 Good morning everyone welcome to the September 22nd Metro Board meeting. Thank you for your patience as we got settled into a new space. I'd like to ask for a roll call. Director Dutra. Director Colantari Johnson. Present. Director Coney. Here. Director Lind. Here. Director MacPherson. Here. Director Newsom. Present. Director Pagler. Here. Director Kiedos Carter. Director Rockin. Here. Exo Facial Director Henderson. Here. Exo Facial Director Northcutt. Great thank you so much. Okay moving on to agenda item three announcements. Two announcements today. Today's meeting is being broadcast by community television of Santa Cruz County and I believe I'll ask we have language services. Is Maria Villa here? Oh great. So we have Spanish interpretation services available and I'll let Maria translate that. Hello my name is Maria. I'm here for any Spanish interpretation services. Thank you for being here. Okay item four is Board of Director Comments. Please. I wanted to remind everyone that America walks which is an organization you can find them at America walks dot org. They're asking all of us to take the week without driving challenge that's going to be October 2nd through the 8th. They're encouraging elected officials public officials transportation professionals organizations advocates and individuals to participate in the national week without driving so that those who have the option to drive regularly can understand the barriers and challenges that non drivers face when trying to move safely in their communities. There is a challenge your organization can take the challenge or you can as an individual and their website is america walks dot org. Thank you. Any other board members have comments? Thank you. Madam chair. I attended the annual meeting of the central coast community energy and past roles last week and we have a lot of challenges ahead mainly about resource adequacy in the grid but we are very pleased to be working with Metro as we have and we will continue to do so. Just want to let you know that Metro was brought up and very in a very positive manner so we're trying to work at the triple CE is trying to work is working with Metro as best we can and I think it's a very positive arrangement. Thank you. Great. Thank you for your work on that commission. Any other board members? Okay. We'll move on to item five which is oral and written communications. I will note that we've received written communication and it's in our packet. We also received some late written communication that was emailed to board members and staff will respond. So this is an opportunity for members of the public to come up and speak about items that are not on the agenda that are related to the Metro. Good day. Brian people with trail. Now we're a local organization supported by thousands of supporters. We actually were a pack for 2012 or 2016 measure D for support. Our goal is to open the coastal corridor from Watsonville to Santa Cruz in a timely cost effective manner. Only 1.2 miles have been built in a decade and we've had the funding. 12 foot wide trail should not cost twice as much as widening highway one which is the case. Clear cutting hundreds of trees for a substandard 12 foot trail should not be done. We need to build the interim trail. Guy Preston from the RTC recommended years ago the interim trail basically rail banking because it was the fastest way most economical way to build the trail. Unfortunately board members from the Metro did not support his and he actually they supported roaring camp. I was very disappointed with that and I felt sad for guys present that he was not supported by this board because it made sense. 15 years ago the RTC hired a consultant the Woodside group that confirmed 15 years ago that they could rail bank. There are three primary corridors. So Cal Highway 1 in the coastal corridor all of them need to be open and for us to keep keep that coastal corridor closed for decades is wrong. We need to move forward. We need to get the misconception that the railroad tracks can't be pulled because we can't touch them. Guy Preston presented rail banking the legality of it. It's the most cost effective approach and what's really disappointing is that economic loss to our community on the decades that we're sitting here not using that resource the traffic congestion the increased climate change the economic benefits that we're missing that we do not have from opening that corridor. There's a simple plan. Communities do it across America which is rail bank hold the rails and place the trail in. That doesn't mean you can't have a future transit doesn't mean you're not going to have a train. You have funding for a train study but we need to open that corridor as soon as possible. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your comments. Others in public who would like to make. Thank you. Let me just ask do we have a timer going with someone online. OK we'll go ahead and have your public comments and then we'll go online. I just want to say in regards to his comments and stuff as someone that usually needs to use some mobility devices to get around I would encourage that as you look at all options for the for the rail trail and so on and so forth you consider that. We in my husband love the parts of the rail trail that are already open. We feel safer walking on those than on the sidewalk to be honest with you between down not like off Mission Street and so forth and I will use it to go around town back there and just because we can do something doesn't mean we should should consider long term costs not just immediate costs. Thank you for your comments. OK we'll go and take comments from those participating online. OK. But there's no one who wants to do public comment online. I misunderstood. No. OK. We don't have participation online. OK. All right. Anyone here who wants to give oral communication on items on the agenda anyone else. OK. Thank you. We will move to item six labor organization communication. Good morning board of directors. James Sandoval here and I have a bittersweet announcement to make to you all. Today will be the last day I address you as the general chairperson of Smart Local 23 who represents all the bus drivers and paratransit drivers at Santa Cruz Metro. My last day at Metro will be September 29th and Brandon Freeman will be be slotting into my position. And the reason is because I have been elevated into the international vice president for my union smart transportation division. So thank you. And I say it's bittersweet because I've been doing this for nearly five years and you know I really care about everybody in this room. When I stepped in day one you know it's always been my goal to bring that family feeling back to Metro and I'll be honest with you when I was elected I don't feel like I didn't feel like that family feeling was there and it was a goal of mine. I could remember the last time I was in this room having this board of directors meeting it was a it was a meeting that was pretty pretty bad and we were asking for the board's help and thinking about the past and thinking about where we're at now. It's just amazing to see the progression that we made and with everybody in this room we are the reason why we're bringing that family feeling back. So I have extreme gratitude to every single one of you all the managers all the all of the bus drivers all of the everybody all the employees at Metro and including all of you as board of directors we were able to be part of this and I also want to give a big shout out to Michael Tree because of his leadership we were able to bring us where we're at today and beyond just his leadership you know the fact that he cares that's that's what it really that's what really matters to get us where we need to be to have that family family feeling for Metro and I feel like a lot of these people or everyone in this room really cares and that's what it's going to take for us to keep going down this path to keep that family feeling and keep bringing Metro together so we provide an awesome transportation system for our community. So with that being said I just want to thank you all. Thank you. Wait don't go anywhere. I just want to take a moment and acknowledge you James you lead with vision and compassion. You've been a great leader for the Metro bus drivers. You've been a great facilitator of deep conversations. It's been a pleasure to work with you in my few years on the Metro board and I know that all of our paths will cross because you'll continue to do the great work in our community and I'm looking forward to and we're looking forward to working with you Brandon as you step into this leadership role. Thank you. Thank you so much. Hi good morning. I'm Don Creme HR director and I'm not sure it's appropriate that I speak now but I did want to speak after James because I want to publicly say thank you to James. When he made when he took the general chair position it's right when I was made interim director and so we were kind of like the blind leading the blind and him and I sat down and had a meeting and we were like it was about a two hour meeting as like a two hour meeting and we talked about work and our personal stuff and we shared stuff about our families and we just said you know what we're going to go into this knowing that we're not going to always agree but we are going to have the utmost respect for each other and the end goal is to make sure that Metro is successful and so thank you because I think we've always been able to do that. Right. I mean we've always had tremendous respect. We haven't always agreed but it's just been a pleasure and I want to say thank you. Thank you Don. Good morning. Hello board. My name is Jordan Vasconas SEHF president for SEIU. I just want to also give some kind words to James. I just want to express my gratitude toward him and his leadership has inspired me to kind of take on my own personality as he kind of took on his own personality and I just want to also say that because of James we were able to establish solidarity across the two unions that didn't formally exist. So I think that is worth its weight in gold. So thank you James. You definitely are going to kick ass at your next position. Thanks. Thank you Jordan. All right. Okay. Thank you. And again thank you James for all of your years of service. We are moving on to item seven. Are there additional documentation to support existing agenda items? There are not. Okay. Then we are moving to consent agenda. That's items 8.1 and 8.8 and we will take that all in one motion unless something is pulled. So let me just see if any item needs to be pulled or if there are any comments. Okay. I'll take it out to public comment. All right. I'll bring it back for motion. Second. All right. I think we can just do we don't need to do roll call do we. Okay. So all in favor say aye. Okay. Any nays. Any abstentions. Right. That passes. The maker of the motion the second. I'm sorry. You announced the vote you should. Oh thank you. The person trying to take minutes. Thank you. Say who made the motion. The maker of the motion was Rotkin second. Pagler. Thank you for that reminder. All right. Moving on to our regular agenda we have item nine which is presentation of employee longevity awards. So I will go ahead and read the name and I apologize in advance if I mispronounce any of your names. If you are here please come and step up. So we have 10 years. Eduardo Bibi Esca. David Hernandez. Johnny Lopez. Eduardo Madrigal. Ignacio Mata. Lisa Mendoza Garcia. Juan Montesino Zarate. Amy Perez. And Romeo Vidal. Oh you are all here. Look at there's many of you here. Wonderful. Please come up. Thank you for your decade of service here. We appreciate all that you do and if you have a couple of words I invite you to speak. Thanks for the opportunity. Thank you. Right well let's give a round of applause. We do have certificates for you. We do have we do have someone who's been here for 35 years. Angel Valdez are you here Angel. Okay well let's give a round of applause for Angel for 35 years. Okay we're on item 10 safety certificates of achievement presentation for the fourth quarter ending June 30th 2023. I will invite Margo Margo Ross. Good morning everybody. Margo Ross Chief Operations Officer. For the last 90 days we've had the transit supervisors the safety and training department and the dispatchers. They have followed the five tenements of FTA. They follow the safety policy, safety risk management, safety assurance and safety promotion. They've had no accidents or incidents in these last 90 days so hopefully we'll award them and applaud them. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right we are on item 11 consideration of author authorizing the use of the California Department of General Services contract for purchase of 48 40-foot fuel cell electric buses and authorizing the use of the Washington State Department of Enterprise Services contract for the purchase of nine 60-foot fuel cell electric buses from the new Flyer of America, Inc. Wanda Muth, thank you for being here. Thank you. Good morning board members, staff and guests. My name is Wanda Muth, I'm the director of capital planning and grants program management. I'm here today to ask the board to authorize the use of the California Department of General Services contract to purchase 48 40-foot hydrogen fuel cell bus and the Washington State Department of Enterprise Service contract to purchase nine articulated bus and award contract to new Flyer America in a combined amount of not to exceed $7,427,309.08 and authorize the CEO to execute the contract with new Flyer using these two contracts. This board submitted metro zero bus rollout plan on January 27 2023 and metro submitted this rollout plan to California Air Resource Board around March and our rollout plan was approved by CARB the same months. The rollout plan had three goals. The first goal is to deploy pilot zero emission bus in Watsonville which we did in back in 2021 and the second phase is to convert our entire field serving Watsonville area to zero emission by 2027 and also build hydrogen fueling station and also including charging infrastructure for for electric buses. Our third goal is our third phase is to convert our entire fleet to zero emission by 2037. So to achieve these three goals over the last five months we have been applying for multiple grant applications from state and federal grants and in as you know as you know in April we received roughly 38.6 million in California state transport agencies transit and intercity rail program. Thank you and in July we also received roughly 20.4 million from federal transit assistance bus and bus facilities program. We also received roughly 4.8 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation's multi multimodal project discretionary grant. We partnered with multiple agencies and third parties to apply for this grant application. For example if fly was named as a manufacturer in the grant application and we also named CTE Center for Transportation and Environment as for project management and we also named Mesa Group for the construction of hydrogen fueling station. So this is largely a partnership it was largely a partnership program and we in the grant application we also said we would be using the state contract the state contract because the use of state contract will take advantage of the procurement method that reduce customization making this project more efficient and cost effective. So based on New Flyers timeline we expect the delivery of these buses by the fourth quarter of 2024 for the 40 footers and by quarter one of 2025 for the articulated buses. So as you know as you know three years ago roughly 62 percent of our fleet were beyond the U.S. food life and now we are purchased with the U.R. approval we are purchasing 57 buses which will take which not only replace these buses but also we are replacing these buses with zero emission buses. So this is tremendous achievement given where we were three years ago. So the purchase of these buses roughly going to reduce 1.1 million metric ton of carbon emission and today contingent on the award funds award of funds from VW I'm asking the board to authorize the use of these two contract using these two contract to purchase roughly 57 buses and award two contract to New Flyer, New Flyer America in a combined amount not to exceed eight seven million four hundred twenty seven three hundred nine thousand dollars authorizing the CEO and general manager to execute the contract with New Flyer of America utilizing two these two contracts and happy I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you for your presentation and thank you for all the work to get us here. Let me see if there are any questions by board members. Yes please. I'm just wondering in working with New Flyer will you be able to determine where the buses are actually built in the Minnesota plant or the Athenian plants? Alabama. Minnesota. Alabama. Alabama. Yes. Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. Please. And I noticed in the Senate was a nice article on the 106 million dollar deal for fueling hydrogen vehicles but I also noticed there is some pushback on that and about the charging stations and things. It was nice to see metro acknowledged for the largest purchase nationally so kudos. Thank you. But did you have a response on some of the concerns for the hydrogen fueling stations? Yeah I mean we I know we we have extensively worked with our partners especially when it comes to our zero emission rollout plan we tested electric buses battery electric bus we already have 10 percent of our fleets are already battery electric bus and so we we did a route analysis using those state those technology and so we believe that the hydrogen fuel sale technology best will best serve our routes given the topography of route and also in terms of the fueling I guess the federal government has allocated roughly eight billion eight billion dollar nationwide to support that supply chain when it's come to providing that fuel and also the governor is roughly allocating 1.1 billion for the construction of hydrogen fuel station nationwide so we feel very comfortable when it's come to getting those fuels to our agency in the coming five years. Certainly a lot of grant support and you know that supports and you know wonderful for us to have too. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Dr. Atkin. I just wanted to add that in our last meeting we had pretty good presentation on the prospects for getting adequate hydrogen fuels service. It is an issue I mean we shouldn't fool ourselves that there's not some risk involved here because there are not currently enough hydrogen stations to sort of service all of our needs but the presentation that we got from a number of groups that are working on that project suggests that both the availability of fuel and the cost of that fuel which is pretty high right now should come down reasonably. We got a comment at our last meeting from a member of the public I think somebody from the Electric Vehicle Association Monterey Santa Cruz County that basically you know we were just we were depending on something that requires fossil fuels to create in other words you have how do you how do you get this hydrogen you put basically you put energy in the water that splits the molecules apart and gives you hydrogen and oxygen and she was correct in her comments that at the current time there's an awful lot of dependence on fossil fuels to create this hydrogen but the exact same thing is true of people who are driving around in their individual electric cars where does that electricity come from if they're getting it from a solar system then fine it's you know even that's not perfect because there's issues about where the lithium comes from and everything else that's very complex but I was pretty confident after our last meeting that we're not taking that big a risk and moving forward with hydrogen and that basically the fuel will be available for us if we need it. Yeah thank you. Other comments or questions please. I just had one comment so you're doing two things historic today the 57 bus purchases as you mentioned the largest in North America thus far and then with the nine hydrogen articulated buses that will be the largest fleet of articulated buses in the nation running on hydrogen. Wow thank you for explicitly naming that for us right okay I will see if there's anyone who has public comment on this item item 11. Eduardo Montesino you usually be celebrating you know you know the last time that there was a big purchase of Santa Cruz Metro I think the only one was here is Michael Rocken in 98 where when we had the 98s and we were coming up to an anniversary for one of those 98s that's a million miles you know so that just calls how the the maintenance department has does a really good job but like I said this is you know historic for us since like I said the one of the last purchase was in 98 so this is a new day so I would urge you to approve it thank you. Thank you. Good morning my name is Beverly Desho I am a volunteer for the Electric Auto Association of the Central Coast and have been for 16 years now as a complete volunteer using my own time just to promote what is best. Hydrogen is 95 percent natural gas they have not gotten to where it's anything beyond that natural gas 75 percent of natural gas is methane which has a heating capacity in the environment of 120 to 80 times that of CO2. In order to make hydrogen it's necessary to or when you have it in the vehicle it's necessary to compress it or freeze it in order to ship it be shipped over our roads it is highly explosive and has and leaks because it's a very small molecule the charging stations I don't know if you've gotten quotes yet for how much the charging stations are they're between 1.9 million to 4 million to 20 million I've heard all of those price ranges that is cost prohibitive. When you have hydrogen you have to when you have a hydrogen vehicle you must compress it in order to ship it compress it or freeze it in order to ship it it's very costly I don't know if you've been given cost quotes here for the for the infrastructure so you for oh I didn't know I was on a time limit anyway why don't you finish your sentence please okay the the fossil fuel industry is behind this it's pro it's trying to prolong them being in existence this is not a good idea it's not a good idea at all I can give you more information about that but it is a boondoggle basically led by the fossil fuel industry to stay in the game thank you for your comments thank you for this timer I just want to uh the timer is on three minutes right now is that correct two minutes okay thank you good morning my name is Matt Ferrell I'm speaking for myself today and I just want to thank the transit district and the regional transportation for this their collaborative work on this grant I think that in in terms of heavy vehicles my understanding that my understanding is that hydrogen represents a real advantage because the vehicle is much lighter with all the without all the batteries that are required to create ranges for buses that would demand you know the service capacity for some of the routes you're running and also the grade changes that you're looking at in serving places like the university and I was really encouraged that supervisor McPherson was talking about collaboration between cce and the transit district on working on this issue and I wish them the best in collaborating on that and I agree with Eduardo that 25 years waiting to replace the fleet is just too long so I urge you to move forward and thank you to both agencies for all this work thank you my name is Barry Scott I live in Aptos and I first just want to say how excited I am about this opportunity in this purchase it's it's historic it's crazy and for our small little county to be replacing more than half of its buses in one fell swoop it's just so encouraging I'm my background is in architecture and industry and the trades and then architecture and then education I'm I was a principal in in the the coast future streetcar demonstration that you might have written or remember and I'm the state director for the National Energy Education Development Project I work with PG&E and other utility providers in educational programs I'm considered a subject matter expert in energy generation conservation and renewable energy and I think it's unfortunate that hydrogen should be so maligned because if we went back 20 years to electric vehicles we'd be looking at lead acid batteries the truth is that hydrogen generation technologies are advancing there are countless copper chlorine production thermal chemical electrolysis and the Rocky Mountain Institute not known as a fossil fuel organization as has as considerable materials on this so we're maybe we're getting hydrogen buses before we've worked out the technology to get absolutely green hydrogen but that we're moving in that direction the energy density of hydrogen is a fuel and the capacity for these buses to serve longer hours and take hills and so forth and to be able to be available during natural disasters is significant so I hope we'll see a unanimous support for this purchase and then we'll just move forward thank you so much anyone else wishing to make a comment on this item I just would like to encourage you all to really think about what the layout of the buses as you buy them just because a bus is ADA compliant doesn't mean it's easy for somebody in a wheelchair to use as a current example the buses that you got in like 2021 or 2022 that you got from VTA that came with a clear door at the driver's door it was really difficult to get the wheelchair onto the turn is so tight and it's it's like it's barely ADA compliant to get on there and that just makes it a little more difficult and some of the I think there are electric buses that have the environmental wraps on them a lot of those buses only the very top little window opens and one of the things we learned from the pandemic is that fresh air is good for the health so I know I and I know a lot of other people kind of don't like that aspect of the buses thank you okay anyone else good morning Brandon Freeman I guess chairperson of smart local 23 I'm going to keep it short because I think I've made myself in my position pretty clear last board meeting hydrogen is the future but when we're talking about the cost and things I don't think that you should worry too too much about the cost because if you wanted to go battery electric remember we need a new operations building to do that we are maxed out on our charging capacity at our current location we don't have another location to move to I don't think you're going to build an overhead electrical array over that entire operations yard so as far as cost this is actually probably the more cost efficient option is to go with hydrogen because we can actually fuel the buses in that way as far as the last thing kind of unrelated was the windows the windows are designed that way intentionally because of the HVAC systems that are on board specifically to take care of things like coven that are airborne so pressure is not always better we do have a system of place to take care of thank you thank you okay I think with that I will bring it back to the board thank you chair yeah I just wanted to put my party hat on here a little bit as was suggested by mayor Montecino you know oh I will yes I will move that we approve the recommendation here I'll second either way okay all right all right and go ahead and make your comments please um yeah as was mentioned by mayor Montecino when I joined this agency a few years ago this was just such a huge looming problem that 60 percent of our fleet was beyond its useful lifespan and we really didn't have a clear idea of how we were going to solve this problem and then we brought on CEO Michael tree how he brought some vision for how we could move towards hydrogen uh and electric buses as well of course and begin to solve this problem I think we also need to thank our grants director wanted to move men jitsu sorry men just do uh for really pulling a rabbit out of a hat here you know we went after these this bucket of state funds the tertip funds in a way that this agency never has before and really knocked it out of the park um I know that it was a team effort with you chair with mayor Montecino uh with our all of our regular employees I also want to thank the executive director of our regional transportation commission guy Preston who went up to Sacramento with me and we talked to the folks at calista and you know really sold them on our vision for a sustainable transit system here in our county and how it was going to work together with our plan to build more housing in a sustainable way I mean I think that's what's really most exciting here is we know we have a housing crisis the only way that we're going to be able to build the housing we need in this community is with a sustainable transit network for people to get around as well you know so I know we've heard some concerns from various members of the public about hydrogen uh and the energy that it takes to produce it I've received a number of concerns from the community as well but I think you know ultimately as we really need to break up the sustainability problem into discrete and solvable pieces we need to have sustainable non-emitting transportation and then we need to look at how we can produce that the energy that's needed for it sustainably as well and uh this obviously is a huge step forward for uh the transportation piece of the puzzle this is going to define the shape of sustainable transit in our county for a generation it's really excited exciting to see it take place uh and I couldn't be more thrilled so thanks go team yeah thank you on your party head just to to take on because I agree completely with you and to take it further back when I joined metro several years ago I was trying to think how long but quite a lot probably 10 years ago we needed 60 buses and we didn't see how we could accomplish that and it was just a continuing year to year um actually you know desperation and how are we going to to replace these buses and to see what's been accomplished this you know this past year and a half two years is amazing and I'm I'm proud of all the work that metro all of you have done and uh just agree completely with mono thank you other comments okay yeah I won't repeat what my colleagues have said cut it beautifully um so we will take a vote all in favor say aye aye aye any opposed any abstentions okay that passes with the maker of the motion being director konig and the second being vice chair brown did I get it okay wonderful congratulations um we are moving to item 12 which is public hearing to receive public comments on the proposed disadvantaged business enterprise goal of zero percent for federally funded procurements for federal fiscal year fys 24 to 26 chuck farmer hello before I let people make comments if they have any comments I just wanted to say that for each three years we got to go in and for any federally funded projects so keep that in mind that we're setting our target for zero and the reason why we're setting it at zero is we only at least our vision for the next three years is to buy buses and the buses are not dbe so if that's really where the focus of the funding of federal funds then we might also set it at zero because we're not going to be getting any dbe's so that's the sole purpose and before this meeting we've actually had two reach out events events over 120 different companies dbe companies and we had attendees and they were very appreciative we we've reached out to them and got really good positive feedback but because we're talking about just the federally funded projects this is zero so um I just want to be clear on that thank you other questions okay I'll open it up to the public yes my name is Antonio Rios from the city of Watsonville one of the questions that I have mainly is our our senior citizens um I think we need more routes for our senior citizens in the city of Watsonville along with the students that go from Watsonville to Carrillo College another idea that I have is one moment I think I think you are wanting to come in on the next item oh yes I'm sorry okay coming soon coming soon hang tight thank you director Rodkin I just want to say that since my early days on the city council and that's a long time ago I've been frustrated by the fact that we aren't able to come up with a higher percentage of um uh required contracts coming from the minority or disadvantaged communities and after years of working on this issue it really comes down to a practical question are there firms available to provide this and the thing is if you set yourself a goal that you don't meet then you're in really big trouble so you need to be realistic in setting this goal and as was pointed out by Chuck Farmer our financial director they we're going to be buying federal buses from Alabama or wherever it is and stuff and we we're not putting this out to the local community and trying to find if there's some small struggling uh beginning businesses that could use our help getting a contract or something like that and so it's I always reluctantly vote for these things because it's just it is on some level it seems like an embarrassment to vote for a zero goal of zero percent we're not going to do anything but I don't really think there's an alternative to it and you have to be practical I don't want to find ourselves in a fight with the federal government over a goal that we couldn't possibly meet no matter how much we tried or something so I'll be happy to move the approval of this item we have a motion I won't be happy I'll be unhappy to move this item we have a motion is there a second second okay all in favor say I hi any opposed any abstentions okay we have first by rockin second by conag thank you okay we are now moving to item 13 and that is the public hearing to receive public comments on the proposed reimagined metro phase one service proposals for the implementation in December 2023 um John Ergo welcome good morning directors John Ergo planning and development director so in a moment I'm going to turn the podium over to Jared Walker who's wandering in the back there great who's going to lead us through a presentation of the reimagined metro phase one service proposal which if the board adopts today will be implemented in December but first I'd like to briefly recap how we got here so last October we all met or most of us anyway at a board retreat where we laid out three very ambitious goals for Santa Cruz metro double ridership in five years to levels not seen since the mid-2000s never buy another bus with a tailpipe and maximize the development of affordable housing at our transit centers all three goals are of course interrelated and supportive of each other and all are in service I think of a singular vision where metro really strives to be the best community partner it can be to ensure that Santa Cruz county is livable equitable and sustainable if the past few years of the pandemic were somewhat of a nightmare uh then I think the current moment feels like a dream that you don't want to wake up from in the past six months we've secured funding to complete the redevelopment of pacific station which with our city partners is scheduled to break ground in february we're well on our way to securing the funding we need to redevelop the Watsonville transit center into affordable housing development and transit center and we've just heard about the historic purchase order for 57 zero emission hydrogen fuel cell buses in six months in my mind the service changes we're asking you to consider adopting today are no less historic because they begin to reverse the reductions in service this community as seen since 2016 and really over the last two decades they also set the stage for the service expansion plan that we will bring back to you for your consideration and under phase two this has really been a group effort we've worked not just with metro staff internally but our partners at the cities of Santa Cruz Watsonville scott's valley and capitolah as well as with the county as well as with our bus operators smart representatives and in april we held a three-day design charrette where we work to develop the draft proposals that we brought to you first in june taken together the phase one and phase two proposals aim to create a transit system that is fast frequent and reliable that responds to community concerns and one of which transforms riding metro into a matter of convenience and self-interest rather than self-sacrifice the whole notion that we could even consider increasing service was given life by our bus operators particularly particularly by the concerted efforts in recent months to recruit hire and train new operators something i think like a third of our operators currently have been hired in the past year or two so give them a break as we welcome them into the family but it's it's really been a staggering turnaround of the past couple of years so in short metro is on a roll literally and figuratively and with your support we plan to continue that momentum so i'd like to invite jaret walker to present the phase one proposals and i'd like to suggest a point of order if it's appropriate at the end of the phase one proposal we hold the public hearing before we roll into the presentation of phase two so i think we'll pause at that point if that that makes sense good morning thank you very much for the opportunity this has been one of the most exciting projects my firm has worked on a long time we work for so many transit agencies who are trying to figure out how to down scale trying to figure out how to do less with less and it's really exciting to have a chance to work with the transit agent with the transit agency and with the community that really wants transit to have a larger role and is ready to make that happen so reimagined metro is specifically about re-envisioning where buses should go and how often so the design and scheduling of the network the key goals include increasing the overall amount of service provided making transit more reliable and relevant to the community's needs adapting of course to post-covid travel patterns and creating a network that's useful and attractive for many people's trips we're planning changes to the network that would come into service in three phases phase one right away December 2023 as fast as possible with the operating resources that will be available by the end of this year and that's the phase that you will need to make a decision about today if it's going to happen in December today's the last opportunity to approve it keep that schedule so most of my presentation will be about phase one and how we got to phase one because of course that's the thing that i need you to really understand in the most detail so you can decide whether to approve it then afterward as john mentioned after the public hearing i'll give you what's more of a sneak preview of of early thinking about what phase two and phase three might look like as the network continues to grow with certain assumptions about resources and staffing that seem reasonable so where we are now we've been through a process of analyzing the network we went through a process of developing a couple of alternatives for phase one and ran them past the community in the community input process we got back their feedback and that was the basis then for the final design of phase one that's before you from here we bifurcate into two tracks phase one if you choose to approve it today goes very rapidly into implementation preparing schedules training drivers all of that to get on the street by December 23 phase two and three go on to their own track of further refinement and another round of community input on the design to get it until we get to the point where those are ready for your approval for implementation so what we're doing today is presenting that feedback presenting phase one and then also previewing phases two so let's review the conversation we had this summer at the time what we were looking at was the possibility of adding about 10 percent in service above the current level at that time and what we saw was were to come up with simpler and more direct routes higher frequency better transfers and in some areas there were going to be some changes in which streets had bus service here's the existing metro network as it is today now please remember in every map that we draw the colors are indicating all day frequency how often the bus comes the dark blue on these maps is a bus every 30 minutes the light blue on these maps is a bus every 60 minutes purple on these maps is a bus every 20 minutes and red on these maps is a bus every 15 minutes and you will note there is no purple or red on the map today alternative one which was a lean toward frequency had a series of choices in it that had had less service to certain places in order to build up higher frequencies so for example over here in Santa Cruz service was removed on high street to pay for consistent high frequencies on both 18 and 19 the two main paths to the university over here service was removed through Twin Lakes to have a consistent 30 minute pattern here several similar choices going through and I'll explain those both opportunities reflected the operating constraints of 145 drivers by December and no new infrastructure except for the temporary closure of pacific station and the um you know how to get back so alternative B which was a lean toward coverage looked very similar but in various specific spots we had different choices that reflected greater emphasis on getting close to people but at the expense of frequency so for example here we have service on high street but on the other hand the 19 corridor which is Bay Street and the boardwalk to the university was only every 30 instead of every 15 we have a split in here where you see the service in LIVO coming apart into hourly branches in order to cover more area and so on um so um excellent okay good so both alternatives would provide similar overall coverage to the network alternative B provided service near slightly more people alternative A by virtue of being more frequent was more useful in getting more people to destinations but not but but there were individual areas that it wasn't going to serve and the people in those areas weren't going to like it so we had a public conversation about those quite an extensive one an online public online public meetings that about 90 people in total attended stakeholder conversations with about 20 organizations rider focus groups with about 30 riders from about the service area including one focus group in Spanish in-person outreach three events in Watsonville one in live oak in-person outreach is the thing that we do specifically targeted to demographic groups that tend not to respond to other forms of outreach so that was like going to the transit center in Watsonville and actually talking to people that you met there for example in English and Spanish an online survey the online survey these days is always where we get the bulk of the feedback 789 responses online plus 15 people who did a paper version of the same questionnaire that got coded the same way and finally a project website that saw about 1500 unique visitors over the course of the outreach period this summer the high-level takeaways there's very positive response to increase frequency positive responses to the simplified pattern of service especially the dramatic simplification of service that's proposed for Watsonville and I'll go I'll get into that in a little more detail there was lots of concern over the potential loss of service on high street there was a lot of desire to see a return of the Watsonville Santa Cruz express bus the 91x which is not which we were not proposing in the in the alternatives and there were a lot of questions about how major service changes will be communicated the survey results overall reflect a diversity of county residents and metro riders among those who reported their demographic information a little over half were regular metro riders 45 identified as people of color including 30 percent latino or latina 40 low income 40 not owning a car 28 identifying students of ucsc or cabrillo and 15 identifying a disability that limits mobility so obviously a demographic slice that is more representative of the ridership that is of the entire population but also with a significant number of people from the general population 48 percent we're not metro riders but we're nevertheless interested enough to take the survey and I think that's very encouraging we asked do you agree that metro service where and how often the bus should come needs to change there are very few defenders of the existing system as it is so at the high level so then we asked then we presented the changes at a very high level just describing the general ideas like is listed here and that we're proposing to make more to a 10 percent increase in service that we're proposing higher frequency in areas with higher demand that we're proposing simpler service with more direct routes better transfers with shorter weights and no second fare but that to make this possible we need to change some route numbers and names and in some areas we might change which streets have bus service so in response to that kind of high level of description not explaining exactly who was going to be affected how there was an overwhelming feeling that generally those principles sounded like a good idea obviously responses will differ once we start looking at maps and see exactly what the effects are we asked people generally about which improvements were most important to them and overwhelmingly 56 percent said higher frequency wherever possible 34 percent then specifically mentioned the Watsonville Santa Cruz express service 33 percent suggested weekend service levels matching weekday service levels 29 suggested more frequent service on 17 to San Jose 29 more service in the evening 23 direct service between ucsc and the east side of Santa Cruz and live oak 29 something else so these were these were prompts we prompted people with a whole series of different possible general kinds of improvements and the responses came back this way and i'm pleased to say that by the time we get to phase three of the plan all of these things will be in there unfortunately they aren't all in phase one it's not all affordable immediately but everything on this list is something that the agency is interested in getting to so based on that we took all that feedback back we had a bunch of intensive meetings and we you know stared at the maps a lot and stared at a lot of twists and turns and came up with these recommendations so updated parameters the good news is hiring has gone faster than we anticipated at the time that we drew the alternatives and as a result we can put out a little more service than we expected at that time which means that some of the painful trade-offs that we were asking the public about in the this summer it turns out will not have to be made we'll be able to do both things so we're on track now for about a 25 percent increase compared to spring 2023 whereas the alternatives that we showed the public were based on only a 10 increase so again there's your existing metro service and there's proposed phase one purple means 20 red means 15 now what i'm going to do is talk you through this area by area so let's start with the west and we'll move from west to east through the area so here's your existing system and what you've got here is the 1819 patterns that you're used to that jointly form the kind of figure eight pattern connecting downtown Santa Cruz up to the university through a combination of mission western the 18 path and based and boardwalk based the 19 path you also route called the 15 that sits on top of them only during the school year providing some further frequency and you've got the 10 every hour on high street in the existing system everything breaks at the transit center nothing flows across it that's a feature that we can't fix in phase one but we will try to address it later on going east you have a very complicated structure of the 71 and 69 patterns that are both ultimately going to watsonville by various routes and then the hourly 66 and 68 patterns that are serving the southern part of southeast santa cruz sea bright the southern part of live oak ending at capitol and mall it's quite complicated here's what we think we can do so on the west side it's all good news we can now afford the 18 and 19 both at 15 minute frequency which will be a huge payoff for people traveling to the university and also on the west side generally we can afford high street i'm i sorry i stand corrected we do have one route coming uh continuing across now we can afford to have high street every 30 minutes and this one route we have been able to connect through to the east side so what you now see is route three on the west side on covering high street to the university continues across downtown and out the east side going through going through sea bright and live oak now there are a bunch of little complexities here that i should mention briefly one of the thing that's happening here i don't seem to have a pointer unfortunately so i'll have to talk you through this without one as you see the three going east out of downtown on broadway and turning left on sea bright what's going on there as you proudly know is that the murray street bridge is going to be closed for for construction for a while and as a result it is not possible to go down to the south end of sea bright there'll be no way for buses to do that physically while that bridge is closed that's why you see the three going back up to soquel and capitol a drive to seventh there's no other way to get across the the water there then it comes down and in response to the public feedback that people preferred to see this route split into two hourly pieces here that's what we're doing so we have an hourly piece that goes via twin lakes and an hourly piece that goes via bomber and seventh along east on portola then there was another question of the public right now you have once an hour service going up 38th and once an hour service going up 41st the public feedback on that led us to suggest that the right thing was actually to send all the service via 38th to bomber to 41st as the way to best split the difference between this and keep the frequency together now one and two as you see there are the routes that are replacing what are now called 69a 69w and 71 we think one and two are simpler numbers that will be easier for people to deal with these two routes are both every half hour and they're designed to leave downtown Santa Cruz offset that's why you have a red line coming out of downtown Santa Cruz where you see them together one and two because there's a bus every 15 minutes there then you see the red line split into two blue lines which is a bus goes this way the next bus goes that way and you have 30 minute service beyond that split point they both highway route one goes up so called drive past dominican two goes capitol a road capitol a mall and up 41st they come back together and they come back together into a purple line which means that the worst possible weight is about every 20 minutes there the reason for that is that if buses come out of Santa Cruz evenly spaced and then one goes a longer path and one goes a shorter path they're no longer evenly spaced where they come back together so there'll be about a 10 minute gap and then about a 20 minute gap that's just how the scheduling will work but still that is much more frequency between Cabrillo and Santa Cruz and between Cabrillo and Watsonville than you have now much more regularly scheduled frequency consistent so before after now i should mention here too by and large these changes don't have much effect on the San Lorenzo Valley and scots valley but there is one small exception which is that in the existing system service coming down from the north from scots valley on the 35 every hour half of them go down emeline's emeline street past the county social services office which slows down the trip from scots valley so in the proposed system a different route route four covers that area so that all the 35 services can come the fast way into town saves a few minutes on trips in from scots valley in san lorenzo so mid county aptos capitol so here's the existing system it's quite complicated um and here is the proposed streamlining of it so now again you have one and two coming both coming from Santa Cruz rejoining at 41st and so cal and then with a worst case frequency of about 20 coming across past cabrillo when we get to aptos they split again half the service jumps on the freeway at state park another half of the service continues on so cal through aptos jumps on the freeway at freedom and then they're both on the freeway into watsonville new route 73 is an hourly service that's replacing just the rural segment of route 71 right now you're running 30 minute service through a rural area on route 71 the rural part of freedom boulevard west of airport way in watsonville the only destination on that segment is aptos high school so the recommendation is that that piece be broken off as a feeder route and so you see it coming from cabrillo college going down and heading up freedom boulevard we'll get to watsonville and i'll show you what it does there but the idea is that allows more of your of your service to all go into watsonville from the highway one side which means better service to both downtown watsonville and to watsonville hospital both of which are much bigger transit destinations than anything on the rural part of freedom boulevard aptos high school remember generally about high schools they produce a bunch of demand once a day or twice a day at their peak times but they don't fill buses all day they don't generate the kind of all-day demand that a hospital does or a big so finally to watsonville i have unscrambled a lot of incredibly complicated transit networks in my day and watsonville is really still kind of amazing to me how complicated the existing network is it's an enormous tangle of overlapping buses none of which are likely to be coming when you need them these pale blue lines mean a bus coming once an hour we know we can do a lot better that for this than watson in watsonville not just in terms of their access to Santa Cruz but also just the ability to get around town so there's the existing network and here's the proposed so as you see in the proposed network we've done a lot of streamlining to get you four one two three four significant half hourly routes operating locally in watsonville that are now frequent enough to really be useful and in certain cases there'll be some some effective combined frequencies higher than that so again by breaking off the 73 into a local route the rural part of freedom boulevard we can now have four buses an hour coming down highway one half of which route one come off at airport way go through the hospital go over to freedom center and come down freedom and Lincoln into downtown the other half of them come straight in on main street into downtown they come together downtown so this is now enough frequency that the main destinations inside watsonville are connected with each other with a bus that has some hope of coming somewhere near when you need it also we have a new half hourly route that goes out main street turns and goes up green valley across the center of the city and it's continuing on route 79 which goes out to the east we've doubled the frequency on this route it's currently only to do that however we've had to come off of a take service off of a street called martinelli whose service was only running in one direction anyway and therefore wasn't really that useful and wasn't really being used so there's some people on martinelli who will have to walk further to service but they were already walking to service in one direction anyway because the service was only running in one direction so those are some of the adjustments route 78 also is a new service that covers beach and aloni on the west side and the county social services that are on that cul-de-sac off of harkins lou near the freeway and that then flow on through to care to do some other bits of coverage up to freedom plaza so quite a different structure in watsonville oh one other thing 91 is there just a couple trips on the peak we want there to be a lot more of it but we're going to start with just a couple trips on the peak to start is what we can afford now 91 is proposed to be different than the old 91 some people remember in the old 91 some people remember it was watsonville cabrio college santa cruz but now with the new one and two watsonville has a nice express to cabrio college anyway the one and two already do that so we're going to suggest that the new 91 not stop at cabrio college that it be a non-stop from watsonville to santa cruz we think that'll be more effective we think that deliver travel times to be more useful to a lot of people so the other improvements in phase one routes one two and three would each operate every 30 minutes later in the evening then now until 9 p.m. and there'd be some service on them every 60 minutes all the way till midnight so until 9 p.m. in both directions if you think about how these services and add up there's a bus every 15 minutes between santa cruz and watsonville it's a bus every 10 to 20 minutes at cabrio college to both santa cruz and watsonville and there's a bus every 30 minutes or better on all parts of soquel drive so if the board approves the phase one proposal today and the project team will immediately proceed to preparing the major service change to be implemented in december a bunch of tasks that have to be done right away writing or publishing new rap maps and schedules preparing for the resigning of bus stops in late december writer and public information efforts throughout this period at this point i would like to stop and answer any of your questions about phase one anything that you feel you need to know in order to make a decision and then i think the next step would be to go into the public here thank you mr. walker i'll bring it to our directors questions okay vice chair i just want to make sure i understood the 25 increase in service that's in phase one by december that's that's what we're looking at yeah being able to do that thank you dr racken could you comment on the extent to which making these changes in december helps pave the way for phases doing three versus if we imagine the other way around it was where do we want to be in the end and you know get ourselves in front of the voters and do all this stuff are we is there a waste in this step or not or how do you um i'm going to defer to your ceo i think on that whose job it is to actually deliver this i i would say that the strategy that has been articulated to us and that we certainly don't disagree with is to recognize that the hunger for better transit service is so intense that the sooner you do something about it the more positive feedback you're going to get to go into later phases but i don't know if your ceo wants to make additional comments about that yeah i would just mention that this phase one really is a building block for phase two uh which you'll see if you like phase one and uh you like yeah i mean it's uh this is uh pretty cool stuff pretty neat stuff i mean this this is good service for people who are hungry for it but um phase two we were anticipating we can talk more about it after we uh exit phase one and start talking about phase two but phase two was really something that staff wanted to get off the ground in the first half of 2024 so this phase one happens in december and then very quickly gets replaced by phase two it's a brief phase one a building block and then phase two comes in what type of tracking are you going to be doing of the phase one um implementation so that we can review it to make potential changes during the next phases i keep thinking about the 91x and how that isn't going to stop at cabrillo anymore and you mentioned that you know that's taken care of but i just wondered what measures are going to be put in place because we're making some changes now um and we're going to make more so maybe you could tell us a little bit more about tracking that and how how you'll incorporate that into the next phases you have interesting new information from it yeah thank you for the question so uh we currently have automatic passenger counters installed fleet wide which is the first time in metro history which allows us to track ridership every stop throughout the system we've never been able to do that and we also think it'll be ntd certified so it means we can certify the data to the fta by the end of the year um so as soon as the phase goes in we'll be tracking data at every stop uh in real time essentially the second piece is we have this new computer aided dispatch automatic vehicle vehicle locator system installed as well which is giving us all the real-time information that's out there on the street so we'll also be able to track reliability run time and make adjustments to the schedule to go through so really for the first time in the three and a half years that i've been here we actually have data uh good data robust data to track not just ridership but uh on time performance and travel time as opposed to a one day a year uh my questions i think are for mr. walker um i mean and they have to deal with schedule uh meaning the timeline for implementation and i'd appreciate a reality check if we have three months from today until we implement this is that realistic for educating our community on the changes that we're bringing about these are significant changes on routing numbers so forth uh and the second part is i believe that the pacific station reconstruction is now postponed until february so we'll implement the winter quarter service in uh december and then we'll have to move the downtown facilities mid quarter we have two changes going on it makes sense looking for the reality and the comfort of implementing and educating the public i'm not going to tell you that you can't do it yeah i think that it is certainly from my the thing thing i can say as a consultant it is i normally would advise allowing six months for these tasks but you have a different situation you have a relatively compact community you have uh an extremely motivated leadership that's very committed to doing this and i think you also have a rather well networked community where i think education is going to be easier than it is in a lot of places although it's still a lot of work especially when we're getting into the minority language communities and people who aren't as plugged into the process but i'm not going to say it's impossible i think it can succeed thank you i have quite a few questions sorry um so just so i'm clear phase one we'll start with phase one um it looks like the 15 would cease to exist can you verify whether or not that's just a numbering convention and if the capacity will still remain so let's count capacity going up the hill here so what you have right now on uh going between downtown and the university is three half hourly routes plus two hourly routes so that's two four six eight buses an hour what you have here is two fifteen minute routes a 30 minute route and a 60 minute route so that's eight nine ten eleven that's eight nine ten eleven buses an hour so the total quantity of service going up the hill is going up from eight buses an hour to 11 buses an hour which is why you won't miss the 15 notice for example that the three which is about has about the same travel time going up the hill as the 15 does now uh is being upgraded from hour late every 30 minutes so i don't think anyone will miss the 15 got it okay and then the 18 and the 19 are now every 15 minutes correct that's right always coming soon all right um i don't mean to skip ahead to phase two but i'm just trying to make sure i understand what phase one is versus what phase two is uh is phase two is there a requisite for access to the west remote parking lot at ucsc's residential campus for phase one to be feasible well if you look here at what route three is being drawn as doing yep we are we would i would prefer that if route three is going to run continuously all the way across the city it'll run more reliably if it can get a break on the campus if it can't get a break on the campus and it has to end in a one-way loop of the campus then the bus has to go all the way from capital of mall to the campus and back to capital of mall without a break and that's going to make it less reliable so the university can help make this service more reliable by making it possible for that route to terminate on the campus that has been the key barrier to getting continuous east west service across santa cruz from the campus to the east side of santa cruz is not having a place to take a break on the campus phase two which we'll get to in the next part of the agenda does assume that a much more substantial terminus has developed on the campus and and that's where you see a significant increase in east west service across the campus across the city and that is tied very directly to having a larger terminus okay what it's sorry not to dig too deep and go down a rabbit hole but what about a continuous loop from capitol campus back to capitol makes what what variable is making it less reliable there versus being able to stop and what's the so as the bus is going down the road it's stuff happens that and stuff happens that make it get late so the reliability of a bus is directly related to how long it has been going since it last had a break because at its last break is where it had an opportunity to catch up to its schedule if it was so your reliability is directly proportional to how far the bus has been going since it last had a break that's why we think it's important that's why it's critical to get a terminus facility on the campus if you're going to be able to run service continuously across 18 and 19 work now because they're short the bus only lays over downtown it does not have a break on the campus it loops the breaks the campus continually but because of that by the time it gets downtown it really again it really needs a break it can't go further or it would just be too unreliable so that's the principle you think about how far has how long has the bus been running since it last had a break and that's what's going to drive your reliability okay okay thank you thank you chair a couple questions the first is and you've since you've got this slide up on the screen you mentioned that the three a and b are rooted the way they are because we're assuming or we know that the Murray Street bridge seismic upgrade project is on the horizon and we're not going to be able to go over the Murray Street bridge if we vote for this phase one today is there a built-in assumption that once that project is complete that 3b or sorry 3a then starts routing over that bridge yes i think the long-term assumption would be that 3a which you see if you describe it from the east it's coming along Portola into cliff goes down into Twin Lakes we see a going north on seventh i think you'd assume that once you have the bridge it would turn west on Murray north on Seabright and west on Broadway that would be the two-way path so that you'd have the service back at Seabright and Murray but what we're showing here is what we anticipate to be the detour in effect for several years yeah you know i've looked at this map a lot and you know ultimately i do think this is probably the best solution i mean as much as i like the simplicity of the greater frequency with the three just having one spot we need a way for people to basically get between lines two and three and you know get to key destinations like Simkins Swim Center and get up and down Seabright so i think this ultimately is a pretty elegant solution the other question actually was at the south county map around Watsonville you mentioned that there was a route that would get people to the county facility i assume you meant the new westridge facility that we're opening up off of green valley so would that be the 72 or 75 the county office there's the county office is there on that cul-de-sac off of Arkansas that has some social services okay yeah i'm seeing main street in the in the highway so i mean because the the facility is ultimately north of the highway we're talking about different things yeah okay 78 it is it is still north of highway one highway one is right that's what was throwing me for a loop okay yep got you 78 to westridge great um and the final question is i'm gonna see in our yeah um so phase one does require a little bit more money as you said i think the packet outlines about two million dollars more per year all right and then that would be coming out of the as you said that sort of plus up from state money that we've seen in this budget cycle can you just you know for transparency with the board remind us how much total is available and then we're using that two million i think the suggestion is over the next four years you know how much that that uses up yeah and i think john was costing out phase one literally just getting all the details in order on on the actual cost of phase one so john if you've got a latest on that it's about a seven percent increase uh over pre-covid levels let's say so it is an increase in operations but one tricky thing about it is we don't know the we don't know the full cost until we actually design the service it we know how much revenue hours we will project increasing but the actual cost is measured in really the number of bus operators that are required to operate the service but we think it's about a five to seven percent and so yeah the idea was it's hopefully mostly cost-neutral but any overrun that we are being conservative one and a half to two million uh in an operating expense per year could be drawn from the the one-time tursuit money which is the plus up which is 28 million uh to be spent over four years okay so the 28 million we're roughly saying it's likely we might need we could need to spend up to eight million of that to provide phase one increased service at this time okay thanks for the clarification other questions just um on the 35 again is that um the frequency is it going to be the same it's going to be reduced to a half hour so 35 is already coming down the hill every 30 minutes from scott's valley and san lorenzo valley and what you see happening right now as it comes down the hill is that it branches into two pale blue lines because half the service um goes down emeline street and half the service goes straight into town so what we're doing is eliminating that emeline deviations so that all the 35s do the same thing so we're not increasing the frequency to the valley but it will be more regular and more reliable on every bus we'll go in the same way other questions um i have one uh additional question director paylor kind of got to it but what are some of the specific tactics um to make sure we reach out to the harder reach populations i'm thinking youth um monolingual spanish speakers so i don't know who can answer that if we approve it today we have three months essentially to notify the public and and we'll get going this afternoon um but we're we're we're planning to target a lot of at bus stop information so posted flyers notices translated of course in english and spanish um and i think we'll also uh develop a road show if you will go to city councils any commissions that we can get in front of for the next three months to make sure that the word is out there in addition to the traditional avenues that we uh disseminate our information on metro social media our our website our email list etc um we also have some new tools where we can publish this information to google maps to transit so that people currently riding the bus that use those avenues we'll see uh service notices pop up right and perhaps some of those stakeholder groups that and go back to the stakeholders yeah and so as we develop phase two we're going to be going back and doing outreach and going back to the stakeholder so it's another opportunity to say here's what's coming phase one by the way thank you director downing um a lot of people get their information just from the bus stop when they're standing there and um you're going to be moving some stops and removing some stops um a few um do you tend to because i don't i don't know myself but do you tend to post something on that stop saying the stop's moving and um so that people have enough notice i know sometimes the bus stops you know don't have as much information yeah i think there's there's maybe five bus stops that may be eliminated eliminated so for sure we'll be posting notices there yeah but we'll hear from whoever it is of course and and for that individual it's a big impact um but we'll also plan to just post at every bus stop where there's a service change thank you dr odd kid i don't know if we usually do this but given that the school's starting at ucse fairly soon we might think seriously about doing advertising um flyers at the bus stops um but also even paid advertising agency press or something like that because that's a huge target audience and try to think about it i mean social media will reach some of them and and that's also a group that will be very quick to think about using their phones to gather further information so posting stuff that says if you get on your phone this is what you this is what you need to do or something but that seems like we don't usually purchase like full page ads and stuff but that might be worth thinking about that's a great idea thank you for that and just to reiterate so we have a process now where we we post a laminate tie to every bus stop when there's a service change so we're going to do the same thing it's at every every route number change every every change is on this map we'll have that posted so the end of the fall excuse me the end of the fall quarter is december 15th is that a date that you're kind of targeting for this to go potentially live after that december 21st thank you and and one other suggestion for our um you know high school middle school if we if if information is sent to those schools they can send the information back out with parents and even some of the you know we have the ed foundation or these types of things that will help disseminate that information and probably all of us in our communities may have a contact to be able to help with that if needed yeah and then the other place i think we could hit a senior centers thanks thanks for those suggestions just a quick side note on the students youth cruise free is now over 400 increase year over year in ridership which is double what it was uh kind of when schools went on break so the word is definitely getting out there through the schools i i let one of our high school students at some disadvantage know about the free passes and he was so excited and helped spread the word too so i i'm thrilled to see the increase for students 400 clearly the word is is getting out there okay if there aren't other questions at this point from directors i'll open it up for public comment um and please yeah thank you i was gonna ask if you could line up line up against this walls Eduardo Montecino uh i'm a service guy i've been here for for a while um god uh i'm i'm really excited about phase one but i'm more excited about phase two that we'll talk about later you know um this is an opportunity this is you know uh you know in a very very long time i've been here for a lot of years and we've been gone from down down down having to get um you um you know contractor like jerry jerry walker to tell us how how we how we cut cut so this so this is exciting you know this is actually exciting for the community it's actually going to change the community trajectory we're you know we're we're doing how we want we're doing socal improvements where you know we're building capacity you know so you know i'm really excited we need to get all on board and it but it's all of us and it's encompassing all of us to get get the word out um because it's not only for just the riders that are riding the system but it's getting the word out to the outer community that they're not going to be able to have an option an option to you know to leave their car maybe it's not all the way but maybe you know it's half a way that can get them to a destination where they need to go so i'm really excited the community i think it's right um we need to make those improvements but like i said i'm more excited about the face too but um this is really good improvements i urge you to uh approve them thank you thank you mayor montesino my name is dodie anderson and i am a resident of lesseble beach and i was a regular like um excuse me bus um user when it came to lesseble beach um i'm speaking for myself and also for all those people who signed a petition from lesseble beach to please bring back that bus service um first i'd like you to know that the community of lesseble beach is really grateful for the possible return of bus coverage we have not had bus coverage for over 10 years and um that has created we we've been stranded like an island we have no way to go to the doctor to go to school to go shopping and to go to any entertainment venue this is over 10 years so just as a side comment please don't delay this we have been waiting so long i think if you speak to any resident anywhere they're gonna say no keep it to us now um so we we're happy that you're gonna consider bringing the bus back to us and we would like to emphasize that there is a bus stop that is already on playa which is near the el patio grocery store and we'd like you to consider having that where the bus stops because that bus stop is already covered for inclement weather it is um a near a lighted facility the um stop is the closest uh you could get to our library to our church and to our our community clubhouse oh okay please finish up your sentence are you are you complete i would like to say that we want to thank you for bringing back access and please leave the bus stop where it is okay thank you good morning chair and board members i'm claire globally i'm the transportation planner for the city of santa cruz here to express our sincere support for the phase one proposed network the service enhancements that will be going in as part of this really increased mobility for the entire city and for those in the city who are traveling outside the city to cabrio to capitol to jobs um medical appointments everything else that people just need to do as part of their daily lives we're also very very appreciative of the opportunity we had to participate in the design charrette to give our feedback on this to be able to work directly with metro staff and the consultants to refine the concepts to make sure that it was serving the broadest cross-section of our community and to also give big kudos for the really robust public outreach that was done to bring this plan forward so we're really excited and hopeful that this will roll out and we're also um a really willing partner to continue to disseminate all of the information to writers through the various platforms that we have to get the word out about the big changes the exciting changes that hopefully will be happening thank you so much thank you thank you for your work good morning chair callantari johnson and uh metro directors my name is matt ferrell and i'm speaking today on behalf of the board of the friends of the brown trail uh we strongly support uh the implementation of this uh plan we think that it's a critical foundation in rebuilding our transit system that will give us a foundation to move forward with the work that comes out of the rail concept study all the forms of transit need to be integrated the bus and the rail and we see this as a way to step forward so thank you to everyone for your work and uh thank you for my my uh early anticipation of your unanimous approval of this phase thank you good morning my name is faina seagull also from friends of the rail and trail we fought really hard to get the tersep funds included in this budget and we are so excited to see it implemented in such a fantastic way in our community with 25 expanded service this is really great it affects everybody in our community and we're excited to see us building up the transit ridership so spectacularly so thank you directors and thank you ceo tree and the entire staff metro for making this happen thank you good morning and thank you metro board and staff what an exciting time for our community and for addressing climate change and equity rarely do we have the opportunity to be a part of the groundbreaking changes in transportation systems that is happening right here at santa cruise metro and it takes vision thank you michael tree and a whole lot of work thank you to all of you and your staff to create a simpler yet more effective system and it was an honor to be a part of a stakeholder group in the reimagined metro process by the way my name is lani falkner representing equity transit the kind of changes being proposed here with phase one and soon with phase two we'll make a real difference in the lives of our community members for the better starting with the first phase increasing service to 15 minute key segments in some areas really is a grant ground changer but the real exciting changes lay in the future when metro moves to 15 minute service across the entire county with phase two the direction metro is moving will address three important issues that's mitigating climate change more jobs and equity by providing regular dependable frequent and hopefully free service close to 30 percent of our community does not have reliable access to a car my son is an example who he used public transit throughout high school so we didn't have to be in that long line of cars at schools that you see and as an adult he doesn't own a car and relies on his bike and bus to get to work it is increasingly expensive to afford a car so providing alternatives to driving a car is a critical step to addressing our climate crisis and equity and i would like to ask and urge the metro board today to please support phase one of reimagined metro and look towards phase two thank you so much i'm rohan twilly i'm a ucsc student some of you may already know me as the person behind metro's bus stop signage and the route 18 and i'm really excited about these proposed service changes it's awesome to see it finally happening i want to thank metro's planning department and jerry walker associates for making this possible um i do have some concerns as just concerns us through some other members of the utility community about the proposed routing through campus of the route three i was talking with some staff members at taps including the bus operators supervisors and as the assistant transit managers they're concerned that the proposed uh routing for route three as shown in the map requires turning movements that are physically impossible for a bus to safely complete um i acknowledge that the bidirectional routing through campus is incredibly important for having this east side thing we want to make sure that's possible um but the key issue of having the bus where it's currently shown turning around at the arboretum they were greatly concerned about that and that metro had not communicated this to them um we're sufficiently concerned about this um that we planned out several alternative routings that better seat the new ucsc and we really want to make sure it's easy as possible uh to do this for metro to implement it without disrupting the phase on proposal because the phase on proposal is great so we actually went out and tested this in a bus yesterday to make sure that you can do these routings on campus um and these routings meet the following goals one all the turning movements can be safely completed no arboretum uh number two the outbound terminal of the route has a place where the bus can safely lay over and crucially has a bathroom for the operator to use during that break and then three buses enter and exit campus to the west gate to minimize the amount of time people have to spend on the bus um and we put together a overview of the different options we tested and i've submitted in written comment what all of those are as well as the video from the test we did uh with the tap staff thank you thank you for those recommendations um and for speaking you have those in writing you sent and you sent them to us we'll we'll take a look hi my name is jonathan i'm a student at ucsc and i would like to talk a little bit about alternative solutions for turning around at the arboretum one solution we tried was cowl circle uh there is ample space to turn around using the circle even with the bike rack lowered two buses can lay over at the same time without obstructing traffic uh the bus stop is also a da compliant there are several bathrooms adjacent that could be used during the layover and service area to carol cal stop circle stop provides greater coverage for academic and residential buildings than the existing stop on hagar drive a second option is east remote overflow lot buses can turn around in the east remote and go through east remote in order to turn around this is something taps upper campus bus has used many times used many times doing the day and there is an existing bus stop inside east remote that buses can lay over at there's also an adjacent overflow lot that more buses could lay over which is way closer to bathrooms a third option is barn theater lot buses would essentially do a full loop or on campus pull into barn theater after running counterclockwise this is something taps clockwise loop and night upper campus buses already do many times each day although taking the quarry plaza or east remote although this is longer this routing has more advantages of serving each stop that metro currently serves on campus including low light ridership stops in the metro area and east campus the fourth option is quarry plaza here there is an existing red curb that allows for a da compliant bus stop where the bus can drop off passengers before turning around although when we tested it we weren't able to make that circle make a loop there without you finish your sentence please without we couldn't have the the bus like the bike rack lowered while making the turn so in conclusion a cowl circle east remote barn theater and quarry plaza are better places for turning around compared to the arboretum for route three thank you i'm tomastillo i'm another ucsc student and just after going through all these proposed turnaround options i'd like to reiterate how much how excited we are for this for this phase one proposed network it's great um it's very set we're all excited um all and all i want change is to turn on location i don't think it could work um and some of the benefits for other potential turn around locations is increasing capacity as you don't have to go through the empty static empty part of campus on haigar road you can go up like west you can go up empire grade and you'll have more busy parts of campus served faster and the ability to restrict um short on campus journeys through outbound drop-off only and on pick-up only buses on campus and so there's enough um capacity for essential off-campus journeys so they are not clumped up with people who should be taking a loop bus for example um also outbound delays no longwood cascade on the outgoing trips like um jerry walker said earlier um then right is also it would save we are just having having to wait at the time point at science hill for like five plus minutes when service is lower or ridership is lower which is a massive convenience many times when i'm have to wait for the bus to go um and then finally if all if all metro buses are under actually like this it'd be great as well um i would strongly i would strongly i would love it if more buses run like three does if there's a proper turn around place located on campus and then overall we just we urge metro to consider this feedback um phase one is great overall but this is a weak point in phase one we believe thank you thank you there's more questions we'll do thank you my name is maria perez um i work with the generation by her violent climate action and i'm also part of the sanacris county commission for the environment and uh our communities are experiencing climate change and areas like watsonville are disproportionately affected and i think metro is definitely gonna play a role as a local solution to climate and i hope that there is more um frequency and more service and areas is proportionally affected by climate change like watsonville is um and i also i think the changes are great i did notice that there is um in watsonville there are no routes going to sanacris from the holohand stop um near the school district and there is an apartment complex there behind the arco station where many families and youth live um and and kind of not having this access from that that stop adds 15 to 20 minute walk to either both both of the next like alternative bus stops and one of them the one going towards airport boulevard walk as you walk to safeway for that stop there's no lights whatsoever and many um many of the youth even come to sanacris to work at the borwalk really really late and that's like the closest way to get to those that apartment complex so i think that really would be super dangerous for the youth but also the the school district is right there in that stop and the school district also many parents go there for getting the um school buses for for their children in their schools and also it has served as a covid testing site in the past so i would like to see that if that route could stay connected thank you thank you hello my name is uh romeo bidol bus operator um wanted to uh just say we don't have a service in uh curilitis area we used to have a 72 that service that area and uh i'm just wondering if there's going to be changes going in that area during uh school hours that traffic on freedom in curilitis every morning is just way too crazy and i think if you put a service back to curilitis during those times that will help with the traffic and freedom in curilitis and also with the shortages with the school bus operators that will also help um bring those kids to school that's all thank you so much my name is an antonio rivas from the city of wasunbel i think those a lot of people here around here so one of the things that i'm very concerned is that you know the increase of the city population in the city of wasunbel as well as the lightbulk is very important that you'll be able to in the future to be able to accommodate them in the city of wasunbel we need more frequency routes and you can be able to implement now a bus or two buses that will include green valley, east lake, riverside, freedom boulevard, airport boulevard it will be great so they can be able to go to the different routes to the hospital to saluparalli hent in different areas in which a lot of our seniors and our people will use it's important that we because i know you decided to have it in san a cruz but not in wasunbel like always do you always left us behind it's important that you consider that if you're not considering phase one make sure that you include in phase two it's important to our city of wasunbel it's increasing our city population is increasing very much and we need that we need that frequency in our city of wasunbel make sure you make decisions now and phase two to make sure that our city of wasunbel is covered because many many many years you have left us behind and you know that finally you're doing something good so i hope metro be able to do that it is important to our to our citizens and also for the non-english speaking of people make sure that when you do signs do it visually and make it bigger so they can see it it's important thank you thank you want to start that up so i want to talk about some of how we got here because i've been hearing some things about turn movements and some assumptions about what we can and cannot do i have personally driven every line on this map 35 foot 40 foot and 60 foot variety everything here is possible it is not essential that we make that button hook turn or have a layover on the campus in order to pull this off we can loop it it will be long it will be less reliable it will be possible the only thing that we cannot currently do is hold over multiple buses in that west remote parking lot we absolutely can drive through there although there are some concerns with that particular area they are concerns that we can work around i also want to let you know that on a majority of these routings i didn't drive alone michael and john both went with me so they have full knowledge of what this looks like in practice physically in a bus we know that we can get this done so those aside been here for a very very long time under the same system i was here pre cuts i was here post cuts pre-covid post-covid through all of it right we we've seen we've seen a lot but the consistent thing that we've seen is a decrease in ridership and we are finally now building the foundation to change that and when i think back of everything that we've been doing in the last year and a half it has always been met with resistance because change is difficult nobody necessarily likes it straight out until they realize hey this is going to be okay it's very very scary how are you going to pay for this how are you going to drive this but we were here and how are we going to get new buses well we're getting 57 new buses how are we going to find drivers we're down by so many well now we're not every challenge that we've seen so far in the last year and a half we've met we've exceeded and we put the service on the road and this will be no different our leadership our staff our drivers from the top to bottom we're fully committed to this community and we're finally ready to deliver a transit system that is truly world class so that we can actually sit here and say we are a leader in public transportation mean it know it and have the entire nation know it thank you thank you so i just want to say real quick i understand you know any change is going to be really difficult to do to please every single person but one thing we all could agree on is our system is not where it needs to be right now we only have riders that pretty much are riding the system because they need to not because they want to and that's the biggest thing we need to do here's get people on our buses that want to be on our buses that are convenient for them and i fully support phase one and i'm excited about frequency because frequency is where it's at with public transportation not disregarding coverage we're still going to provide coverage but frequency is where it's at because when you could walk to a bus stop and know you're going to get picked up at 15 minutes that's going to get people on our buses and so i just wanted to echo a lot of what brandon said and not only that just say that i support phase one and thank you for your time thank you okay i don't see anyone else standing up to speak so we'll close the public hearing and i'll bring it back to the board for a motion i see director rottkins hand i'll make a motion but there may be discussion obviously sure my motion is that we approve the staff recommendation with this one addition that they look at this question of the route three uh and it would be up to the our staff working with the consultant to determine if any of these alternatives make more sense so let's investigate what's being proposed and i'm not suggesting that they do any of those because maybe what we've done already is the best way to make it happen but they at least give it one more look at that that particular part of the route i just wanted to make a quick point of clarification there's an error on the map which i think prompted a lot of this discussion it was never the intent to turn around on the arboretum i should have shown west remote uh as brandon mentioned none of it kind of impacts the plan but we'd be happy to work with the students that did the test round to determine the other locations because finding a location to turn around on campus as we'll see in phase two is is critical for that phase but it is not critical for phase one either way we're happy to take their suggestions no and there are trade-offs some of the virtues of places let me see if there's a second before you okay thank you please go ahead there are um issues about whether the best place to stop layover for if there's a restroom and so forth and those issues but there's also questions of efficiency and how much longer it takes to take a particular route and i'm happy to have our staff resolve you know again with the consultant resolve that final maybe our staff make the decision what what the final resolution of that issue on her route three would be but i'm not suggesting there's anything wrong with the what we've proposed here but let's look at what was being proposed and see if there's virtue in some of it great other comments director rottkin you're complete here director i obviously support this i think it's fantastic right okay director henderson yeah um just to kind of piggyback on that while obviously we would support anything to better help our all of our affiliates staff students of course our guests coming to and from campus we do need to do our due diligence on the turnaround on on route three um we need to have some internal discussions i look forward to working with all of metro staff getting some more feedback from the students um you know but we absolutely need to make sure that this doesn't have for we mitigate as many unintended consequences as possible um and it's it's tightened there it's tightened the west remote parking lot and we just need to do our due diligence and we'll do that internally and you know like i said we look forward to working with everybody and trying to find a solution to make this happen because i think it's i think it's great but we just need to make sure it's feasible and it works thank you chair i just want to point out again what an amazing turning point this is for the agency it really is the other hand to the discussion we were having this morning about buying a bunch of new buses because if you're going to buy close to 90 million dollars of zero emission buses you want them to be full and we started this conversation because the critique that myself and a lot of the other directors have heard consistently from members of the public is why are the buses empty so even people who don't ride the bus want to know that our public infrastructure is being well utilized and that people are able to take the bus to where they want to go and this is really a demonstration that our agency is taking that on that we're determined to make fast frequent and reliable service and this i mean 25 expansion and services is just amazing i really love the simplified numbers especially in mid county i think that's where we're seeing them the most so the one two three it's first of all makes it easier for people who haven't written the system before to start writing the system and second it it will actually change we know from psychological studies that people actually perceive lower numbers as faster the demonstration of this is actually that wide receivers were recently able to start choosing lower jersey numbers and they all have because they think they think it makes them faster so i would love to see these numbers rolled out to more parts of the system because people will think that the four bus is faster than the 55 you know and the other piece that i really like about this is finally having routes that go all the way from the east side up to uc santa crews and i think that this just demonstrates a more a much more unified vision of how we can move forward with our housing and transportation infrastructure together how the housing that we build in the city and the county can support the university and how the work that's being done on the at the university can support the rest of our civic infrastructure this shows that we're thinking about the whole thing as as one unit and has a unified vision for moving forward so i really appreciate that thank you everyone for their work on this thank you dr mcpherson yeah i'll repeat some of that we have some tremendous pressures we know in local government for increase in the number of new housing units and if we can target our audience to reach those people who are coming and who are here at the present time we're going to have a huge benefit but this 25 increase in service is going to really make a significant start and being on this board for more than 10 years now it's uh it's really a welcome opportunity to see us increase our service to the people of santa crews county thank you okay any other directors um i'll just make a couple of comments um i appreciate everyone who is here today and who spoke and provided some other suggestions and recommendations i know that watsonville came up a couple times and we'll be hearing more about the um enhancements to that service area in phase two um i also want to thank the staff who i know this has been a huge lift and there's more to come so i want to thank you for the work that you have done and thank you in advance for the work that remains um and for your leadership and and moving this um michael you know clearly the the community is hungry for this i i heard it in your testimonies today and have seen it in previous correspondence and and we're ready we're ready as a community um to move in this direction and and i know that there are a lot of eyes on us and that's a good thing because when there's eyes on us and we're ready and we're successful then we deepen our partnerships and and bring in more resources i've seen that happen in many different subject areas and i know that we're going to make that happen here around transportation and i've said this before this agency has proven time and time again and especially in this meeting today with the momentous momentous votes we've taken that we are more about we are beyond moving people from point a to point b we are really about environmental sustainability we're about equity and we're about overall health and well-being for the community so i really appreciate where we are now in the direction we're going to go to and i think with that we will take a vote please um board member dutra is uh i think he's on the phone is that what he's texting me asking if he can make a comment if he calls in you could put the we will be taking a vote momentarily first let's see if we can connect with director dutra you want me to put you on the speakerphone or i'll put okay good thank you i just want to say um i've been listening to you know everybody's comments i wanted to also personally thank you know um michael and john for coming and meeting with i mean both myself and finessa and watson bill and i'm having the conversation um over the past you know few months um on the revision of what metro is going to look like i've been sitting on this board for quite a while since 2014 so i've seen the eps and gals and the eps and flows and um and i understand the needs of our community um you know we you have a really solid voice and our representation we are looking forward to as phase two will be a lot you know more positive and phase one is good but phase two is really going to start bringing in you know what you know south county is looking for in their metro system so i just want to say um you know thank you for putting in the hard work it's never easy especially when you have you know the we have a amount of funding you gotta deal with and you gotta put that into service and um we just want to say that we're headed in the right direction and you know i will support this and i want to say thank you for those who did attend today and those of that have been working with us i'm currently at our cal cities meeting that's why i'm not there today so i'm here representing our city watson also uh but i might look forward to you know beating back up the staff as we move forward into the next phases thank you director dutra thanks for um being persistent and and getting connected with us even given our um technology limitations okay so i think with that we will take a vote on the motion that was made by director rodkins seconded by director paikler all in favor say aye aye aye oh then we need to do a roll call vote thank you okay we are going to do a roll call vote uh director brown aye director downing aye director dutra aye director colin tarry johnson aye director conic aye director lindt aye director macpherson aye director newson aye director paikler aye director rockin aye and the motion passes thank you okay so yes thank you not farrell still here he got his unanimous vote that he wanted um all right let's move on to phase two of this agenda item um as you see you won't have any opening remarks on phase two before i plunge in well this is that world-class system that uh of staff has been promising for the last couple of months to bring to you uh jared is uh he focuses on access and i think that's the most important uh i tend to focus on ridership because that's kind of an indicator of whether it's working or not and people have that access but i think this is uh we talked about getting to seven million i think what jared's going to show you in this phase two uh combined with some incentives that staff has in mind is going to get you to seven million and beyond so with that i'm just excited and uh i guess the only other thing i'll say is obviously this gets much more expensive uh phase two and so staff has uh a game plan for offering uh what i would consider a pilot project for a number of years to get this off the ground and we'll be uh with the finance committee in october to talk about financial game plans in regard to phase one and phase two just so that there's absolute clarity on where the money's coming from and what the you know game plan is both in the short and the long term thank you very much so um i want to be very clear that this is the first time right now at this moment is the first time the public has seen this map and it is not whereas phase one i was ready to present to you as a thing we can really recommend because it's been through a public conversation we've heard the public comments and we've had a chance to work through them we're not there with phase two we're at the beginning of the public conversation and the next steps do involve a lot of things that will have some controversy involved in them that will need to be worked through so i i like this map i'm i'm keen to present this map to you but i also want to be clear that this is the beginning of the conversation and we're far from a point of asking you to adopt in working with your staff on phase two we were asked to assume that there would be a significant increase in funding but also that there would be significant infusion of funding directly tied to the needs of the university so the expansion in service that you see here in the city of Santa Cruz and capitol in particular is directly tied to that assumption that there is financial participation in some form from the university to maybe maybe things are run as a pilot for a while in the meantime but that ultimately there is substantial and ongoing financial participation from the university in order to sustain these levels of service right away as you look at phase two you see three huge high frequency routes in Watsonville and one three huge high frequency routes in Santa Cruz one high frequency route into Watsonville for that to be equitable for that to pass our basic standards of equity this can't all be coming out of directly out of government funds there has to be some other participation to fund this extreme level of service in Santa Cruz or this just would not be an equitable distribution of service between Santa Cruz and Watsonville so that's very important to be clear so with that assumption the idea here is that lines one two and three now do all three run continuously across the center of Santa Cruz so that you now see one two and three all departing from the university all crossing through downtown Santa Cruz replacing the current 1018 and 19 paths and all continuing east one along Soquel to toward Capitola and three on the more complicated routing through Seabright now again for the same principle I meant I mentioned before this is not possible without a large terminal on the campus that makes it possible for routes one two and three to terminate on the campus and take their breaks there we've sketched that at west remote it doesn't have to be there but it does have to be such that we can go two way through the campus to the far side of it and end there at the end of most of the demand so west remote is ideal for that because once you've gone up the east side of the campus you've gone through all of the dense parts of the campus west remote is really the end of the campus there's not there's a there's a rural gap beyond there the only real loser here is the arboretum I as a botany geek care about that but in the larger scheme of things that is possible to walk from western to get to the arboretum and and I think that's reasonable in the context of this growth but so that's what you're seeing and that's why you're seeing it so now you're seeing one two and three flow all three flowing continuously across the city from the university all the way across to capitol now further east from that that has some knock on effects even if the bus is terminating on the campus by the time it gets to capitol mall or cabrillo college it's been going a long time and it's starting to lose some reliability particularly in the current operating environment of what the streets are now in the absence of bus lanes or bus priority or much else to protect you from the very unpredictable levels of traffic congestion that you experience on these streets we don't believe that those buses can can reliably run in service all the way to watsonville for that reason what you see is a split happening at cabrillo college routes one two and three now where routes one and two and one ends at cabrillo and separate routes called 61 and 62 pick up from those points and continue into watsonville now the the big payoff here is you do get the 15 minute service all the way into watsonville it's the route that's called route one in phase one here it's called 61 uh comes from cabrillo college across airport way past the hospital and down freedom boulevard and lincoln and into downtown um but we do have that issue of needing it to be a separate route so that and the way i would present this in watsonville is we need to do this in order to protect watsonville riders from santa cruz's congestion because the congestion problems tend as a rule to be to be in aptos and further west and we'll have a more reliable operation between cabrillo and watsonville if it's a separate route now the other part of this so how do you get from watsonville to santa cruz a half hourly route 91 appears in this plan so route 91 the the express that many people have been asking for nonstop from watsonville to santa cruz every 30 minutes all day that becomes the primary way that you go from watsonville to santa cruz if you're going all the way down to santa cruz if you're going to cabrillo you use the 61 service so inside of watsonville then we now have a high-frequency service every 15 minutes connecting not everywhere in watsonville but really connecting a lot of the biggest dots the the hospital the commercial area around freedom and green valley freedom boulevard lincoln street coming in and downtown so this is a first shot at what phase two might look like um the um the map shows so this this is this is basically a description of a set of improvements that metro would like to make over the course of 2024 it requires metro to hire enough drivers and it requires a relationship between metro and ucsc that is a much more complete financial partnership uh that includes both making an on-campus terminal for the bus's work and also includes funding support for the santa cruz frequency upgrades the intention is to proceed step by step as those three elements come online none of which are entirely predictable from where we step but that these are the things that would be done as those things come online phase three is a longer term concept already by the end of phase two metro would be providing the highest amount of service it has ever provided but phase three focuses on some further improvements that are in the longer term based on other priorities that were identified in outreach and in prior outreach processes with phase two we want to show clearly that staff ultimately does want to deliver on everything that the public has asked for and this is that longer list of things he has service ideas for phase three weekend service levels similar to weekday now i can't emphasize too strongly that ever since covid took out much of the classic commute peak weekends have been the place that public transit is growing most effectively all across the country and it has to do with the fact that if you think about everyone who works in the service sector if you think about everyone who works in retail they all work on saturday they all work on weekends when those places tend to be busiest and as a result making life possible for a lower income person holding that kind of job and wanting to live without a car weekend service is just critical likewise evening service is critical that's when you think about when retail closes when you think about when restaurants close what it takes to get everybody home when you always when you look at evening service if you just take a magnifying glass to the last trip of the night yes the ridership will be really low then but one of the things we've discovered i've been through many waves of service cuts and one of the things everyone in our industry has discovered with service cuts is that when you cut the last trip of the night the trip before it dies and so you cut that one in the trip before it dies and this is what happened to evening service in many transit agencies so the the delivery of a full day of service an 18 hour an 18 or 19 hour day of service is critical to making it possible for people to trust the service to be there whenever they need it which makes them possible to plan their lives around it at all and to make decisions about whether to own a car based on that there's also an idea to make much faster service to felton and ben lomond that what we would like to do there if you if you're familiar with what the 35 does it's quite an adventure it goes up the length of scott's valley comes back through scott's valley and then finally takes you up over to felton and then finally picks up highway nine going to boulder creek we'd like ultimately to separate those into two different routes for there to be a scott's valley route to um to santa cruz a separate felton ben lomond route coming past the scott's valley transit center but direct into santa cruz without having to go up the link the scott's valley and back down and those two would connect to each other at the scott's valley transit center so that would be possible still to travel between scott's valley and felton um we think there's a potential for a lot more ridership out of the san lorenzo valley by eliminating that duplication and finally there's a whole list of places where we would like to introduce more frequent service including uh every 15 minute service on highway 17 at least during the peak and every 15 minutes on watsonville local lines and a little bit of additional frequency through capital of village although capital of village continues to be a problem for fixed-route buses because of the congestion and geometry and street geometry um so i'm not even going to show you a map of phase of phase three because it is it is really just uh we want to acknowledge and list that those are the ideas that have been heard from the public that also make sense to me as a as a service planner as a set of priorities and that we would encourage you to go to next so phase two and three are still conceptual drafts um we certainly welcome no no formal action is needed but we welcome the board's advice and we are and of course this will go forward then into a round of public outreach which will last people essentially does phase two match their highest priorities for improvement if not how would they rearrange those priorities and how would they priorities prioritize the longer list of improvements listed in phase three thank you thank you mr rocker director rothkin i have a question we used to have a route an express or call an express route that ran from the east side of santa cruise i think it was 12 a part of a while ago and it got cut because it was not as essential as some of the other routes we had to keep in place but the concept was like remember it correctly and we took a pin map of the um where every faculty staff and student lived and designed the route to gather the three I think it was three stops pick up a lot of people in a kind of concentrated area on the east side of santa cruise and then it went straight to the university without going through the downtown metro center so people got there really quickly relatively speaking again we couldn't afford that route when we were making cuts but it there's been no mention of anything possibly restoring that and the concept I mean I I had maybe there were stars in my eyes visions you know why couldn't you get your newspaper when you got on the bus or you know you could arrange all kinds of current subscription type stuff that things that maybe you charge a little more for this whatever but people really get a quick ride to the university and don't have to go through downtown santa cruise and stop at every place along the way because after it made those three pickups the bus was full and it just went to the university so is that a possible consideration for phase three I mean it's not you don't have there's not an answer like we will do it but is that or is that concept a useful concept well I think the public outreach process is a great time to surface things like that and develop them and talk about them more um I will say about that that's that sort of hyper express service there's got these three we've got these three stops we're picking up lots of people going to the campus it's only going to happen once or twice a day that enough people from there are going to want to go there going on and so it's oriented toward a very narrow peak the challenge with universities is that that works pretty well in the morning when lots of people want to go to the university at the same time whenever the first class the first class they're attending is it doesn't work as well in the afternoon because people tend to leave you the university in a much more scattered way across the afternoon and so you tend universities tend to produce a sharp morning peak in a flatter afternoon peak and it's harder to make that sort of specialized service work in the afternoon but I'm not saying it's impossible but you could also have an express conceivable in the morning and not in the afternoon that's quite possible the other buses quite possible I would just add that uh we also operate the route 12 only ran once in the morning inbound that's all it did but we had a number of limited express buses that once the bus was full as it approached the campus it might high tail its way to a midpoint or three stops on the campus itself and it was very much the same thing the bus is full it can't take anyone more let's go to these other stops so I think I want to say just about this that um there's so much growth to be achieved at the university with sheer frequency right most of the people going to the university are going all over the clock and they're going and you're not just at a concentrated peak and they're coming and going all day all evening and so I think you're going to see the frequency by itself be transformative I also think that once you have that frequency in place and you start seeing the ridership patterns on it you will start then identifying the places where there are additional markets or where there is you know you'll encounter situations where there's overloading at certain hours which suggests that maybe some express is right at that time would help and you'll start seeing you know the possibility for those services reemerge but you gotta have the frequency there first when you described the changes after covid um and wanting to expand to um your evening and weekend service and have that available to people that have to have to go to work um I didn't see holidays in there and I like yeah holidays weekends and holidays I'm sorry yeah holidays generally have the same schedule as I believe the same schedule as Sunday we can get into holidays okay because I if you're trying to get people that normally wouldn't ride the bus to go to the boardwalk or something on those holidays so they don't have to drive that would be great good point we'll take on we'll take on a discussion of that the other uh the other just the note for for uh route 55 which I know will visit it's um the way it runs and doesn't run it is currently the only bus that goes through capitol village and um I'd really liked us to look to see who's actually going to capitol village when we look at service to capitol village because I don't think it's people necessarily from lasalva beach and uh we had a zoom meeting with the lasalva community um before re-establishing their service and some of the comments there were well we don't want to go to Santa Cruz we want to go to Watsonville so I think you need to look as Watsonville's growing more people from mid county are going that way um to do their business because of some of the traffic problems and because there's more available in Watsonville so I just want us to keep that in mind it's not just in Watsonville but to Watsonville um service that way okay uh so I understand that uh phase two is improvements over the course course of 2024 as the resources become available the operators the funding um but I'm wondering for phase three do we have a goal for when that would begin or do we start implementation just once phase two is complete whenever that may be I think you should think of phase three as basically sort of the next tier in a list of priorities and that no one can really predict at this point exactly when at what date you'll get to a particular point on that just whenever phase two is done yeah that's okay thank you a couple things um looks like 61 is a 61 61 is a circulator between gobrio and Watsonville correct yeah it's the eastern half of what is called one in phase one okay so it doesn't continue on so my question is um direct service or transferless service at least from Watsonville to campus we have a large amount of employees that that live in Watsonville and it might be something that's valuable to that to that group um so that could be the 91 um so something to keep in mind that might be uh worth considering um additionally there's no west gate entrance or uh access to the campus are not using the west gate at all uh any more it seems with this concept while empire grade only has a few stops uh it's just something to keep in mind that that now becomes a there's one stop affected there it's the stop at the Arboretum right north southbound that's the only stop on that segment that stop is um walkable from western which would be the nearest stop with frequent service again i'm a botany geek i go to the Arboretum it's not ideal for me but it's it's um it seemed uh and this obviously is something that yeah you at the university are going to work out with metro and have a chance to work through exactly how this works yep um and then just to go back to the the concept of a stop on campus and how you would say you know stuff happens on the street and it's an opportunity to catch up are you saying that if stuff were to happen between the Capitola Mall and campus that the stop would then be skipped in order to catch up no how do you how do you what i'm saying is that i mean the service is what it is it goes down it goes down the road but i'm saying that the furthest the further it has been going the less reliable it's going to be uh further it's been going since its last break and that's why if you want service to flow east across the city from the campus to the east side of Santa Cruz and Capitola it has to be able to that service has to be able to take a break on the campus that's all i'm saying you can't you can't do that you can't expect to do that in a configuration where service comes all the way into the campus loops and drives all the way back across the city without having had a break that serve that returning service will become very unreliable because it's been going for a short break sorry you end up with a shorter break at that stop isn't that well you need enough of a break to catch up to the schedule you know that's what i'm asking usually about 10 percent of the running time reduce the break time so i don't want to i don't want to underestimate what that facility ultimately is there are right there three 15 minute routes and one hourly round so four eight twelve thirteen buses an hour all flowing two way across the campus to a break point on the west side and all flowing back two way this by the way will take up most of what your shuttles are currently doing on the campus in terms of just carrying people back and forth around the loop because this will now be so much frequency you know 13 buses an hour you know averaging better than every five minutes but these are long routes to a 15 minute route arriving at that end point is going to need a break of 10 12 minutes the facility should be scaled on the assumption that now and then two buses from one route will actually stack up there it's not i don't want to so i don't want to underestimate that facility it needs to be quite substantial in order to be able to support this network really really succeed great thank you thank you chair rinick and love the interplay between east side of santa cruise live oak and the university i think there's never been a place i've lived in live oak where i didn't have university students living somewhere next door so it's definitely needed the one question is i mean in that area the difference between obviously phase one and phase two is that we're no longer splitting the three into three a and three b is there a reason why the logic that led us to split it in the for phase one changes with phase two reason the logic changes is that once we have the bridge back this is further in the future and we've drawn assuming we have the bridge back and that of course so whenever that happens if you're going to if we come west portola go up seventh across brahmer sorry go up go up across 17th across brahmer and back down now we've gotten close enough to twin lakes but i don't necessarily feel like i need to have gone within wahi distance of that by virtue of having gotten back down and so that's why this is suggested but again as this goes through public outreach if this if the that's a question we'll ask would people rather see all this frequency going one direction or they'd rather have to continue to have the split which will give them 30 minutes through service through twin lakes and 30 minutes service on brahmer great thanks for the explanation so talking about the financial basis for this the contributions of the university are absolutely key to make this work and i understand we have some of these preliminary discussions that suggest that's not ridiculous that that's a possibility it won't be easy it's never easy to extract money from a partner in these kinds of things but even that is not enough to make this really work if we want to be a world-class system i think in our least in our earlier discussions we had a pretty clear idea that we need to look at a local tax and something like a half-cent sales tax um i don't we've talked about this in the past i don't think we can sell this at the level of give us a half-cent sales tax and we'll try and keep the system together for you this is give us a half-cent sales tax and we will have a world-class system that will compete with bolder colorado and portland or again and other places that people you know site is the places where they're dealing with transportation um there's a bunch of other folks that are thinking about getting sales tax it's a strange little dance that goes on like who gets november 24 um you know when there's a more progressive vote that's out there if we're thinking about doing this fairly soon like like a vote in november i don't know we are how and when will we make a decision about beginning to like put our dibs in i mean so that you know when somebody says well we're thinking about november 24 say we've already we put that out there already we've been working on this thing and this is going to get us a world-class and it's tight as monos pointed out to the housing problems that we've gotten and blah blah blah i'm just making a plea here that we need to sort of get out there soon if we're thinking about this year and even some other date in the following year so it's just to michael not to to jared like what are our prospects for they being able to say to people we are even though we're implementing one phase one we're already on phase two and beginning to think about holding our space for a serious sales tax because again i i really think the people in this community would support this if they really knew that it was going to like result in something that really made a difference um which i think we can offer them even what we're talking about here so what are your thoughts about when we sort of launch this to the public and start claiming a date or something it's pretty concrete is a question yeah um so it is kind of a delicate dance with multiple partners and trying to find the right partner and the right timing of the dance and so on so i will tell you that phase two does require participation by the university and it does require if you to run a long term beyond a pilot project it will require an augmentation and funding one of the options could be that ballot measure it's been 45 years since you've been on a ballot by yourself to make improvements with metro i think there's a lot of good resonating sound bites in addition to a pilot that the that the public could actually see feel and and try that could motivate towards a successful ballot measure we've done polling and and obviously uh have seen a lot of strength in the number of folks it would be supportive of increasing funding for metro i will say that those who are looking for dancing partners and looking to land on a strategy and a year all know that we have been seriously considering november of 24 and i would say that just lots of discussions happening on a daily basis and i would assume that the board's talking about it in the very near future because you're right there's a lot of work that needs to be done if november of 24 was the date but there's also a lot of discussion on other dates as well as financial analysis of how we would fare going on a different date if if that was the board's desire our comments okay i will take it out to the public and get comments from public on this Eduardo Montesino like i said i'm more excited about the plan too even or phase two because it's it provides a vision a roadmap you know there's details to be worked out but we'll get there you know it's the vision that we that we got a plan in the community to see that it's going to get us you know to a potential sales tax to a you know to a renowned robust if since that we've needed for a long time you know we've gone through the 12 a's we've gone through the 91 so going out of the way ucs we've gone you know we lost a lot of ridership in ucs staff doing the carpal's we've gone you lost a lot of the farm workers you know because we cut service in watsonville so we've done a lot of these things um so this provides a roadmap you know to get us into the future to get us to get people not only the people that use it all the time but to get people on board because you know we're working on all these plans all the cities in the county to not provide enough space for parking well they need an option and we are that option so we gotta provide that vision and look forward to working with all of you and to provide this continue on this vision moving forward thank you for me i think to uh after hearing the funding coming from ucsc and that's phase two and like what happens if that doesn't actually happen like because phase three was watsonville 15 minute you know trips and watsonville is like if phase two doesn't go through like what happens to phase three uh that's some of our questions um hopefully you know like we could still get that amount of service in watsonville and uh another kind of question i throw in there is like the i know um metro mostly has the large buses i seen some like smaller buses in monorail and i'm wondering like uh is it because like there are no as like wheelchair accessible or has that like any of that uh to reduce you know the cost has that been looked into or to provide more um to reduce cost in some areas i had a quick question um so metro so this is a lot more frequency than metro's ever done before which is really exciting but metro doesn't currently have the operational policies needed to reliably operate frequent service like this things you'd see at other transit agencies such as outdoor boarding to reduce dwell times uh or if you have two buses bunched up right back to back the bus in front goes drop off only so it can you know get ahead a little bit um is metro going to be considering the operational policies in conjunction with the phase two process so we don't really do q and a in this format but you can pose your question and then when we come back to staff i'll see if they can answer that thank you um other public comments um i really like the changes proposed in phase one and in phase two i would just like to encourage everybody involved in developing phase two to consider changes that would make the 35 more reliable as of right now and after it turns around like past then then loman it is almost always behind schedule so thank you thank you mr ergo if you could come and speak to um two questions that were brought up around operational policies to operate at this frequency and then the other one was what if phase two doesn't happen and maybe that's um sure ask so we are actually considering all-door boarding for phase one we haven't made a final decision on that but it's a discussion we've been having perhaps just around the loop at the campus perhaps uh the entirety of the routes 18 and 19 so we are considering all-door boarding uh with phase one and we'll continue to develop operational policies to address bus bunching and reliability as we roll out phase two in terms of what if phase two doesn't happen so again we'll we're going to jump into the details in october at the finance committee meeting and and beyond um but the general idea is that phase two can be faced so there are improvements that we can roll out uh over time assuming we have the operators and resources to do so so it doesn't need to be an all-in-one package some of it does you know if we go forward with this idea of uh introducing a break in the route at cabrillo that obviously has to come with the frequency on both sides to both Watsonville and Santa Cruz um but other improvements like the three and the two can come on uh before just the three i'll say but anyway phase two can be faced well just a question on the question on smaller buses and why can i help with that one um we we recently completed this very similar study for mst for moderately as transits we're very familiar with their smaller buses please remember that operating cost is mostly labor and that the size of the bus does not have a very large effect on the operating cost at all the primary reason to have smaller buses is to fit around tighter corners in difficult geometry it's not because there's any cost savings to it uh so keep that in mind a good a smart transit agency runs the largest bus it will ever need in any time during the course of the day and and the and the empty seats on the bus are not costing you anything so it's better to have a bus that's too large than too small thank you one other question the i hear from boulder creek then loman and um some of the same concerns that were mentioned that lack of reliability and i'm i'm understanding that phase one will address that and obviously part of the problem is it's more rural and harder i mean in scott's valley people say well you've got buses so i don't have to walk from granite creek to scott's valley drive they don't come into my neighborhood so it's not boulder creek or ben loman that's being um you know receiving less service but the question i or what i'm hearing i want to be able to take back that phase one will begin addressing the um efficiency and shorter timeframes phase one is the first step toward it i don't want to promise that taking that little emeline deviation off is going to fix everything that's wrong with route 35 it's a big long route has a lot going on phase three which takes the scott's valley deviation off the route starts to make a bigger difference toward making the route more useful and uh but ultimately you know reliability is going to be a challenge and of course you know access from some of the remote neighborhoods in the forest we've had quite a bit of conversation in the course of the design workshop we talked through all those neighborhoods from which various requests have come and it often just comes down to visualizing the physical reality of what those neighborhoods are and what you would have to do in order to get closer to them it becomes very hard to do efficiently and even highway nine makes it challenging yeah yeah thank you just another issue of small buses is you have to keep a complete separate inventory of parts if you have different different if you have right if instead of three kinds of buses you got 12 kinds of buses or something so yeah especially as you head into this new hydrogen future you're going to want to minimize the diversity of your fleet definitely great thank you and i don't do we need a yeah so this was okay well thank you so much mr. walker for being here today with us and for the presentation and all your work and thank you all for the robust discussion you're here yeah all right we are on item 14 which is ceo oral report all right well i uh i'm just excited about today i'm not going to give you a lengthy list of good bad ugly that's going on behind the scenes because there's not a lot of good there's not a lot of bad or ugly it just really continues to move forward in a positive direction really excited about the the action items that you participated in today i would like to say just a special thanks for all of the public that visited our booth during the fair it was just uh you know on sunday i was there for uh all the afternoon and it just uh was like 20 to 30 people constantly in line to learn about metro to spin the wheel and get a prize and a lot of folks came up and talked about employment with metro and in particular animiri was there and just did like a masterful job of talking to them about you know the benefits of working with metro both for males and females i uh wanted to just recognize that the articulated buses from san diego the 15 that we needed and would like to run on the routes that are servicing the university there was a slight delay as new flyer was having some supply issues and getting san diego their new buses so of course they wouldn't release the artics to us till their new buses came in but the first three of the 15 came in this morning they look great they performed great from san diego on into santa cruz and so we're hopeful that about three buses come in every week until we get to the 15 and so we're going to turn them around we're going to get them on the service you may still see some of the colors that san diego transit uses on them until uh danielle gets a chance to put the metro scheme on them and some one right at a time work on some of them and so we're excited that's it's all going in the right direction but a hiccup and in just timing and um yeah you know what i'm just excited to be here i think that's the comment i'd give you my gosh it's uh this is really exciting and i'm excited to see what the public thinks of phase two and uh finance committee has some heavy lifts ahead of it but it has options and i really think doing a demonstration project as soon as we have the drivers to be able to do phase two we'll give the public a year or two to really experience what this world class uh transit system can do for not only housing but for congestion for equity and in the whole list of opportunities sitting in the county are very positive in discussions about transit signal priority for the 15 minute service so that the buses move through the intersections quickly and that will be a key component and it'll be exciting to to to see how this all unfolds with phase two and we think that we'll be back in november at the latest for an action item with phase two just to kind of give you a preview and a timing of that so with that i i don't have any more comments thank you are there questions for um from the board okay um all right so then item 15 our next meeting is friday october 27th at nine a.m at the watsonville city council chambers that's at 275 main street in watsonville and with that i will adjourn our meeting thank you all for being here