Municipal Services Committee - Regular Meeting

It's 2.50. So call the meeting to order, and let's begin with a Pledge of Allegiance, please.

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.

We'll begin first by a roll call of membership, please.

Mike Pata.

Here.

Diane Dexter. Here. Michael Brown.

Here.

Carol Casmar.

Here.

Bered Meltzer.

Here.

Larry Werdinger.

Here.

Dennis Doherty is excused. Mayua Tao is excused. Ron Torrance. Present. Matt Larson. Here. Brian Borchardt is excused. Greg Vandehey.

Here.

Chairperson Diburn. Here.

Thank you.

The quorum has been established.

Thank you. Now I need to move into a pool of minutes. I need a motion to approve the minutes from the previous meeting, please.

I so move. Second.

I have a motion and a second. Thank you. Are there no questions? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Thanks. Motion carries. And public participation. I see no one here and no one remotely. So we'll move on to the action items. And the first one is to decline the bids for the Whitman Avenue Phase II construction. I need a motion to that effect, please. So moved.

Second.

Motion, there was a second? Okay, motion to second. So, Ron, if you could please explain that. I think we've all read about it. Thank you, Chair.

In essence, we anticipated the project to be about $15 million. That's what we had funding for, and the bids came in in excess of $20 million. So we're rejecting all the bids. We'll go back and do some value engineering, redesign, and come up with something that is affordable. So stay tuned. We'll be coming back, but I would ask that you reject these bids and let us move forward.

Question? How do we anticipate this affecting the overall timeline of things?

For Whitman Phase 2, it's not going to make a significant difference.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you.

Any other? Yes, please.

Would there be additional costs to redesign and everything?

Far less than the $5 million that we're over. Yeah, there's a little bit of stuff, but most of the work is going to be done by the vendors, or by the, excuse me, the engineering firm, and then, yeah, there'll be a little bit of expense, but it won't be a lot, because the design's already done. It's just a matter of retooling to make sure that see if we can do something differently that's a little bit more cost effective.

Thank you. Did we get a feeling from any of the contractors as to why it was so far off?

There was a few things. The biggest thing was the stormwater runoff. That was in excess of $2 million just for stormwater runoff. Most of the work design was for underground, which we believe it probably could have been done above ground, far less money. Just an example, one of the items that was put into our bid was an underground rain barrel for $900,000. No, thank you. So there's a lot of things we can do in the re-engineering to make it come back around.

I was going to say, stormwater runoff is a major factor, especially with the DNR.

Yeah, absolutely. You have to do it. I mean, it's clearly, but. There's less expensive ways to do it and still meet the regulations and then we don't need to dive that deep into it and spend that kind of money.

Any other questions? So do we anticipate the new beds to be within budget?

I certainly expect to. I talked to the architect this morning. They've said they've been working towards that and he's feeling pretty good with where they're headed as of this morning.

Anyone else? If not, we have a motion and a second on the floor to reject the bids as proposed. All those in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? Thank you. And I'm sure we'll hear about that again. And the second item is authorization award contract for temporary transit center site work project. Any motion to approve, please?

Motion to approve.

Second. I motion to second. And again, Ron, I'm assuming .

Thank you, Chair. So we're preparing to hopefully get the construction project going sometime soon for the transit center. And to make that happen, we have to develop a temporary transit center. We intend to do that on Collada Way by the spring, that well that's been abandoned, Collada Way. Is that Superior?

Yeah.

That ends there. We have to do some work to make it ADA compliant and some other work to make the buses fit. So the facilities department put out some bids. The low bid was Martel Construction for $48,238. And the second was Vinton at $55,622. So our recommendation is to move forward with a little bit Martel construction to begin the work on getting the transit center ready to go. And that needs to get moving so that is ready to go. So when we are ready to start the transit center project, we can just start transitioning over there and get ready to start doing demolition, things like that. Did we answer any questions that anybody might have?

Okay, if there are none, then... We have a motion and a second to approve. I believe this is the lowest bid, please. The construction company that Ron mentioned. All those in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? Thank you. Motion carries. And then the next item is approval of route modifications, which we've talked about before, but now we take action on. So I have a motion to approve the route modifications, please.

So moved.

Chair, I just had a thought on this. I'm going to go through here. I think there's just a handful of changes that we're going to talk about.

Okay.

When we're all done with the presentation, you may want to go through and vote on them separately because there's different communities affected. Sure, okay. So not everybody's affected. You can split it up then. I just think it's for those communities that may or may not be impacted. All right. Okay. We can do that. So proposed changes, all the proposed changes were found in the 2026 transit development plan. These were designated as short-term resource neutral modifications. And our operations team has gone out and tested the changes, driving a bus around, timing it, make sure everything works. So there's four proposed changes, two of them in Appleton, one in Grand Chute, one in Kaukauna. Beginning with Route 2, we plan on, and I'll go through this and I'll show you a map, we're planning on removing the route from Badger Avenue. They redesigned the street there. Route 15, we want to modify the route to minimize conflict points and improve on-time performance. Ultimately, that will be asking to discontinue the service loop that goes into PetSmart and Home Depot. And then the third modification is Route 20 to extend that south onto Cooks Avenue to Piggly Wiggly and then remove the service on Henry and Glenview to preserve this time schedule. It took us a while to get there, but we were finally getting there. And then Route 30 was to move the outbound service from Appleton Street and Prospect to Franklin and Memorial Drive. So Route 2, the challenge was the reconstruction redesign of Badger Avenue between Lawrence and Spencer Streets. There was going to be a change. His biggest considerations, that was our access point to the Boys and Girls Club. How do we still continue to serve the Boys and Girls Club? So instead of, the recommendation was instead of using Lawrence and Story to access the Boys and Girls, we continue along Walnut to serve Route 9. So if you see that tan colored line, we would continue heading west on Franklin, south on Memorial, and then west on Lawrence, and then south on Story on continuing regular route. The black dashed line is the portion of the route that we are taking it away from. If you look at that and notice where that is, that goes right by the Autogamy County Courthouse, but the courthouse is served every 30 minutes by the link route, so there's plenty of service going right by there, so we didn't feel that was a problem. But this allows us to continue to serve the Boys and Girls Club with a change on Badger and the access point removal. That's this one in a nutshell. And if anybody has any questions on Route 2?

Just a general question. Have you discussed these routes with the various communities already so that they're aware of what's coming?

Well, we went through the transit development plan and invited all the communities to participate. Many of them did. And they also held an extensive amount of public meetings to try and get the public in and get public comment in. These routes, they're minimal changes. They don't rise to the threshold of our public hearing requirements. So we believe we've met the threshold of public participation during the TDP process.

Are these permanent or temporary? Didn't you say temporary?

Well, these would be permanent. Route two, I think we're actually running this route very close to this right now as a detour because we couldn't get into the Boys and Girls Club anymore. So some of these we've actually had to put in temporarily as a detour and now we're following up for permanent.

Okay.

Any other questions?

But, Ron, I assume any of these routes, I mean, even though we're changing them, could be changed again with action.

It's up to the Transit Commission. They can change any of them. Yeah, absolutely. So, George, I don't know if you want to vote on each one of them as we're going through, or if you want to go back to them all.

Sure. The question, I mean, we can vote individually on these if you prefer, or we can go through all of them and vote entirely. There's already a motion seconded to approve all the changes, but... Should I do a separate motion and approve for each one, or can I just have them vote on each one individually?

Just do one big motion.

I disagree because there's some I'd like to abstain on because they don't impact me and my community.

Well, they could impact your community because people in your community do take these routes. They transfer and take it. It's a system. I mean, indirectly, they affect everybody.

I appreciate that. Thank you.

So we have the the motion a second to approve all the routes I think one way forward is to introduce all of them and if that if people are willing to vote on them as As all as one right it cannot it can pass that way if at that point We know someone knows that they want to maybe separate one out the mover and seconder could withdraw theirs and we could vote individually then and get a motion a second on each one individually

THAT MAKES SENSE. SO I'LL GO THROUGH THE PRESENTATION.

LAST CALL, ANY OTHER QUESTIONS FOR ROUTE 2? 15 Services Woodmans on West Hill Boulevard suffers delays, safety concerns quite frequently. Considerations for access to the groceries are on time performance, safety in parking lots, et cetera. The TDP recommendation was to eliminate the segment serving PetSmart and Home Depot and then maintain a current bus stop at Woodmans. The original TDP through Woodman's parking lot, that recommendation did not work. We tried to run it and we ran into more conflicts than we anticipated. So we intend to stay right where we are at Woodman's. So the question really is gonna come into this is whether we should continue going all the way up to PetSmart and Home Depot. And I will show you that on the map here shortly. So this route currently is heading north on West Hill. goes up to the PetSmart entrance, takes a left into PetSmart, takes another left and comes down adjacent to the Home Depot, and then exits the parking lot before it heads back down south towards Woodman's. So the dash line is the area that we're talking about removing. We do know that we have a couple of people that work at Home Depot, I'll be honest with you. I can tell you that at least one of them that I'm aware of does have a physical disability. I know the individual uses the bus and VT2 depending on how they're doing on a given day. So that particular individual could use VT2 for all of their transportation if they didn't want to walk to Woodman's. The problem we run into with Route 15 is it's very, very difficult to keep it on time during the busy times of day. And then part of that problem, because it was running so late, It's very difficult in Woodman's parking lot. If we can buy ourselves like two or three minutes in Woodman's parking lot, that'll make all the difference in the world. We have had vehicular conflicts in front of Woodman's, multiple lawsuits. It's just a highly congested area that we probably should have never been in there to begin with, but we're there and we have to stay there. So there's very minimal ridership on the north end of that route. and the TDP recommendation was to remove that northern section. Please.

How far away is that from Wisconsin Avenue? Because Wisconsin Avenue has service too, doesn't it?

There's buses that travel on Wisconsin. It's probably six blocks. That's a half mile.

Yeah, so I don't know if that's an issue or not. A handicapped person that might be there.

ADA is three quarters of a mile.

Yeah, I mean, I can just add the town staff is very cognizant of this corridor as it relates to transit, bicycle, pedestrian accommodations, which are non-existent. So we're certainly looking for opportunities to include those sidewalks and even pedestrian, I'm sorry, even bicycle accommodations when we can. It's just a very challenging corridor as far as the built environment, lack of right-of-way, all those sorts of things are frankly in the way. But when we get to the point where West Hill is reconstructed, we would certainly look at all options available. At that point, we have a redevelopment project on the very southern end of this corridor where it meets College Avenue, and we were able to work with that particular developer to at least reserve some space for future sidewalk in the way of an easement. But frankly, that's the least of our problems. I mean, you can drive the corridor and pass Culver's, and there's a retaining wall in the parking lot. If you look at some of the aerial photos, there's literally vehicles hanging out over into the roadway.

Yeah, can we do something similar like we did at Walmart, where we put an inset?

Yep, absolutely, that would be part of the reconstruct, would be like potentially a transit stop on the roadway. Right. But you'd almost have to assume you're doing something with lane reconfiguration, a road diet, to make space for those things. There's just not space there.

We did have an extension discussion about that when we looked at this route before.

We did have an extensive discussion. Mike and I have talked quite a bit on this. The way it's built up right now, there aren't a lot of options that are immediately available, and it's a major reconstruction effort at some point in the future, but probably not.

Unfortunately, we do have sidewalk on the east-west portion that's being shown here on Woodman Drive, but Blue Mountain, kind of the same situation with the collect-ped facilities, too.

Thank you. And I know that you already mentioned that there's minimal ridership. And you talked about one individual impacted. But I just think it's just important to reiterate for the record to make sure this is very clear. Is it truly the case that VT2 can absorb and accommodate whatever needs travelers have that are lost by this change?

Yes, absolutely.

So let's cross the bus here. What's the cost of bus fare?

$2.

What's the cost of VT2?

VT2, it's $4. So it's twice the cost.

It's an impact.

It's an impact. The individual that is using it I know uses VT2 on a regular basis and also uses the bus from time to time. So whether or not they would be severely impacted, I don't know. That's their personal choice.

It's a big concern. Yeah, and I am concerned about that cost impact, and I don't know. what we can do about that. But if there are any options that we have for providing some sort of relief for individuals who rely on this, and if there's maybe some kind of arrangement that can be made for discounts or anything like that so that their costs aren't doubling as a result of this change, I think that would be important.

Yeah, that gets very difficult because you have to determine whether or not they're actually paying for their fare and somebody hasn't paid for it on their behalf, and then you're getting into personal business. I don't know how you do that without getting into their personal business. I hear you. I'm not arguing with you. I understand the impact of it. I don't know how we can accommodate that, but we'll see what comes out. If people come back with... concerns, we'll come back and we'll chat about it and figure out how we fix it. Thank you. Does that sound reasonable? Yep. Thank you.

But for all these changes, I guess, what's the timeline? Is there education that goes out, I'm sure, and kind of communicated to those riders that might be impacted, that sort of thing?

Yeah. Actually, I've got that at the end of the slide. I'll go through what our plan is.

All right. That was a good question.

One we anticipated. Any other questions on Route 15? About 20, so Kaukauna residents have requested better access, including commission members have requested access down to the PIG on behalf of residents of Kaukauna. So we received this request from one of our commissioners, as well as the mayor of Kaukauna. And we slipped this into the TDP for discussion. And consideration, of course, is trying to get access to the PIG in Kaukauna. So in essence, we want to extend the route to Piggly Wiggly, removing the Henry Street and Glen Vue area. One of the biggest concerns we had is the housing authority. We still had to get a bus by that and then still get into downtown Kaukauna. And we think we've accomplished it through this. So right now, the bus is heading south on Crook Street and would turn on Henry. We're going to continue south through the roundabout. and turn around and stop adjacent to Piggly Wiggly. We're not gonna go into the peg. We're gonna stay right on Crooks Street. We'll put up a bus stop there and stop, and so people can get out there. There's a nice sidewalk access from the peg out to the bus stop. And then we would continue on Crooks and take a left on 10th, going right by the Public Housing Authority, and then get back on our regular route into downtown Cricklawn and going past the City Hall, et cetera, following the regular route.

Any questions?

Yeah, I think it's super important. I mean, the Piggly Wiggly moved out there at least 25 years ago, I'm sure. And not only that, it's Walgreens, it's the dollar store, it's the hardware store. And they need access to that long overdue.

Any other questions? Last but not least, Route 30. This one also has an on-time performance issue, some of our one-way segments. So how do we figure out our on-time performance or correct our on-time performance and getting through neighborhoods and customer ease of use, et cetera? So the TDP recommendation was to establish a bidirectional service on Franklin Street and Memorial and removing us from the one-way service on Prospect, in essence, getting us out of the old Third Ward. So the current route in the black dash you can see is traveling down Appleton Street. We take a right on Prospect Avenue going out to Memorial. Instead we would head west on Franklin to Memorial and take a left and just continue south. So we're really not missing a whole lot outside of we won't be going through the old Third Ward. I can tell you that they will be thrilled to death that we're not going through the old Third Ward anymore. I've already heard from one of our senators. They're happy. Any other questions on that?

How many stops were moved out of that one? Amy, do you know?

Probably around five. And again, near the courthouse area, Appleton Street. Appleton Street is frequently shut down for special events downtown, so we have to detour. And then in that area, in the courthouse area, it's served every half hour by Route 9, the link.

Was there an increase of stops with the new proposed route compared to the previous or the current route?

I'm seeing about four dots on my screen that I'm looking at. It's going to be pretty much a wash.

The ones on Franklin Street outbound are used by other routes as well. So there's already bus stop signs there for Route 3 outbound. We're just adding a sticker for 30 to be added to that. Just the ones going southbound on Memorial by 8th Street and 5th Street would be the additions Thank you Any other questions?

Okay next steps target implement implementation would be October 5th and So we start communications starting on September 8th, doing direct outreach to impacted organizations like the Kona Housing Authority, Boys and Girls Club, et cetera. Notification decals and impacted bus stops. Start a social media campaign with X, Facebook, Instagram. Text messages to subscribers, messaging on ridemyvalleytransit.com. So Sarah and her team put out push notifications to anybody who's subscribed to Valley Transit. has been very well received by our riders for getting information. We'll certainly update our home page and potentially a blog on the home page. Our digital screens at the Transit Center and the Whitman Building. We're also in the customer lobby. We'll also have information sheets on them. We can put flyers on the buses. And then we'll put new route and stop data in the print information on our website. So we have to transition all that information onto like Google and Apple Maps, et cetera. So when they get on their phone, it'll show up that there's a bus stop and things like that. We have to get all that updated. It's pretty extensive.

Would it be possible to also provide PDF and Microsoft Word copies or whatever appropriate format copies of this to transit commission members or, I guess, to me, maybe if nobody else feels a need for this, so that it's easy to provide that information in direct response to inquiries for people who maybe aren't on social media. And if people call me on the phone, maybe I could print a copy and mail it to them kind of thing.

That's a great idea. When we get the new maps done, We'll print some off, and we can get some out to you. I don't know, Sarah, you're out and about if you want to drop some off. That'd be awesome. We can get you some on all of them to have information.

Thank you.

We could drop some off at Long Chain Marketplace, too.

Yeah. And eat some good food.

Any other questions? Yes.

I'll use another form of transportation. I don't want to railroad this through, but we do have a motion. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Bad joke. We have a motion to second to approve this as is, but if there are those members that want to make some modifications to that, we need a motion to that effect. Otherwise, I would want someone to call for the vote. Okay. Hearing none, all those in favor of the changes, please say aye. Aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? Thank you, motion carries. You're opposed or you? No, abstaining. Abstaining, one abstention. All right, thank you. Okay, thank you, motion carries. Excuse me. Okay, now move on to approval of payments. And I need a motion to approve the payments, please. So moved.

Second.

I have a motion and a second to approve payments. Would you please go through the? Thank you, Chair.

So I didn't really pull any of these out. There's nothing that's sticking out that looks really out of the ordinary at all. I will tell you that we've had a couple of purchases of fuel. I think one came in at 334 a gallon, and the other one came in just under that. So we're under budget with fuel. through all the ups and downs of the market. We're coming through this okay, as we're well through half the year. I don't know if anybody has any specific questions, but the biggest one on there, there's a $20,000 payment to Plunkett Raish Architect Firm. We did some very, very preliminary work on the transit center, and that's what that was for. So I'll be glad to answer any questions provide any input anybody might have.

Seeing any. Therefore, all those in favor of the approval of the payments, please say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? Thank you, motion carries. Move on to information items, and there's one on the agenda that I'm going to bypass because we have it in later. So we'll move on to financial reports. Thank you, Chair.

So the first one in here is June. You should have been at, if all things equal, about 50% of our budget. We're well under the 50% expenditures on the budget. If you notice on the revenue side, we haven't withdrawn much from the federal government yet. And we're still waiting for our reimbursement from the state government. So the revenues look lopsided, but those will catch up here very soon. But all in all, we're under the 50% threshold. Our operating expenses were at about 42%. We're at half the year. If we go on to July, we should be at about 58%. Again, we continue to be under budget with our expenditures. And again, the wonky thing showing up is that the revenues aren't there yet because we haven't drawn down the federal dollars yet or the state. I think we just got the state grant application signed about two weeks ago, finally. So that stuff should be coming through shortly. And as those things come in, then we'll start issuing reimbursements to the communities. If anybody has any particular questions, I'd be glad to go through anything with you.

Not seeing any. I have a question.

I see that we're basically two months behind in our reporting. Is that normal?

Well, we didn't have a July meeting.

Yeah, right. So wouldn't July numbers still be here, though? I mean, this is the August meeting. We're at the end of August.

June and July, I just went through the income statement. June and July are both there.

I was looking at the... income statement.

Yep, July's there. This third page is July.

My bad, I apologize. No problem.

It's all good, they're all stuck together. I had to look twice myself.

Okay, with that, we'll move on to a Writership Report, please. You doing the tour?

I am, thank you. All right, so we'll talk about ridership. Start out in June. See the ridership is down 4% for the month, about 6% for the year. Should make note that the trolley service is not running this year. So you see a few yet less riders on there, although it's not real significant in numbers of rides. But there's about 15 and 1 half hours of service that were cut out because of that with the trolley service. Although the route is still running, the trolley's not. Any questions on June ridership? The demand response is continuing to tick up. You see the monthly ridership is up 18%. Year-to-date was up 10%. If we go on to the July fixed route, we're down 13% for the month of July. I think everybody's well aware of the tornado that we had. As an example, One of the biggest impacts we had is our Route 30. We couldn't operate that for a couple of weeks.

We couldn't get through Menasha down into Nino for obvious reasons.

So certainly the ridership was impacted. People still had the opportunity from Route 41 to get up to the mall and get into downtown Appleton or other places. We did even try running the bus for a little while, trying to have an opposite half hour bus leaving towards them all, but we weren't getting enough ridership out of it to sustain it. We were just trying to get any services we can for the folks in Neenah, trying to assist them to get to work wherever they needed to go. But certainly that was a big hit for everybody. The ridership certainly was down. Again, with that, even with the change due to the storm, the ridership for the VT2 was still up 8% for the month. and 10% for the year.

See any questions? Move on to the final item, the second quarter performance indicators.

I'll take that.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair. So the on-time performance for the second quarter KPI was 92%. Again, our target is about 90%, so we're just over 92%. that's good because there's still a lot of construction going on, but we were able to maintain 92%. Total miles between major system failures, this truly tracks if we're having major breakdowns, having to have a bus towed in, that kind of thing. We went 11,000 miles between a major breakdown. Our target is 7,500, so we're We're holding our own. Those of you that have been on the commission for a while, you remember we started buying new buses in 2017. Well, those are starting to get several hundred thousand miles on them by now, so we're starting to have more and more issues with them, but they get old fast. And then on the bottom of the page is the complaints per 100,000 miles. Our target is less than 12. If you notice, in June we popped up to 15.33, and then in July back down to 10. I'm talking with our operations folks. The spike in May, I think May and June that was, our spike in May was primarily related to all the new construction that was starting, all the detours were going on because stuff was popping up. Not everything is advertised as going to happen or doesn't happen exactly as it's anticipated, so we have to make immediate detours. People are mad when the bus isn't where they think it's supposed to be. So we got a spike in complaints, up to 15 per 100,000 in May. And then June it settled back down to about 10. If we look at the reportable events per 100,000 miles, we didn't have any, so we're less than one. And then we show the passenger revenue hours. Our target is 12.8. We were at 11.5. Again, a lot of things happening. The summer months are always lower, so we're teetering right on that line in the summer months, and we did so again this year. Before I go on to demand response, any questions on the fixed drought APIs? On the demand response side, they're at about 95% on-time performance. Complaints per 10,000 rides was 7.7, a target of less than 14. Reportable events per 100,000 miles. They didn't have any in this reporting period. And then the last but not least, we do report passengers per revenue mile on the demand response, although that's kind of an indicator that's not really useful on a paper trip, so it doesn't matter to me whether they take one per van or three per van or One van for everybody, that's their problem. We pay by the trip. So their passenger per revenue hour is 1.9. It's been pretty consistent. That tells me their scheduling is pretty much the same all the time. Any questions on that?

Seeing any. OK. Finally, the item that we bypassed, the request for future agenda items. As typical, if you have proposed agenda items, please contact Ron or myself if you'd like, and we can consider, we'll put those on the agenda for future dates.

Absolutely.

Then finally, future meeting dates for next meeting dates. Again, the proposal is to cancel the September 8th meeting, as we typically do, cancel the first meeting, and have a meeting on September 22nd. So with that, I need a motion to adjourn, please. So moved. Second? Second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Thank you. Motion, we're adjourned.