City Council - Regular Meeting

Mm hmm.

Good morning, I'm Esther Van Hamer, the Mayor of the City of Asheville, and I'd like to welcome you to the May 21st, 2026 agenda briefing work session. All council members and staff are participating virtually. This meeting is intended for discussion purposes only. No formal actions or votes will be taken. In addition, no public comment is taken during this meeting. The live meeting will be streamed on the city's YouTube channel. accessible through the YouTube icon on the city's website or via the live stream. You also have the option to listen to the meeting live via phone by calling 855-925-2801 and entering the meeting code 3937. Council member Maggie Ullman is flying back from Washington DC this morning. So she will not be able to join us. Council and staff, when I call your name, please say a quick hello. Vice Mayor Antoinette Mosley. Good morning. Council Member Kim Roney. Good morning. Council Member Bo Hess.

Good morning.

Council Member Sage Turner.

Good morning.

Council Member Shanika Smith. Good morning. City Manager DK Wesley. Good morning. Assistant city manager, Jade Dundas.

Good morning.

Assistant city manager, Ben Woody.

Good morning.

And our city attorney is out this week. So we have assistant city attorney, Janice Ashley. Good morning. And then finally city clerk, Maggie Burleson. Good morning. Okay. Now I'll turn it over to our city manager, DK Wesley.

Thank you, Mayor and good morning everyone again. Today is our agenda briefing work session in preparation for our council meeting, regular council meeting on Tuesday, May 26. That meeting will be starting at 5 p.m. in council chambers. We also have a public safety committee. We'll review that agenda as well. And a couple pretty important topics to discuss today. I'm going to turn it over to assistant city manager, Jay Dundas, and he'll facilitate this briefing.

Thank you, Manager Wesley. And so I'll just jump right in. We have the, as stated, the formal meeting for council start, our May 26th meeting started at five o'clock next Tuesday. There's one proclamation for that meeting and it'll be the 14th annual pollination celebration month. Those have been eventful in the past. So look forward to that. So moving into the consent agenda, ITEM B IS A RESOLUTION APPROVING THE AMENDMENT FOR THE INSTALLATION FINANCING CONTRACT TO PROVIDE FINANCING OF ADDITIONAL PROJECTS AND AUTHORIZING THE MANAGER. I'M NOT GOING TO READ THAT ALL. IT'S ESSENTIALLY A FINANCING THROUGH A LIMITED OBLIGATION BONDS IN THE AMOUNT OF $40 MILLION TO FUND CAPITAL PROJECTS. SO IF THERE'S QUESTIONS ON THAT, WE HAVE FINANCE FOLKS HERE THAT COULD ANSWER THAT. Item C is a very important project or a couple of contracts for the city of Asheville litter and cleanliness program. These contracts were funded originally through ARPA funding and other capital or I'm sorry, city operating funds. And have been in place for several years. We continue to extend those contracts in order to make sure that we're being able to address litter and biohazard debris collection through in the right ways and on city property. Item D is a resolution to execute a contract amendment for this year and this fiscal year that we're currently in the next fiscal year for heavy equipment repair. Equipment is very expensive and very expensive to maintain. And Council, you'll see in the staff report that we've made several adjustments to this as well. And we continue to just try to make sure that our fleet is in operational shape so we can continue to do the good work that we're out there doing every day. Item E is actually amending the schedule for the policy, finance, and infrastructure work sessions that we have every other month. We have had a couple of situations where the infrastructure recovery board, which is the primary board that feeds up information into the policy, finance, and infrastructure committee, has not aligned with the information that's being shared with the IRB happens at the beginning of one month. And then the policy finance and infrastructure committee does not meet until the end of the next month. And so it's essentially like almost two months between those meetings. And so we're making that adjustment so we can bring them into the same month and on that schedule. But after we'll adjust the August meeting forward to July, and then we'll carry on every two months after that. um presentations and reports um i'm sorry if there's any questions on any of the consent items i'm happy to answer hearing none presentations and reports is uh being uh presented the third quarter fiscal year 25 26 capital update and that will be presented by walter ear got some exciting stuff as always with with capital improvements Moving to the public hearing, we have two items. One is a public hearing for the fiscal year 2026-2027 annual operating budget. A lot of work through all parties involved has gone into the development of this budget. And so this is the public hearing in anticipation of the adoption of next year's budget. um and then uh and we'll also get a report out on that as well uh update on that um later in the meeting or i'm sorry no the fiscal report for quarter three And then public hearing for the submission of the 2026-2027 annual action plan for community development block grant and home investment partnerships program to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. This is the annual CDBG and home programs. And so council here sees this action plan and has a public hearing annually. This is a really short agenda for next Tuesday. If there's any questions, happy to answer or get staff involved. Hearing none, we can move on to the Public Safety Committee meeting. This meeting is scheduled for May 28, next Thursday at 11 AM. This agenda will include an update on animal welfare calls and enforcement actions update. This will essentially just provide an update on the activities of the animal the Animal Welfare, I'm sorry, Enforcement Division for it through DSD. And then we'll move into emergency operations and continuity of operations plan update. This is work that has been ongoing through our emergency management group, the AFD in particular, Jeremy Knighton has been responsible for leading this effort. All city departments have participated. Part of this effort was really critical in helping us have a framework for getting through Helene And after that, we've done after actions activities, which have informed how we'll move into the next emergency. And Jeremy's been working, actually providing explanations across the nation about this. being able to get him to provide an update on where we are with the development of both the emergency operations and the continuity of operations plan is going to be helpful for just awareness and then also having people understand moving into how we how we move into are prepared to move into the next the next emergency please stop me if there's any questions And then the third item on the Public Safety Committee agenda is early warning systems. This is an important thing, again, also as a response to the hurricane and the flooding associated with that. We did have damage, like physical damage, on some of the stream gauges that we have as part of our regular monitoring. But this is not only replacement of that. There's a PA, a public assistance process for that through FEMA. But we also have an application out for a hazard mitigation program funding for enhancements to the early warning system. We understand that there is a need to work through coordination with the county as this develops. And so really wanting to provide council with some awareness. This also has come up in comments that we've received from the public recently about a work that was done after a past flood. And so definitely want to be responsive to those emails and demonstrate that this is a very serious thing. and it's it's a that's a something that's in progress for us so that that's the last item on the public safety committee agenda happy to answer any questions you have any Okay. Moving on to the eight-week agenda, we've covered the 2026 meeting and no meeting on June, I'm sorry, May 26th, 2026. There's June 2nd, there's no meeting. JUNE 9TH, WE HAVE PRETTY FULL AGENDA ALREADY. AS YOU KNOW, THESE DEVELOP OVER TIME. THERE ARE SOME PROJECT WE'RE ACTUALLY SEEING A FEW PROJECT RELATED ITEMS AND RECOVERY RELATED ITEMS AND THROUGH THE CONSENT AGENDA. GO INTO A GREAT DETAIL ON THAT CONSENT AGENDA IF YOU HAVE ANYTHING ON THERE THAT YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS ABOUT, WE'RE HAPPY TO RESPOND. Public hearing on this June 2nd or June 9th agenda rather is a, that's worthy of note. It's the public hearing for the substantial amendment of the CDBGDR action plan to reallocate funds to single family rehab and reconstruction program. This has been a topic of conversation for a while now and then this just establishes the public hearing on that amendment. Unfinished business is a submission of the CBD and home annual action plan, which we just just touched on in the regular agenda for next Tuesday. No meeting on June 16th. June 23rd again. Not a huge consent agenda, but certainly, like I said, under development. The highlights in that, water revenue bonds, the support of Lenny's Law, which was initiated by council and so have that on the agenda. Contract for the comp plan and the UDO project. It's again part of the recovery work and certainly important for the future of our river corridors and throughout the city for that matter. A couple other projects related items and then unfinished business, we have the approval of this substantial amendment for the CDB GDR action plan to reallocate funds to single family rehab and reconstruction, so this is the the actual approval of that adjustment. And then, after that we go into our summer schedule, so you have June 30 and July 7 with no meetings. So if there's any questions on any of those agendas that I've walked through, happy to try to take those at this time. Yes, Council Member Gurney.

Thanks, Jade. I didn't bring this up as like an issue with our agenda per se, but I am starting to hear some general questions as folks are analyzing the budget around wage and compensation, but also benefits packages. And I submitted some questions to the budget and finance department, which have been circulated with the full council, which I appreciate. An additional question that's coming up is, it seems like internal staff are starting to ask about the impact of the 1% benefit for retirement program. 401k match right the 401k match um it does seem like there are going to be some questions we should be prepared to answer around that when we have the hearing um specifically the budget impact um if it's a permanent cut or if we anticipate bringing it back things like that are going to come up i um

Kim, I appreciate that. I reached out to HR yesterday to understand, because this was part of the cuts, the several cuts that we've looked at to balance the budget this year. According to, I guess, Tony or Lindsey, the 1% 401k match is the equivalent of $530,000 a year. And I assume that's based on who participates in it, because not every employee participates in it. Is that right, Lindsay?

Yes, that's correct. And I think I have, I'll look it up to get exactly how many people participate in that program. But I do have that data, just not at the top of mind.

Yeah, and to answer the other piece of that question, currently in the proposed budget, it's not a pause, it's elimination, which would mean that it would be eliminated this year and going forward.

But we could revisit it next year. I mean, we could revisit it. I mean, you make a budget every year, so.

That's correct. Yes, each year you all have the opportunity to make changes to the budget. Currently in our five-year forecast, we're not anticipating it, but absolutely, every year you can reconsider that benefit.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you for the questioning. Any other questions on the agenda? Yes, ma'am.

Just following up on that, you know, is there, and this is probably rhetorical at this point, but is there any indication from staff, city staff, if there's a preference around pay increases versus this 401k match benefit. In other words, if the pay increase was less and this benefit was kept in place. I'm just curious if there's any feedback that you all are hearing around making that difficult decision. Or if there's any, I guess, alternatively, I'm assuming the tax increase to cover if we were to try to restore it would be about 0.2 cents, if my math is right.

Yeah, we have not, unless HR does and I can follow up with the HR director, we haven't heard any preference on either side. But absolutely, that would be a part of the trade-off for fiscal year 2027. So I will follow up with HR and Finance to see if they have some information that I might not have readily available on that item.

Okay. No other questions. We'll move on to the other items and updates. So with that, Lindsay, I'll turn it over to you for Q3 financial report.

Thank you, Jade. All right, so we're just gonna provide a few slides to go through the third quarter financial report that is also being provided to council. And you're welcome to look at it and ask questions. I'll just go through what we're seeing on the revenue sides and the expense sides, and then quickly some highlights from enterprise funds. So next slide, please. All right, so on the revenue side, a lot of this will look familiar from the quarter two report. We are seeing at this point about 98% of our property taxes here. Collections will continue to trickle in throughout the year, but they were due in January, so we are seeing the majority of them at this point. We have seven months of sales tax data so far. As you know, that that is collected on a lag. And right now, kind of similar situation that we've been expressing for this year so far. Collections are higher than last year, since last year was Helene recovery, but they're still trending under budget. And lastly, fees and charges is actually looking pretty good. So we're expecting to end the year above budget in a lot of those fees and charges areas. And that's partially due to the fact that we were conservative on our estimates for this year, just due to being right after Helene and not exactly being sure on what the trends would look like. And we're also seeing some higher than expected solid waste fee collections. Next slide. On the expense side, again, a lot of this will look familiar. Our health care costs are continuing to rise. We did come to you in the Q2 report with some just acknowledging that some of the public safety over time was expected to end the year over budget. I will say that one kind of good piece of that is right now we're looking at still that pot ending over budget, but by less than we were when we came with the Q2 report. So it's been some progress made in kind of monitoring and reducing spending on public safety over time, which is great. And of course, we did in this past quarter institute a hiring freeze. And so that plus some normal attrition, of course, will offset some of the overtime spending and health care costs increases that we're seeing. And lastly, of course, we are continuing to monitor fuel prices as the entire country continues to face increased prices throughout the nation. Next slide. So here we have a picture of what our fund balance use will look like. So as you will remember, when we adopted the budget last year or last June, we balanced the budget by using $2.2 million of fund balance. And our fund balance at the time when we closed the prior year was 14%. What we're seeing now based on the revenues and projections for the end of the year is that we'll only need to use about 800,000 of that fund balance that we set aside. And so that'll get us to 14.6% fund balance, which is of course a good bit closer to our 15% target, which is great. Next slide, please. Just a few highlights on the enterprise funds. So we're not seeing anything of concern in any of those funds, but just a few things to note for Council. Water will achieve more revenue than we have budgeted, which is great. It's a sign that our system and collections have bounced back since Helene. Council will also remember that at the last council meeting, there was a budget amendment approved for Harrah's to add more revenue and budget authority for them since their revenues are expected to come above their adopted budget and they'll need to spend more money to go for their additional events that they're holding, excuse me. And lastly, we'll just note that some enterprise funds are showing decreased personnel spending due to vacancies in those areas. So those are kind of the main points to highlight for enterprise funds. Next slide is just discussion. Any questions? Yes, Council Member Barone.

Thanks, Lindsay. Going back to the overtime conversation, this was one of my questions that I'm getting a variety of questions around from the public since the draft budget, but also since folks are keeping an eye on our overtime costs. It still isn't clear where it pulls from other than if it's just, we always pull from the general fund. What I see in the staff response to the question was, as noted in the fiscal year financial report, which you're giving now, personnel expenditures are tracking with the budget based on the city's payroll cycles. Some individual departments will likely have overtime expenses that exceed budgets by year end, but those over expenditures will be offset by vacancy savings elsewhere in the budget. This is a common occurrence, it says. Overtime can be a variable budget item to estimate, particularly in public safety departments such as police and fire. Accordingly, the unpredictability of overtime has increased in the last five years. To budget overtime, we look at year-over-year trends and use that to project what we expect departments will spend in the upcoming year. It does seem like we're then having to budget a lot of overtime. And it's kind of unclear since we're just trending up year over year how we realistically do that for next year. And if it's just in vacancies, but we're trimming the vacancies, where else can it come from if not the general fund?

Well, in my view, if we don't wanna spend money on overtimes, then we can give our public safety the money so they can actually hire the folks that they need so that we don't have to have overtime. Is that what you're suggesting?

I can imagine that that is connected. And I think that's part of what our budget gets at. What I'm more curious about is because we have been trending towards affording overtime through vacancies, but we're cutting, this budget cuts vacancies. What position does that put us in?

Council Member Turner, did you want to add before I take a stab at answering that?

No, go ahead.

Okay. Yeah, so this is the budget process that we go through every year. We do take a look at how much overtime has been spent in the past, how much we anticipate spending will be in this year that we're currently in and kind of budget based on that. But that's not, I would say, it's not like we see overtime increasing and we just automatically raise the budget to match that. We think critically about it. If there's minor adjustments that need to be made here and there to match spend, we do that. But if we're seeing increases that are beyond budget in a significant way, we wouldn't just necessarily budget for what we're seeing in the trend. go back to departments and work with them to make sure that they can use the overtime budget that they have and continue normal operations. And sometimes that does mean more hiring, which we are accounting for on the police side, as council member has mentioned. So it really is a balance. And at this point in for FY27, we're not anticipating, needing to adjust over time and public safety beyond what we have in the budget right now.

Question, Kim? Because I guess what I heard was something similar. Like when I'm making budgets, I'm just thinking my overall personal budget is, and if I have OT, it's in there. If I have vacancy, it's in there. So they're kind of, it's like a washing of itself throughout the year as one depletes, but it's still just an overall personnel number. But I think what Kim is really getting at is something I'm also concerned about, which is how are we going to do this long term looking at the increase in OT? How are we reining it in? And so I know I met with DK a little bit about this just to express that concern and learn there are some moves being made or some analysis being done for next year. It's not really anything we can do this year, but it is worth pointing out, you know, I have a I also share the concern that overtime is growing. And I also share that there's a concern in how it's being used. Like I'm worried that we have staff working 80 hours every week, 52 hours, 52 weeks a year. Like that's not sustainable. it's extremely high amount of overtime. So I'll be looking at policy ways like, is the cap on overtime too high? Do we need to look back at the 86 versus 80 hours like it was before COVID and Helene? Do we need to look at how tenured employees are receiving it while newer employees are not able to get the overtime shifts? I don't really know, but I feel like what Kim and maybe I'm saying is like, let's look at this on a policy basis because I'm worried about that budget growing every year too.

Absolutely. As are we, and I don't want to speak operationally for Chief Stepp or anyone else, but I'll just say we're also monitoring it and starting to have those conversations because we also do not want overtime budgets to have to grow in the coming years.

I'm also thinking about departments where we have temporary employees that are essentially doing full-time work. Can you confirm for me whether or not temp employees are eligible for overtime and when that kicks in?

I don't believe so. Tony, are you on the call and have a better handle on temp seasonal than me?

Yeah. Hey, everyone. Tony McDowell, finance director. I don't know if Emily's on or not. I was going to suggest that Emily, if she is on, answer that question.

She is on.

putting her on the spot sorry emily it's possible it's a follow-up question i'm thinking of some examples around like sanitation workers and harris civic center employees sure emily probance hr director we are actually in the process of evaluating our temp seasonal status to identify um what we need to do to correct Councilwoman Roney if we do have anyone in a temp seasonal position who is working beyond what that status allows. I do not believe that they're eligible for overtime because they should be capped to a certain number of hours annually and weekly. And so if that is happening, that would be outside of policy and we would have to address it. But we are currently looking at how we can reclassify some of our temp seasonal workers as part-time employees to better reflect what's actually happening within their work weeks.

I'd love some more follow-up information on that, especially because if we end up losing, let's say, sanitation workers and then the temps can't pick it up, then are we going to not be able to take out the trash? So yeah, that would be helpful follow-up information.

Certainly.

We're temp seasonal. Can we get overtime? Just kidding.

Okay. Any more questions for Lindsay or Tony on the third quarter financial report? We have noted those follow-ups. Thank you for your questions.

I guess one question, DK. If sales tax comes in higher, if fees come in higher, we're not contemplating making any adjustments after what we've already voted on? I mean... We're kind of betting on last year to figure out this coming budget. We thought sales tax would break even 98%. Are we considering any future adjustments to revenues or anything, or are we just going to keep moving forward with our more conservative path?

Are you asking specifically in reference to the proposed budget, or are you talking about post-adoption? Proposed budget. proposed budget?

Yeah, so that was one of the exercises that we went through as we were putting together the third quarter report was looking at the numbers that we were seeing and seeing, okay, how does that compare to what we have budgeted for FY27? Are there any adjustments we can make to account for more revenue here or there. What we saw was that we were already taking into account those trends that we were seeing. We weren't seeing anything drastically different than we were already expecting for 27. So we didn't end up making any changes based on the Q3 report, but that's a good question. And just to note that we do look at that at this time.

Okay. Thank you, Lindsay.

Well, and the other thing I noticed is we're not going to be quite at 15% in reserves. And I'm assuming you guys are kind of doing all the math here and hoping that that comes out a little bit better and maybe we actually vault over that 15% this year if we keep this trend up. Yeah. Anyway, I wouldn't feel comfortable scaling it back, knowing that we're not even quite going to hit that 15% reserve number.

Yeah, good point. All of those things count into the equation. So if nothing else, we'll let Lindsey and Tony fall off, maybe not fall all the way off, but fall off. And then Ashley is going to come provide an update to you all around the AHRQ Comprehensive Operations Analysis and the Draft Network. And I think she'll also be joined by the consultant from Jared Walker and Associates.

Ashley. Thank you. Good morning. Ashley Hare, Transportation Director. Thanks for the slides, Talia. I'm going to hand it off to our consultant, Ricky Inguera, here in a moment. But the first couple of slides here are just a recap of what we've done and where we are currently. So if you could go to the next slide. So the comprehensive operational analysis that we've been doing for our transit system started last spring in phase one The consultant did some analysis on our current system, the patterns we have, and we also went out to the community to ask how they use our transit system currently. Phase two happened last summer. This was where there were those theoretical concepts developed for ridership and coverage, and we again went out to the community to ask their preference. We took that feedback. We took the council direction that we received in November and we are now in phase three where the consultant has been working with the community with our stakeholders and with staff to develop a draft network plan. And so we will be going out again to the community starting this evening. Actually, we have the next month and change of engagement planned out to ask the community do we have this network right? So if you could go to the next slide. So the goal of this phase of engagement is to sort of close the loop on what we have heard so far, show the community how their feedback was incorporated, how city council direction was incorporated into the draft network. And again, this draft network is using the resources that we have currently. It's functionally a cost neutral revisioning of our network for efficiencies. So again, starting this evening, we will be going out to the community and working with engagement through the end of June. We have a new survey that we'll be putting out an external stakeholder workshop. We'll be tabling over at the Transit Center seven separate times, and we have 12 neighborhood meetings planned for the next six weeks or so. We'll be coming back to Council at the end of July to talk about how that engagement went, what we heard, and summarize that feedback. Towards the end of August, we'll be coming back with the final report to council on the project. And if it's decided to move forward at the earliest, this would be implemented in fiscal year 28. So July of next year or later. There's a number of logistical things we would have to do to get it in place. Moving bus stops, developing new maps, the communications around all of that, that sort of thing.

so with that i'm going to hand it off to ricky and um we'll go from there so ricky great thank you uh next slide please uh thank you for having me here today thank you for inviting me to talk to you and introduce you to this new draft network um as you may remember in the previous phase of this project like ashley was saying we had designed two conceptual alternatives to show what the future network in nashville could be We designed one network that we call the ridership concept that lean heavily towards achieving high ridership, which means less routes that are more frequent on the strongest quarters in your city. And we designed a coverage concept that kept all of the coverage that you have today, but look for additional ways to improve the network. We took those. We went to the public. We heard back from the public on the preference between these two. We brought that over to you. Next page. And when we presented those to you, we heard from you all that collectively city council wanted to design a draft network that had a shift towards ridership. I think nudge towards ridership was the exact words that you all said. And so we took that direction. And so we took the current network, which is pretty much split between Writership and Coverage 50-50 in terms of how resources are allocated, and we designed this new draft network I'm going to talk about today that shifts a little bit in that direction towards Writership, using 40% of resources towards Coverage and 60% towards Writership. And the other thing that you all told us is to make sure that we keep coverage in the areas that have many low income persons, and so we have done that in the way that we designed this draft network where we removed coverage are places where there are less relative people. Less concentration of low income people. To follow the direction we heard from you. Next. So this is the existing network, and I like to start with this to remind you all of what the colors are. Remember that the colors on our maps signify the frequency of service. So routes that are orange on the maps are routes that come every 15 minutes, routes that are dark blue are services that come every 30 minutes, and light blue about every 60 minutes, every 40 to 60 minutes. Overall in your system today, routes radio from downtown. You have a few quarters that have 30 minutes service. But overall, you have 60 minutes service in most places. Next. This is the new Draft network. If a person using the slides can flip back and forth a few times, I think that's helpful to sort of see the changes. So this is Draft, back to existing, then Draft. And so what you can see at an initial glance is that there are fewer total routes, but there's some of these orange segments which come every 15 minutes. And that's what that shift towards ridership is. It means slightly less coverage to provide higher frequency in the strongest places. And that's what we've done here. Now there's a couple of key features and changes that I want to talk about. So let's go through those now. Next. The first is that in many places, the routes are slightly different. There might be straighter or the loops might be a little different. And a lot of that is we have done to improve runtimes and on-time performance. Today, the system is about 66% on time. And I know that you all have a goal of increasing that up to 80% on time. And so some of the slight routing changes we've done in a few places have been to improve running time overall and get that on-time performance up higher.

Next.

We have removed coverage from these places. Now remember, we removed coverage in these places because they have lower ridership relative to other places, and because they are not places that have high concentrations of low-income people. We make sure to keep coverage in those places. So we removed service from Beaver Dam, from Growth Park Inn, the social security office since a lot of those things are done online today from kennelworth from mayhack because it is in a place that is very hard to survive transit uh from the outlets which is not very low ridership but it's technically the next lowest ridership place and then from this segment on outer haywood between brevard and patent uh mostly because we realign services to go on patent because pan is faster and we can improve on time performance i see a few questions so i'd be happy to take those

I'm a little surprised about Kenilworth. There are several homes there that utilize vouchers for their tenants right on Kenilworth Road. Where's the closest bus stop to Kenilworth Road, Biltmore and Tunnel?

That would be around, there is, depending on where in Kenilworth you are, there would be some in Biltmore and Tunnel. Yeah, Billmore and Tunnel, depending on where you are, exactly.

I share that concern because right now the S2 comes in from the Tunnel Road side. And then within the second or third stop into the neighborhood, that's where those two pockets of voucher holding or voucher accepting housing are. And that is the stretch of Kenilworth Road that does not have access to a sidewalk.

Okay. I hear you and I share those concerns as well. What we have done in this draft network is look at relative one place to the other, given the direction to shift a little towards ridership and remove coverage in the places where less low income residents live. There are low income residents everywhere. That's just the truth of any city. People are spread out everywhere. So there's low income residents everywhere. There's minority residents everywhere. In these places are the places that collectively in a design retreat that we did with staff, these are the places that have the least relative to other places. Now, I wish that we could increase frequency without removing any coverage. Given the current budget, if we do want to shift a little towards ridership, it does mean removing service from these places. Ashley.

Ricky, if I could jump in for a moment. Chris Whitlock, our transit division manager, is also on this call, I believe, and he may be able to speak some to the ridership patterns that we have on Kenilworth and in that area. Chris, are you here?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, the Kenilworth area, S2 is one of the lowest ridership routes, but... but yeah, we do understand that there may be some transit dependent, uh, community members in those areas. Um, so we, yeah, we did it. We are looking at trade offs in this draft network. Um, but I mean, this is sort of why we're bringing it to you all today and, and to the public to kind of get everyone's feedback on, um, if we're missing anything, if we need to reallocate some of those resources to some of these areas that you're mentioning.

Yes, that's a great point. And that is why we have the engagement coming up over the next five weeks to get this sort of feedback from folks.

Councilwoman Rooney? Antoinette, you go ahead first, because I don't know if you had your first question answered.

I did. I didn't like the answer, but I got it answered. The next question I have is about Grove Park Inn. I used to work there many moons ago, and a lot of workers were dependent on bus service to get to Grove Park. Is that a really low rider ship route as well?

This is another area where over the next year if it's decided to move forward with this network plan that we will be working with the like Grove Park and, for instance, to see if they have resources to run shuttles if they feel that's necessary for their staff. I can't speak to the ridership. I don't have those numbers at my fingers. Maybe Chris or Ricky do. But that is something that in these areas where service has been removed, if the final network includes that change as well, that we will be working with those businesses to see what options may be available.

If I could just add, I think it would be helpful if we can provide some ridership information on the routes that where this draft network is proposing to remove. So we'll provide that information for the two noted here, but also the others.

DK just preemptively answered my question.

I do still have some questions. pair assignments with elders and homebound neighbors in Kenilworth on the weekends. And I'm just kind of curious how we started with which routes we weren't going to remove. And then seeing that one on the list, that connection seemed off. There are a lot of aging adults that are aging in place. Harvest House is a very busy full parking lot right now with people who can drive, but that can change. So I still have questions about that. Also, a lot of the assignments that I have are connecting people to the Social Security office because they have limited internet access. So it did make me wonder if we're making the right move there. When we're looking at the North Asheville route, when I have some experience working in the service industry, My understanding was that Grove Park was one of our partners that pays into the program where they're essentially paying for the bus passes for their staff. So they are one of our partners who has historically contributed to our transit system. So it seems a little strange to me that we would name them here when, for the most part, we were talking about neighborhood coverage and frequency. It seems like what we really are talking about is removing coverage along Charlotte Street corridor. And because we're talking about removing corridor coverage on Charlotte Street, we have also approved two pretty big housing developments on that same corridor because of its proximity to transit. having that connection would help is like, because we're looking at removing Charlotte Street coverage, what does that mean for the development that we've approved, but also as North Asheville keeps losing transit service over the years. That connection to our missing middle housing study is important to me. North Asheville was seen in the study as being less ready for missing middle housing development because it has less transit coverage. And I don't think we wanna like horse and cart this where we keep removing transit from an area means it's less, ready for duplexes, triplexes, cottage clusters. I don't think that's the land use direction that we agreed to in that study. So I guess the connection I'm asking is one, can we change it to Charlotte Street Corridor versus Grove Park? And then the other one is, I don't understand why Kenilworth and Social Security would be on the chopping block when we said we were gonna consider low-income residents.

I'll say for Charlotte specifically, there is still service on inner Charlotte, just the closer part. You can see it there on this route 18. So it is the outer part that's losing it. So we could change it to outer Charlotte, for example. And pretty much same answer for social security and kind of worth. This is just thinking, if we were to shift towards ridership, what are sort of the places that have the least low-income people? That was really the thinking behind this. In the perfect world, you increase ridership by having additional budget. And if you have additional budget, additional resources, you increase ridership without removing any coverage. This draft network is showing what it would be to do that shift. But yeah, any of these cuts would be very difficult to do. And I'm not minimizing that.

Council Member Turner, I think her hand is up.

I guess just a couple of questions. So as part of this study, are we getting any kind of like next recommendations? Like in the next few years, if we try to allocate money towards transit, does this give us next steps? Like, would we be building back to what we had? Or, you know, I just, I don't know where it goes from here without another study. So if there's anybody, anybody that can speak to that. And then also if there's any outcomes predicted, like if we did this, ridership would hopefully go to X. Do we have any of that kind of data? Yeah.

I do have outcomes that I have in the rest of my presentation. I can show you what those look like. In terms of growth or additional budget, yes, there is a part of this project that could tell you what you could do with additional budget.

Oh, okay. I guess I looked through it and didn't see it. I will look again. Thank you.

Okay. That information will be in the final report. It's not included in these slides, so. Right, exactly.

It does seem like you've got maybe 25 slides. So we're only, you know, maybe we should, well, you tell us, but should we let you keep presenting?

I think it'll be best to go through the whole picture. But if Councilman Hess has something now, I'm happy to take questions.

I'll wait. Councilmember Hess, you want to ask your question before we move on?

I'll wait. Okay.

Thank you.

All right. Next slide. So removing that coverage service from all those places, what it does is give us resources that we can reinvest in frequency in the strongest quarters in the city. And so the draft network has increased frequency that runs every 15 minutes on this inner part of Route 2 that goes from Hillcrest through downtown to the River Arts District. It has 15 minutes service going south of downtown through Biltmore and McDowell to the edge of Biltmore Village. It has 30 minutes service going west along Patton and 30 minutes service going south of Biltmore Village along Hendersonville, which actually ends up being 60 minutes service down to Biltmore Park So those are the increase in frequency in the city that we get from removing that coverage. And that is in these places because it is the places where we can do it within those resources and the network design, but also because these are some of the strongest quarters that you have in city. Next. And the other new component, key feature of the Draft Network is time transfers at ArtStation. Today, we've talked about this before, today your routes arrive at ArtStation and they depart at different times throughout the hour. But with this new network and with the way that we have done run times, we can make sure that they all arrive at ArtStation at a similar time and they leave at the same time. So that if someone's transferring to a 60-minute route, they don't have to wait anywhere between zero and 60 minutes they will just have to wait five to ten minutes and so that'll make transfers much easier and it'll make people be able to use more routes and reach more of the city next so that was the draft network let me show you how this compares to the existing network a simple measure that we can use is just looking at how many people are near transit next This is a bar chart of the existing network and how many people are near transit in the existing network. The colors here are color coded the same as the routes and based on how many people are close to service of that frequency. So dark blue here showing that in the existing network, 28% of residents are close to 30 minutes service. In light blue, an additional 31%. And you can see that about 61% of the total population is near transit. Next. In the draft network, this looks like this. The orange bar is showing that 8% of residents in the city are going to be close to 15-minute service. But overall, the total width of that bar is slightly smaller because there are 3% less total residents close to any transit service. And that's that shift towards ridership. A little less people close to any service, but more people close to frequent 15-minute service. And even the 30-minute service is increased here. Next. That was all residents, but we did this for jobs and for different demographic groups. So looking at jobs, you can see a 31% of all jobs would be near 15 minute service. There's a decrease of about 4% total jobs near any transit and low income residents and people of color also seeing about 10 to 11% people near of those groups within 15 minutes service and two to 3% decrease in people close to any service. And this is important because frequency really matters for people's ability to get two jobs. Even low income people might have two jobs and a family, so they don't have a lot of time in the day. And it's important that they can actually reach jobs within a reasonable amount of time within their limited time. So frequency is often very valued by low-income residents because it means that they can actually have specific jobs and they can actually get to them within a reasonable time. Next. That was looking at how many people are close to transit. Look at the next slide, please. But another important measure looking at transit is how many jobs and opportunities people can reach within a reasonable amount of time. Next. I've talked about this before, but to explain it, imagine that there is a person. Her name is Jane, and Jane lives in a city full of many destinations. Next. These are places where she can shop, places she can study, people she can meet, places she can worship, breweries she can go to, all kinds of things that she can do in Asheville and the city that she lives. Next. Looking at the transit network, we draw a bubble that shows where Jane can get to in a given amount of time. So this bubble is showing where Jane can get to in 45 minutes using transit and walking. And this includes walking to transit, waiting for the bus, and actually riding the bus. Next. If we overlay this bubble on top of the city, then we can see and count all of the opportunities that Jane can actually reach in those 45 minutes. So if we count the number of jobs in here, we can calculate Jane's access to jobs, which we use jobs because that's the data available, but it's a really good proxy for all kinds of opportunities, schools, shopping, medical services, all kinds of things, because places that have a lot of jobs also have a lot of activity, and jobs is the data that we have available. So this, in a very real sense, is calculating James's freedom to do things in her city. It's calculating James's ability to get to places in a reasonable amount of time. Her access to jobs is determining her access to opportunity and just how free she is to make decisions in her city. So we have done this analysis, and we have created bubbles like this throughout the entire city with the existing network and with the draft network. And to show the difference between those, we came up with this map on the next slide. Here, places that are green are places where there is an increase in access to jobs. Places that are brown are places where there is a decrease. And a lot of this relates to the changes that I was talking about before. But the most important thing, next, is that we can, Average this out throughout the entire city. There are gains and there are losses, but if we calculate this for the average resident, we can see that with the new draft network, the average person can reach 10% more jobs. Question, Council Member Ronnie.

Can you go back to before that covered it up?

Mm-hmm.

One of the things that's coming up for me is the Haywood Road business corridors have a lot of jobs and housing on them. So in a way, by gutting the Haywood Road ridership slash frequency, we're stepping back from an area where we had the kind of ridership and frequency we wanted. there's a whole section of Haywood Road that will lose and have zero transit frequency or ridership where it previously had at least every 30 minutes. So that really was surprising to me. I know there are some folks who are really concerned about losing the entire leg of the Brevard Road to the outlet. And because that's meant to be how we would expand and having an Inca Candler service, which is in fiscal year four of our previous transit master plan. But I think just immediately, it seems surprising to me, how did that choice work out where if the goal was to lean towards ridership slash frequency, we stepped that far away?

Yes, fantastic question. That Haywood corridor is one of the places that I am the most frustrated with this network, and it's a place where I wish I could provide more service. There are two things that just particularly here in Asheville make this very, very difficult. So I just want to explain that so that we're all on the same page. One is that within the budget of what you have, the agency's already stretched really thin. Art is doing a fantastic job already trying to do as much as they can. And so if we do want to shift towards ridership, it's really hard to choose the places where we would remote service. And your land use makes it really difficult. The way that your city has been developed over the last few decades is that you have many developments, many low-income developments in places that are very difficult to serve by transit. And because we don't want to remove coverage from places that have low-income residents, we can remove a lot of those routes that are just really, really far out. And those routes are really providing coverage that is not very frequent and not very useful to a lot of people. But because there's a lot of low-income residents that live in those places, then we didn't remove any of that here. And so in removing some of that service that goes through that outer Haywood part and some of that duplication that was on there that was preventing the slightly better service. And there's a lot of brown here. Yeah, that looks worse for Haywood. And I wish we couldn't we didn't have to do that. But to keep service in all of the other places where there are low income residents, Emma, Deaverview, Flondike, Spruce Hill Apartments, to keep service in all those places, this is kind of what's left. And this is kind of the only thing that you can do so it's just really really hard because the land use that you have i i wouldn't want to do this anywhere uh because it's really haywood really is a strong quarter but there aren't a lot of options left after you want to keep all those places

Well, I just want to make sure that this was clear to anyone who's watching this meeting and may not know what we're talking about. You mentioned like a part of the Haywood corridor. What I'm seeing now is between Brevard Road and Haywood where it meets Patton, Haywood wouldn't have any service. Yes, exactly. So it was going from every 30 minutes to zero.

Exactly. So if you're right in the middle of that, then yes, you would be really far from transit service. If you're close to the edges of it, then yeah, you can walk to transit and it's reasonable. But if you're in the middle, yes, that's right. There's no service there. And part of that was also to improve the on-time performance. The service that was going through there before was very slow and not on time very often. And so we moved that service over to back end to improve the on-time performance. Again, something I wouldn't love to do. It's just there aren't a lot of options.

Councilman Paterna has a question. I just want to say real quick, Ricky, I really appreciate this part of the analysis and the fact that we have you doing this because we would really fail at this without expertise behind it. It would be a really much harder conversation for us to figure out where to do and what not to do. I guess I really just wanted to pause and reflect and hold us accountable to something you said, which is our development practices have pushed development to these distant places that make it harder to get to, more expensive to get transit to. And I feel like as we approach our UDO overhaul and as we look at projects and rescue dollars and so on, I just want us to keep that in mind, missing middle development practices.

Thank you. Yes, and I will add to that that you should really, really, really focus all of your future development, especially low-income development, along your main quarters. That's Billmore, Batten, Merrimon, Tunnel Road. Things that are outside of that are not supporting transit, and they're not supporting low-income residents either because you put them in a place that might be easy and cheap to build, but then expensive to live there because people can't rely on transit. So I will encourage you very strongly to think about land use very strongly when you're thinking about future development plans and really focusing on those strong quarters.

Can you repeat what part of Charlotte Street will continue to have service and what part won't, please?

Yes, the inner part of Charlotte will continue to have service.

I don't know what that means.

It means from downtown up to about Hillside Street, Edwin Place, that area.

Okay.

Further north, there's no service here.

All right.

You can keep going, Ricky.

Next. Next again. And you can actually hit one more. It's just highlighting. So the bar charts here is showing the Average access in gray for the existing network, in green for the draft network. The first section is all residents, and that's the 10% increase that I was mentioning. But I wanted to highlight that we did this analysis for different subgroups. We did it for low-income residents, households without cards, and residents of color. And specifically for low-income residents and residents of color, the increase is higher than all residents. It's 15%, 16% on average for residents of those groups. Yes, there are gains and there are losses. On average for residents in those groups, they can reach 15%. 15% more jobs in those 45 minutes. So just wanted to highlight that. And the last thing I want to say is that This is really, really, really hard. And within your current level of resources, with this slight shift towards ridership, in trying to do the best that you can within your resources to increase ridership without removing a lot of coverage, because we removed some coverage here, but it's not a lot. I mean, it was 3% of the population, 4% of jobs or so. But that's kind of the best that you can do without removing a lot of coverage within your current level of resources. And there is no magic solution. There's no magic bullet on how to increase frequency and make the network a whole lot better without investing more money in transit. So I just want to close and say that while we're trying to make the network as easy as I can, I won't say at any point that you have the right level of resources to meet all of your needs in both ridership or coverage. I think you could really do much better if you had more service and there's fantastic more things that we could do. These are just really difficult decisions because of what the transit budget is. Happy to take any additional questions.

Thank you, Ricky. Go ahead, Shanika.

There was a gentleman that came to a city council meeting a couple meetings ago concerning this topic. And he mentioned something in public comment that I had never heard before. He said that removing routes would also automatically remove paratransit services. And I just wanted to verify that that's true.

The paratransit federal requirement is to provide service within three quarters of a mile of any fixed route. That is the federal requirement that requires transit agencies to provide service in those places. So removing the route from a specific place would remove the federal requirement Now, whether that is the case moving forward also depends upon you all and whether you would decide to continue providing service in those places. I've worked in different communities that have reduced coverage and that decided to just also reduce the paratransit further legal requirement. I've worked in some places that have decided to grandfather in people that have been using the service before. And I've worked in other places where they decided to keep all of the service no matter what, and actually go far beyond what they're federally required. So, yes, removing routes will reduce your federal requirement, but it's up to you what you end up changing.

Thank you. And that happens at a county level, right? The paratransit contract. Yeah, so we are paying into the county's paratransit service performance contract or whatever it is. I guess my question is more for our staff and whoever's, I guess it's both of you that are gonna be executing this next year of research. how are we identifying and which kind of groups of people are we targeting? I saw the list, the 12 neighborhood meetings and so on, but there are groups like, I think we went to Better Buses last time. Are we going to go to like Asheville for All or Target? Any groups that are like, I guess what I'm getting at is how are we going to find more people that are interested in riding the bus, but Don't, because last time we got a lot of people, majority were just existing riders. And part of this goal is to attract new riderships. How are we finding those people targeting?

You mean if the draft network is implemented or do you mean for engagement?

The feedback for engagement for the next year. I just felt like we didn't get a lot of data points for people that would be riders while trying to study how do we grow ridership. So I'm really wanting to see if we can get some information from would-be riders. And I don't know how that's best executed, but we do have... you know, groups that work on that in line with housing, in line with, you know, smart growth and so on. I just wonder if we can implement some of their groups somehow.

Sure. We've been working really closely with CAPE on crafting the engagement plan for this next five or six weeks. Chris can probably speak to that more, but we are going out to, I think we have 12 different neighborhood meetings that are being facilitated by staff and members of those neighborhoods, if you understand.

So that gets though that are like really hyperactive activism around better transportation, better housing alignment. So I'm just wondering, and maybe what the quest is, can we see that engagement plan when it's ready?

Yes, absolutely. And we do, we have our stakeholder group who has been working with us on this process since day one. And a lot of those groups are represented within that stakeholder group. And so they are part of the, I believe the meeting this evening is with them. But we are working closely with them to help get the word out on this and spread that engagement message.

Okay.

But yes, we can get you the engagement plan for sure.

That would be helpful. Thank you. And just in case we have recommendations of another group to reach out to. Lastly, you know, when we do like the pit counts, we started adding questions instead of the regular questions. And I'm curious if some of that we learned a lot. Could that be happening here? Like if we meet people in community during this engagement process that say, oh, my God, you are going to completely change. throw dysfunction at my life if you remove this bus stop here and you're in my neighborhood because I need it every day. Can we find out if they're willing to share more information about those folks, if they're homeowners, if they're renters, if it's a problem of our development, if having affordable housing somewhere else would help them? That's kind of what I'm getting at. I don't know if there's some, you know, proper questions, but more information about who is going to be impacted so greatly would really help us plan.

I believe we are asking those sort of demographic questions as part of this next round of engagement, but we may have an opportunity to tailor those a little bit more to the kind of things you're getting at.

Okay, council, thank you for this feedback. This is an amazing opportunity for us to get this in front of you before going to the public. We understand that there are some very challenging things ahead of us. Using this public engagement piece to really understand the impacts on the community is gonna be critical to be able to commit to the future of transit in Asheville. And so we'll bring us back with that update in the future. um and also i think one important thing was that yeah lots of important things here but one thing that really stood out to me was the connection with with future transit planning and the udo i know in our in our previous cop plan we had transit related uh transit um and and corridor business development corridors connected so being able to like continue that conversation and that thought process is super critical for us to move forward so thank you for that feedback With that concluded, we can move on to the council's closed session. And that is, council member Hess, I think you have the motion to go into closed session. Or I'm sorry, if there's any other comments or thoughts or anything that we need to address before that. Hearing none. Council Member Yes.

Okay.

Let me pull up the motion. I move that the Asheville City Council go in to close session for the following reasons. One, to prevent disclosure of information that is privileged and confidential pursuant to the laws of North Carolina. or not considered a public record within the meaning of Chapter 132 of the General Statutes. The statutory authorization is contained in North Carolina General Statute Chapters 143-318.11 and the law that makes the information privileged and confidential is North Carolina General Statute Chapters 143-318.10 and to consider the qualifications, competence, performance, character, fitness, conditions of employment, or conditions of initial employment of an individual public officer or employee or prospective public officer or employee. The statutory authorization is contained in North Carolina General Statute, Chapters 143-318.11, Subsections A-6. Second, Sage.

Okay, we have a motion and a second. So we need to do a roll call vote. I'm going to do a roll call vote now. Vice Mayor? Aye. Councilwoman Sage-Turner?

Aye.

Councilwoman Roney? Aye. Councilwoman Smith? Aye. And Councilman Hess?

Aye.

All right. We're going to go into closed session. And I think the only staff person joining us in closed session is Emily Proatz.

It's a different link though, right?

Yeah, different link. Yeah, you got to log out of this one. All right. See you all in the closed session. Thank you all.