado it's boundaries span portions or the entirety of the 13 counties that border I-25 from New Mexico to Wyoming and the front-range passenger rail district is responsible for designing financing constructing operating and maintaining a passenger rail system along the front-range the district is going to be a powerful new tool to advance intercity rail as the district can raise the funding and provide the governance necessary to bring intercity rail to our state the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure investment in jobs act is providing $1.2 trillion in federal funding opportunities to support transportation infrastructure improvements across the country with $66 billion of those dollars having been identified for rail improvement projects alone Governor Polis has made clear that transportation innovation including the development of intercity front-range passenger rail service is a major priority in his second term although the route has not been finalized if I can speak on behalf of the northwest metro region through my role on the northwest MCC I would say that we in this region enthusiastically support the prospect of front-range passenger rail and expanding intercity regional access we're studying whether Amtrak should be the operator of this new regional passenger rail service and we look forward to hearing more from our panelists about these potential partnerships and the opportunity front-range passenger rail service provides to potentially implement RTD's fast tracks northwest rail project so with that rather lengthy background in mind I would like each of the panelists to take about five minutes to share your perspective on the partnerships and the contractual commitments that would be needed to bring front-range passenger rail to fruition and I think we'll just start with John. I love the way you're lined up here because I think that is the right way to go about addressing this so if we can start John with you and in about five minutes. Terrific. Thank you Claire and thanks for the invitation and thanks for commuting solutions for bringing me here today. So you know here's the exciting news we're actually in infrastructure week we've been talking about infrastructure week for seems like decades to representative Ngoosa's point we have a historic moment historic opportunity to the bipartisan infrastructure law but it's limited it's a five-year bill it's not enough and you've got some strong competition as you've seen from the presentation from Julie this morning so in addition to I think the framing that he provided which I think is excellent about partnerships I'd add two other words to the mix one is performance to compete with the others for this money because it's going to be over subscribed you've really got to perform and you've got to really make a great case to show why Colorado deserves this money and this project deserves this money or projects deserves this money and then I would also add urgency we're two years almost two years into the five-year period of the bipartisan infrastructure law why that money's already gone out the door a lot of it will be awarded over the next few months and so you know if Colorado wants to share of that you've got to work on that so persistence but urgency and performance and I know there's a tension between them and one of the things that the Front Range Rail District the state and all the partners need to work through is just how to balance you know not going too fast but going fast enough and one of those places that I think is really important is partnership like marriage I mean sometimes you have to have hard conversations and work through hard issues and I think we're in that same place for project development here so let me talk quickly about the opportunity as Claire noted there is 1.2 billion dollars in the infrastructure bill there's 66 billion assigned for rail and that's just for inner city rail it doesn't include what FTA has you know which is another significant chunk of money for community rail like rail other sort of programs within that 36 billion dollars is assigned under the federal state partnership program that's been the kind of premier tool for building inner city rail and congress assigned 36 billion dollars of advanced appropriations it also said there's a possibility of adding additional money in the normal appropriation cycle what we're seeing since we don't have a budget for this here we don't have a budget for next year is that that's a target for some of the republicans in the house of representatives right now they've aimed at FTA's CIG program which I know Deborah cares deeply about they've aimed at the federal state partnership so I think for now we probably have to assume that that 36 billion dollars is what's out there from that 36 billion 12 billion has been assigned for national programs off of the northeast quarter basically the kind of key route between Boston and Washington DC as you heard just with the flavor this morning there are a lot of projects that are chasing after that money so one of the things that congress did in the bill and FRA the federal railroad administration is implementing is this new program corridor ID and really intending to create a pipeline for projects similar to the pipeline that's part of the capital investment program that FTA has run for years to really go from soup to nuts and help bring projects to the fore so the capital ID program was formally set up last year there was a notice soliciting requests for that Colorado did apply FRA partners, Front Range Rail District along that project you've got 90 competitors in that program right now FRA is intending to make announcements on who made the cut in November and even within the folks who do make the cut that's not a guarantee that you'll actually get to the actual construction funding and further advance funding in the federal state program but it's a critical opportunity congress identified in the bill that if you are selected to be part of that corridor ID program that that is a plus factor a preference factor in the award of those grants and so it will be incredibly important both for the money it will allow an instant $500,000 to do basic scoping work move on to a step two that only has a 10% local match to do the service development plan which I know is already started and then a third stage with a 20% match to do the project development work that will be needed to really kind of ripen things up to hopefully compete for some of that money but we've got three years probably four NOFO cycles notice of funding opportunity cycles left in that piece and so the pressure is on. In terms of the question of contractual arrangements a lot of that work will go into applications to support both the corridor ID process but also ultimately an application for that federal state program it requires agreements with potential operator that may be Amtrak that requires agreements with the host railroads probably two in the case of front range rail as well as the sort of partnerships local match arrangements there's a lot of work to be done a lot of marital issues to be resolved in order to be able to make that claim that will ultimately to grant agreements every step of the corridor ID program will have contractual arrangement with the federal railroad administration as well as any construction grants that are provided on that front. So with that happy to look forward to questions and discussion with the rest of the panel I think going back to the persistence and urgency point I think you've got to master the details because you know Washington DOT Sound Transit, Texas and others are doing that but you've also got to have that compelling story backed up by numbers backed up by solid data why do we deserve this money and none of the 90 plus other projects out there actually some of them will get that money too but there's a real competition here and how do we justify for Congress that this money should be renewed when that five year period is up because we know that the five year bill is historic but it isn't close to enough well thank you John for that I think you can tell immediately and you probably already knew how lucky we were to have John in the DOT in the first place and now to have him back here in Colorado with that knowledge that he brings to this so David could you bring your perspective from CDOT Thank you Commissioner I think this group understands that partnerships are essential, no one entity can advance a mega project you want to pull the microphone a little closer okay it's important to open up the tent and bring stakeholders in various perspectives in so that everyone can help shape and deliver that vision it's also important for each entity to bring their role and their strength and know that responsibility and that's part of that marital conversations Julie talked about bumping into each other in early stages but I think getting a rhythm on these complex quarters is really essential project manager for the service development plan which I'll talk about later but I'm coming from a technical perspective and performance is something that I want to dig a little deeper in we know that the passenger rail doesn't start and end at the platform having other trips, having transit having a high functioning multimodal system is really important so it's RTD but it's also transport and mountain metro and out rider and bus gang all working in harmony so that all those systems can complement one another and get to a higher performance same with scooters and bike and ped so it's an integrated system I think about customers as partners so looking at our academic institutions within the corridor we know that students are early adopters and are willing to change their behaviors to take a train and so understanding their behaviors and implementing their needs into our service options is really important as is special events, tourism, recreational trips those are kind of some of the characteristics of our service so all of those activities that are happening whether it's our retired or disabled population or veterans all tourism folks are coming here and using the train as part of the experience again that fits into and defines our service options and then finally our business community other chambers other business improvement districts at the local level that will help we're looking to target major markets and so there's our high population development centers and so that's a part of the partnership as well for all the things that CDOT brings whether it's engineers or modelers or biologists there's limits on what CDOT can do so we look to NGOs, we look to TMAs to help promote and market and advocate for this idea and so that's going to be an important partnership and I say that not to pander but I know the role that community solutions and the like have had in delivering important projects governance at the local level is really critical communities that do local planning looking to the future we've talked about land use earlier this morning but that demonstrates the readiness Longmont and Boulder and communities along the corridor have done stationary planning that does not it shows that they're forward thinking at a regional level COGS and MPOs can come together and say maybe not consensus but by and on addition knowing that each of their individual communities are affected in different ways and then I wanted to talk a little bit about FR8 as a partner too they're providing oversight talked about the funding opportunity but their guidance and their process has been really helpful they have lessons learned on successful and unsuccessful corridors that have been considered across the country and so we want to stand on their shoulders much as all of us think about trains and have needs and wants and perspectives whether it's place making or branding or the menu on the dining car they help us focus on what's first and so that leads me to the contracts John talked about the operator whether it's Amtrak or another entity they're going to have a business bundle on fares and pricing labor security technology that they'll bring to the table and so that's a negotiation as Colorado makes that choice similar fleet is also a compelling and exciting idea with emerging technologies and understanding their safety, their readiness on our facility the railroads willingness to take that fleet on their facility and the availability of that is also a lot of things related to the fleet conversation and contract and I think most important is the railroads themselves we're talking about a public benefit the railroads have a bottom line and have shareholders and so how do we have that relationship where is that win-win where passenger rail and additional trains on their tracks is a perceived burden so that's a very important conversation that Colorado has to be united and intentional about thank you David so Deborah if you could bring RTD's perspective yes thank you so much and I would agree with everything that John and David said as we talk about partnership so I'll just expand and provide some clarification further to the vantage point in which RTD brings recognizing that we are a regional transit provider but relative to FastTrack for all intents and purposes relative to the comments that it was stalled for 15 years I'd be remiss not to state that during the past 15 years we were able to deliver on the ABG and in-lines in addition to the southeast rail extension as well as the Flatiron Flyer so while we have not realized the Northwest corridor relative to having rail I think this is a great opportunity to engage and have a discussion about the importance of partnerships and one thing that's happening right now is working in tandem with the excuse me with the local jurisdiction so we can develop a common set of facts and we're doing that through our Northwest rail feasibility study and recognizing that there's different needs RTD may not know all the needs but you all know the needs because you're living and working in those communities we do understand that public transportation and transportation as a whole or mobility I should qualify it as is an economic generator and often times when we look at the mobility options that David made mention of we have to think of other conveyances not just those that are large complex vehicles that require a lot of infrastructure but with that keeping in mind that one of the critical partners and one of the reasons it's been difficult to realize Northwest rail is that RTD does not on the right away so picking up on what you said BNSF is very critical and where do I see linkages as we go forward it's in the sense of understanding what it is that we don't know now the operational cost the designs and their synergy as we look at front range passenger rail because we don't know what we don't know until we get that common set of facts and recognizing that we did have an opportunity and it's critically important to RTD because we were able to sit down at the table with BNSF and I have to commend my staff the only time we could get a meeting was on a holiday which was June 19th and staff made sure they were at the table and we recently have engaged in a factual agreement where we can get information relative to what those operating costs are and as we look at projections in reference to ridership and costs and things of the like we're hoping will be in lockstep and I meet regularly with the executive director of front range passenger rail because we both need that information we don't know if the alignment will be along the Northwest corridor at this point of time but it will be optimal recognizing where the are in RTD and we provide commuter rail it gives great synergy to the opportunity to bring forward inner city passenger rail and we need to ensure that we have a comprehensive transportation network for the region because not everybody is going to live close to a station they need other options in which to get there and we have to be willing to lean in at the table and have those conversations quite naturally in order to ensure that we bring this to fruition and so to the point that we raise local communities you know relative to TMOs, businesses academia not to mention our obvious partners being federal government i.e. be it FTA be it FRA and the individual sitting at this table and of itself we have to be open to having conversations we also have to ensure that we're courageous with those conversations and be vulnerable when we have those conversations because we may get to a point where we're going to have to make tough decisions and recognizing that we don't have to be disagreeable when we disagree what's the end game that we're trying to achieve and that's to move people in this mega region and ensure that it's competitive and with that being said RTD is here for it as we talk about support letters as we talk about having experts within our ranks with our talent we're willing to provide support letters and testify has been evidenced with recent trips in which we've taken part so with that I will yield the floor to my colleague to my right to get Amtrak's perspective thank you and Dennis so just as before Dennis speaks so reminder so Amtrak we have not selected the operator for this corridor Amtrak brings a lot to the table on that we will be looking at that in much more detail down the road but given your experience in this area Amtrak operating on freight rail corridors and in partnership with local transit maybe you could address the prompt alright well yeah thank you Claire yeah and to that point right we're there's still a process to select an operator we obviously have got a lot of experience as being an intercity passenger operator and so can bring a lot of that experience to bear but you know Amtrak is interested in seeing intercity passenger rail expand and succeed across America so you know if somebody else is doing it okay great let's see it work we'd love to be the ones to do it but nevertheless we are we really want to see intercity passenger rail succeed from all the other panelists you kind of have gotten a pretty good cross section of all the different stakeholders I mean it really does start with the communities that are going to be served so many of the people in this room are represent partners that are very important one of our one of the members of our board of directors is former mayor of McComb, Illinois that's served by one of our state supported services and as he always reminds us as you know mayors and the local communities are critically important to support for the rail services that get provided you know the service the Illini and Saluki the Carbondale service in Illinois got started largely because there was a good amount of grounds well of support locally to make sure that that could happen and so that's it really starts with the local communities as being partners and then you know you've kind of heard the Illini from there obviously we would if we were the operator whoever the operator is would be working with the district and the state as that's that and I'll come back to that a little bit one of the key contractual when it gets to contracts that's one of the key areas but the railroads that the service would operate over is critical you know we at Amatrak we have we own most of the northeast corridor the railroad between Washington DC and Boston not all of it but most of it but outside of that almost 98% of our route miles are operated over somebody else's railroad and David referenced that and then we have partners like RTB we've got commuter railroads in the northeast to operate over all railroads so we're kind of on the other side of that equation there as well so cooperation getting a good agreement with the local entity whether it be the state or a district that's going to support the service and the railroads are key they'll also be in some cases there might be contractual issues with owners of stations as the service development plan proceeds and it's determined where the stops will be and what the stations are going to be some of those stations might be owned so there'll be some work that will have to be done to figure out the access and how that's going to work so a lot of different players that are involved you heard the reference to the FRA the corridor identification and development program is a great program we at Amtrak had put out our vision of where we thought intercity passenger rail could be successful around the country but the current range was one of the one of the routes that was on that vision we're now sort of we like to think that that helped with moving things along with the bipartisan infrastructure law and the program that now exists for development of corridors but that really now is the vehicle that the Federal Railroad Administration's corridor identification and development program is the vehicle to move forward and we're all excited to see the announcements coming out here in a few months as to which routes were selected and they'll be as referenced a series as John mentioned a series of agreements that then need to be concluded with the FRA for the grants that will help provide the funding to be able to advance the corridor service so a lot of different players we at Amtrak have got a lot of experience in this area we currently work with 17 states 19 different entities within those states to support 28 state supported routes across the country so this is kind of something we do every day and we've got one of the key contracts is we've got an annual operating agreement with the state for the entity that's supporting the service to provide that service and that that's one of the key elements that needs to be concluded to move the service forward once you get into operation that's after all of the work on figuring out the capital and the infrastructure work that needs to be done to actually initiate the service so lots of players really exciting time and we're looking to whether we're the operator or not looking forward to seeing success for front-range passenger rail well thanks Dennis and we're going to stay with you now for the next question we're going to have some individualized questions addressed to each panelist that really get into their particular area in more detail so the question is what are so in Amtrak connects US corridor vision Amtrak describes expansion efforts that include adding the Cheyenne de Pueblo passenger rail service the front-range passenger rail district has applied for the FRA corridor identification development program which we've heard about a little bit this morning and assuming that we are accepted into that program and that Amtrak operates the service in the north-west metro region RTD and all of the other partners that have been mentioned here this morning due to advanced FRPR partnership with Amtrak alright thanks for that question Claire you know I think I'm going to be shamelessly steal from congressman Naguz it really is partnership and perseverance because it will take a good bit of time to make things happen so that's why the perseverance is important you know obviously as we heard folks out here have been at this for a long time but it still is going to take a few more years to actually complete the service development plan that front-range passenger rail district is working on right now and then that identifies really the additional work and some of the capital improvements that will be necessary to make a competitive intercity passenger rail service so now then those improvements need to get made maybe not all of them might not have to be done before service could start but there's going to be some phasing and probably some improvements so it will take a little bit of time people need to stick with it I mentioned that we have 28 state-supported service routes across the country right now so that's evidence that hey you can get there right so it works actually we heard this morning from Julie from Wash Dot so Cascades service is a service that I think in many ways is very similar to the service that we'd see along the front-range so it's kind of connecting up and down that I-5 corridor the Amtrak provides the Cascades service between Oregon up to Seattle and up to Vancouver British Columbia so that perseverance is going to be important but the key thing is also the partnership as you've heard everyone mention there'll be a lot of work a lot of agreements that need to get worked out and the local support to make sure that that folks are continuing to communicate the message that hey we see the benefit and the value in having this service come to fruition is going to be important to make sure that all of the various stakeholders and players are willing to stay at the table and engage and help us move forward because you know it's talked about you know the service would be operating most likely when the when the alignment is selected over freight railroads so need to be able to get that cooperation and their agreement to make that happen and then in the end you know as much as you'd love to have public transportation like intercity passenger rail be profitable and covered by the revenue that's collected at the fare box that's not really the way it works so you know it requires a subsidy you know one of the things that we work at from our standpoint is to try to continually get more efficient and economies of scale by expanding our services one of the ways we can get more efficient but nevertheless the amount of revenue that's collected from the riders does not match what it costs to operate the service that's why we talk about all the other public benefits that are delivered by the service and so the way that state supported service works at least if it's work with Amtrak under the law of PREA 209 is that the state or the other local entity usually a state but like in the instance of our service in New England it's provided by the Northern New England passenger rail association as opposed to the state of Maine but anyway that entity basically provides the subsidy the difference most of the difference between the costs to operate and the revenue that's collected so basically the taxpayers need to be committed and decide can stick to that and so I guess this is something we want to have and that's going to be necessary and helpful to be able to get the service into operation. Thank you Dennis for that. We're going to move to John Putnam again and this is a multi-part question that's related to the IJA legislation you addressed a little bit of this and how funding through IJA could advance rail expansion for Colorado and as you respond to this question keep in mind some additional questions about the level of competition across the country and accessing this support which you've also alluded to how the state of Colorado should position itself to have the best chance of winning this funding and what advice you have for the Northwest region to be complete for this funding and I think now that you're no longer at DOT you might be able to answer a little more fully on that, thanks. That's right, I was mentioning I think out in the lobby one of the disadvantages of actually being at DOT is you have to be scrupulously neutral across the country for all Americans and all the states, territories, districts and now I can be shameless in my love of Colorado in the front range so really I think hit some of the key parts of the first part of the question. We'll mention that there are other pots of money Congress allocated $8 billion for the capital investment grants portions for FTA $7.5 million for RAISE which State Highway 119 got there are a number of different pots of money that are out there every one of them is oversubscribed with one or two small exceptions that are not relevant here and so the competition is stiff and need to be able to formulate a very competitive application and so persistence is important, 119 is informative it was a success but it took more than one try you've got to mind your P's and Q's look very closely at the notice of funding opportunity and make sure you're answering all the questions as quantitatively and qualitatively as possible you've got to take advantage of the opportunities to do debriefs if you don't win the first time and improve your application to address some of the questions that in this case DOT office secretary had another case it could be FRA or FTA or another entity you've got to do all that blocking and tackling and I won't say more about that but it is absolutely essential and as representative Ngu said it was critical I think for State Highway 119 to be able to show those interests so getting to the kind of core part of the story take a close look at the criteria for how FRA will award that money and it really gets to questions of how is Amtrak going to operate better move more people move them more quickly, more reliably more safely what's our ridership how many trains what are the land use effects quantify what it means for pollutant emissions I'm glad we had the question about equity how are we serving disadvantaged communities in the federal government we talk about our Justice 40 program which is really an intent to provide 40% of the benefit of our spending to disadvantaged communities how are we going to do that it's going to take numbers it's going to take data so I was glad to hear from David and Deborah about the critical importance of data that we're pulling together that service development plan here in Colorado we're pulling together a lot of that data because that's what's going to be the differentiator between different programs and I have seen a number of you know really cool looking projects not make it to the finish line because they weren't able to actually back up we are going to improve sustainability we are going to improve equity we are going to improve mobility but not actually have the kind of numbers and you know real hard support behind that that's the task that's in front of us right now and so you know I think it's important to lean into this moment to come together to make sure that we are using the states the districts all of the communities represented around here to get that information to tell the land use story to make sure that we're reflecting in that to capture all of that benefit to be able to come up with the most compelling application that will stand up with Texas or Massachusetts or Oregon and Seattle knowing that one of the challenges we have is that some of this district is going through rural areas not as many people to put on trains and we have to tell that story at the same time providing service to those rural communities is part of the benefit that we're providing and so make sure that we're really reflecting you know the benefits of the potential service and tying it into RTD or Metro or some of the other or CDOTS transit based services to really provide that network benefit which I think is the leveraging advantage that Colorado has Thank you very much for that answer that's really helpful and I think the level of competition is kind of daunting but we've never shrunk from that so I think the challenge has been laid so we'll move on to Deborah Johnson and the question I have for you is based on your extensive transportation experience which you outlined in your introduction can you please share how one, the feasibility study regarding northwest rail peak service might align with the planning efforts for front-range passenger rail and secondly how those two undertakings might be combined into a cohesive joint effort from your perspective and additionally as you're answering that question do you have thoughts on different governing and operational structures of which you may be familiar which could potentially be modeled to implement a jointly operated service along the northwest corridor? Thank you Claire, that was a lot but we got it and I think John teed this up for me perfectly as we talk about data I am one that believes that you can't manage what you can't measure and in order to manage this process we have to ensure that we have data and so as I shared in my previous response what's critically important is for RTD in its place in this here in time to work in tandem with BNSF because right now we have no understanding about the operational cost since we do not own the right of way that's critically important as we discern what might headways be because right now we're looking at peak service because of the limitations without us owning the railroad and then as I talk about front-rains passenger rail the service development plan that is underway with that entity is critically important and I do want to qualify that I do sit on the front-rains passenger rail district board as an ex-officio member because that is quite important I'm going to intertwine the other response really quickly because recognizing in other parts of the country you can have people that are sitting on in DC for instance when we talk about the Virginia Railway Express you have somebody from the northern Virginia Transportation Commission the two primary members that sit on the WMATA Washington metropolitan area transit authority which you may know as Metro but since I worked there as WMATA to me then they sit on that board and then additionally they are members of the Virginia Transportation Association Board that connectivity so the right hand knows what the left hand is doing when you're trying to talk about a comprehensive transportation network so pivoting back to the opportunities with the Northwest Rail Feasibility Study which we're looking at peak service and in relationship to the front-rains passenger rail I think the commonality is BNSF that's critically important because right now we don't know what we don't know so sharing that information on the table talking about what might be optimal because it's purely conjecturing and speculation at this point not knowing who the operator will be not knowing what tomorrow will bring but recognizing that the general manager of front-rains passenger rail and myself have to stay in constant communication I have to be attentive when I say I, I as the representative of RTD engage in those meetings as a ex officio member to understand where we might go relative to the timeline Mr. Karcy and I have talked about where we are with BNSF since we just were able to leverage that contractual agreement so as it comes to this data set we won't have that readily available now until May recognizing you know it took some time it's like equivalent to a herd of turtles running through peanut butter when you're dealing with BNSF I'm not trying to throw shade but I'm just stating the obvious facts and so as we look at this I want that publicly for the simple fact we're not playing you know fast and loose we want to ensure that there is an understanding as we go forward and that's why it's so imperative that we're working in tandem with the jurisdictions along the northwest rail corridor so individuals know what's happening staff that is and in term briefing you know elected officials as well I think that is critically important so recognizing that BNSF and tandem with us are in the process of determining those needs and that actually just kicked off you know a few weeks ago assuming that the preferred alternative is along the BNSF alignment that's where we can really move things forward but we have to keep in mind that the regional transportation district is limited we are the RNRTD which is regional and so as we talk about inner city passenger rail that's where there could be an opportunity to bridge something greater recognizing the cohesive partnerships that are paramount whether we talk about heavy rail light rail commuter rail inner city passenger rail finnaculars cable cars there's so many different rail options and often times people conflate but recognizing we have to be able to lean in to the point that John raised and have these conversations rounding out the question the second part of it my experience of different governance or operating structures have been privy to be in organizations where my resident agency were part of such entities I do want to preface my statements by saying it's not a cookie cutter approach there is not a plug and play collectively we need to determine what's best for this region recognizing like John said when we talk about equity and we're talking about low income populations sure there are rural areas and in the interest of full disclosure I haven't basically been in an area where we were providing any rail service to rural areas so recognizing that we can engage and qualify what that may be so one in particular that I'll bring up it's Caltrain and Caltrain basically is along the peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area and that is a joint powers board and the service in which Caltrain provides along the peninsula is a San Francisco to San Jose to Gilroy and that's critically important because you have the Silicon Valley you have people that are trying to get in what I would refer to being from California as the city being San Francisco but recognizing that there's so many viable options there because there is the connectivity so in Santa Clara County where Gilroy and San Jose are located there is the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority and VTA provides connectivity to a myriad of different stations and they have shared stations but recognizing that a member of Santa Clara County also sits on the joint powers board representing those interests as it relates to San Francisco that structure's done a little differently because my former agency being the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency that really is responsible for all surface transportation within the city and county not only the world famous cable cars but we're talking about sustainable streets as we qualified in the city there are also the taxi regulator so it's everything outside of maritime and aviation in the city and county of San Francisco so the mayor appoints the representative to that joint powers board and then as we look at San Mateo County I excluded San Mateo County San Mateo County has their own transit district and at one point in time just up to the latter part of November of 2022 San Trans had the responsibility of overseeing the operations just in November that was bifurcated so for all intents and purposes it was the general manager and CEO that saw oversaw San Trans which is the transit provider within San Mateo County but also had auspices over CalTrain the reason that came to fruition is because when the joint powers board was first created back in 1985 San Trans or San Mateo County brought more money to the table and it was easier in that regard so now fast forward to 2022 that has been bifurcated there is a separate executive director of CalTrain that oversees the day-to-day operations and that service is contracted out to a third party which is Herzog so that's one such it's a lot and then my second example really quickly is VRE Virginia Railway Express which is in Northern Virginia and provides services into Union Station in Washington DC and there's two lines and that is a complicated structure in the sense there's so many different outlying counties and the representation in which they have but VRE's body serves as a operational board so they're overseeing the operations whereas the counties that comprise VRE and you may know a little bit more about this as well recognizing that they too are operating on a myriad of different rail rides away as relates to rail some owned by Amtrak some owned by CXS by Norfolk exactly and so there's three different railroad lines so that's a lot I'm going to yield the floor because my colleague could probably add different information but thank you for the opportunity thank you for that very comprehensive response so the last question is for David Singer and as we've already heard CDOT is managing the service development plan for the future front-range passenger rail service so David can you tell us about the work that is being completed in the SDP and how this lays the foundation for Colorado to successfully secure federal IJA funding and additionally can you tell us about the current state rail plan update and the importance of the state rail plan to advancing passenger rail throughout Colorado yes thank you commissioner I'm going to invert that and talk about the rail plan first it's broader in scales for the entire state and it's a little bit more imminent CDOT is updating this passengers and freight rail plan there are five goals ensure Colorado's rail system is safe and secure expand and improve the rail system for passengers and freight provide greater mobility and connection options preserve and maintain critical corridors and advance the state's economic vitality and environmental quality so while trends may change since the last update in 2018 these goals are mature and broad and so the plan really looks to expand how partners can work together to better move goods and people throughout the state on the rail network the rail networks are the rail plans a little bit different than some other of our statewide plans it's unconstrained it's not grounded in money or price or cost benefit but it allows us to be bold and ambitious and inclusive at the same time it's finite and it's grounded there are only so many rail corridors throughout the state and each of them have distinct opportunities for both freight and for passenger rail not just on the long the front range so in practice the update will do a couple of things it identifies stakeholders the partners who are the districts and the authorities what are the funding and financing authorities and mechanisms in place for freight and passenger rail it tells the story of rails in Colorado what are the past initiatives whether it's fast tracks whether it's the mountain corridors advanced guideway system saving the southwest chief in southern Colorado it also identifies trends taking publicly available information on passenger rail so the performance of the chief or the winter park express it also looks at trends like coal throughout and we can make some projections on how freight movement might be different and evolving throughout Colorado it names the existing systems like the California's effort the southwest chief the winter park express RTD but it also talks about scenic and historic railroads as to Georgetown loop is also in the plan and then it begins as we engage all those entities we start to understand their visions and we incorporate their current state but where they want to be in the next five years in the long term and so it's capturing those ideas and then impossible identify some projects so for example the last plan the southwest chief had a mature vision and data to support modernization and over the past five years the chief was successful in bringing over a hundred million dollars in grants to modernize that system so the front range passenger rail was a corner stone of that last plan in 2018 and it is again in this plan too it's a snapshot in time we know that the plan will be updated in time we know that the front range will evolve in time but it's a marker to all of our stakeholders and to federal partners that it's a priority for Colorado so I wanted to talk about the plan first and its ambition which segue into the project itself Julie you could see her glow when she started talking about complex projects and for 20 years at CDOT I had the privilege to work on complex projects too whether it's the 36 there's a lot of teammates here and that's something that is a legacy it's something that's tangible and I've gravitated to the state collectively has never really shied away from innovative complex projects and so when Colorado received a federal digital grant to do corridor planning which is service development plan we raised our hand and leaned into that opportunity it was before the IIJA FRA was being optimistic and recognizing that they needed a pilot they needed a proof of concept and a model to serve for the rest of the country and so we worked with them to develop a scope and a process that worked for us but also could be duplicated across the country so in spite of the urgency and stiff competition we've got about a year or two head start on all the other corridors that are looking to introduce new service so that is good there are going to be some growing pains as we understand some best practices and lessons learned but from Colorado we brought all the innovations that we have working with FTA and FHWA on accelerating projects and whether it's planning environmental linkages all the ways we can streamline this concept while reaching the public getting federal buy-in including planning decisions at the local and regional level FRA incorporated their best practices and lessons learned whether it's with railroads or operators we mentioned the criteria we're going to adopt those criteria for successful corridors at every step of our process equity inclusivity legislative intent in project planning regional equity performance, ridership and travel time environmental context connections with other modes input from the railroads and the operator so it's a balancing act those are a lot of factors and it may not you know there will be trade-offs with any of these complex projects so what's in the service development plan all planning studies start with what are our goals what are our objectives what are we trying to accomplish if you can grab a flyer we laid out one pager we talk about providing choice for transportation we talk about connecting communities we talk about economic vitality and doing so in an environmentally sustainable way those are broad goals so let me we have a little bit more definition on how we're going about doing that it's a modest introduction of service it's operating on existing tracks from Pueblo to Fort Collins it's a proof of concept and we're looking to capture early adopters who what customers and what markets are ready to be a part of this today and what we've seen is that that works across the country you start with a successful proof of concept and it evolves in time so we've talked about route that's one of the early steps part of our alternatives analysis is also service what type of trip and what type of customer are we looking to provide how many trips a day how many stops is that weekend or weekday trips you can see different variables and range of service options that we'll be developing to provide the necessary data more service more trains, more trips may require more infrastructure to provide the type of service that we want and so the investment, the infrastructure we need will also be a range of options and that could be more tracks it could be more bridges, maybe tunnels, platforms what is the tangible things needed to make the facility out there today provide the necessary service for freight but also for passengers and so you start to have the characteristics of a range of alternatives data will help us defend and understand and test out these different scenarios so we'll do a ridership model using the statewide model that Dr. Cog originally built so we'll begin to understand the projections for each of these scenarios we'll understand speed the concept working closely with the railroads on how it affects their operations we'll understand the revenues that may come from such riders and then we'll understand the availability and accessibility of the certain stations and markets along the corridor too this is where we can don't have to start from scratch Amtrak has a station area guidance that is broad and helpful for us so we don't have to reinvent the wheel of these principles the small, medium or large system helps us pick the spot and also design what are the necessary amenities in order for that spot to function environmental context all of these things help us provide cost estimates not just to build it but just to operate and maintain it on an annual basis so that helps us demonstrate what's operationally feasible and then we begin to do a cost benefit analysis using this data in place and only then we'll start to understand how much it's going to cost to pay and how are we going to pay for it and so that's where the financial questions begin to be answered based on the technical information there was a reference to implementation ideally we can do this all at once but as we've seen in major projects it's usually having to be done in phases and so this data will help this is a project manager the data will drive phasing the data will help drive how this is implemented at least give informed information to decision makers so that FRA is looking for a pipeline of projects for which to fund and so that's kind of the high level cookbook recipe for service development planning thank you David and what I wanted to say after that is we will go to the voters and the voters will resoundingly say yes we want this and we'll be on our way thank you all for what you brought to this discussion this morning it's been really rich and valuable okay thank you that's what I wanted to know so we do have about five minutes for questions from the audience who would like to go first lack of oh I'm Tara yeah there you are down there yeah Tara go ahead please I appreciate if I make commissioner and I making an assumption that's directed at me and trust and believe it's nothing personal strictly business because I understand the question and so I've been very forthright and transparent about my responses I could Monday morning quarterback this all day I wasn't here when the initiative was placed on the ballot and I am trying to make a tasty picture of lemon made with a salty a big bag of salt and some moldy lemons and so with that being said recognizing that there was a ballot that was there was an initiative that was placed on the ballot and from my understanding and my research that I've done it wasn't carved out specifically it was for fast tracks as a whole and recognizing that when there were ridership projections that as we talk about the competitiveness of projects the first question I asked when I came into this region is why didn't we have a full funding grant agreement and that's something we would have had in conjunction with the federal transit administration because we didn't have those projects there and so as we look at fast tracks as the complete package there were different phases of said project and when I came into this organization nearly three years ago and I was getting questions such as the one council member it was like first and foremost let's get a common set of facts because we're going off some data that could be stale there's been changes I look at things holistically we'd be remiss to plan transportation and not look at it as a three legged school stool because there's land use there's economic development land use and housing and then there's public transport so as you ask the question to me when will we get rail we do know projected out relative to where we are with front-rains passenger rail and that looks to be more or less in the late 2040s early 2050 and that's why we're working in tandem doing the study to discern what the path forward is so I don't know if did you want to say something else because I saw you say something well the point of the matter is we're talking about rail and as you know I would love to talk to you in more detail because I'll stand up and say oftentimes people look at a rail consist as the end all be all forms of mobility that can lead to economic development and vitality in a community and while rail sets or trainsets are exciting for people there's other means of mobility that can be leveraged and so considering that holistically there's a multitude of things that can happen that's why we're doing the Northwest Rail Feasibility Study to discern what that may be we're also working as I said in my previous comments with BNSF because basically where is the right-of-way going to come from if we're not working with them recognizing what was stated nearly 20 years ago relative to this corridor and what needs to happen so probably not the answer you wanted to hear but I'm a straight shooter and that's where we are and I wanted to say that for everybody as we look to where we are as a region that's why it's imperative that we have conversations that are imperative that we're partnering with different municipalities federal state partners so we can discern what might be the most viable path forward so thank you for the question yeah no thank you for that answer and Councilmember Weiner thank you for the question because I think that question reflects the big challenge we will have in this area in asking the voters for additional money I know as a moderator I'm actually not supposed to have a thought about anything I'm just supposed to read what was written down here for me but truly I think the reason I am on this board is because I see a partnership with Front Range Passenger Rail as really the best opportunity we are going to have just understanding the realities of the cost of putting commuter rail on a freight rail line and so the partnership between RTD and FRPR is really the best opportunity we have to bring rail to this area and we have a good partnership and that's what's so good about having Deborah Johnson on the board ex-officio with us so I think we're out of time thank you for that question thank you again to our panelists for the very valuable discussion it was good to see you thank you thank you so much to Commissioner Levy for doing an excellent job moderating the panel and thanks to all of our panelists as they're exiting the stage for providing such insightful comments our hope today is that you walk away from this summit with a much deeper understanding of the intricacies of large scale rail development in Colorado and I think that's something the panelists did a great job in talking about I would say to the last question again as an MC I'm not supposed to probably offer my opinion but I think transit focused land use planning is good planning and it's smart planning so I think it's never a mistake to be planning for transit villages transit ready development and transit oriented development so hopefully Boulder will continue and other communities in this region I'm excited to introduce our next speaker Evan Manville, climate mitigation planner with a climate friendly and equitable communities program at the Oregon department of land conservation and development in addition to his work with climate friendly and equitable communities program Evan also works with Oregon's transportation and growth management program which is a joint effort of the state's transportation and land use agencies in both roles Evan works with communities to promote transportation and housing choices using communications policymaking and planning tools we're really happy that Evan's able to join us in Colorado today and to share his expertise on improving how cities can grow more sustainably so please joining me in welcoming Evan to the stage thank you everyone get that up wonderful well it's wonderful to be back in Colorado I was born and raised in Colorado I spent my adult life explaining to people across the country how the lambkins are a ferocious mascot go for Collins High baby lambs anyway it's great to be here so I'm here to tell you a little bit about Oregon's approach to land use, transportation and housing challenges I originally titled this step 5 of 12 saying oh we made a lot of progress and then I was like well these challenges are really big so it's now step 5 of 12,000 we've made some progress but hundreds of years have worked ahead of us now Oregon and Colorado have a lot of similarities both our history and our politics our general size and our population some of our biggest challenges and in fact if you lay out the state of Oregon it pretty much fits on Oregon it's like somebody took Colorado had a couple of good Oregon or Colorado beers and then drew Oregon a little bit shakier but we got a lot of similarities so I think we have a lot to learn from each other now Oregon's land use system is generally talked about is starting in 1973 bipartisan effort of a Republican farmer urban Democrat and Republican Governor Tom McCall and they said hey you know we have some statewide values that we really want to protect everywhere and deferring just to local governments is not enough and it's not getting us to those goals and so they set up a department that I worked for and commissioned to oversee us and while the legislature continues to pass laws our commission has the ability to pass administrative rules which have the force of law and the local plans that are now adopted follow both the statutory and the administrative rules so localities have their own comprehensive plans but they're within the greater system and they're conforming with that system now some of the things similar to what Julie mentioned they copied a lot of our work I would say we have urban growth boundaries around all our cities they're not set in stone they can expand outwards gradually there's a lot of planning but they do create efficient planning also in these comprehensive plans are steps to protect farmland and forest land things that the rural areas need as well as the things that urban areas need utilities, economic development housing, transportation as was mentioned in my introduction and there's a flyer in your handout I've worked with the transportation growth management program in the early 90s and I realized that too often land use and transportation decisions were divorced from each other and not nicely coordinated and so we, Governor then Kitzauer said hey, you all work ODOT, our department of transportation and the land use planning agency form our program together and we said great and we pitched it to federal highways and they said yes, you can use some federal highways dollars to help communities on projects that have that overlap so we've been funding hundreds of plans and efforts at local government levels to do a transportation plan, do a transit plan do a downtown area plan diversify their housing think about parking, think about walkability, bring speakers it's really a variety of things that we've done both on the plans and in forwarding the community conversation every now and again there's a site that's really key to a city and they're like we want to redevelop the site and we bring in a consultant nurse to after this is the way it's best to serve your land use and your transportation needs so that's been fabulous it also hasn't gotten us where we've needed to go so Oregon has pretty standard science based goals for reducing climate pollution and like most of the rest of the world we're failing to meet them and it's pretty dramatic particularly in transportation pollution we've made more progress in some of our energy cleanup and other things but transportation our largest sector of pollution has been sticky so Governor Brown said you need to fix this so we're cleaning up our fuels we're cleaning up our vehicles and our agency is like we also need to drive less and that's going to have a lot of co-benefits if we do that so we launched something called the Climate Friendly and Equal Communities Program images here are just images of our extreme weather how thousands of Oregonians have lost their homes scores have lost their lives already under climate disruption so very serious challenge and we need to course correct now the other thrust of the program is equity land use and transportation have a pretty embarrassing is not strong enough word horrific legacy on equity we've located highways in certain places we once with redlining was declared illegal we use single family zoning in its place to concentrate privileges to the white and the powerful at the expense of communities of color and those with lower income and that's had intergenerational effects because most wealth is transferred through property so those people who benefited from redlining or old zoning decisions and so on and so on and that's a large part why the average white household today has 10 times the wealth as the average black household so we we recognize that challenge and we're trying to see what we can do about it so the program again there's a one pager in your program which is great has a lot of components one is regional scenario planning and this is kind of complex computer modeling where we say hey let's twist a lot of dials and what you're doing locally and see how we can reduce climate pollution in your area like through your local actions a lot of it has to be federal or state or whatever but what local actions can you take so hey let's increase the price of parking or let's dramatically increase transit service or let's change your land use zoning so you allow more dense development and so this program requires the three largest metro areas to do that porland has already done it they did it about 10 years ago so they found a mix of actions that they could take to reduce their climate pollution now it's Salem Kaiser and Eugene Springfield so we're just launching that program over the next couple of years we should have some local plans that meet the model's goals smaller communities given the intensity of that process we decided let's just do some things that we know work don't need to get too far in the detail and the first is obviously allowing climate friendly development happen where the market wants it to happen too often our land use plans have height restrictions or density restrictions or like all sorts of barriers to housing happening that's walkable or mixed use developments happening so we're requiring 15 communities through our rules to identify specific climate for the area zones and decides them that in theory a third of the community could live in them so you know it's for some communities that's a big twist for some it's a small tweak for some it's hey it's kind of in the middle so we're kind of working with communities to get that done another part of the program is parking reform and management now parking mandates are the government pretty much encouraging more driving it's the foot on the gas pedal during the climate crisis instead of so abundant free parking means people drive more and it has all sorts of problems you can see in the red here is a typical downtown this is downtown Corvallis I can do this for pretty much any downtown that's all the parking that's all the off street parking pushes uses apart and it makes things less pleasant to walk it also has a huge impact on housing costs particularly multifamily housing it's about 15 somewhere between 10 and 20% of the cost is parking we're paying to house cars instead of house people and it has impacts on small business redevelopment on all those things so we thought let's pass the nation's strongest parking reforms we have this opening let's get it done and that's what we did we said okay no we're not going to allow local governments to mandate parking near transit we're not going to allow mandates for affordable housing or for childcare or for small unit development various equity uses we're going to limit how much parking can be mandated for multifamily and then cities have to go beyond that and do some more reforms that doesn't mean parking is not going to get built the market is pretty clear that a lot of people need a place to store their car and they're going to provide it and the lenders are going to stubbornly be risk adverse and try to copy the past car dependent development but we at least need to get out of the way to allow it to happen where it can happen the other thing we did those are kind of the land use reforms in the program we did transportation reforms and we said local transportation plans have to go further on planning for walking biking transit and they need to think about where they're investing their transportation projects so let's do it in those walkable areas let's do it in underserved areas with high concentrations of underserved populations et cetera and we need to move beyond transportation planning mainly being about how do we quickly move cars everywhere and so we're kind of asking local communities hey choose some local goals beyond be oversee like stopping congestion and build a list of projects because whatever is in the plan doesn't really matter but like what's actually going to build model that and together those projects cannot increase climate pollution so we can't be going the wrong way we clearly need to go that way really fast but let's not go that way in the time being and we also ask local governments say hey when you're expanding roads into big roads or bigger roads look at alternatives that might meet those goals in a more affordable way that better meets our goals now most of this is long range planning so it's going to take years to know how that went because this program started in 2020 and was adopted in 2022 parking reforms were front loaded because that's a policy change and those have happened and nine Oregon cities have said oh you gave us no choice we're just going to repeal all our parking mandates so most Oregon's large cities have no parking mandates anymore and more are coming and we've already seen developments that were shelved or denied come back to the permit counter say hey I have this 100 unit affordable housing complex you told me several times no I'm bringing it back now you can't deny me or hey this arcade owner was like hey I want to expand my arcade and serve beer and like oh you have to pride a lot of parking so people can drive drunk it's like okay he no longer has to do that so the sight line institute has done a really nice job in picking up some of these anecdotes and these stories I highly recommend visiting their website if you're curious how transformational parking reform can be it hasn't all been shiny clearly we've taken on the status quo and the status quo that like the previous status quo wasn't thrilled or some people were thrilled so there were a couple of challenges from home builders and realtors and also about a quarter of the cities that this applies to so yeah it's a hot topic they also introduced legislation to repeal what we did and so we worked with local partners and had heated conversations and adjusted a few of the rules and some deadlines tried to find some resources etc the legislature did not pass that bill they realized we're working in good faith with folks and they actually provided three million dollars for us to help local governments implement it so that was great so we're going to continue to adjust it moving forward but we wanted to be pretty aggressive and see what we could get done so that's that program housing work we have done a lot of housing reform and a lot of what was in polis's bill copies a lot of what other states have done including Oregon we allow granny flats everywhere pretty much and traditional starter housing local governments can't stop that from happening they have to allow it local governments also have to have housing production strategies because we're not producing enough housing the state also said hey we need a bunch more affordable housing here's two billion dollars that goes far but not nearly far enough and then the state is just continuing to increase hey local governments haven't managed to get this done so we need to increase the state authority again and again and one of the things that they set up was a housing so the state is now analyzing how much housing is needed let's break it down by community you need to do your share and adopt a housing production strategy to get it done so overall this is kind of the tension the state is really trying to be in some ways a good it's trying to be a good partner but it's also trying to get to our shared goals so we're out there we're doing some analysis we're providing resources we're providing consultants we're measuring how fast people are getting and we're really trying to make sure this happens and the local governments are being good partners generally making sure there's enough land updating codes we're working on parking in climate friendly areas allowing their zones to have this kind of traditional starter home and they're being told to make progress on fair and equitable housing and take some other actions so how this plays out over the next few years I don't really know yet like the accountability tools is we have a lot of legal tools already we can tell the federal government they're not complying with state law there are no federal transportation dollars or we could take over their development review process and say alright we're going to process developments that come in we have that power but we don't have that politics necessarily to support that and that's fair that's good so there are legal tools and then there's the political reality and the political balance this is a start we've also changed that appeals of developments that were denied now have to provide local governments provide attorney's fees if the appeal is successful so there are lots of things that we're twisting and turning to make sure that the housing crisis is dealt with and that's providing some consternation some conservation communities are upset about some of the things that are happening in Oregon about expanding urban growth boundaries about doing, waving some other laws that have put in there all of which have good intent but collectively it prevented us from meeting our housing goals and Oregon has a housing crisis we have 36,000 units short every year parking reform can do a big part of that but like 10% of it so you know, yes thousands more but we need tens of thousands more and over a decade hundreds of thousands more so it's been an interesting challenge I would note two things and then open it to questions one is pretty much all of this has happened in a bipartisan way the original land use program was passed by a Republican governor and with Republican legislators what people call the missing middle, the duplexes, triplexes that stuff, that wouldn't have passed without bipartisan support there weren't enough Democrats to vote for it and got it substantially a more aggressive housing policy that failed by one vote would have shown up if four people didn't four people had shown up to work four people skipped work and that's another story but anyway but it did not have enough Democrat support so really I would recommend building the bipartisan coalitions hearing the various tensions there are various people who want to change different things in housing production and in land use and if we work together across party lines and coalitions I think we're more likely to get to those shared goals that we all have under Oregon system goals that I think most states and most Americans have with that there are handouts in your thing I'm happy to take any questions I guess that's certainly been part of the conversation but it hasn't been a huge driver of it people bring that up and it's like most of the conversations I've heard have said that's a smaller factor in things but I'm not the housing planner so I don't know all the works but that and rental homes, second homes those are always things that are brought up as things people are concerned about we have a housing production advisory council now our governor is super focused on housing and she's collecting everything she's throwing all the spaghetti at the wall and saying what can we address so I haven't heard specifically what we're doing about it it's been raised but our housing team has not said this is a core problem well yeah there are a couple of quick things one is CFEC which is what we call it the program it started out strong because different people were around the table we specifically said okay who wants to be on the advisory committee open call submit to us an application and include your demographics and then we charted it against Oregon's demographics and we said okay this is who's on it this represents Oregon there are people with disabilities people of color we're going to provide stipends we're going to change who's in the room and that's fundamentally going to change the outcomes and that's key so we very intentionally led with equity because it's an equity program and when we had public meetings we said sign up for the public meeting and provide your demographics and we show up for the public meeting okay just to let you know 90% of the people who are homeowners and only 60% of Oregon's are we're super white we're super rich we're super homeowners just think about the people who aren't here as we have this conversation so that kind of shifted the conversation some those couple of things a lot of the politics are politics that have been going on for 40 years and interesting mixes of coalitions you know I I talked to somebody who was in early conversations about it but I did not follow that closely enough I feel that yeah you know in some ways it was a super lot in one thing like CFAC worked because we're bureaucrats and we're administrators and we have seven commissioners who can do things that aren't necessarily politically easy in a traditional legislature like we in some ways did a lot more than the legislature would do because we had decision makers who were different so I think it's great that the conversation has started I think it's fascinating to know what's going to come back clearly crises aren't going to go away and I think people you know that's the nature of legislation you try it session after session you adjust it you get through what you can get through but I'm not an expert enough to know there's not enough parking reform I can't speak to that more in depth but we also do have debates about golf courses versus housing in Oregon so lots of similarities anyway so thank you all thank you so much for sharing your experience I think like you know there's a lot of similarities so hopefully we've all been able to take away some lessons learned and I think that that last question probably deserves another couple hours for us to chat about as an audience I'm really excited to introduce our final speaker today for our 7th annual Sustainable Transportation Summit Senator Faith Winter is going to discuss priorities related to sustainable transportation and land use in Colorado so she may have some thoughts on that last question as well Senator Winter was elected to the State Senate in 2018 she represents District 25 which includes portions of Westminster Broomfield, Thornton and North Glen currently the chair of the Transportation and Energy Committee as well as a member of the Health and Human Services Committee so please join me in welcoming our last speaker Senator Faith Winter good morning everyone it is very exciting to see you here I'm actually very short I get lost behind the podiums I'm very excited to be here today thank you to commuting solutions for all the work that you're doing and I look forward to having many many more conversations as we gear up for the legislative session in January and I think one of the threads that we've seen through all the speakers today is that everything really is connected we can't talk about transportation without talking about climate and we can't talk about climate without talking about land use and we can't talk about land use without talking about transportation and transit and walkability and so we really have to have these conversations in a holistic way and I think one of the speakers from Oregon when he talked about looking at the demographics and looking at hey it's actually mostly homeowners here but 60% of us are renters throughout the state and really grounding ourselves in that equity framework right and so we have to talk about land use and climate and transportation within that frame of equity and making sure that we are taking care of these communities and we've done a lot sure and we've done a lot and I know C dots here but they've really taken up the mantle after we passed the environmental justice law in looking at environmental justice and doing mitigation and making sure that the disproportionately impacted communities that have long taken on the burdens of our transportation decisions and land use decisions are treated more equity and benefit from the changes we're starting to make and we have to continue that this session and I don't have all the answers on the housing bill but I'm going to own my corner in the transit space and I've started doing stakeholder work and anyone in here that wants to meet with me about this I would love to please make suggestions so I'll talk a little bit about what I'm going to be talking about in the next session. So we're looking at transit so last year one of the things that we were really looking at in the housing bill was in transit or in corridors we have to increase density and we have to increase affordability because that's how people get from where they live to where they work to the doctor to jury duty to schools everything else and we know that transit isn't going to actually doing the land use appropriately and thank you to Deborah I don't know she's still here about RTDs of a really important part of that conversation as well but then you know we had tensions with local governments some of you in this room about those density and affordability requirements in transit or in corridors and you would come to the legislature and say well fine we'll increase density if we have transit and we have no transit and we need to give us more money for transit and so looking at how we're driving affordability and density has to come with some funding as well and so how are we funding our transit system and I'm looking at that in three different ways first is how are we spending the money that we have for transit now so under Senate bill 260 which many of you helped me with we passed and increased our transportation funding to the tune of $5.4 billion over the next 10 years and significantly increased the amount that goes to transit and I think oftentimes in the metro area speaking of demographics everyone just assumes that transit is RTD only but Colorado actually is more rural transit than any other state in the country which is something we should be really proud of and continue to support and so we increased that transit funding under 260 but a lot of you in your local communities don't feel like it's having an impact you don't feel like it's getting to you so how are we allocating it I know Dr. Coggs in the room working with Dr. Coggs to make sure that our transit money is tied with all of the work that our local governments are doing through MPOs so one is the allocation working do we need to statutorily change the allocation or change the process of allocation second how do we increase funding so do we take an increase of funding from the general fund do we increase some of the enterprises we have do we look at new enterprises those are all ideas I want from you so if we're going to increase transit funding what does that look like then we talk about increasing funding so now we're getting a little closer so local governments are like okay we're actually talking about funding we can talk more about affordability and density and then folks say well we have to make sure that funding is being spent transparently and to meet all of our goals and so is the governance especially of RTDA but I would say governance of our transit agencies across the state is the right governance maybe, maybe not maybe it can be changed maybe it can be tweaked how are we doing accountability how is RTDA working with Dr. Koch how are they involved in the climate plans and land use plans and the growth plans and their air quality plans that we have done at the state level and so when we're looking at the transportation question I started today saying you can't talk about climate without talking about transportation without talking about land use without talking about housing and we need to do that within the equity framework so I'm looking and asking for ideas and starting the stakeholder work to say can we come to the table thinking about equity to achieve these three goals accountability affordability and density and transit wearing a corridors transit funding and equity and governance so can we come together and have that conversation and I'm not coming with predetermined solutions there's a lot of local elected officials in this room there's non-profit leaders there's chamber commerce leaders there's policy experts and so I'm saying here's the goals come with me bring me your ideas thanks and I would say this conversation also involves air quality we're clearly in severe non-attainment with no idea how to ever get into attainment and the transportation sector is our number one polluter and these decisions have to lead us to cleaning our air because people are getting sick people are dying because we can't get into attainment sure so within the equity framework so the first is increased density and affordability and transit or in corridors increase and make sure transit funding is working and then make sure that there's accountability and transparency and how we're spending that money with our partners that are receiving that money sure so from some of our other speakers for example from Oregon they talked about having some ex officio members on different boards that bring specific expertise so I think that's one of the ideas is does RTD have the adequate expertise let's do that evaluation and if they don't how can we help partner from the state level with them to provide that expertise Deborah talked a lot about data what data can the state provide in order to partner better with RTD how is RTD being incorporated into Dr. Cog because we know that there's low level government frustration on the level of service and Dr. Cog is designed to actually have that ground up approach within the confines of growth plans and air quality and climate and serving the disability community all of those things and I know when I was a city counselor to compete for that transportation money you had to show regionalism cooperation you had to achieve more walkable and livable cities so how is RTD being incorporated in that is there a more in depth way that they could be incorporated on RTD board members is that the right number are the size of districts the right size should there be at large members that are looking at the whole system right so I think there's a ton of opportunities a lot of questions RTD is one of only three elected transit agency boards in the country so we are a little bit of an anomaly so how are we operating within that we're setting them up for success and we're better serving our communities so I know I just moved to Broomfield and I went from a transit score of 42 at my old house to a score of zero there's no absolutely no transit anywhere because of service cuts and so how are we making sure that we're doing that and we're also there's attention within RTD and I think they would say this too they're a very large district so there's a tension of serving populated areas disproportionately impacted communities employment centers and also serving such a geographically large area let's talk about that tension and see what solutions we can come up with and I just want to say RTD's been great and I have been meeting with them so it's not like this I'm not coming in heavy handed I'm working with them in partnership with RTD I'm really excited about all the conversations we had earlier on Front Range Passenger Rail so I started getting involved in Colorado Politics in 2004 as a community organizer on the Fast Tracks campaign so I've been working on this for a very long time and the conversations we're having now are much more tangible they're positive, they're forward looking part of that is because we did create that district we have provided some state funding so the state has said yes we are invested we are investing both our time, our money, our resources we are setting this as a goal and I think the railroads have come to the table in a way that they haven't in the past so I'm very optimistic and we know that when we're moving folks on rail that means less cars on the road and ultimately we do have to reduce our vehicle miles traveled and figure out what that looks like because that cleans the air if you are still in a car on the road you're going to benefit as well from VMTs being reduced both the climate benefit and the congestion benefit and making sure that our air is cleaner and so moving this way I think is really important I liked the conversation earlier about early adopters and how are we showing proof from the pudding and showing that this works and showing that we can move this forward because I think there is a lot of skepticism around if the ridership is going to be there and we do have the modeling and sometimes the ridership isn't there but I think starting with those early adopters really making it accessible making it work for where people live and that goes back to the density right and that is really important to achieve our climate goals because we cannot electrify our way out of our carbon reduction goals so the state has done a ton of work on electric vehicle adoption electric school buses electric fleet adoption but we can't just do that we also have to look at transit excellent sure and I don't have all the answers but I do know that we still care very deeply about housing we still have an affordability crisis we still have a lot of renters we're still figuring out that equity piece of how we're taking care of renters in a way that makes sense we have housing shortage it's not just affordability we don't have enough housing stock so those conversations are continuing I know they're continuing with the coalition that started them last year I'm very diligently on figuring that out going forward and as the speaker said earlier that there was a lot in that bill everything from density and affordability to ADUs and so I don't know if we'll see that size of a bill again and I've been working with the administration and I started this conversation around the transit pieces and those three goals and said I'm going to be really transparent I'm going to start talking about it publicly I'm going to start doing stakeholder meetings I'm going to meet with my local governments that were upset last year and see where we can get because I think that's going to bring people to the table and so I at least am driving the transit conversation I think that's really important and I want to bring up so what is also making me very optimistic right now is the partnerships at all levels of government including organizations like yours so we have CDOT that has been very successful with bus staying and snow staying and they're getting ready to expand bus rapid transit and they're partnering with RTD to make sure RTD is being connected into that BRT system and so you have the state working with the local level and then there's really exciting things going on in Boulder there's a lot of nonprofits and private companies on micro mobility that's really targeting those other types of trips and then Bicycle Colorado is here and they've been a huge partner in really expanding the use of e-bikes across the state and I think that's going to continue to happen and we've done so much to incentivize the purchase of e-bikes but we haven't done enough to increase our bike infrastructure so people feel safe on their e-bikes and so I think that's kind of the next step in terms of the e-bike revolution is making sure that we have the infrastructure to match the safety so you do feel safe for recreational trips or trips to the store or you don't mind putting your kid on an e-bike and sending them to school because you know there's a protected bike lane, you know the lights are working in the way that works for bikers and so I think that's kind of the next step in working on that Excellent, thank you everyone I really do appreciate all your work, I've partnered with many of you for many years so let me know if you want to meet and talk about transit let me know what ideas you have and I look forward to working with you over the next couple months, thanks Thank you so much Senator Winter I love the enthusiasm and the comprehensive approach that you're taking and thanks to the audience for your questions today I'd like to take this moment as we conclude with our 2023 sponsors for their generous support with which this event wouldn't be possible so a big thank you to our 2023 presenting sponsors Boulder County the City of Boulder and the City and County of Broomfield also a big thanks to our Gold Sponsors Colorado Transportation Investment Office RTD the Northwest Chamber Alliance Google, Sterling Bay and Elevation Credit Union Silver and non-profit sponsors Commuting Solutions really does appreciate your support I'd also like to give a shout out to Commuting Solutions staff for all their work and their ability to transition with technical challenges and finally a thank you to our audience for participating and I'll just close by saying Commuting Solutions envisions a region with a rich blend of state-of-the-art multimodal travel options accessible to and well utilized by everyone who calls a region home we work to hasten the day when transportation no longer contributes to climate change we hope that you leave the Longmont Museum and Cultural Center today with a more hopeful outlook and a greater understanding of the exciting prospects of large scale rail development in Colorado and ways in which sustainable transportation can bring people together so with that I'll conclude thanks again for attending and have a wonderful rest of your day