City Council - workshop

for staff and for the CACT. Kind of difficult for everybody involved. And so we have a proposal to have the CACT play a role in sort of vetting some of these projects with staff, focusing on two citizen-initiated projects and having the city staff focus on executing our capital improvements program, which is extensive, and that's one of the great levers we have for transformation and through our operating budget and responding to safety needs based on data and experience. So that's the summary of what we'll do. And Amanda, I'll turn it over to you.

Sure. Thanks, everyone. Amanda Brain, DPW director. In addition to the city manager's office, we have Jenna Brummond here, who's our transportation planner. Also, Tara Hoff, who's our deputy director in DPW on the engineering side, is joining online. So I will get into the slides. Is Tara controlling these? Yes. Okay, great. You can go to the next one, please. This one, as Wyatt alluded to in the council's strategic priorities, transportation being a key one, safety strategy specifically calls out Again, stemming from the council retreat, using crash and other data to drive street safety project priorities and solutions that provide the best results while making efficient use of staff resources. Refine the neighborhood traffic calming program so it delivers a limited number of resident-driven solutions per year with a shorter, faster process. So that's what we've kind of taken as our guide. Next slide, please. So in terms of NTC, what we hear is there is always room for a bottom-up, community-driven, petition-based program. Cities all across the country have them. That is really important. We are going to keep that. There will still be that program. But what we're proposing to do is to reduce the number of NTC cases that are worked on in a given year. to allow for more capacity for the data-driven projects, to expand the role of the CACT in evaluating and prioritizing the cases, kind of refocusing residents on identifying problems, and then staff propose the solutions, and then overall a shorter, faster process. So keep NTC, but kind of reframe it. And the next slide, please, as part of this larger safe streets approach, which is something we've talked about broadly, and we'll come back to council again in the fall, I think, to talk more about Vision Zero and complete streets and all the things. Tonight, we're really a little more narrowly focused on NTC and how that fits in. So the proposal is, moving forward, to do two neighborhood traffic calming cases per year, which would be like Hillwood, East Columbia Street, you know, all of these petitions that come in through Jena and go in through the whole process. We'll get to that on the next slide. And also one before and after analysis that we've talked about. We're doing the one now on Gundry and Annandale, and there was a lot of value in re-looking at some of our work, if we spent all of our time re-looking at other projects, but doing some of that analysis. And then as this pie chart shows, allowing more capacity and staff for post-incident projects like Grove and the WOD Trail. We've been spending a lot of time on that lately because there have been a lot of crashes there. That's why we're spending time on it. As well as other proactive data-driven safety projects. So we keep talking about this, all of us. We need to have more staff capacity to do these projects. whether it's looking at crash and near-miss data from smart cities, doing these quick-build projects before CIP projects, Broad Street, Washington Street, more capacity on the pie chart for that type of work. And then as a note on the side, we also have transportation safety is achieved through our transportation CIP projects as well. All right, next slide. And this is kind of the heart of the proposal, I guess, this flow chart, because since the council retreat back in January, this was this idea that NTC is on pause, right? And so Jenna and the CACT are like, well, it's on pause. And we're like, what does that mean, right? So we have paused analysis of new requests. Jenna's just sort of holding on to new petitions as they come in in a bucket. We are still working on NTC, however, right? We completed the construction of Greenway Downs, which we're planning a little celebration for. We are currently completing the design and soon the construction of East Columbia, which achieved consensus from the working group, for Hillwood Avenue, which achieved consensus. So those are moving forward. Gundry and Annandale, before and after analysis. So these are other NTC projects that are kind of cranking through the system, but we've paused new requests. This proposal would be... Then in September, October, we can reopen that application period and staff would do a preliminary review of all of these applications that have come in, get a sense of what they are, you know, everything. And then say at the November meeting, bring that to the CACT to discuss those petitions and using CACT to help vote on which two cases to move forward. So having CACT play this role in helping us vet which two projects from this bucket should move forward, and then they would move forward following that the next few months to staff to review data, collect data, develop, you know, the issue is speeding, and so we collect some speed data, so we suggest some speed homes, so maybe we need that. Like, what are the solutions that meet, that we as planners and engineers recommend for this location, and then bringing that back again to the CACT and using that to invite residents and discussion in CACT about the proposed solutions light and heavy and all the things and then in April to June completing design and constructing them so I think this kind of gets at things taking a long time. If we can do fewer and focus it a bit tighter and then advance them to construction and get some of the stuff moving faster. So we'll probably come, ideally, this is kind of the most time on this later. This is sort of the heart of what we're proposing for NTC. But if you can go to the next slide, I'll kind of share at high level this kind of Safe Streets project list, which is what we've been kind of working through as staff and plan to post on the website. And we'll go through these in just a minute. But this portfolio of projects. There's some that are complete in construction, in the planning and engagement and concept design phase, and then in the queue, which is all the projects that keep coming in that our staff is not working on right now. We'll get to that in a moment. Another reminder that this same staff, and so again, Tara Hoff is online, who manages this team more directly, this same staff who are doing a lot of this work on the DPW side, as well as, of course, there are planners and there are DPW operations, but are the same ones who are advancing annual paving. and MassDARMS, and ADA Transition Plan, and Smart Cities Initiative, and all of these other transportation priorities. So we'll do the next slides, and maybe a little quickly with the next one, please. So this is a list, and I know this is maybe small, I don't have to go through all of them, but these are some projects that have been completed over the past fiscal year, and we'll start a new list for next year. Some of them are NTC, some of them are just sort of similar scale of projects, you know, South Roosevelt Bike Lane, Southwest Street Speed Cushions, Great Falls in Virginia, where we... did a modified curb extension, those sorts of things. And we're trying to do a better job, as we've often talked about, of kind of celebrating some of these things. We want to make sure we're putting it on the website, letting council know about these items so that we can better celebrate and communicate them. THIS LIST IS WHAT IS IN CONSTRUCTION OR IN THE PROCESS OF BEING SCHEDULED. SO FOR EXAMPLE, THE HILLWOOD AVENUE AND THE EAST COLUMBIA STREET NTC PROJECTS REACHED CONSENSUS, DESIGN'S DONE, AND WE'RE JUST IN THE PROCESS OF FIRMING UP WHETHER OUR CONTRACTOR CAN DO IT, YOU KNOW, THE THIRD WEEK OF AUGUST OR THE SECOND WEEK OF SEPTEMBER, YOU KNOW, TRYING TO GET THOSE JUST KIND OF SCHEDULED. AND THEN WE HAVE A FEW OTHERS OF THESE THAT WE'RE IN THE PROCESS OF GETTING ON THE GROUND, WHICH WE'RE REALLY EXCITED ABOUT. The next slide is, again, farther back, in the planning, engagement, and concept design stage. So some of this, there's one more NTC here, Great Falls, as well as West Annandale and Gundry, the before and after analysis. We've talked about this mini traffic calming circle that's in concept design. AND THEN THE OTHER TWO ON THIS LIST ARE PARK AVENUE AND MAPLE, A QUICK BUILD, TRAFFIC CALMING BEFORE THE CAPITOL PROJECT. AND THEN LINCOLN AVENUE AND GREAT FALLS, AGAIN, KIND OF A QUICK BUILD BEFORE CAPITOL PROJECTS. SO THOSE ARE THINGS THAT STAFF ARE WORKING ON IN VARYING DEGREES, BUT AREN'T YET READY FOR CONSTRUCTION QUITE YET. And then the last slide is what is in the queue. And we're kind of still building this out. There's probably more to add in. But the four key sources across the top are the list of NTC projects. And again, Jenna can probably speak to this better. These are in a few different stages that have been kind of coming through petitions or have been in various stages of conversation, kind of the bottom-up petition-based list. We have staff-initiated projects. Our staff are very interested and passionate in moving these things forward. We have a staff member who was looking at, well, we're doing annual paving. That was the timber in Jackson traffic calming island that was done recently. A couple of our staff said, we're doing annual paving. We're doing concrete. We're doing paving. Why don't we tighten this up and do this at the same time? the capacity for that sort of thing. Crash data and post-incident. Again, we've talked about this a lot. This is really the heart of both smart cities, but also we were talking this afternoon with Chief Fard at our kind of cross-team meeting about some of the locations that he sees, which are very similar to the ones that smart cities and VDOT crash data and that sort of thing near misses. Some of these are going to be pretty tough, but we could focus more staff time on those areas. allowing capacity, and then requests. This is probably a much longer list, but a few things that come in from council, from residents, from CACT, from various sources, saying, oh, why don't you look at this? Why don't you look at this? Great, but they're all kind of on this list. So I think that's kind of the larger point we're trying to make with this four-piece, these phases, is that there's a lot of stuff coming in. Staff is trying to manage our time, both on this portfolio of Safe Streets work, as well as our other, again, portfolios of annual paving and mast arms and all the other things that we do, many things. And I think maybe I'd suggest going back to slide five. I think ideally the heart of the conversation tonight is the future of NTC. It's been on pause. It's been a priority since I've started here to reframe it, refocus it. And so that's what we'd like to propose tonight is how we keep it as a program with a role for CACT, and it's one piece of our larger staff portfolio. So I should probably pause there. We did share this at the June CACT meeting, had some discussion. I think you may have spoken again. And so I will leave it there for now. Thank you.

Thank you, Amanda. Is there any other staff report or should we jump into discussion?

Discussion's fine.

Okay. I'll defer to CACC first. You guys are welcome to go around and see if you have comments or questions.

I'll do some introductory overview kind of and try to stay focused on responding to the, what you just covered, as well as what is in the discussion agenda as well, right? Okay. First, the things that we've been doing these first six months have included interim meetings between our monthly meetings with amanda and it's we've we've teamed up on putting agendas together and and get and well well jenna's there i mean um i could say with all of us and say all of our names but uh Anyway, so that's I think that was a really good step forward and we have heard this. There are a number of points in here that I don't think. Really address the safety for the city. And those can come from anyone in our in the committee. What we've been doing also in the first six months is we have four new members, so they're new to. the issues that have come up and so there's a lot of catch up but there's also a lot of very great ideas that are coming out as well. I would like an opportunity at City Council to give a short report at another date of what we've done to date because it's pretty comprehensive and it's a lot more outreach to the community. What I'd like to do is ask about some things that you covered. So one of them is two projects and one follow-up. I'd like to understand how you came up with those two data points, those two action plans. Are they based on budget, staffing, difficulty with the procedure to get a decision of how things are going to be done? Is it of something about CACT, the way CACT used to operate, as opposed to the way we are operating. So there are a number of things I'd like to understand why, too, because the end game is safety in the city. And there are a number of places that are not safe. And if we only did two a year, or two for the rest of the year, I think that's short-sighted for the city. Not for the leader of GPW.

I understand. I think Amanda's presentation, it's two bottoms-up requests. And reserving the capacity to do a lot more top-down based on data. Yes. Because I think ultimately we do share the same goal that we want to be safe for everybody. But if we expend all of our resources and only the bottoms-up requests, we don't get to any of the ones that actually have real crashes or near misses, ideally, as well.

Let me address data then. So data can be... What's the term for it? Analytical or descriptive? There's probably better terms for it, right?

Quantitative, qualitative.

Quantitative, qualitative. Thank you for helping me. That's why you're vice chair. And we have not seen a lot of data collection. Our speed signs don't collect the data for analysis. We haven't seen many put in additionally. There is no real way to collect quantitative data on pedestrians. How many cross a crosswalk? How many push the button? I mean, all those kinds of things. So when we say the word data, let's not focus it on one thing, which is everything's quantitative. There's a lot of qualitative. as well.

I guess it would be helpful for staff to chime in, because with us not being experts on transportation data, what are the sources of data that we're using to inform their column?

That was going to be my next question, which is describe some of those data collections that are analytical, and I would like to describe some of those that are qualitative.

Right. So I can start with the Smart City program, the VTTI folks. And we were just, again, talking with them this afternoon. They joined our Smart Cities working group meeting. They have a ton of data, which is honestly, we're still kind of wrapping our heads around. They have a big dashboard. They can look at it in a number of different ways. Now, that is focused, to some extent, on some of the signalized intersections where they've got some data. But they also do have other ways of – they've talked about some other really innovative sensors – Tara, I don't know if you online want to chime in with anything. If you don't, that's fine. I'll let you just raise your hand. But the Smart Cities folks have come up with some other... There's other kind of like sensors they could put at the trail.

So a couple of the things we've been talking about are a couple of the systems that the folks have installed with all the smart cities equipment. Dirk and Miovision are the two tools that they've talked about. So this data or these tools help track near miss incidents at different locations in the city. So we have the second set of data that we have.

How many locations may I ask?

off the top of my head I don't know I think it's 20 or something like that but we'd have to get back to you on that specific answer so thank you but this is like additional data beyond the data we collect from the police department related to actual incidents crashes right so you have crashes you have crashes with injuries, crashes involving pedestrians, bicyclists, vehicles. We have data enabled to kind of map that data out for the city. The Smart Cities data gets layered on top of that. OK, you've got data on the actual crashes that you had, but you don't have the near misses. So that's additional information data that we can look at. And so if you go to the last slide that Amanda had with the big eye chart on it, So when you look at the third column on that list, there are intersections that probably are familiar to everybody here. These are some of the intersections that I think Chief Fard was talking about last week with you all on where the top accident locations in the city are. And then additionally, this has intersections that the smart cities folks have identified where we're having the most kind of near misses and where the most risk in the city is for somebody getting hurt. And so I think kind of what we're advocating for tonight is have a more kind of judicious process to prioritize the list on the left of all of the different neighborhood traffic calming requests that have come in and free up our time to be able to kind of spend more staff time on the green column there where we have, you know, all these intersections where crashes are happening, where people, you know, either getting hurt or at risk of getting hurt. Right now, as we're sitting here today, we're spending most of our time on the left side of the screen, and we haven't had time to kind of, you know, the capacity to dig into the green list like I think we would like to.

Jess Saganbart, Vice Chair. I've been on the committee since 20, well, 2020, 2021, but 2019 is when my son almost got hit by a car in front of my house on West Marshall Street, and I've been obsessed with traffic calming ever since. So a couple questions. I don't think anybody on the CCT disagrees that data should be driving our decision-making process. Something to consider is the NTC program specifically talks about residential streets, which is different from some of our more incident-prone streets such as South Washington and abroad. I think everybody probably saw the article recently about, like, A third of our incidents are happening at South Washington and abroad. Thank you. So we're like... the data should drive the staff's time. I will say I was personally horrified when, and not, Justine not to call you out, but when Justine was saying we need to focus on where the data is and we're focusing most of our time on neighborhood streets. So I looked back at the NTC handbook, and it said residential streets, NTC, residential streets. And also, by the way, we should have been given budgetary and other kinds of reports, and I have never seen that since I've been on the CACT. So I don't know. I'm just a citizen of a resident. I don't know how much we have spent on NTC. I don't know how much. money and staff time. So when I heard that six months ago, I was horrified. I'm like, no, we should not be spending most of our time on residential streets if most of our problems are on bigger streets going through our city. But I don't know that. I'm going to ask for the world because I'm a mom. So I will just say, like, I... I... I wish that I had seen that data, and I agree with you guys that it should be data focused. And I was entrusting that you guys were focusing your time and efforts and had like, okay, we're going to spend this much time on NTC and we're going to spend this much time on non-NTC. But I didn't know that.

I think a follow-up to the data and I think what you said is focus All the time I was over on the left want to try to focus on the right I don't know that I mean met kind of all the time But that's where I think we spend kind of a lot of our time, but that's a good I mean, that's that's a goal you guys should write that like that should be it and there should know that how much time you're spending and You should not let that

Dominate your time, right?

So that's a procedure, right? So one thing that would be helpful and it doesn't have to be tonight, which is well Here are five most recent NTC projects. Well, how much did we spend on them? How much time did we use how much staff hours did you spend? Executing the design of it every everything that has to do with getting to digging holes and blown out streets and whatnot. It would be helpful to know that and I would hope that that's part of the decision process is knowing how much an individual NTC costs in terms of time and the dollars to put things down on the street and I think that would be very very helpful and I think it's It has to be done before going or explained and possibly defended, but explained before I would feel comfortable saying two's the number and one's the number. Well, that's arbitrary to me, me meaning the CACP. It's arbitrary and I would like to see us have a little bit more We talk about data. I'd like to see more data for that. CACT would like to see that.

While we're on the subject of data, there's an inherent bias in this because all of our sensors are on our main roads. So that's where we're going to find the most crashes and the most near misses. And I do like the idea of focusing on those areas of risk, but we also need to find a way to... assess the risk on these residential areas especially around our schools which are not being captured by a lot of these smart city sensors yet so i'll and i'm going to agree with the chairman here is i think the idea of saving the staff time for the stuff that is very important is very important and is a good use of the city's resources but we also need to take a look at Again, the data that we're collecting, how it's being collected, because there are going to be gaps in this because of where our sensor network is.

And so that's the sensor network. But then there's also contracted sensors come in. Jenna has put things into the neighborhoods where the neighborhood has spoken up and said, hey, we have all these things happening. We'd like it. So we put out a sensor.

Yes, for the traffic tubes.

So the traffic tube to do counts, well, that's going to be for vehicles only. It's not going to be for bicycles, walking, waiting at a bus stop, all those things. It's not going to cover those, but it's not a network. It's by project only. And a footnote to that is CACT would love to see way more collection of data. I think

We would we would love to swim in the data So, you know Michael your point on We don't have sensors in all the neighborhoods. I think it's a good one I think the crash data we do have is holistic for the six So so that that's kind of uniform the the added layer of the smart city stuff to your point We don't have that near misinformation in other locations. I Think from a crash standpoint, we know where kind of the crashes are happening Yeah, and that's what's pointing us to some of these other major arteries.

Just so we can keep the discussion going. So here's what I've heard. The good news, we're all aligned that we should use data. We're also aligned that we should focus on the areas that have crashes and the data points to where we should use resources. The question is, is it two projects a year? Is it three projects a year? What's the right mix of resources? That's probably a question for staff.

I would argue that is not the question. And I'd like to jump in. I was waiting to see if you could get out there. First off, I'd like to say, David, you're You're making me look bad. Why is that? Because of everything you've done since you took over the chairmanship. Well, thank you. I think the question is actually, should NTC exist as separate projects? That is a fundamental question. We need a bottom-up way to put things into the Smart Streets project list. I look at this, and one of the biggest things we have as a problem is multiple queues. We have multiple lists for sidewalks. We have multiple lists for this, for that. I see four lists. Why? We should have one list of Safe Streets projects. Now, NTC is a way of acquiring to that list. Safe streets should be prioritized. If it makes sense that we have higher priority projects that are based on crash data, staff initiations, requests, or whatever they are, and there are zero NTC because we have more important higher priority projects, then it's zero. If we look at the list of projects and it's four, those are the highest priority ones, then it's four. We don't need a set number. What we need is, we need to be looking at this.

I'm not sure why this is happening. I hear that with hearing aids.

The challenge is we've always treated NTC separately. And once you get past that data collection point, It's a whole lot of tracking and it takes prep. And we're talking about projects that maybe don't deserve that level of effort over other projects. When the request comes in from the public, we should know if it's valid. Sometimes we get requests, and we've seen it. One of the four members of the CACT who have recently joined, just so you know, I joined CACT same time as Jess. So I have many years of living through this. We get the data, and sometimes that data, you just look at it and go, this is not actually that big a deal. And sometimes you look at it, and I think about Columbia, What is somebody doing going 70 miles an hour plus on Columbia? It scared everybody to find out that that was happening. That all of a sudden got higher priority. I'm not clear why we're still treating NTC as separate projects versus as a way of bringing in projects into one Safe Streets queue.

So safe space is the parent, and the other ones are just other terminology.

This doesn't answer everything you said, but on this list, and I've been struggling, frankly, with how to best graphically show this, this is one list with different origins, I guess. We could have a list of 50 things, and then we could just say how.

This is a new one. You created this based on our conversations. Right.

So if we could have one list with 50 things, and then another column could be like, how did this get to us? council request, NTC, data, council data, council data, well, just a big field and a column. And then the question is then for staff is how we are prioritizing our limited staff in what they should be focusing their time and energies on.

And I would say that's a place where CACT comes in to help where you prioritize and then they can look and then also give you that citizen perspective. Bring that in to say, hey, there's something you didn't notice that, oh, that At 9 a.m. on Saturdays, the data is going to be different in this one situation because we live there or we're there. Sometimes I bet most of the time it's going to be Oh, is it that important? It's going to be a hard discussion.

The NCC handbook says residential streets, so that's like another conversation slash debate, right? What defines a residential street, right? Like broad Washington, probably not, but like...

No wood, even if it's an artillery. So I don't know. One point that I think is important to make sure that Amanda has a chance to talk about is I think the resources for all four of these origin projects are the same. So it is actually one list because it's having the same set of resources. Where I was going, Art, before you dumped in, is that I actually think it is one list. Whether it's artificially two projects here, three projects there, I think we're looking at staff based on, again, like risk and impact. And I think the other question for council is, is $200,000 enough? Because I think the thing we've been continuing to struggle on is, We want to get more things done. And I think that diagnosis so far is that we tend to get bogged down by NTC-originated projects. But we also may find that in this new approach, we actually just want to do $300,000 worth of projects based on community demand. And that is a useful conversation for us to have. And I think we want to be informed by staff on that budget point. For actual construction or people to actually run the process. And that's the thing I think we haven't gotten to, which maybe we can time it for next budget season.

Well, just saying, is $200,000 enough? The CACT can't help with that answer.

I haven't seen the budget.

Because we don't know what any individual project costs. Yeah, we don't. We don't know in terms of continuous records, meaning pieces of pavement and curbs, and then also staff time. I mean, I'm not saying that these are easy projects or that they're whatever. And we're also not questioning anybody who's doing the work, right? But I want to follow up on one thing that Art and you just said about data. And it's the qualitative side. When a group gathers together and form a group for a neighborhood, like we have some people here today just listening, right? And they say, this has happened, that's happened, this continues to happen, et cetera. That's data. And I have to believe them. I mean, I don't think they're making it up, right? So that's data, and we should be collecting that data even more. That's one of the reasons why we've been doing more communications and outreach to the city, is to gather that. And this whole year we've had NO FEWER THAN THREE EXTRA ATTENDEES AND SOMETIMES 12 FROM THE COMMUNITY. AND THAT'S A BIG HELPFUL THING.

PEOPLE WHO LIVE ON THE STREETS EXPERIENCE THE CONDITIONS, AND WE WANT THEM TO HAVE THAT PROCESS.

RIGHT, AND THAT'S DATA. A COUPLE OF REACTIONS. SO, YEAH, I HAD A REACTION TO THE PRESENTATION IN THE SAME WAY WHERE IT FELT ARBITRARY TO ME TO SAY, WE'RE GOING TO DO TWO, AND THEN WE ONLY HAVE ONE AFTER-ACTION REPORT, BECAUSE IT'S LIKE, WHY ARE WE ALSO ONLY DOING TWO AND THEN SEEING only if one succeeded, right? Like it sort of seems like we're going to do something that we should be determining if what we did was actually successful or not for like every single project as opposed to like only choosing one thing to do and then you get more and more behind in knowing if your projects were successful or not and using that information to help inform other things. But then also on the, I took our council strategic discussion or retreat discussion to go to not only like What are we doing about NTC? Because it is, you know, taking up staff time because we're not talking about it in a way that is a data input in where we're missing data in the overall conversation of what our safe street priorities should be. And we're getting a lot of data from the places where the sensors are, but we're also getting a lot of data there because, you know, Pedestrians and bicycles and cars are forced to interact in those places because people have to navigate through them in a way that they're not forced to interact on a residential street as much because people are changing their behavior, living there, recognizing that they're in danger of walking on their street or they're in danger of bicycling on their street. And those are the things that we need to be getting at in terms of like the anecdotal information that should be informing how we're thinking about how all residents are using their streets and it seems like CACT and I took David to be talking more about this in conversations we've sort of had in passing the presentations to the council that if there's a way to harness CACT it could be both in giving feedback to staff on the like Here's the data-driven conversation staff is having this monthly staff roundtable, and we want to report out and get your reactions to what it is we're doing. But beyond that, could CACT, instead of through the long, drawn-out, petition-based, everyone needs to get an X percentage for something to happen program, instead be a program that's neighborhood input comes in, Like CACT helps to assess it. They have a conversation with the neighborhood They have a sense of like what other data does the city need can you be you know? Individual citizen observers out there to try to like, you know verify what it is that you're hearing from the neighborhood and then use that as like a verified data input understanding the other stuff that's in the list to say like yes, we should do this because X, Y, and Z reasons relative to this other list is important to do. But then try to, like, streamline the process so that we're not doing the, hey, you all came to us recognizing a problem, but now having come to us with a problem, like, we're giving you a solution and we're not going to spend six months deciding on if you like the solution or not. Like, this is the solution you get based on the problem you identified and the expertise we bring to the problem that you were, like, repeatedly agreeing was an issue for your street. So that, like, we're kind of addressing where the bottleneck is. You're addressing where sort of the lag time is. You're addressing where like the staff energy is. You are using CHCT in sort of like amplifying effort, right? And you are able to think about where they fit in your like prioritization list or like budget overall without just like kind of picking numbers out of the air.

The role of CACT, it feels like this project is talking about NTC but not talking about the role of CACT. And those two are very intertwined. The role of CACT and the scope of it needs to be part of this conversation. It needs to be part of it. Do, when something comes in, if you're not sure whether to go do basic data collection because you're not even sure that this is a nuisance model. CACT is your place to go. The residents want a place to say what's going on, how are things, where are they going to go? They're either going to bug staff and you're going to spend a whole bunch of time responding or CACT becomes that forum and we listen to them. How do we incorporate CACT into the overall process of safe streets? And if we have to change the the scope of CACT. We changed the scope of CACT. It's not that... It's some paperwork. There are already things that I know need to be added, such as parking. But it's... I think we need to... Take a bigger look at this.

Yeah. And you're all, you know, and citizens, it's citizens talking to citizens so that when, you know, like residents come in, they're like, well, we need this. And then you also have the insight right into like, well, here's what staff is balancing or here's the, like the budget that we're dealing with. And so we can all go advocate together for more transportation dollars or for X, Y, and Z. But like where we are now, we understand the frustration. We understand that. You know, the behavior you're dealing with, we understand, you know, a traffic enforcement issue versus a, like, quick build issue. But, like, as people who totally get why you have your concern, we can still tell you, like, with a straight face, yeah, you're number 12 on a list because there are 11 things in front of you that we generally agree with staff on, like, to take priority over. what you're coming and talking to us about.

So clearly, we're all very passionate. Laura has her hand up. She's very patient, so I'm going to call on her next.

Oh, very good. Hi, Laura. Sorry, Laura.

Hi. No, it's OK. Can you all hear me?

Yeah. Okay, can you hear me?

That's better.

Okay, so one of the things I just wanted to bring up, and I know I've brought this up before, but it's an interesting conversation when you talk about more subjective, qualitative data. One of the things that's really, I think, important to me, and I know it's important to all of us, but when I think about neighborhood traffic calming and projects that are close to elementary bus stops. So the one I have in mind right by my house was Nolan Street. So Nolan did not have sidewalks, and it had a huge elementary bus stop. And it took almost five years to get speed humps on that road. And I know Andondale and Gundry, we hear a lot from that community. And they also have a big elementary bus stop. So that's just one thing I would like to throw in there that maybe that's... CACT helps with those conversations and looks at extenuating circumstances. Again, using Nolan, Nolan is in a huge, you know, if you look at crash data, there's not a lot, but when you think about the fact that they had no sidewalks and a huge elementary bus stop, to me that should shoot it towards the top. So that might be a role that CACT could play in just looking at those sort of extenuating circumstances for some of these areas.

Thanks. That relates to a question I had, which is in general, whether you're prioritizing the NTC list or the crash list, what is the rubric on how we're prioritizing? Is it volume of pedestrians? Is it injuries? Is it bus stops? Is it vulnerable populations? Is it commercial areas? Is it all of the above, and then you give some sort of weighting? I think... CACT probably three generations ago did come up with a really good rubric on that. I don't know whether we still have a copy of it.

We do.

We do. But that could be a starting point. Because I think that's where, if we do believe this is one master list, and if we do think that there are going to be some projects that may trump, sorry to use that term, NTC projects, I think having that transparency would be helpful because it's a much easier conversation with the neighborhood. Here's the budget we've got for the entire year. Here are the top five projects we really have to get to because they're in vulnerable populations. There's high head volume, there's actual crashes, or here's the number of near misses. We'd love to get to you, but you're number six. We either need to up the budget or we need to wait until the next budget year. That's a much easier conversation to say, well, artificially we've declared this many projects and this many room we have and everything else just has to wait. So whether we discuss now or future, I think having some insight into how we're prioritizing and some sort of rubric at the CACT, again, because you are our citizen representation for transportation needs across the city, can help apply a lens on. Justine.

One of the things that we were talking about is what the role of CACT is and what council expects from CACT, which is a much bigger conversation. This is what I was talking to David about. This is a huge conversation, and so we're not going to be able to solve that tonight. But that might actually be something that we do as a council want to discuss at some later point, and I'll work with David to come up with what we think CACT should do. And the team. And the team, yeah. And make sure that everybody gets brought in, but come to the table with at least some starting ideas. But to that point... You know, one of the key things for this is that we're going to need to have some sort of the rubric, and to have the rubric we need the data, and then we need to decide what data we want to use and what we don't want to use. And so one of the questions that I have is would that be something that CACT would come up with? Would that be something maybe DPW would have as a starting point? I know that Andrew had sent out some things from other counties. I guess a huge question mark that I don't think we can decide tonight is what data we're going to use to prioritize projects. Is that something that council is going to have input on? Is that something that's going to be wholly within CACT? And how do we even go forward with that process such that you guys have a clear standard?

I think it's shuffling two decks together. Okay. The staff comes up with that, and CACT has already begun working on what we want to do for priorities. So we're consistent in neighborhoods and on the main highways through the city. But then it's also...

In the meantime, on the data, understanding what data we need to collect could also drive the need for us to get data collection equipment. Now, Rupert, you mentioned one big gap on it, and why it really kind of failed. is it did not include pedestrian and bicycle because we couldn't get the data.

Right, and so that's also expensive to collect. So it's like, you know, some of the things like, oh, it would be nice to have more data, but then it's like, oh, suddenly we're now spending $100,000 on collecting data. And it's like, it would be better to, like, put that money into actually, like, doing something rather than Collecting and so this is where we have things to weigh. I just wanted to make a few other quick points You know part of where this gets bogged down is that you know You then go to the neighborhood and then the neighborhood says we want this and this and then people say no I don't want this here. No, I don't want that here and I don't want to sign here and so I guess at least how I envision this is like bold. Oh, and then we come back three years later and they said this wasn't enough and like this didn't do. And so having bold, quick, temporary solutions, I think is sort of, at least in my head, what needs to be done. So it's those flexi posts. And so I just wanted to... say to the DPW staff, you guys have been doing really great work with that, and I really have been excited about, you know, whether it was the Timber and Jackson or what you came and presented about, oh my goodness, whatever's near, oh, Gundry, yeah, and Andrew, but also Grove. So just all these things coming together, it's like really, I'm like, oh my gosh, we can do this. But making sure that we're, I guess, pushing it far enough such that we don't have to waste more staff time coming back saying this wasn't enough. And then if it is too much, then we can pull it back.

Before we lose that point, because that was one thing I was hoping or expecting that you guys would come with a recommendation. So I was expecting in this NTC 5.0, you would tell us if you enter the NTC process, and I think Erin alluded to this, and you tell us there's an issue and the data concurs that there's an issue, we're just going to recommend solutions. The NCC process is not going to do this neighborhood voting thing anymore. I don't know whether that's part of the plan, but I feel like if that is the staff recommendation, that needs to be a bold change we talk about more openly.

The other professionals, right?

They know. Sorry to interrupt you. I didn't know whether that's part of the recommendation. I was hoping it would be. Are you all saying it will be?

I would hope that there would be discussion on that having gone through the NTC process and almost having it fail because of one person after the neighborhood had already voted to do it. So as an NTC member and a person who has gone through the NTC process, I would absolutely hope that that would be a discussion point.

And I would like to point out that In the past, a project, an NTC request comes in, it's been treated as one project the whole way through, whether it's light, heavy, whatever it is, and it goes the speed of that heavy. We don't have to do that. An NTC request comes in. IT GOES ON TO SAVE STREETS PROJECT. STAFF CAN LOOK AT IT AND SAY, WE'RE GOING TO PUT THIS ON THE SAVE STREETS PROJECT AS THREE DIFFERENT PROJECTS. AND SO THOSE POSTS, THEY'RE ONE, WE'RE GOING TO BE ABLE TO DO THAT REALLY QUICK. BUT WE THINK WE MAY NEED heat hubs here. We'll put it on the list, but it's going to get prioritized lower. It might take longer, but we've got multiple projects. They're smaller. Amanda wanted to respond to that point before.

Some of that need is buried. On slide five here, in the December to March, which doesn't have to time frame this idea of stat so after this proposal was you know they come in CACT helps us triage and vet and decide which ones to move forward but one staff says okay we're gonna work on East Jefferson Street yep East Jefferson Street let's go then staff review and or collect data and staff develops recommended infrastructure changes whatever mix of light heavy solutions staff feel is appropriate for the issue, and then bringing that to a CACT meeting, to workshop and discuss, and then move forward and implement it. So I think that is sort of implicit in there, that rather than trying to get away from some of this whole back and forth and back and forth stuff, residents help

recommend recommend and with CACD recommend the problem identify the problem speeding cyclist crashes whatever it is and then staff developing solutions you guys have been doing a lot of that and I so respect and appreciate that the past year or two you guys have been taking initiative and not letting naysayers be naysayers and like just like the data scientifically approved You know, right? Yeah. Like, so, thank you.

And maybe that needs to be made more specific point, as you said, sort of like bold, quick, temporary solutions, getting stuff on the street. And I guess if there's consensus from council that we can sort of do that rather than waiting for a 51% majority of a working group.

I think it's worth time, but I do want to get back to Justine.

Oh, I just want to... Sorry. No, no, no, that was good. I think the only other thing is, I guess, there's so much data that we need, so this is a little bit back on the other topic, there's so much data that we need, and it's like, it feels a little loosey-goosey not to, like, have a lot of data, but then it's also we need to weigh how much the data collection costs.

And so... And where to do it.

Yeah, and where to do it. And so there's not going to be a perfect solution to any of this, and it's going to feel like Swiss cheese in some ways. But I think what we need to do is do the best that we can with what resources we can. And so part of that is, like, the near-miss data is, I think, really useful, but it's also frustrating because there's like two different collection places, like Families for Safe Streets, two places have them. I think WABA has one. And so I guess if we could have one designated place for people to put near misses in the city that the city would then use as a resource. And this could be part of the communication that CACT does, which is like, did you have a near miss? Not to promote vandalism, but I've seen in other places, in Portland and other places, they put up stickers at crosswalk poles and stuff like that saying, did near miss? Here's a QR code.

We should be able to report that.

Yeah, so that could be a communication thing that CSCT could do. But anyway, I genuinely believe that the near miss data is maybe some of the, that will tell you, hey, there's a pedestrian. That will tell you, hey, there's an issue with, anyway, I think that gives us a lot of the core of what we need. and finding a good central place to report it would be really important.

May I follow up on one of your points? Is it okay? And it's one of your two. Is the follow-up on an implementation of Safe Streets, because I'm now thinking Safe Streets is one list, it's NCC's in there, NCC's, you know, whatever, short, whatever. Every single project needs to be followed up. Was it effective? Now, is that analytical data collection or is that standing out there and doing some observation for 50. We're talking back to the residents about it. Because we don't want to waste money on a project if we have two examples of ones that didn't work, they didn't save it. We've also talked with a number of residents where they say, what are all these speed bumps? They're not doing anything. It just helps me jump over them faster. Or what are all these flexi posts? And what happened over on this street? It's really narrow now. What are you doing to the cars? We need to get through. Well, that's the car-centric, right? And the feedback to them is, Well, why don't you observe it and see if it actually is slowing things down, right? And other data collection pieces. Because there are some implementation that probably didn't effectively save anything. Or one's been delayed so long that there'll be yet another incident. That's something we really don't want to do, or we'll be getting our lawyer in on it, you know, wherever she went. You know what I mean? That kind of thing.

Can I get Mary Beth? I know our former CAC teacher has a lot of passion on this topic.

I just wanted to go back to the list and the rubric and the fact that, as Laura said, you learn that you're project number six, but then something else gets ahead of you and you're still number six the next year. Or maybe you drop down to seven or eight. So I feel like the list and the rubric and the ranking of each project should be really clear and transparent so that you know that this is a high-volume street, it has many pedestrians, all the things, and then, okay, here's your... Grove and West, and here are the reasons why this is a 12. And here's East Broad and Cherry, and that's only a 4. And people will easily be able to see why. I think that is important. And then as far as collecting data, I also feel like we do have to be careful of not... I just have this overarching fear of cameras everywhere watching what people are doing, right? We're having huge backlash to flock cameras and that kind of thing. So as we're collecting data, we also want to make sure we're protecting privacy.

Regarding the case prioritization, you know, there's this kind of question about is this one list or is this two lists or multiple lists, right? One of my concerns is if it is really one big list, then you kind of need the same rubric for every project. And so one of the things that I like, even if it may be as arbitrary that the staff has recommended like two NTC projects a year, is that I could envision a scenario, and maybe I'm just imagining things, that if you have everything in one queue, your commercial spaces are always going to get priority over your residential spaces because there's always going to be more traffic volume. There's always going to be higher speeds. And so I like the idea of reserving some space for residential projects because, again, if you have one rubric for every project, There are so many projects that you'll never get to. Some projects will always be number six on the list. There was more I was going to say and I forgot.

That's a good point. Good point. Just to that point, it then also empowers. I think it's just a good community exercise for people to say, hey, there's a problem on my street and be able to bring it up. Whether or not their street gets handled, that action I think is rather good for democracy and rather good for the city. So for people to feel like they can take their own street into their own hands and maybe come up with a solution and bring neighbors together is, I believe, a very good process. how things get implemented and then how people bicker about where things get implemented and almost killing the project, not so good. But getting people to come together to bring it to the city I think is actually a very, very good thing.

And I'd just like to say one thing about DPW. The DPW of 2026 and second half of 2025 is a lot different DPW than it was before. So I'm not just saying that. It's been much more efficient.

I would agree with that.

Dave? Mark, go ahead.

Go ahead.

A couple things. First of all, I'd like to point to the beginning. What is David?

Yes.

The second point is, do we need to see the CT staff working together in a more seamless way than in the past? Yes. So I think this very discussion has made some major progress. I would say that we're focused on the roadway.

Traffic safety experts have said from the beginning it's the driver, the car, and the roadway.

We can control the design of vehicles, but we can have some influence on the enforcement of the roadway. by the state.

So hopefully we'll be able to energize our community effectively to get the kind of authority we want from the state for electronic enforcement and see people on the ground or virtually participating in hearings to break through some of the limitations. In terms of priorities, We say that we're making our goal is to make our streets safer for all users. And so our blueprint needs to be effective for all users. So those would be the points I would make. I would finally conclude by, as I said when all was being said, no committee works harder at the CSC. Nor does any community, does any board or commission have a more fundamental We're extremely grateful for the hours that you've put in and getting a better linkage between staff and CACT, a smooth process. I like that we set some fairly agenda time frames about how and then do a better job of a holistic approach as to what we're going to do. It's not just the design of the roadway. It's creating the impression that people who drive in the city of Falls Church will abide by the law, but will not get you. And that works for some people. And then the education enforcement as well. So those are the points that I would make.

Thank you.

I just want to say one thing, just to echo what Andrew said about maybe it's not necessarily arbitrarily picking two NTC cases a year, but maybe it's instead setting aside a budget allocation. My overarching fear is, first of all, everything should be data-driven. However, with that said, I fear that the data is never going to support a residential street when we're talking about intersections such as Broad and West. The data is always going to be in the favor of Broad and West, which is a problem. But this program was meant for residential streets. And I think whether or not it's two cases, I would argue that shouldn't necessarily be the case, but a budget allocation. And then maybe it's a, if you qualify for this amount in terms of how many speeders you have, how many... Bus stops are on your street, for what Laura said. Whatever the rubric that you create for the residential component of it, then maybe it's, okay, you qualify for light solutions. And if not, now you qualify for heavy solutions. But I just am very fearful that what became a residential program is going to be phased out because the data is always going to speak to the higher volume areas.

So I think that's worth considering because it could be that you have a budget to do three light solutions and one heavy solution. Staff recommendation is this really merits a heavy solution that takes up all the resources for that year and the next year you can have the same project applied to different things but that way it's a little more fair instead of just naming the number of projects.

Two last comments. One is when we talk about staff time, I think people don't realize how much time Jenna spends on meetings with the NTC groups and trying to arrange them and putting together this long list of projects every month. I think what we have here on page five where we're just saying we're moving forward, we're going to go with the experts, is going to have a huge impact on Jenna's time especially. The other thing I'd like to point out is that when we talk to people and they're like, what's happening with my project? Why isn't it getting done? You say, they're prioritizing things. And then you tell them what they've been prioritizing. Very often, people who request it go, oh. And they don't get nearly as upset because they recognize what they couldn't prioritize is an ugly situation. would be thing. So I think with this list of safe streets, I think transparency is extremely important so that people understand, well, maybe I'm number six, but what are those other five? And a lot of times they'll look at the other five and they'll go, I GUESS I'M NUMBER SIX. I GET IT. I MEAN, VERY QUICKLY, YOU CAN LOOK AT THEM AND SAY, OKAY, I GET THAT ONE. IT'S WHEN THEY SEE ONE AND THEY LOOK AT IT AND THEY GO, THAT'S ABOVE ME. AND THAT'S WHERE CICP CAN HELP TO MAKE SURE THAT DISCONNECT ON PRIORITIZATION. HONESTLY, THAT HASN'T BEEN HAPPENING LATELY, AND SO THAT'S GOOD TO KNOW.

kind of having taken all of this in, right? I almost kind of want to come back to pitching where we started, right? Because I think as the conversation's gone on, everybody's made some really good points about the role of the CACT to help kind of prioritize the work. And, you know, I think Andrew's point is kind of where I think some of the staff was at on, like, if you put this all in one bucket and threw all the data in it, we would never get to, you know, or it would be, I think we would miss expectations from some of the community members that have brought up important issues. Right. And so, um, so I want to come back and kind of maybe advocate like that. We give what Amanda's laid out a try for this, this fall. You know, it doesn't, it doesn't mean we can't kind of revisit doing some more NTC projects. I know there's some kind of, uh, hesitation about is to the right number. Right. Um, From a budget tracking standpoint, we can work on providing more information on concrete construction costs. We don't track staff hours down at the project level to be able to say how much we worked. We worked 137 hours on wood and whatever. And so I want to caution expectations on our ability to provide a lot of detail there. But I can imagine a scenario where we kind of go through the flow that the team has laid out here and we knock out two NTC projects from beginning to end by next summer, and if that works, then maybe we can repeat it. We can kind of decide whether two is the right number or not. I'm afraid if we walk out of here without a little more clarity, I don't know whether we're supposed to try and kind of figure out two or whether we need to, like, The rubric point is really good, and I think we can work on that both for NTC projects and then the greater list. They might be a little different, but anyway, that's my pitch back to kind of like where we want to go.

I appreciate that. I just want to reiterate the handbook, the NTC handbook says that we're supposed to be getting like a budget every year, and I have never seen that as far as like what are we spending, and again, we're spending way too much money compared to the rest of the city I'm horrified by that like I don't I just I don't know I'm gonna ask for everything because I'm gonna ask for the safety of everybody in our community so I would appreciate seeing just what we're spending it if it's staff hours or which is budget or you know whatever I'm happy I appreciate that and then also I also would appreciate, as a CACT, being able to have some input on the scope of projects, because sometimes NTC projects, the staff is responsible for, like, okay, it's going to be from this street to this street, and that's it. But if you ask me about Gundry, I would say, no, Gundry needs to include that whole loop plus Virginia Avenue, because that is all, like, very, you know, Anybody who's driven that knows that the Virginia government, like it's, but unfortunately sometimes I see that the city like is very narrow in its scope and so I would appreciate that as something that we could have some input into. Also, sorry. Oh, also, I would also appreciate being able to be invited when the staff has meetings with the neighborhood and on-site walking in the streets. And I would appreciate being invited to that as well, which we haven't been before. So a big fan of the leadership with Amanda and Matt in the past year. Things have been looking amazing the past year compared to the past several years before that, and so I don't mean to be... Spurging big fan of you guys. Things are looking great. Just a couple of points that I respect.

I have one comment. One comment on what Andy said, I want to point out. What I've heard, and I think there's a lot of agreement on this, is the idea of an NTC project all the way through. We're not talking about, we're saying there's NTC originated projects. Once they're a project, once they're in the queue, That's just a source. These are residential projects. I understand there's concern that we don't lose track of residential projects, and we should be referring to them that way. I look at Timber and Parker, that's a residential project. It was not initiated through this NTC, but the fact that it was a residential, we are seeing those benefits. So I think the terminology we use, we need to start there. Say NTC is a source. Once they're a project, It's not an NTC project. It is a residential, it's a crash project. It's different terminology. Light solutions, heavy solutions.

David and then Justine.

I appreciate saying, you know, there's been lots of good discussion and we should move forward with this idea. I'd like to go back. So I'm going to stay directly on that point. The A year ago or so, it came out that NTC is on hold. I think that we, as two teams, the City Council and the CACT, and maybe DPW, but definitely us two, we botched the communications. There's a lot of residents that said, what do you mean, NTC? Why is it on hold? We want safety, right? They got the plexi posts and the blah, blah, blah. We're not getting it. You know, Grove and the seven accidents at the W&OD, that should get done in three days. I mean, that's a no-brainer. And we can't say, you know, Parks Department, they did some things. Anyway, so I would say that based on the conversation, it would be premature to say two and one because I think the CACT would agree with me that the one is totally unacceptable. We need to follow up on every single project that we do. Right? And then the second is two, I think we could only make that determination with some of the information we've been talking about that need to be collected. Unless we say we came up with the two because these are the only resources we have this year. So let's apply them to two. Then I'd say let's go forward. But I don't have that. We don't have that. This table doesn't have that information.

I guess, yeah, just to get more clarity on, like, a good path forward so that staff have, like, a clear... Yes. So maybe what the solution here is... I don't know if it would be possible at the next CACT meeting just to present, like, here's how much an NTC project approximately costs, generally... I do like the idea of being able to, like, you know, time is, like, you know, time is running out. And so, like, if we want to have, like, two projects by the end of the year or whatever else, it's like we should get moving on that. Right. So, like, we want something rather than nothing. So I do think it's worth pushing forward to some degree. And so maybe the only delay we have is maybe just getting some numbers for the next CACT meeting. But otherwise, generally moving forward. And then what would be great... would be for the next budget cycle. We have those numbers. We can say, hey, with that, we can do, like, present it to city council, and then obviously CACT would be informed. With this budget, we can do three light solutions and one heavy solution, or, you know, whatever combination. And then that can move forward to CACT so that things can you guys can pick and choose but I would say almost that's the next year solution and right now let's get some of that information at the next meeting and then try to move forward with at least at least two given our budget so I think you know the um so I think we can work on some better budget information that I would say over the last three years at least however long I've been along

The limiting factor on the NTC program is not the budget. It's not the $200,000 that gets allocated every year. We're sitting on a surplus of money in that account right now, right? It is the getting it through the system, right? And so the budget information is probably not going to give you the clarity that you're looking for with this. I think we've taken a judgment to say, I think, if we can focus on like banging out two NTC projects that gives us some capacity to evaluate and work on some of these other areas of work that we've identified, mainly along the commercial corridors. And so, If we want to pick a different number, I think that's okay, but it's better than zero.

Given where we are, status quo doesn't work. We want to unpause the NTCQ. We want to get some projects done. We want to focus on the commercial. I think it's worth giving it a try, and we can assess how it goes in a year. Next July, we can say, how did this go? Did we get enough NTC projects done? Did we get enough throughput in the other buckets? Were our assumptions correct?

How about by the end of the year instead of a year?

I do think, though, that, I mean, I do think we need to figure out what is NTC, right? Like, what is the resident, the residential resident data input source, right? And so, regardless of if it's, oh, we're committed to two residential projects, or, like, we're not doing NTC in terms of the boarded petition process and, like, everything else, there still needs to be something so that people say, well, you chose two, and that's what's coming through next summer, but, like, I have a really significant problem on my street. someone needs to understand that and I need to get in someone's ear about it and that committee needs to get in staff's ear about it so that they understand that like this is a problem and so there still has to be regardless of if it's oh the NTC petition project in the project and where are you in the queue and whatever else there has to be the like where's the platform for that conversation to take place so that something needs to get accelerated or something needs to get bumped because you know you have a committee that understands the priorities but also understands the significance of of like the collective that's coming together with this voice to say we have a significant problem, that that lives somewhere that isn't like a staff member getting 80 emails from the same neighborhood.

And DPW gave us time in between meetings to start addressing those things. And we've had three very good, each CACT meeting has been better because of that.

I'm glad to hear it. I think that's reasonable for what we're calling NTC now. What I would love staff and CSU to do together to do is give us a more systemic approach to both residential and commercial assistance. I mean, given the knowledge that we have from the NTC, good, bad, and different. So how do we pull these things together so that our citizens know where to go and then what rubric eventually will be applied? And whether you call it NTC or you call it a soft solution that's staff-based or whatever, how are we going to address the issues? Where does it come in? How is it processed? What are the criteria and what comes out? And that's a good beginning, but I don't think it's all there yet.

Any final thoughts before I attempt to sum up? So I'm here again. We share the goal of getting our streets safer. We share the goal on using data. I think I'm hearing general consensus or agreement that both bodies are willing to try out the staff-recommended process for the coming year. TBD, whether it's two residential projects, whether it's budget, whether there's a third project that might actually be higher priority than a commercial need. Maybe the CCT meeting is the right form for that discussion. Before we lose the point about how many projects we monitor, I'm kind of with Erin. I feel like we actually need to monitor all of them. The level of effort we apply on monitoring doesn't need to be the same. But I think I want to get in the mindset that it's important to know whether stuff we do works. And if it doesn't work, we should stop doing it. And it doesn't feel appropriate to just say we're only going to limit to once. That's my vote is that I would like to make sure we apply some sort of like loopback process to make sure your outcomes match what you intended to do. So we tried for two, or tried with the two NCC projects. I think the two things that I think are important as we roll out these changes is, one, we need to be very clear with the community on what the changes are. A new handbook or whatever the new NTC project communication is, there's no more voting on whether you like these solutions. And so we need to set those expectations very clearly for the community. I think the other big takeaway I heard is that we need to be very transparent on the prioritization of the project, as well as all the other things that are taking up the same set of resources, whether it's an online list that Mary Beth talked about, whether it's discussion in CACT. When we come up with a rubric and then the prioritization list, I think that's important for the community to get bought in on the new process. And I think the third is it would be helpful if staff were more explicit in the asks that you have. What I heard you say is you were asking the CAC to help prioritize. You were helping residents identify problems and not solutions. You're asking council to give you air cover so you can get to projects that actually have like higher risk and data that says these are dangerous areas. That is what I heard as the ask, and so I think that needs to be part of the rollout as well, is how is this going to feel different, right? Because now we're in the fifth version of trying to do this, and if you diagnose the problem as we get bogged down in the process, I would like staff to be more explicit on how this is going to feel different, both to the community as well as what you need us, and to hold us accountable to how this is going to be different this coming year. Because I know we have a tendency as counsel to often get into solutions, and we often will then jump onto, oh my gosh, the room filled up with people who really want to work on this thing. It's to hold us accountable that if we are then like, well, Wyatt, why can't you work on it? Or new Wyatt, why can't we work on this project? Hold us accountable. Say like, hey, this is the recommended list based on the prioritization, based on the rubric, based on the CAC2 discussion. We can't get to this unless XYZ happens or you make that trade-off. Say no to us because... We are the face of the community, but we know that by feeding those things, we are then distracting staff from getting more things done.

And then clarity on the limitations. So I think if it wasn't the $200,000, but really Jenna's time, then I think we need to know. So then maybe it's not even fully a budget thing, then we need another Jenna. And then that's a lot more money. So then figuring out what the exact limitations are and communicating that.

And do you think no voting is really an important thing that the community see here. So when they start the process, they understand, gosh, you're entering a process that you are giving up some authority here, that you want the city to work on fixing it, you're not going to get to vote.

The form shifts from dedicated to CICT.

And that will create other challenges that we'll need to work through.

Which again, that's the council. You need air cover, we're going to try this out. We're about half hour behind, but it was a good discussion.

Thanks for giving that topic. Thank you.

Two tactical things because they were kind of like the lead was buried. Is Gresham getting a new signal?

Yes, it is. The note that was in here about Gresham is some marketing that was done last year. Yes, we're coordinating with the Smart Cities program in Arlington County on a new signal at Gresham. Yes, that's in the design process.

And it's going to come this fall?

I don't think so. We can get the updated timeline. We can talk about that sometimes in the CIP quarterly updates occasionally. We can get you the timeline on the Gresham signal.

I'm sorry.

Oh, the Grove and the WMD trail? Right. So the Nova Parks folks did some things. There were three things that we've talked about with the public at CACT meeting. Moving the no parking signs to improve sight lines. I believe the signs were moved. They might still be adjusting those. I talked to our operations team earlier today. Second item is about the... There's a painted curb extension at West and Grove right now. We're going to be putting some hatching and some flex posts in that, and our operations team is going to be doing that hopefully this week. And then the third thing, which is going to require a contractor, is that Grove in the trail and west in the trail doing repaving and the red high visibility crosswalks at those two crossings to improve kind of consistency. And those we have, that we're going to use a contractor. We're going to use some of our NTC funds and do that sort of late August, early September.

There was a fourth too, which was no parking sign that got put up. to remove the two vans that blocked the bicyclist's view.

Yes, and they were removing that one, yes.

That's a no-brainer. They said they were doing, yes.

I have not checked in lately.

There were rumble strips coming from the bridge down to the grove, that downhill area, and then there was some markings on the path as well.

Letty, I really appreciate your summary. I think it really did capture it. Everything went to staff. I think CACT has to do a number of things too, and we're going to discuss that, like setting what we think the priorities should be for the project, that sort of thing, how we're going to communicate this to our residents, and how we're going to engage our residents. I think we have at least those three things. big things to do.

Yeah, we'd love to rely on you and partner with you on that communication to residents, right? Especially if, again, there's not going to be a voting process anymore, and that's a big change. You guys would probably be the first line of defense for some of that. So we'll need partnership there.

Thank you. I'm going to, sorry, these topics are the topics I care about the most, and I feel heartbroken. I have to leave my sisters in critical condition. And so I will not be joining for the next session, but what I would like to do is I will send notes afterwards if there's anything that I've commented on. So thank you.

Thank you. Good luck with that.

So we'll have Herb Holmes, our Director of Operations, and we also have... And we've got a presentation I think and he's gonna make the introduction on this one, but I might or I'm close to Amanda on presentation.

Yeah, I can like kick us off. So I think following up on this winter's Snow adventures. I think council has asked us to kind of take a look at kind of our operations and in the city code specific about some, you know snow removal on sidewalks, and so we're here tonight to kind of present, you know, some of staff's recommendations on kind of a path forward on those things. We know that the snow topic can be broad, and there may be some other elements that you all want to bring up and discuss, and we're game to take that feedback and, you know, the direction from council if there's some other things you want us to look into. I think for tonight, we've got a couple more narrowly focused kind of recommendations that we want to kind of share with you all and get your feedback on the direction and then we can kind of, you know, take that additional input if there's some additional work that you'd like us to consider. Sound good? So then I'll let Amanda kind of kick us off.

Great, thank you, and I will start, and then I'll turn it over to Andy, and then, yeah, we'll turn it over to Herb Holmes, our other deputy director for operations, who can help as well answer questions. Okay, so the next slide, please. So we're focused kind of on snow removal on commercial sidewalks and other sidewalks. So this map and list, you know, we have 37 linear miles of sidewalk in the city. 23 miles are residential, 10 miles are commercial, About two miles are government or public institution and two miles religious or private institution. So this map is really just intended to illustrate kind of the scale of sidewalks. This is not about responsibility or anything. It's just sort of the scale of how many sidewalks, 37 miles in the little city. The next slide. So one of the things we've been talking a lot about is proactive communication as an important part of our snow policy. So one thing that we think, staff anyway, worked really well this past winter was a few things. Before the snow, we did some targeted outreach by staff to repeat offenders, so some of our DPW. Staff you know reached out to directly to some of those folks who've been been at issue in the past You know educating property owners on their responsibilities and timelines expectations. Also, I'll give credit to our office of communications as well as DPWs by Our customer service and support team This snow removal phases diagram which was used repeatedly on social media and on that, you know fallschurchva.gov slash winter website in various places to help folks know which phase of work we were in. And I think that was a really effective tool and something that we can kind of keep building on so everybody knows really where we are in the process. And we'll get back to that next slide. And then one thing we're going to kind of build on this coming winter in terms of communication is expanding that snow removal phase graphic. So this is something I was at a NACTO conference and they were talking about winter weather and winter cities like Minneapolis. And these were just two examples of another way of GRAPHICALLY SHOWING WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT AREAS, WHO DOES THE SIDEWALKS, WHO DOES THE BUS SHELTERS, THAT SORT OF THING. STAFF HAVE ALSO TALKED ABOUT ADDING A TELEPHONE HOTLINE WITH A PRE-RECORDED MESSAGE FOR RESIDENTS WHO ARE NOT ON SOCIAL MEDIA. AGAIN, WE HAVE REALLY GREAT, LIKE, INSTAGRAM AND FACEBOOK STUFF, BUT ANOTHER WAY TO SAY, OH, WE ARE CURRENTLY IN PHASE TWO, SO THAT'S WHERE WE ARE. SO THAT COMMUNICATION, WE THINK, IS REALLY IMPORTANT. NEXT SLIDE. I want to talk just a minute about our snow team. We have approximately 30 DPW operations staff who are driving plows and are also clearing with the skid steers and the loaders and the other equipment, working alternating 12-hour shifts. Of course, all of this depends on the scope and scale of the storm, right, whether it's a smaller storm or a bigger storm. We also have our two DPW customer support and service managers working alternating 12-hour shifts that are really integral to that. Rec and park maintenance staff are focused on clearing sidewalks at general government buildings. And we use, come up various times, 100% city staff, no contractors, to do snow clearing. Next slide. So just to talk a little bit about, in terms of DPW operations first, again, looking at this snow removal prioritization. So phase one is alerting folks, it's coming. Also the pretreatment and the brining and that sort of work. In phase two, the lengths of these phases can vary and will vary based on the storm. That's where these herbs expertise to know when we're in each phase, right? and the operational details of how this works. This is kind of the communications part. Primary and emergency routes prioritized for public safety and access. That's where they're starting. And then in phase three, the DPW staff is gonna be first doing residential streets, including cul-de-sacs. Next, doing coordination with Falls Church City Public Schools. Next, doing curb ramps and bus shelters on the commercial sections abroad in Washington. And this is something we've done in the past, and this most recent winter, frankly, did more of, right? I know you were doing a lot of focus on that, particularly night work, because those same crews were doing other things. And so having those crews focus on that as a focus of pedestrian-friendly commercial districts and recognizing that that's important. And then they'll be taking additional passes at roads as needed. So the next slide is sidewalks. So during that phase three, while DPW crews are doing our thing, rec and park staff are clearing sidewalks at general government facilities. Business owners are responsible for clearing the sidewalks in front of their commercial properties. And residents are responsible for clearing the sidewalks in front of their homes. That's what's happening during phase three. So the next slide, I'll just talk briefly about residential sidewalk snow clearing. So as we said earlier, there are 23 miles of residential sidewalks. Approximately, it's an estimate 1,200 residential properties with sidewalks. Again, it's proactive communication from the city, letting folks know well in advance of winter during the storms, all of the things, what you should be doing. Residents are encouraged to clear sidewalks 24 hours after snowfall ends. And we are really encouraging neighborliness and goodwill. So this is an image from last winter on Instagram. Being a good neighbor, there's been a lot of discussion about volunteer groups and 13-year-old kids in the neighborhood and all of that sort of thing. But using... kind of that's where the focus is on the residential side of sidewalk snow clearing is that it's important as being as being good neighbors now when we get to commercial properties as I said they are responsible and if they don't show their sidewalks this is where we this is where the I'm going to turn over to Andy now this is where the bulk of the staff report focuses tonight is on some options for code changes and so we're going to focus here on the staff's recommendation okay so um

So I think based on kind of a review this past year, Sally and I took some time here over the last several months to research the state authorities available to the city to enforce clearing of sidewalks. Each one of these we found would require either changes to the city code, process implementation changes, or both. And each of those kind of brought, I think what we found were different challenges for actual implementation. And so... What we're proposing instead is a request of the General Assembly as part of its upcoming session to modify part of the state code that currently only applies to counties in northern Virginia. It's written for counties and not cities. To give us some similar authority to what they have to be able to issue $100 civil penalties for not removing their snow. So For us to do this, we would kind of work with you all this fall on what that general assembly request would look like, as well as several changes to the current city code for us to use this upcoming winter. And so two of those things would be shifting to a uniform time frame for clearing sidewalks of 24 hours. This is the best practice as we've looked across all the other cities in Virginia. And for now, remove the section about fines. I think what we've One of the things we've dealt with this past winter is a lot of phone calls to our staff saying, hey, there's something in your code that says you should be issuing penalties. Why are you not doing that? And so our ask would be, let's take that out as part of this kind of full code update. Operationally, what we would do this winter is deploy inspectors to actively inspect the commercial properties in the city 24 hours after the snow stops to see how well everybody's doing and then issue kind of warnings, reminders for folks to do this. This is a change from kind of how we've done things in the past, which has strictly been complete based. So then we would come back. I think if we go to the next slide in the summer of 2027 following the successful adoption of those changes from the General Assembly We would come back and make a second set of changes to the city code add the hundred dollar civil penalty One of the things we're also proposing kind of in our request to the General Assembly is to clarify that that hundred dollars is is that applicable each day the snow is not cleared so it accumulates if the work isn't done. So then the next following winter what that up would look like operationally is we would do we would have that inspection process in place like we would set up this upcoming winter and then we would add on kind of issuing those civil penalties to help drive kind of better better participation from our commercial businesses on this sidewalk clearing. So the next steps on the final slide would be to come back to you all in August and get moving on those changes, both for the general assembly request and then the city code changes. So we elected kind of in the presentation not to dive into all of the options in the staff report. Happy to walk through any of those, answer any questions you all might have. Talk about any other kind of feedback or suggestions you all have. I think one of the points I neglected in my kind of opening remarks to make is when you think about kind of the city operations and kind of staff kind of workload intensity, there isn't anything that happens in the city I think more intense than the city government responding to a snow emergency. I think of kind of day two showing up at the property yard and talking to Herb and some of his team. I mean, these guys are working 12, 16 hour days. They're bleary eyed kind of folks and working really hard. And so I think as we've kind of evaluated how to handle some of these kind of challenges and some of the feedback we've gotten this past winter, there's a capacity limitation for our staff to be able to kind of do additional work. And we're, a little hesitant about kind of committing to taking on additional tasks. I'm sure we'll talk about a few of those, but I wanted to make that point. I just, you know, that is one of our constraints that we're very conscious of.

So to preface before I open up for discussion, I think clearly we had really unique circumstances this year, but also very clearly when you go around the region, like for your team, like, did an amazing job. Like, by far, the pride that I think the city residents have and how quickly our streets were cleared compared to the region is very evident. So kudos, especially in a very difficult situation. The discussion here is not like, oh my god, we did a bad job. It's like, hey, we really care about our sidewalks. Like, as the city evolves, like, how do we get to a place where our sidewalks are just as accessible as our streets? So hopefully we will talk about it in that vein. We'll open up to CACT first as our guests.

I think the idea of clearing snow on the commercial sidewalks, one is the commercial sidewalks need to be defined, right? Which is it that's going to help business if we, the city, plow them, right? Is that part of the proposal? We're not proposing the city to do any commercial sidewalk clearing at all. Okay, I read that incorrectly. Okay.

I think this is phenomenal. I also think your team did a phenomenal job, so just kudos. Not wanting to create extra work, but I'm curious. So thinking that some of the small business owners in the city might not live in the city. And so if there is a big snowstorm and somebody's coming in from, let's say, outside Fairfax, and they can't get to their business to shovel a sidewalk, I personally like the idea of the $100 fine, right? There needs to be some accountability. However, is there an opportunity if however that business gets notified, it's been 36 hours and you haven't shoveled, is there an opportunity to have a link in the email of here's a Google Doc of local residents that can shovel or whatever it is? Meaning, like, it could be seven days until somebody can shovel, only because they can't get into the city. Like, is there a way to help connect them to local residents, teenagers, who would shovel? Does that make sense?

have to go real quick I'm sorry I just I'm sorry to interrupt her thought but that's important but also the Oak Street Elementary School a big part of our memo that we submitted to you guys just think that could have been handled better but I'm a big fan of all of your work I'm sorry not complaining sorry so we've talked about ways to you know encourage or connect kind of

neighborhood kind of neighborly support for residential sidewalks. The elderly woman next door needs some help kind of thing. And I think there was a lot of good mojo in the city this past winter kind of along those lines. I think making that connection to maybe some of the small businesses in the city is a good suggestion. I think trying to find the fine line where the city kind of helps make those connections, but we don't want the legal liabilities associated with some of the others. My lawyer would advise on some of those things. So that's some of what we've talked about, but it's a good suggestion.

Other thoughts from the CACG?

My main thing, looking at this, and I've gone back and re-read a couple of the things, and my ideas have changed since we discussed it earlier, but one of my main things here is we open the schools really early, which As a parent, I appreciate, but again, focusing on the schools and the school routes as part of your residential program. We had bus stops that were hard to get to because the residential streets weren't... Herb did a good job doing the streets, but kids were walking in the street to get to the school because the sidewalks weren't clear yet. So I think there should... be some thought given to school routes as part of this document and ordinance, as well as the commercial stuff, if we're going to keep the city open and the schools open at the same time.

Council.

All the buildings that are commercial buildings, whether it's a small business or not, they have someone who's taking their trash. They have someone who's doing their landscaping, so... would seem that it shouldn't be that hard for a commercial business to also contract with someone who could plow their streets so the pre-work is really good and maybe that's the list we can provide of people businesses that would love to be hired to clear clear sidewalk just like we have a list of who's a tree contractor in the city you can have that kind of list But I think this is a really good start. And then one question. If we back up to the inspectors, they're the same people who are, are they the same people who are shoveling, plowing, or a different group of people would come out and be inspectors or just figure it out depending upon the storm? Originally different people.

Okay. Just thank you again for all the work. We have a the firsthand view of everything happening at the community center and the sort of, you know, government facilities and then hearing, you know, the trucks over and doing the intersections and, you know, as we said, this was hopefully an anomaly, but, you know, seeing how dedicated people were for how long kind of they were putting in for the days on end, really appreciate the work. I THINK ONE OF THE THINGS THAT WAS IN THE PRESENTATION THAT WE DID DIFFERENTLY THIS YEAR AND WE MAYBE ARE COMMITTING TO GOING FORWARD IS LIKE THE BUSINESS SIDEWALK INTERFECTIONS. YOU KNOW, LIKE MAKING SURE THAT WE ARE ABLE TO ACTUALLY clear out the crosswalks, right? At the corners. And that if we are taking that on, that goes such a huge way to being able to actually make things more accessible or like where businesses are like, okay, I finally cleared out and now I have to go deal with like the snow mound on the corner again, just like the snow fatigue and your team feels it more than everyone else and keeps clearing, but like everyone else feels it and then they go inside. And so seeing that or an expectation of like, yeah, we're gonna try to get the, you know, business district or commercial district or you know city center district cleared off with the corners um i think will go a long way and the same way i know mr snyder often raises the people are trying to clear their sidewalks and then you know because of the volume of snow it gets like dumped back into the sidewalk again and so i think you know how I don't know, maybe done it before, but this year it was immediately apparent how much we used Larry Graves and the parking lot. There was a snow dump overload space. And so being able to continue to incorporate that into the city's snow plan as an overflow space so that if there are like big volumes of snow and we know okay are we able to actually move things there so that we don't end up with this constant cycle of like we're just pushing back into the same place and revisiting the same place but actually able to bring like the snow volume down in some places like phase permitting right and staff right bandwidth permitting that like we incorporate that as an ongoing um you know solution to that aspect of the problem And then I think, you know, the reminders or like the outreach is great, but just like you say to people, come up with a voting plan, like you should be coming up with your personal snow plans. Like if we're going into the winter and you go away on vacation, like what is your snow plan? Are your neighbors, you know,

Do they like you?

Coming into your driveway and your sidewalk? Have you hired your contractor in order to do that? Has your HOA hired someone as your business? If you live outside of town, are you not going to be able to get there? What is your clearing plan? And kind of just constantly reminding people that they have to be accountable for clearing their space. Yeah.

I've got just a question. Is anything taken into, is there enough off-street parking to have cars also be, or commercial organizations to have to get their cars off the street?

That sort of thing.

I mean, just on the... Well, that's a subgroup of it, but I just mean for... For just regular? Yeah.

Not particularly. We didn't have that many issues with cars on the commercial routes just because of what we were clearing at that point from Washington and abroad. There's really no street parking. So we didn't encounter that. I don't think it's necessarily necessary that we sort of focus on that more so than we focus on the actual clearing of the sidewalks from the commercial properties, because that starts the commerce, right? We want to get businesses open so we can get back to as normal as possible. So I think that's going to be our biggest focus. And I think this winter was sort of, like you said, it was an anomaly, right? But now we have a baseline for an anomaly. Now, when we go back to our regular snow, we should be much better because we face what we did this year, which hasn't happened before. I mean, I've been snow commander for almost 20 years. having that type of snowstorm that we had, you just don't have that. And I do. Great title, by the way. So, yeah, we did some things differently this year. We ad-libbed a lot of this stuff, right? A lot of the things that we did may seem like it was choreographed, but it really was not. It was spur of the moment, and we just decided to do it that way.

Bus stops and access to bus stops, do they count as commercial?

So we partnered with the schools this year. Me and Alicia Prince were in. I didn't mean school bus stops. I meant WMATA. WMATA bus stops.

In other words, all the way down broad and whatnot. Right. And also, does it incorporate snow routes?

So WMATA. Emergency routes. We are in charge. The city or municipalities are in charge of the bus stops. Okay. So WMATA will have nothing to do with the actual clearing of bus stops. So that becomes incumbent upon the city to clear. One of the things that we focused on this year was it wasn't, it was such a hard thing because it wasn't just the bus stops, it was getting to the bus stops. So once we did the actual stop itself, we had to clear either a path from the road or a path from the sidewalk, right? Just so people could stand there. Or when the bus came, they didn't have to crawl over a snow mound, right? And that was a challenge for us, right? But we're in touch with WMATA, with their bus people. If we have to change a route or if there's something going on, we call and we are in communication with them pretty much every storm or not even just snow, just any type of weather incident or traffic incident.

Thank you. That's really helpful.

So You guys did a great job. The only complaint is that our stuff is clear and then you turn right and you go a little bit and it's not so clear. Because you hit Arlington. No. But like many things, what gets you is the details. And I think it's the details where to be very careful with this. And some of the details I think we need to pay attention to, for instance, are we're talking about setting a fine to the commercial businesses, but we need to make sure they're going to the right people. Because the businesses that are in those buildings, they're not really the ones, are they really the ones responsible for clearing the sidewalk, or is it the landlord? he's the building owner and i think we need to be proactive i like the idea of being proactive of let them know you need to have a plan you need to be up ready for this whoever it is because the business i mean look at rare bird they don't own that building are they responsible for the sidewalk there in the corner but they're the ones who get exposed And I think it's important with the communication to be very clear of what it looks like when you've cleared it. We all saw stuff where it was a foot wide, a foot of a seven foot sidewalk, and there was a foot cleared. And they're like, we cleared it, but I think our communication needs to be very clear. You need to clear at least half the sidewalk. I think half is probably reasonable, or something like that. And you need to connect to your neighbor. You need to take that extra step. There's three feet. It's ridiculous that three feet isn't clear. You are responsible for connecting to the next clear area. Communication to the residents, I think we've got more than enough time to get something into the December tax bill tax bill and insert so I think we've got a car tax bill real estate tax there's also a car tax bill whichever one was ending up oh but we have the opportunity something we're saying something in December we've got an opportunity there I think this ever is a great time to put something right in front of her in front of people saying this is your responsibility, you hire somebody to clear your droplet, you have to tell that person to clear the sidewalk also. I can't tell you, there have been many of them where, oh, nice droplet, sidewalk's closed. And then the last one I want to talk about is the W and OD. Plowing along the W&OD, we need to discuss that on a budget. The other piece of that is the crosswalk, is the sidewalks across it. And it's kind of a symptomatic of many other little spots within the city where there isn't, there really is some sort of government. And W&OD is unique because it's not ours either. We just need to step up and shovel the sidewalks off the W&OD. I mean, we just have to say, connecting those two We just need to get them done. That way, all north of the WOD can connect in. It's those little connections between the sidewalks that really drive people up the wall. Connecting from a sidewalk to a crosswalk. It's those little details. We just need to, in our communication, make it very clear we're responsible to connect to the next person.

I was just going to say, I wanted to reinforce that point, because on a couple of occasions I was almost hit by a car in one of them where the sidewalk was blocked where the WOD met Great Falls. I had to walk out onto the street, and we all know that was an exceptional year. It was very thin on the street, so I literally had to walk in the middle of the street with cars behind me. you know, literally right behind me, and it was a little frightening. So I think I just wanted to reinforce that point. Actually, it would be better, I know we probably can't, but if we could clear the WOD as well.

That's a separate issue, but I know it's a really different discussion.

Yeah, but your point is well taken.

Yeah, I will. I do want to build on the trail thing. Not only the W&OD, but also the trails on the south side abroad, because the kids use those a lot to get to school. And again, if we're going to have the schools open, which is a wonderful thing, we do need to make sure that the kids can get to the school without having to walk in the streets.

You're talking about the Howard Herman Trail?

The Howard Herman Trail, and the one that goes behind Berman.

Thoughts on the resources needed to tackle hopeless trails?

We don't have the passage.

So rec and parks, like their order of business is city hall, library, you know, warehouse. And then from there, they try to tackle the parks. And, you know, oftentimes by the time we get to the parks, you know, in this instance, it was all concrete and we just couldn't do it. But in, you know, other snows, if it's still manageable two days later, then they will, you know, their next thing is to go to the parks. But that is a crew of three, and so they tend to get pretty wiped out by the time they've taken care of the city buildings.

I think some of the areas that I think we've been trying to do a better job, and I think the team overall, even under this past year's conditions, have done a better job, is all these random properties that the city owns where we're the owner that needs to clear the sidewalk. Some of the Virginia Village properties, the two properties we bought by Oak Street Elementary. And so I think the W and ODD trail crossings and these things are just more added to that list. And we can kind of... Add them to the list to try and tackle them, just trying to manage expectations on, I think we're kind of why I was talking, it might be day three before we get to that. Most of the snows we have around here by day three, it melts. So, you know, I think understand where everybody's coming with those comments.

It also gets to when they clear the city hall and they clear the community center, they do a really good job and they clear it 100%. Do they need to clear, does it make sense to have those 100% cleared and other properties not cleared at all versus have city hall and community center pretty good and then move on and then fully cleared. So if they get completely wiped out, we've got everything good enough versus something's fantastic and something's not at all. So it's one of those prioritization. making sure we don't let perfect get in the way of good enough.

Laura, you've been very patient.

Thank you. Well, first I want to thank Herb, our snow commander, for an amazing job. Salute. Yes, we, and to your team, Herb, we, my husband and I, I think probably about five days after the storm, went downtown for dinner, and we felt like we were in a different country. It was so terrible. Those streets were like, what the heck? So we were really spoiled with the amazing job, Herb, you and your team did, so thank you so much. I have a question, I don't know who this would be for, but what are churches considered? Are they considered commercial?

So the distinction, you know, we have, under existing rules, churches are treated, you know, because the ordinance addresses residential and commercial properties. That is something we're going to need to clarify because we're proposing to address commercial properties with enforcement. That's what the proposal is before you. We might need to circle back and think about the faith community. But I think I would tend to treat them as residential.

Okay, the reason I ask is, in particular, if you think about it, there are three huge churches on Broad, and there are two large churches on North Washington Street. So they're on very heavily used corridors. And in particular, I remember, I won't call this church out, but the one of them on Broad had not shoveled. And I think it was five or six days after the storm. And I saw people trying to walk from the east side towards trying to go to Whole Foods. And the sidewalks were not shoveled, so they were in the middle of the street trying to get to Whole Foods to get groceries. And so it was definitely, I remember, because I remember driving by thinking, wow, we're in day five or six. And so... You know, I know that churches don't have, you know, probably the financial resources maybe some businesses do, but it might be worth to reach out to the church community and to let them know, you know, kind of give them some ideas that you need to have a list of volunteers on call or something. But they've got to be held accountable in some sense because they are on very, you know, we've got five large churches on very heavily used corridors. So that's just one thing I wanted to... And then the second one would be to really utilize our Chamber of Commerce. I might suggest that the staff in the fall make a presentation. The Chamber of Commerce on the liaison, it meets once a month. And maybe the city staff comes in in the fall and just does a quick info to remind the businesses what their responsibilities are. And that might be a nice proactive approach. Thank you.

I think those are both good ideas. I think we generally would agree. from hearing the nod that we should treat churches like commercial, especially because of where they are. We would like to do proactive communications. And other institutions.

Right. I was going to add the standard. Maybe a better standard than commercial is any place that invites the public to enter is required to clear the snow. And that should be the distinction.

Madam Mayor, just a couple of points. I do favor a fine. But somebody needs to keep a list of available contractors, both residential and commercial. I don't think it's beyond the city's capability to do that from a legal standpoint or any other standpoint. If we're going to tell people they've got to do it, then we've got to give them a way that they can do it. It's hard to find if you don't. That's basically government number one. Number two, when we have a high volume of snow like we did now, what I saw repeatedly was the streets were green, But it was all dumped on the sidewalks. You clear the sidewalk, the next day it's dumped right back on the sidewalk. It's utterly unfair to require residential owners to deal with that kind of circumstance, or commercial owners to be penalized under those circumstances. So I'm suggesting we look at the way we plow when there's a high amount of snow. Maybe we don't need curve to curve open streets if the effect of that is to constantly keep the sidewalks closed. And that's in essence what happened. And then when you shoveled a block, you went right up to the corner and there was six foot of snow piled up at the corner. So all I'm trying to do is share a realistic response from someone who actually had to do the shoveling. and how it just wasn't the right priority. We had great streets, but God help you if you tried to walk somewhere, or God help you if you tried to abide by what you wanted to do, because you'd shovel a thing, and the next morning you had to do it all over again. So all I'm saying is when we have high volumes of snow, we need to look seriously at where we're putting it, and do we really need to put the sole priority on the streets?

A follow-up to that is snow removal versus snow plowing. There's a different set of equipment, right? Correct. So it comes up, it goes into a truck, the truck leaves and goes to the Potomac River and dumps it wherever they're doing it. Into the parks, you know, because they froze over it. So that's one, is snow removal versus snow plowing, and that might be taken into consideration.

I think the challenge sometimes with that, well, there is a cost. I think the challenge becomes all of our trucks at that time are used for plowing.

And so we literally have no- Even though there's a dump back there that's still- Correct.

So we may have one, the trucks that we used, we used them at night. We took the equipment off after we plowed during the day, and then we came in at night And we loaded them up and dumped them, and then we reloaded them back with the plows and the spreaders for the next day. So it becomes an equipment issue sometimes where it's just not feasible.

There are no snowblower add-ons to trucks.

Well, they do have them. Oh, they do? They do. Oh, good. They do have them. They're extremely expensive. Oh, yeah, yeah. Extremely expensive.

And maintenance.

But in the snow that we had, I mean, it still wouldn't have helped. I mean, this was basically all concrete. I mean, it was solid, right? And that's why I said this was an anomaly. And to your point, yeah, it was hard because we faced that as we were plowing or as someone was clearing a sidewalk. And we would come through. And even if we weren't at the curb, there was so much snow almost in the middle. It's just dumping it back on. And so that is a challenge. It's a real challenge. And especially as the weather turned and it got colder and the snow got harder, right? It was... very very and I know it was frustrating for a lot of residents and it's something that we're looking at how we do our operation during those times and whether we communicate going forward and sometimes it's it's almost telling residents what we're going to come through don't shovel your sidewalk and i'm not sure that that's necessarily the answer but i think there could be a better way to communicate when we have these type of anomalies does this does the city have any technology or i should say for this anomaly did the city get blindsided by the fact that

the city didn't get good enough forecasts?

No. Actually, the reason that we fared better than a lot of municipalities is because we actually stopped our plowing efforts earlier and went to machines to move the snow more or faster than other municipalities. There were some municipalities that were trying to plow this for two and three days. And we, on Sunday, the snow came in on Saturday. On Sunday, we started with our machines.

We do the forecast.

Yes. I know the forecast. I do know the forecast, yes.

You keep saying an anomaly.

We are better prepared.

Just a thought about outreach to businesses too. Art mentioned tax bills for residential, but Tom Clinton has every single business license and Jodi Acosta and others have those kind of communications. And then the Economic Development Office also has those kind of communications. So I think it should be sort of an all-hands-on-deck when you're reaching out to businesses to make sure that all those... And then the assessor even knows who owns the commercial properties. Yeah.

Because they're the ones who pay taxes and probably have the contracts from trash. Right, right.

And do you like the idea of the product and communication? I mean, communication to the people living in all the apartments isn't really going to help. It's another people. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

So we spent a lot of time talking about proactive communication. I guess I want to go back to the enforcement. So what I'm hearing from staff is that we do not actually have legal authority to levy any fines. Staff's recommendation is to take it out of the code this fall and hope that the General Assembly will let us get that authority added to include cities. Hopefully next summer, when it actually becomes effective, July 1st, 2027, we'll add it back into our books. Is that kind of the takeaway on the enforcement side? I guess one thing I want to bring up, and maybe it's just me, is so our current role is six hours for commercial and 12 hours for residential is when people start shoveling sidewalks. And I think the staff recommendation is moving to 24 hours. I guess I'd like to see us hold a high bar and actually keep it at 612. I know 24 gives you more time and maybe you have unique circumstances that if it's another Snow Crete event that you are more flexible. But if we are aspiring to be that walkable place, I guess I would like to hold a high bar from when we'd like to see snow or window people sidewalks. I know that that is an outlier from where the region is, but I want to at least put it out there for discussion. Especially in the next year, we don't actually have authority to enforce it. back from kind of our values of being a lawful community and lower our standards here.

I agree with the mayor about maintain our standards. However, operationally maybe we just don't start issuing warnings or fines for 24 hours. Because if somebody, our standard is six hours and somebody clears it in seven. We don't have authority to issue a warning. But I'd like to keep that high bar out there.

So two thoughts. So one, I think when you read the code, it's like six hours, except when it's at this time of day. So it's a little clunky. And then when you think about some of our streets, like the six hours will apply to some properties on that street, and 12 hours will apply to other properties. And so... So maybe one other thought or suggestion is if, okay, if dialing it to 24 hours for the reasons you all have talked about, we want to aspire for better, maybe it's making it more uniform at 12 hours for everybody. Like that's just a suggestion. I think the trick with saying the requirement is 6 or 12 hours but we're really not going to enforce it until 24 is I feel like, you know, this past winter and other winters, we get calls from the community wanting us to, why haven't we done something at hour seven? And so I think we want, we want what's on the books to be what we're going to do. And, and, um, or at least that's the feedback. I feel like I, and we, our team has heard, you know, this past winter, and so I don't really want to say, well, we're going to put out the standards this, but we're only going to enforce that. I think we ought to settle on what that would be. So just a couple points of feedback on that.

Can I go back to two things? First of all, this list of contractors, I continue to believe, whether it's the shorter time period or the longer time period, don't make people do what they can't do. In other words, help them solve the problem. Okay, and I think the city ought to be able to play a role there. And secondly, I think city operations, we started to do with the crosswalks at the intersections. I think that needs to move up as a priority.

I have one final question. I thought the issue we had was with the fines, but that we had the clear and bill authority. And I guess we don't, you know, I understand not wanting to use the clear and bill authority if the clear falls on us, right? Like it's another administrative piece to the things, even if we outsource it and we say, well, we're going to go to our list of contractors and then we're just going to bill you. But it's not as though like there's no enforcement mechanism. And it does seem to me that like if we are really dealing with like just total like businesses that are just completely ignoring what we're trying to do and achieve that like we could clear and bill those businesses. So just like it's not as though there's no enforcement mechanism.

That's right. Right now that is the enforcement mechanism available to us under law is we clear it ourselves and we bill the property owner for the work.

But we can contract.

Right, that's right. We do it or we cause it to be done somehow.

So the challenge we've discussed with that is having confidence in our ability to deliver on that. And so Herb, the last couple winters, has attempted to get a contract for supplemental snow clearing services for the city and got no bidders both times. And so... Back to kind of setting an expectation to the public of something we're going to do and then not being able to do it. Is the concern, I think we talked, it's rather than a legal concern, it's a service delivery concern.

To what David said, though, I think looking at the phase three curb ramps, we only talked about Broad and Washington. Before we're looking at additional passes, I would say It's connecting the links. If you've got phase two, we've already got the roads cleared. Phase three, we've got the residential streets cleared. Before we start doing additional passes on residential streets, we should be connecting those links. Make sure we have sidewalks that are contiguous. Just what's in phase three, I think those corners.

I think that's what we've talked about.

Yeah. Well, it's not on the list, though. That's on slide six.

Yeah.

It's on Broad and Washington. Correct.

The rest of the city?

Or at least the bigger streets, at least. I don't know. That's what we have to figure out, is how do we do the connect? So if you look at, for instance, Park and Maple, it's not exactly deep in... depths of the residential area, but those corners are when we start getting things like that. A lot of times those connections occur where there's governments like Virginia and Park Libraries there, so we're doing that corner anyway.

I think too, sometimes you just have to go around. if it's not Broad Street or Washington Street, that there are times when it's not going to last forever. And we can't possibly clear every single solitary corner.

Yeah. Most of the time, by the time you get to that point, it's over.

Can I just clarify one thing? Because I've heard this comment being made. I support and I'm okay with providing a list of commercial businesses that are available to clear snow. The objection I had was to a list of volunteers or engaging volunteers or somehow organizing volunteers. And I just wanted to put that out there for tonight. Thank you.

Okay. Any final thoughts? It sounds like more proactive communication this fall and December, kind of the last before the snowstorm comes. Hopefully no snowstorms. With all the discussion tonight, we will have no snow. It sounds like we will add this to our legislative agenda to request the ability to have fine enforcement. I guess still up for discussion whether we want to keep the same 6 and 12 hour standard or move to some still higher bar. Does the council have an opinion on moving to 24 hours or 6 and 12 or 12 for everything?

I think consistency of 12 is good.

12?

Okay. Any other takeaways on this one?

I think Sally's point about public spaces where public are invited to participate instead of using the term commercial might be much more accurate.

I agree with that. That's really good. Proactive communication where there's public activity. public invitation and then Dave's suggestion about list of contractors that we can make available for people.

And then I guess finally I would just say and this is kind of a technical point but for language purposes we do have the authority to prosecute snow removal the failure to remove snow is a misdemeanor and misdemeanors have to be adjudicated by a court unless you can get them on the prepaid penalty list for Arlington County, which we could look into if you want. But my point is, when you say the word fine, that is really a criminal term. And the authority we're seeking is for a civil penalty, not a criminal penalty. So just for clarity, if we refer to it as civil penalty, that would be just more precise.

How do you assign a charge of commercial property with a misdemeanor?

Yeah, it's on the order of a parking ticket, you know, similar to a parking ticket that you can, or, you know, you got a ticket because your dog wasn't on a leash. It's a minor misdemeanor, and you can prepay.

But it gets to, I think, you know, I think maybe the point you brought up earlier of, like, who exactly gets the civil penalty, like, that is something, like, we've kind of turned over a little bit. It's like that isn't a simple answer in some cases. And so we'll work on that some more. Yeah, it'll be this.

I think that's it for our transportation topic. Thank you so much.

Thank you for inviting us. We look forward to other opportunities like this. I think this is very productive.

All right. Thank you.

Thanks, Commander.

I feel like now we see the 24-hour, like the 0700. He's not my best buddy.

He's not my best buddy.

Well, like with the police, I'd like to do a ride-along. You can come do a ride-along. Thank you very much.

Dana, we're going to break until 10. You're going to introduce Kaylene. She's going to do the presentation.

I'm just going to talk about how the policy has been applied in the past. Just a couple of examples.

So the next item, the Arlington County Community Services, this is really a consent preview.

Yeah.

So we don't need a big staff presentation on that. Maybe just note that it's there. Are there any questions? But I don't think we need a presentation.

I don't think so either. And plus, we're getting Fairfax's next month.

Yeah. So there'll be another one.

Yeah.

Hey, okay, I was cold, now I'm hot.

I don't think so, is Matt?

Yeah, I hear you. I don't think he has to be here for this one. I'm glad it wasn't us.

You guys may hear the speakers for a second, but we're not live.

Oh, this is just the speakers in the room.

I even have it muted on the channel. It's just here.

This one's just more sensitive, it seems like. And then we had everyone with the louder voices. I know. Yep.

This car behind me, around me, in the meeting.

Is Andy's coming back? I don't know. He didn't look like he was coming back.

Matt's coming, but I don't think Andy's coming.

I think I'll ask anyone that's coming up. Correct them towards the center here. Oh, do you want me here? No, that's good. That's perfect. All right.

And Kaylene's going to be talking, but she's kind of wondering. Thank you. You're welcome. You always seem to be able to figure out. It's kind of like a sixth sense.

I don't see my head. The problem is not Windsor Hill. The problem is making sure we're taken care of. Yeah, no, it wasn't.

You can see the whole table.

Legislative land use approval projects where the owner has committed to comply with this policy by contract, voluntary concession or proper. It does not apply to every landlord or rental property in the city. Some of the major components of the policy include, as referenced on page three, planning. Before displacement occurs, owners must submit a relocation assistance plan that describes the project schedule, the relocation timeline, the affected households, replacement housing, financial assistance, staffing for the relocation, and reporting to HHS. Communication, which is referenced on page 4. The owners must provide advance written notice, identify relocation contacts, conduct tenant service, which is referenced on page 4 of the policy, and keep residents informed throughout the process. The policy also requires a minimum 120-day notice before tenants must vacate their units. Assistance, which is referenced on page 6, owners must describe how displaced tenants will receive assistance, including moving expenses, storage, utility hookups, security deposits, rent differential assistance, and relocation services. The policy references the Federal Uniform Relocation Assistance, or URA, payment schedule for eligible payments, and that is also attached in your packet. Oversight, which is referenced on page 11. The policy establishes city oversight, where HHS will review the relocation assistance plans, monitor compliance, and coordinate with developers. The Housing Commission will also review the plans in a public meeting before approval by the Director of HHS. It also includes tenant protections, including tenant retention, which is referenced on page 5. The policy encourages owners to retain existing residents through phased rent increases, rent discounts, minimizing tenant fees, longer leases, and maintaining affordable rents whenever feasible. We also included a right to return, which is referenced on page 10. Residents temporarily displaced receive priority to return to the redeveloped property, provided that they continue to meet the program eligibility requirements. We also included provision for school age children, which is referenced on page seven, where households with children attending Falls Church City Public School, they will receive priority consideration for available housing within the city limits to minimize disruption to education. The policy also addresses additional support for households that have elderly, persons with disabilities, households with limited English proficiency, transportation assistance, bilingual assistance, and home ownership referrals. The policy also establishes timeline requirements. The relocation assistance plan must be submitted before permits or vacate notices. It requires a 120-day tenant notice, required relocation schedule, ongoing reporting to HHS, and that the city review completed within a 60-day period. The policy itself does not appropriate funding. Relocation costs are generally expected to be the responsibility of the property owner or developer. The city may identify additional funding sources when appropriate, but adoption of the policy does not create an automatic financial obligation. In closing, the proposed residential tenant relocation policy establishes a consistent and transparent framework for tenant relocation. It strengthens protections for displaced residents, clarifies expectations for property owners and developers, and formalizes a process that will support future redevelopment while advancing the city's affordable housing goals. Staff recommends that council to approve the resolution adopting this policy. Thank you.

Thank you, Kaylee. Is there any more of this affirmation?

No, that's pretty much it. We just wanted to, if you had any comments or feedback, that type of thing. And then Sally's here also, that we worked really closely with her.

I have several questions. Okay. Some of this had blue headings and some had red headings. Does that matter? Was that a...

I'm not sure.

It was a hierarchy thing.

Blue is higher up than red.

OK.

I thought it might be, but then I couldn't tell. OK. And this applies to all residential units, not just affordable housing, right?

it's voluntary I mean it applies to the three things that Kayling said so projects receiving city or EDA funding projects where the owner has committed affordable dwelling units as part of the legislative land use approval or projects where the owner has committed to comply with this policy by contract voluntary concession or proffer So anyone else, they don't have to follow it, but kind of, as I said in the beginning, generally if there's a displacement of tenants, they'll call the city and ask us for guidance on what to do.

So in a, I don't remember seeing this in any of our voluntary concessions over the years, that if there would be a need to relocate, they would follow a policy, right? We haven't really put that into any voluntary concessions.

I don't think so. That was more of a looking forward kind of a wording. And historically, they've volunteered affordable dwelling units, but not necessarily conformance with the policy. Okay.

So in those situations, if it's a brand-new mixed-use building, they have proffered an affordable dwelling unit. that would then be part of the policy, but maybe the one right next door would not. No. Okay.

If they offer, right, to sign the policy as part of their offering the ADUs.

Yeah. Right. But they haven't, right? I mean, we have, up until now, we haven't done that.

Yeah, you haven't done that. The thought would be moving forward to add that to the language of the voluntary concession. Okay.

And also, this is very similar to the state and federal, you know, the codes. So they're going to have to follow a policy, even for the units that are not ADUs. They just wouldn't have to follow our policy. That's what I was going to ask.

Is the state and federal voluntary or is it mandatory?

It's mandatory.

So even if they didn't volunteer to be part of the city one up until now, they would have been governed still by a state and federal policy?

Yes. Only if they're receiving federal or state money. Federal funds. Yeah, that's right. Not every single housing unit would be affected.

OK. And now I have a specific concern about Virginia Village, which is referenced in here. And that is, and we talked about this a while back as well, if someone is living in one of the non-city owned units, paying a low rent simply because they're frugal or because they're sending money to their family, but they do have a higher income, I'm quite concerned that we're going to end up bumping those people at some point in the process. And is there a way we can have some sort of clawback or carve out to say, if you reside in Virginia Village, you will still be able to reside in Virginia Village?

Well, the rent is going to be calculated on income. So right now, we have an obligation to keep folks that are there because we purchased the building so we're not displacing anyone. Right. But if, you know, there was any redevelopment or if they had to be displaced for any reason, when they come back, their rent is going to be based on their income. So, I mean, in the situation that you described, then they can afford a higher rent because their income is higher. You know what I'm saying? Like, that's a choice.

Well, again, yeah, but that's a choice that they've made, and they've lived in this neighborhood for, I'm going to make something up, 15 years, and this is what they want to afford because they're frugal. And then we, I just wish there was a way we could protect them somehow with some sort of, I don't know,

I see a sentiment, because it feels unfair for that individual. You know, you're trying to apply your policy fairly, because that unit is very precious, and there are probably people that are more in need.

All the people on the wait list. Right. Hundreds.

I get the conundrum, which is like, I want to be fair to that person, but you also want to be fair to all the people in need at the home.

Right, right. So I just, and I don't know, maybe there is no one like that in that situation. No, but there are people like that. There will be, yeah. Yes. Yeah.

I mean, because like you said, you may just want to pay your lower rent so you can buy other things. I mean, it's your choice. But you can afford a higher rent. I mean, I don't know how much higher, but your income is going to allow you to have a rent based on your income. Yes. So...

Which... Maybe your comment earlier made me think of something else, which is do we look at residents' assets at all? Because somebody could have a very low income but have other assets somewhere.

We have a cap on assets. I think it's $40,000, right? $40,000. $40,000. So there is an asset cap as well. $40,000.

Okay.

I don't know. I kind of have the concern of Mary Beth here that, you know, all along we've said, well, we've bought this property and like if it gets redeveloped, we're going to relocate people and you're going to be able to come back. And we haven't done it with the caveat or we haven't been as maybe diligent. every time we've talked about it, to say, and you're going to come back so long as you meet the income eligibility requirements of the program, you know, that's instituted at the building.

Well, I mean, it is... Because I picked up on it because it actually first came up in housing commissions. The staff has constantly talked and have said that they have to come back under the new income.

Because it's affordable housing, so...

But is there a way, like to Mary Beth's point, right, if there are, I don't even know, but like what the proportions are, right, but if the If the breakdown were like you 10% of people who wouldn't be income eligible. What is the the potential that they come back to an apartment but they pay like market rate for that apartment so they have like a unit but the unit is not an income eligible unit. The unit is a unit that we recognize that they can pay more for them. A person who would be there as part of the affordable. program and maybe they don't decide to come back. But it's like a policy in terms of how we're applying the policy given the situation, given the reality that we are the people dislocating.

Well, the only... That's the tricky part. Yeah, the problem is that, I mean, what you're describing, we would lose that unit. It wouldn't be affordable anymore.

No, I know that, but it's like the person also would, like, technically be evicted from the city, probably. Like, maybe they could find a place, you know, above the hair cedar, but maybe there are no units there. And so we say, like, okay, well, 10 miles away, if we were to do a 10-mile radius, which maybe needs to be smaller given our size, we're like... Great, you've lived as part of our community for 15 years. Go live in Wolf Trap, which is 10 miles away. And you may not be able to come back because there isn't any money in it.

I think your idea is provided for the relocation because the relocation policy says you get prior to come back at what rent is based on your income. So in that situation, they could come back based on the affordability rules.

And we go up to 110%. I mean, we have units that go up to 110%, so they could go up to that high. I don't know what the range of units is going to be at Virginia Village, but we have ADUs that go up to 110%, so they could potentially go into one of those higher units.

I'm just saying, I don't think that we should... be so strict in this circumstance and I understand the policy I get that we're doing this in order to to expand affordable housing preserve yeah preserve and expand but at the same time it's like but we don't normally say like well you could afford a higher permit so you should go live somewhere else and we're gonna like forcibly remove you from the unit you have been opting to live in this entire time and so it does seem like to the extent that they have an option to return, but they can pay a higher rent than someone else would pay, then we should be open to them paying that instead of saying you're not income eligible and therefore you can't return.

Well, that may be an option. I mean, we don't know what is going to be developed. There may be units up to 110% at Virginia Village. I mean, it depends on... what is proposed and what is going to be built there. I mean, they may have options there, but we also have other options within the city. So, I mean, all of those options would be presented.

But doesn't the policy say they have priority to return? There's that sort of units they return to based on their income, but they do have priority to return to Virginia Village.

Based on their income.

Yeah, and page 10 also referenced someone who cannot move back if they don't qualify. there is also the possibility that they can get compensated for another move I guess that would determine based on at that time what exactly that means what type of move they would need to do so if they do not qualify to return back in reference as we mentioned in Virginia Village then there is also assistance to get them relocated somewhere else yeah see that was my question because I thought on 10 we were excluding this

set. So tenants that are no longer qualified to move back to the property after the project is completed, for example, due to a change in income, household size, or composition, they receive relocation or assistance payments for two moves. I don't know that.

I read the earlier section that they get dibs on the new property. They do. Yes, depending on the rent. So if they can qualify for 110%

If we have units at that... Yeah, so if there's a place for them to move back to...

Yes, we'll assist them. Either here or at one of our other 110%.

No, yeah, exactly. So they would get priority in the building. They just don't get it at the same cheap rent.

Sure, no. It's based on their income.

So if they could move back but declined to move back, let's say they found lower... would they receive the second move? Yeah, people have the option to not move back in, yeah. The relocation and assistance for the second move, if there was a unit for them to move back to, but they are like, no, you're not going to, you're going to make me pay more, so no, I'm going to move somewhere else.

Then we would assist them with that move.

Even if it was that they declined to move back to the property.

I think only if they're not qualified. Yeah. Do we assist?

Yeah, if they decline because they're not qualified.

They're qualified for a different unit within the property.

I see. Yeah, I see. I didn't understand that when we wrote this, that, like, there's different... We have different AMIs.

Yeah, okay. But I don't know what the AMIs are going to be. We don't know what it will be as yet.

So this means you're no longer qualified for any of them.

Yeah. Unless your income qualifies you for one that we have there, that's a higher level of AMI.

Yeah, but I mean...

If it's a higher level of AMI, the rent would go up. But then they choose not to move back.

Right.

Would we...

There's no assistance for that. There's no assistance for that.

No. Then we would not provide assistance. So that's also written on page six. I think that might need to be clarified.

What did you say, Kayleen? She's saying something. It's on page six of the policy. If someone elects to not move back, then they would not be entitled to relocation assistance. So let's just say someone is relocated and they like where they are and they're fine there and they do not want to move back, then they do not receive any sort of relocation assistance or they choose to move somewhere else.

Okay, volunteer-elects. Okay. Erin, did you get your concern?

No, not really. Because, I mean, I'm reading K, and it says, like, the best opportunity to lease the affordable units, and they'll be offered the opportunity to lease the units before being marketed to the public, provided the tenants satisfy the program's then current eligibility requirements. So I think if you had, like, let's say you have 100% affordable building, and it goes from 30% AMI to 110% AMI, And person X was living in Virginia Village. They were relocated outside of Virginia Village. Virginia Village reopened. It's 100%, 30% to 110%. And person, I don't know what I call them, X, is 120%. Does person X get to say, sure, that's a 30% AMI unit or a 110% AMI unit, but I'll pay market rate. recognizing I don't qualify to be in a 30% or 100% AMI unit as you've defined that unit. So do you say to that person, person X, you need to go find somewhere else in the city, or do you say to them, sure, you don't qualify, but given that you were a preexisting tenant, we're going to let you come back into the building, which was 100%, 30 to 110%, but you're going to have to pay A MARKET RATE RENT. LIKE, I DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS.

THAT'S NOT OUR INTENT, BECAUSE WE WOULDN'T HAVE A... I MEAN, OUR INTENT IS NOT TO HAVE MARKET RATE UNITS IN THIS BUILDING.

NO, I KNOW THAT, BUT I MEAN, IT'S LIKE FOR THE PERSON WHO'S THE... YEAH, BUT I GUESS IT'S THE QUESTION OF, LIKE, IS THERE SOMETHING TO DO TO ACCOMMODATE PRE-EXISTING TENANTS WHO GET BUMPED BECAUSE OF REDEVELOPMENT AND THEN, LIKE, CAN'T RETURN TO VIRGINIA VILLAGE.

If council wants to do that, we would have to. It's an idea that's not in this policy. So we would just have to introduce it as a new policy.

So this applies to more than just our buildings?

No, it might be in the policy, but it might be for purposes of our redevelopment or our feed process. That's what I'm trying to understand. There are people who are currently living in city-owned properties that may be redeveloped that would not BE COVERED BY THIS POLICY. AND I GET THAT, LIKE, IF THEY'RE IN A CCAU CURRENT ELIGIBILITY UNIT NOW, AND WE'RE, LIKE, A CCAU PROGRAM, AND IT WAS LIKE, OH, YOU KNOW, YOU HAVE MOLD ALL OVER YOUR APARTMENT, WE NEED TO RELOCATE YOU, WE WANT THE PERSON TO COME BACK IN, LIKE, I GET THAT YOU'RE HAVING PEOPLE DO THIS IN THE CONTEXT OF, LIKE, STARTING IN AFFORDABLE UNITS AND RETURNING TO AFFORDABLE UNITS, BUT WE ARE JUST IN, LIKE, THE ON POSTURE OF basically potentially redeveloping units that have been people's homes and then just kind of like shrugging our shoulders to them if they don't qualify for income eligibility.

Well, I mean, we would also assist them. I mean, we have a list of every apartment in the city and all the rents. I mean, we would provide that to them. We wouldn't just, you know, leave people out in the cold. I mean, Kayleen is very good at working with every tenant. We'd do everything that we could to help them find housing. But at the same time, we have, like, you know, over 300 people on our waiting list that have been waiting for years. to have the opportunity. You know what I mean? They don't have the opportunity to pay an extra amount for rent.

So it's a fairness issue, too. Yeah, this subset, right, of individuals. Right.

And the subset is, so all the people that are living in the city-owned units now are qualified for affordable housing. No. No. No, they're not. Because some of them were there already. Yes.

And we're not displacing them.

Oh, when we bought it.

Yeah. Because when we bought it, we agreed not to. We don't have... Do you have any idea, Kayleen, about how many people we might be talking about? Of the people you know.

It would just be currently just one household. If we're thinking of anyone that's going to be over 80% AMI, it's only one household.

Well, then it wouldn't be as much. I mean, if it's one household, we could definitely assist them with finding somewhere or... you know, have that higher income AMI. Female Speaker Yes.

Female Speaker Okay. So, given those concerns, can we leave this and do something specific when we get to the Virginia Village moment? Or should it be in the policy?

This policy applies to everyone, so it's not just Virginia.

So we don't want to do something specific in our policy to be aware of it as we are working with our cities.

Yes, and properties are already using this policy. Yeah. So, yeah, we just want to have one adopted policy that applies everywhere. Okay.

So I think this policy is very good. other than that one concern about that one.

Luckily, it's one person. That's good to know.

Yeah.

It is good to know. Yeah.

And for the return, we can also, instead of making it as a policy, as we mentioned, since this is a policy for the whole city, if we are concerned about that one household that is over 80% AMI and we're adamant on them, you know, returning back to the redeveloped property, if there is nowhere else for us to find them, we can have it where they're in the units, even though it's a... affordable unit that they will pay rent based on what their AMI is until we actually find something that's better suitable for them. So the unit, although it would not be considered to be a market rate unit, but it would still consider to be an affordable unit, but the person will be paying the market rate rent until we find somewhere else to move them to. That could be something that can be considered once the person comes in. It would be out of compliance with that specific unit, but it would be until that specific household moves out, and then it goes back to being an affordable unit.

Especially if we're only talking the one person. So would that work? Do you have any other comments and a few questions?

Okay, so on the. I understand right there was the 120 day notice to the tenant and then there have to be the 60 day notice to the city prior to the issuance of a notice to vacate letter, which would be at the 120 days. So like technically you're talking about the city has the submission of the plan to the city has to take place basically 180 days before a person would be the vacate date. Yes. But in places the plan talks about the tenant notification letter so that like the relocation assistance plan. So for example in 4A, B, C tenant notification. The relocation assistance plan shall include a copy of the tenant notification letter notifying the tenant of the required vacation of the premises, blah, blah, blah. Are we talking about the draft letter that they plan to give someone? Are we talking about, like, I looked at Fairfax's recently adopted plan for comparison, and they seem to say, like, they want a copy of, like, the letter that is the notice of intent to, like, redevelop or rehabilitate or whatever it is but that letter isn't the notice to vacate so it's like this is the notice that this is happening as part of this we're going to need to do a tenant survey we're going to need to do x y and z so that like Because here, you know, you wouldn't be issuing the tenant notification letter as to, like, the notice to vacate because the plan would have to be submitted prior to that.

So it would be, like, for the plan?

Letter to vacate, yeah. And so that discrepancy just stood out to me in terms of the, like, what are they actually including in their 180-day packet? Is it their draft letter so that we can review what it is they plan to give to tenants? Or is it the... A letter that's like a notice of intent to be followed by a, here's your actual notice to...

So it would be kind of like the B above that, the displacing activity, like what is the displacing activity and what's going to be happening?

Yeah, I mean, that's what I'm asking. I don't know what the tenant notification actually is. So I think that... Fairfax adopted their updated policy on September 9th of 2025 and then looking at that one it looks like Arlington also was undertaking like updating their policy because everyone's kind of fallen out with their local policies even though they recognize you know the federal and state requirements but they're all doing like if you have county funding like we want to make sure to that we have this mandatory policy that you're having to follow. And so it would probably make sense just to, I know the Fairfax one passed, but to see the status of the Arlington one and then just try to bring ours into alignment in terms of how we're talking about some of these things at different points in time. And then I think in other places they've talked about, you know, the duration of rental assistance. So like the URA, for example, it was like rental assistance up to 42 months. I think in ours, I don't know if it has the kind of duration or if there's a cap on the duration of rental assistance. It was either here or maybe the Fairfax one went up to like... four months right so there might be something on like how long is this potentially lasting for um and then uh on g i i just i would be more comfortable if the city attorney just gave a closer look to the like priority return status and making sure we don't have fair housing issues, just in aspects of that. So again, maybe checking with other jurisdictions and how they've handled priority return frameworks. And then on L, it seems that given the housing market for permanent relocations, I don't know whether we're able to do it or not, but this is by listing the vacant units. And I don't know if we're talking about a listing every two weeks. Would a biweekly, so page 10 under the permanent relocations, the owner should provide for relocation assistance. And one of the things is biweekly listings of vacant units within a 10 mile radius.

You're asking about the meaning of biweekly, is it twice a month or twice a week?

Yeah, is it like twice a week or is it twice, or is it every other week? Right, I understand. But it seems that in the housing market, if an owner were giving a person, in the housing market we're in, a list of vacancies every two weeks, They'd be like gone by the time the person was inquiring about the vacancy. So I think we need to reduce the cadence of like they're pushing that information to people who are in this situation. And then, you know, we probably want to decrease the mile radius because if you actually draw like a 10-mile radius out from Falls Church, we're talking about like Wolf Trap. mm-hmm Delhaven Anacostia like can we tighten up the radius of what we're looking at to the extent we're trying to keep people like close to relationships you know like their support system and their medical providers and all of that sort of stuff and then argue that providing a list of vacancies really isn't make sense in today's day and age they should be providing access to

A service that provides those, because they're real time.

That's kind of true. Yeah. A list of vacancies.

Just sending a list feels 20 years old. It's more like they need to make sure that that person has access to listings.

Right. I think they would have to. Kayleen, how would they have access to listings?

The thing is, the way it's set up is that the plan would include how they are going to do that. This is not us telling them exactly how they would go ahead and provide these listings. This is just specifying the things that they have to include in their plan. We don't have anything specific on saying how exactly they're supposed to do it. I guess in a case like this, once they put together their relocation team, that would be something I guess they would have to make clear on how they plan to provide these listings to the households. Be there is some electronic means or some way that they plan to do it.

Yeah, I guess I'm just saying that they should think about how they're doing it. But at a minimum, it should be like weekly listings of units within like five miles and even five miles.

Okay, we can discuss the edit.

Using access just because if they're printing them out and handing them to them, it's like they could also just be saying, here, let me help you load an app on your phone.

I mean, because like even you were talking about Virginia Village, a person may have a computer, they may not have a computer, may be elderly. I mean, they may want a written listing. I mean, it depends on the person what is going to be you know, most beneficial for them. But I wouldn't assume everybody has access to electronic listings.

My point is just that number two seems to be giving people stale information in this day and age, and that L2 should be getting people information faster than biweekly, and that we should be doing it with a smaller radius than a 10-mile radius, given that we're only a two-mile city to start with. AND THEN MY LAST POINT WAS JUST ON FOR REVIEW AND APPROVAL OF THE RELOCATION ASSISTANCE PLAN. I WASN'T SURE OF THE, I GUESS, PURPOSE OF HAVING THE HOUSING COMMISSION, LIKE PRESENTING THE PLAN AT THE HOUSING COMMISSION. one for just like a timing, right? If you only have 60 days, like yes, the housing commission could be meeting in those 60 days. So I get like the housing commission's input on the plan itself, but I guess when it comes to the plan and some of the information in a plan even though there's like surveys and whatever else there's gonna be like household information that you might not want to make part of a public meeting and if you're presenting a plan at a public meeting then you're running into like potential privacy issues as to the people who are there or for

expectations as to like what the purpose of that meeting is versus the purpose of the plan and so I I just I just have some hesitation about what five accomplishes you know I think this is they would just be the vehicle to hold the public meeting I mean like for example some of the properties don't have community rooms or a place to meet you know like Virginia Village there's no location you know what i mean if they were going to all come together so i think it was just you know they that's part of their mission is to you know get community input on plans and that type of thing so i think that's where they were looking at them hosting the meeting i guess the flip side is it's just like a public i take the purpose is that it's the city reviewing the owner's plan and giving feedback as to whether they've met like the

Criteria of the plan and that it The city can do whatever reach outreach. They're like doing to the affected residents, but that it may May not be prudent for a variety of reasons including privacy considerations Probably just fine to have a public meeting And they'd be just fine yeah Just slowing things down.

Yeah, I had a similar thought I

just handling it administratively but I don't I don't know because I mean you could go to the Commission as a housing Commission you could go to the Housing Commission and say we've received a plan this is what staff is doing like there's a there could be an oversight role for the Housing Commission with respect to staff just updating them as to what's happening but you don't have to have a public meeting on the plan itself which may be just surfacing more information given the information that's included in the plan, then you want to necessarily have posted publicly, if that makes sense.

The plan will still be a public document, but that's different than having a public meeting. And a public document, I guess, we'd need to be careful about personal information.

And this will just be an opportunity for residents to give input, you know, just at a meeting hosted by the housing commission.

That they object to certain parts of the plan, perhaps.

Mm-hmm.

I don't know if that's it. But I do think, yeah, check our neighbors and what they've been doing for these sort of same reasons and that it would just make sense to move it.

Thanks. Thanks for this. I think it's a really solid policy. I need to revisit the Virginia Village piece one more time. I know that it's not, you know, we don't have anything specific regarding Virginia Village in this document. But, you know, when I went to one of the information sessions at Oak Street Elementary, I met a couple. And the A husband was of retirement age. The wife, I think, makes a meager salary, and they do have a child in the school system. And they were talking to me, a very nice couple, but talking to me about the reason they lived in Virginia Village is because And my understanding is they do live in one of those four quadplexes that backs up to the Bowl of America that we own. But they're concerned that they're living there for a reason, and that was to save money, he's retired, that sort of thing. I guess my question is just, and I know this isn't so much regarding this policy, but it has been in the back of my mind. Do we have any sense of how... the numbers of people that might be affected coming back and now having to pay a higher rent once the... I guess we wouldn't really know that until we have the RFP selected and really know what the developer would be charged. So I guess if you could just talk me through that a little bit so I understand how that's all going to work. I know I had used the term... can we grandfather these people in who had been in there originally, choosing to live there on purpose because they were naturally affordable because they weren't in the greatest shape. And now knowing obviously they'll be in places that are in better shape because they'll be brand new. But again, just wondering how we're gonna work with these residents who had to leave. because of this development. And now we're coming back and might have to be paying more. And I understand what you're saying, Dana, about what they can afford it. I get that. But on the other hand, a lot of them chose to stay there because it was a lower rent. So I am still sort of grappling with that.

I just want to point something out also as we're referring to Virginia Village. Income is not going to be the only thing that some people would not be able to return to the same thing. As all leases in Virginia and properties, there are also occupancy standards. which goes against or would be considered lease violations and there are units or households at virginia village that are within lease violations and they would not be able to return if we being specific income is not going to be the only issue or thing that we have to think about They would have to follow a lease base. They would have to follow occupancy standards. And a lot of that is currently not happening at Virginia village. Since we, you know, referring to Virginia village income is not going to be the only thing we need to consider. So a lot of households would not be able to return the way they left, even if they meet the income requirements, a lot of that will change. Okay.

But would we be able to give them some extra, for lack of a better term, hand-holding to try to, you know, if they want to return and just helping smooth that, you know, just working with them and figuring out what they can, I don't know, I'm just, you know, again, I just, talking with this couple, I have them in the back of my head and they were concerned, so I'm assuming we would work with them and help them figure out what the best options are. Yes. Okay. Okay, thanks.

Thank you for this. My one comment is anywhere it references payments, because mostly you link to a 2021 schedule, do we have the ability to index it to inflation? We're adopting this policy at a point in time. Anytime we are offering payment schedule.

I think the payment schedule comes from HUD.

Yeah, it is from HUD, and it should be as amended. Yeah. But 2021 is like the latest.

Is that the latest? Yes, this is the latest. It has not been updated.

And then it just says, like, it's going to be updated every time there's an update. They'll, like, incorporate the new numbers into the tables. But they have it, like, the tables are in the document. Right.

Well, things have increased a lot since 2020.

That's true.

That's just something I noticed that, you know, I think it's a good discussion and adopt something. So thank you for this.

Thank you all for your comments, and it's your first pass. Thanks. We appreciate it. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Do we have a schedule for the next time this comes? I don't think we do.

This is going, I'm sorry, when it will come, like on an annual basis or something?

No, we just got a lot of feedback to make some edits and stuff.

So we were planning to be on the agenda for Monday night. So if we needed another turnaround time, it would come back in August. So it would be that.

I think that's okay.

That's no harm. We can take a look at all the things.

Let's do that then.

Okay. Okay.

Thank you, everyone.

Thank you, Kayleen. Thank you, Kayleen. Thank you.

So the other item for human services is we have a CSA agreement amendment that we're asking that be on consent for your next meeting, and we'll just see if you have any questions about it.

Raising the CSA to up to 12%?

Yes. It's the rate that we would charge Arlington to put residents in there.

We'll have another one for Fairfax County coming soon.

That's coming this month.

This is specifically to Aurora House? Yes. Any other piece of the CSA?

Okay. Seems like we're good.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. All right. So I think we're on to Virginia Village.

All right.

And Matt's going to run in.

Is Matt running in?

I don't know.

He's in his office. He might be electronic. So as Matt is walking in, we'll turn it over to him for a second.

What is before council is code language that would...

provide a special exception approval process for redevelopment in the Virginia Village District in the period after July 1, 2027. Prior to that date, the ordinance would allow for redevelopment under the terms of this ordinance. Essentially, the entitlements are in the ordinance. And then after July 1, 2027, it would be by special exception. So we'll go through that. That sort of was driving the main amendments. But we also have some updates to the city code to address landscaping and some other comments that the council had made and community members have made. And we've attempted to address those. And we have some technical updates. As we reviewed the ordinance since first reading, there were some things that we wanted to addressed in the code language and working with the city attorney we've done that I think in a good way and we can brief you on that so turn it over to Matt thank you and we also have other updates that we can provide as well as promised in the staff report yeah so good evening I'm going to be joined by Jack Traynor who's going to help run the presentation the first half is

of covering the key fundamental update from our last conversation in late june and as wyatt mentioned getting into the distinction between two different review processes that i think we're landing in a pretty good place we did want to highlight and i can kind of jump into the second half of the presentation which gets into some of the adjacent and related updates that we've done since June, which capture feedback we heard from you all, from the community, things that I know are reflected in the RFP. And some of those really get into I think consistency with what we're trying to achieve on that site. So as Jack's going to get into a number of those slides, you can see between massing, between vegetation, between parking and some of the other aspects. We're kind of making this a more substantive update since we're here, since we're going to do another first reading. Why not just try to capture as much as we can? So with that, I'll hand it over to Jack and go from there.

Okay, thank you, Matt. I'll start on the fourth slide, the schedule. It's kind of Matt which is going over following tonight's work session Council's scheduled to have your second first reading on the proposed zoning amendments at your July 27th meeting And then these will come back for final consideration the third quarter of this year So going to the next slide I So all the updates since the first first reading a couple weeks ago are in gray, the bulk of which is introducing a special exception. parts of the code where special exception would be required for all proposals in the district, which would go into effect July 1st, 2027, following the RFP window. And so staff's proposing to break this up and keeping the buy-write option, but that wouldn't go into effect until June 30th, 2027. reflecting the, you know, discretionary review of the RFP projects, and then recognizing that, you know, so everything that follows that would become the special exception following the buy-write period of the RFP proposal review. And I can go into this a little more. So during the special exception process, that would obviously go through the city council review and approval. Staff's proposing a 60-day review period for that with specific review criteria, specifically looking at affordable housing or open space contributions, building design. compliance with the adopted streetscape design standards and mitigation of impacts on surrounding properties, specifically traffic lighting and parking. So that review and criteria scope is proposed to be kept pretty narrow in order to meet that 60-day window that staff's proposing. And if we go to the next slide, so that's the bulk of the UPDATES TO THE PROPOSED CODE AT COUNCIL'S REQUEST, BUT THERE ARE A COUPLE KIND OF MINOR ADDITIONAL THINGS I JUST WANTED TO HIGHLIGHT REGARDING BUILDING SCALE AND DESIGN. SO KEEPING THAT THREE TO FOUR STORY MAXIMUM, IF YOU'LL RECALL INTO THE CODE, IT'S ACTUALLY ON THE NEXT SLIDE. In order to keep that three to four stories near Gundry Drive, I think our previous iteration had a maximum height of 40 feet or four stories, but it's actually really difficult to achieve four stories at 40 feet. Typically, four stories is somewhere between 40 and 45 feet. recognizing that the maximum height's been changed just to four stories for that zone within 150 feet, but obviously everything else would stay the same. The bulk plane would still drive that four-story height closest to Shirley Street, and the step back would still apply above three stories. And then moving to slide... Above three stories. Yes, above three stories.

Not below four stories, at the fourth story.

Yes, after three stories.

At the third story.

So the probability of it being at 40 feet. So if you look at the Park Avenue townhomes, they have that same rule being applied where it's 40 feet or four stories, whichever is lesser. The issue that we're discovering is that you can't really fit four stories into a 40-foot height. And therefore, when that rule is applied, you can only build three stories, which is what the T zones are delivering on park Avenue. And after the third floor, there's that 10 foot setback and a fourth floor appears. So that's kind of what we're discovering and kind of being more explicit about here.

that let's just say three stories or 40 feet because that's really what was actually happening given grade constructability of these units it just makes i think more sense and people can visualize what that looks like i guess the heartburn i'm having on this is that i actually really i i recognized that the four stories the 40 feet was going to be a problem um and i but i liked it because what's a story. And if you have a situation where with basement apartments, you know, they're half down into the ground. Now you're dealing with four stories, but 40 feet, it kind of pushes things to say, we've got that basement apartment environment. So we were kind of forcing it down a little bit. And then I was thinking, yeah, and then you can fit four stories within that 40 feet.

So I think in that environment, the basement wouldn't count as an actual story because not enough of it would be above ground. So that would actually still achieve the same outcome where you would have maybe a partial level, which is your basement, and then three stories above that.

I guess that's what was unclear to me is a basement apartment that obviously is not going to be completely underground because you've got to have egress and everything else. Does that count as a story? Or at what point is a story a story? That's my fundamental problem with stories is they're so vague and undefined.

It's five feet. I did look that up. I think if five feet is above ground of your basement, then it's a story. Is that right? Something like that.

Usually I think it's like half of it has to be five feet. Yeah, it's five feet. It's overall height. becomes a factor of that base weight.

Sorry, so can you explain one more time? We've gotten rid of the height cap on the four stories, 40 feet. We've also gotten rid of a height cap on what six stories means. So can we just, sorry to make you repeat this, but the rationale for having no height in feet cap is exactly what?

So it's still there. We haven't gotten rid of it. I think what we're saying is in some areas, the height map is very clear about relying on stories for a maximum height. And I think when we try to do the same in terms of feet, we start to run into inconsistencies. There's other areas where I think we've heard everybody, four stories may be a little bit too tall before we have that 10-foot setback. And I think everybody seems to be comfortable with what we're seeing on Park Avenue in terms of the T-zones and what they're delivering and recognizing As we mentioned, the buildability of four floors within a 40-foot restriction is, I don't want to say almost impossible, but very difficult. So all those forces combined, I think, are allowing us to clarify, not remove, what we mean where in terms of height restrictions and expectations for building stepbacks.

Yeah, I guess I'm just wondering, what does four stories mean on Shirley without a height cap? I mean, when you say what we are all clear at, to me it's not clear what the height is.

Well, I think right now in Shirley we're saying 40 feet or three stories.

Is it keeping that?

Yeah, it was keeping feet. I guess to eliminate stories or feet, I'd rather keep feet because a foot is a defined amount. And let them have flexibility about how many stories.

Right, or you keep the edge, you know, like you have the edge so that you push the... You keep it three on the edge, you actually push the four in. But the way it was, I thought it ended up being struck that both the height for the four stories and the height for the six that there's actually in the code language not...

I think the six did not have... Six you didn't have feet yet, so I think that was something we had discussed that would be added with second reading.

I mean, I don't think it can just not have it.

So I think in both cases that's something we can add between the first and second reading. I think that's what we did previously.

But we had the 40 feet, so it was like, okay, great. I think if we had to remove one or the other, I'd rather remove the one that's a vague term.

Yeah, I just don't want it open, like, to be open-ended. No building shall exceed six stories or no, you know, three stories or 40 feet, and then wherever it says 573, subject to four-story height maximum, and then you don't have the 440 anymore in there. So there are two places that probably need a definition as to what ultimately the cap is. Okay.

I also wonder if the step back is adequate at 10 feet or whether it should be more for properties above and below.

So just along that edge in the park, maybe?

What's that?

That edge in the park?

Yeah. Yeah, in the park.

I think your change actually lowers the step back effectively the change you made I think it actually effectively lowers it because 40 feet three stories in 40 feet is not really to get to 40 feet in three stories is difficult so those would be big ones And we're not going to be doing... That would happen if you had, like, 9-foot, 10-foot ceilings. We're not going to be doing those inside units or affordable units. So I think you probably... With that change, I think you probably actually lowered the step back effectively.

Which is a height. I think what I just heard here was more of a horizontal dimension. Is that what you're getting at? Oh, step-back versus... Step-back, step-back.

Step-back versus step-back, sorry.

That's right.

Okay, on slide eight, some additional clarifications have been added to the screening requirements, notably an evergreen tree inclusion to ensure year-round coverage in screening. occurs and so that specific requirement's been added. And then also the fence screening element's been clarified, reduced from I think three fence options down to two that are kind of more private.

Okay.

And that, okay. And then on slide 11. Sorry. Sure.

One thing about the screening. Sure. So we don't have removed, I don't remember, maybe it's not in here. There's no screening, let's say between an RM and a B zone. So between like the Gibson Street Bowling Alley, like there's no screening requirement is there a buffer requirement in the code like i'm just thinking if you were to come down south maple like ideally i would think design aesthetics wise the people living in the building probably would want to screen from the bowling alley parking lot but i but now there's like the screening only applies within the properties until like the edges between uses but then it removed or it doesn't include between an R and an RM and a B.

So right now the screening is being applied to the two sensitive boundaries with Winter Hill and the public park where we have a 35 foot setback within which 15 feet will be allocated towards vegetation. we've kind of further elaborated on what that means the two zones let's say the northern part near global america and the southern new tax analysts don't have as deep of a setback because those areas are not as critical to the south that building has already redeveloped at some point both america may as well so we don't have as much space

to work with we can still consider vegetation it just won't be 15 feet deep yeah yeah i just i mean that's why i was asking like you know the buffer requirements and that table that has the like different zones yeah is is the reason that there's like no buffer in this code because there's already the rmb in the buffer table that elsewhere exists because i would i would think that you would want a sort of screen between a residential use and a bowling alley parking lot right

There's not currently.

If it's not 15 feet of trees, I understand that. But it should be something for the six floors of building you anticipate there.

We can clarify that.

And that will be taken care of with the RFP anyway, not the zoning.

No one comes after us.

They're all on by us.

It still makes sense to have it.

It makes sense to have it, but

We'll still be able to say, no, no, no, we want a row of trees here or something.

Right. Also, there's a new sign, and it's no longer called Bull America. It's now Lucky Strike.

Oh, it is.

It went up today. Yes.

We print everything now.

Everything. Everything. Where it says Bull America, you have to go to a copy-paste or a search replace.

While we're on setbacks, Zoning as written. How does it allow for building articulation?

Yeah, the typical like projections first I plan would apply I don't know what those are offhand, but there's no specific language, you know prohibiting What's what's allowed under typical site plan? for development

Because we've also heard feedback that people don't want the flat wall. They want to face the flat wall. And so we are super strict about it. I think we want to allow some interesting building articulation. We want to allow a back porch. We're not allowing a dumpster back there, but we want to encourage that.

So there is, at the end of the staff report, when we look at the draft zoning language, I think it used to be in the intent paragraph. We shifted to the design standards, the introduction to all the different requirements that exist. Now I have, I think, two or three sentences that kind of get to that articulation, good architecture, high-quality materials. So I think we've elaborated on that. If we need to go further, maybe add anything else that maybe you guys feel like is not being captured, like balconies perhaps. I don't think balconies are in there. But to the degree that we can be more explicit about projections into the setback.

I think one of the challenges we have is That sort of stuff is exactly what I think we need in the urban design documents. However, we don't have those yet. We have this. This is going in before that's available. And so I think we have a bit of a timing issue here that we have to deal with because exactly that sort of interest, that architectural interest that we want, how much of a projection, variation, it belongs in urban design, master planned, We don't really want it too much in a zoning overlay.

Yeah, so if we want to look at what the code text says, how it sort of addresses that question, it's part of the special exception review criteria. I think that's what Matt was getting at. when considering a building's aesthetic and its architecture and design. 519 is so one of the proposed considerations. And again, this is part of the special exception review considerations. So the resulting development effectively utilizes building articulation, facade projections, transitions in architecture, and the use of high quality and durable materials that reflect their interior uses. and considers a facade scale and rhythm compatible with the surrounding neighborhood and residential districts.

That makes it eligible for an SE?

This would be part of the consideration within the SE process, yeah. So it's something you would look at under an SE.

It's something we would look at when we're evaluating the RFP responses.

we're talking about. I can't get to it. The height, lot, lot, yard, and tree regulations. It's in the supplementary regulations. 1102. The structures in there. The front yards. The measurement of yards. Buildings and projections in yards. The supplemental, except for accessory drawings, is regularly following buildings uses, architectural features, may occupy or project into required yards as indicated. And then it goes into the minimum front or rear yard. And then it's cornices, eaves, architectural features, uncovered stairs, terraces, steps. And so it's like two and a half feet, six feet. It came up in T-Zones and other stuff. Right, it did. I think that just answers your question about... Yeah, I just wanted to make sure we had something.

So it sounds like we can reference something outside of this specific overlay. Things would still be allowed in the back to encourage good design. It's so strict that 35 feet means the basement building. It's completely flat. And then this might actually... As long as that applies to the overlay...

I haven't found a provision like that that applies, because the one that I found is an R1A provision, and then the other one I found was a, I forget what district, but...

This one's been 481102 supplementary regulation. Okay.

The funny part is, like, 524, 525... Because it came up with the whole thing on the penthouses, on the mechanical units, on the top of buildings, too. Right.

So I don't, yeah, I don't know if it applies or not, but that seems to be where the code talks about projections.

Yep.

It says in any R district.

So we can run that down, and I think the language we mentioned earlier about facade projections, building architecture, I believe that was all drafted in June, which means it's in the RFP as well. So that's something we're going to be expecting. Okay.

Can I ask a question about setbacks while we were on that slide? What is the Gibson Street setback? I don't have one right now.

I believe 18. I think we have a slide for that.

It's 18 from South Maple. And so I think it was 20 feet for all internal.

Well, internal, but I thought it was 18 or 15. Shirley Street is 15.

I think staff report line 626. List them A, B, C, D, street by street.

Yeah, I was looking at 623 to 634 and I didn't see it.

Yeah, it's on that list.

But is that because we own everything on Gibson Street?

We don't.

No, but like if 300 South Maple wanted to redevelop or something.

There's one property we don't own.

We had 15 feet from commercially zoned properties and fronting Shirley, so 15 from Shirley. 18 from South Maple, 20 from abutting residentially zoned properties within the district, and at least 35 feet from Gundry.

So they're corner properties, so they're on South Maple and Gibson, whether it's the city-owned side or the privately owned side, and I'm trying to figure out what's the corner setback from Gibson.

For Gibson.

I think you found a miss. We can add that to bullet B under Maple, because I think... The height is very similar to what we're showing from April there. That's probably the most appropriate one.

So as long as we're talking about the setbacks, I raised this kind of a little late with the previous first reading, but I've since understood it better. As far as with the previous first reading, we reduced it down to 15 feet on Shirley. I was very concerned about the height, width, And so the enclosure from the research I've done, we're not seeing a, we're seeing a greater, tighter than a two to one enclosure on Shirley right now. Even assuming a 35 foot street. I think it might be closer to 33, so that would make it even tighter. The, so you've got 15, 35, 15, And if you're looking at this two-to-one enclosure of the street, which is as small as you could go for a residential street, it should be a maximum on each side about 37.5, I think, or 32.5 to keep that two-to-one ratio of an enclosure.

So I think by closure, you're kind of describing a different, almost bold plane from Shirley. Exactly.

That right. What, you know, width of the street relative to the height, um, obviously with a wide street, like broad, you can go higher in a residential single family. You want to be like four to one. I have no idea if we are, but for a residential street, we don't anything less. It starts to become more of like an alley or,

So I think the measurements we took on surely were closer to 40 feet in overall width. And I think that point is probably valid in our last iteration when I think we were showing four stories before the setback was being applied. Now that we dropped it to three, because we know we can't fit four stories within 40 feet of height, I think that kind of changes the calculation where... Maybe.

I think we're starting to get very close. I think if it's 40 feet straight... We're looking at, like, 35 feet height to hit the two-to-one. Which is kind of where three stories... Yeah, which might be about where we are. I'm wondering whether we want something in there to maintain that. Start using enclosures.

I think I had a similar thought on that, in that, like, this step back, right? Whatever it was, because it was our facing. And this is the... Step backs are at, step backs are at, or a budding, right? And if you say like a budding are the like shared lines and it's not residential facing, then you like whatever the height is without necessarily getting the step back on the Shirley, the Shirley Street facades facing one another are going up and have no like breakage in the facade. If I read it right, from like the abutting versus the residential facing.

So I think we just covered Shirley. If I follow you, you're describing what would happen when two lots side by side, let's say in the middle of Shirley, we own some and then others are private. What happens to that transition between them?

No, I think I'm talking about if you're walking down what's now Shirley going toward Big Chimneys.