 Good evening everyone. Welcome to the February meeting of the Public Works Commission. My name is Brendan Hogan calling this meeting to order at 6 31. First item on the agenda is the agenda itself. See that being shared for our benefit and reference. Thank you for that. Mr. Golding. Motion to approve the agenda. Right. We have a motion. Thank you for that. I will second the motion. I'll second the motion to approve the agenda. Outstanding. Thank you. Is there any discussion around that motion? All right. We'll call roll just for procedures while we're all on the phone here. Commissioner Barr. Here. Hi. Hi. Right. Commissioner Bowe is welcome. Seeing a vote on the agenda. Hi. Thank you. Commissioner Overby. Hi. Vice-chair O'Neill Vivacco. Hi. Commissioner Kennedy. Hi. I don't see Commissioner Montano and I for myself. Trying to pass this. 6 2 0. All right. It's moving forward to a public forum. I saw a couple hand in the air before or something in the chat. Let me just check here. Chair Hogan. Just so you know, I just promoted Commissioner Montaneo. So he's coming over right now. I'm not sure if he was intending to vote for the last item. Got you. Great. Welcome, Commissioner Montano. See you. All right. I didn't hear you present on that. So we'll skip you on that vote and look to catch this next go around here. Mr. Goulding, do we have anyone in the room or in the virtual room interested in speaking at public forum here? We had a hand up by Sharon Busher. If you've, that hand is now down, but if you intended to speak right now, we can promote you over. And for anyone else who joined us, any members of the public who joined us, just use the raise your hand feature on the bottom of your screen if you want to speak during this public comment. We have a hand up turn along. You'll be promoted over. I know. I'm sorry. My husband, Michael Long, wants to speak and I would like to speak. So Michael will go first. All right. Welcome, Michael. Good evening. I wanted to speak. I just saw a front porch forum posting about ballot item four, and I wanted to address that. My understanding is that DPW and the city generally is not allowed to advocate for ballot items. They can only inform the public regarding those items. So I just want to point out that this posting on item four is advocacy and it's not information. It really is misinformation to a significant degree. I mean, there's some good information about the things that they plan to do. And many of those things are worthy things, but there's critical misinformation regarding how TIF works because it says that there will be no impact to taxpayers. That's simply not true. There will be impact to taxpayers. TIF sucks millions of dollars out of the Ed fund and out of the municipal fund, and that can only have significant impact on taxpayers over time. It says too that it will be entirely financed by tax revenues generated by new grand list growth in our downtown TIF district. Again, that's kind of a corollary to no impact on taxpayers, but that too is false deeply, deeply misleading because TIF dollars are taken away from the municipal fund and the Ed fund based on what tax revenue was in the downtown TIF district in 2011. So every dollar added since 2011 becomes fair game for TIF siphoning off of those dollars to pay off debt for projects of any kind. And for instance, properties that might have been tax exempt in 2011, such as the former Y building. Once they come onto the tax rolls, as that building has now and it has an annual tax bill of about $80,000, the whole of that $80,000 goes into TIF and does not benefit the Ed fund or municipal services in any way. So these are details that should not, it's not responsible to gloss them over and to pretend to the taxpayers that there's no impact and it's all going to be money that oh we didn't have before. It's really, it's a deeply duplicitous and an irresponsible, inaccurate, false claim. And I'd ask that that be corrected on Front Porch Forum. One, it violates the prohibition of advocacy and two, it's not true. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Law. So can I say just a couple of things, please? Please. We only have one computer here set up for this. So I certainly echo what my husband just said. But you know, in simple terms, like if you think about it is that, well one, things can go wrong. Like look what happened at City Place and that's in the Waterfront TIF district. I think we've promised $25 million. I've been trying to get the number. I don't really know. But if that would ever get built and they're still waiting for financing, how will we pay for the schools, the additional fire protection, the additional police protection, everything that we will need for those 425 or however many units they're building. But that's where this is so flawed. And if you look up TIF and you read about all the states that have stopped using TIF because of things like this and it is robbing the education fund. And that's the worst part. Like we use that as a bank and that's just not fair. And I agree with my husband. I went to all these meetings and I heard Brian Pine say we're not allowed to sell things or promote things. But that front porch forum post is the biggest sales pitch I've seen. So I would like you to correct that. And we should be funding this work with a bond. Let's just get a bond and not take TIF money because it's just a bad way to finance things. Thank you. Thank you. Chair Hogan, next up for, oh, sorry. Yeah, please. Next up we have someone with the phone number ending in 3604. You'll be promoted over to speak now. Hi, good evening. This is Sharon Busher and I had trouble with Zoom. So I did have my hand raised but I could not seem to get to unmute myself. So I apologize. But good windy evening to everybody. And I'm here to speak to the department but to the commission because the commission is really the representation of the people, the residents, to the department, the interface. And I wanted to speak to you about a process that has changed significantly regarding traffic calming. And I learned about it because I live at 52 East Avenue and a while ago residents put in a request for traffic calming. And so we were noticed about a preferred solution being put forward. We were not allowed to have access to that preferred solution in advance of the meeting. And I want to let you know that unfortunately, none of the residents on the street were even asked about any solution. I understand this is data driven and driven by experts. But I think that sometimes I think we forget that Burlington is a small city where I still hope that people that are actually in decision making positions and people that work for us that are heads of departments and members of departments remember that what we're trying to do is make the city livable for people that travel through it but people that live in it also. And I think that the process was apparently too lengthy and too much back and forth and I can appreciate that. But now the process has gone to the other extreme where the residents on the street aren't even involved. Now let me be very clear, I was a city counselor and I do exercise my right and give voice and I did reach out to Elizabeth and to Chapin to let them know about the BED substation, the fact that East Avenue is a truck route, and the fact that Velco has to access things off of East Avenue and that ambulances go up and down the street. So I did want to bring that to everyone's attention but that was like two days before the presentation so it certainly wasn't input that could be considered. And so what I'm really asking the department but definitely the commission to reflect on a process that I hope you were involved in and approve the proposed changes but look at that and make sure that you really wanted to exclude the residents. We're really concerned on East Avenue. You know a lot of parking has been removed and total parking is going to be removed from Colchester Avenue and this proposal if we heard it correctly and it was really difficult to see is proposing to remove 17 spaces. Even in my section of the street we have two houses that take up and there are two investment properties but they take up nine spaces. I live in a section of East Avenue that is the oldest section and some of the houses didn't really have driveways so they're shared driveways that can accommodate one car. So if you eliminate parking I think that what you've done is really eliminate people especially older people and I'm now in that category right to even have visitors. I don't understand the city's desire to eliminate a segment of the population that is aging and a population that might be physically fit and bike but still needs a car and so I'm asking you as commissioners to ask the department to explain the process and I hope that you will modify the process for everyone not just for residents of East Avenue but for other streets. I think it's flawed. I think that we still should be able to communicate and have dialogue and have something that is livable and solve safety solutions for everyone. They are difficult choices but I'm asking you to please consider this. Thank you. Thank you. There is no one signed up any further for public comment. All right everyone's going twice we will close public forum and move forward to item four the consent agenda. Just one item on the consent agenda this evening which is the approval of draft minutes from last month. I understand there was some proposed edits circulated earlier today about Mr. Goding's possible to pull those up for our reference here. We have a few changes to spelling of names throughout the document and then revision to one of the public comments just needed to be purged a bit further together. Commissioner Overby had some further changes down below if you folks have them in front of you. I'll pause on each substantive change. Commissioner Overby raised a good question here and I hadn't had time to research it but the question is upon her communication with Karen Long they realized that some of the public comment that was noted down probably was less accurate than it could have been so through Commissioner Overby Karen proposed change reflected here and so we raised that for the commission to review and if needed to discuss process for public comment provisions. Sure and now I'm unclear why this is down in the section again this is a proposed edit to how the public comment was reflected. Yeah I believe it was during Karen's public comment during the during the let's see this is during the main street great streets presentation. Oh gotcha sure not the general public comment noted okay thank you. And then I'll keep scrolling down a slight change to the phrasing of how the presentation was or how Director Spencer's update on COVID operations or impacting the department just to be a little clearer. Sure and that should be everything that is in front of you and up on the screen. Got it thank you for that scan Mr. Golding. All right seems reasonable from my end so we welcome a motion if we have one. I move to accept the consent agenda with the minutes for the last meeting edited as such. Thank you for that motion Commissioner McDaniel. I'll second the motion to approve the amended minutes from last month. Second from Vice-Chair on the above goes thank you. Is there any discussion around that motion? All right none will go to a vote then. Commissioner Barr. Abstain I wasn't here for the meeting. Abstain sure. Commissioner Bose. Aye. Thank you. Commissioner Overby. Aye. Vice-Chair O'Neill-Vavaco. Aye. Commissioner Kennedy. Aye. Commissioner McDaniel. Aye. Aye. Aye for myself. Six four one of saints. Thank you. Move forward to item five a Lakeview College Sheet occupancy update. It will be having Jeff Padgett come on up to provide this annual report to the commission. This is a annual report that we're asked to bring to you as you all gave us delegated authority for implementing parking agreements in the Lakeview College Street garage and part of that requirement was that we provide this annual report to you. Thank you. Mr. Golding is Jeff here to be promoted. I see a DPW commissioners. Communications with a hand in the air. I see that too and I think he might be logged in under the main account that we have and it may not allow multiple users to come over. So I'm getting error code. Jeff, if you can quickly pivot to a different account, which I think he's on is doing now. Excellent. Thank you. Pickups of remote meetings. I know. If it doesn't resolve quickly, we can move to another agenda item while we wait. Sure. Well, Chair Hogan, if it's friendly for the commission, I could give my director's report while we're waiting. Sure. Here's Jeff. We have one. Great. Sorry, guys. Hey, welcome, Mr. Padgett. Robin, I use the same Zoom account to when we set up meetings and stuff and my computer seems to always think I'm on that one. Sorry about that. All right, here now. Let me share my screen. Everybody sees that big white screen? Got it. Thank you. All right. So this is the annual occupancy report for Lakeview and College Street Garage. And the reason we're here is because DPW has delegated, Chapin has the delegated authority to enter into parking agreements with monthly partners. This was a process that used to every permit or every monthly permit agreement had to go past the Public Works Commission, which really slowed down the process. So now we have delegated authority to enter into those agreements ourselves. But as part of that, we need to report back to you every year how we're doing with occupancy, how we're managing it. So ostensibly, we don't overfill the garage or artificially keep it empty. Just report to you guys that we're managing the perm the permitting process properly. So that's what we're doing. So occupancy remains low. During the pandemic 2020, we dropped from 60% occupancy down to 30. And throughout 2021, we bounced around between 30 and 40%. So not a dramatic increase over the year. We did have a couple of peaks early in the late spring and in the middle of the summer. We hit 85% a couple of times. So it's not like nobody's coming. There is market there is a matter of how fast it returns. I will speak a little bit more to these occupancy numbers as we roll on. Feel free to stop me and ask questions, but I will get there. There's only five or seven slides, and I will sort of wrap them all up at the end and sort of tie it all together. So occupancy is still low. Revenues, however, are recovering quite nicely. Our budgeted revenues for monthly permits are about $98,000 a month, and we're rolling and bringing around 93. So we're doing pretty well on monthly permits and transient permits, which includes hotels also. We're at about 90%. So our recovery is happening across 2021. It started out quite low, but by July, August, September timeframe, we were actually up at around budget revenue. So revenue is returning quite nicely. So here's the breakdown. We have that $98,000 budget for the monthly permits, and you can see we were down at around $50,000, and now we've recovered right up to this August number is a little confused because there were some permits from September, July, and some in September, they got credited back. So there's a little account thing going there. But regardless, the point is the green lines budget and we're over it, which is pretty great. Same thing with transients in the hotels. We pulled out of the last winter and we had a good summer and we even held that right through Christmas pretty well. So we're bullish on our recovery. The free employee program. We have about 70 companies participating in free employee downtown parking for employees downtown. There's about 700 individual people, workers, that have permits. But on a daily basis, only about 125 of them are parking at any given time. So if you look at how we budgeted this out, we said that we thought that this program would cost about $180,000 in opportunity cost, and we came in at about $151,000. So we're running at about 84% of budget, which is great. However, if all 700 decide they want to park every day, we've got some problems. So we'll speak to that in a minute also. So the basic conclusion is our occupancy remains low, but our revenues are recovered. So to me, that's that there's a discrepancy. How can our occupancy still be low and our revenues are recovering? Well, part of it is the way that we're managing the garage right now. We're counting occupancy manually. So we've had some folks counting occupancy early in the morning versus say at two o'clock in the afternoon. So I think that our occupancy number is actually artificially low. So we've actually changed the way we do occupancy counts. We've pushed it up to 11 o'clock in the morning and three, four o'clock in the afternoon. So we're getting better resolution on that occupancy count. And also one of the big things that's changing is we're actually we're transitioning to running the garage on Park Mobile starting on March 1st. And that is going to dramatically change how we staff the garages, which means we'll have people actually physically walking the garages and typing license plate numbers in to see if people are parked, you know, two, three times a day. And that will give us the opportunity to actually do more strategic counts throughout the day. And on top of that, we have, you know, we have all of the Park Mobile data that we can actually do real time live counts at any time. Yeah, we can see who who is parked at 10 o'clock at night, we can run a report on that. It's not exactly accurate that some people might want they might buy two hours of parking and then leave after one. So there's a margin of error in there, but it's it's very tight. So one of the other issues is we have that so 700 permits out there with the free free employee parking program. We need to change how we manage that permit so that basically if you're not using it, we're going to take it away. Now you can always come and get it back because you're eligible for it. But we don't want those 700 permits floating around as ghosts that might show up at any given time. And so we just need to tighten up that program. But remember, that program started, you know, just last year. So this is brand new for us and running these permits started in April. Before that, we're doing it as a validation style program. So this is a sort of a logical evolution for us to tighten up that program. And we have the same issue, frankly, with parking groups. So the folks that have an allocation of 50 or 100, often they only have 20 or 30 or 40 people parking against that allocation. So we really need to do an inventory of our allocations and talk to these groups and say, look, you really need that 100, because it's really goofing up our ability to understand what our oversell is. So all of that speaks to tightening up our administration, which I believe that the approach with Park Mobile will do and our redefining of staffing will do, so that we can start to really get to understanding what our oversell threshold is, which has been elusive because of COVID and the other things. So that's the performance of the garage and the whole. One of the things that you had asked that I report on during this presentation was the status of the 100 Bank Street, because they have a special development agreement. And this is the first year of it, so nothing has really changed. But I just wanted you to see that there's a placeholder slide in here. They currently have an allocation of 200, which is what they've always had, and that won't change until we go through. There's nothing to see here except that we have the slide and we will fill it in every year and keep you guys posted on how that's gone. So that's it. Happy to go back and talk to any of those slides. But the overall message is recovery is underway. Revenues are up and we have very much tightened management approach, and that's evolving. So happy to answer questions. Great. Thank you for that. Let's circle back through fellow commissioners, Commissioner Bose. Yeah, no questions from me. Thank you. All right. Do you want to just take down the presentation so we can see everybody? We can pull it back up as needed. Yeah, be hard for Chair Hogan to see everybody. Yeah, hold on a second. Where the heck did you go? Commissioner Kennedy. Thank you for your presentation. The one thing that I was thinking about, I was in the meeting, just as a viewer, last April when you approved the new permit program. And I think it was brought up then. But I feel like it could be beneficial given that there's 700 permits out there. And not all of them are being used to encourage people to use other modes of transportation aside from personal vehicles. And since it hasn't brought up before, I'll let, I believe, was Commissioner Overby. I don't remember exactly, but I'll let them talk about it. But I think encouraging people to use other modes of transportation could help to alleviate that issue for us while also benefiting environmental impacts and various other things in the city. Just one thought that I had. But yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, thanks. Commissioner Montano. Hey, thank you for the presentation. So my question also goes back to the free parking program. I'm just wondering how businesses are eligible, how many basically spots are allocated. And then my third question was also relating to Commissioner Kennedy's point, like how is the city encouraging people to use alternative modes of transportation? And that could include carpooling, which would also limit the number of permits that are used on the daily basis. Right. So this program is eligible to businesses downtown that have what in simple terms, I think of as frontline workers, cashiers, waiters, waitresses, bartenders, salespeople on the floor, people that are actually engaging and bringing that dynamism to downtown. Why people go downtown? Because it's a fun place to be and there's people, workers, there are fun workers. And this was part of the removal of the two hours free program from Marketplace Garage. So we removed the two hours free from Marketplace Garage, offensively increased our revenues, and we're using a portion of that revenue stream to in essence subsidize this program to support further support downtown businesses. So it's part of that context of supporting the downtown businesses by providing, not only providing convenient parking at Marketplace Garage for their customers, it isn't being impacted by employees parking there. This is the issue. We have Marketplace Garage employees of downtown businesses were parking there. So we've got 125 people that are now not parking in the Marketplace Garage and not parking on the street and those spaces are available to visitors, tourists, or anybody coming. So that, you know, that's the context in which this was developed is developed to be sort of this holistic approach to help keep downtown dynamic. And then as, you know, this particular component is not, you know, we're not looking at it, you know, encouraging bike and pet, you know, that's sort of kind of a, you know, I'm going to sort of pass the buck a little bit and say it's kind of a different department. But at the same time, I do have, like, you know, one of the programs I'm pushing for it, and we've got money for is bike, a number of bike racks in stock. And I'm just beginning conversations with stakeholders downtown to figure out where to put these things. You know, it seems like it'd be easy to put a bike rack in, but, you know, you've got to bolt it to the ground. Somebody's got to own that ground, got to be concrete, it's got to be appropriate, you know, it's got to be safe, you know, so there's a lot of things to figure out. So I do have, you know, although this particular program is not intended to address all the differentiation in my department, we are absolutely, we absolutely have pieces and parts that are trying to support alternative transportation. Yeah, thank you for that. And I guess I just have one more related question, although it pertains to the marketplace garage. I understand there's a number of bike lockers there. And I was wondering how people could go about renting those lockers, since I believe the city's web page, in order to do that is down. I actually haven't been able to access that. So are those currently being used? And are there any at the lakefront garage? There are none at the Lakeview College Street garage, but I believe Nicole Loche actually has the spreadsheet that manages rentals of those. I believe you can rent them, and I think she has a method by which to do it. There's smart bike lockers by the GMT Transit Center, and then the lockers at the marketplace are old school key locks. And we've really struggled with the operation of those. And some of them are actually coin that weren't working well. And people would people would store stuff in their long term to if they were needing places to store equipment or backpacks or the like. So we I think collectively need to figure out how we're going to provide secure bike parking in a way that is functional and efficient, and it meets the need. So there are some at the downtown transit center that are up and functional, and there is there are covered bike racks in the Lakeview College Street garage, but no secure locked parking. And we have a number of bike racks at the at Lakeview College Street that came in when the high school came. It's actually a condition of their approval through zoning is to provide bike parking. So it's outside, it's not covered. Great. Thank you for that. Thank you. Professor Barr. I have no comments at this point. Thanks. Thank you. Commissioner Overby. I had had significant communications with Assistant Director Padgett the last couple days about some of the information we got. And I think some of those his responses answers some of my questions. However, I do want to say that I did not support the employee of the free employee parking thing, particularly partly because of what Commissioner Kennedy referred to, that it really didn't it encourages cars to come to town. But it is it was a majority of the commission voted for it. So we have it. So we need to make the best of it. But Mike, so so one of my questions has to do with what you said during your presentation about switching to Park Mobile as the method of taking payment for the garage. Does that mean that there will no longer be cash or credit card payments at the at the gate? Do you have to use the Park Mobile application to pay for parking in the garage? It's Park Mobile and Calais pay stations. It's the same. It's the same exact architecture as we have on the streets. So on the street, you can either pay at the meter, the credit card, or with Park Mobile. Same idea. And there's a pay station. Yeah, so they will. So you won't have to use the Park Mobile. You can just go on with the credit card and and and how does that work with it? It's just like St. Paul Street. If you park on St. Paul Street, there's the kiosk pay stations on St. Paul Street. So there's kiosk as well. So there'll be a kiosk in there. There will be a kiosk. Got it. Okay, that answers that question. The other one, the the statistic about 100 Bank Street having 200 permits available to them as optional to buy, has there they've not purchased any permits for their their people from the 100 Bank Street office building? Yes, they do have some, but their allocation hasn't changed. I have to look exactly how many they've purchased. They haven't purchased very many, but they still have an allocation of 200. Yeah, well, I was just trying to compare, you know, you've got 703 employee ones out and 125 getting used and you've got 200 allocated, but not given out. And so I was just curious of the it looked like they hadn't used any of the 200, but sorry, they sorry, I'll make that more clear next. Well, it's not a big deal. I just read your chart and it had nothing for 2021. And I was like, are they not using any at this point? So we do have some permits that are being used by the 100 Bank under that 200 allocation. So yeah, and the the last thing that I communicated with you about was the issue was sort of the the occupancy problem. And I know we decided when we talked about this last year, it related to do we want that parking garage to be for employees and people that we want to keep in that parking lot instead of the marketplace, and not for visitors, or transient people, which which would, you know, has a different you would you would facilitate revenue differently, like what you're doing with with the monthly permits, versus trying to make it more attractive to visitors that would like to use the parking and was always we're always hearing the complaints about there's no place to park and it's expensive and yes, the private, you know, the private unified parking company, it's $3 or $4 an hour. So we know people think you know, that's expensive. But my point is, I sent you some pictures and I have them and I could share them about why we can't get more people that are visiting to use those garages. And it really has to do with the way the access is, and the way finding to and from them. And, and that to me is, it's a choice that we're making that may be a logical choice that we don't care to facilitate additional transient revenue. I'm, you know, you are making that decision, you know, as the Department of Public Works. But I think it's an important thing to point out, you know, that that we have this little challenge. And so if anybody is interested, I can do a sharing of the photographs that I took a couple days ago, to show what our visitors see if they're trying to get in and out of that, that parking structure. Is that something I can do? I'm allowed to do or, you know, are the commissioners interested in seeing those? If they're not, I'm not going to waste your time. I hear you do it if you want to share. I've got three photographs, one the College Street, one the Bank Street, one the Cherry Street, the three places that people would try to get to Church Street. So let me share this with you. All right. Anybody see that picture? Got it. This is our, this is how people come and go from on to College Street if they're trying to get from the parking lot that they drove into this entrance. That's what they will, that's the welcoming, not so welcoming way to see it, to get into that parking lot. That's one way. The next one, maybe you're going to try to get in there through the Bank Street entrance. This is the Bank Street entrance and obviously there is some construction thing which, you know, is still going on with the people's bank, which you can pretend isn't there. But this is what people are offered when they're trying to get in and out of that parking garage. And farther down, this is sort of continuing down the pathway to get to the parking deck. It's just not very attractive for a visitor or somebody going to the Flynn for a performance. And then the final one is this is what it's like if you want to try to get to Cherry Street, get to downtown Church Street via the Cherry Street route. So what I want to suggest is that it would be really, really helpful if there was some thought put to a way to make those more appealing. And yes, there are signs to help people, but they're very, very tiny. I didn't show you pictures of that. But it has to be a decision. And maybe, and I think Jeff, you had pointed out that the naming is going to be changed maybe to the downtown garage. So that'll help with some marketing of that. But it sounds like that means we're looking toward making it again more of a visitor's welcoming parking location. So I just bringing this up because I feel like we've, I've had this discussion about wayfinding and the way, look at those entrances for, I don't know how many years that we've talked about that garage. And I feel like we're not making any progress. And those bike racks for the students are, you know, just sort of also add to the unattractiveness of people trying to find their way to, to and from the garage, you know, up Bank Street. So anyway, I just wanted to bring that up because I really think it's something since we're talking about occupancy, you want to increase the occupancy, you want to increase the revenue. Are we going to just say it's just for downtown employees and keep them off of the prime spots? Or are we going to say we really do want to make it into a welcoming downtown garage, like, like downtown Annapolis, Maryland, I don't know if you've been there. They make it easy for people to find their way to the main, the main areas that they want people to shop and to enjoy the restaurant. So just my comments on this particular topic. So thank you very much. Thank you. Vice Chair, I'm going to take the stick and beat those 700 spots in the employee parking program. So is there any way that you're able to track? You said that about 125 of those employee parking passes are used on a daily basis. So, you know, dynamic shifts and so forth. Do you have a sense of, of whether or not those 700 are used during the course of, I don't know, a 10-day period, depending on people's shifts? And or can you get that data? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Out of those 700, there's what, 500 and some odd, whatever that is, that just don't even get used. There's only 125 people in the garage at any given time on those permits. So yeah, so we have to figure out how to, I know there are hundreds that are being issued, people, you know, because, because we're giving them out. We, you know, if somebody asks for 10, we give them, you know, we're sort of being in that early stage of just trying to figure out adoption. So like from our perspective, when we were running this as a validation style program, the utility was much lower because you had to pull a ticket, you had to have a validation. It was a two-step process. You had to remember, you know, it was, there's more friction, right? And then we converted to a permit style system, which was more like, okay, you just have this permit, you can come and go, would you please? Everybody's like, oh, great, I'll take one of those. So we made it much easier for people. So even if people were not totally convinced they were going to use it, they would take it anything. And we just need to start raining that in and dialing that, dialing that in. It's a management issue for us, absolutely. Okay, with good data, right? Yeah, right. And now we're going into Park Mobile, we will still know very closely who's coming in. When we take our shots in time, we'll know who's parking. And now this is like kind of this conflicting point for me, to kind of reflect back on what Commissioner Kennedy and Overby and Mutano were talking about this, you know, TDM, like how do we, how do we as a city, right, encourage, you know, the net zero energy plan and transportation management, while you as a department need to earn revenue. So I feel like I'm channeling Commissioner Barr here at UVM, where, you know, it's great if we can fill our garage with, you know, cars full of like five people, right? But you don't like the city doesn't get revenue if we just have bike parking. So I don't know, I don't know where kind of where Public Works falls in that kind of really delicate balance of wanting to get revenue for the car park. But the city's goals net zero. And we don't have it, honestly, we don't have a transit. I say this, oh, Director Spencer, are you on the GMT board? GMT, go ahead. We don't have, we don't have ample transit options that run into the evening where some people would be able to take advantage of that. So I just feel like there are all these conflicting pieces. And I, you know, so I feel like I want to push on the walk bike bit and transit, but I feel like we can't because those systems are in a place. But if we still have all this parking, then we're not going to get there. So I don't know, maybe that's just more like, you know, this is more rhetoric, and then I feel like you can actually answer. But maybe if you could throw something at me, Jeff. Yeah, no, I mean, I hear what you're saying. And, you know, my job is to run these facilities. And I do not absolutely don't see my job as generate more traffic and bring it into Burlington, just to fill my job by garage. The way I look at it is, let's make this garage so attractive, so that when somebody's coming into Burlington anyway, they say, I'm going to go directly to that garage and park in that garage and not drive around the block for 10 or 15 minutes looking for a parking spot. I'm, I'm, I guess I'm dealing with the reality of the people that are coming anyway, and not looking at my, the garage as I operate as generators of traffic. I see that's church streets job, right. That's the advertising budget of every store in church street is to bring more people in. My job is to make it when they get there, make it as fast and as efficient and clean as possible to park their car quickly. You know, that's, that's how I look at it, you know, and I'm, I'm happy to entertain all the different ideas around, you know, integrating multimodal and electric and all this stuff into the garages. I think that's great. But that takes a sort of that broader look. And so then my, my leap from there. Oh, director Spencer, are you gonna add context that I think together we've, we've come a long way. We removed to our free from marketplace garage for everyone. Part of that was in working with the business community was to offer a small subset of people who were either parking in marketplace or on street in the downtown to get the heck out of the high demand spaces into a garage we can't fill. And that is good parking policy. That doesn't mean that we're not still earning money. We're charging everybody in marketplace now. It used to be that 70% of the users in marketplace got out free. That change, that is a fundamental price message that didn't exist previously. We're offering free parking spaces thanks to this commission support for car share of Vermont in the marketplace garage. That's another investment we've made. And the traffic fund is a more flexible fund than the garage parking facilities fund. We with that fund can do things like we funded part of St. Paul Street, Great Streets. We funded the school travel plan to improve walk bike to the schools with funds from the traffic fund. So if we can get the on street system performing as well financially as the garage system. Unfortunately, the on street system is still hovering in the 50%, 60% range that we would have money to do more innovative stuff. The parking fund regulated by charter can really just be used for operating these garages. So it's not a flexible fund that we can do transformational stuff with for better or worse unless we collectively get to the legislature and get voters to change the charter. So I hope that makes sense. This was one targeted narrow program and not a sea change leaving the kind of price to paying for parking so that we encourage alternate modes because we're still swimming that direction from. Okay, now that's helpful that kind of this bucket of money goes for the parking garage. I get that. Jeff, you also mentioned bike racks, right? And I think way back when BHS was moving, which was just last year, BHS was moving to Macy's. There, you can't put bike racks in the car park. Is that my understanding? Because I know you have, I know those ones that Commissioner Overby was referencing right at the back door to Macy's by Best Bank Street. Yeah, we explored putting them inside the facility, but kind of came to this sort of general consensus that it really wasn't safe to have the kids and the bikes and the risk of them riding their bikes in the garage and just all the other things that come with happening at bike racks. Everybody sort of felt it was better that they be out in the open or everybody can see what's going on because you're not allowed to ride bikes in the garage. It's just dangerous. And we don't want to walk around in the garage because it's dangerous. And they won't walk their bikes. I get it. That also makes sense. And how's the BHS parking going? Is it? It's great. The first couple of months were a little bumpy just getting everybody trained on what you can and can't do in the garage. What you can do is park your car and what you can't do is anything else. Training everybody, staff, students, everybody alone and our staff learning how to interact with a different demographic. But we really enjoyed having them there. The energy they bring is high school energy. It's great. And one of the interesting things that happened as soon as they moved in is the graffiti almost disappeared. I know the picture that Solveig showed had a bit of graffiti in it. But that is the exception. Actually, I had conversations yesterday about all of a sudden, just this week, we had this little rash of graffiti and they haven't had it for a long time. And our crews are really, I mean, we've had a very positive change in our maintenance crew. And the responsiveness is huge. And they've been really staying on top of the graffiti in that walkway area. And I don't know what happened, but the students showed up and the graffiti kind of faded away. Might just be the energy. Just good energy. So yeah, we're happy to have them there. And it's also fostered, you know, so talking broader, you know, I have a relationship with the school district now. So we're actually going out to the other schools and dealing with some issues at other schools related to parking, like at pickup time, parents park in crosswalks, they park in illegal parking spaces. And our enforcement crews out there giving tickets to parents while they're picking up their kids. Like who wants to do that? So we're trying to work with the schools to create a new message around safe kids. So it's been good on a lot of levels. Jeff, that's that's like just music to my ears, you know, having worked at EES and EMS and the parking pickup and drop off, which is which is just absolutely dangerous. This is great. Okay, no, that's that's it. I kind of really wanted to hear this employee piece. We're dialing it in, hopefully. And I'm glad to hear that the BHS parking is going well. Maybe you can teach my son how to pull into the garage. It's fun watching them drive around. Yeah, right. That's all for me. Thank you. All right. Thank you for that. I think that's just, this is me then. What are the, I've got to ask, as you call it out, what are the what were the two daily peaks where you hit 85? You know, I didn't actually zoom in on them, but I got to imagine it's a day, a Saturday in in April, you know, one of those first sunny Saturdays and then the other one was in like July and it was probably one of those festival weekends. One anecdote is even on Fourth of July evening, when we were doing, you know, flat fee parking $5 just come in, we still didn't fill up. There was still, I mean, it was almost full. I mean, there were 20 spaces left. But even on that night with a special event with special direct marketing, we still, you know, so it's just interesting. I don't know the conclusion is, but it's interesting. Yeah. Curious. I missed the calculation of your 89% budget performance with the transients. We were looking at one. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. 33, you did 35 or vice versa. Yeah. Right. Oh, I've got, I've got this backwards. Sorry. Okay. Fair enough. And I was going to ask about real-time reporting and it sounds like this move to Park Mobile is a step in that direction. Is it safe to say that, you know, first step there is you can pull it and you could know what the real-time, you know, real-time approximation of your occupancy is. Love to see some point on order that communicated to the public. Yeah. You know, I do too. I just have to get a little, I have to get a stronger computer and some different software because the volume of transactions that happen in a day is massive. I mean, I was, as I was, I built a model to calculate real-time occupancy and I think it's got like 400,000 rows or something. So, yeah, I agree. We need to get to that point. We will, but it's going to take a little bit more time. Sounds like an opportunity for a student project to help or our city innovation technology department folks to help. Internship. Very good. Curious about the, you know, when you're looking at reining in potentially the employee parking program, do you have terms in minds whereby like if you haven't used it in two months, then you go, what are you, what are you picturing there? Yeah, that's exactly it. Whether it was two months or three months, we have to sort of sit down and do it one day and come up with that number. We'll talk to some of the, we'll talk to some of the businesses that are participating too because, you know, it's not just the people that are parking, it's the businesses. They're helping to manage this. They have to renew their parking every month. You know, instead of sending them a bill and they give us money, all they got to do is send us an email and say, keep parking with these people. Sure. Okay, thanks. Can you speak briefly to the, you know, some of the motivations here is certainly improving the usage and patterns at the marketplace garage and Director Spencer spoke to that a bit. But have you seen sort of encouraging patterns of, or I guess there's a validation program in place? How is that, how is that working from your perspective? Well, we have a validation program stood up, but nobody's taking advantage of it because it's just too hard to use because yeah, you know, you have to interrogate your customers to where they parked. You know, did you park at marketplace or did you park at Lakeview College? Did you park at the Cali Pay Station? Did you park with Pay Mobile or Park Mobile or did you? Right. It's just too, there's too many avenues to pay. So when you do, we have to craft these validation programs more streamlined, you know, so it's just through Park Mobile or something like that, which we just did over the Christmas holiday. We did one hour free, which was backed up with PID money. And we did that for all transactions on Park Mobile to a successful program. So that was, I mean, that was a credit that was like directly if you were using the app or something. Yeah. Yeah. One hour free if you use the app. Yeah. Very good. All right. No, thanks for that. That's all I had in mind to yours. Thank you. I will open up to public comments. There is no one signed up for public comment at this time, Chair. All right. Thank you for that. Struggle back briefly. Yes, Commissioner Overby. I just had one follow-up question on the employee free parking. I think when we talk about this originally, and I might be wrong, but I think I suggested that there should be some small token financial contribution for the employees that actually decide they want one of those passes like the 125. So have you thought about, you know, implementing something like that because it's the free is like what you said, they just say, oh, yeah, keep them all. And if in fact the employers want their employees to have that benefit, they could say it only costs you whatever $5 a month or $10 a month or something, you know, something that you can actually it's not to collect revenue, but it is to deal with the ghost passes that you're dealing with. Have you thought about something like that? Yeah. At this point, the first thing we're thinking about is putting this sort of put a shut the shut it down mechanism in. And then once we get that, if that shut it down mechanism doesn't work, then I think we need to talk about you know, charging for it, but that's a tip. And we'd have to be, you know, this program exists, remember, as part of a negotiated sort of approach with downtown business community. So we would have to really engage downtown business community, understand their needs, you know, what the, you know, what the, how they value the program and really understand what a reasonable charge would be. I'm not opposed to entertaining any concept, but at this point, we really I think want to try to truncate the amount of permits through this policy. And then see if that works. And then we'll try maybe we'll try the money. So in fact, to have any kind of charge to the employees is that I didn't maybe I heard you wrong. Are you saying that there is a commitment to the employers right now that there will be no charge to their employees for this, this parking permit? Well, that's how the program was set up. The program was set up explicitly as an offsetting program with the two with the return of two hours free. The employee free program was created with that implicit explicit offset. So if removal of two hours free, I'm sorry. So to change that we would, you know, it would require some conversations. That's all that's all I had. Let's call commissioners there. All right. Seeing none. We are no action requested on this one. So close item five and move forward to item six on the agenda south ends construction coordination plan. Thanks, everybody. Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Chair Hogan. Excited to have senior engineer Corey Mims joining us and maybe a city engineer Baldwin. Here he is. Great. We have talked in the past about the exciting number of projects in the south end that we have all coordinated into a south end construction coordination plan. I've got a lot of progress on these and I'm going to leave it to Norm and Corey to give you all updates. This is not an action item, but given that we're heading into a construction season, a lot of this is underway. We wanted to give a quick briefing to the commission and answer any questions. Thanks, Chairman. So I guess I would just start by saying that I'm going to let Corey take the lead on this and then I will plug in where there may be some missing spots because there's a lot to share. So, Corey, why don't you go ahead? All right. Appreciate that and I need to minimize the screen. Sorry. So we came to you in September with the south end construction coordination plan, giving you kind of an oversight of what we anticipate the construction seasons over the next several years to be looking like as far as the major projects in the south end neighborhoods. So as Chapin had said, Dr. Spencer, we are here to just give you a brief kind of overview and update as to where we stand on these projects. If it's all right with all the commissioners, I'm just going to kind of run down through them real quick and just give a real high-level update on each one of these. So we started off with in 2021, we completed V-trans completed work doing concrete crack repairs along 189 and also in kind of the Winooski area. So that work was completed in 2021 and in upcoming 2022, V-trans is doing a class one paving program throughout both Burlington and this town of Winooski. It's going to consist of their contractors out right now. They're anticipating getting bids back in near term. I don't have the exact date. The state is putting this work together. This is night paving program and it's going to consist of in Burlington, Main Street, Up Willard, and along Riverside. And that work is contractually placed to be done in 2022 as well as part of Winooski potentially could be included in that work, Winooski Avenue. That work is still planned to be started this summer 2022 and extended into 2023 for completion. Vermont Rail and Amtrak project has been underway and has made successful progress here in 2022. They're well in 2021 and we'll be finishing here this spring in 2022. Stelvin Street Roundabout project is currently underway as everyone's aware and it is a little bit behind schedule. We're still anticipating that work is looking to be end of 2023 construction. I don't know if there's anything more to state on that at this point but it's a little bit behind schedule but it's still making good progress. The big one in this South End Coordination Plan and which I'm kind of happy to say is as far as the Champlain Parkway project is going currently it is out to bid. We just had today this morning the mandatory pre-bid meeting with contractors. That one is planned to be, let's see, bids received by March 18th and we'll be going to council with those, apparently a little better for a bid award in April. So Cory, I would just frame for the commissioners that this is phase one of two and explain the segment that it references in this bid. Correct. So in the South End Coordination Plan it identifies this portion of work. These are the segments that ultimately connect between Home Avenue up with the new Champlain Parkway. It'll be on Lakeside Avenue to Pine Street and then heading north on Pine Street to Kilburn. This is part of the initial contract and then this will also include the shared use path section that goes from Shelburne nor near the South End of Burlington. So that this phase of work is anticipated to be completed fall of 2024 commencement of construction summer 2022. Next we have the Main Street, Great Streets as that's being designed to still proceeding on that. I actually am not too familiar with where we sit on this project. Norm, I don't know if you could speak to this one. I would just say that there is a significant amount of conversation ongoing about what scope of work would potentially be designed and constructed and how it would be potentially funded under a potential TIF vote coming this March vote. So it's in early stages really just gathering up what the public's interests are and then engaging stakeholders and it will take at least a year or two worth of design once there is clarity about the scope of work that's approved by members of the public. And the next one there is the Real Yard Enterprise Project. Real Yard Enterprise Project has started its outreach in its NEPA process with community members and local stakeholders. We have upcoming planned stakeholder engagements here well early March. So we're progressing on that project as far as the NEPA process and permitting is going and we'll be providing updates when as you know we progress. So I would go a little further Corey and say that we have met with federal sorry Vermont rail systems we have met we're scheduling to meet with individual stakeholders property owners within that area and we're also scheduled subsequent to that to the tent to meet with a group of stakeholders and then a public meeting to follow. And of course you're welcome to take a look at the website it's railyardenterprise.com. It has some of the schedule in there and some of those details it really is kind of the starting point to a project website that will have all the records and information related to decisions and meetings and so on so forth. So please take a look at that. We have been meeting with Federal Highway to get clarity about what process would be required under EA environmental assessment. I think that's important to understand kind of on the ground for what would be required on this federal process. It is a federal process it's pretty complicated there's significant issues related to right away acquisition historic preservation and environmental considerations in stormwater. So there's a lot to go on there and of course we're talking about a project that is budding up against the eastern edge of this rail yard. So it's a lot a lot of working pieces but we are very bullish about making that happen it happened fairly quickly. So I don't know if there's much else to offer at this stage but know that we are working very hard to advance that in coordination with this keep on pace with the schedule. Thank you. Yeah and the final portion of this is the final phase of the Champlain Parkway which would be anticipated to be working on the finalized permitting design in 2024 and construction potentially starting in 2025. All that is dependent upon the completion of the initial contract and that's you know that's kind of the some in summation the updates as far as the south end coronation plan. If any of the commissioners have any questions. I just had one more piece and that is we are working very hard also to engage the public in using different languages so that everyone has an opportunity to participate and deeper dive in terms of the civic engagement public engagement. So that's it I'll stop talking. All right thank you for that overview to both of you. Let's go back to my commissioners now. So it's Commissioner Kennedy. Hi thanks for the updates. I don't really have any questions at this time but I know a lot of people have been asking me for like when the roundabout is going to be done and when great streets will like start and that's very clarifying so thank you and yeah. All right thank you for that. Commissioner Mutano. Yeah thank you so much for the presentation. So my question is about the Rail Yard Enterprise project and I just took a look at the website now under the project purpose and the item that I'm most interested in is number three enhancing multimodal travel connectivity between Pine Street and Battery Street and I'm wondering in what ways the project would do that and sort of what alternatives are being considered at this early stage. The current typical cross section is going to consist of currently has a 10 foot shared use path listed for bike facilities and pedestrian usage that's you know we want to make the connections for those bike and pedestrians coming down battery to continue over as they want to make their way over to Pine Street and so this this new roadway would be very conducive for that traffic so they're not having to go up the hill up to Pine Street and come back down so this that would be the multimodal. So I would also kind of add that there is current cross section proposes to have a sidewalk on the east side, two travel lanes and a as Cory said a shared use path and some shoulders for Greenbelt. This cross section may change over time based on the challenges of trying to avoid impacts to the historic buildings that are within that district and also the rail yard as a 4f resource so it's going to be very challenging to kind of thread the needle with all the interests and decisions will have to be made as decisions are made will keep you informed and up to speed on on any key milestone decisions that relate to that. And to clarify on this project as it stands right now we are in the very preliminary phases of looking at the three alternatives that were addressed previously from the previous study and so in this process we are not making any final determinations in design this is just looking at the impacts and trying to find the the selection from there. So the details would then be further developed. So there are three alternatives that are currently being considered that will ultimately arrive at a final preferred alternative and then that will open us up the opportunity for design. Great thank you very much and I do just have one other question and it's about the connection between the rail yard enterprise project and the start of construction on the second phase of the so-called Champlain Parkway. How are these two projects going to be connected? Do you anticipate construction beginning at the same time in that year I think it was 2025? It's a situation of you know we're doing everything we can to advance the rail yard enterprise project. We are very dedicated to putting the resources there in our time and effort with regards to the start of construction. We had previously presented to council when getting the authorization to proceed with the bidding process on the parkway to acknowledge that they are kind of the gatekeepers of the city so when it comes to authorizing construction contract. So we're going to do everything we can to get this project underway and the start of construction on the second phase or the final phase of or final contract for the parkway. It's to be determined as to when it's going to start in relation to any of the other work. So Commissioner Motano being more direct about it these are two distinct separate projects and we are trying to thread the needle with what our federal and state partners require of the parkway as well as what we've heard from members of the public in terms of environmental justice. So we are trying to accommodate all interests and we will work very hard to achieve this objective of following the schedule. Thank you. I don't have any more questions but thanks so much. Alrighty thank you but Commissioner Barr. Actually I don't have any questions for this it's been very well explained thanks. Commissioner Bose. Yeah thank you. I don't have so much of a question as a couple of suggestions. I found it really helpful as you outlined different elements of the public engagement the meeting with stakeholders a number of these different initiatives that the department is taking to try and engage with the public as you said several times and also you know there's a lot of different projects that you have you know outlined there a lot of really complex you know elements to them. I think it would be really helpful both as a record of what you're doing in the same way that you have that chart that lays out the construction schedule and you know some of these different elements to actually both document some of this public engagement that's going on who the different stakeholders are both as a record but also as a kind of reminder to be engaging. I don't know if this is so much a comment to the two of you as it might be to Director Spencer just because I think that it's especially given some of the controversies that have continued to swirl around these projects I think being very intentional and very clear about the ways in which the the department is trying to respond to these sometimes very opposed interests and and shifting ideas around I mean I've heard a lot of different things being said about the Champlain Parkway how could there not be given the long history right and all the different changes that have taken place so that's just one kind of suggestion that I think a lot of what you added in this presentation just as as little details that for me were really helpful to say that okay well we actually have this plan to engage at this point with you know with with these members of the public with these stakeholders here's where we're taking it to City Council I just think making that more visible would be a great idea. We agree we agree we've been working on just creating a kind of a milestone record of every touching point that we've hit in terms of the public so that when we look back we almost have a record of everything that's happened in its history and not have to recreate history after the fact makes it so much easier. It also counters some of the narratives some of the narratives come out of simply not knowing why would you know some of the behind the scenes stuff but also there's a lot of filling in of the the spaces or filling in of the blanks and you know I've had conversations with with you know people in the city who are like well it's gonna add this or it's gonna add that and I'm like okay so what does that mean to you what does nine percent mean to you you know I mean so there's just a lot that's that's going on out there and you know I actually think that the roundabout is a very good example for me at least of getting pretty regular updates about this is what's going on this is how we're trying to handle this and I don't know if that's kind of a model for how you're you're planning to roll things out in terms of communication with the public but I think it's a very good model. Yes one of the big elements to selecting the consultant team for the rail yard enterprise is an actual public engagement piece and so we we have a part of that team sub consultant part of that team is is a public engagement piece. That's great. All right thanks a lot no no questions from me thank you. Vice Chair O'Neill Luwako. Thank you. Okay yes I'm you know just ditto on everything Commissioner Bose just said those are my my points about that I wanted to make about about outreach and documenting what where are the places that the public can can get involved and when I mean these are a lot of fantastic big projects over over a period of time and for some of us who've lived here a while it'll be great to get the Champlain Parkway whatever it looks going to look like but where where can just an average citizen like I don't know the whole history about it where can I go where can where do I get that information do I have to look for it or are there opportunities where the information can come to me are there any are there any more public meetings so so information like that and I think the piece I love about the roundabout and I go through that a lot is the communication I love my little Friday blurb on what's going to go on what blasting it's like and and the delays and what's going to be closed it's clear and it's concise and it's regular so I know to look for it even if I don't read it then I can go back so utilizing something like that and finding out you know is it just the people in this echo chamber who like that or are there other modes of communication that speak to different sectors of our population and then you mentioned the paving the v-trans paving on riverside and main main street and and willard and maybe this is probably going off in a little bit of a tangent um riverside avenue and the slope stabilization I know it doesn't quite fit in with this but norm do you have any um any more information on that I thought like okay we're going to go ahead v-trans is going to pave this and then is like the rest of the the slope going to you know cave in in two years um and if this isn't if this isn't the time then then maybe we can um you know talk about it later but that's Riverside Avenue I don't think is at risk of full failure or any of any of the above it and then and it's not clear what would happen on the private property either it's just we're trying to be provisional and protective of the public and so there are three properties that were of concern because of their activities and we wanted to kind of stop those activities that would exacerbate an existing condition that frankly there's no way of knowing fully the can uh subterranean condition given it's infilled with various mix of materials that and trash and vehicles and debris and so it's it even the geotechnical engineers can't say definitively what the existing condition is but we know that if you load a high bank on the steep slope that over time it's going to find a place of equilibrium it's going to roll down the bank so we've tried to stop them from doing that we have been engaging this state hazard mitigation fund to see if there's ability for the city to serve as a grant recipient to support these businesses and potentially have a property buyout but okay we are still in process for that okay that's good no that that's all thank you very much for the updates all right thank you uh commissioner overby well i know this is going to be a continuing discussion about the various big projects and and i'm just going to point out um i'm going to i appreciate the overview one of these but the the champlain parkway i think um i have i have some concerns about the plan so i just want to ask the as i saw it i know uh commissioner bows is pointing out the timing no is it but it was commissioner bows anyway about the timing of one one started and one finished um the rear yard enterprise versus the second part of the champlain parkway but my my my first question is i know we hear all the time that the design of the parkway requires the stop lights for intersections or and not roundabouts because otherwise the federal government will require us to pay back money so in effect what what i'm wondering and this is just i'm trying to figure this out is that meaning that um now that the the technology of uh safe intersections is really the the roundabout is the safer intersection for slowing speech down and and making it easier for the car cars to slow down and people to get through intersections my my question really is does the current bid plan that you put out to the contractors this morning um or i guess it was this morning have any you had a you had a bid meeting did you that was going to we had a pre-bid meeting yes was that today uh correct the pre-bid meeting was today but the bid was released on February 2nd okay well then what i'm getting at is the the the idea of are we required to spend the money that we have for stop lights at all these intersections and then then go back later with our own money or some other money and undo that because really the the new the the the current uh safety regulations now the certain recommendations are for roundabouts so are we really required to in effect spend money to put in stop lighted intersections on pine street um and then and then rip them out later is that commissioner over b i don't i don't really want to i i guess i i guess i can talk to you later but i'm just i guess i would try to say to you that i pause paused right there for now you got to understand that there are different techniques to deal with control and intersections and there's merits to both a signalized approach versus a roundabout approach and there's limitations to what we have for right away without impacting historic preserved buildings and so i've heard many times the idea of a roundabout as a preferred alternative for those intersections and the consultant has done their work that cannot fit within that space and so it's really challenging for us to continue here that roundabouts are a more safer solution yeah they may be in certain conditions but not in this condition and so we number years ago were kind of arrived at the decision we made and i don't think even contemporary analysis would change that decision we also are forced to advance um the design has proposed because we've gone beyond that stage and the federal government and the state are not agreeable to protracting this schedule so we so we don't have really the so-called option i would say to you that when you look at the context of the rail yard enterprise being developed in the parkway being developed that there is going to be significant shift in how traffic is circulating within that neighborhood and that still street network and it may provide us an opportunity to rethink what we have there before we build that next phase maybe but i don't know because we're working with federal state partners and one part about that too is that these initial contract the portion that you said that we put out to bid is from Kilburn south to home avenue so we are not in this phase working on the north of Kilburn section of pine so none of those intersections are in this contract yeah and i think yeah i think that that the timing of that i think people are really hoping that that the rail yard enterprise gets connected so that you're not hitting the mail you know the maple pine intersection there but but okay so i'm i'm not going to go into more but but but the bottom line is yes we have to build it as it is and it's all specified as you know stoplighted intersections and that's what we have to spend the money on there's no changing of that so that i just want to make sure i was hearing that correctly yeah and and also it's a it's a two percent of our portion with federal partners being the have your lifters on that project the parkway so so if there's their money they're going to want to spend it for the stoplights at this point because that's what they committed to in the past and what we committed to i guess that's what i'm hearing and i've heard that and i just want to make sure we got the the second question that related to that is i know there's been quite a bit of discussion about the um you know the connection between the south end of pine and the champlain parkway not being just disconnected and and blocked off and the when in the process might a you know around about being you know put back in there is that something we just wait wait maybe and because i know that's been a concern as well it will be built with a dead end there so pine street just dead ends and you can't get on to queen city parkway at all uh in that eventually so i would say on that question and japan's worked very hard with our partners to get concessions once this project is built to consider any number of things and that could be one of those things that we can think they consider if we give if we i guess have a strong argument so but this project has to be built as designed we can't be modifying at this stage or we're at risk of of being undefault of the of the agreements right and and the good news is that you're not putting in a stoplighted not investing money in stoplighting at the pine and queen city uh champlain parkway intersection so you're not already wasting that money and then ripping it out which is what would what might be happening in the other locations i think those are the questions that i have and i know i'm going to have more questions about it because you do have a lot on your plate i do agree with um mr. o'neill vivanka that the communications excellent on the shelvin roundabout that's great um and so um i just am hoping we can you know make sure that that the reality enterprise project gets connected before we have any additional traffic coming down from part one of the champlain parkway because i think that's what would help people feel a little more comfortable about it and then obviously it's all built 10 years from now roundabouts are going to be the thing and we're going to just have learned our lesson and we just go and put in where they're appropriate um we put in roundabouts because i think you will have now you will have had the experience of the shelvin one and and seeing how well that works and people right now just don't know that so people are reluctant to to to feel good about those in burlington they just haven't used them enough so thank you very much i think that's all i have i would just i would just respond to one more point and that is council ultimately will decide uh when we release the next phase of construction and they certainly um expressed an interest in waiting on completing uh the last segment of the parkway until rayard enterprise is complete but we also have federal partners have expecting us to complete this product within a 10-year window so we are we are working very hard to advance r.e.p so that we're not in collision with those two both the council and our partners thank you for that i know it is there's a lot of balls in the air for sure and a lot of people who are weighing in and everybody has an interest of the you know getting the best solution i i'm not you know saying anybody doesn't um but um i think things have changed that that's slowing traffic down and roundabouts are 24-7 traffic calming whereas stoplights um are not very safe for pedestrians so that's my only input on that so we'll we'll we'll see we're doing we're doing better we have a roundabout happening and i really think that that's going to be very helpful for people to understand how how much better it is for everybody for cars for pedestrians for bicyclists so i'm looking forward to that and i appreciate your work on that and more if we like work and all the people working on it that's we are too that's probably that's been around for a long time it's it's it's great work and it's about the most difficult surround about you could have possibly chosen to do so i i feel your pain yeah thank you all right thank you briefly on that class one paving bit could you clarify if i mentioned that part of a new ski have might get paid would you elaborate a bit on which part and uh so it the way the contract my the way it was explained to me from v trans is the contract states that uh main street uh up willard north on willard from main street north to riverside riverside east to a new ski that section is listed as to be completed by the contractor in 2022 um but once the contractor completes their required work in 2022 which includes work in both the town of a new ski as well as those indicated streets that the contractor can then continue work and that winterski avenue be one of those continued streets they would then likely move to following completion of the other required work in 2022 so there is kind of just a little asterix on that as far as you know depends on the contractor how fast all construction goes and i don't know they're not limited so that's where we sit with saying that we like to let people know that that very well could be for something done in 2022 otherwise it might be on the 2020 class one paving list for a future year 2023 is when that rest of that work would be completed and the rest of that work being winterski avenue all the way down to st paul st paul over to shelburn and shelburn all the way down to the city limits to 180 okay thank you yeah all right uh yeah i appreciate the the presentation here nothing further on my end let's check and open up to public comment if anyone's interested in participating it's time there is no one here we're signed up for public comment all right close public comment in that case there is no action requested on this item thank you again for the the presentation in exchange here and so look to move forward to item seven on our agenda bright street traffic calming this one is an action item and we are a transportation planning team thanks cori and norm we're joined by elizabeth ross for this item everyone um elizabeth ross transportation planner with dpw um so tonight i am bringing a request forward for a parking change on um bright street through a traffic calming request that the neighborhood has submitted um i don't have a separate uh standalone presentation so um i'm happy to rob golden i don't know if you want to share the memo um from the packet or i can share my screen directly but i'll just be sharing the packet so um i'll i'll go ahead and share my screen um sure if you're gonna pull up a reference that'd be great yeah let's do that all right great so just dive right in um so it'd be hopefully you guys can also see that great so this request as i just mentioned is coming through the uh traffic calming program uh we received a request from bright street residents a while back now for traffic calming on their street and we are now thankfully getting to their street and so we are working with consultant vhb on this project we um we and vhb collected data did analysis looked at our traffic calming options in the new 2020 traffic calming manual talked with fire department um and arrived at a recommendation which um essentially is a parking chicane um which which means that by alternating currently the parking is all on the east side of bright street and we are recommending that parking basically in the middle section of the street gets shifted to the west side this would create a chicane basically forcing people to adjust their movement horizontally it's a horizontal deflection on the roadway um causing people to slow down and create that traffic calming effect um another thing that we are recommending with this alternative which isn't part of my request tonight but just for added context is also rehabilitating the curb on that southwest section of the street where it's pretty um degraded and worn away and basically non-existent and it really makes the road feel like it's wider than it is and so we're we're looking to re kind of reformalize the roadway through new curbing uh new greening opportunities brass will place new trees and um you know essentially this recommendation we felt um provided the traffic calming benefit that we're seeking and also um the added benefit to the neighborhood of a little more uh I guess greening you know beautification formalization of the street which that visual narrowing within your curb should also just make it feel a little bit narrower and hopefully to slow people down but all that to say the request for tonight is to approve that parking switch um for that middle section of the street from the east side to the west side um um and I think those are really the yeah that's the key the key point there um it would involve also there is one accessible parking space um in that area that we would be removing so um that one space would need to be uh transitioned to the other side of the street essentially moving it from 48 Bright Street to in front of 41 Bright Street um other than that I know that um I think it was Commissioner Overby had a couple of concerns about the driveway um situation in front of the housing co-op back there um with recycling and trash pickups so as well as the uh fire hydrant um that are both on the sides of the street where parking is being proposed to be moved to so I'm happy to you know speak to any of those questions um but I guess I'll just keep it short and um happy to take questions okay thank you uh yeah let's check with our commissioners here um about Commissioner Overby you had a brief exchange previously anything uh further on your end yeah I actually had communication with um engineer Ross about the the fact that when I went over to look at the situation because we had dealt with this street before years ago um I was concerned the fact that the area that's marked as um on street parking that's been moved to the west um there is a parking there is a fire hydrant that's going to block you know parking on six feet on either side of that which um which engineer Ross pointed out that that's the law for sure um but then also it happened that on Tuesday when I was there was the day that they the uh the six giant blue recycling bins were actually out in front in the other uh position of the on street parking and I do have photographs that I sent to her which I you know I'm able to share with you the two photographs that sort of make me have some concerns about how this what other alternatives were considered besides this uh just switching this middle section um if if the commissioners are interested I will show those otherwise you you can imagine on the which you're seeing there in front of you on the on street parking that's marked on the the left side I I think maybe it'd probably be just as easy you'll see that one the little pink on street parking that got moved to the west side which is the top of the street there that had had uh six blue recycling bins in that position because it's actually a a sidewalk that goes down into the main you know main into main entrance to the to the right street co-op and then why don't I just if people are okay with it I'm more than willing to show that otherwise I'm concerned about the fact that uh I guess they were when when when uh engineer Ross was there in talking to people he said they just put those bins in the in the in the walkway there that that's the entryway to the uh co-op and I just can't imagine that but you know maybe that's what they're willing to do to change after this parking thing changes I I don't know but um so my concerns are that that um there might need to be some changes made to where these on street parking uh west side positions are that that do not conflict with the fire hydrant and with the clearly the location that the co-op puts their recycle bins on Tuesdays so if you want to see the pictures I got them don't you're if you get it um you can actually you've probably got them anyway or I do have them secured up if you want to show people I think we've got the sense of it yeah okay yeah so I'm happy to respond question or overview um so yeah I did see your photos and um I saw it I believe they showed the um recycling bins kind of queued up there were six of them right around here not mistaken um I think we had actually been told by a different resident who was and I I I apologize I didn't address the the public feedback portion of this project as well there was a mailer which is what we're looking at right now that was sent out and there was a neighborhood meeting um it wasn't didn't have great attendance but um we did get some good feedback out of that and and one of the residents there did also comment on the the fact that trucks need to access this driveway um for that recycling and trash pickup and I guess he made it sound like they they backed down the driveway um so we had actually run turning movements using our our engineering software the phb did um to make sure that the those trucks of that size would be able to make that turning maneuver to get into the driveway but it sounds like it's actually that they they placed them at the curb edge um so I guess um my response to that is I and I certainly wouldn't claim to be the most well versed in the way that the recycling trucks maneuver and do their pickups um but I guess I would think that they could pull parallel to the on street parking and access the um the uh bins and bring them and kind of cross that parking lane where there would be an opening here um and they would be able to bring them to the truck and load them that way um and maybe someone on this meeting would be able to correct me if that's not how they operate but I I would think that you know there are several streets in the city in the city that have on street parallel parking and and they still have to access bins that are um you know in the green belt or or otherwise so I would that would be my response to that um and then in terms of the fire hydrant I didn't um expressly uh list the parking area you know accounting for a six foot gap in the parking because I know that the um ordinance has a separate section that discusses you know every fire hydrant has the six foot uh no parking area in front of it but it has to stay clear to the road so I didn't list you know parking from here to here and then parking from here to here because that part of the ordinance for fire hydrants kind of covers and supersedes this parking um this parking section uh so the only thing you know that I think would change as a result is it would you know being six feet it shouldn't take more than one parking space but that would you know pretend that would likely affect wow you know one parking space that could could have been moved to that side of the street um I will note though that out of this alternative and the other alternative that we presented to the neighborhood this one does retain more parking even with that one spot lost to the fire hydrant um our other alternative would have had uh two parking spaces lost from the existing condition versus this alternative which um I think is probably a net neutral uh change so from that perspective we would still be retaining more parking than going to the other other alternative that we um had as an option so I will leave it at that and the commissioner overview I don't know that helped to address your concerns well what was the other alternative I mean obviously you've decided this is the better one but what was the alternative um it was uh choker traffic calming design so there were essentially two mid block curb extensions um so actually a total of four curb extensions but two of them paired together on either side of the street coming in into the center of the street causing a yield condition at two points two separate points along the roadway um to create that traffic calming effect and the reason we went with this option um we felt that we would still get a traffic calming benefit with the chicane um but also we would have money to do the curb rehabilitation on the southwest side which if we did the chokers we really wouldn't be able to do any of that other curb work um which we felt would be a loss you know lost opportunity to the neighborhood so we felt like this essentially gave us more bang for our buck so and retained more parking so where were the chokers positioned uh I don't have the exact house numbers that they're in front of because that wasn't uh part of my recommendation tonight um they were located at uh two they were spaced at two different points throughout the road throughout the street well thank you for your explanation I'm I'm I have concerns about the the way this is so I won't be supporting this but you know that's just me so there's just a lot of people that live in that bright street co-op and that is actually a walkway it's not a it's not a driveway so um anyway thank you for your information all right thank you uh let's see commissioner kennedy uh thank you for your presentation um I appreciate the explanation I was kind of having trouble understanding like what it was going to look like um just going through the packet um but I think that this is a great idea and I like that you can read that we can redo the curb and kind of add to the vibrancy of the street I just drove down it today to better understand um what the situation is and it's definitely something needs to happen it definitely seems like you can kind of just shoot right down the street um right so yeah I think this is great um and I don't my only questions are about the recycling and that's all explained so thank you all right thank you commissioner mattano hi thank you so much for the presentation and I just have a question about this traffic traffic calming project in general what is the target speed on that street and what kind of benefit um in speed reduction could you expect with this technique versus maybe some of the other ones that were considered yeah um so I believe the target speed this street is not a slow street um in our plans in our planning documents so I believe the target speed is just the speeds limit which is 25 miles an hour um and saying that I'm trying to remember what the um what the speed was the 85th percentile speed was um when we did our data collection but I can tell you that the um anticipated speed reduction with something like a chicane like what we're proposing is six to nine miles an hour um and that's a greater speed reduction than the other alternative which was the chokers the curve extensions which was uh I think it was like three to four um it was quite a bit less like three to four miles per hour uh speed reduction anticipated with that um so this one actually provides a greater benefit all right thank you commissioner bar thanks thanks and and great presentation um my experience through understanding of the chicanes is that they are a very good tool to use if in place properly and it looks to me like this one is going to be put in properly uh I would only point out or maybe address the the ADA space that's going to be relocated across the street and I'm just curious if you have any information about who might be using it is it a resident that on the street is it something for the co-op is it uh because relocating across the street might make it um not accessible for somebody to use it if they were used to parking on the other side and if that were the case I guess I'll just add maybe you could take one of the other parking spaces um to the north or to the south and turn that into an ADA space if it is something it needs to be used on the what is that the east side I think have I jumbled that up too much um so you're you're you're asking whether it might be closer to have it stay on the east side versus moving it to the west side right because when you put an ADA space across the street then you create another impediment for them to have to physically cross the street and probably there's not a mid block crosswalk or something there so they have to figure out a way or go all the way to a corner and then come back and I was just curious if there was any kind of data on who uses it and if it is a resident on the east side of the street then maybe another place could be made you know used in its in its place on the east side it's just something to think about I I'm I'm in support of this this uh proposed chicane so I just wanted to throw that out there because ADA is one of those things that if it's not compliant or it's not accessible that it it's kind of tough to use right no that's a really good point I didn't um I didn't go back to find the history of what when this was requested and I haven't heard from um we've we've sent the mailing to notify for the public meeting that happened a few weeks ago and then we also sent the mailing for um for this meeting um notifying about the proposed change coming forward and haven't heard um from from whoever is using that um I know just from being on the street I did see the car parked there you know with the accessible space tag hanging from the rear view mirror so I know it is actively used um I don't know any information about where if it's for the household that it's located currently directly in front of or if it's for a different household I'm not sure so that would require like a yeah a closer look so I guess I would just suggest that you know moving it across the street and wait and see and that's a viable option and then if somebody on the east side were to say hey you took away my parking space or something then you can adjust later on that's the good thing it's just some pain on the ground and a sign in the in the you know just relocating it it'd have to come back to us probably for for approval but it's something that can be mitigated later on I just wondered if you knew that's all so no no but that's that's all I have thank you thank you commissioner bows uh I've got no questions this was very well explained I really appreciated the presentation thank you thank you thank you vice chair on here with an echo um yeah I I do want to push on the ADA spot um uh and just wonder if they're um I don't know what communication um we have with parking to try to identify who is the holder of um you know the tag it is easy to do after the fact but um it's federal law and if we can offer goodwill by doing that extra bit of outreach before we find out that the people who are using that spot really need it on that side I just think it saves us time and and money on paint um so that's my kind of strong urging and then a question and this is a probably a citywide question so with the fire hydrant um Burlington doesn't uh mark out fire hydrants of like what however many feet um is there any plan to mark this out because it will be changing the the side of the park the side of the street where parking goes um and I don't know like so that so that folks really can see like oh this is six feet or whatever these I can't park between these yellow lines is that part of this or no um yeah so to address your first comment about the ADA um excuse me the accessible space I think uh Nicole Losh is also on this call and she might actually have a little more detail on the usage of that space which might be helpful for this conversation so I don't know if we could promote her so that she could weigh in on that um while that's happening um the question about how the space is marked for the fire hydrant I actually don't know how the city handles the um I just you know saw that in the ordinance that it's a citywide kind of blanket statement um for that it's prohibited in front of the fire hydrant um maybe Norm if he's still on the call her chief and might know um how that's handled I I can answer that if you'd like okay great so as a practice cities don't necessarily stripe around hydrants because there's there's so many in so many places and uh it should be an accepted standard practice that people shouldn't park within six feet of the hydrant so I mean we could take the next step of striping it but it would be and certainly we're not I don't think we're interested in signing it and striping doesn't effectively provide any level of a degree high degree of enforcement so it's it's like a generalized speed limit it's posted at the limits and generally people should know but okay better better for us that's how that's been our approach that's that's fair I can't I was looking at um I haven't been on bright street um or I haven't noticed the the fire hydrant but I wasn't looking for it um and again because we're changing the parking um I think they're going to be people who get caught up in um parking and and and right we shouldn't block the fire hydrant I don't want to make excuses for people but I guess I guess as much communication um as possible in going out once you know because you said you didn't have a whole lot of participation but but as um as the parking changes um to let people know this is really this is really happening and it's changing and look out for the fire hydrant we can revisit that policy but I think that's generally where we kind of land with the hydrants today yeah so I guess you know it's really the ideas that we would while this would if this is approved this would obviously be a change from one side of the street to the other we would kind of expect people to apply the same logic that we're hoping that they apply whenever they park anywhere else around the city that might be near a fire hydrant and we you know we hope that they uh are exercising that and then anywhere else around the city so it would be the same here and we hope no thanks thank you for that and I think what I heard Commissioner O'Neill-Vavonko saying is just if we're communicate when we communicate the changes if this passes tonight that we include a communication to the neighbors about the hydrant so let's do that it doesn't seem like we've had any sort of pervasive problem of people parking in front of hydrants but we can check what a parking enforcement and thanks everyone um I'll I heard a couple questions about the accessible space so I just wanted to share um at least my observation from when we were out there and granted some additional outreach to make sure that um what we observed isn't the only instance but when we were doing some of our field work the use of that space that I observed was actually someone parking there and walking across the street to the west side so this may actually be a benefit to someone's using it and again this isn't necessarily a reserved space for that person it could be used by someone on the east as well so we can look into this a little bit more but I just wanted to share that um our observations and we were out there as it was used by someone on the other side of the street where the the space would be relocated thanks Nicole thank you okay thanks for that that uh just a question in recent conversation about uh winter parking restrictions we said that there is at least a a preference in that switch sides uh a parking mid block like that and um referring to partially to our decision where we went with a winter uh switch sides on Catherine but not to do a mid block on on Charlotte there may be other reasons at play why we didn't pursue that on Charlotte because have we had a change of heart here or is there something different about this bright street situation that makes us feel better about switching sides without a stop control um I guess I uh I can't speak to that I'm not sure um I'm not sure about the that communication and sure yeah I can yeah I can respond that I think it was uh our city engineer who was concerned about switching sides of the street at an intersection there is no intersection here interior to bright street and therefore it's a more predictable traffic pattern uh in the street section that we're talking about I believe city engineer Baldwin that the concern um with Catherine was about switching without a stop sign is that right great there was an intersection where we were looking to switch parking at an intersection it just didn't have stop control I think the difference here is is the length of taper and as following what commissioner bar had said it's a function of how much of a lateral shift it is and how long the taper is to properly accommodate based on the speed condition so a local street has a significantly lower speed therefore needs a significantly shorter taper and less volume of traffic so that I think there's more flexibility in a local street than there is say a more active high volume higher speed street that another is a reason thank you for that and uh we'll be glad to refer to this uh refer to this later if needed question on uh I guess could you clarify the the budget for traffic coming you alluded in the packet to uh sort of an increased allocation from city council an increased preference for this for city council could you clarify a bit for what that difference is um yeah I know that we did receive um a good chunk of money to help us work through our backlog specifically um you know the city council is um you know communicated that they were definitely interested in in getting more of these projects implemented and completed um I think I would probably defer to Nicole more so I think she would definitely be able to speak to that better I don't know if she's still on the on the meeting but uh if you we can definitely you know get more information to you after after tonight if that's something that you're um if you're interested in hearing more about that sure I am still on the call though and happy to to add to that yeah so yeah um council allocated an additional 300 000 specifically for traffic calming in fiscal year 22 so that's that was just you know one lump sum and as Elizabeth said we were using that to try to really make some headway on the traffic calming backlog so our goal was to um build traffic calming on at least three new streets this year we already had birch cliff parkway in the queue so that one was already funded so um bright streets east avenue and scarf avenue are the uh streets that we are actively working on right now with that additional funding excellent thank you and I'm glad to see the refreshed um traffic calming page on your website about this uh if I'm reading this right should right now be listed in the underway category there yeah I actually did it's funny I just updated that um today oh sorry yes my notes on that were uh as of two days ago yeah yeah we're a little behind on our website maintenance great okay now there's nothing uh nothing further on my ends it's uh check and see if anyone's interested in speaking at public public forum on this one no one at this time all right that said uh we are seeking an action with regards to the the traffic regulations that would support the the presentation here so I'll make a motion to accept staff's proposal we have a motion thank you for that I'll second the motion oh sorry commissioner kennedy okay all right we'll give it to vice-chair on the other side on the second is there any discussion around that motion all right let's go to a vote then uh commissioner bar aye commissioner bows might have lost commissioner bows passing uh commissioner overby no no uh commissioner kennedy hi commissioner montana hi vice-chair on the obovaco aye and I for myself just checking again I'm still no commissioner bows all right we'll score it five four one against and one absent all right uh motion passes thank you very much for the presentation there thank you yeah and we are moving forward to uh directors report item eight in our agenda excellent uh following up from public comment earlier today uh regarding our traffic calming program uh as you heard from uh elizabeth nicole here we are working to buy down our outstanding list uh with a new program uh the program has changed uh our approach and you heard from uh former counselor Sharon busher tonight with some concerns about our efforts uh look you know this is our first major project under the new program we are going to meet internally uh to debrief uh how this east avenue project is going it is a larger project than uh then bright street and uh we want to get it right and we're trying to find the right balance so we're happy to give you more of an update uh next month uh in the directors report there were updates on a few traffic requests and um I can provide a little further update that we have heard back from the individual at overlake park and have a plan forward uh the conversations just happened today uh so hopefully at the next month's commission meeting we'll have an action item there and we are still uh in process on reviewing the Adams and south union street request so I know those were two uh the commission is discussed and wanted to give you those updates and um you know I did include in the directors report uh kudos to staff for uh a weekend of water main breaks and then followed by a storm response that I think uh from my perspective went quite well thanks to our crew's efforts so of course always happy to learn what we can do better um but uh you know folks work a lot of weekends in the winter time to keep our our city moving great thanks for that all right we will move forward to commissioner communications at this point so let's start with commissioner bar let me put my picture back up I apologize for keep turning it off but I have some some glare here um I I guess that I want to always commend uh snow removal and how fantastic it's been that my my streets and the streets between me and uvm are very clear and and salted and walkable and for the most part the bike lanes are bikeable I will just point out and we kind of talked about it a little bit in the last um the bright street traffic calming about the the bins a lot of times recycling bins end up in the street and on their sides and in bike lanes for one thing so I just wanted to make that comment I don't know if anything could be said to the to the recycling team to just make an effort to try and at least place them back where they were before so that they don't end up in the street and smashed by cars going down but other than that I I'm still amazed at how well snow removal happens in this city and taking care and especially the the water main breaks that have happened how how efficient it has gone with the repairs so commending all who made that possible thanks thank you um to sure overview um I just wanted to make a comment that been asked of me about uh the the flower pots the traffic calming or the narrowing of this the road at main and uh south onuski uh a couple of people have mentioned to me that if you're on a bicycle coming down main street those things force you out into the street and I sort of noticed that as well it's sort of I I know and I said to them it's intended to narrow the distance you cross but I don't know that there's anything much but I I have gotten some concerned comments from people saying those are the you know not a good idea to have that particular um flower pot sticking out into main street at that point so I don't know what to tell you but to share that piece of information and um I had one other thing I was going to ask about um and I'm forgetting what that is but so I'm going to have to pass if I think of it I'll raise my hand again how's that thanks sounds good thank you uh Commissioner Kennedy um yeah on the note of commending staff uh I had the unfortunate situation of having my car towed this week uh which is the first time I ever got a ticket in the city um but that's okay I made a mistake um was a little bit too close to the driveway um but everyone that I spoke to in customer service and at traffic was super nice and super helpful um which I obviously appreciate it is very stressful um on that note also I would just I'm curious if there's a way we could set up like an online systems you don't have to call in and like talk to a person to figure out where your car is um I called like three or four times before actually getting in contact with the person and not the answering machine um which like was fine for me because I had time but if I was trying to get to work and like relied on that job that could be a really big issue for someone um that's just something that I'm curious is if that's possible and I don't know if you have an answer right now but we'll look into that one of the questions it's just privacy we need to make sure that we're not sharing public information about people's cars and and ownership so we'd have to look through maybe some uh searchable database that you could type in your license plate but I'll talk to Jeff and team and we'll get back great um and then I just had one more question um about the Adams and South Union stop sign what is the criteria for getting a stop sign there the engineer Baldwin want to answer that yeah so uh there is a series of warrant considerations that uh process requires it it ties back into um volume of entering traffic certain thresholds of volume of entering traffic and also action experience and whether or not that would correct any sort of problem or um clarifies uh signing right away so there's standards of practice that relate to that that we follow okay um and then with uh just there's one other like intersection that I know has been brought up a lot um at Duke meetings and um just generally amongst like my friends and I've thought about it myself I have the college in South Willard streets uh it's a signaled intersection but there's no signal for pedestrians um and I know it's been brought up at Duke as like a possibly like potentially there could it could be a blinking red light it'd be an all four-way stop or something like that I don't know if that's something that's been looked into um but yeah that's it so yeah that answer your question uh for a number of years that intersection it was kind of flip-flopped back between stop control and the signal because of its volume of traffic and I think that it was a number of years since I've looked at it but um as I think the signal is probably the right approach in that intersection but I do I do agree with you that there should be improved accommodation for pedestrians it is a that should be signalized but with just a function of the capital investment within our system and what where the priorities are so that's a an action decision within the traffic operations team and not the engineering team but uh we certainly have expressed support for that idea okay that's all I can ask um but yeah thanks everyone all right thank you uh Commissioner Montana yeah I'd like to second what everybody said about the quality of the sidewalks and pedestrian infrastructure um after the storm a few weeks back I thought it was totally fine walking every day between the old north end and campus um and I thought just like that the speed of the cleanup was good um like related to that I also walked through the college and south willard intersection a few times each day and I definitely think that is something that traffic operations um should uh take up as a possible change to the traffic pattern there um it is a really busy intersection and people do drive quite fast on south willard and there are times where I've seen people you know nearly get hit um but it's a matter of just everyone you know taking care and really slowing down as they arrive there so I would definitely consider that as as a priority intersection just from my own experience and it's just a very high volume area for pedestrians in general so I think that's a good priority yep all right thank you Vice Chair O'Neill Lovacco okay well I'm just going to jump on that bandwagon on College and Willard I think this is way before any of us were on here um and when jave was a local function I was advocating for pedestrians out there since my now 20 year old was in preschool at the Y um so if there are more people who can join this course it's where like edmund's kids they walk and once our kids were in third grade they walked on um by themselves they were crossing guards there's a crossing guard shortage um so I think anything that we can do to keep our kind of more vulnerable users safer I know and I remember um back then I was told by the um previous director that it was too expensive because of the way those lights are um and we were also told that was also too expensive down at Howard um St. Paul and Winooski and that got done um so I know that it can be done at some point um but now that all my kids are out of Edmund's middle no I still have one more in the middle it'd be great if that could happen um and then some some good news Chapin um director Spencer um a a um a dear friend resident of Catherine Street um commented to me that um she I thought was going to make a voodoo doll um when we the winter parking switched the chicane um system switched and she thought um cars were going to be zipping down um the street because there was going to be no parking blah blah blah she has admitted and she might even admit it publicly at some point um that it is going very well the shift in parking from one side of the street to the other um from the top of the block um down to lower Catherine is working really well um and so kudos to the team for coming up with that um with that solution and no voodoo doll of you or me um so good job on that um and one thing about the the snow this bugs me um we we have no fines for or no kind of real teeth for for people who have private plowers who plow the snow into the sidewalk or the road um and it's something because I walk a lot um you know and we have neighbors who aren't here um they live mostly in Montpelier and there was like a like a snow boulder um just I don't know I don't know what we can what what we can what the city can do about it I just feel like I just get grumpy you can call us customer service we do follow up uh with uh with contractors uh our crews are actually trained when they're traveling around if they see it to talk to folks and report them and we do have a small fine in ordinance that uh we can charge but I think the more important thing is we intervene and explain the proper protocols so do call customer service if there's a particular area or incident if you could give it to me uh send me an email and I'll work with our plow team who's out monitoring when when we're plowing to look for issues in that area okay yeah I mean they'll they'll know it's on upper cliff street and it's big um anyway but thank you and the the water main break here on over lake we we we it they it was just handled so quickly you know by the time I made the phone call until the truck was here I mean maybe it was like 45 minutes um it was so I just felt like it was pretty quick and I mean a truck with a crew not someone like you know just checking things out and they worked all night um and the crew shifted in the morning at seven um it was just just fantastic so thank you definitely pass that along it's some of the hardest work that we have all right thank you for that um quick follow-up uh treatment if your crews or residents report issues with snow from private private flowers ending up in the public right of way we know who to call or how do you know who to call you can call customer service and we will I mean how do you know who to call right um well we can talk to the property owner uh for one uh and then sometimes our crew has noticed who plows driveways it's amazing to me how much our plow crews soak up information and there are problem areas that they have knowledge of and have spoken to contractors so and Norm's team has the excavation inspector who can also help us out in protecting it right away okay thanks yeah we've explored the idea of getting a possibility of Caleb getting able to issue tickets but I think that the real the real kind of fixes to really have a conversation with someone and not try to be punitive yeah exactly at least the first step yeah more more heavy-handed I seem to recall that in Montreal there's like a contractor registry program so that there is a formal sort of audit trail or sort of accountability trail for these these things but I'm you know I'm glad to hear we do have some avenues to follow up and uh now that I know that I was certainly that's a lot of my observations other things I appreciate certainly the outstanding and exhaustive work to uh clean up after the recent storm and so forth there have been of course some challenging uh freeze the cycles since then and I guess my main suggestion around that or sort of question is what happens when there's clear drainage issues that are leading to frozen patches of sidewalk and I know in some cases it's probably it's you know right-of-way drainage stuff like that's on us in many cases it's private residents that are draining and creating unsafe situations in the sidewalks so usually in those cases we have excavation inspector follow up with a property owner situations sometimes what we see is people with uh sump pumps who pump out off their another foundation across their property and if it's proximal and close to the sidewalk can create a slippery condition and we we we compel them to find a solution that avoids that circumstance unfortunately we're coming into a season where we have this free saw cycle and sidewalks are slippery and uh our right-of-way crews are doing everything they can to keep them clear but it's uh freeze at night thought during the day and it just creates slippery spots that unfortunately are unavoidable but we certainly can be avoid having someone pushing water from a sump pump across their yard into a sidewalk yeah yeah no i certainly i appreciate there's going to be sort of the routine slippery spots but like you know the stuff where it's piling up three inches deep yeah yeah that's uh we follow up on those excellent so i should check with uh the excavation if you see something like that to where it's predictably could be avoided if people were using a little more common sense let us know and we'll follow up with the property owner okay should go through customer service then yeah through customer service and they'll route it to our excavation inspector will do i'm sure there's been a couple hot spots so i just want to make sure they're in your queue and you guys are on it i feel like you know it's like there's probably like warning signs if you're watching forward the in the fall from this kind of thing i know there's little we can do now but the evidence is out there now for yeah right yep future conversations okay something you can't have them immediately fixed because of weather conditions but because i can't obviously build solutions but they get put on notice excellent and uh lastly glad to hear the coordination between uh mr pageant's team and the school district uh received as a parent message from jeff and Leonard passed along through uh the school channels about um parking practices and so forth i will call out publicly that there's much that the school district can do to support this as well and i will follow up with um jeff and his team on this as well for example as an admins parent we heard the message that was conveyed it was about you know not parking in the no parking lanes and not having your flashers on that doesn't count as not an excuse for parking in a no place but yet the parent handbook in places suggests parking for pickup in many of those same locations so in places like where there's a disconnect between what the school district is is putting out and and suggesting and what the school district is tolerating and what is in place with traffic ordinance or what needs to be in place with traffic ordinance um i think we all across departments need to be collaborating on those but i do appreciate that those conversations are happening and that is all on my ends and with that i will move to the next item on our agenda which is the adjournments next meeting so moved have a motion from commissioner bar thank you for that commissioner overby yes i remembered what i wanted to ask if if you don't mind before we adjourn i had i know laura wheelock might have been the one to answer this question but i know that i asked about the the remediation of the ravine sewer that's proposed as part of the tiff main street grade streets project and she said she didn't really have a lot of information about the details of it but since i heard somebody say that the years ago there was work done because the fletcher library was was falling in and that that ravine was part of the was part of the problem and so i'm just curious i don't know i guess neither of you would have been around at that point when this was happening uh so maybe there isn't you don't know but do you have access to all the studies and you know data and the the work that was done when the fletcher library actually had a problem with that ravine and that was when they before the new section it must have been before the new section was built um so there may there may be material and maybe it's just lost to history but um i'm just curious if you had any information about that because somebody said oh this is the story by matt and i said well well maybe somebody knows at dpw what i understand is martha has done had done some pretty extensive um study of what's what was going on with the library particularly for some of facility's repair work and she may actually she may actually have some information but uh i think what i know mostly about the engelsby ravine is because of the spatial or elevation uh level of the fire station one relative to the ravine they had on high frequency uh surcharges within that building so that probably is the more challenged building city building municipal building because of the ravine sewer and we also had some history of the intersection of main and windowsky flooding during certain straight rain events and there's been some effort on our part to mitigate that through a redesign of how that intersection assumes runoff but every time you make a change to the system it it potentially moves the problem elsewhere so we are very cautious about any sort of modifications to that system this plan within the great streets really is intended to find a solution to relocating that line down collage street down windowsky avenue and and making those parcels that are impacted by that system to make them more developable as opposed to what they are now which is you know a flat vacant lot with parking that's not very sightly for a mainstream entrance to the city but also is not the highest and best use of a piece of land that's within a key part of our downtown yeah i think the question really related to the the fact that there was no idea of how complex and challenging it would be and so they were they were asking me about you know how how expensive that work would be done and i i was just struggling with what would be any how much work had been done with it and they also asked me is that actually a combined storm sewer that six foot okay so that's what i thought so i think i can talk with you offline and get the get the information about what studies exist because then i can share the information about that because it's relevant to the potential use of any tiff money for that versus anything else water resource probably has the probably the best information about that system from a technical standpoint so megan yeah i can be your point of contact megan's out so on vacation which is great finally and so i can help connect you with the right person and i can continue to kind of find information for you as well but yeah well you're going to need it anyway if you're going to try to fix the problem but i i would like to address the questions that were asked to me so thank you very much sorry to delay the adjournment so okay i apologize for prematurely closing our commissioner communications with that will aim for uh item 10 adjournment next meeting date march 16th i already had a motion on the floor you got a motion from commissioner bar thank you for that is there a second you all want to stay you have to second yourself jim i'm waiting i know i'll second the motion i wanted to give commissioner kennedy the opportunity yes i said always next month all right we'll give it to the second to commissioner on the obama co is there any discussion around that motion all right let's uh say goodbye with the floor vote here all in favor if you say hi hi hi myself any post all right we are adjourned in 908 good evening awesome thanks i'll catch you next time