 Good morning and welcome to the September 6th meeting of the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission. Could we start with a roll call? Commissioner Bertrand. Here. Commissioner Brown. Here. Commissioner Randy Johnson. Here. Commissioner Kaufman-Gomez. Here. Commissioner Caput. Here. Commissioner alternate Schifrin. Here. Commissioner alternate Mulherrn. Here. Commissioner Leopold. Here. Commissioner alternate Virginia Johnson. Here. Commissioner Botthorff. Here. Commissioner Chase. Here. Commissioner Watkin. Here. And Commissioner McLendon. All right. We will start with a review of items to be discussed in closed session. Yes, Mr. Chair, you do have a closed session scheduled today. It's a labor closed session, conference with labor negotiators pursuant to government code 54957.6. Is there anyone who would like to address us about items in closed session? Good morning. My name is Veronica Rodriguez and I am the internal organizer for SAU 521 and I represent the RTC core group in RTC. And so I'm only here to say that we were done with negotiating. That's a good thing. And that we feel that in the core, the membership feel that it was a fair contract. And when you review it during closed sessions, I'm hoping that you see, you also agree with that. We had a ratification vote last week and it passed by 100% by the core membership. So they're also in agreement. So they were hoping that when you go in closed sessions, you see and that you also feel the same. You agree with that. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Is there anyone else who would like to address us? Seeing none, we're going to go into the room for a closed session and we'll be back here as soon as possible. There is no report out of our closed sessions. But thank you for your patience. Now we will continue on with our meeting. This is a time for oral communications. This is an opportunity for people to address the commission on items of responsibility of the RTC, but not on today's agenda. Please come forward. Good morning. My name is Dean. I attended the Watsonville presentation about the train and all. Recently, I read a study. I read a summary of a study. Can't remember where, which stated that invariably when cities or jurisdictions add rail to their transit mix, the net effect is less usage of public transit. Don't know if that's true. I would like to know more about it and I bring it to your attention because it seems like it would be pertinent. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning. Hope everybody had a wonderful Labor Day weekend. First, I have a handout in front of you, an invitation to get together from this campaign for sustainable transportation. My name is Michael St. And the reason I gave you that handout is the subject of our speaker Melanie Curry. The subject is a gap between our climate goals and our transportation policies. So it's an educational thing. So you're invited. I hope you can attend. Also I wanted to clear up some frustration. I think the commission had last meeting at the August 16th RTC meeting and that was certain advocates coming up and constantly talking about HOV lanes. And I think that was a little bit of frustration for you. I just wanted to clarify that CFST does not advocate for HOV lanes. I was hoping we were not being singled out for that. And our primary advocacy is either for a no build project or dedicated shoulder for mass transit. So that comes up again. Hopefully it doesn't. But now I'd like to speak as a taxpayer and basically a believer in climate change. Personally, as all of us are getting tired of paying for the effects of climate change and for projects that do nothing to mitigate but actually increase our global warming, i.e. highway widening for single occupancy cars and the cost that it's going to be costing us in the future with the increase in our global warming. Basic some of these costs, just two I can mention offhand are the costs of the wildfires here in California. Primarily we had $443 million of emergency wildfire funding that is presently exhausted and I'm sure the fires are going to continue for a month or two more. So that's going to cost our society. And one that's come up that's not surprised me is according to this week's August 31st sentinel what climate change will cost our state. Basically the taxpayer has a possibility of paying PG&E's negligence regarding wildfires. Climate change will continue to exasperate and disasters cost us billions of dollars in the future. This is why I support not widening highways anything that costs and having to mitigate its own contribution of greenhouse gases towards global warming is something I do not support. Not to mention that auto travel is the most dangerous form of transportation. To quote a friend's letter to the sentinel, climate change is now a bread and butter issue. It's extremely expensive. Our elected officials and candidates for office need us to tell them in no uncertain terms that we're going to be tired of paying all these bills and ask them what they specifically endorse to bend the curve into sustainability. And then we all need to vote. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning. Barry Scott. I live in Aptus. And I just have three thank yous for the commission today. First is thank you for your vote in June to allow Progressive Rail to become the operator. Thanks, Urdu, as we see the empty tank cars leaving town. This was something that nobody wanted to see those things around, and I'm glad to see that they're on their way out. I understand, too, that improvements are being made, improvements are being made to make sure that freight service in Watsonville is continuous and expanding, and that repairs are made at the crossings and the signals and so forth to keep this line viable, and that Progress is expected on the washout at mile post five. And the last thank you is thank you for the speaker series, Jeffrey Tunlin. Last night I enjoyed his presentation. I'm back for it again today. Thank you for having this. I hope that we repeat this, continue this. I think it's clear that the community has a lot of, a lot invested in this, but there's also a lot of misinformation and a need, a great, great need for more information. Transportation is a sophisticated topic, and it takes speakers and professionals like these to come in, and I think that's one of the best things the RTC has done since I've been following matters. So thank you for that. Keep it up. Seeing no one else, we'll look to see if there's additions or deletions to the agenda. We have one add on page for item 23. Okay. Thank you. Then we'll move on to the consent agenda. I'll look to my colleagues to see if there's any item they'd like to comment on or pool from the agenda. Mr. Schifrin. I have a couple of comments on items 9 and 10. I don't really need to pull them. This is the auxiliary lane cooperative agreement with Caltrans is number 9, and I just want to raise a concern based on our experience with past Highway 1 project. It always seems a little tricky to me to have an agreement where we're paying the cost, but somebody else is deciding what they're going to end up being. And so I, as I understand the agreement, the commission is, contract is going to oversee the design and approval of the auxiliary lane project, but Caltrans is going to be in charge of the construction. And I don't, it's their road. I don't necessarily have a problem with that, but since the measure D funds are going to be paying the lion's share of the cost, I'm a little concerned that the commission be actively involved in that construction process so that we don't end up with the $800,000 bill at the end of the, at the end of the time because things happened that the commission had no control over. So that's my concern about that. On number 10, which is a design contract, I'll just mention that I can understand why we're moving forward with a design contract for the auxiliary lane project before the environmental document is certified and completed, but it's a somewhat dangerous approach to take because oftentimes the environmental document will have mitigation measures or changes as a result of that process that could change the design. So I understand why it's being done. I'm not opposing it, but I just wanted to sort of raise the concern and maybe ask the question of staff of whether we have another date or maybe I've forgotten the date when the final EIR EA is going to be out on the Highway 1 projects. I'm going to defer to Sarah, but as far as I know, we have not changed the date and be in December. Thank you. So for the EIR we are on schedule for the end of the year and we're very, very, very close. It's like very minor wording changes at this point and the document's actually going to FHWA this month. So we see it as we see the light at the end of the tunnel and we're comfortable with advancing the design. Okay. Thank you. And as for the first question you had about Caltrans, your concern for Caltrans leading the construction phase, if we decide later that we want to take it on, we can amend the co-op and we could definitely discuss that at a later date if you're concerned. Thank you. Before you leave. So I remember when you brought up working with Caltrans and that was a very interesting discussion. So there's a give and take here and you're okay. That's all I want to say. I do have a question about consent agenda. It'll be hard for them for the minutes to reflect your question, but I appreciate it. So Mr. Bertrand, the items on the consent agenda. Yes, sir. I'd like to either pull item eight or have it changed. And for the draft minutes of August 16th when Ed Bortoff was chairing, I brought up a item for a future agenda discussion and that's not captured in the minutes. It was stated at the meeting when I brought it up that it would be agendized in the future meeting, which would be this meeting. And so I'd like a review of the minutes as recorded and have the agenda. All right. Well, then we'll pull the item just so and I'll put it at the end of the day. So I don't want to get into it now. Yes. We have our first speakers already here. Yes. I'm just going to pull this to the end of the agenda. That's acceptable. Thank you. So we'll pull that off the agenda and we will make it item 25.1. Mr. Johnson. Thank you, chair. So item 14, which is the approved memoranda of understanding extensions, I will be voting no on that. So if you just, I don't need to overly reflect your no vote. And primarily simply because it's overly generous and not really interested in the interests of the taxpayers. Now I'll see if there's members of the public who would, if there's any items to briefly comment on or seeing none, I'll bring it back to our commission for the movement consent agenda as amended. Second. Motion by Schiffer and seconded by Rockin, all in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? Mr. Johnson's recorded as a no on item 14. So now we move on to our regular agenda. I'm going to ask that we jump to item 22 because we have our state senator here, Bill Monning. This is a state legislative and funding updates adopted position opposing proposition six. Senator Monning has been a great advocate for the county of Santa Cruz and has been a leader when we've come to ask him or the Metro has come to talk to him about transportation issues that were very appreciative of that. He's also worked to pass legislation to make it safer on the highway with his legislation about a truck driver education. And last year with the passage of SB1, it required a two thirds vote as senate majority leader. He plays a role in that and because it passed with the exact number of votes, we couldn't have done it without him. So good morning, Senator Monning. Good morning, Mr. Chair and members and Director Dondaro. I appreciate the opportunity to join you this morning and I'm going to offer a couple of overviews on our state budget in this recent legislative session as relate to transportation issues. And then I will focus a little on proposition six and some pertinent legislation related to transportation issues and I'll welcome your questions as well. Again, I want to thank you all for your service and with a singular focus of transportation and safety being interlinked in the work that you do representing Santa Cruz County and communities. So we passed a record budget this year and on time budget. It was our eighth on time balanced budget unlike the federal government. We must have a budget that reconciles revenue with spending. Our biggest increases went to education K through 12 and higher education were the biggest beneficiaries as well as our rainy day fund, our reserve fund. That's the good news. And as you've all followed our ongoing challenge in the state has been wildfires, wildfires that used to be contained to what was known as fire season. Now we have year round fire season and tragic fire incidents from Northern California to Southern California to Central California, Central Valley and Yosemite and some of those fatality fires both residents and firefighters. When I was elected to the Assembly in 2008 our fire suppression budget was $50 million a year. The past two years we've exceeded $1 billion and we're on the path to that marker this year early in the budget year which starts July 1st and we've necessarily had to go into reserves to pay that fire suppression and firefighting budget. We just passed at the close of session a joint conference committee recommendation of a committee that was convened by Governor Brown to respond to the 2017 fires the billions of dollars of damages over 5,000 homes lost in Northern California and trying to find a pathway to keep energy flowing to our communities in Northern California and having those responsible where fault has been found to shoulder the expense of those remedies and home replacements. Senate Bill 901 supported by both houses and now on the governor's desk addresses not only utility liability but on this area related to fires that does link to transportation and allocation of $200 million per year for the next five years out of what we call our cap and trade funds directing that specifically to prevention to trying to clear brush and dead trees to try to address what were afflicted by drought that is the biggest cause of these wild fires is sustained drought linked to climate change and this new normal of dry and dead timber throughout our forest areas. So part of SB 1 a lot of the headlines have been have said bail out for PG&E. If you look down I think the committee was very thoughtful in trying to balance maintaining services to residents throughout the state and having a liability equation that does not put it all on rate payers where there's a finding of negligence or gross negligence that maintains liability on shareholders of privately owned utility corporations where there's the result of drought high winds and sparked fires that aren't traced to the negligence of the utility what the committee approved was the ability of a public utility in this case PG&E to issue long term bonds to try to minimize the increase to rate payers. So that's a little bit of an aside but I want to bring it back to transportation as we start to look now at the benefits of Senate Bill 1 that we passed last year and which is now going to face voters on the November ballot on Proposition 6 in effort to repeal that passage of SB 1 and the road protection bridge protection public safety protection that it offers to every California resident. As you have in your materials I won't recite all the projects in Santa Cruz County but every county in the state is a beneficiary and every incorporated city and community is a beneficiary. As was mentioned it was a two-thirds vote in each house bipartisan support in each house to raise five billion dollars per year to address a hundred and thirty billion dollar challenge of road repair and maintenance. Interestingly Senate Bill 1 was supported by the California Chamber of Commerce by the League of Cities by CSAC the county's Association of Counties. It was supported by the California Trucking Association. So part of this equation at the gas pump is truckers are going to pay more for a gallon of diesel and yet they supported Senate Bill 1 and they opposed Proposition 6. Why? Well their biggest investment is those trucks. The safety of their drivers is paramount and they said bring it on. We will pay more for a gallon of diesel if we can be assured that that revenue will be invested in road safety, bridge repair, road maintenance, etc. So voters in our last election passed a constitutional amendment that guarantees what the language in SB 1 already said. Any money raised for transportation can only be spent on transportation, can't be spent on high speed rail, its roads, its bridges, and its public transit. So you have in your materials how Santa Cruz County will benefit. Let me just highlight a couple of those benefits that you have from your materials. Already since Senate Bill 1 went into effect November 1st all of our communities are already benefiting from that increased investment and most communities roughly enjoy twice the highway and road support they did from the prior revenue stream. In Santa Cruz County local streets and road projects have already received $7 million per year from SB 1 investments. Transit projects will receive approximately $3 million per year. The Highway 9 bridge replacement $23 million that's in the pipeline. Highway 1 and Highway 9 intersection improvements $3 million. Bicycle pedestrian bridge over Highway 1 at Maravista $7 million and Harkins Slough Road $14 million. And these lists go on. I also want to highlight particularly for Santa Cruz County residents the safety contemplated both by the Route 9 San Lorenzo River and Kings Creek Bridge project $23,200,000 and the Highway 17 repaving $19 million. Friends if voters vote to repeal Proposition 6 this all goes away. Supporters of Proposition 6 say the money's in the general fund. The state should be paying this out of general fund money. I've already cited how we're going into reserves to pay for firefighting. How we've increased our budget to education largely because of our Prop 98 requirement. You know 50 cents of every dollar we receive in the state budget by the will of the voters goes to education K-12 and community colleges. So that's 50 cents off every dollar right off the top. And you go down each category of our spending for health and human services for other county supported programs. A lot of that budget is directed and earmarked before we ever pass a budget. There's very little discretionary budget maintaining a state that is now the fifth largest economy in the world. We've passed the United Kingdom to number five. We have a state economy of over $2 trillion per year and we're supporting that with a state budget of $138 billion a year. That's transportation, that's infrastructure, that's public safety, that's response to fires. The volatility of our general fund were nine years into recovery from the 2008-2009 crash. You look retrospectively, most economic recovery has never lasted more than seven years. We're into the ninth year. Most economists say it's not a question of whether it's a question of when. We're going to hit a dip. Will it be a dip? Will it be a crash? Will it be a major recession? The beauty of SB1 and what was supported by two-thirds of the legislature is that that is a guaranteed source of revenue for roads, bridges, safety. If you relied on the general fund with the volatility of that general fund, there's no way you could guarantee and plan as transportation committees, as Caltrans, et cetera. These projects are years in the design and planning and often years in the construction. The maintenance is an ongoing need that we're in arrears. The beauty of SB1 and the importance of rejecting Proposition 6 is to guarantee this steady, predictable form of revenue and who pays it? The people using the roads. We're not passing this off as interest payments to taxpayers. This is a user pay fee. Those using the roads are paying for the roads that they use. We even have a provision for those that are driving electric vehicles and not stopping in our gas pumps. They're still contributing to the wear and tear on the roads. And starting in 2020, they too will pay an annual fee for that share of road repair and maintenance that they are contributing to. So I've got a binder and I think you do too full of road projects around the state of California and in Santa Cruz County. Not only will this improve public safety for those using the roads and highways, it will also create 68,000 jobs, high paying, good jobs. And the people earning those paychecks, they're spending those paychecks in our communities. So this is a win-win for the roads, the public safety, the bridges of the California, but also for our local economies in terms of this greater investment of those who are working. Now you're going to see TV ads, vote yes on Prop 6, repeal the gas tax, repeal the gas tax. But you need to ask yourself when you see those ads, who's behind them and what's going to replace it? There's no magic pot of money that if we lose this five billion a year of investment, Santa Cruz County will be a big loser, Capitola will be a big loser, the city of Santa Cruz will be a big loser. Every city in the district I represent, 21 incorporated cities will be losers. That's why every city council I meet with, every board of supervisors I meet with say, vote no on Proposition 6. I know it's on your agenda today and I just close urging you to support that no vote. You will be in the company of public servants and representatives in public entities throughout the state of California. And I'm glad to answer questions on that, but if I might, Mr. Chair, I just wanted to thank the board for support of some of our bills that have made it through the legislature and sit on the governor's desk. You referred to my Senate Bill 1236. That was prompted by the tragedy that took the life of 25-year-old Daniel McGuire commuting from Santa Cruz to his job in the Silicon Valley and a truck driver with minimal experience, with minimal training, carrying a double load of aggregate, did not know how to use his gears to break. He ran into 10 vehicles, including the one driven by Daniel McGuire who perished at the age of 25. Why was this driver on Route 17? Because his boss told him to avoid a CHP way station on 101 and circumvent that by coming across at Watsonville and go over Route 17. We learned through the litigation related to that case of that negligence, but not every tragedy is cause for legislation. But when we looked into this one, when we met with Daniel's family and took account of what had led to this unnecessary loss of life, we found that the state of Washington has a requirement for behind-the-wheel training for truck drivers. What I should have said, we first learned California has no requirement for people with a Class A license to have any behind-the-wheel training. They show up at the DMV, they do do a driving test, a controlled driving test, and they get their Class A license. Senate Bill 1236, supported by the Independent Truckers Association by the Teamsters, is now on the governor's desk. And I want to thank you all for your support of that. It has a minimal 15 hours of behind-the-wheel training. That's 15 hours more than truckers currently have to have. So I thank you for the support of that and for the patients of the McGuire family. This will be a lasting legacy for Daniel. It won't bring him back, but it will hopefully save other lives in the state of California. A number of bills listed that you've supported. I won't recite all of those. We did pass the committee trailer bill budget on transportation that also provides further support to infrastructure in transportation projects. And Senator Bell, good colleague who represents Santa's Day just over the hill, we share parts of Route 17, his Senate Bill 1328 is now also on the governor's desk. That extends Road Usage Charge Technical Advisory Committee through 2022. That committee is trying to look at how do we reduce fatalities per miles traveled. And again, that's intricately linked to rejecting Proposition 6 on the November ballot. And I think, friends, I'll pause there and welcome any of your questions or comments. Thank you so much for your presentation, for your leadership in Sacramento and for your advocacy against Proposition 6. I know many of our jurisdictions have already taken a position of opposition. The Transit District has also taken a position of opposition. We know how important it is for these funds. And my rural constituents are, you know, they have a road, a Granite Creek Road that had a PCI of 15. It was a barely passable road that's now being fixed. And we have a big sign there that says paid for by SB 1. And we're trying to let people know how their money is being used. So thank you for your work. Mr. Johnson. Thank you, Chair. Scott's Valley did the same last night. You brought up the issue of wildfires and the amount of fuel sometimes along with the wind that kind of breeds destructive wildfires. I know that in the past there's been some resistance on local people against responsible foresting that can kind of cull through the dead wood and all that fuel. And I'm hopeful that, you know, even though sometimes having, you know, people come in and cut down trees and so forth is unpopular. But at the same time, you kind of have to get rid of all that fuel that just lies there waiting to be infernalized. I don't think that's a word, but I appreciate that. And that is part of the balancing act that we've tried to grapple with in Sacramento. And I think given the the horror of the conflagrations afflicting our state, you'll find a much higher appetite in Sacramento right now to provide mechanisms for that clearance to take place. I mentioned the 200 million a year. We also had it in the last year's budget 200 million, but now we guarantee it out of the cap and trade funds as an appropriate investment of cap and trade funds. But as you can imagine, 58 counties, 200 million doesn't spread very far. So we need other partnerships. We're looking to federal partnerships as well for a lot of our forests, our U.S. Forestry Service control, but that partnership between the feds, the state, and local to try to reduce the risk, that's that's imperative. So thank you. Thank you. Mr. Bertrand. Senator Monning, I appreciate the time I spent in your office as your intern working on my public policy degree. So following up on what Randy said, I think the education has been somewhat effective. My daughter phoned me up and said, Dad, we're going up to our property and we're going to cut down dead trees. So thank you for your program. I appreciate it. Great. And thank you. And I don't know if I need to apologize that our internship did not deter you from pursuing current position, but thank you for your service. That was just the opposite. Thank you. Good. Good. Mr. Rockett. First of all, Senator Monning, thank you for your presentation. One thing that's worth mentioning is the fact that the public often think that the high gas prices that we're facing right now, and they are relatively high for the United States, are due somehow to this, the SB1. And it's really important to point out to people that the SB1 contribution to the cost of gas is still trivial compared to what's happening in the marketplace and whatever other manipulations are going on that cause us every fall to have increased fuel prices and this year to have them higher than they've been traditionally. And I think we need to make sure our campaign explains that to people because I have heard people saying, you know, gas prices are so high, is it caused by that tax? No, that is not the cause of what's going on here and people need to understand that. And I just want to thank you for your very eloquent representation of how important SB1 is to this community. Yeah. Well, thank you for mentioning that. And if I could just take a moment, because that's a critical point of the fluctuation of what we're paying at the gas pump per gallon has much more to do with international oil costs and the manipulation, quite frankly, of our oil prices by the oil companies. I'm fearful and have some trepidation as to what fuel prices will be like in the month of October and whether there'll be any artificial manipulation. But SB1 fees went into effect November 1st of last year, 2017. They increased what we pay per gallon by 12 cents. It's fixed. It's not a percentage of what you pay. It's 12 cents increase per gallon. Last July before it went into effect, I keep record every time I fill my tank. I paid 379 a gallon last July. The fee went into effect November 1st. In early December, I paid 315 a gallon. That included the 12 cent increase, but it was less than I paid for a gallon in July. Now we see the prices hovering in the high $3, low $4 per gallon. Recent news reports, economic reports, storms in the Gulf have disrupted the predictability of oil coming from platforms in the Gulf. That's affecting right now what we're paying at the gas pump. And ironically caused by global warming issues that cause those storms to be more serious. I appreciate you're mentioning that. So it is important to look at the broader economics of oil and fuel. And again, to come back to this notion, we're the ones using the roads and highways. We want them safe not only for ourselves, but for our children, our relatives, for school buses, for firefighters and public safety workers. You know, some of their response time is affected by our inability to maintain roads or make necessary improvements. So it links to our ability for first responders as well. Our messaging in NOAA N6 is to lead with what we lose if Proposition 6 passes. Now, someone necessarily want to get into the discussion of gas fees and cost of the pump. I think the proponents will lead with that. But we believe that's a distraction. The focus should be on projects that are in the pipeline because of Senate Bill 1 and will be protected by the rejection of Prop 6 and go community by community. We can tell people in Capitola, in Santa Cruz, in Scotts Valley, in Watsonville, we can point to the road projects that are in the pipeline now that will disappear if Prop 6 passes. We do need to take action in opposition, don't we? Yes. So I would be open to a I saw many were here from the public first. I'll just get it on the table here. I move that we approve the staff recommendation which includes adopt an opposed position on Prop 6. I second that motion by Schiff and seconded by Rockin. Now we'll see if there's any member of the public who would like to address this briefly. I'm just going to say thank you all. Again, appreciate your leadership and keeping our roads and highways safe. So thank you all for your leadership. Well, thank you for your ongoing leadership. Appreciate this opportunity. Thank you. Is there any member of the public who would like to come say anything? Seeing none. Oh, good morning. Just very quickly. Bike Santa Cruz County supports your recommendation to have a no position on Proposition 6. We greatly appreciate the act of transportation funding that has been included in SB 1 and is now available that wasn't there before. Thanks. Thank you. Seeing no one else, I'll bring it back to our commission. All in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you again, Senator Monning, for all you do. Thank you all. Take this message to Southern California. Yeah. We need a lot of votes up here is really what it comes down to. I'm going to try to move through the other pieces so we can hear our featured speaker. Are there commissioner reports? Anyone who would like to make a quick report? Mr. Bertron. Yeah. Last week I went to the climate adaptation conference and I like to point out the fourth assessment has been put out and it's a very dense reading, but it covers many different issues related to climate adaptation and the issues due to climate change. So look for the fourth assessment. And I think many of the issues that you may be working on are addressed there and the contributors are totally immense. Very good background behind the people who actually wrote the reports. Thanks. Seeing no other commissioners, I'll move to our next item, which is our director's report. Good morning, Mr. Dondaro. Yes. Good morning, Mr. Chairman and commissioners. Just two items to share with you today. First, last month we promised you a quick report on update on the unified corridor study. The draft report of that study will be brought to you at the October 4th RTC meeting. There will be no action recommended at this meeting for that item. During the month of October, there will be a series of outreach meetings to seek input on the draft document that consists of the following. A stakeholder meeting with partner agencies, focus group meetings with community organizations, two public workshops, one in North County and one in South County, RTC advisory committee meetings and presentations at city council meetings. Locations and times are yet to be determined on those. Members of the public have expressed interest in an evening public meeting. Therefore, staff proposes an RTC special meeting on the evening of Thursday, November 15th, starting at 6 p.m. That would be publicly noticed at this evening meeting. The second draft document will be presented containing the recommended preferred scenario. The location is still to be determined for that meeting. There will be no action recommended at this meeting for that item. And the final draft UCS document will be presented at the December 6th RTC meeting where approval of a preferred scenario will be requested. Then the other item is just to remind everybody about our innovators innovators in transportation speaker series. We have our final speaker who will address the commission here today. We'll get to that in a little bit. But also in two weeks, we have one more speaker lined up. She will not be here to address the commission, but we will have a public presentation Wednesday, September 19th at 6.30 p.m. in the Veterans Memorial Building here in Santa Cruz. That's the presenter will be Becky Stechler. And she's the program manager of the Urbanism Next program at the Sustainable Cities Initiative at the University of Oregon. And her topic is impacts of emerging technologies on communities. Be a very engaging presentation. We will have it recorded and post a video of it on our website afterwards for those who can't make it. But that will be open to all and we encourage the commission to attend that as well. Again, it's Wednesday, September 19th at 6.30 p.m. at the Veterans Building. That's all I have to report. I'll be glad to answer any questions. Mr. Bertron. Thank you, George, for scheduling an evening meeting. And I think that came up at a recent Watsonville meeting of the RTC from public comments. So thank you. Anyone else? Then we'll move on to item number 23, which is our Caltrans report. Good morning, Mr. McClendon. Good morning, Mr. Chair. Good morning, commissioners. I also have two quick items. The first is announcement of the California Transportation Commission. We'll host a town hall meeting on September 19th in Gonzales at the Gonzales City Hall. The agenda topics will include agricultural goods movement in the Salinas Valley, Monterey County Transportation, transit service in the Valley, and U.S. 101 general overview. My second announcement is a call for projects from the California Strategic Growth Council. It's part of the Transformative Climate Communities Program. They're cycle two of that program. They're offering $46 million for implementation and $800,000 for planning grants. The program is part of Assembly Bill 32 aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions through developing and implementing neighborhood-level transformative climate community plans. Our community plans include multiple coordinated greenhouse gas reduction efforts providing local economic, environmental, and health benefits for disadvantaged communities. That announcement has been shared with RTC staff and we've asked for them to distribute it to the technical advisory committee roster. That's all I have. Thank you. I'll see if there's any brief questions. Mr. Schifrin. It's partially a question, partially a request. There's a pretty significant litter problem on Highway 1 north of the city of Santa Cruz between the city and Dimeo Lane. It's about a 2.7 mile stretch. Commissioner Coonerty, who's the county supervisor for that area, has received a significant number of complaints about that ongoing problem. The office has contracted Caltrans' maintenance staff and been told that resources are slim, which is understandable, but we've also been told that at times Caltrans does contract with nonprofits and other groups to assist with litter control. The county is contracting with a group called the Downtown Streets Team to do beach cleanup at county facilities on the North Coast. They're up on the North Coast doing beach cleanup. It may well be a good synergy between their services and what Caltrans could be providing. It would make a big difference in terms of this major entrance to the city of Santa Cruz. We've been in some contact with the maintenance staff, but I was asked to bring it to your attention to see if there is anything you could do where people you're talking to about pursuing this. We're happy to help in any way we can. As I said, the county is contracting with this group. They're a very responsible group, and we really appreciate working with Caltrans to see if we can do something about what's a long-standing problem. As you may know, Dimeo Lane is the entrance to the city's landfill, and so despite the city's attempts to prevent litter from falling off vehicles, it does, and it really is a significant problem. Okay, I'll see if there's any other comments. Well, I wonder if you have a response. If there's anything you can... I just wanted to get the name of the road that you... It's Highway 1. Highway 1 and the... It goes up to Dimeo Lane, D-I-M-E-O. Okay. It's between Western Drive and Dimeo Lane. Thank you. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut it off there. That's fine. No comment. Others? Mr. Caput? You bet. Yeah, thanks for all the work you've been putting in, and I'm happy to see that I guess it's right on schedule. Is there a start date for the pedestrian sidewalks, basically, on Highway 152 from Wagner to Hulahan Road? It says winter, but it's on schedule, right? This year? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, if we have a schedule update, we reflect it in the project update report, and if it's this winter, then probably by the next meeting or the... As we get closer to that schedule, we'll have more refined date on, you know, a more precise timeline. So we put a general season. If, you know, the further out we are from the completion and then the closer we get, we'll have a better idea. And it would also depend, I guess, on whether... When you're actually ready to do work, if it's raining or something, then of course it'll be. Right. Okay. Such an optimist. But it is on schedule right now. That's right. That's what I'm concerned about. And then the other would be... I'm sorry. It won't take me too long here. On 129, that's just about complete. We have a complete date on that. Highway 129 open grade overlay and metal beam guardrail upgrade. Just east of Watsonville to School Road. Yeah. So the comments look like that one should be complete by next month at the end of October. Okay. And then lastly, the Lakeview Road construction roundabout and improved street lighting. That is on also, I guess, Highway 129. That's still on schedule. The only reason I'm asking this is every now and then something gets delayed. I don't like surprises. So go ahead. It looks like it's all... Everything's moving along pretty good. Okay. Okay. And the last question would be something about pavement and friction pavement. What is the difference there on... Maybe the terminology is not so good, but... Well, on some roads, like on Highway 17, when we install a high friction pavement surface, that it's a safety improvement for vehicle stability in Highway 17 when you have those curves and hills. So there's a higher friction on the pavement surface. That might have been where you saw that. Yeah, because I saw that on 129 also. Is that usually on the curves? Is there better traction? The last question is, how is that different than regular pavement? Has it got grooves in it? Is it rumble? No, it doesn't rumble. I don't know the detailed specifics on the difference other than it's a higher friction and it's better for the tires. So I don't know the specifics, but that's about as far as I know. I was just wondering why they wouldn't use it on all highways if it's better for traction, but there's probably a reason. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. McClendon. Seeing no other questions, I'm going to move on to item number 24, which is the Santa Cruz County Measure D Taxpayer Oversight Committee. Mr. Mendez. Good morning, commissioners. As Shannon Montz, your communication specialist, says that we're training this morning, so I will provide a brief staff report. As you know, Measure D does require the establishment of a five-member oversight committee. So staff did ask for applications. 35 applicants submitted their applications. Chair Deopold established an ad hoc committee to review those applications along with staff. The ad hoc committee was composed of Chair Deopold along with Commissioner Nermis McPherson and Brown. And based on review of those applications, the committee and staff recommend five applicants for you to consider this morning. And they are listed on Attachment 1 of your staff report. They are Janet Edwards of District 1, Michael Machado of District 2, Abel Rodriguez of District 3, Carmen Herrmanseer of District 4, and Todd Gwin of Supervisal District 5. And both the committee and staff feel, you know, good about the recommendation, because the Measure D does ask that the committee represent the community as a whole in various ways. And we feel that this group of individuals does fulfill those requirements of Measure D. And so with that, we do recommend that you appoint those candidates and also out the right staff to begin the work with the appointed members of that committee. Thank you. I will just say that we tried to pick a group that is geographically diverse, use different modes of transportation, have great financial experience. And I think we've worked to put together a list that reflects all parts of the community. Ms. Chase. Yeah, I just wanted to echo what you just said, Chair. I appreciate had the thoughtfulness that staff and the committee put in on this. It does appear to be a really diverse group, and I think that really represents Measure D and represents the county well. So thank you for your work on that. Mr. Rockin. Move approval of the ad hoc committee's recommendation of these appointments. Second. Motion by Rockin, seconded by Schifrin. I'll see if there's members of the public who would like to weigh in on this. Seeing none, I'll bring it back to our Commission for Action. All in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. An important part of Measure D. We move on to item number 25, which is our Innovator in Transportation Speaker Series, Measuring What Matters. We're going to hear from Jeffrey Tomlin. Good morning, Mr. Dondaro. Introduce. Good morning again. Yes, it's a real pleasure for me to introduce our speaker today. I first met Jeff a few years ago at a conference, and he was able to put together a presentation on transportation planning, and particularly focused on public transit, and incorporate a lot of humor into his discussion. I was very impressed, and I've been waiting for the opportunity to invite him to Santa Cruz County, and so when we put the speaker series together, it was an easy thought to invite Jeff. A little bit about his background, he's the principal and director of strategy at transportation planning firm of Nelson-Nygard. Jeff has been working for more than 20 years developing award-winning plans in cities across the globe. He helps balance all modes of transportation in complex places to achieve a community's wider goals and best utilize their limited resources. He has developed transformative plans throughout the world that accommodate growth with no net increase in motor vehicle traffic. I think that's pretty notable. Jeff is known for helping people define what they value and building consensus on complex and controversial projects. He provides residents and stakeholders the tools they need to evaluate their transportation investments in the context of achieving their long-term goals. He understands that managing parking and transportation demand is a critical tool for revitalizing city centers and creating sustainable places. He's a dynamic and frequent guest speaker worldwide, and Jeff is the author of sustainable transportation planning tools for creating healthy, vibrant, and resilient communities. With that, I'd like to welcome Jeffrey Tumlin. Great. Thank you, George. Is there a slide advance that I can use for the PowerPoint? Are you able to see something here? Thank you, and it'll be loaded up shortly. Commissioners, good morning. Once again, my name is Jeffrey Tumlin, and I'm so honored to be here today to talk about transportation, about community values, and about how being clear about what your values can help get Santa Cruz County unstuck and moving forward in this very interesting time in the transportation world where things are changing very, very rapidly. So I'm going to talk a little bit about what transportation planning and engineering is, our role in solving congestion, a little bit predicting perhaps what your next speaker will be talking about with autonomous vehicles, and then I'm going to talk about my experience working with the city of Oakland to help get Oakland unstuck by clarifying Oakland's unique values. So let's launch in. This is a much shorter version of a longer presentation that I gave last night, so I'm going to move pretty quickly to make sure that you have time for questions. I got my driver's license on the morning of the day of my 16th birthday. I love driving, and when I'm stuck in traffic congestion in my little car sealed in and protected from the elements, even for me, it seems really obvious that if I'm stuck there in congestion, right, if only there were one lane over there, like I could finally drive fast and surely that would solve our problem. It would be great, or like if we can't have a lane over there, then maybe Elon Musk will give us a lane underneath, and then we can finally drive smoothly again. Congestion is extremely frustrating, and it seems, you know, like an easy problem to solve, except for the fact that uniquely in the world of transportation, we pretend that transportation is divorced from the basic laws of economics. So let's review Econ 101. So you remember from high school, right, there's the little charts that you had to look at. There's the supply curve, which says that the market will tend to deliver a good the more people are willing to pay for it. And there's the demand curve that says the cheaper a product is, the more people will want it. With that equilibrium point being the price, the lowest price that allows the market to deliver the good, where supply and demand are in balance. And for every commodity in our society, food and clothing and housing and your utility bills, we use price to balance supply and demand. In transportation, we do not. In America, rather than socializing healthcare, we've chosen to socialize driving. And so rather than using price to balance supply and demand, we use time. Congestion is simply what happens when the demand for mobility equals the supply. But congestion is just the equilibrium point for any equation, particularly in a vibrant economy. The other thing that we forget about in transportation is that it's part of a complex system. So congestion is deeply, deeply frustrating. So we argue for years and then we put together tax measures and we go and vote to raise the sales tax to widen the highway. It's a lot of money and it makes driving faster and so we're so happy. For most of the tools that we use in transportation, this is where the thinking stops. But transportation is a complex system and our actions have counteractions and reactions and faster driving means we make different choices. So we might drive across town to go to lunch because, you know, the highway was widened. Or better yet, honey, let's move to the bigger, cheaper house farther away because they widened the road. Faster driving means more people drive and more people driving means there's congestion. And basically every city in America is trapped in this death spiral, continuing to believe that this time adding one more lane will finally solve the problem. It has never done so in world history. You can go to 10,000 case studies and 10,000 out of 10,000, not 9,999, but all 10, demonstrate that highway widenings don't solve the congestion problem because congestion is an economic problem, not an infrastructure problem. So there are many things that we can do in the transportation industry. One thing that we have no control over, however, is congestion. It's not an infrastructure problem. It's an economic problem, and it's only susceptible to economic solutions. When you look at all empirical evidence, there's basically only three ways of dealing with congestion. There is managing it through time, which is our default choice in the United States. There is destroying your regional economy, which Detroit was successful at for a while. So they solved their congestion problem by simply eliminating employment. That works well. Or you can use price to balance supply and demand just as we do for food, clothing, and housing. So let's talk a little bit more about how our efforts at trying to solve the congestion problem have failed us. One way that they have done so is the way we measure the success of the transportation network. In my industry, we have one primary metric that rules all. It's called Intersection Level of Service, or LOS. You've all been presented with level of service analyses in Project Review, and your engineers have told you, oh, well, we can't make that change because the intersection fails. So level of service is a measure of vehicle delay. And specifically, it measures the seconds of vehicle delay at an intersection in the peak hour as measured off of the peak 15 minutes. And it's scored in this sort of A through F letter grade system, with each letter grade change being an additional 15 seconds delay. So level of service F means greater than 80 seconds of delay on average for that car, with a presumption being that level of service F is failure. The intersection fails. Your poor municipal traffic engineer is a personal failure. Failure, failure, failure can't do it. This is the excuse that we use for stopping all kinds of perhaps otherwise interesting change. Let's talk a little bit about the implications of that. So if this is, let's say this is Highway 1. So this is traffic volume on Highway 1. You'll notice there's like a big peak in the peak direction in the morning, and then a sort of reverse commute peak in the afternoon. And if that's the capacity of the highway or the arterial street, what we focus on is that. And our task is to spend a lot of money raising that red bar of capacity in order to accommodate peak driving. Now, in any other industry that was actually wanting to be successful in business, they would not focus on raising the red bar. What they would look at on this graph is that. All of the outrageously expensive infrastructure that they built that is being completely wasted. And the challenge would be, how do you fill up the rest of that unused capacity? Or how do you flatten the curve in order to make the most efficient use of your existing infrastructure? In transportation, we don't care about cost effectiveness. And the result of that is that the best thing we can possibly achieve, given our current performance metric system, this is the ultimate success. Wow. I could drive as fast as I want at all hours of day on this street. Awesome. The absolute epitome of perfection based upon what you as policymakers have ordered your traffic engineers to achieve for you. This street, on the other hand, this is University Avenue in Palo Alto. It used to be four lanes. It's now only two lanes. It's at level service F, not for 15 minutes, but for 15 hours a day. It is severely congested. And Palo Alto could double the capacity of this road any day. It'd be very easy for them to do so, but they choose not to because the performance metric for University Avenue in Palo Alto is not seconds a delay for cars. This is one of the highest grossing retail districts in California. The performance metrics is sales tax per square foot of real estate. The purpose of this street is to create a community center and to provide the entire tax base for a city. So how we think about level of service varies very much depending upon your perspective with a traffic engineer, perhaps having a very different perspective about level of service than an economist. More importantly, level of service because it's a metric of vehicle delay, it rewards the least efficient mode of transportation. So it takes 10 times as much space to move somebody in a car than in any other mode of transportation. Like cars are the ultimate in terms of convenience, but their downside is space inefficiency. So if you're prioritizing the least space efficient mode of transportation and penalizing the more space efficient modes, what you're doing is making your overall system increasingly inefficient over time, which is not so good unless your resources are growing exponentially, which here in California they are not. But more importantly, because level of service is a metric of vehicle delay, what it says is that a person on board a 40 passenger bus is valued at one 40th the value of somebody driving alone in a car. And if you're on a bike or on foot, it's not that you don't matter. It's that you only matter insofar as you slow down the people in cars, the people who are the only ones who matter. So if you were to care about social equity, your current set of metrics for measuring the overall performance of your transportation system says the only people who really matter are the most affluent wasteful people of our society. So it gets worse, of course, when you start looking at how level of service is dealt with under the California Environmental Quality Act. So level of service is baked into our analysis conventions under CEQA. So anytime you have a development project that comes forward, you've got to overestimate the motor vehicle trip generation for that project and then accommodate that worst case scenario level of vehicle trip generation by either widening the road or what my industry does all the time is we shrink the project to get just under a level of service threshold. So we eliminate enough housing units in order to not trigger a level of service threshold change from D to E or E to F. This is a great way of avoiding meeting your housing need assessment, but it's a useful tool for developers and something that my industry makes a lot of money off of doing these sorts of analyses. But the best thing to do under our current regulation is to move your project to a more isolated greenfield location because of level of service analysis only requires that we look at immediately adjacent intersections and if you're immediately adjacent intersections are out in some rural part of the county, you're not going to trip a level of service threshold, but you never have to count the fact that in that more isolated location your vehicle trip generation rate is probably twice what it would be in a downtown location and your vehicle miles traveled are probably about four times greater and all of those trips are still ending up in downtown Capitola or downtown Santa Cruz or out on Highway 1 or Highway 17. They're just four times longer, but you don't have to account for that in the current way that we analyze transportation. But of course our favorite thing to do and the thing that we really make money off of is widening that road in order to accommodate the worst case scenario level of traffic generation, which sounds like it solves the problem except that by making it easier to drive we actually increase the rate of driving and we make it more difficult for people who are currently walking or biking or taking transit to do so. By widening this road on this project we eliminated a crosswalk which meant people could no longer get to the bus stop all attempting to solve the problem of congestion. So what we find when we look at the history of the California Environmental Quality Act transportation analysis conventions is that our over reliance and misuse of level of service has actually created and in fact exacerbated the very problem it was intended to solve and I would argue that nothing has done greater harm to the environment of California than the way we have looked at transportation under the California Environmental Quality Act. Now fortunately Senate Bill 743 which was passed way back in 2013 is requiring that all local jurisdictions in California dump use of level of service and ideally replace it with a metric of per capita vehicle miles traveled. So this is something that the county and all local jurisdictions in the county will do. You have until July 1st of 2020 in order to do this work Pasadena San Francisco Oakland and San Jose have already completed the work and they're finding huge benefit for everything that they care about particularly traffic congestion the environment and social equity. Now let's talk a little bit briefly about autonomous vehicles because there's been a lot of chatter about oh all these problems that we've talked about with congestion they all go away because we'll have autonomous cars and planes that will allow us to finally avoid traffic congestion. So we've been talking about this for a very long time and the imagery that we see today is no different than it was in 1945 except you know video games have replaced the board games and you know the children are gone and the people are of ambiguous ethnicity because you know it's 2018. But let's think about some of the unintended consequences of this next technological revolution. So who's investing the most in autonomous vehicle technology? You probably know this. Google. Right. What's Google's revenue model? Do they sell information? What do they sell? Ads. Yeah Google's an ad company. About 95 percent of Google's revenue comes from advertising. So what is an ad company doing investing in cars? Like it's very difficult to break into the auto market. Why are they doing that? What is the revenue model for the future of mobility? Captive audience. That's right. The revenue model for the future of mobility is not mobility it's capturing the value of time of the people inside that vehicle. So one of the things that we realize when we start thinking about this and go to auto shows which are very scary is that the future of autonomous vehicles in addition to being having profoundly scary potential social implications will result in a massive increase in vehicle miles traveled. Like if you could have your autonomous vehicle with your bed and your entertainment console in your office why not live three hours away from work? Why not just have your vehicle travel around in circles all day instead of park? Why ever take the bus which is more space efficient when you could have your giant autonomous AV take you everywhere? It's going to be great. So convenient because that's what Silicon Valley is the best at. Improving convenience for the most privileged members of our society because that's where the real money is to be made. But what about the rest of us? So what is the effect on cities? Well it's kind of disturbing like there's some upside parking goes away as a land use. We're estimating you know probably about 80% of parking demand gets eliminated over the next 20 years. You end up with some stranded parking assets but you also end up with severe congestion and sprawl and really disturbing potential impacts on public health. Transit agencies some people are talking about transit agencies just simply going out of business like why need why do we need transit when we can all have our own little autonomous vehicle taking us everywhere? Well there's some important answers to that including the fact that we still are going to need high capacity modes of transportation and particularly high capacity high efficiency modes of transportation that are operated for the public good and not merely for private profit. So the alternative model in all of this is recognizing that autonomous vehicles will be successful because they are adaptable to the trillions of dollars of existing infrastructure that's already out there are streets and the streets are in public ownership. It is government's responsibility to assert public ownership over the public right of way and to very carefully manage that public right of way for the public good and I think the government of Finland is one to watch they have been inspired by the United States Federal Communications Commission which in the beginning of the 20th century asserted government ownership over the airwaves and said we own the airwaves and we're going to use the airwaves in order to promote innovation and private profit but we're going to make sure that there is competition in the private market that nobody gets a monopoly and in addition we are going to promote the public good. We need to do the same thing with our roadways which means of course defining what we mean by the public good. It also means very careful management of our streets it means that with autonomy we can finally use pricing in a way that is rational and equitable we could provide people with mobility wallets and if you want to use more than two square meters of space at peak hours great but we're going to charge you for that because we have a responsibility for keeping people and goods moving on the street and if you want less space than that if you want to walk or take an e-scooter or take a bus we'll fill your mobility wallet with extra cash because you are helping us make the most efficient use of this limited public asset we can use price in a way that is actually radically pro-equity while managing this incredibly valuable asset. It also means that transit needs to get in the leadership position in order to quickly switch to autonomous operations in collaboration with municipalities because again the laws of geometry say we can move 10 times as many people in an autonomous bus in a dedicated right of way than we can in autonomous vehicles in mixed flow but there's other things that we need to do as well with transportation so I can't solve your congestion problem but transportation has a more profound impact on public health outcomes than the entire medical profession does we are the ones who are responsible for whether you can get your 10,000 necessary daily steps as a part of daily life as opposed to expecting that you're going to drive to the gym and walk on the treadmill and the results are really compelling so I served as the interim director of transportation for the city of Oakland for a while and I discovered that I was responsible for knocking 15 years off the life of children growing up in certain neighborhoods because we had intentionally placed freeways in those neighborhoods and we're dumping pollutants on them because we'd intentionally placed high-speed roads in those neighborhoods and we're running children down in traffic and because of the design of the roadway was denying our kids the opportunity to walk and bike to school all of this added up to a 15-year loss of life and a loss of at least one grade level that was me in transportation causing that and we know that this gets only worse with autonomous vehicles the social and public health implications of ubiquitous nearly free door-to-door mobility and designing walking entirely out of our daily life not only has a profound public health impact but it allows us to socially isolate ourselves in physical space in the same way that we have done in social media space over the last decade that is already bearing itself out at the national political level on the other hand we know that humans crave social ability we crave beauty we actually like to walk or wheel in places provided they're designed correctly we also know increasingly about the science and biology of happiness so this is a neuropeptide called oxytocin it's produced in the brain in very limited ways it's the biological basis of human trust and it comes when we're under breastfeeding under orgasm but it also is released in the brain when we exercise outside and you've perhaps experienced this while you're arguing with a loved one and you're about to say something you regret and you go outside and you go for a brisk walk or a run or a swim or a bike ride and suddenly your perspective shifts this is your brain chemistry at work and we can design around this brain chemistry provided we design our cities with people in mind first rather than just cars because we know also what happens when we design around cars the fight or flight response that's triggered in the brain we're stuck in traffic congestion results in road rage which is a clinical term one of the results of which is the shutting down of access to the prefrontal cortex of the brain the part of the brain that allows us to think through the consequences of our actions when you're stuck in traffic every single day that fight or flight response and the connection to the prefrontal cortex becomes permanently impaired and again i think we're starting to see this in our national politics the real function of transportation i would argue our primary impact we're in the business of creating land value something that we rarely acknowledge but that's in fact what we do we create land value and we also foster local economies including small business districts and so we need to be very conscious of our impact on who's winning and who's losing as we shift land value around as a result of our transportation projects and again we need to recognize the limited geometry of our streets if we are no longer bulldozing african-american neighborhoods in order to widen highways and again uber and autonomous vehicles suffer the same geometric limitations particularly on urban streets even though we compact them together more tightly on the highway we are now yay congratulations we are the biggest contributor to uh uh greenhouse gas emissions in addition to continuing to be major contributors to other criterion pollutants as the energy sector has cleaned up the transportation sector has worsened and the way we look at transportation in all of coastal california i would argue we are the worst climate denialists in the world we have a big impact on affordability in oakland we were struggling with rising rents we had limited control over that but we could reduce household transportation expenditure by making it cheaper and easier for people to particularly do something other than driving and we found that giving free transit passes to low-income youth had a profoundly positive impact not only on social equity but also traffic and school attendance rates of course there are 40 thousand americans a year that die as a result of allowing us to drive at 75 miles an hour while looking at our phones but one thing that i really want to talk about is our work in oakland thinking about equity oakland is very very different than santa cruz county one thing that it does have in common is that oakland is quite clear about its values and it's very passionate about those values santa cruz county has different values but is equally passionate in oakland we were very stuck there was very little agreement on how to move forward on expenditures um but there was clarity that equity is important we just didn't really know what it meant and so part of the work that we did in the city was defining very clearly what equity means and noticing that equity is the enemy of equality or rather equality is the enemy of equity because if we simply equalize investment today what it means is those of us who were born with great privilege if i get an equal amount of investment my privilege accelerates those who are born with a lack of privilege uh you give them equal investment they fall behind um and that perhaps is not right so our challenge in oakland was of course over the last 70 years transportation investments had intentionally stripped power and resources away from people of color this is the redlining map from the 1960s of course redlining was a set of federal rules that denied mortgages and other financial instruments for people living in neighborhoods with lots of people of color in my industry we got extra points for routing the highway through areas of blight blight of course being defined as african-american ownership so this map uh is very interesting and led us through a conversation about reparations that didn't go very far but it did make us realize that we had some making up to do and that our task was to define the city's values in a clear way and then to align all of the mechanics of governance with those values it meant starting with values going through a process of goals and objectives of strategies that can achieve the goals very importantly making sure that we had quantitative performance metrics that relate it to all of our values tied those performance metrics and values into the budget and finally report it back to our policymakers and to our our residents about how we were doing and it's most important to remember that the effective policy statement the policy statement that matters is not your comprehensive plan it's not the little mission that you put up on the wall the only relevant statement of values is your budget so by having this conversation allowed in public in oakland we unlocked a massive amount of change really quickly so we created this little department and together with you know people in many other city departments in oakland we in a period of about a year did parking requirement reform city-wide eliminated most parking requirements in the the more walkable parts of the city we completely restructured our approach to parking management we eliminated level of service and rewrote all of our transportation analysis requirements we created a new department and attracted a permanent director we developed some new tools for analyzing equity we passed in a very resource constrained city a 350 million dollar infrastructure bond with over 80 percent of the vote and then we did a whole ton of internal work having every staff person see the values in the strategic plan and redo all of their work requirements and warrants and procedures and standard operating procedures in alignment with those values we got an immense amount of stuff done so very quickly i'm gonna look walk through the some of the analytical tools that we had to build in order to quantify some of the stuff so equity yeah there's no like equity model that you can just pull out of a spreadsheet in order to figure out what this means and so we defined equity in oakland by starting with outcome disparities so looking at health disparities in our community accessibility to jobs and particularly issues that children and seniors were facing throughout our community and we mapped it all and we started with regional data that wasn't particularly useful to us so we had to disaggregate all of that data and break it down by the census block group level and see the patterns in the city about you know where low-income people were living or where seniors were living and of course noticing that all of these patterns of disadvantage perfectly matched the 1964 redlining map this then allowed us to do some aggregate scoring and we allowed our policymakers to wait each of these different demographic factors differently but of course no matter how we changed the waiting that 1964 map still came very strongly through on this map then we overlaid other data including environmental resiliency factors all of our bikeways and busways and of course where we were succeeding and failing at wheelchair accessibility where we were having high rates of crashes and then on top of all this we overlaid our entire capital plan which allowed us to do some very straightforward and visual analysis of the degree to which our city-wide spending was perpetuating or correcting past patterns which enabled us to have a very productive conversation about reallocating that budget in order to achieve our city-wide goal and again we unlocked this by having a very very difficult conversation about what Oakland's values were not what people wanted but what their values were and where those values were in alignment and where there was divergence around those values so that again we when there was disagreement we had some tools for providing policymakers with information that they can use for making those difficult calls and allowing us to move forward rather than they're just being stuck with arguing and with that there's a lot of material very quickly I'm happy to take any questions you may have thank you thank you mr. Tumblin for a great presentation I've had the pleasure of watching some of your other talks on YouTube I encourage everyone here to also check that out you'll see parts of this and other pieces you have a lot to share and I appreciate the work that you've done I'm going to see if members of the commission have questions mr. Johnson thank you chair thanks for that presentation um so your premise is that everybody here is who took or drove their car today is affluent wasteful and privileged and even though the values of this community might lend itself to correcting climate change taking public transportation um the number of people here either through because they like the freedom of their cars or whatever probably chose to drive a car now were you were you one of those oh absolutely yes I I am an enthusiastic motorist I love driving right and I love free parking as well so there's there's a hypocrisy embedded really in I think in your message to the degree that everybody kind of sees the values everybody sees the goals and objectives but nobody wants to really follow what you just described here in a really nice presentation so I guess you know I'm feeling a little bit of guilt I feel you're a little bit unctuous in terms of you know preaching to us that this is a way to go but at the same time are you really willing to follow the same values that you're saying the rest of it should so a good question and a very common question so I think it's incredibly important not to moralize around transportation choices this conversation that I just gave you was a little bit more about economics so yeah I oftentimes drive sometimes I walk sometimes I do other things the question is to what degree should my choices be subsidized by government so right now every parking space that I get for free I love that I will go out of my way for free parking but I also know that it costs me ten dollars a day it costs somebody ten dollars a day to deliver that parking free to me um that's a real cost I parked free at my hotel last night and I know that the cost of that was simply bundled into my room rate and so the person staying next door to me who didn't bring a car she was subsidizing my free parking so she shouldn't moralize or feel guilty we should simply ask is it efficient to provide parking and driving free while it costs two dollars to take the bus does that make sense and if I want to be able to drive and park having uh government subsidize other people driving in front of me that perhaps does not get us what our objective might be which is to be able to drive when we need to drive and to provide an equivalent amount of subsidy for other people who may want to do something else that the result of assuming that all driving and parking should be free is actually creating a very bad situation for motorists who need to drive and of course there are many very low income people who have no choice but to spend a very large percentage of their household time and money on driving in order to access employment I think in many ways the low income folks are most disadvantaged by the inequity of our current approach particularly when they're stuck in congestion trying to get to their two jobs and daycare in order to make their very challenging lives work so I yeah again I I'm not trying to moralize I'm trying to help us understand the consequences of well-intentioned actions the congestion consequences the financial consequences and the social equity consequences thank you mr. Bertrand again thank you for your talk and your manner of delivering so in terms of parking and economic activity in downtown areas or other areas like Main Street that kind of thing can you talk a little bit about the availability of parking the pricing of parking the timing of the pricing like evening maybe free during the day it's higher and the economic activity on a street with your economic way of looking at supply demand that we want to generate money so the Palo Alto example was a good one sure so parking very controversial topic also a really fun one and a topic where there's a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance which I sometimes enjoy so parking is super important for the functioning of any place particularly downtowns downtowns require the right amount of parking but it's important to recognize there's several optimization games that we need to play that particularly in a downtown environment too much parking is worse than too little parking the challenge is to figure out what's the right amount of parking and then to recognize that parking is an incredibly expensive asset uh and we need to manage that capital asset effectively so again we've got limited tools for balancing supply and demand in the parking world price is the most effective tool and the right price for parking is always the lowest price that helps you achieve about a 10 percent availability target in every parking lot in every parking garage and every block so the right price is always the lowest price that makes it easy for a customer or an employee to always find a parking space wherever she's trying to find one and what this means is that if there's plenty of availability the right price of parking is free that's perfectly fine to have free parking but if there's parking congestion you need to adjust the price in order to achieve that availability target and that means the price is going to vary tremendously like the price on main street is going to be a lot higher than in the parking lot around the corner the price on the street is going to be a lot higher than the price inside a creepy parking garage that people don't actually want to park in even though it costs more to build that parking garage the price is going to be uh perhaps more expensive on a friday or saturday and there's nothing in Leviticus that says that parking has to be free on the day of the lord so the reason we don't charge for parking on sundays is because we haven't updated our parking regulations since 1955 when stores were closed on sundays so again it's simply taking a resource management approach with a goal being radically good customer service aimed at a successful commercial district it's also important to recognize that because parking is so outrageously expensive to build or even to maintain that sometimes it's cheaper to do something like provide free transit passes to all downtown employees than it is to build your next parking structure sometimes it's cheaper to invest in bikeways than it is to invest in parking structure if that serves more people so parking is simply a form of access and the right approach is about figuring out what's the most cost-effective mix of investments in order to get access to the point where you've optimized the success of the district this brown oh i think you pretty much answered the question but i just was wondering because you you acknowledge the um the fact that there are certain people in our community who don't necessarily get to choose to pay that much more money or you know factor that in in their rational economic decision making they just must get to work and in places where there is in public transit or other alternatives available and so i'm just but those are questions about the broader market and other kinds of regulatory um decision making outside of the traffic and transportation planning so i'm just wondering in your discussions maybe using the case of oakland how you discuss that those challenges because as we know people who can choose to pay more uh or commute at certain times will do that and those who can't still must and so just wondering how that yeah so so firstly you need to lead with equity and take it very seriously um and that means having conversations uh with uh disadvantaged people people of color low-income people rather than speaking for them and it's amazing what you learn when you actually go out and talk to low-income families like wow um low-income families oftentimes place a much higher value on their time than affluent families um in part because their lives are more complex and they have to travel longer distances uh and like if you you know you're charged by the minute when you're late to pick up your kid at daycare so the first part of it is actually talking to affected populations rather than having people speak for them the other is recognizing that anytime you change the rules of the game there are winners and losers uh and you know our you know your task as government is to try to find the solution that creates the greatest total net benefit recognizing that there's going to be individuals and no matter what you do that are going to be negatively impacted it also means recognizing that the status quo is radically inequitable um and so you know changing it don't be afraid of of changing it because the status quo is not working so other things that you can do uh and we certainly had these conversations in oakland was you can means test so in transit we means test for transit passes driving is free you have to pay to take transit but if you're low income you can qualify for a discount you can do the same thing with parking you can do the same thing with roadway pricing um you can also ask the question if there's net revenue as a result of this change what are we doing with that net revenue are we taking that money and creating better choices and more affordable choices for those who've been disadvantaged by past decisions or are we um basically creating more convenience for the most privileged members of society so that's that's a very big question those are some quick things to start looking at um as you start thinking about change thank you mr shifrin yes thank you um for your presentation clearly you're at the forefront of transportation policy in the state because the state has changed uh and i want to talk a little bit about level of service um level of service has as you said been used for many years um it's not so simple to go to vehicle miles traveled i've been following the state's attempt to the sequel guidelines to come up with a procedure to measure vehicle miles traveled and it's it's kind of complicated and i think it's going to end up providing more funding for traffic engineers than uh was um required for a level of service but i i think i have an underlying concern and it leads to a question a lot of the current idea of uh not requiring parking near transit stops not looking at level of service because um there you know we want to encourage bikes and walking not just car travel is based kind of on an assumption that if you don't provide parking people won't people won't own cars if they're close to uh transit stop then you don't need to provide parking you don't need to deal with congestion because the new development you'll have more new development and people won't be having cars and i wonder if i i've never seen any studies that document that because of my sort of anecdotal experience people who can afford cars have cars and they use them maybe they use them a little less during peak hour maybe they don't but i just wonder if there is any good data that documents this move to eliminate parking what we've seen in Santa Cruz is that streets are becoming private you can't park on one of the number of streets at any time unless you have a permit because the city because even two hours you can't park for two hours on one of our major streets near the downtown unless you have a unless you live in the neighborhood because so what we're what i think we're seeing is as we move away from requiring new development to provide parking doesn't stop people from having cars just means that there's pressure on the local government to not allow anybody else to park on the streets that they pay for so let me go back to i'll stop okay so philosophizing and go back to the question about what the data is around uh whether by not by not providing parking it really reduces the amount of cars that people have yes so there's abundant data so first of all one of the things i want to make sure is clear that currently most governments force developers to supply more parking than the market warrants so if you eliminate minimum parking requirements it's not like developers will forget to build parking developers will just build the right amount of parking for their project we don't force developers to only build three bedroom units because people have an average of 2.0 children we do take the highest household auto ownership and force everyone to have that many parking spaces like so government doesn't interfere with the private development market to force more bedrooms or housing units for people government only interferes with the market to force more housing units for cars and the result of that is for housing units for every car in santa cruz county when we don't have enough housing units for people so eliminating minimum parking requirements simply means the developers will supply the right amount of parking because they're going to need to just to get financing for their project the other thing is that what we find in the data and this is true and you know i mean all the urban markets the places that have eliminated minimum parking requirements that there is a tremendous amount of self selection in the market people don't buy a three bedroom unit if they just have one person and a family of 10 doesn't get a studio apartment not realizing that there's not a place to stash their children people tend to rent and buy housing that matches their lifestyle all minimum parking requirements do is allow us to avoid managing the public right of way i live in san francisco the city and county of san francisco gives me oh about it's probably a thousand dollars a month of free real estate where i just leave my private goods out in the public right of way thanks to the taxpayers of san francisco it makes no sense that that san francisco prevents the construction of housing for people as a way of avoiding managing the public right of way and free storage of private goods on public land it was not as eloquent as i should have stated it but again what we find in the data is that there is a strong tendency and san francisco has perhaps analyzed this more than anyone in their process not only of eliminating minimum parking requirements but ascribing vehicle trip generation rate based upon parking supply the best data on the relationship between traffic generation and parking supply you can find in san francisco where they clearly determined that there is limited relationship between the size of a building and the vehicle trip generation rate that there's a far stronger correlation between vehicle trip generation rate and parking supply as a result of self-selection employment you know an office building that comes with no parking regardless of who's using that office building it's going to have a far lower rate of vehicle trip generation than an office building with a giant parking lot similarly for housing people choose the house or office that works for them and their personal desires right now our requirements say the only acceptable lifestyle is an autodependent lifestyle either for the home end or the work end of course san francisco has a public transportation system a little bit more extensive than sanacruz county and has you know a downtown where huge numbers of people yeah so fayetteville arkansas and buffalo new york haven't have eliminated minimum parking requirements as well they don't have great transit systems they just recognize that forcing developers to over supply parking was only creating negative impacts on their communities so again in a buffalo or fayetteville the developers will supply more parking than in san francisco but they are going to be smarter about the right number of parking spaces then government is going to be that a one size fits all solution that is imposed by government only creates negative outcomes and the only function that it serves is allowing us to mismanage the public right of way i know i don't want to get into an argument about housing markets and buffalo and fayetteville and housing markets and sanacruz and the price of housing and the incentive to developers to build more units and use more of the land for housing and less of the land for parking yeah it might affect it somewhat so look at santamonica then you know i mean sanacruz is unique in many ways but one thing that is not unique about sanacruz is the desire to drive driving is convenient for everyone it's the same everywhere we love driving because it is so convenient we just need to recognize that when we choose the convenience of driving that has consequences um and consequences that actually may get in the way of our own desire to drive by encouraging more people to drive in front of us i'm sure this that's a fertile ground of a discussion i certainly don't disagree with that i'm gonna look to miss johnson thank you i had a question for staff and then a question for you so how is our county doing in our cities on um level of service versus vmt have we made the switch yet we have not um i know there are some efforts um happening and i've heard some complaints from the public works um corners um jeff asked me this question earlier when we were out in the hall and i i don't i think the uh level of interest on the level of service question is it's very divided you know between the planning and the engineering community and it's been it's been very very slow in being pushed forward by the state i think part of the problem is the confusion on how to do it and and technically it it is complicated and i think that question was raised earlier so that's the reason now there is a deadline and so we're all going to have to learn how to do it um and we do have one of our staff has been following the regulations and the updates to sequence so on um but i i'm not aware of any rigorous application of that change yet in our county are there any studies any data that we can point to that say that if we move from level of service to vmt is required that that's going to increase density and housing in downtown areas or wherever yeah within the quarters yeah well sure i mean like greater density in places that are walkable in your transit that's the most effective way to cut your vehicle trip generation rate as well as the length of those motor vehicle trips so a vmt approach rewards density in your transit but sequa isn't going to force any community to increase allowable density right so there's the california environmental quality act analysis and then their zoning control and those are very different but what you know switching to vmt does is it says that auto dependent sprawl that's problematic and you're going to have to find a way of mitigating that not by moving the development farther away but by shifting motor vehicle trips yeah so i understand that vmt i understand that's what vmt does but i guess my question was is there actually any studies that demonstrate that density would be affected but i think we're just assuming it will be or it could be it certainly changes the market dynamics and it makes local jurisdictions think like okay if if i've got to accommodate another 20 000 housing units the way to do that that is going to result in the best environmental performance and traffic performance is to is to concentrate that near transit and walkable services yep thank you and i should add that the locations that have already adopted their 743 rules are pasadena um san francisco oakland and san jose and all four of the cities the process was remarkably easy it took a few months for both san francisco and oakland they both ran through processes that in addition to a limiting level of service and substituting vmt in a very simple way of analyzing that they increased the development impact fee for transportation because that was a useful trade so in both of those cities they've basically eliminated consultant work on the transportation side right like we're really expensive all of that pointless traffic analysis you know this 300 page reports that we used to write that's gone it they basically go through a checklist and pay a fee and as a result of that developers agreed to pay a substantially greater fee in exchange for avoiding real estate attorneys and people like me as well as shaving two years off of their entitlement process that's huge yeah thank you uh-huh miss chase or i'm actually good thank you first of all thanks for your talk it really was excellent um in response to randy johnson's excellent question about like how we got here or what our individual choices are i think your answer another way to put um your responses that it's not so much about what individual choices we make in the current choices that we have in front of us you make the choices you make and that might be driving for a variety of reasons but more about what are the choices and how we you know change the structure of what people are looking at as those options and sort of what interests me would be a little bit more detail about how you manage to get values consolidation or you know people to agree about the values of equity and so forth just to give you an idea of what i'm talking about yeah the most rational thing this county could do about our highway one problem is turn one of those lanes into the existing lanes into an hov lane yeah overnight you would have people finding ways to find people to drive with and they would get there really quickly and you sitting here and stuck in traffic wouldn't take very long for people to say how do i get in that lane once it take um there are similar situations with parking decisions that city makes um but the problem is right now if you were to do that i mean this commission has the you know ultimately working with the state of california we could probably make that happen if we decided we wanted to do it but believe me we'd all be recalled from whatever positions yes i recognize a public member very very quickly even those of us that are appointed would be recalled somehow i don't know how it would happen but it would yes um and the same thing with the city that wants to decide well you know if we really provided people with the transit passes and these other kinds of things and in a really clear way simultaneously we're just reducing the parking the free parking or the low-cost parking that's available people would change their behavior but what would happen in the meantime and it would be a meantime is some businesses would go out of business because people go can't find parking near that thing and so i'm not going there and if the city of santa Cruz became radically under parked let's say or not let's call it under parking but reduced its parking people would go to the 41st avenue and go to capitol and shop and vice versa so how given the fact that we have different um first well how within a community like oakland did you decide you're going to move more in this direction and how do you make these decisions when your city might be ahead of the other you know i'm not saying that santa Cruz would be ahead of watsonville they might be ahead of us but how does one city decide to do this when you're competing shopping markets um basically to still provide free parking well so partly you need to recognize the way in which the status quo is failing so by providing free parking and having those spaces be mostly full you're driving customers away right so you'll drive customers away if you charge too little and make parking annoying you'll drive customers away if you charge too much and your parking is empty so again it's about looking at the transportation system as a big sound board with a lot of dials right and you've got to get all the dials adjusted just so and if anyone is too far to the left or too far to the right it's going to sound terrible so we tend to think in extremes in this industry for some reason um and like use slippery slope arguments in order to um avoid having an effective debate your task as policymakers is to figure out like the goldilocks spot like not too hot not too cold just right and also recognize that we have a limited tolerance for change right so going too fast down one direction even if it's well intentioned can result in backlash so incremental steps are always uh easier to deal with but very importantly if you're clear about values and performance metrics you can be clear about project objectives and continually evaluate projects as you go along based upon what had been promised and what the values were and make adjustments including as government deciding oh yeah that project did not succeed unintended negative consequences let's undo it and start again this is something that most government agencies are terrified about right so we get stuck in the status quo as opposed to being clear about the direction we want to head and continually incrementally making changes in that direction and being unafraid of failure um i mean that the biggest part of my job in oakland was providing cover for my staff people to go out and do their good work to make sure that if anyone on the city council ever started the public started accusing them of doing something no no like you praise staff when things have gone well you criticize me when things have gone wrong um and it's my job to basically uphold your policies right and to continually ask you like okay you said these were your priorities are you sure those are your priorities because i you know i'm just staff we're just here to implement those um it required also training my staff and how to fail skillfully because in most government agencies no failure is acceptable i come from the private sector um if you're not failing at the right pace you're gonna quickly be out of business that in the private sector it's all about risk management and risk taking in order to accommodate changes that are external and common adults right am i going to respond to the changes that are coming down the road or am i just going to sit here passively and operate my business like it was still 1975 so you know as policy makers it's your task you hold the values and you need to provide clear direction to staff about the direction the county should be heading in and demand that they report back on progress and have a way of measuring the degree to which they're actually doing what you told them to do and so constantly be investigating the unintended negative consequences of you know you're very well intentioned ideas but sometimes things don't work out as expected like with level of service it seemed like it made it was a measure of congestion it seemed like it was the perfect way of eliminating congestion oh oops it actually worsened the problem rather than solved it thank you again for your presentation i i'd actually already got an email from someone who came to last nice presentation appreciating what you presented i just had a couple of questions um you know the uh uh the question about level of service and vmt i think is an important one and i think we have to wrestle with it uh in in some way and to be clear about what our values are uh the the our regional transportation commission worked to um in our last major overhaul of our regional transportation plan come up with scenarios and they the staff asked us what our values were do we want to improve reliable travel travel time did we want to did we want to reduce admissions did we want to promote equity and i thought that was a useful exercise uh for us to start um looking at it and it may uh this talk makes me think that maybe we should be looking there should be some measure of that in the decisions that we make on our regular agenda so we're clear that we're following what we said we were going to do in the plan um and so i i appreciate that we're we have a major uh study coming out um that that is eagerly awaited called our unified corridor investment study looking at our three major corridors we're going to have different scenarios and we're going to be asked to make these value decisions once again and we'll we'll kind of see if we're still on the same track or not um but uh as you just mentioned in terms of uh making changes and not being afraid to fail uh there are consequences however of that so i you know this is uh the county uh as did a sustainable Santa Cruz county plan which looked at modest increases in densities along our transit quarters it's that's what we're supposed to be doing right that all experts will say um and we reduced our parking standards um uh and the fear will be and i know i'll hear it from constituents once we're done with the environmental work is that hey they're parking in my neighborhood now um and then we're going to have the same request that they see in the city of Santa Cruz create a parking program so you can keep those people out of my neighborhood how do you manage that transition yeah um and because i get what you're saying is i i don't i'm not sure i completely believe that the market will figure it all out um but uh and i believe we have to have some basic standards but how do you how do you manage that transition um between what people have always expected and and the impacts that will be real yeah and particularly with parking parking is a fun topic because it's oftentimes a proxy for completely unrelated fears and anxiety so you need to recognize that there will always be complaining about parking because it is not possible to make people happy about parking and the parking complaint may really be code for something else so um you have residential parking permit districts here in Santa Cruz they are anti market and anti democratic and anti equitable but if they are what is necessary in order to allow your higher values to be able to move forward sometimes it's okay to do that so something that many particularly coastal california cities that have um a uh deeply entitled existing population that is afraid of change living in predominantly single family home neighborhoods those single family home neighborhoods like there's not going to be any development of those neighborhoods it's okay to just freeze those places in amber as a way of both acknowledging that folks living in that neighborhood a lot of them have been there for a long time and they've built lives around the expectation of free and available parking and they are concerned that their lives will be greatly disrupted some of them just want to stop other people from moving into the neighborhood here right so differentiating between the actual motivations of people who are afraid of change and acknowledging that there are things that people are legitimately concerned about and you can manage around that even if the management technique is something anti democratic like residential permits um i always draw a residential permit boundary districts around the single family home neighborhoods and then deed restrict any corridors of change from ever being able to join that residential permit district so you create a line between like okay these are like our existing areas that are afraid of change and these are areas of change and we're gonna like draw some lines to protect those folks both from rational as well as irrational concerns that's okay if that's what's necessary in order to meet your housing affordability goals and meet those goals in places that don't require low income people to drive endlessly therefore eliminating any of the financial benefit of the income restricted housing i appreciate that and it's it's a lot harder to do than to just talk about it right i know you know that right i mean yes no i've been to all those workshops believe me i've been yelled at and we're gonna face it here in the county as we look you know we have the voters at an urban services boundary of concentrate development we were we've just done this plan that that sort of recertifies that by saying we're gonna increase densities and it's going to be very hard to get people to change we've done a lot of a lot of conversations about it um the the uh i was curious about you know you've you've portrayed very clearly um that the widening of highways is is uh is a losing game um and i think even caltrans i've heard kelly uh make this presentation that it's that it's a losing game uh but that's what the voters here said they want auxiliary lanes here in santa cruz that's what we're gonna do uh and but we're one of the one of the um debates we're having here in santa cruz is the question of whether we're gonna use our rail line for passenger service or not and one of the the complaints we get is you'll never get enough people to reduce the congestion on highway one and if i'm understanding your argument uh correctly is there's no way that we'll ever reduce the congestion on highway one because as soon as we add space we will fill the space that's the induced traffic that's right the no matter what you do with the rail corridor no matter how magical futuristic whatever you're doing with our corridor it will not have any impact on highway one it will have no more impact on highway one than adding a lane to highway one will have on highway one because all of that capacity will fill with latent demand yeah and that's okay that that's not say don't do some great project on the rail corridor there are many very good reasons for doing a project in that corridor solving congestion definitely is not one of them i mean uh and i think a good example of that is up in santa rosa where you know 5 000 homes went away and highway 101 didn't certainly become empty all of a sudden yeah um that was it's still clogged yeah los angeles spent 4.5 billion dollars widening the 405 through sepulveda pass only to have the widened highway open more congested than the narrower highway was after enduring six years of severe construction related congestion um and think about like because transportation is a complex system so okay you've you've just expanded capacity by say 20 percent you're moving 20 more cars is there 20 more off ramps and surface streets to accommodate that no you when you widen you move the bottleneck from one place to another yeah well and i was very uh you know this uh work that you've done in oakland um about uh equity i think is really important uh trying to figure out where we'd find the resources to be able to have that discussion uh i i think of as a county supervisor and i'm i'm trying to get our board to think about where we make our infrastructure investments should be tied to where we're asking people to live and and both in terms of roads of bike lanes sidewalks and parks um that there's a there's an equity question here whether the single family homes neighborhoods are going to have all those things and the urban uh or more urban where we're areas where we're asking for density that somehow we're not going to invest more money in there as we're asked more people to live there so i think it's uh i appreciate that work and i'm going to take a look more closely at what you did in oakland because i think there may be parts of it that we should be doing here in sanikers anyway i want to thank you for it we're we uh it's a public meeting so i ask we get to ask members of the public uh mr dondaro yes thank you mr chairman um i could have lots of questions but i was really pleased to hear you bring up performance metrics in in many different aspects and um we are doing that in this corridor study that we're doing right now so hopefully our our board will have um more than just a gut reaction but we'll have some measurable things to base their decisions on we also have incorporated performance metrics in our regional plan not to the extent that we wanted to at the time because as you know gathering data is expensive that's right however since now that we're a self-help county hopefully we can do more of that in the future um i thought the example of oakland was great i've lived in oakland before and i know that what a complex city it is um but you had the advantage in that you had a a large domain to work within that had one governing body and one of the one of the frustrations uh for me and for our staff working in this this regional agency is that um we serve um many different masters and you know we've got four incorporated cities and then we've got half the county lives in unincorporated areas which is kind of unique and so um trying to uh execute something like what you did in oakland um it's hard for me to even imagine where to start um and i just wonder if you have any uh brief advice for a regional agency that would like to move the county in a stronger direction i think for example the equity question comes up over and over and over again it's getting more voice and we have we have that challenge but i i don't think we're anywhere close yet to really grappling with it and so i just wonder if you have any suggestions for a regional transportation agency that doesn't do zoning and doesn't have the control over a lot of those other decision points that that maybe you did in oakland yep uh good question it's complicated here so another rule about performance metrics is to make sure that you're using the fewest possible metrics that reflect all of your goals and where there's existing or readily available data by which you can measure those goals um it's quite easy to have performance metric systems get wildly complicated um that's not going to help you because then they will not get used um so in oakland we uh like you know severely resourced resource constrained space all this tool development was done by city staff part time just basically mining the data warehouse from the city to try to figure out what could we use in order to answer some of the key questions another thing piece of advice that i would give is to focus on the um the values and metrics that are the critical decision the things where you're stuck a lot of the stuff that's easy and there's agreement about that's not going to help you make a decision about do i do this project or do i do that project in fact one of the things that we realized was that the most important work for your performance metrics is being able to say no to a project that is a seemingly good idea but just doesn't cut it given our limited resources it's a tool for saying no to constituents and being able to tell a story behind that about why yeah yeah that's a great idea but we just can't afford that given these priorities so at the county level um there i'm assuming if it's like alameda county you have astonishingly good public health data um because the medical unlike the transportation industry which never does post project evaluation right in the medical profession like after you do the surgical procedure they actually go and check on you to see how you're doing and learn from that so the medical profession has great empirical data on health outcomes um and uh they should be able to parse that down to a localized level to see what are health outcomes another area of data that you should have immediate access to is your safety data where are you killing people like can we all agree that killing people on our streets is bad uh it's usually a very easy way of prioritizing resources is to solve critical um safety problems um all of the demographic data all that is publicly available and you can break all of it down to the census block group and have a very very fine level of mapping around household income age both um seniors as well as uh young people um you should be able to get data on disability what's the pattern of where disabled folks live in your community um absolutely race uh tenure so whether you're owner or a renter um and then you should be able to do so with some additional post-processing where for example um uh rent challenged households so people who are of low income and are experiencing high or rising rents so tracking the impact of gentrification on your low income population is also something that you can do and map readily if you've got a decent GIS um other things that you can do are take all of this and just put it all online you've got phenomenally smart people here in Santa Cruz County and there are data nerds who will volunteer to play with your data in order to find things that are meaningful and tell stories about that and that was something we absolutely relied upon in Oakland was a lot of volunteer hours because people cared very passionately and they were willing to invest their own time so we made a commitment to transparency just putting it all out there in part to build trust but also because we kept ending up with people calling us up saying hey like I've got this other data layer do you mind if I do uh you know like download all your GIS shape files and play around with it like sure and here's how you post the results of that just put it all up on our website yeah so you there's a lot that you can do with existing staff and existing tools um and don't let um perfection be the the enemy of the good so now I'm gonna ask that there's members of the public who have any uh comments or questions they're gonna come up there uh Mr. Tomlin uh excuse me two or three minutes two minutes hi Brett Garrett from Santa Cruz I just want to say thank you to Mr. Tomlin for a wonderful presentation I found a lot of it all most of it almost all of it resonated with me very strongly I loved Mike Rotkin's idea of just kind of creating an HOV lane out of what we already have it could also be a lane that people could pay to drive single in if as an alternative and I just want to I heard a comment that the county voted for highway widening and at least from my perspective we did not vote for highway widening I personally looked at measure D and said well I hate this highway widening but there's so much good stuff in it that I'm gonna have to vote for it and I'm I'm imagining I'm not the only one that voted for measure D completely in spite of the highway widening and not wanting the highway widening so please consider looking at alternatives to the highway widening thank you very much good point thank you anyone else I know we had a public session last night and so there's a chance to ask questions I just want to offer my thanks to Mr. Tomlin and for Mr. Dondaro for identifying him as a speaker this is part of a speaker series that is all available online and is to help the community conversation about the transportation choices that we make uh we just have one more item oh mr let's once again appreciate that talk that was incredible I think mr Bertrand had one uh one final question yes thank you very much mr chair so um maybe a little bit out of the field but when you say you're from san francisco I know that um there's a parking and a street cleaning program okay so I'm interested in two things one is parking and street cleaning we almost have a controlled experiment san francisco does you have to move your cars two times a day I'm excuse me two times a week in areas around here as far as I know you don't capital you certainly don't have to move the other one is the effect of ad use on parking I know the state is relaxed parking requirements so in the interest of time I just like to know are there any nuggets that you could give us about this because in a sense a parking program that requires you to move your car for street cleaning which is good for the environment and we're very concerned about our bay here could reduce the available parking in aggregate right and the other is the ad you in terms of parking in the neighborhood and the community's acceptance of that ad uses sort of a slow change and it does have an effect on parking those two questions okay so uh there is also mary brown quite some time ago I'm trying to remember the name of her study um did some interesting analysis in san francisco which has minimum parking requirements but has no enforcement of making sure that your uh parking space is actually used for storing your car uh there's some like ridiculous statistic about the overwhelming percentage of garages residential garages in san francisco that are used for storing stuff rather than cars and which seems like why should government force me to only store a car in this giant storage space like shouldn't I be able to store whatever I want but you know we're not rational when it comes to parking so one thing that we have found in san francisco is so the the street sweeping rules vary all over the city there are many streets that have no street sweeping some that do I've actually been in a couple of neighborhoods that went through the change and lo and behold when you impose street sweeping a big percentage of parking demand goes away because people clear the junk out of their garages right and put their cars back and then so they don't have to have the hassle of moving them around thank so in every case that I've seen there's been no significant negative impact on availability um because there's this flexibility in the market um and then now I forget your second question it to use I mean we're sorry to go in that direction yeah so another thing so again residential parking permit controls are anti-market and anti-equity but they're useful if you want to achieve your larger goal of providing more naturally occurring affordable housing so things you can do are limit the number of residential permit per parcel or deed restrict ad use from being able to join the parking district you can also do hybrid programs where um you allow outsiders to pay to park in the residential district um so you can switch you can have the homeowner have discounted privilege parking and have the new renters be charged market which gets particularly anti-equitable and anti-market but if it solves the problem of allowing tolerance for ad use then the net impact to equity and to the marketplace is potentially significantly positive right don't don't be afraid just because the status quo is so broken don't be afraid of breaking it even further as part of the path towards getting to a more rational equitable approach that's a good way to end yeah break the mold break the mold thank you again for your presentation we just have one item left on our agenda which is the minutes from our august 16th transportation policy workshop meeting mr. Bertrand thank you mr. chair i noted that an item i brought up last meeting was not noted in the meeting minutes and i'd like that to be added and in particular it was about bringing an item agenda for discussion of this commission and that item agenda was and you know staff could go back and look at the meeting minutes but that item agenda was to to bring forth a discussion about how we might move forward on evaluating the investment study in terms of a committee of commissioners thank you very much so i'd like to have that added to the agenda i'm excuse me the meeting minutes thank you yeah hold on mr. rock and so i remember the request and i remember also be even making the comments that that we're all responsible for reading this there that i'm not exactly sure what a committee of or who would even appoint the committee as a chair i'm expecting everyone here to fully read this very important study that we've been talking about for a year and engage the material and people of course are free to to join with other commissioners within the letter of the law right that the long general majority and and and work on the material together i'm not sure what assigning a subcommittee to look at this material would have any effect on on our conversation or value okay i'm i do remember your comments at the time and i um wanted to have that before the commission to decide and that's why i wanted to be agendized okay you're absolutely right it's our duty to read the report and come up with in-depth questions and analysis my point was that a committee of peers here would do a much better job as a group as opposed to individually and as a group we would bounce about ideas back and forth and stuff like that so basically i wanted that agendized so this commission could decide if that's the way we could go not whether it's valuable or not at this time but an agendized item uh mr racken well i'm generally in favor of the idea that members of the commission have the ability to get something on the agenda i agree with your comments mr chair that it may not be helpful to have such a committee but what i'm going to move is that we um refer the minutes to the staff have them find out whether that request was made you know it was in fact may i believe it was but just to double check it was made um and have this agendized at a future meeting in which i think the first thing that would happen is i i will probably move to table it but i think he has a right to try and get it on the agenda and see what the response of the commission is to it i look to our lawyer for that that seems like a reasonable action that we can take given that we're deciding the minutes okay uh so there's a motion uh by racken to review the the tape staff to review the tape um and if there's a request to put it on the agenda that we have it on the next agenda uh this and that was made by racken seconded by johnson any other discussion anyone in the public all in favor signify by saying aye aye any opposed motion carries unanimously and with that we end the meeting our next meeting uh is uh is listed on the agenda as september 20th to be at the regional transportation offices uh this is going to be a special meeting of the commission that's not going to be at the regional transportation commission office it's going to be at the metro transit district offices and we will be interviewing the finalist for executive director of the rtc so there will be a public portion briefly at the at the at the beginning of that meeting but the rest of it will be in closed session so i ask that we make that change and our next regularly scheduled regional transportation commission meeting is back here again on thursday october 4th um thanks uh for community tv for uh filming today thanks for everybody's participation i look forward to seeing you soon okay so the 20th tpw