 Well, we've got Ryan here, we've got Tony's here for Greg, Bruce is here, I'm here. It's only, oh, and Patrick's here for, uh, Sacks. Just because we have two-fifths of the, uh, of the capital of city council, come on. Uh, it's, it, there doesn't seem to be enough on here to be controversial, but that's always the famous last words. Keeper, keeper busy as well, I'd say. Good morning, uh, and welcome to the February 1st meeting of the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission. Could we start with a roll call? Commissioner Hagen, Commissioner Botthorff. Here. Commissioner Chase. Here. Commissioner Anderson. Here. Commissioner Leopold. Here. Commissioner Alternate Mulhern. Here. Commissioner Coonerty. Here. Commissioner Alternate Gregorio. Commissioner Rios. Here. Commissioner Johnson. Here. Commissioner Brown. Commissioner Bertrand. Here. And Commissioner Lowe. You might need to turn on your microphone. I'm here as an alternate for, um, oh, I just went blank. Hagen. Director Hagen. Mike Rockin. Thank you. All right, well, we'll move to oral communications. It's the time for members of the public to address us on items that are not on today's agenda, but under the purview of the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission. You'll have three minutes to speak. Good morning. Good morning, Brian Peoples. Trail now. Appreciate the time. Um, I just want to comment on the recent editorial in the Sentinel from a, um, Santa Cruz Metro board member. Um, basically I want to remind Metro Santa Cruz Metro, the focus is, um, supporting the buses and not the train. I think I understand that your goal in your letter was to, uh, focus on keeping that alternative, but, um, resource, that corridor still available, but I think there was a little bit of, um, misunderstanding that maybe you're more focused on the train than the trail or excuse me, train than bus systems. Um, the other thing I want to point out at trail now, we support not a trail designed as a recreational trail, but designed as a transportation trail. And there's a significant difference and it's actually called out in, uh, the conservatory rails to trails guidelines on what that is. It's not just a bunch of rich white people who want a recreational trail. We want a transportation trail. And we do believe that the trail as designed as a transportation trail will have an impact on highway one as well as surface traffic. We believe that the local use of that transportation trail in the core section as well as Watsonville residents will reduce the need for using that transfer highway one corridor. We do believe that. Um, so I just wanted to point out, I'm hopeful that you were focused on keeping the options available and less about the need of a train because I want to remind you, you represent Santa Cruz metro buses. And if there is a train that would pull resources away from the buses, we, we know that. So I'm sure that it was focused on keeping that resource and not promoting a train. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anyone else who would like to address us in oral communications? Good morning. Good morning. I would love to have four or five minutes, but I'll take the three. Good morning commissioners. Michael St. from Aptos with campaign for sensible transportation. This morning I'd like to focus on sustainability. Our U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to pain sustainability isn't part of our work, they say. It's the guiding influence of all of our work. Another definition of sustainability from the UN World Commission on environment and development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Now I'd like to take you back a little bit to the past. This is a January 28th, 2012 transportation cafe which was hosted by director Don Darrow here. Also included was RTC planner Grace Blakely and Portland head planner Peter Hurley. The first question from Mr. Don Darrow. We are just now thinking about climate change and sea level rising for the next 50 years. What should we do? Grace's comment was we should make transportation investments that are effective more than 25, 50 years or even 100 years out. Grace also added that the focus was to curtail a personal business trips on highway and also many of the trips which she called home maintenance trips which I think she is doing a very good job with the cruise 511 and that may address this issue. Mr. Don Darrow said had a list of things that we need to take into account, future technology, demographics, price of fuel and climate change. Grace agreed with the comment but also added that this is a global problem and we need to do something about it. Mr. Don Darrow focused should be on sustainable ability outcomes. Grace said status quo is not sustainable concerning climate financially or demographically. Then Peter from Portland came in, the planner from up there says you need three things for sustainability, healthy economy, healthy people and healthy planet. Getting close to the end here gentlemen. Peter said that for economic reasons not driving a car supports the local economy. Three out of every $4 for a gallon of gas is exported out of our county. That money could stay in the county if we transition to the walkability, mass transit, it would spend those $3 locally. Mr. Don Darrow, what's the answer? Peter, multimodal transportation, bicycle, walking, transit. One person should not use one mode of transportation for everything. The best comment at the end was Grace, public participation is critical. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning. Before we start the clock, could I just ask for a point of clarification? Item 20, where we're talking about the progressive rail property negotiation, should all talk of progressive rail be held to then? Or is it okay to speak to progressive rail in general outside of the property? That would be the appropriate time if you want to talk about progressive rail. Anything about progressive rail should be held to then. Okay, in that case, I'd just like to take a moment to speak about the general landscape of transportation in Santa Cruz County. And the sad way that it has kind of become an adversarial game. And I know that, as Gail McNulty representing Greenway, when I walk up to this microphone, probably half the ears in this room just automatically close because Greenway has perceived by many as being a bad guy in this situation. We're perceived as being a rich, elitist group that wants only a recreational trail. And that personally to me is very sad because that's not who I want to be. I mean, my background is actually as a graphic designer and a writer. I was living in New York City when 9-11 happened. At that time, I was working as an art director at Macy's. And I woke up the next day and realized that that was not what I was supposed to be doing with my life. I seriously know that our world is broken and we need to do radical things to make a difference. And I want to be part of that radical change. I know that we need answers for people in South County that are taking two hours sitting in gridlock trying to get to and from work. They need change. I don't personally think that's ever going to happen on a train on the rail corridor. This conversation is way bigger than a trail. The trail is honestly a little side note here. This really is about how we can get people moving in our county, how we can bring more employment to Watsonville so that people don't have to sit in traffic for two hours. Because it's not fair. And there are parents sitting in that traffic for two hours who should be home helping their kids and doing other things. And they don't have those options. And when families don't have options and when we don't have choices, and this is a big part of our housing and our transportation and our jobs, we can't separate those things. As long as we allow these things to happen and we look at these kind of dreamscape fantasy changes, we're not doing what we need to do. In a larger way, we're all in a big ship here. And that ship is sinking. And I don't care how much money you have. As the climate continues to change, we're all in this together. And we need to make changes for the people of Watsonville. We need to make changes for everyone in our county. We need to fix gridlock. We need to lower our greenhouse gas emissions. And we need to look for real achievable ways to do this soon. That's not what's happening right now. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Paul Ellarick. I'm from Aptos. I wasn't going to even comment on oral communication, but I saw something this morning that those of you that came here from North County probably saw the traffic going south on Highway 1. It was atrocious. I can't imagine living with that every day. Outcoming south, it was fine. But we're talking about a need for transit to get people moving. The number of cars that I saw northbound on Highway 1, if every one of those people were riding their bikes, there would be a big mishmash of wrecked bikes on a trail. We need to train. We need transit on that rail line. And I hope you keep it in mind when you look at that. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anyone else who would like to address us? Good morning. Good morning. Welcome to Watsonville. Jenny Sarmiento from Watsonville. And I would like to say that we have such a unique opportunity to build a system that would get so many residents from South County, from North County, to travel throughout the county any time that they want to. And also to build the trail right next to it for people who enjoy riding their bikes. Because as I understand, we will not be able to use electric bikes on a rail, because there are different codes for that. So I think it was misleading to think that people will be able to buy e-bikes and ride their e-bikes to Santa Cruz. That's not possible for a lot of the people that live here in South County. I do agree with the last speaker that we need to make some major changes to improve our local economy. However, we are one county. We are not. Just think about what the world is doing right now. Everybody's trying to build walls. Is that what we want to do? Build a wall around Watsonville so we stay in Watsonville? And people from Santa Cruz don't come to Watsonville? We are hoping that the next generation really looks at Santa Cruz County as their hometown. And they work together in improving a lot of the issues that affect us all. So I completely support, and I hope that you definitely support the rail and trail. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else who would like to address us? Good morning, Council Member Hearst. Good morning, Commissioner Lowell Hearst from the west side of Watsonville. I thought this was a metro meeting for a minute, but I was temporarily confused. All the talk about buses, and maybe this is the train meeting, and maybe I'm confused there, too. I think, well, first of all, let me say welcome to the house that good government built, and good government couldn't build this house without a good economy. And a good economy certainly spins around the wheels of good transportation one way or another. So you have a weighty job to do, and I know that you're fully capable and thoughtful in your deliverance. And so we all know that we need to have multimodal transportation. It's not one solution. It's many. And we don't have as many dollars for those many solutions as we need. So a prioritization is in order, and a look to the future is in order as well. You know, I've seen a lot of trails in my life. I've seen transportation trails, and I've seen commercial trails, and I've seen recreational trails. And I remember a guy in Nepal carrying a refrigerator on his back going up a set of steps for about 5,000 feet to get over to the next valley. And that was a commercial corridor, a very narrow path. And I've seen in the Cusco Trail baskets of corn moving up the mountainside in a very narrow trail. So I don't suggest that that's what we're going to be doing here, but there is a need for all modes of transportation. And maybe we should just have a youth work program set up where the kids build the trail. Solve a couple of problems there. But my main point is that when transportation is politicized, all modalities get thrown under the bus. And that's not good for the economy. So let's get people moving. Let's stimulate the economy. Let's build a wonderful infrastructure that really works for all our people. And I know that you folks that came down from the north today could look over in the other lane, the northbound lane from here, and see what was going on. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mayor Hearst. Is there anyone else who would like to comment during oral communication? Seeing none, we'll move to our consent agenda. Is there any additions or deletion to the consent or regular agendas? No, we do have some handouts, though. Handout for agenda item 7, public comments. Item 14, director's report. Add-on pages for item 18. And a handout of public comments for item 21. Great, thank you. Now we'll move on to the consent agenda. I see my colleague, Councilmember Johnson, would like to make a comment about something on the consent agenda. Just want to pull item 7 for some clarification. If that's OK, Chair. OK. So we're going to pull item 7. Is there anyone else who'd like to comment or pull one of the items? Mr. Bertrand. I'd just like to comment on the discussion related here for the commissioners last meeting. So there's a comment in here about why is progressive rail interest in running a rail in this region? So I think this is pertinent, and I hope it's expanded upon. OK, beautiful. Anyone else? Is there any member of the public who would like to pull an item off the consent agenda? Seeing none, I'll move it. Move approval of the consent agenda. Motion by Rockin, seconded by Rios to accept the consent agenda as amended. All in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. We'll deal with item 7 right now. Mr. Johnson, you had a question about that. Yeah, that's so much. Well, I guess it is kind of a question, just from the standpoint of, it looks like we want to shift federal STBG funds program for the Highway Corridor in exchange for RSTP. And I'm just curious about the rationale and why that is. We're shifting monies here. And I don't know. Maybe I missed it in the staff report, but just wondering why that is. Go ahead. Yes, good morning, Commissioner Johnson. This is something that's pretty much routinely done in switching federal funds for state funds, because Santa Cruz County is a smaller county, but we don't get millions and millions and millions of dollars of federal funds. It is easier for smaller jurisdictions to deal with the state funds rather than the federal funds. And what the state does, the state is willing to take the federal funds, because they already deal with millions and billions of dollars of federal funds. They just add it to the pots that they're dealing with already in meeting the requirements, the funding requirements of the federal government, and so on. So it's just a way to make it easier for smaller jurisdictions. So it doesn't add any money to the project or anything like that. It's just the one-to-one. Secondly, it's mentioned in the resolution that the over 92-day public review period, 900 comments were received. Have those all been responded to? The response for the comments and environmental document comes when the final environmental document is issued. So that's when you will see the responses of the community, the responses of the consultant and the project development team have been working on response to those comments. And I think the staff report does say that responses for all those comments have been drafted already, but there's still review that's happening at different levels before those comments can be ready for the final environmental document. So you're saying that they cannot be responded to until the final draft comes through. Is that a statutory limitation? That's how it works with environmental documents. And also, Caltrans is the lead agency for the environmental document. This is not the RTC. So then when Caltrans feels ready to release the document, that's when that happens. Thank you. I see a member of the staff. I'm not sure if she had anything to add. No. Is there any other comments about this item? Mr. Mulhorn. Will those comments be incorporated into the document? Or will they be an appendix to the document with a list of all 900 questions and then the responses to each of the questions? I think that's a variety of ways that the comments get responded to, because there's a variety of comments that people submit. Some comments are relevant to things in the document that maybe need to be modified. Some comments are more general comments that just people want to make sure that people preparing the document are aware of, so they certainly need to modify the document. So it just varies, depends on the comments. Move approval of the. Oh, let me just see if there's any public comment. Sure. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you, Brian. People from Trail Now. I wanted to take the opportunity to specifically state that Trail Now supports Widening Highway 1 to Larkin Valley Road. We support Bus Rapid Transit Long Highway 1. We think it really is the longer term solution. And we look forward to supporting this commission on your efforts to acquire additional funding for Widening. We want to remind you that part of the Measure D sales pitch was we would be a self-help county. And so it gives us an opportunity with this, so to say, shovel-ready project to go out and get some state funding and federal funding. So I wanted to make sure that it was clear that Trail Now does support Highway 1 Widening to Larkin Valley Road and we're big supporters of Bus Rapid Transit. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anyone else who'd like to address us? Now the opposing point of view. Got me figured out there already. Mike from Aptos, again, sensible transportation. I'm actually going to agree with Brian here quickly. First, the widening just to emphasize for campaign would not be for cars in single occupancy. We do recommend the Bus Rapid Transit on shoulder for Highway 1. And I think that's much more sustainable than the single occupancy cars. Also at the RTB 2040 meeting on Tuesday, those of you that were there, the transportation issue was the primary concern. And basically, no one came up and really gave a strong emphasis for wanting cars and widening of a highway. Everything was pretty much mass transit and bus and oriented type situation. So my other question would be, if you were to take these 900 comments and whoever reviews them comes to the conclusion that, yes, we want mass transit versus cars, can we shift funds to a project of that magnitude? Thank you. Thank you. And I didn't mean to mischaracterize your comments. So is there anyone else who would like to address us? Seeing none, I'll bring it back to the Commission for Action. Move approval of the resolution on item number 7. Motion by Rockin, seconded by Coonerty. Could I get just a quick comment on that? It's just a question. And I don't expect it answered by anybody here today. But in general, to think about people who are in favor of Bus Rapid Transit on Highway 1, when only plans we have at this point that are realistic are for auxiliary lanes that have to get back on the other lane every time you come to a bridge. And there are several of those. And we know that it costs something like a half a billion dollars to take out those bridges and replace them. It's not realistic from anything that I'm aware of in terms of our funding source. So that's not just a comment. It's a question. What are people imagining Bus Rapid Transit on Highway 1 looks like if you don't have the half a billion dollars to actually have three lanes all the way down? Just an open-ended question. Well, for the point of this meeting, we'll consider it rhetorical. All in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. We will move on to our regular agenda. Well, we'll start with commissioner reports. Are there any commissioners who would like to make any comments? I'll just add just a couple things. We'll be talking about it later when we come to the state and federal legislation about a trip that the director Dondaro and I took up to Sacramento. I do want to let commissioners know that in anticipation of the unified corridor study and the decisions that we'll be making later on this year, one of the things that I've been talking about with a number of people is that we should better educate ourselves about a number of transportation policy issues. And I'm working with staff and others to try to figure out some good speakers to deal with a couple of issues that I think are important. Discussion about future transportation options, the economics of transportation, the rail banking process, cost and requirements, transit and affordable housing, and some other issues. I also think it would be useful for us to take at least one field trip, if we couldn't do it all in one, maybe two, to visit a trail that would hopefully be nearby, something like the trail only option that's been suggested, as well as a trip to something like the smart train so we could see what that's like. So we could better inform ourselves, understand how these came together, understand what the dynamics are of maintaining and operating these different transportation options. Because we're moving towards this decision that has a big impact on our community and I think we should work very hard to be as well informed as possible. If there are issues that you would like to see covered in that, please let me know. And I open that to members of the public as well to contact me, but we'll be using our transportation policy workshops. I can see that we might do five or six policy workshops during this year to talk about some of these issues and maybe coordinate them with some public events. So I'll have a more filled out schedule about that at our March 1st meeting, but I wanted to let you know. Next we'll move Mr. Bertron. Yeah, just a comment, I didn't think about it at first, but capital just like a lot of other places in Santa Cruz are dealing with cut through traffic and it has a major impact on the life and the viability of any particular situation, our cities, our counties that are experiencing right now. In Capitola, it's come to bear that Jewelbox neighbors are very upset. Part of our discussion was trying to realize what we could do in this regard. So there's some programs out there, ways that actually direct traffic to these cut throughs. And it seems to me as a comment that these programs are going against the public interest. I don't know what we can do about that. It's been told that we can't do anything about that, but on a state level, it might be something good we can push for. Okay, thank you. Is there any other commissioner reports? Seeing none, we'll move on to the director's report. Good morning, Mr. Dandero. Good morning, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, commissioners. A few items this morning. First, to give you an update on the Unified Corridor Study, our consultant team, Kimberly Horn, is working on the step two performance measure analysis. They're working currently on updating the Santa Cruz County travel demand model to a 2015 base year. They're also determining methodologies that will be used for analyzing the various projects and performance measures, and compiling baseline information for the performance measures. Our staff is working closely with the consultant team to provide data we're needed to support their analysis. Next, I'd like to, this congratulatory note to one of our staff, Brianna Goodman, was recently promoted. John, would you like to stand up? Thank you. She was promoted from a planner technician, which is our entry level planning position to a planner one position. And I should note that she actually started with us several years back as an intern. So she started at the bottom of the ladder and she's moving up. She was born and raised in Santa Cruz County, received her bachelor's degree in architecture from UC Berkeley, and her master's degree in transportation policy from the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis. While at Davis, she conducted graduate research under Dr. Susan Handy and presented her thesis at the Transportation Research Board 2016 annual meeting. So we're very happy to have Brianna continue her work with us and I think she may be talking to you later on one of our agenda items. Congratulations. The next item, the chair already referenced the Central Coast Coalition Ledge Day, which was Tuesday this week. We spent the day in Sacramento talking to our delegation there as well as several folks in the transportation industry, including CTC executive director Susan Branson, outgoing transportation secretary Brian Kelly and his replacement acting secretary Brian Annas, as well as CSAC senior legislative representative Keanna Valentine. I'm not gonna go into the rest of this because it's more pertinent to agenda item 19, our legislation stuff, so we'll pick it up there. But the attachments to my report are also relevant to that and we'll reference those later as well. And then next, the American Public Works Association has a very active local chapter in Monterey Bay area and every year they give awards and very recently, the Monterey Bay chapter awarded the city of Santa Cruz the 2018 project of the year for a value of under $5 million for the Brantz of Forty Creek Bicycle Pedestrian Bridge and multi-use trail project. And then secondly, the 2018 Public Works Person of the Year who is with us today to city engineer and assistant public works director, Chris Schneider, a ceremony on January 24th. Chris, would you like to stand on that? I'd like to say this is really well deserved. Chris works closely with our staff on numerous projects and this bridge has been open now for a while and it was a long time coming and we're working with Chris on other projects as well and does a fantastic job. So there's a picture here of Chris with another gentleman you might recognize, Bruce Shuchuk who was our construction manager when we did the Auxiliary Lane project. So, and then there's a picture of the bridge. So the project completes a gap in the five mile river walk system providing a fully separate pathway for pedestrians and cyclists that keeps them safe from motor vehicle traffic. The project is helping to increase walking, biking and safety in Santa Cruz and supports the city's new Go Santa Cruz initiative which includes ongoing work to expand active transportation facilities and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And then I got informed this morning, it's not in my written report but also with us today is Maria Rodriguez with the Watsonville Public Works Department. She's Assistant Public Works Director and she was recognized for her work in working with programs with youth. So some great recognition locally here today. So that concludes my report for now and I'll be glad to answer any questions. We've never had so much applause at your reports before. So, Mr. Bertron. Question. Thank you very much for your report on the UPC and Unified Quarters, excuse me. So I'm very interested in the methodologies that are being developed right now and that's very important for the whole result of this study. For the education of this council and the public, can we get a report on that when they actually do settle on some methodologies and come to this council and tell us what those are? Well, we will be reporting to you as we make progress, yes. I'd like to get a better idea of how they choose to go about doing the evaluations and having that before the public. Yeah, I think we can provide that. Okay, thank you very much. Are there other questions for Mr. Dandero, Mr. Rios? Not a question, but a comment. I'm really glad to see somebody that come from the ranks like Brenda and I think it's also to show that there's an opportunity in local governments and different ways and I think this is showing because a lot of times everybody's thinking because I go talk to a lot of students and to give them a hopes that there are jobs, there's futures in local government, I think it's very important for us to relate that and to see somebody that goes out, stays, comes back and stay in the community and I hope you can stay here. I know the affordability of the living standards here is pretty high so that runs a lot of people out of here. So we have to find a way because it's not only you the professionals that are facing this, you can just imagine one of the problems that we're having here is that a lot of fund workers are having to leave the area and not just for the immigration, of course Trump is scaring everybody, but it's also because of the affordability of housing. People cannot afford it and that's also very, very neat that we have here. And also I wanted to just congratulate Maria. Maria, she's been doing great work here and thank you. Again, work with the youth is so important and Watsonville has a very young, large community and the new generation also looking for ways that they can stay here every year, 400 or more graduate from our high schools. Where do they go? Where's the opportunity? So again, thank you very much and thank you for everybody for doing good work. Thank you. Mr. Bertrand. Yes, last time I spoke about the study that was going to be done on the Trestle and Capitola, is there any update on that? And I think Louise has handed that project. Yes, I think as I mentioned at the last commission meeting, that is part of a request for qualifications that will be released soon for a variety of engineering services including inspection of the bridges and will include inspections of all the bridges. And I think as we communicated before, we are committed to making sure that inspection is done before any trains run over that bridge again. We previously thought that trains might run in December of last year. They normally run for the holidays but because the washout that didn't happen, so that inspection did get held to be included with all the rest of the engineering work that needs to be done. And since the study can be part of the process too of the work that now the engineer on staff is doing because at that time we did not have an engineer on staff. Okay, that totally makes sense. What's the timeline for this at this point? You can report on that next time. Yeah, we don't have a specific timeline yet, but I'd like to know. Thanks. All right, seeing no more questions, we'll move on to the next item on our agenda, which is our Caltrans report. Good morning, Ms. Low. Morning, Mr. Chair and commissioners. Well, when I was here last time, I let you know that Highway 101 was closed in Santa Barbara after those horrendous mudslides. The highway reopened on Sunday, January 21st. It was closed for nearly two weeks. It was a monumental cleanup effort. It was, and it was a testament to how well all the agencies work together in collaboration to make things happen quickly. There's still cleanup happening on one of the other routes, and there's also a number of closures on the side streets. So many of the ramps are still closed, but things are getting slowly back to normal down there. So I just wanted to let you know about that. Secondly, I wanted to highlight from our district director's report, this is updated quarterly. You have a copy in your packet there. It includes, among other things, an announcement of our planning grants. We have an open solicitation right now through the end of February. I have a little show and tell. I have one set of these application packets, and there are also all the information is available on the website that's listed here, the link here. For several programs, one being Sustainable Communities, another Strategic Partnerships, and a third one referenced as adaptation planning. Adaptation planning is when you see these packets that come by the handouts, they're separated. The adaptation planning is bound separately from the other two. In total, there's nearly $41 million available statewide. We're looking for activities to promote the sustainability and the benefits of a multimodal transportation system that promotes public health, social equity, the environment, and community livability. Our deadline coming up is February 23rd for the applications. We had a workshop at our offices yesterday, and I know that there were some folks from the county here who participated in that call. Our staff are available to consult with any of your staff or organizations wishing to propose ideas and kind of vet them out before time is spent on an application. And one of the other highlights that was mentioned is if you have an idea for a planning grant and you're not successful the first time but you're passionate about it, don't give up because we have opportunities. These are annual calls. In fact, with SB1, we also, we had an extra call for projects in October. So these come up regularly and good ideas are worth promoting. And sometimes through these competitive programs, it might just come down to having some feedback on where an idea or proposal could be strengthened to bring it further into fruition. But please take a look at those. We were especially encouraged by our headquarters office to look at the adaptation planning program. That program is new. We did award some proposals last year but that was the category that there were the fewest proposals on. And of course, being a new kind of a program, everybody's wondering, well, what is it really about adaptation that you want to develop? And there are examples that include planning for evacuation routes in cases of extreme weather events and other emergencies like that. So please check that out. We're also working to provide answers to you back from questions at your last board meeting, specific to 152. And meanwhile, we do have an updated report on the construction. So anything else for me? Are there questions for Ms. Lowe? Good morning, Mr. Caput. Thank you. And, thanks a lot. How's it going on the start date for Highway 152 installing the sidewalks on between Wagner and Hullahan Road? 2018. Both sides. Yes, 2018. And here we are. Yeah, we'll be providing some updated information for you on that, but that's a 2018 proposal. So, it'll begin this probably spring or summer, right? We haven't prepared the ready, the design package is being prepared now and then it would be advertised for award. So when we get closer to announcing a season for construction, we would provide the more specific information here. So right now it's just scheduled for construction beginning in 2018. And something I can talk to you about later on the phone or whatever is the safe routes to schools. Is that, if it's on a freeway and all that, then your department actually deals with it. Is that correct? Well, not necessarily. It depends on the characteristics of the route and the need. Many of the safe routes to schools proposals, in fact, the old program, the applicants were local agencies. The state itself doesn't use those types of funds. The active transportation program, however, is the umbrella program now for which all of the complete streets activities are funded. And the CTC will be announcing a call for projects and ATP program. I believe it's this March. For applications due in June. Because we're looking at a couple of sites in the Watsonville area where the freeway goes by. One of them is about two blocks away from the actual school. But it's the only route that when schools going, starting or finishing, that they actually can access, you know, going home, walking. So I don't know how close it has to be to the school for safe routes to school. Yeah, I would encourage if the planning hasn't occurred yet that maybe the county could apply for one of these planning grants that's circulating now. Because it's really helpful to have a scheme, have things connected together, and then implement a program so that there's a good network of connectivity. And lastly, I guess on some crosswalks, they have light enhanced crossing where the little blink lights will come on. And are those more complicated than just having a, you know, sidewalk? Definitely, when you add electronic activity and lighting, you have, there is a degree of complexity there. It's a case-by-case situation as to whether those kinds of installations are warranted under a given scenario. So there's not just a one-size-fits-all or a pick list. Yeah, and you did put, the Caltrans did put one on Highway 129 at near Watsonville High School. So that was good. It's actually working very well. Thank you. Are there other questions for Ms. Lill? Seeing none, we'll move on to our next item, which is item number 16, which is a budget and administration personnel committee nominations. Each year we make choices for our budget and personnel committee. For those of you who want to dig a little bit deeper into our budget, this is an excellent opportunity. I've heard from one commissioner of the, I've heard from most of the people who are currently on it that they want to still be on it. But if you could let me know by February 15th, then we'll make an appointment at our March 1st meeting. I don't think there's anything else unless anybody has any questions. Then we'll move on to item number 17, which is the city of Santa Cruz Rail Trail Project, the Interim Ingalls Option Design. Good morning. Is this the button? Yeah, now it's on. Hello. Oh, great. Okay, thank you. So Corey Coletti, I'm the senior transportation planner and the rail trail program manager. I'll be introducing this topic and following my presentation, Chris Schneider, our celebrity engineer, will follow with more details. This is an information item only, no action is required. So I'd like to just give a brief overview of the issue here. And as I do that, I would like to use this opportunity to provide some reminders about the rail trail project, goals, the process, and correct some mischaracterizations that have been floated around along the way. As you know, in 2013, the commission after, one year after purchase of the rail line, we completed the Monterey Bay Sanctuary Scenic Trail master plan, and that master plan defined the rail corridor to serve as the continuous rail trail with the rail trail being located adjacent to the rail line. The trail is specified to serve commuters, neighbors, families, visitors, all traveling at different speeds and with different abilities. The RTC is working in partnership with local jurisdictions to deliver specific projects. And because of that, in addition to the RTC's adoption of the master plan, the County of Santa Cruz, as well as the cities of Santa Cruz, Capitola, and Watsonville, all adopted the master plan as the design guidance and execution document. In February last year, you received a presentation on the project that we're here to talk about today, which is the city of Santa Cruz's west side, not the Watsonville west side, but city of Santa Cruz west side's rail trail, which is a 2.1 mile project from Natural Bridges Drive to Pacific Avenue. The city of Santa Cruz is the lead agency on implementing this project. And in February of last year, presented a phased implementation plan to you with the section from Natural Bridges to Bay and California scheduled to go to construction later this year. The RTC contributed 4.1 million in federal earmarks, which are at risk, so the sooner we spend those, the better. The RTC also committed 1.1 million in measure defunds towards this project, and substantial additional funds are coming from the city of Santa Cruz. The California Coastal Conservancy Ecology Action, Friends of the Rail and Trail, and Bike Santa Cruz County all contributed funding. It's a true community collaboration. So now that the plans and specifications for phase one have been completed, the city of Santa Cruz authorized its staff to advertise for bids and award a construction contract. The rail trail is designed as a continuous path on the coastal side of the tracks. Currently the plans and specifications include an Engle Street option, which is a rerouting of the trail onto adjacent streets via bicycle lanes and sidewalks between Swift Street and Fair Avenue. This option may be needed due to a setback in receiving an easement from New Leaf Community Market for that very short distance. And Krishnider will provide more detail on this issue. So this item is being brought to you as an information item, because the trail's short-term design may diverge from the continuous one presented to you previously. And as you recall, in adopting the master plan, you committed to providing this continuous facility to the community. The master plan effort, I'd like to just note, it was led by RTC staff, but it was developed over a multi-year process through a collaborative effort by traffic engineers, civil engineers, environmental specialists, railroad right-of-way specialists, landscape architects, the California Public Utilities Commission, coastal zone specialists, many other professionals with specialized skill sets. Our local jurisdiction partners also provided vast amounts of public input, as did hundreds of members of the community through public meetings. Through the entire process, the trail was designed to be continuous. There have been many discussions and claims about on-street diversions. As you'd expect from a 32-mile project that will be built incrementally, on-road connections will be needed as more difficult and costly gaps get filled in. The Branson 40-bike headbridge, as you heard earlier, just completed a five-mile gap in the city of Santa Cruz's River Walkway. That gap had been in existence for a long time, and it's an example of how the more difficult projects take a longer time to get filled in. But the commitment is for continuity. And the trail will also utilize the existing crossings, the trestles that will be either retrofitted or we will see the need for entirely new crossings. So the trail based on long-standing and current RTC policy is planned to extend continuously adjacent to the rail corridor from North County through the city of Santa Cruz, the Harbor, Live Oak, Capitola, Aptos, the Watsonville Slews, and the city of Watsonville itself. Eventually, it will connect to Monterey County because of the Monterey Bay Sanctuary Scenic Trail Plan that is actually a two-county plan intended to arc the Monterey Bay and highlight the Sanctuary Scenic coastline. And with that, I will ask Chris Schneider to go into the specific of the Engle Street interim detour possibility. Thank you. Commissioners, Chris Schneider. I think Corey's given you a lot of the information on the city's phase, segment seven, phase one. We have completed the plans and specifications, the city council has authorized us to advertise the project and award the construction contract. Now, we're still working on the federal requirements as well. And when we get authorization from Caltrans and the California Transportation Commission on the funding allocation, that's when we can actually go out to bid. And hopefully we'll be seeing that in the next two months. Back in, we had approximately two years been working with New Leaf to provide us, the owner and the store, to provide us an easement to construct the trail all on the coastal side of the trail. The diagram in front of you in the red is the area that where we were acquiring the easement. And just before the holidays, New Leaf and New Seasons, their current owner had determined that they were not going to issue us an easement based on our previous discussions. And they were gonna wait for the unified corridor study to be completed. So we came up with another option in the interim, which we call the Ingalls option, which uses the existing street and sidewalk system and bike lanes to bypass the area that we needed an easement for. Everything's existing, other than a few crosswalks, we're gonna enhance the green lanes, potentially the lighting. Councils authorized us to include this in the design of phase one. And we're also keeping the other part in phase one. So we have both options, the original plan as well as the new option in the plans. Councils also directed us to continue to pursue the easement with New Seasons, New Leaf and the owner. And following their New Seasons and New Leaf notification, they weren't giving us the easement, there was a large outpouring of support for the original plan from the public. Since that's happened, New Leaf has come back to the table, so we are negotiating the easement with them. For the time being, we're gonna keep both options in the plan. We'll see how that goes and how that proceeds through the CTC process, and hopefully we'll have the original plan under construction in the near future. The project is estimated to cost 3.1 million fundings available through federal and local funding and donations. And the federal funding's always at risk, primarily by not meeting schedule, there's potentials for loss of the STIP funding. And there's also a federal earmark, which is fairly old and the federal government is looking for money. So we need to move these things forward so we don't lose this great opportunity to have it 80% funded elsewhere. If you have any questions. Okay, thank you very much for the presentation. Are there questions from members of the commission? Mr. Bertrand. I'm just trying to understand the reference to liability issues. Once the trail is finished and point liability, I'm gonna understand that. We have entered in an agreement with the Regional Transportation Commission, I believe it came to your board a few months back, which talks about the joint responsibility of the trail owned by the RTC, but maintained by the city of Santa Cruz. And I'd have to refer more about the liability to the attorneys rather. Hey, I'm just an engineer. Mr. Rios. Well, first, I wanted to congratulate you for, and the city of Santa Cruz for finding an alternative and did not let new leaf hold it back. So I think it was really good that they were not just gonna come in bully, whoever that new owner is. Second, I think that now that there's been more support and now that they wanna come back to the table, which is also good, but also leaving the two options open. I think that was really good. My question is again, you mentioned about the 4 million, that if it's not used, what's the window for not losing those 4 million? It's hard to pin it down. There's no absolute date, but the CTC is always looking at telling us we have deadlines. You can ask for extensions, but they discourage the extensions. There is a lot of competition for these funds. And if we don't spend them in a timely manner, we lose them and they go to somewhere else. The federal earmark, there aren't currently any more federal earmarks. It's an old one from a Sam far. And as we all know, the federal government is looking to fund other things than probably a trail. And therefore that's at risk as well. So again, no definite timeline, but the pressure's always on to expand it and commit it. Can we ask for extensions already? On this project, I'm not sure. Not yet, okay. I'll recall. Thank you. Mr. Rockin. Thanks, Chris, for your work on this. I wanna make sure I don't put words in your mouth. Is it fair to say that you're optimistic that we can work out a deal with New Leaf that'll allow us to go back to the original plan towards that too strong a way to put it? Yes, I'm very optimistic. It won't be exactly the plan that we're talking about. I mean, they do have concerns about circulation within their parking lot and their own liability as a result of that, of changing it. It's already a kind of a tight parking lot. But anyway, I think we're in a really, we're in a good process right now. The owner is more actively involved. And obviously he's the one we actually get the easement with, so no, it's working out really well at this point. It's just gonna take a little time to work out the different details associated with this. Thanks, I also understand that this was worked out in a way that they actually get additional parking spaces to replace the ones that would be compromised by this. Do I get that right as well? Yes, the original plan was to provide six new parking spaces in a lot adjacent to New Leaf as well as three short-term spaces on the street where there currently isn't any parking. And the original design had no loss of parking in the existing lot. They were becoming compact spaces. But again, that's, you know, we're working out the details on that that might change the total number, whether it's as many new versus, you know, the existing we'll have to see. Thank you, thanks for your work on this. Mr. Johnson. Thank you, Chair. I may or may not have heard the word bully, just a few seconds ago. I think the demonization of somebody like New Leaf, which is a fabulous company, is patently unfair. And it's my understanding that some of the outreach that gathered signatures against New Leaf was also unfair. So I would caution people to kind of place a blame on any sort of mischaracterization of what a great company, people in Scott's Valley would give their I-teeth to have a store like New Leaf in their community. And so I would just, like I said, I would just caution, I mean, this is a business. It has interest just like any other entity. And so I'm happy that things are gonna be reached out. But at the same time, I think a company that's been in the community as long as New Leaf has been, even if it's new owners, should not be perceived as somebody who is not fair and a bully and underhanded in any other kind of characterizations that misleads the public. Thank you. I'll just add my comments. Thank you for the work of the city on this. I think the community is very excited to see this segment built. It'll be the first segment that gets built and it will be, people will get a real sense of what the opportunity holds in the creation of this trail throughout our entire county. I was both surprised when I heard about New Leaf backing away this late into the process after the community meetings had been done after a lot of work had happened. And I was hardened to see the large amount of support that came out for it. And I'm glad that New Leaf has come back to the table and is working with the city. And I appreciate that work. And I look forward to being there for the groundbreaking. Mr. Bertrand. Oh, you have it, okay. This is gonna present more opportunity or danger of accidents having to go around New Leaf. I hope they're cognizant of that. Okay. This is an information item. Looks like the least one member of the public would like to get up and speak. So please come forward. Hi, I'm Gail McNulty Greenway. And I would like to echo Commissioner Johnson's sentiment just about the way that that petition came out and how it did kind of put New Leaf really into an awkward position. I do live in Bonny Dune and I do shop at that New Leaf on the West Side. And I can say personally, any of you that are there, that is a frustrating parking lot. And the thought of them needing to restructure it is does feel both unsafe to me and also creating more of a stressful situation for those people. And also, I think one of the things that we're not looking at again with this plan is just the idea that using that corridor in the way that we are, if you look at an overhead shot, it's a beautiful green space. There is lots of room. If we do at the end of the unified corridor study to decide to go through with a plan that does not include rail, then anything that's been done to the New Leaf parking lot at that point would have been done needlessly. So that's something to just kind of keep in mind. Also, just not very far from there, in that same segment seven phase one plan, there's actually another on-street detour that we're not really talking a lot about. It is, Mr. Potteruff, I'm sorry, this is bothering you. It's over when we get to go to PCS. I'm also a PCS parent. And there is a detour that routes trail users onto natural bridges and then onto Mission Street extension right in front of the PCS parking lot where if we have young children and parents and people using that trail at either the time when people are arriving or leaving that school, that's going to create terrible situations. Because what it does is it asks people to basically right in front of the PCS entrance take a diagonal turn to meet the existing bike trail. Just another problem in that same segment that no one's talking about. So segment seven, you know, well Greenway doesn't want to stand in the way because we know that people want this to happen and have been looking forward to it. It is really showing just how bad the trail will be if we go forward with this plan. Thank you. Thank you. I want to remind speakers to keep their comments to the items and not individually to individual commissioners. Brian Peebles, trail now. I do want to remind this commission that it's important to have when you talk about federal grant expirations and you tell the community that the money's going to expire. You should have a hard number on that. You can't go and say we think it's going to expire. You should know those details. I work in contracts for the largest defense contractor in the world and I deal with contracts and I understand the funding process very well and what we call canceling funds. So I do know about that. And you can get numbers. The other thing I want to point out is that the current Monterey trail plan, 33% of it is diverted to surface streets. I understand that they're saying it's not diverted but do we really have the expectation that we're going to replace the Capitola trestle, the Aptos trestle, this is La Selva trestle and the footings to the ground where the trestles connect. You have to remember those trestles are positioned in the middle of the corridor. So it's not like you can just pick them up. So when you talk about a corridor that's 30 feet wide and you have the trestle going through the middle, you can't put a trail on the adjacent sides. So there's a very misrepresented understanding to the community out there. They think that we're getting a continuous trail. You're not getting a continuous trail with the current plan. It's not happening. And as Gail pointed out, segment seven really illustrates the cost of what's gonna happen. You're only doing one mile of the 32 miles with this and this was the easy section and the costs have already doubled. They've doubled so much that that federal money, you could build a rail two trail and you would still have money left over and you wouldn't need that federal money. So I wanna encourage you to pretend like it is your money. And then lastly, you are building a recreational trail on section seven. So those of us who wanna see what a recreational trail is versus transportation trail, you are gonna build a recreational trail because this trail goes back onto sidewalks. Actually, it is a sidewalk on a segment of it. It's actually a sidewalk. It goes onto the sidewalk. So it's what I would deem as a substandard trail. So again, encourage you to focus on spending our millions, you know, properly. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning, Chair Leopold and commissioners. My name's Mark Maceti Miller. I'm a professional civil engineer with more than three decades of experience designing public works infrastructure in this county and adjacent counties. I wanted to just comment on the federal funding and the potential loss of federal funding and the amorphous nature of those deadlines. I recall a time around the 90s, late in the 90s when the Santa Cruz Harbor suddenly found themselves with no money in their reserve accounts because the California Boating and Waterways, which is a pretty friendly organization to harbors, decided that they needed the money back from all the harbors in California and that they just sucked it back. All that money that was allocated, earmarked, et cetera, gone. No notice, no warning, gone. So federal funding under the current administration, I wouldn't count on it. I think you ought to spend it as soon as you can because it could easily disappear overnight. And just to speak a little bit to the cost, if I understood Chris Schneider correctly, the cost is estimated at 3.1 million for a little over a mile of rail trail. The master plan for 30 miles of trail was 121 million. It's about $4 million a mile. So it appears by my calculations that this section of the rail trail is about a million dollars under the budgeted amount. I just wanted to close with that. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Good morning. Morning, commissioners. My name is P.I. Cannon from Ecology Action. I'd like to thank the RTC staff for their work on getting this section of the rail trail started. It'll be the first section built. And we're all looking forward to riding on it. And for city staff are persevering obviously through change of plans. And then it does seem like we're at a point where Knee Leaf has made a public statement on their website saying that they are engaged in negotiations with the city. And obviously then there's the property owner too to make sure that the rail trail can stay in the rail corridor and be on the bay side of the railroad tracks. So it all looks like it's heading in the right direction. And I do also want to recognize everybody for their efforts to make that happen in the LEAF market. I mean, I think they responded to outpouring a public expression of support for the trail in the corridor. And they took some bruises on that. And they are making a sacrifice in this plan in terms of their people already said they have a constrained parking lot, limited space. So it's a hard, and they're going to bring in even more with this easement plan or whatever it turns out to be. It can get more space. So I think it's important to recognize them and their contribution to the community. So and I just want to thank the commissioners for moving this project forward because it will be used for transportation, people, biking, and walking through the west side. And obviously, you've got to start somewhere. So this 1.3 mile section of trail starting it here is a great way. And then we can all kind of see what the uptake is. And I think the momentum will build and people will want more of the rail trail. So thank you very much. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning, Yannica Strauss with Bike Santa Cruz County. I think everything that I wanted to say has already been said. But Bike Santa Cruz County has been working on this project for a very long time. And we're very excited to ride on this trail by the end of this year, hopefully. We appreciate the city of Santa Cruz for approving the project to go to construction and for city staff for finding a way to keep the project from being delayed. And there's a huge benefit, as you all know. So thank you again. Thank you. Chris Snyder again. Sorry, I can't help myself. Well, you're an award-winning engineer. Yes, thank you. So I get a little leeway here. Our project manager in Public Works is Nathan Nguyen. And Nathan was the one who was the project manager for the award-winning Grants 40 Bike Pedestrian Bridge. That project required easements from private businesses. And it worked out great. So there are many projects that we do that require easements, construction, or permanent easements. You just don't hear about them because they do work pretty smoothly. And this one with new leaf was at a certain point. Another question is cost. This project is designed to be constructed at approximately 3.1 million. It's an estimate. We don't have a bid yet. If we were to remove the rail, that's an additional cost. You can't just pay over tracks. You'd end up with some weird edge conditions. The rail would pop through eventually. All the infrastructure in the streets, the concrete rail crossings, the flashers, all that would have to go away. So a just-trail project would be more expensive than what we're talking about, probably significantly more. Another million, maybe another 2 million? I don't know. And then also, the closer you get to the track, the closer you have contamination issues. So that would be a greater issue in any project that is right on the track. Building a trail right where the track is, that divides the whole right-of-way, that limits what you can do with the rest of the right-of-way by keeping it to one side, which is the purpose of this. We keep it on the coastal side. We limit the track crossings. But we also maximize the use of the remaining right-of-way for transportation or maybe other uses if something happens different in the future. But anyway, I just want to remind people of that. I appreciate that. Thanks for sharing that experience. Other testimony? Please come forward. Hi, my name's David Day. I live in Lesola Beach. I'm just trying to understand if we're currently doing a study that's going to find the best use for the track, why are we allocating money and moving forward with construction, where at the conclusion of the study, that investment might have been wasted. We might have to tear up what we've already done. I think it makes sense to wait for the study to conclude and proceed from there instead of rush under a threat of losing finance or, I guess, federal funding that we don't even know if we're going to lose or if we don't know when the extension's deadlines are. So I think as opposed to moving forward with this, I think we need to maybe take a step back and wait for the study. I mean, otherwise, the study is, what's the point of doing the study if we're already moving forward with a scenario? That's all I had to say. Thank you. Thank you. Morning. Good morning. I'm Elliot Crowder. I do live in Lesola Beach. I ride my bike a whole lot. It's my primary transportation. My car may stay parked for a week at a time. I think I could expand that if I had a link to Watsonville and primarily out to about 41st Avenue would be a good range. And it seems that the obvious and the logical is often overlooked by great planners. And to me, it seems that the rail itself, the railroad as the property that it lays on and as the right-of-way as it goes through, is the obvious. Bicycle trail only, no train. And we don't need all the whistles and bells. We just need a clear corridor where we don't have to mix with traffic a lot. Thousands of people would use this within a year or so once they get used to it. Look at the access from the seascape community into the major new Safeway expansion, New Leaf expansion. The access is just staggering when you ride it and look at it. And you go, why not do it now? Do it well? And also, I have talked with the fire marshal and he thinks, this was a former fire marshal, Smith, thought that what a beautiful north-south emergency access for fire and police should Highway 1 become impeded for some period of time. He also pointed out that it would give him backside access to some of these eucalyptus groves that burned quite well along the KOA area and down through the new Brighton Bluff down to Capitola. That particular segment, beautiful. All we need is to resurface and be able to ride on the existing corridor. I would appreciate some thoughts in terms of expediency and less expensive, simple and obvious. Thank you for your work on all this. I know it's not that simple. I'm oversimplifying. But that's just the way it looks to me. Let's just take that 32-mile trail and get it rideable. Thank you very much. Thank you. Mr. Chair, would you please make sure that the comments are directed to the items in front of us, otherwise I'm going to feel like I need to make a speech and I'd rather not. Thank you. Well, that is a threat if you're going to make a speech. So I would remind the speakers that this is about the West Side Santa Cruz Rail Trail project and the Ingles option. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you for this opportunity. My name is Bill Cook. I live in Santa Cruz, California. I ride a bicycle. I've ridden a bicycle almost my entire life. I ride 50 to 100 miles a week now, mostly recreationally. I have respect for all the professionals that we have here today. They're highly trained. They're very intelligent. This is a very unfortunate situation. Rail and trail are incompatible uses. And this project is of no use to me as a cyclist. And so I'm sad about that. There remains tremendous possibilities going forward. And I'm glad about that. I think, unfortunately, what we're seeing is the beginning of an ongoing failure. Recently, the 2017 Traffic Violence Report came out for our county. Every three days, someone on a bicycle walking or driving a car is severely injured. That's nearly twice the rate for the period from 2014 to 2016. Folks in my cycling community, we'll ride our bicycles no matter what. You can't stop us. And that's the way it is with the entire community, the currently rides that I know. And I know a great deal of people do. Otherwise, it's too dangerous. I've been hit by a car. Many of the people, I've made no effort to find out how many. But I can hand you 10, 20 people who've been severely injured. While riding properly and trying to be safe. And done permanent damage. Protected bike lanes are the only way to move. If you want, if we're going to increase the population of cyclists in our county, the only way you can safely do it is by the addition of protected bike lanes. And this is the process we're involved in. I think it's, thank you. Thank you. Good morning. We're talking about the west side rail trail option and the Ingalls option. Yes, my name is Nancy Connelly. I live on the west side of Santa Cruz. And I appreciate what you just asked me to stick to this. And I would like to point out that just recently, Mr. Schneider stood up, made some comments about costs without any details, which I think was inappropriate. So I think if we're to speak just to this segment without exact details, I think been mentioned. But in regards to segment seven and the Ingalls section, I was very dismayed at what did happen in the community around New Leaf. And I agree with what was stated about that company being a long-term and a long-time business in our community. And I think they were the latest villain in this play. And I think it's the responsibility of the commission to manage that within our community. And I don't think that was done so well. So as a proponent of riding on the rail corridor only and not on surface streets, I have been struck by vehicles twice, commuting from the west side to Soquel. I now work in Watsonville. It's no longer an option. But I am in favor of a unified line and not going on surface streets. And I'm glad we're working through. But I do feel it is your responsibility to avoid that situation with a local business going forward. And it's not about this issue. But I also, without being rude, I think it's the responsibility of all of you to give you, for all of you to give us your full attention. And some I see on phones or making smirks. And that's not appreciated. So when we do speak, I do appreciate your full attention. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anyone else who would like to address us on this information item? All right. Well, I hope we didn't cross the threshold. No, it'll be brief. I'll be briefer than usual. I just want to say I don't own a car. I get up to go to San Francisco once or twice a week by riding my bicycle down to the metro station and taking public transit to San Francisco. If anybody is going to ride a trail for transportation with a bicycle, that would be me. And I'm not riding my bicycle to meetings in Capitola, much less to Watsonville from Santa Cruz. And if I'm not doing it, it's not a transportation that we're talking about if there's not some alternative. And frankly, I'm not a particularly real hazard, as I wrote in the editorial today. Rail has real possibilities for our future, but I'm not in favor of the rail just because I think we have to have a rail. I ask that people who are in favor of the trail-only option to think about what I would put there would be a busway. And that would be, believe me, more disruptive and more frightening to people who are, I'm sure they'd be separated, but in terms of the noise and exhaust and other kinds of issues, a lot more problematic than an electric train running along that route. So I also want to say that I was one of the people on the board of the cooperative that New Leaf bought to become a store here in Santa Cruz. And the people who are from Santa Cruz who started New Leaf, who I have a close relationship with through those negotiations and elsewhere, were in favor of providing the alternative route. And then they got bought by a company that doesn't come from Santa Cruz. And it turns out that they're now negotiating in good faith and we're having good stuff moving forward, so I want to give them credit for where they're going. But I'm among the people who were quite concerned when the people that own New Leaf, who are not local anymore, decided that they're more concerned about what's happening with their parking lot than the needs of the county for transportation. So I don't think it's out of order that people started saying to New Leaf, we'd like you to reconsider what you've done. The actual petition that went out, other than signing it, to New Leaf was not nasty or accusing them of, you know, I don't know what people are thinking was done or something, just suggested that people would like them to keep the option that the local New Leaf people had committed to earlier when they bought this. And I think they got the message and they're now responding in a positive way. I'm hoping it will work out and that's why I asked Chris Schneider that question. He's optimistic it's going to work. I'm going to maintain that and think that it's going to work out fine. The final comment has been pointed out several times as with the example of connecting the levy circular route that you can go all the way around now. When we first put a lot of other money, millions of dollars into other parts of that trail, nobody knew that we could complete the whole thing. It was some day we're going to have some way to go all the way around it and now we have that. It didn't take that long. So even if it turns out that we can't in the short term negotiate a way to keep everything right along the rail quarter with a continuous trail, I'm optimistic that that will happen eventually and then whoever owns New Leaf or other properties along the way will get enough public pressure from the people and their customers to tell them, please don't destroy the trail possibilities, the trail possibilities that exist near your store. Okay. Mr. Rios. Make a short. Maybe I should have used the word New Leaf found love. Okay. You know, the frustration here is that every night I hear the horns of the trains here. All of us that live in Watsonville, we hear every night going loud, bup, you know, every night. And I'm glad that this is happening because again, you know, I feel like we've been red circle here in Watsonville. We don't have a Trader Joe's. We don't have a New Leaf. We don't have a whole food. We don't have nothing here. And to hear comments before saying somebody said in one of our meetings the only reason I would go to Watsonville is to have Mexican food. Come on. I never heard nobody answer that person and say, come on, there's more things in Watsonville than just Mexican food. There's us. Okay. So that's part of what I'm coming from. I'm glad that this is happening. I'm glad that New Leaf, the new owners are coming forward. If I said the wrong word bully, well, I said I'm glad they saw love. And now they see that it's in the interest of all the community to have this happening. I'm really supporting this and I'm really glad that has come to a discussion on making it happen. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Ms. Chase. This item has come before the RTC many times. It's also come before the City Council and Santa Cruz many times. And the thing that has been a constant in this is that there has been a huge amount of creativity, collaboration and flexibility brought to this project over and over and over trying to make it the best project it can be for this community knowing it's just one portion of what will connect this entire region. And I just want to keep saying that those things have not changed in this process. It's been incredibly collaborative, incredibly inclusive of a very large segment of this community to try to build the best thing that we can. I'm really happy with where it is. I think it's great that New Leaf and New Seasons is back at the table really trying to figure out how to make this work. I think we should really end with thinking that, you know, focusing on that, that we're working together to try to find the solution and not try to abandon the good and the pursuit of the perfect. All right, thank you. Nice way to end. Seeing no other comments being made, we're going to move on to our next item which is item 18, Cruise 511 in your neighborhood, the final report. Thank you for that introduction, Charlie Apple. Good morning, commissioners. Grace Blake-Slee of your staff. Today, Brianna Goodman and I will be providing you with information about the Cruise 511 in your neighborhood program. The project concept that led to the Cruise 511 in your neighborhood program which was previously referred to as the user-oriented transit included in the 2014 regional transportation plan as one of the projects that support sustainable transportation goals. RTC in coordination with Metro pursued and was awarded a Cal Trans Planning for Sustainable Communities grant to test this pilot project. Brianna Goodman will provide an overview of the project and then I will follow her presentation with information about the report findings. Good morning, commissioners. Brianna Goodman of your staff. RTC 511 in your neighborhood was a pilot project designed to test the effectiveness of individualized marketing techniques in changing Santa Cruz County residents transportation choices from driving alone to more sustainable options. The program was carried out between March and September of 2017. Individualized travel marketing involves identifying people who are interested in making changes to their travel behavior, engaging with individuals in a friendly personal manner such as our bilingual introductory postcard, including the benefits of alternative transportation, and focusing resources on these individuals to provide them with customized and relevant information unique to them or their community segment to help them change their travel choice. This method can be contrasted with traditional marketing which applies a uniform message across individuals and engages them regardless of interest level. Program objectives address the concept that while new infrastructure may lead to more trips by sustainable modes usage of these facilities can be maximized or combined with comprehensive outreach tools to provide information about transportation options. Cruz 511 in your neighborhood program was designed to see if providing relevant and customized information through targeted outreach could change the number of trips made by driving alone to riding the bus, bicycling, walking, and carpooling in order to support our regional mode split goals. Travel resource material distribution was a central component of the Cruz 511 in your neighborhood program. Customized resources were designed to appeal to a specific community segment, in this case one of the two selected neighborhoods I'll discuss in a moment, and help participants try the new travel options that attracted their interest. Resources created specifically for the project included map guides for riding the bus, bicycling, and walking in each neighborhood, with information about routes, nearby destinations, and instructions about how to easily and safely use these alternative modes. There was also a guide to transit connections for the Greater San Francisco and Monterey Bay areas, tips for how to best shop by bike or on foot, and guidance for beginning to carpool. Other materials available included previously developed resources from Metro Transit, the cities of Watsonville and Santa Cruz, the League of American Bicyclists, the RTC, and the Pedestrian Safety Work Group. Neighborhoods were selected as the specific community segment to focus on for this project, as there was an opportunity to provide customized, relevant information covering their common access to transportation options and nearby destinations. All neighborhoods in Santa Cruz County within one quarter mile walking distance of bus stops with service every 30 minutes or less were potential candidates. After a review of 15 neighborhoods, Central Watsonville and East Side Santa Cruz were selected as the target audience for the pilot program. These maps show the boundaries of the Central Watsonville and East Side Santa Cruz neighborhoods that we contacted. Neighborhood characters is considered in this review included, number of households within one quarter mile of bus stops with frequent service, number of routes serving these bus stops, presence of reasonably level terrain, overall street connectivity, number of trips currently taken by each mode, a mix of single and multi-family housing, and proximity to services and commercial centers. A variety of contact channels were utilized in order to gain maximum participation, test different contact channels, and appeal to different types of community members. The program invitation, which included a short survey and a list of resources available for order, was distributed to over 4,000 households via direct mail and over 2,000 households received a visit by a travel advisor. Travel advisors can list portions of the neighborhoods and spoke with individuals at their home to gather information about their travel behavior and collect resource orders. Use of travel advisors resulted in high participation rates from underrepresented community segments such as South County residents and residents whose preferred language is Spanish. Members of the Cruz 511 in your neighborhood project team also set up booths and neighborhood events to solicit participation, such as Bike to Work Day, Earth Day, Open Streets, the La Princesa Grocery Store, and the Staff of Life Anniversary Event. Participants could also view resources and take the survey online on the Cruz 511 website. Traffic was driven to the site using outreach on social media, such as Facebook and Nextdoor. Now Grace Blakesley will present to you the results of the program and answer any questions you may have. Thank you. That was definitely a Planner 1 presentation. Thank you. Thank you, Brianna. Now I'd like to provide you with some information about the program's effectiveness and how we evaluated it and then some of the key findings from the report. Early on in the program, several measures were identified to evaluate the program's effectiveness. We selected the measures based on bus practices for transportation and man management programs, the ability to align the measures with regional, state, and federal goals, as well as the available resources for collecting the information. Examining the number of Cruz 511 in your neighborhood program participants and total travel resources distributed provided us information about how effective the program was at getting the attention of individuals who are interested and creating the opportunity to provide them with relevant information to make informed travel choices. Examining the number of drive-alone trips before and after the program, as well as the number of trips made by bus, by walking and carpooling, before and after the program, were also important measures for understanding how effective the program was in achieving its overall program objectives. The distribution of trips was also used to calculate the program's impact on vehicle miles traveled and the vehicle miles traveled by way of changes in trips by car and the associated reductions in greenhouse gases and household transportation costs. The information was also used to calculate any changes in the number of trips made by active transportation modes and the associated changes in physical activity. The program was also designed to evaluate participants' awareness and attitudes towards transportation options before and then after the program to really try to understand if based on the information provided they became more familiar with the transportation services and facilities in their neighborhood and if their perception of different modes of transportation changed. This measure actually also provided some information about what people saw as some of the barriers to using alternative transportation modes. The public's perception of the program was also considered. For example, did comments from the public demonstrate that the program was useful or that we were missing something from the program. The information used to evaluate the program was all collected using pre- and post-program surveys and requests for travel resources. A total of 1,202 individuals participated in the program. The original target audience was 6,606 households which was later increased to add about over 300 more households to address sample loss where travel advisors could not access a household due to a gated apartment complex or otherwise inaccessible home. 41% of participants had addresses within the Central Watsonville neighborhood or received materials for that neighborhood. 57% of participants had addresses within the east side Santa Cruz neighborhood boundaries or again received information for that neighborhood. And 2% of the participants could not be associated with the neighborhood because no address was provided. Participants were distributed geographically within each of the neighborhoods. 59% of participants lived within the neighborhood boundaries set by the program. 73% of participants lived either within or just outside the boundaries such that they would have been able to identify the location of their home and the neighborhood-specific bus bike on the neighborhood-specific map guides and use the guides to determine their travel options. This map shows the location of participants countywide. Although the majority of the participants were concentrated within the Central Watsonville and east side Santa Cruz neighborhoods some participants lived outside the neighborhood boundaries. About 17% of the participants had addresses outside of the city of Santa Cruz and city of Watsonville. If participants provided an address outside of either city customize resources for the nearest neighborhood were provided. These participants likely enrolled at the program at one of the neighborhood events or through the online communications. Breonna provided an overview of the four different communication channels that we used to contact individuals and invite their participation in the program. Door-to-door contact with travel advisors did result in the greatest number of participants when compared to the other communication channels. It was about 43% of overall participants enrolled as a result of contacts with travel advisors. Participation enrollment by each of the communication channels did vary by each of the neighborhoods. Although door-to-door contact with travel advisors was the highest form of enrollment for both neighborhoods. When you look at Central Watsonville you'll see that the second highest communication channel that resulted in enrollment was at events and for East Side Santa Cruz it was online communications. Of participants who requested materials in Spanish, 50% of those participants enrolled through door-to-door outreach and 41% were enrolled in events with 9% by mail. Material distribution was a central component of this program. Participants were able to order one of each travel resource and could request all of the resources offered. The customized neighborhood-specific map guides, one was developed for each neighborhood for bus, one for bike and one for walking. They were some of the most popular resources. The regional bicycle map also developed by the RTC was also one of the popular items ordered. Overall, more than 6000 materials were ordered and almost half of those resources were for materials produced by the RTC specifically for this program. Material resource requests were generally evenly distributed across the travel modes with the exception of carpooling which was requested less often. Thank you. The majority of materials were requested in English with 80% of requests for materials in English and 11% requests for materials in Spanish. Of materials requested for the central Watsonville neighborhood 24% were made for materials in Spanish and 2% in the East Side Santa Cruz neighborhood. 389 free bus day passes made available by Metro for this program were distributed and at the time of finishing the final report 248 were used. The passes were used on routes between the city of Watsonville and the city of Santa Cruz. Between the city of Watsonville Cabrillo College in Capitola for routes connecting East Side Santa Cruz in Live Oak and also on local Watsonville routes. An average of one drive-alone per week trip per participant was reduced as a result of the program when you were comparing the average weekly drive-alone trips reported by participants who completed both the pre and the post program survey. This resulted in an estimated 1,175 drive-alone trips reduced when this average weekly change is applied across all 1,202 participants. The number of the weekly trips by bus, biking, walking and carpooling followed the reverse trend with a net average increase of 0.96 change in weekly trips by these modes, which would results in a total of 1,055 new trips made by bus, bicycle and walking carpooling when this average is applied across all participants, all 1,202. Can I ask a question about that? Yeah. You said you handed out something like over 300 bus passes and about over 200 of them took advantage of it, but it shows that there was a change of 459 bus trips. Can you just, I'm just trying to figure out those numbers. Oh, okay. So that would assume that individuals who did not receive the free bus pass also chose to take a new trip by bus. We would assume as a result of the information provided about bus services. The map guide specific to bus identified all the bus stops located on the primary transit route and also promoted Metro's bus stop bus stop ID program, which provides information about when the next bus will arrive. Another way to gauge the program's impact on the number of drive alone trips participants were asked to self report in the post program survey how much they reduced their drive alone, how much they reduced their drive alone as a result of this program. 59% of the participants who completed the post program survey reported that they reduced their drive alone trips and 40% reported that they drew trips by more than one trip per week. This information is generally consistent with indications that the program could have reduced trips as much as one per week. Another important indicator is individuals likelihood to maintain travel choices. They were asked this question in the post program survey. This question would provide some information about to the extent that a program could lead to a longer change in travel habits as opposed to a short term change. 87% of participants who completed the post program survey indicated that they were somewhat likely or very likely to continue their travel habits. Overall, participants were very positive about the program focus and the travel resources and tools distributed. People praised the visual appeal and usefulness of the map guides. They remarked that they used the free bus day pass, the book of coupons for local venues, the bike lights and reflective bands. Those not within the neighborhood boundaries often required that the program be expanded to their neighborhood and comments were also received about barriers to using alternative modes in transportation. The program cost were associated with the cost of developing the program, implementing it, tracking it, the results, analyzing the results and reporting and administration. This includes designing all of the materials, translation, printing, purchasing tools and resources provided by outside agencies. It includes the cost of travel advisors to conduct the door-to-door outreach and all the work required to fulfill the orders and mailing. Material design and distribution was a significant part of the program and did account for approximately 38% of the program cost, including direct cost and all staff resources required for communications and outreach. The travel advisor work accounted for about 23% of the program cost. A cost analysis of the cruise 5-1-1 in your neighborhood's program impact on vehicle miles traveled and green house gas emissions was also calculated to provide some information about the program's effectiveness and allow for a comparison to other programs to have similar goals. Overall reflections, what we found is that implementing a variety of outreach methods was really effective in obtaining participation from households in two different neighborhoods and participants who prefer English and Spanish resources. We also found that the visually appealing and content-rich customized materials really generated interest in the program and made the useful information easy to understand. We also found that focusing on transportation services that are available in people's neighborhood was really effective in providing people with relevant information about transportation services and facilities. ROTC staff will consider the cruise 5-1 in your neighborhood program findings when developing future transportation demand management programs. We'll evaluate the opportunities to replicate this program and other locations within Santa Cruz County and to apply these techniques and other ways to support informed travel choices. The staff is today is recommending that you accept this report, included as attachment 1 and available on the RTC's website. Before I close, I did also want to thank Breonna Goodman for her work on this program and congratulate her students at the RTC. Thank you. Thank you. Are there questions from members of the commission? I have a comment. Well, I was really excited about this item when it came before us and I'm really excited to see the results. I guess what I want to know is it seems like this was really successful. We got a lot of great information. I love that there were so many different modes included in this practice. I love the Spanish and English and the great data on this. It really does seem like something we need to continue to replicate. My broad question is, what would it take to do that? I know that you're going to be doing some more analysis of this, but I would just really like to voice my support of us figuring out ways to do this again in potentially other areas because it seems like these results are really positive. The program was very well received. We are working with the Cruz 501 project manager on where the program should be allocated over the next few years and that is part of the discussion. Others? Mr. Mulhorn. Thank you very much. Our initial target population was 6,929 households. The average household in Santa Cruz County is 2.7 people, which means that our average target population was somewhere around 18,000 people. If 150 of them completed the program, that's less than 1% participation rate. How can we consider that as success? If we were to just take your cohort that responded to the initial survey which is 1,202 people, that's somewhere around 7% of the initial target population. How can we consider that successful? And then we're extrapolating data from the respondents of the post-program survey to the entire cohort, so 150 people. Is that a statistically representative sample of the 1,200 people that initially participated? I'm struggling with your numbers here and I don't think that they support your conclusions. I do believe that the outreach, the canvassing was demonstrated to be entirely successful, but the statistics you cite don't support your conclusions and that we're going to be using this as a planning level document moving forward to develop policies. I think that commissioners after us aren't going to have the benefit of the context of this discussion. They'll just be presented with this is a successful program, let's move forward with it. While I appreciate the effort that was put into it, I'm troubled by the conclusions that you're attempting to draw from the numbers. There are a lot of numbers in there. Let me offer one point of correction that we did have 1,202 participants and the number 150 is the number of participants who completed the post-program survey. So we did provide information to the 1,202 participants. But only 150 completed the program? No, actually all of them participated. It's just getting people to fill out a post-program survey to tell you the results is challenging. But the behavioral changes that you're discussing in your report are based on the self-reported comments of the 150 people who completed the survey. Right, and self-reporting can be challenging. I know there was a discussion in the report, so I appreciate you raising that. The report does provide a lot of information about all of the assumptions used. We really made a focused effort to provide information about all the assumptions so that the program could be replicated and the comparisons made. We did have some data noted in the report. One of the ways we tried to address that was by asking the question about the number of trips you take by whichever mode before the program and then asking that same question after the program if the individual doesn't have the benefit of knowing their prior answers. That can be challenging in a variety of ways. It's also challenging to know that everyone's reporting their trips the same. There are definitely a part that I appreciate you pointing that out. Your other question about I think if I understood it correctly about applying the results noted by the 150 to the entire participant population, that is how we calculated it. Someone provided information in both the pre and post program surveys. We looked at those comparisons, matched those responses, and then we assumed that same were the 1200 and two participants to come up with those numbers. That is correct. Other ways that other places do it they sometimes look at just the overall participation and compare that to the post program which would have actually shown a much greater benefit. We tried to take the conservative approach for all of the numbers in this program. It is not countywide program. It was focused just on the neighborhoods. That's another different way of looking at it. We are not trying to apply these results countywide to people who might live in a rural area or a different environment. You brought up a lot of the challenges with collecting data for transportation demand management programs. We did follow all of the best practices and we tried to always take the conservative approach to providing the results. Thank you very much. My issue is with characterizing this as a successful strategy for people of our target population actually engage with the program. I don't know how can we characterize this as successful when only 1200 people out of 17, 18,000 people actually engage with the process. You make a good point. It is definitely challenging to get people's attention. When we compared the participation rate overall with the participation rate of other programs it was in the middle. There also are some challenges in making that comparison. I appreciate your close read of the report and I do recognize there are challenges with the information. I hope it's very well documented in the report. That was our intent to make all assumptions very clear. Mr. Bertron. Thank you for your report. I think Commissioner Chase brought up some concerns that I also have. That's basically sustainability. When I look at what Patrick had to say, I do have some questions and he's really focused on that. Zero, definitely into that. Basically, Cynthia says to me that to be overall successful we have to continue this program on a long-term basis if we're actually going to switch people's patterns. Very difficult. I'm sure that you realize that. Also note in the study you've looked at other studies that were done across the nation. Do the conclusions here jive with some of the studies or all those studies? What's your sense of experience across the nation in terms of trying to come up with a way to change people's transportation patterns? Thank you for that question. This study is really focused on a concept called individualized marketing and what that really means is really trying to personalize and customize the experience. It also means instead of promoting one message that might appeal to the general population at large, it's trying to focus your resources on those people who are going to be interested. Instead of assuming that everyone is going to be interested in changing their travel choices, you really try to connect with those people who want to learn more information, they want to be more informed about their travel choices and you focus your resources on those people. Other similar programs are showing this to be the most effective way to achieve a change in travel choices. I think that's what we saw here was that by working with people who are showing interest in learning more, we saw more results than you might, a better result than you might see with a program that was focused on the population as a whole. And that is what's being done in other areas is returning to strategies like individualized marketing to provide information and promote changes in travel behaviors. So this program is very consistent with what's being rolled out, particularly on the west coast of the United States and has been completed for a long time in Europe, so we're really seeing some of those concepts applied here. There are different ways of applying it and we looked at all the different applications and tried to find what would fit most within our community. Okay. I have a couple more questions. So in terms of the age participation and the gender distribution I'm particularly interesting that the age distribution was fairly equal. I don't know how that could be that sort of boggles me. The gender participation though lends something to what you just talked about. That could be a more successful target audience. Do you have similar thoughts on that? I also was very pleased with the distribution of age. We don't see that in a lot of our public outreach for transportation planning efforts. We see it typically concentrated in an older demographic. I would attribute that to the variety of outreach strategies. We really focused our resources on providing many ways to get the information to people and I think that could be one of the reasons we saw a different distribution of age. In terms of having more female participants than male participants I really don't know why that occurred and I'd have to spend some more time looking at similar programs to see if they had similar result or trend. So one last comment. In some of the survey responses there was one response that basically said everyone who's going to make a different choice is going to have to make choices on whichever mode they're going to do. If that could be folded into how we do our outreach and help people make those choices, make them see the different benefits going which way or that and I think that's part of what you're doing to make this a successful one. I think something that really set this program apart and this was a pilot project so we were testing these concepts is focusing on the neighborhood level and that is really different than what's been done in the past for TDM programs and the other issue was making specific guide for transit, a specific map guide for bus, a specific map guide for walking. What we saw in other programs was those neighborhood specific guides were often lumped together and the information wasn't easily understood. What it did provide was more information about connections between those modes but we decided to focus it really on if I'm interested in walking, I want to have a guide that's going to show me what the recommended routes are. If I'm interested in biking, that's what I'm going to want. I don't necessarily want all of this information and it will be lost on me so really that customized and relevant information was something we were striving for in this program. So basically people could make choices a lot easier to make an informed choice. That's the idea. Thank you for your patience, Mr. Rockins. No problem. I enjoyed listening to my colleagues talk about this thing. First of all, I want to thank the staff. The report makes accessible the method used and the questions that points to Patrick raised and stuff. Wouldn't it be possible if you hadn't given us this level of detail so I do appreciate that. Maybe this is trivial but if you look at the charts on page 1844, 45, 46 the keys need to be made larger. I literally cannot tell you what the charts are trying to show me. I mean it's like, and there's plenty of room to make the keys bigger so you can see what they're actually referring to. On 1846, you have a pie chart where the largest segment in the pie chart is not even labeled so I'm not sure what the answers were for that group. I'm sorry, Commissioner Rockins, would you mind telling me which page number it says on the report on the bottom far right corner? 37 for the one that's got a pie chart that has no label for the largest group. So I don't know whether those are people that did nothing or did more than the others. It would be helpful to know. There's two pie charts, the one on the right. There's no label to the bottom segment which is the biggest piece of the chart. Very likely to maintain their travel choices. Good news but it would be better to label it. They're very likely to maintain it. The other charts where it comes down to the key that tells you what these bars mean on the chart, the key is so small that I literally can't tell the difference. Now, after a while I figured out it can only be one thing because it's in a certain logic but it would be a lot easier to fix that part of the report. It's just a really trivial point. On the bigger point, a couple quick points, women tend to respond much more positively to door-to-door visits and that's true in survey research on every issue that you could come up with probably explains the gap in terms of why you had more female response. I think Patrick's point is kind of an important one. Not so much about that it's not clear that it was successful or not but self-reporting is problematic as you point out. You point out the report. It's not like you hid this or something but I get surveys from UCSC all the time about how I get to work and I tell them I ride typically one day a week but the truth is that's what I intend to do but some weeks I can't do it if it's raining I'm not going to do it and so forth so there's no choice of point eight times a week so I've never under-reported my use of alternative transportation I bet nobody else does after they've been through your study so you can assume there's a bias here that people are telling you they've changed their behavior a little bit more than they actually have they're unlikely, especially those that have taken the trouble to respond to the post-survey more likely to be people who believe in it as a concept so you probably have a bit of over-reporting in terms of how much they actually changed their behavior and a good methodology would be to take some smaller segment of the group to at least test your theory and actually get some find which there are ways to do actually measure what their changed behavior was and then try and apply that to the larger group and that methodology would give us more confidence in the fact that these people are self-reporting how they're going to change their how they have and are going to change their behavior the final thing I think would be helpful would be get some measure of how this program as a whole weighs against other ways to engage people in changing their mode of transportation for example, if you had three hundred and three thousand dollars or whatever the three hundred and three thousand dollars if you at one point at UCSC they did a survey they got a pin map showing where every faculty staff and student lives that goes to UCSC and then we designed a bus route this was a long time ago where the bus stopped, picked up a lot of people in three stops on the east side of Santa Cruz and then expressed up to the university without stopping downtown and that program didn't cost three hundred and three thousand dollars but we got a lot of people taking the bus and then we sent them a letter Dear Joe Smith this bus stops right next to your house you'll get there in an X amount of time and a lot of people who otherwise would not be interested in riding the bus interested in going there there might be another set of options what if you gave out free bus passes that's the whole program free bus passes to selected populations that you identified one way or another how would that, how many people would change their behavior given a free bus pass rather than having to pay for the ride to where they're trying to go so I think to know that this was truly a success you'd want to measure it against some other ways of trying to engage the people in changed behavior if we put more frequent, take three hundred and three thousand dollars and put more frequency on the seventy one route that takes people from Watsonville back and forth how many more people would take the bus fifteen minutes instead of I don't remember how often that bus runs but whatever it is cut the time frequency, double the frequency of that bus how many people would then think it was worth taking that bus or if the district took three hundred and three thousand dollars and applied, which wouldn't hardly be enough to do it but applied it to a program where people there could be a whole bunch of different kinds of programs you could do but basically give people different kind of service next bus so that people knew exactly when the next bus was coming at their stop, like they do on CalTrain or on the BART system or something which the district's planning on doing but three hundred and three thousand dollars would help I don't know to what extent the money you got for the grants was fungible and could be used for other approaches or whether this was only available for the kind of study that you did which case I think it was good that you did it but measuring this approach against others would be another way to figure out whether this was was the bang for the buck worth the money that was spent I'm not quite as critical as Patrick about this in the sense that it doesn't tell you very much at all I think it does give you some idea of how people will respond with more information and so forth in that sense it's quite useful but to get a sense that it really was successful and whether we should apply for a grant in the future to do more of this in some way by neighborhood and so forth I think you want some other comparisons before you go out there and then quite as much money on the study of this kite in the future Thank you I think what I'm hearing is that people are feeling challenged perhaps with what's on page 59 where it says that the approach was successful at reducing drive-alone trips and what this report was intended to do was to really provide all of the different metrics that we used to try to get at that question and this is really the only place where it claims that this is a successful approach and we'll look at that there were many ways the questions was asked and one interesting factoid was related to your comment about the post-program survey and participants towards the end of the program we did have a fewer participants in the post-program survey from the city of Watsonville early on so we used the travel advisors to do additional door-to-door research to try to get a broader representation from the city of Watsonville and that was successful and also interesting was that we had a handful of the coupon books still available and we put that out there as an incentive and we tried to make some comparisons about the results of the folks who provided responses to the post-program survey before and after that offering and there was some differences people overcome some of those challenges but there's certainly a lot of challenges here with getting the information collected some of the other ways the information collected is through a trip diary it's much more staff intensive because you can't follow up with the individual every day to make sure that the information is filled out correctly but that is another way to try to address some of the challenges with these numbers so I appreciate everyone's close look at this report there's a lot of pieces to it and certainly page layout isn't my strong point so I'll work on the graphics there Mr. Johnson want to make a comment thank you chair so I was interested in you mentioned 389 bus passes were given and I think 248 were actually used in your study why that discrepancy why did people take bus passes have free bus access and not use them we didn't ask people that question in the follow-up survey but perhaps that would be something that we should include in future surveys if you received a resource and did not use it could you tell us why that was not a question that we asked in our follow-up survey thank you so since Commissioner Rocken brought up the whole concept of bang for the buck I'm going to follow up on that a little bit so according to the table here $303,690 was paid for this project when this was first announced I voted no on it and I think in reference to what it costs and the results that you got I think I was justified in doing that bang for the buck is a lot of what we do up here as commissioners looking after the people's money so I appreciate the fact that we want to personalize we want to customize and I think the materials that you handed out and the attention to detail that you did I'm not quarreling with that I think for the amount of money that you had what you did with it was not miss spent in that way but I do think that if we're going to be serious about spending dollars effectively as a commission this is not what I would want you to replicate I don't think we get enough to use Commissioner Rocken's words enough bang for a buck because the results here even though they compare somewhat favorably with other entities that use this process of customization is not it's not enough for us to continue paying these kinds of dollars for these kinds of results and so if you were going to do a survey and it might just add another thousand or two dollars to it what you should do is send out to a random thousand voters in our county and give them this information and see if they approve of it my appraisal probably wouldn't because they can't see spending $304,000 on a program that was well implemented and again gives me no pleasure to say this because I think the staff does a good job with what they did here and what their marching orders were but at the same time we're up here to effectively use the funds that we have in the most beneficial way in the county community and I just don't think it was done that way so thank you thanks Mr. Bertron based on this experience are you planning to come back to the commission here with follow-up plans based on the things that you've learned and things that you think would do better the information the findings from the sport will be considered in coming up with a plan for future cruise 511 programs what exactly that will look like I know right now I know the cruise 511 program is really looking at strategically where to focus its efforts and looking at the current community needs both safety and related to transportation demand management programs so the information certainly will be considered what type of proposal will be made in the future I can't say right now I hear too many comments about empty buses or near empty buses and anything that could help Metro in regard I welcome it I'll just take one opportunity to also thank Metro staff for coordinating with us on this project I ought to have mentioned that earlier thank you I'll just add my comments I think in trying to get people to use alternative transportation we have to try lots of different strategies this is obviously a new way of going into neighborhoods talking to people individually and trying to make a difference with people about the word success but we know that just doing things the same way is not going to be effective so we should look at take opportunities where there are some grant resources to try new techniques to try to reach people and we should look at these in the bigger picture we always have to make those choices but I appreciate that the staff thought of a creative way to try to make a difference to get people out of their cars into another form of transportation so I appreciate the work that the staff did appreciate the report I think one finding of this report that's really important and it really goes beyond the ways that people travel is how we reach people this was an opportunity for us to test a variety of outreach strategies to reach people in our neighborhoods and I think it tells the commission some good information about how we can reach people particularly in the central Watsonville neighborhood and that does have a cost to it so those are some really good information that came out of this report regardless of its focus on transportation and management and travel choices Mr. Rios I guess you answered my question because I was going to ask you how is this going to help the commission and how is it going to help future funding and what are we going to tell back to the community what can you come and tell us I would like to hear a report you come to our council and how what kind of response we got here in Watsonville that would be possible I think it would be really good and to show us by graphics because I think we need to let people know out there what we do with these studies I think it's very important that the whole community knows what are the possibilities what are the difficulties and what are people saying I think it would also be good for people that participated to see the reflection that is being also spread throughout the city here in Watsonville so thank you very much thanks now I'll see if there are members of the public who want to make any comments good morning commissioners P.I. Cannon from College of Action I just want to say in terms of this program reaching people to change their behavior right now the automobile is a pretty convenient thing to get from point A to point B so how do you get them out of the car and there's lots of research on it and some places say the value proposition has to be some magnitude of two to three times more valuable than what person is currently doing and so we have a majority of people driving alone and greenhouse gas is our number one contributor is a driver on the long trips as you know so I think the RGC staff effort towards chipping away at trying to get a value proposition that's two or three times greater than what they're doing already is you know a hard hill to climb and the data that's included even though it might be a small size of people that participate in the program and did the follow-up survey isn't valuable I mean in College of Action that's what we try and do is get people to act you know for a better environment each day and it's the small little acts that add up to something bigger and also I think going neighbor to neighbor is important too because you know some ten years ago when Prius was a new car that reduced less pollution it was seeing your neighbor have a Prius in their driveway that was a big factor in you then saying hey I can get this new type of car if you know my neighbor drives one and he has you know similar lifestyle to me so I think that's a really important way to have have those go in their neighborhood and see the socialization of taking the bus and walking building so if we're going to tackle this problem sometimes it's you're chipping away little by little and hopefully it builds on itself so I just want to say support the staff's effort and get the information out and look for ways to kind of get people the social programs to get people to use the bike lanes that we're building to take the buses that we have going on our city streets so I'm going to add that thank you Thanks for your comments Good morning. I try not to take too much of your time long meeting I understand but you know 30 years ago I was a facilities manager for a high tech company in the Silicon Valley and I actually helped establish the shuttles that service the high tech industry where Google is actually in Mountain View to Caltrans so I understand what motivates people to use transit this kind of effort is a good effort but at the end of the day the end of the day it needs to be convenient for them you need to have the infrastructure and the systems available for people to get from point A to point B so anyways I just wanted to point out that you know I think it was a good effort and I appreciate the effort that you guys are making for the community thank you Thank you Is there anyone else? Briefly we have quarterly meetings for the La Selva Beach Improvement Association Jack Friend did attend our last meeting and he did witness a vote to basically supporting trail now no train get on with it That letter is on file We want to keep it to the cruise 511 That letter is on file and the vote was something like 80 to 9 with a few people abstaining with like 100 people there thank you About the cruise 511 in your neighborhood program Michael St. Aptos campaign for sensible transportation and all I want to say is it's very difficult or going to be difficult to change people's habits on transportation I think we have to start somewhere and lots of very very good programs have gone out initially and have not done so well but people continue to strive towards those goals and they turned out to be very well received eventually and to be a big hit basically campaign for transportation supports cruise 511 transportation demand management is one of our goals here in Santa Cruz County I want to thank staff for putting up the money and having our employees do a wonderful job and go out and get something going so we can get single occupancy cars off the road if you're worried about costs I think we presently actually have one of our members helping Grace Dana Bagshaw and she's helping that neighborhood we have a lot of advocacy and members can pertain for sensible transportation and we're volunteers so if you need any advocacy going around neighborhoods I think as we hit more and more neighborhoods this will become a better program we'd be more than willing to help so our assistance is there if you need it thank you is there anyone else who would like to address us seeing none bring it back to our board for next motion by rock and second by Bertrand all in favor signify by saying aye any opposed motion carries unanimously next we'll move on to item number 19 which is our 2018 state and federal legislative programs I see no Rachel Marconi so I'll turn it over to Mr. Dondaro yes Rachel's at CTC meetings in Sacramento today so I was recruited to cover this item commissioners every year we bring this item to you and we update it we have goals and policies to pursue both at the state and the federal level I hope you've had time to read through these I'm not going to go through them line by line but do note that many of these are longstanding issues but the new items are indicated with an asterix so if you want to know what's changed since last year that's the way to tell but I think as we discussed earlier your chair and I were in Sacramento at the capitol on Tuesday visiting with our delegation and the overall theme of the day was really that we need to protect senate bill 1 it's under attack and I think our representatives were all in agreement that it's up to us at the local level to do that there's really not a lot they can do but they did the heavy work last year in getting the bill passed now depending on who you talk to it was either a 3 year effort or a 10 year effort depending on how far back you go in the history of it but the fact is it was a monumental milestone for transportation we had been losing ground for literally 20 years and it was due mostly to the fact that the biggest reason was the fact that the gas tax was never indexed to inflation and for some reason that point seems to get lost on the public so when you quote raise the gas tax you're actually since it was fixed in 1991 dollars it was losing ground every year so what they tried to do was to restore the value to what it was 20 years earlier and stabilize the funding programs that's the other big thing so and there was also some innovation going on it's a very multimodal program there are competitive grant programs for public transit for inner city and commuter rail things we never had before so we encourage you to go to your public works folks and your planning departments and any opportunity you have to encourage people to not support this repeal of senate bill 1 the attachments in my director's report item 14 which was a handout talk about prop 69 which basically would codify firewall around senate bill 1 some people have been criticizing senate bill 1 because they're saying well what's to keep the state from raiding the coffers again as they did back when we had a very difficult time with the state budget and so many transportation funds were not protected in the constitution so that's where the legislature went to borrow money they're still paying off that money by the way and I think with senate bill 1 the goal is to have all those debts paid off within three years the second item in here is the opposed senate bill 1 repeal there's a whole lot of information in here on this there's a coalition that's been formed called protect local transportation investments so I encourage you to vote yes on prop 69 and vote no on the repeal senate bill 1 there's a lot of I will say misinformation going around about this issue and if you flip through the third page in the handouts it starts with debunking the myths and there's about I think 10 different myths in here so you know there's a lot of clarity provided if you just read through this once I think you'll understand that senate bill 1 was very carefully crafted to address a lot of these fears that people had we're trying to correct the mistakes of the past so a lot of these myths are actually coming out of the past but they're not relevant now so we had a very engaging discussion with Kiana Valentine from the California state association of counties she's been up capital for 18 years and she knows this stuff very well and she said she learned a lot from our group and we had both republicans and democrats in our group of board members and I think everybody was felt a little more knowledgeable after that discussion the other thing I'll say is at the federal level right now our hopes are very low we don't really know what's going to come out of this congress so I'm not going to make any predictions there I think we're mostly focused at the state level at this point and just try and preserve what's there and I'm glad to answer any questions and the chair might want to add some I just want to add a couple of remarks based on the trip you know I was up there as part of this central coast coalition back in 2015 Secretary Kelly our transportation secretary kind of laid out a plan of what it was going to take to get something that we now call SB1 past and he worked very diligently and lots of other people here in Santa Cruz and across the state worked to pass this and put together a huge coalition right now there's a fairly cynical attempt by republicans and I just want to name that because one thing that I didn't know the signature gathering campaigns are being funded by 11 members of the republicans in congress who are interested in trying to use this as a wedge issue to get more republicans elected in November so our very own elected officials are working hard to disrupt a significant funding source for an identified need that comes up in their survey in Santa Cruz County and in state of California about infrastructure spending and John Cox has run a republican candidate for governor is using this campaign in order to promote his efforts they've got something like 400,000 signatures to place on the repeal they probably need 900,000 they have until sometime in May to get this done the right now the polling on it looks sort of a 50-50 split so it's going to be important for communities like ours to step up to not only support Props 69 which is those guarantees that this money will be used for transportation but also to stop any kind of repeal of SB1 in the county of Santa Cruz it represents a three fold increase in the amount of dollars we will have for our road system and really gets us to the place where we might have enough money to actually maintain our 600 mile road system but I know it makes a difference in a lot of other communities it also makes a big difference with our transit system who gets a significant portion of money from this new bill and it would be devastating to the transit district to lose SB1 because of everything that comes along with that on the federal front it's also important to note that the much touted infrastructure from the president even though we're a year in even though he spoke about it on election night we still don't have very many details and the details that we see represent a historic shift in the way in which the federal government pays for infrastructure whereas things like transit buses in the 2020 split where the federal government picked up 80% of the cost and 20% with the local community they want to flip that in this infrastructure plan and no matter what numbers you hear one trillion, one and a half trillion there's really only $200 billion of new money potentially from the federal government for those of us who were on a transit trip to D.C. last March we were very disturbed in talking with the administration's mind or beach head member as he called himself that said that in their vision of infrastructure that transit wasn't part of it it was kind of unclear whether roads were part of it it was about extraction technology and broadband and other things so we face a big fight at the federal level the state becomes very important for us and thank goodness for the voters here who saw the wisdom of supporting measure D that gives us resources to be able to increase that are not at risk that can only be used here and will help us leverage more money and access new pots of money that are available for self help counties so in the form that's in here I encourage your you to fill it out and to get your jurisdictions to fill out so we can stand together in fighting any repeal of SB1 the other only other thing I'll just talk about we talk with many legislators and the administration about trying to change the definition for disadvantaged communities because as we know here in Santa Cruz County there's only a small portion of Watsonville maybe one census track and live oak that can qualify for the disadvantaged community funding that was put into the cap and trade bill that cap and trade bill really focus on air pollution and so our air here isn't bad enough most of the time for us to to qualify for these funds but when the transit district looks to get transit funding for transit center improvements in Watsonville they wouldn't they didn't consider that to be a disadvantaged community so we really made the case that we need to change that and we heard some supportive efforts not only from legislators but also from the executive director of the California Transportation Commission so I appreciate the work that our staff did and our lobbyist in Sacramento did putting together that annual trip of the Central Coast Coalition really does make a difference and we're a lot stronger when we're with the five counties of the Central Coast than we are going by ourselves Mr. Rockin I think the staff has the correct priorities in this legislative program and one of the ask whether we have the staff capacity to have us prepare materials for each of the four cities and the county for resolutions and appropriate kinds of responses to that and the backup support for its enshrinement as a source that can't be tapped when other problems happen at the federal level absolutely we can do that I meant to also mention that in the next meeting we're going to bring a resolution to you here at the RTC also so we go on record as having firmly stood behind this but yes we could provide that material so I'm going to move that we adopt this legislative program as proposed by the staff to prepare materials for the political entities in the county to join us in this effort I'll second that there's a motion by Rockin seconded by Chase I want to see if there's other members of the commission who want to speak Mr. Johnson thank you chair so on nineteen four it says under expand local revenue raising opportunities expand the authority the RTC and local entities to increase taxes and fees for transportation projects including new gas taxes and vehicle registration fees is it the intent of the RTC to pursue that or well we actually did pursue a vehicle reg fee back in twenty twelve but we didn't get too far with it essentially it looked like it was going to be as much work as getting measure D passed and we didn't have the money for the campaign so I don't see that in the near future I mean it could happen so do you want to keep this in here we like to keep it in there as a placeholder in case things change right thank you I think the best thing we can do and I think the counties the county and the cities are doing it is really use the monies that we have from the source I mean I think you can look around Santa Cruz County in the first kick in I think it's going to be one monies and it's there's a market improvement of our roads and our transportation network systems bike trails whatever it might be we're getting that done with what the legislature approved and then local voters approved and measure D and I want to thank them again for that it's just not going to get done without it and it's as simple as that and we're going to be done under our transportation network unless we stop this effort to ban or have a referendum against Senate Bill 1 and what I'm doing is I'm no longer in that party but I'm going to those Republicans who supported this and say thank them and let them get out there and say hey this is a it is a bipartisan bill might only have been one person in the senate but let's thank him let's really put some positive reinforcement about those who did support this no matter what party they're in I think and I so I just want to be careful to say let's just make this a positive support system to kill this thing from getting on the ballot and if we don't if it doesn't continue we're not going to get the work done to address our transportation crisis that we have here in Santa Cruz County and throughout the state of California now see if there's member of the public who wants to add anything good morning thank you Brian Peebles trail now I want to remind the committee that trail now was a public what is it a political action committee we came out actually opposed to measure D initially and the work that this board did to adjust the language we came out to reverse that support we supported measure D and we actually put a lot of money into it I personally put my own money into it and we were strong advocates of measure D and we like to think that we helped get it over the over the line so to say and I encourage you to continue to reach out to what you might consider the more radical local organization transportation organizations because we can really help you and you know I want to start that by commenting Mike's comment and sitting here listening to his feedback on his perspective of his editorial and I it sounds like you know we're more closer aligned to the direction our community needs to go so you know I just wanted to recognize that listening and hearing his perspective a little more gives us all a better understanding of everyone's goals so I encourage you all to reach out to the private groups and those that are more tended to be in the middle and the right side of the political isle so we're here to help Trail Now is here to help and support you any way you want thank you anyone else who would like to address us I guess I should take that as a compliment thanks Brian I'm going to change hats here a little bit also a member of Citizens Climate Lobby here in Santa Cruz and as a suggestion recently Santa Cruz City Council has adopted a carbon fee and dividend resolution which goes to the federal government and what we propose is a $15 million carbon fee on fossil fuel companies and then that money goes back to the U.S. taxpayers basically and they can use that money as they see fit this could be part of your resolution I mean it could also go statewide I think it did at one time go to the legislature this would put both price on carbon emissions have the fossil fuel companies clean up this basically and at the same time people would shift toward lower energy demand transportation which would actually help save our planet and since that's the only one we have I think it's a great idea a wonderful side effect of carbon fee which will ramp up each year would be dialing back automotive congestion without any billion dollar highway expansion even as a low income low carbon residents come out ahead financially from the dividend I would think the RTC would like an income or an outcome like that this is also a sustainable pursuit so we'd like to ask the RTC lobbyists or anyone involved to promote this with the legislature instead of cap and trade obviously cap and trade is not working as well as it should presently in the federal house we have a 60 representatives that support this cap and trade carbon fee and dividend and they have to be equal in number we have 30 democrats and 30 republicans really highly suggest you look at this closely also our group in Santa Cruz for carbon for a citizens climate lobby can also do a presentation to the commission as well as the staff if you are very interested we appreciate it thank you I don't see anybody else coming forward to testify you had a question Mr. Rios I had a question if the legal cities board has taken a position as SP1 being a priority I wanted to ask you if the league of counties have taken a position yes they have thank you so there is a motion on the table by Mr. Rockin to accept this and the staff to come back with information about how our jurisdictions could support this effort all in favor signify by saying aye aye and the opposed motion carries unanimously we move on to a review of items to be discussed in closed session yes good morning commissioners there is one item for closed session it's a conference for your property negotiators pursuant to government code section 5496810 negotiations has to do with Sancres branch rail line and your negotiators your executive and deputy directors George Dunder and Luis Mendez and the negotiating parties are the RTC and progressive rail and the negotiations are priced in terms and will there be any report out from closed session we don't anticipate a report out from closed session I know there was at least one person who wanted to comment on this before we went into closed session again gail mcnaldi because of rail knows there is money to be made in our corridor it's not in tourism and it's not in transit as california fights offshore drilling and works to promote sustainability the U.S. oil and gas industry is booming and major energy companies have leched on to a historic loophole in railroad law that is allowing them to literally build whatever they want along an active rail line graft in messachusetts community wakes up to construction noises they find out that their local tourist company has partnered with an energy company and is building a major propane distribution terminal they complained, they worried, it's too close to our school it's too close to our water supply they went up to the chain to their state level and beyond they lost, they built that facility last week there was a new story that the facility is leaking the local fire department was quoted in that story they were supposed to be high security but the back gate was wide open the community was totally powerless and vulnerable and I'm afraid that because Union Pacific has the operator rights to our corridor we may be just as powerless and vulnerable we know that progressive rail is looking at building a propane distribution terminal in Watsonville what else might they be thinking about building along our rail line claiming to be good neighbors they've reached out, they're telling us they have a safety record and they will do everything to be good neighbors before signing anything with them I suggest you speak to their hometown Lakeville, Minnesota where residents refer to them as a breathing nightmare they don't maintain the tracks they'll do anything for a buck speak also to Chippewa County, Wisconsin where they have a major Fraxand business it's turned out that what used to be three trains a week is now running closer to three trains a day this has raised major community concerns about safety and noise and also traffic we're all sitting here talking about traffic and gridlock well, freight trains are not good for traffic Craig Mackenzie, the CEO of Progressive Rail has no railroad background but 29 years as an oil and gas executive four out of six of the members that are on his leadership team came from a company called Dakota Holdings Craig himself was the CEO of Dakota Holdings in 2013 when that company loaded up 77 out of date oil tankers which then went to Canada you've probably heard the story that train was insecure, it rolled down the hill it destroyed a village 2,000 structures, 47 deaths he claims of an impeccable safety record granted the oil company was not the only one responsible for that aspect for that accident but cost-cutting measures definitely were a piece of it Progressive Rail we're both in sheep's clothing please do not invite them into our home thank you good morning Brian Peeples trail now I just want to remind the board that trail now did offer a proposal as well and our proposal was a local organization and we would have subbed out the freight operations south of Lee Road our proposal was bringing in 2.5 million dollars of private funds and our proposal was to allow this board to beta test transit solutions along the corridor to come and really do some testing not lose your rail line regulatory requirements you wouldn't have lost that operating license we had the experts giving us cost estimates on the work we were doing the cost estimates were provided by the actual contractors that do this type of work our proposal was to beta test transit from lee road to boardwalk during the next five years of your remaining license agreement so and also proposing to protect the trestles those are very valuable assets I really worry if a tree is going to fall and take out the seascape trestle or the hidden beach trestle or maybe the capitol trestle when that happens games over we're done we're encouraging you to look within look within the local community we're offering an offer all of leaf to say hey go ahead and set up a contract for freight operations in Watsonville but for from lee road up to Davenport we're offering $2.5 million to work with the commission to come up with more beta testing of how we can use that corridor you know we're not coming in here telling we're going to pull the tracks up and make it into a trail we're going to find the best solution and we can do it very quickly because as Gail commented the railroad operators can do what they want with that rail line and so what we were proposing was to keep it as a rail line and do indefinite maintenance for a while from lee road to Davenport while we test and see what's the best options for us real test real test with private funds we were bringing in private funds and again one of the most important thing is to protect the trestles so our offer is still on the table if you go and you work a deal with progressive for freight work south of lee road we encourage you to open up and look at local people local people community shareholder ownership plan thank you very much thank you good morning thank you again for this opportunity my name is Bill Cook I live in Santa Cruz our country's done in its history many remarkable things we went to the moon in order to do that great great amounts of money were spent on rail wholesale license was given to individuals some of them were my relatives that worked in the space industry there was no idea it was too crazy too expensive you could not go out of business if you were in the space business if your idea didn't work there was another you just came up with an even wilder and crazier idea and it would be funded same thing was true in the 1850s we were building rail if you were if you decided to go into the railroad business there was unlimited funds for any wild crazy idea you had about where a railroad might be put it did not need to succeed this was kind of grade school history but commensurate with the funding was no limits on liability the freight rail in particular has no responsibility within its corridors they have free reign that's how rails got built and placed in the first place there is no local control or state governmental control over the activities that a rail line can perform within the corridor there is no need currently is my understanding to contract with a rail operator for this line there is no reason we are not required I suggest to you that deferring action on this indefinitely is best plan for the time being until you can all come to your own decision thank you so much good morning good morning I have carefully reviewed that progressive rail proposal that was presented to you last month I listened to the presentation by their representative and I can tell you I'm impressed I'm impressed with their professional approach their business plan and I trust that you'll collectively work together to put progressive rail under contract as soon as possible I've recently become aware of some fearful concerns that have been expressed by members of our community around a small part of their proposal which has to do with a propane facility propane offloading facility I'd just like to point out a few facts around that for your consideration as you think about this number one safety safety is a concern of all of us transporting liquefied petroleum gas propane or any other freight by rail has been studied several times by many organizations for many years transport by rail is consistently found to be 14 to 17 times safer than transporting the same freight by truck according to a paper published in 2017 by the steel interstate coalition titled rail versus truck and auto safety record I quote railroads and trucks carry roughly hazmat ton mileage but trucks have 16 times more hazmat releases than railroads statistically railroads are the safer form of transportation for hazardous materials end quote second rail is environmentally superior moving freight by rail is much better according to a paper titled the environmental benefits of moving freight by rail published in June of 2017 by the American association of railroads I quote on average railroads are four times more fuel efficient than trucks according to an independent study for the federal railroad association greenhouse gas emissions are directly related to fuel consumption that means moving freight by rail instead of truck lowers greenhouse gas emissions by 75% end quote third local control since there is no existing rail yard within which progressive rail could locate a new propane distribution facility any such facility will necessarily be located on an adjacent parcel of land and therefore subject to all local land use regulations and permitting requirements thank you I wish you good morning and you'll be the last person I wish good morning to good morning my name is David 8 I live in the Salva beach I remember when measure D passed there was this overwhelming sense of optimism that we're finally going to have solutions to the transportation what I call crisis because in south county it's it's taken we've essentially pulled our daughter out of school we do now a homeschooling program at mountain school because we could not get our daughter to soak hell to attend terror redwood and also make ends meet so we've completely altered our lifestyle around this crisis and now with the news of Iowa pacific you know pulling out a passenger rail has never seen more distant and the more I look into progressive as a company it seems that they are primarily an energy company these guys are energy executives they really it doesn't seem like they really have a short term plan to actually get passenger rail implemented in our county so are we really just trying to save face right now and get anyone to take control of our line so we can keep it active are we really committed to the citizens of Santa Cruz county to actually get real alternative options available to us to relieve this crisis because right now it is unbearable I have to say and though the more it goes on the more we consider just selling the house and going somewhere else so I think I think you guys have the duty to make the best decisions for the citizenry thank you thank you is there anyone else who would like to address us well then I wish you a good afternoon and ask that my commissioners join me in the room for closed session our next meeting of the regional transportation commission will be on March 1st I don't remember where but somewhere it might be at the county board chambers