Municipal Services Committee - Regular Meeting

All right. I would like to call tonight's meeting of the Municipal Services Committee to order. It is June 22nd at 4.30 p.m. Please rise and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Roll call of membership. Let the record show that Alders Wolff and Daugherty are absent and excused. Alder Furcus is here, and Alder Van Zeeland is joining us remotely. I need a motion, please, on the approval of the minutes from the previous meeting from June 8th, 2026. This is item 26-0835.

Move to approve.

Motion. And Alder Van Zeeland mowed a second.

Second. Thank you.

Any questions, corrections, changes? There being none, all those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Excellent. That passes three to zero. We'll move on then to our public hearing and appearances. There is only one. It is 26-0836, the design hearing for the 2028 Paving Reconstruction Project for Franklin Street between Division Street and Drew Street. Which of staff would like to take the lead on this?

So I'll start and I'll kind of go through Brown. Yes. I'll, I'll go through, um, the design hearing, uh, documentation memo that was included with the agenda. Um, kind of give an overview of existing conditions, what our proposal is, and then I'll, uh, pass it over to traffic engineer Lam for a little bit more detail. Um, discussion into how we came up with the proposal. So I am working on trying to share my screen and it worked just a minute ago. And let's see here.

I don't know if that's going to work or not. Do I want, okay. Yeah. Okay. Let's try it again.

actually have to have it go to window there we go yep all right sorry about that that's all right so we are talking tonight about franklin street as you had mentioned between division street and drew street this is scheduled for a 2028 uh, paving project. Uh, we had a public information session last Tuesday, um, to display the plans and invited all of the adjacent property owners, uh, to the meeting. And I'll kind of talk a little bit about how that went, um, in the proposal section. But as I mentioned, this is scheduled for a full reconstruction. And in that case, we're looking at complete removal and replacement of all sidewalk, terrace area, curb and gutter, and pavement as part of the paving project. So this is a full right-of-way to right-of-way proposal for Franklin Street being in the downtown area here. as far as, uh, the existing conditions go and some of the stats of, of what we have out there right now, um, traffic counts, we've got a couple of different counts between some of the different blocks, but on average, we're anywhere from 3,400 to 4,600 cars, vehicles per day. Um, in this stretch of Franklin street, this is a bus route. Currently, there is no on-street parking along this segment of Franklin Street. We do have bike lanes on both sides. The existing right-of-way is 60 feet. The existing pavement width from face of curb to face of curb is 44 feet. I won't go through all the stats of all the utilities, but the pavement, the current pavement in place was, was, uh, initially the concrete anyway, was put down in the late seventies and early eighties. So we are certainly at a timeframe of, of replacement for that. It has lived its life, um, for us. Um, there are, as far as trees, this is not obviously in our, our downtown area. We don't have a ton of trees. There are, this is kind of a mix of residential and commercial properties along the corridor here. So we do have on the east end, um, A FEW TREES ON THE NORTH SIDE IN THE NORTH TERRACE THERE ARE A COUPLE OF VERY LARGE TREES THAT ARE IN POOR CONDITION THAT OUR CITY FORESTER IS IDENTIFIED WOULD BE REMOVED DUE TO THE POOR CONDITION THEN THERE'S A COUPLE OF SMALL ONES THAT COULD STAY IF IF WE IF IT WORKS INTO THE INTO THE DESIGN. SO GETTING TO OUR PROPOSAL AND I THINK WHAT I'LL DO IS INSTEAD OF TRYING TO LOOK AT THE WHOLE THING BECAUSE YOU CAN'T REALLY SEE ANYTHING WILL KIND OF ZOOM INTO ONE BLOCK AND THEY'RE ALL somewhat similar um basically we're looking at should mention as always a utility work in a utility work water main sanitary sewer storm sewer if we need to to replace it would be done in twenty twenty seven with the paving following in twenty eight so our proposal um we are proposing to reconstruct franklin street uh at a width of thirty nine feet from face a curb to face a curb And that is compared to the 44 feet. It's a little narrower, obviously. And I should preface that 39 feet, it's not consistent along the entire way. And we can kind of talk about that and look at that a little bit on our plans if we need to. basically that is where we are proposing to have on street parking on both sides. So kind of leads me into the next part of, of our proposal, which is we are proposing to remove the bike lanes from the segment of Franklin street and add parallel on street parking to both sides where we can, where feasible, where it fits in with driveways and intersections and, and where we can put those spots in. Um, so that's the 39 feet is included in the two travel lanes and the, and the parking lanes. Um, we also with this, uh, proposed cross section, we would get, um, a minimum, a minimum of at least four feet of terrace, um, and a six foot sidewalk. So that would allow us, uh, to incorporate some tree plantings, um, Um, as this is part of the, the downtown area, and we would look at incorporating streetscape elements where possible. So very similar to what we did a couple of years ago in the downtown area, long Lawrence, Morrison, Durkee around the YMCA, that sort of that sort of project. Um, We also would be incorporating at intersections what we call curb extensions or bump outs. So narrowing of the curb and gutter as we get to the intersections provides traffic calming and shortens the length of the crosswalk. So it improves pedestrian safety. And I happen to stop here at Morrison and Franklin on the screen here. So that's a good place to mention that Traffic Division did look at the existing traffic signal here at Morrison and Franklin and found that we don't really come close to meeting the warrants for traffic signals. So our proposal includes removing the traffic signals at this intersection and implementing two-way stop control stops on Morrison. So it would be through on Franklin Street. So that's kind of a very brief overview of what our proposal is. And like I mentioned before, Eric can talk a little bit more about how we got to that typical section from a traffic and how they analyze the traffic situation. Before we get to him real quick, just want a couple more things here. Our estimated cost estimate for the construction of this whole project is around $3 million. There are 32 properties within the corridor along the project limits. We had three, I'll call them representatives, they weren't necessarily the owners, but three representatives of the properties attend to our project. Public information meeting I got two of our questionnaires back in general honestly the feedback was positive. There are concerns with access during construction which is understandable and we get those concerns on every project but. The consensus. uh, that we got from feedback that we got from most folks that we did talk to, which weren't a lot, but a few was the on street parking is a welcome addition. Um, also there was, uh, I think a comment in one of my questionnaires about, uh, uh, adding or replacing trees is also important. And like I mentioned before, we would, we would look to do that as part of our streetscape, uh, component of this project. So that's basically what I have. So if, um, Eric would like to elaborate a little bit more. You have to stop sharing. All right. On how we actually looked at the traffic component of this. I'll let him.

Traffic engineer law.

All right. Bear with me for just a moment.

There we go. All right. Okay, thanks, Jason. So I want to just maybe give a little bit more detail a little bit of background as to kind of what was going through all of our heads and what the process looked like to get here because there's some pretty dramatic changes that we're proposing. First of all, I think it's important to point out that we had a cross departmental group that reviewed all the plans gave us input on these and and ultimately felt comfortable with with everything we put forward in terms of Valley Transit, police, fire, econ dev, so on and so forth. So one of our tasks in the traffic division is when we look at something like this, a couple of different things. First, we need to understand what the traffic is today and what it's gonna be in the design year, which is 20 years from now, or 20 years from construction. And there's a lot of detailed work that goes into that that I won't bore you with, but suffice it to say that ultimately what we're looking at is trying to understand what the traffic's gonna look like 20 years from now. That's just sort of standard industry practice that's used across the board. And we know based on that traffic and having then run that traffic through our mark micro simulation models that we don't need three lanes out here i think anybody who drives this road kind of just feels that this is it's overbuilt um i i don't mince words on this sort of thing very much i'll just tell you i call this an urban hellscape it's it's just concrete from wall to wall um there's really no redeeming value to it other than to move cars through the town as fast as possible so We saw this as a really big opportunity to incorporate our streetscape best practices, incorporate some traffic calming best practices, and to start to extend what we've done in the College Avenue area over the course of the last 20 years, especially in the last few years with Durkee, Morrison, Oneida, and Appleton. and start to extend that streetscape up into this area and really set the stage for a lot of economic development projects that are expected in this area to be able to support those developments with on-street parking and better pedestrian accommodations. For those of you that have known me for any period of time and have been in this committee, you know that I take bike lanes and bike infrastructure very seriously. So when we talk about removing bike lanes, I think this might be the first project that we've ever done that on. And so I want to talk a little bit about why we felt that that might be appropriate here. I'm going to skip a couple of slides here. Come on. Okay. So this, I tried to keep this as simple as possible. This is sort of an amalgamation of our on-street bike lane plan and our trails master plan. The pink lines indicate existing bike lanes or other significant bike infrastructure or proposed. So for example, we built bike lanes on College Avenue in the last few years. Um, that is reflected on there. We, we know that from the, some of the other studies that are out there that we want to extend, uh, bike facilities West of Richmond street. So that is also showing in pink. So that's kind of a combination of existing and proposed. But what you see when you look at this is. My, oh, my, we have a lot of East West bike facilities, either existing or planned in this. very compact area so when we look at that and we say okay well packard street is been identified as a major east west bike facility college avenue has been identified as a major east west bike facility maybe we can get along without having some the redundancy of franklin street And quite frankly, I think Franklin Street has not gotten used very much, and not because it's not in a good place necessarily, but the condition of it is so bad that people just don't feel comfortable riding in it. The other thing I wanted to point out is Washington Street was identified in the on-street bike lane plan as well as in East West. So when we looked at this, we have limited resources, right? We have 60 feet of right-of-way. We want to support better pedestrian infrastructure. We want to do what we can for bicyclists. We're trying to support economic development. And so the group really ended up coming to the conclusion that because of that redundancy there, that our resources would be better put towards some of the other practices. So that was some of the thought that went through that. I'm going to just show you a typical section of what it would look like. I know Jason gave you the aerial view. This is what we call a typical section. I don't know how to move that. There, we got it. So two 12 foot drive lanes here, two seven and a half foot parking lanes, and then a four foot amenity strip, which would be that would be, uh, be consistent with what we've done on a lot of the other streets in the last few years in the central business district. So colored and stamped concrete, decorative street lighting, um, trees, and then a six foot sidewalk, which if you think about it from a pedestrian standpoint, if we go back and look at, um, Come on. If we look at this, this is a very uncomfortable pedestrian environment, right? People are zipping by. There's literally nothing between you and the vehicles driving down the road except for a curb. When we look at this design, and here's a... a more real-life representation of what it would look like, you're going to have parked cars and an amenity strip between the pedestrians and the cars moving down the road. So very, very similar to what you see here on Morrison Street, except that the street would be just a pinch wider because there is more traffic that we're dealing with. I think I'm going to leave it at that, unless anybody has any questions.

Director Youngworth, do you have anything else to add? I do not.

All right. I would like to call three times for the public hearing, but then I would like to bring it to whomever is on Zoom and Alder Ferguson and myself for any questions that we can kind of tee up before we actually see this as any kind of action. So this is a public hearing. Is there anyone who wishes to speak? This is a public hearing. Is there anyone who wishes to speak? This is a public hearing. Is there anyone who wishes to speak? There being no speakers, I would like to close that public hearing, but then I would be interested in whether Alder, it looks like Alder Schultz has joined us, and Alder Van Zeeland, I believe, is still with us online. If either of you have questions at this point, Alder Ranzeland?

I do.

Okay. Alder Ranzeland shakes her head, so I would say that's a no. Alder Schultz?

Can you hear me? Yes. Oh, thank you. Sorry, I don't have my video going, but I guess two questions. First, a comment, and thank you for the long, detailed explanation about the removal of the bike lanes. That was one of my primary questions, and I assume that it had been well vetted, and you came to a conclusion with rational thought and reasoning for the removal of those. I guess the only other question I have is, I didn't see this on the map and maybe I missed it because we were kind of zooming around from place to place, but what is the impact on the design specifically on that short section of Oneida Street that's gonna become a pedestrian mall? Is that incorporated into design? I just didn't get a chance to see that.

Traffic engineer Lam.

Jason's going to pull up the drawing while I'm talking, but I can tell you that the drawing is, what do I want to say, is not reflective at this point of what that's going to ultimately look like. We just don't have a lot of information, so we kind of have it as a placeholder right now. Yeah, keep going. So we're showing it just as a normal intersection and it is not likely to be a normal intersection. But anything in and around the transit center at this point is not well vetted because we are waiting for more information to become available.

Okay, I appreciate that answer. The only final question I always have is just generally speaking, when we're looking at all of that hardscape, all that concrete, and now stamped concrete. Have there been any discussions about incorporating semi-permeable pavers in that space so that we have a little percolation or some other means of capturing all that runoff or dealing with the runoff, or is that simply not tenable in a dense urban street that we're looking at?

Deputy Director Neuberger.

Thank you, Chair. I can speak to the permeable paver question. Appleton DPW has done a couple of pilot programs in the last 10 years involving permeable pavers, and the results have not been spectacular. There was one pilot project that was done at Fire Station and another one that was done in Industrial Park. We just weren't we're not satisfied with some of the settlement that we were seeing in those pilot projects. There was the manufacturer of the paper blocks even stepped up and at their cost reinstalled the paver blocks after we got some initial settling, and the reinstallation settled. And so it's not ready for prime time. We would just not want to recommend going with a paver block approach on a city street at this time. And I would say this, being a collector street too, would probably also not be a good candidate for the next time that we might try to do something like that. There are also poured concrete, permeable pavements that have been done out there. I understand even some of them have been done in northern climates. And at this point, I would say it's a still developing technology that DPW is not ready to implement. again probably wouldn't be in a in a in a street like this can certainly appreciate the fact that there's an awful lot of impervious here and so that's you know potentially a a chance to try to get some more infiltration going where you might not have a larger grass area we would probably um this permeable pavers and this sort of thing is something that does get considered about every five years when we do a citywide stormwater management plan update, and it just has not risen up near the top of the list of things that we want to try to implement. We'd rather look at some other types of practices for managing stormwater runoff. And so I would say it's been vetted to some extent in some of these downtown areas, and we're not recommending that approach.

Thank you, Deputy Director Neuberger, but also correct me if I'm wrong, the rebuild of the sanitary sewer that's planned for here is going to actually be more robust as well, correct? I mean, it'll handle the water that we're anticipating at least as well as it's handled at this point in time, but probably likely better.

it will be at least as good, the storm sewer will be at least as good as what exists today and not prepared at this time to say whether any pipe size increases are involved there. If they are, they would be marginal. This is not, for example, one of the areas in the city that's been identified for major conveyance improvements.

Okay, thank you. And Alder Schultz, I assume that that doesn't answer your question that much, but perhaps it does, question mark?

I appreciate that response. Actually, that does answer my question, and I'm very appreciative of the fact that those discussions are happening, even on a five-year interval, trying to figure out ways to do a little bit better job of infiltrating our rainwater. You know, and also looking at ways to incorporate more green in our urban streetscape. And I know it's incredibly challenging to do that in the heart of the downtown corridor to try and get anything. And so I appreciate the design. I know we're chasing, trees are always a good thing. And maybe the flower boxes around those, so much what we have on College Avenue, give us a little bit of that. But I do appreciate the conversations and, you know, always looking forward to more sustainable eco-friendly solutions when we're talking about those spaces in our streets. Thank you.

Thank you. Alder Fergus, do you have any questions?

Sure. Thank you, Chair. First one, not to take any of these renderings too literal, but is Franklin Street our trucking route currently?

A portion of it is, the portion west of Division. Okay, all right.

I was just curious about that. Like I said, I didn't want to take that rendering literal that had the two trucks and the traveling. I'm like, wait, that made me think, wait a minute.

That's a fair point. When we design, even if it's not a truck route, we're still trying to take into account trucks to one degree or another because we do have to get all the delivery vehicles through there. Okay, another question is,

The downtown being notorious for being built over ravines that were filled with garbage, I'm assuming that this isn't gonna be something that digs so deep that we have to be worried about contaminated soil, but just to ask the question, is that something we have to be concerned about with this project?

Deputy Director Newberg?

Potentially, yeah. So we do have some pretty good surveys in the downtown area, and at this point, it's a possibility that we're prepared to manage.

Okay, and I guess the only other, not so much a question, but just with the comment, I know first time proposing any sort of street project removing bike lanes, and I'm glad you came prepared for some pushback from that, but my feeling is, and I think the information provided today kind of confirmed that this is really just looking at the network holistically, and I kind of think back to some of the discussions around when we put the bike lanes in reconfigured College Avenue, and how Franklin Street was kind of put out there as like, this is sort of a release valve, this is a alternative. And I feel like this design really kind of make action on that just beyond hey this is here it's like this is here this is going to be built more i would say to kind of entice that traffic say yeah come here we've got on street parking it's you know if you're frustrated with you know not enough on street parking for your liking on college well now if you're okay to walk two blocks which again this has got nice pedestrian facilities to make that a more enjoyable experience than current state does so I think this does a nice job of threading the needle between the different needs and wants for the transportation network in this neighborhood. So, good job. Thank you.

Thank you. I had a little bit of a question, and I had it earlier for Director Youngworth and Deputy Director Neuberger, but how will this... conflict slash coincide with the transportation center construction and yellow ramp traffic, et cetera, et cetera. How will we manage that appropriately? Director Younger?

Very carefully, of course. So we're going to have both the temporary transit site, as a part of this corridor that we will have to navigate and the permanent site. So we have been including transit within our internal conversations on design. We have already pulled them in on it. They're aware of the timing of this and actually weighed in on the most appropriate timeframe that they believe for alignment with that project. um, which possibly may be at the start of next year. Again, where we have federal funding that we need to work through some details on that. Um, but we are aligning such that we anticipate paving to occur the same calendar year that they're going to open the site. So utility construction will coincide with site construction potentially. So we've, they're aware and we know that we'll have extensive coordination that will have to occur and phasing, that is likely to navigate lost routes.

And that coinciding with how the number one neighbor concern or one of the neighborhood concerns was access during that period of time, just going to figure out alternative routes, et cetera.

Yes. And again, that's, that's part of that phasing plan is likely when we do utilities on one end, they'll be able to freely use the other end. We'll have to flip flop. So we'll we, we, we'll be definitely having some more extensive conversations on navigating that. Thank you. With them.

Deputy Director Neuberger, you mentioned before that there may be some brownfield or something of that sort. Do we anticipate that the $3 million estimation here is going to be significantly changed due to any of that? I mean, obviously, this is all completely maybe. But I'd be interested in your thoughts in that regard.

I don't anticipate that the cost of managing contaminated materials would be a budget buster on this one, no.

OK. Thank you. Does anyone else have any other questions?

Alder Van Zeeland Online did have a question.

Oh, yes. Alder Van Zeeland. Please. Oh, hang on. You're on mute. Hold on. There we go.

There.

Perfect.

Good?

Yes.

Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Thank you. Aldershilt had asked about the stormwater and the example that we saw, I think that was Morrison Street. Are there stormwater grates built into that street area? I thought that I saw that on the example that we were shown.

We do have storm drains throughout that will be in the roadway to collect drainage. And then there will also be the tree grates or we are anticipating inclusion of tree grates to get some of that soft scape included similar to the Morrison street example.

Okay. And then my second question is can you talk a little bit more about why we are adding the parking when we are very close to the city parking ramp? What is the advantage of the street parking in that location? versus having people use the ramps?

Traffic engineer.

Sure, I'll put on kind of my quasi-econ dev hat for a minute. Through our discussions with them, and when we look at the neighborhood plan that they've put together, I think there's a strong understanding that, well, a lot of parking that's generated by these future developments will be able to park in the ramps that there's a lot of opportunity for ground level retail. And that with a lot of ground level retail comes need for curbspace for quick in and out, you know, imagine a pizza place or whatever. so by offering curbside parking it really expands the types of businesses that would be suitable for that ground for some of the ground level areas thank you that's helpful to understand when we're talking about street level retail that makes perfect sense thank you all right any other questions anybody

Alder Schultz, it doesn't look like, oh, Alder Fergus.

Thank you. Just, there was one point that was made a little bit earlier about the transit center. And I think that something worth highlighting with that is that's going to require some pretty heavy equipment to build that. So having that start and hopefully be completed before the actual final street goes in. So yeah, I get it with the timing, definitely something to watch. I imagine, make sure everything stays on time, but no, definitely don't want to build a brand new street and then have all that heavy equipment come in to build a brand new transit center. So.

Or alternatively, open up a whole new transit center and shut down the road that they need to be exiting onto.

Yep. Delicate dance.

All right. No other questions, comments? All right. There being none, we will move on then to item number eight.

Move to adjourn.

We have a motion and a second. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye.

Aye.

We are adjourned. Thank you very much, everybody. Thanks, Katie. I appreciate it.