Art in Public Places Committee (Through Sept 2021) - Regular Meeting

So I would like to call meeting the order right at 04:00. Alyssa, can you read the names of board members? Yeah. Present are vice chair Ridlington and board members Hart, Kelly, April, Scores and new Board member, Vidal. Absent is Chair Nearer.

As members of the public join the meeting in person or via Zoom, you will be participating as an attendee. As a reminder, this meeting follows the Brown Act, and we will not accept public comment outside of the dedicated time once the public comment period or the item is closed. The city of Santa Rosa is committed to creating a safe and inclusive environment free from disruption. We will not tolerate any hateful speech or actions

and are

well staffed to monitor that everyone is participating respectfully or they will be removed. If necessary, we will also immediately end that. So before we launch into the agenda, I'd like to say welcome to Zach. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Sure. My name is Zach Missell. I'm a I've lived in Santa Rosa since January 2000.

I've lived with my wife, Lucy,

and our two cats. I own an IT services business here locally. I've been involved with the bike community since probably 2001 in various forms or another. A I'm at this point, I'm a I'm a little bit of a a fallen cyclist. Not like falling over. Yeah. Just not having not not riding very frequently, but we do get out and about frequently in the community. We're at. So that's super fun. And I've owned the business since 2003, yeah, 2003. And, yeah, I'm just looking forward to coming in and learning and hopefully participating in a really constructive way.

Great. Which part of the city do you live in or which board which city council member of the city?

Sure. I live in the JC neighborhood.

Okay. Yep. Welcome to the club.

That's great.

Welcome. Okay. Moving on. Do we have any statements of abstention by board members? Do we have any comments on the agenda items from board members?

K. Let's move on to agenda item number five, which is approval of the minute. You have in your board packet the minutes from our April 16 meeting. Once you've had a chance to look at these or maybe you already have, it would be great to get a motion and then a second. Move to approve. Okay. We have a motion from Kathy and a second from you by Jen. Yeah. Okay. Great. All in favor of approving the minutes?

Do we not vote if we weren't here?

It is fine to abstain. We can have an abstention if you weren't here.

Yeah. I was in here last.

Okay.

So all in favor of approving? Okay. We've got five approvals and one abstention. K. Moving on to agenda item number six. Public comments on non agenda items. Yeah. We do. Okay. Alexander, can you explain how public comments will be heard at this meeting? Yeah. At each agenda item, the item is presented.

The chair will ask for board comments and then open it up for public comment for in person attendees. Once the chair is called for public comment, the chair will announce for the public to raise their hand if they wish to speak on the specific agenda item. Public comment will be limited to three minutes and a timer will appear on the screen to the board and public to see. The public may only comment once on an individual item. It's only during the public comment.

So I know we have at least one public comment. Let's start with Dwayne, and then okay. Then Alexa.

Hello. My name is Dwayne DeWitt. I'm from Roseland, and I wanted to come today and offer a supportive comment to the current director of transportation and public works. I've never done this before. In the past, I've never had any of the people in that position come through my neighborhood and look at any of the things that we needed to deal with.

I've seen them over there three or four times now. This is really amazing to come to the wrong side of the tracks, see what's going on over there with us. It's just so exceptional that I've come here to go on record to say, I do believe this man's gonna make our situation better throughout the city, not just on the other side of the tracks. So I also wanna add something because the Bikeable Santa Rosa, or is it Sonoma County folks, rolled through there the other day with a group of bicyclists, and he was involved with that also. I'm like, this is stunning.

No one wants to say this, but it's, like, really rare for a government employee to take the time and the effort to get out there and actually see what they call ground truthing. Go and understand what we really talk about when we come to these things. We've had previous transportation and public works people ruin our neighborhoods. Stony Point Road, that is a perfect example. A quarter of a century ago, I was on the project area committee for Southwest Santa Rosa Redevelopment.

We told them you do not need to widen the road beyond the right of way as it exists now. Still, they came in and destroyed 17 housing units. They turned that thing into a freeway. They divided neighborhoods. They essentially looked at it like, hey. It doesn't matter what you folks who live here think. It's about us getting food wood,

making sure they were gonna

have traffic going up and down Stone Point Road all the way up to the north where they're building so much extra housing. Anyway, long story short on all of this, I will continue to advocate that we have better, one might say, safety precautions because man was killed recently on West College at Clover. No. This is the kind of stuff we shouldn't be having happen after the death that happened on Stony Point Road in the past. It's like if we're gonna do vision zero, let's get to it now, and let's make a big point about it being real.

And I do believe that this current director of transportation and public works will take that on. I want you to protect this job. That's specific because the public in the past has not been able to keep good employees here because politics plays into it. And there might be politicians that disagree with his efficiency, so watch out for his back. Thank you kindly.

Thank you, Duane. Alexa. And for those just joining us, we're in the middle of public comment on non agenda items. So if you have wanna speak on a general topic.

Hi, everybody. Alexa Forrester. I live in the Montgomery Village neighborhood, and I am one of the Co leads, the Bicycle Santa Rosa. I just wanted to do a little report out. We did our bike around the blocks party on Sunday. We started in Coffee Park. We ended at Trailhouse. We rode through all seven districts from 10AM to 4PM. Director of Public Works, Dan Hennessey, joined us for a portion of that, and we had different groups joining us. And it was very instructive both on what's working well and what's not working.

So I just wanted to say what we what we heard and experienced ourselves is that it would be fabulous if every time the creek path crossed a major arterial, there was rather than a median blocking you from crossing, actual infrastructure to get you across. Where those had been installed, it was really great for us. I would say the Roseland Creek Trail that allowed us to cut through along through that park. And then right where we came out, there was a flashing beacon that we could push to cross safely was really great, especially since we had a young one with us at that point. Other places that we saw so that was a break in connectivity.

Of course, the Smart Trail, which isn't really in the city's control, but that's gonna make a huge difference in connectivity from Coffey Park down to the the sort of core of the city. And then other places that we saw a lot of room for opportunity were along Hearne Avenue. I know there's a planned bikeway from the new library site to Hearne Avenue over crossing, but I hope that will extend along the South Side Of Hearne all the way to Community Park so that you're not not having to ride in a bike that are there to get to the library. And, yeah, and just basically greater connectivity between all of the neighborhoods. There are these, like, little sections where, like, you come out of the Joe Redoda Trail, and then you're have to cross Sebastopol Road, and it's unsafe for, like, 200 yards, and then it's safe again.

You know? And so getting those little gaps closed will go a long way to, like, making a complete network so everybody can get safely where they wanna go. And I'd also like to echo Duane's comments. We really appreciate the leadership. We also appreciate Alexander Osukwara, who is also out there riding with community members. And I would like to invite all the board members to join us next year when we do our bike around the blocks, at least for the portion that goes through the the council district that you represent so you can see what's working for cyclists in the area. Thank you.

Do we have any additional public comments? Okay. Great. Let's move on then. So, anyways, that's conclusion of public comment on nonagenda items. Let's move on to agenda item 7.1. And are there extra agendas for anybody who's

just you can walk in.

I can get up on the podium. I'm gonna grab an agenda item. So item 7.1 is a report on the fiscal year 2627 transportation and public works for the plan. I think that's Dan. Yes. Looks like today is the Dan show.

Unfortunately, Tareena's out today, so you're stuck with me for alternate agenda items. But thank you for the opportunity to present. First, we're gonna talk about the proposed work plan for next fiscal year. I will say these three items do blend together a little bit. I'm sure that questions will come up that are answered in later, but we'll we'll skip forward. So please answer as as you're

or ask

as you're ready. So what's included in the work plan? In your attachments, you had a list of projects that three or four pages detailing everything individually that we're doing currently or plan to execute before 06/30/2027. You have a list of bicycle and pedestrian projects that have been completed this fiscal year. You have a list that have are under construction. We have a list that will be ready for construction. We'll talk a little bit about those in just a couple slides. And then you have projects that are still in the planning and design phases. Those are all active projects. We're not including anything on that list that doesn't have a plan to execute them.

So nothing is is happening in this department anymore that doesn't have a strategy to complete it. And I'll talk a little bit about why that's important when we get to the capital improvement update item and the impacts of past decision on current year budgets. Talking a little bit about what we did. More than four and a half miles of new bike lane. I wanna highlight specifically that the class two b bike lane, that's the lowest number that we've had in some time, and it's because we are focused more on separated all ages and abilities facilities.

So the half mile of class one off street path, the class four bike lane protected but on street, that is the direction that we're heading. We know that those are the types of facilities that connect networks and not just facilitate existing riders to be able to use those areas, but also drive demand for new riders. Alexander led the installation of a raised crosswalk near Stevens Elementary School. Some lessons learned there, but a really good installation and great feedback from the school immediately after installation. We installed a few new rectangular rapid flashing beacons, including one right outside the office here to provide a crossing across Stony Point to the office park over there.

Huge change. It's not the a number one, you know, control that we would want for a road like Snowy Point. But before, it was five wide lanes on assigned 35 mile an hour road without any control. We have seen pretty good observance of that flashing beacon.

They're not

the one, like, hitting that, go across the street for lunch every now and then, seeing people yield instead of trying to make eye contact with five lanes of drivers approaching from two different directions. Another thing I wanna highlight is the expansion of the red Redwood bike share service. So almost 20 new bikes in the service, and we've continued to get good feedback about use of those through the county transportation. They've been providing a commission that that program is as successful as they had hoped, and and they're looking for ways to continue funding that in the future.

Alright.

So a little bit about what's in the works. This is a kinda snapshot of that four page summary that you have. The Lower Lower Cogan Creek restoration phase three completed a couple months ago. There was a ribbon cutting last week. A beautiful new paved creek path between Dutton Meadow and the previous sections.

We now have a paved trail from the intersection of Stony Point and Todd Road almost all the way to Hearne Avenue. At the bottom, you see the Hearne Avenue or the Hearne Community Hub multiuse path. So adjacent to where the fire station and library are being built, we're building a paved multiuse path on that property. When that's done, we're gonna have a about a 300 foot gap between the existing trail and that trail. We're working on a land swap with

a private developer right now to close that

gap because I'd like that all to be one continuous path and then be able to celebrate that that opening. As was mentioned earlier, we're also working on a multiuse path along Hearne Avenue connecting the SmartTrax to New Overcrossing, but then we'll have, again, just a short gap on Hearne Avenue to make that connecting so that you're all the way from, again, Sony Point and Todd and all those neighborhoods that draw into that all the way across to Santa Rosa Avenue. Other projects under construction, you may have heard of the Highway 101, but it's called pedestrian over crossing. After two decades, we have finally bid that contract successfully. Construction has started right now.

What you see out there is PG and E and AT and T doing some work to remove their utilities from that space, but we expect the July construction team to be out there in force starting in June. And just stated date for opening that bridge is late summer or fall. There's also work happening right now on Fulton Road to, as Alexa mentioned, create a creek trail crossing across Fulton Road along the Piner Creek path. We have just recently completed contracting for new protected bike lanes on Dutton Avenue, an extension of the section that was completed last year between Gurnville and College. We will now be taking that from College all the way down to 3rd Street.

That is just a restriping project, and this is phase one of that. We will also be following up with some intersection changes, like, next year at the intersection of Dutton And 9th Street converting that existing traffic signal to a roundabout. Wow. There you go. Other projects that have recently been bid and are under construction include the Hopper Avenue Corridor improvements.

You'll see work happening out there as of now. Pearson Street also was contracted in April. You'll see workers out there right now that is also utility work before the contractor gets out there, but that work will be completed later this year. Calistoga Road, you will also see utility companies out there. The extraction company will begin work the day after school ends at Maria Carrillo and at Sequoia.

They wanted to avoid Calistoga is a significant project because it is digging up the entire road to replace all utilities underneath. So significant contributions from the Santa Rosa Water Department to make that happen. It's also part of the reason why this project kept growing. It was delayed from the simple repayment project that we proposed years ago. That project includes new protected bike lanes, a new class four facility adjacent to Squail Elementary School. We're moving some parking to provide more separation between people on the sidewalk and moving vehicles. But also with the support of the PTA, we did some data collection there led by Elizabeth to support the addition of bidirectional bicycle lanes immediately.

Get any credit for that. Elizabeth.

Oh, sorry. Yes. Elizabeth. Yes. In

the next couple months, we will

be completing projects in the Montgomery Village neighborhood on in the Rock Creek And Matanzas Streets. You see some of that work out if you go down Hammond. That's a Gilani construction project, mostly sewer and water, but they'll be repaving that and adding some new crossings and sidewalks and curb ramps in that area. Sonoma Avenue Rehabilitation is that block between Farmers And Haman that's been under construction for the last six to eight weeks. About another month or so to go on that.

They've basically done all the prep work. Starting next week, you'll see the actual paving happening. One thing I'm excited about that project is that at both intersections, we've maintained the previous vehicle capacity while shrinking those lanes. And so we've been able to provide protected bicycle lanes through that area and have brought the bus stops out into the streets to make boarding and alighting for transit riders easier. So the bus the bikes will actually be at transitioning behind the boarding islands for those stops.

It's first of its kind in Sonoma County. We took from some examples in Oakland, San Francisco, San Mateo County, but we're trying it out here. They though these are portable islands. So if they work, we can convert them to concrete. And if they work and we convert them to concrete, we can move those portable islands elsewhere in the city.

So really excited about that. Work has been ongoing for a new traffic signal at our Burbank at Southwest Community Park to help people across the streets. That's an area with a lot of pedestrian traffic, but also a lot of school traffic in the morning and early afternoons where we have long queues on Burbank and as a result of people trying to get out of that back to Earn Avenue, have some aggressive driving behavior at that stop controlled intersection. So this is gonna mitigate that significantly. Alright.

That's everything that's already started. We have projects that's designed and permitted for additional, Santa Rosa Creek Trail access off Dutton Avenue. We have the connection to the East Side. We're gonna near that on the West. We're waiting one, piece of land acquisition to finalize before we can bid that project.

Smart will be, as was mentioned earlier, constructing starting next year, additional trail segments, where the section ends at Gurnville up to, Coffee Park and beyond. We have just entered agreements with Smart for both the Jennings At Great Crossing and the third and Smart Path signal and connection. They are bundling those as one project. That will be out to bid shortly. They we have completed the funding bubble for that.

We are cleaning up a little bit of design work for changes to the Jending exact rate crossing on the street portion of it for the sidewalk and connecting back to Dutton. That would be a smart led project. There's a lot of equipment to order on that. The I imagine that the rail equipment for new crossings has quite a long lead time. So while you'll see some work happening, that'll likely be open on 2027.

Next year, we'll be paving b streets, and we'll be adding bus only lanes between 3rd and 7th that will be utilized by cyclists as well. We looked at adding bike lanes there, dedicated bicycle lanes, but that was going to really affect transit travel times and reliability. So our solution transit only lanes, credit to Alexander for that creative solution. We have grant funded projects for sidewalk and curb ramp gap closures on Corby, Baker, and Cottonwood in the, Roseland area just off the freeway. And then, out to bid shortly will be a new, traffic signal and protected intersection at Santa Rosa Avenue in Bellevue, which provides access to the school just to the east there.

Alexander,

through the Transportation Fund for Clean Air program, has received a grant to purchase a 100 additional bike racks. Our city manager is also providing some support for additional decorative bike racks downtown. We've selected a a rose motif that we like in terms of its aesthetic, but will also function as a bike rack. I'm sure many of you are familiar with decorative bike racks that don't actually work for cyclists. We're pretty confident about this one.

We'll be working on not just the bicycle pedestrian over crossing, but how do we get people to and from it on either side. We'll have the RFP at College of Beaver. Our twenty twenty four safe streets and roads for all grant, we are almost to the point of actually being allowed to use that money to do stuff. We have completed so the county transportation authority has completed their agreement with the federal government. We have completed our agreement with them.

They are environmentally clearing the project on our behalf through Caltrans and the federal government. We've provided them all materials for that. Very low risk. We're putting some, you know, bolts, few inches to the foot in the ground for all of the bollards, ball valves, parking stops, materials that we're gonna use to create that additional pedestrian space at intersections along the high injury network. And then in the spring, we won a grant from the University of California Berkeley, their SafeTrack program, and this is organized by the California Office of Traffic Safety for a complete street safety assessment, and we chose Sebastopol Road for that.

We'll actually be doing that walking on it with the technical team tomorrow on a section just West of Stony Point towards Lombardi and then just east also as we as we work our way back closer to the additional development that's been happening. We have a history of of collisions there. We also have a lot of activity there. That's that's not an easy corridor to just assign more space to. Huge amount of parking and commercial loading that happens on there supporting all of those businesses.

So it's the more in-depth look than just picking a residential street and deciding that there's an extra five or six feet for bicycling. We have we will be or have resubmitted a safe streets and roads for all grants to do the demonstration project and additional planning work on the Sebastopol Road corridor. We're also working on with housing partners for affordable housing and sustainable community grant that includes infrastructure projects that's in the neighborhood surrounded by college, Stony Point, Dutton. So there's a lot of bicycle boulevard, pedestrian gap closures, areas where there's huge sidewalk gaps, but that would be surrounding potential if we're selected for that grant. And then lastly, we submitted nine projects to the county transportation authority through their competitive funding program.

I won't read through the list there, but they're all consistent with this theme you hear of making our lives easier in terms of maintenance of our transportation system and improving access and mobility for those who need it most. So focus a lot on the high injury network, on safety improvements, and on taking care of our existing infrastructure. Some of the fun stuff

that we

did, we just did the city works booth at the Wednesday night market last night. Huge turnout. It was so busy there that it was hard to actually buy food from some of the vendors. We had last year, we did the bike and block party, trying to figure out ways to sustain that moving forward and fund that. Last just last week, we had the energy energizer stations for a bike to work day, and we've been participating in Earth Day for a number of years.

All great events, huge turnout, widely popular. Just gotta figure out how to fund and get time to do more of them. Couple of projects with partner agencies. We've still been working with Bicycle Coalition and others on Safe Routes to School walking audits, doing that monthly to have a long list of improvements that are necessary around schools in the in the city, continuing collaboration with Redwood Bike Share around their needs for additional support there. Been working with the county transportation authority on a community based transportation plan for the South Santa Rosa area, which includes both city parcels and non city parcels, and then supporting the planning and economic development department on their South Santa Rosa specific plan.

That was a lot. You know, one thing that I I wanna highlight is the work that you saw there generates from a staff of about six people. You know, a lot of people help. Those six people do this work, but I'm I'm increasingly realizing how much we do with how little we have. And I was at a conference last week talking to other public works and transportation professionals, and hearing their stories made me rethink some things.

But really what shocked me was their reaction to what we're doing and asking me how big our staff is or how much funding we have. And they it was just the the consensus was shocked that we're able to do

as much as we can.

I think I'm I'm beginning to realize that I need to show more gratitude to the staff and, frankly, to the supporters and the community who are able enabling us to do this work. So, you know, it's it's a labor of love for many of us. I know I I go home and I think about this stuff, you know, when I'm not supposed to not not being paid to. But I think that's true of a lot of the staff. You have a lot of dedicated people here working hard to make make the city a better place. Thank you for the opportunity to present. I'm happy to answer any questions.

Okay. Do we have questions from board members for staff?

I was curious about how you measure the success of the shared bike program?

Yeah. Mostly, it's through ridership. We wanna see usage, and then we wanna see membership growing also. So the companies themselves, they are you know, the providers are not nonprofits. They're they're in to see a sustainable business model. We are lucky to have grant funding to support that, but we need to see usage and growth. And so the the show of additional bikes within city limits indicates that there's demand for that and that that there is a growth happening.

Are there certain parts of the city where you have the growth going more like this and others where maybe it's going down? Or

Can somebody help me out here? We had a Mark Hammond presented on this. I'm wondering if you missed that one. Maybe I missed that one. I'm looking at my notes from June, which makes me that where we put it on the agenda, I'm thinking maybe it happened in September. Because I'm answer a bunch of these questions. Like, he had data on which points to be clicked. Well, first off

Oh, and Rosa that yeah.

Yeah. So Santa

Rosa has been wondering if it's changed since then. Oh, I see.

We could ask Mark to come back.

Just keeps going up, especially in Santa Rosa. Like, of all the cities, so there's, like, I think, seven different cities. We're the one with the highest ridership, which should be the case because we have the highest population. But still, we're probably the ones that have done the most to add, like, drop zones and places where people can connect the bikes to. So you can take places instead of just in the downtown corridor.

Yeah. We we also we have the benefit with our relative size to the rest of the county of having a level of density that's riding in

more

areas, whereas if you were in front of our Katahi,

there's a limited

number of areas where it makes sense to grab a bike where you might not already have one. So we're lucky there too that our geographic reach is bigger as a result of our, you know, our own transit network for one, multiple smart stations, things like that.

Just because the reason I was asking this question, I was just wondering if at some point it plateaus out, but it doesn't sound like it is.

That is a fear. And and, you know, other micromobility and shared mobility providers have seen that. Right? And that is when you get a point of scaling back or, you know, lack of of resources because they need that revenue to keep coming in to be able to fund maintenance of those bikes, but also people to move them around and make sure that the program's structured like it's supposed to.

Do I have other questions? Go ahead. So on the Calistoga Road project, the elementary school there on

you know,

I know during pickup and drop off, the side of the road where they're planning the bike lane, it's frequently filled with cars. And, also, during school events and that kind of stuff, how have they got a plan for handling that?

Yeah. So, actually, what we found was that during the morning, the pickup and drop off almost exclusively happened internal to the site, and level that was happening on the street could handle more. In the afternoon, what was happening was that there's about 22 spaces, give or take, but I think 22 cars to park there and wait for a kid to pick up. And then when they picked up their kids, nobody came here with us.

So it was it is full,

but it's those 22 cars that we gotta get into the site, and there's space to do that also. So, yeah, not without its challenges, but for those few minutes to be able to figure out a operational solution to have twenty four seven infrastructure was was worth doing and and did that with the support of the school's administration also.

I think that they're thinking too of those events because I I can just see this whole the whole street filled up with cars when there's, like, the I don't know. They do several big events at the elementary school year. But and then the other question I have about the bicycle and pedestrian over crossing is on one of your slides where they were showing, like, upcoming projects you're working on, I think it was. It it said complimentary projects. Do you have any

Yeah. So was on the West Side, when you when you would come down over the freeway, you'll be dropped off onto Edwards Avenue. Right now, that is a two lane street with parking on both sides, no bicycle facility, and really nothing to indicate to you, like, where am I supposed to go to get back to the bicycle network? That is the case for almost all of that all the streets in that area. So we're looking really between range and there about how we get people to and from.

We have a bunch of ideas around, you know, restricting parking or making those streets a one way couplet or narrowing lanes. But all of that is stuff that we've gotta work through with the community there. That was not anything that we felt comfortable, like, deciding. This is the project. So in the active transportation plan that was adopted last year, it says it identifies both streets for further study, basically, to connect back to the rest of the network that we know is there or will be there.

And the the hope to work on this project or is the bridge open? I have some questions,

and then

other folks go to after that. I was wondering about the there was a project that I didn't see on the list, which is I think funded the p d a three money that we have voted on a little over a year ago to pave an hour gate, JC neighborhood, close to San Rosa High School. And I think Terina said it's on the list. It did not happen. My understanding, was waiting for city crew availability, generally. Alexander, do you remember more? Or it might be captured in one of these categories. I just didn't see it.

It's not explicitly captured there, but I bet if that's what Serena said that it's still on the list because we were trying to do that internally based on the dollar amount. Yes. And, yeah, our crews are backed up. Yeah. So, yes, that that funding is still available. Yeah.

I mean, so from the list, that

is probably on the lower priority of the things. So it depends on if we have funding from that source by the time we get through most of the project.

Oh, okay. I thought because we voted we had a bucket of TDA three money Yeah. That we voted on how to use it. I don't remember which happened in which year, but I feel like we said one RRFB. No. I don't remember. Was That aside, like, I thought it

was huge It was school

improvement. Right?

Yeah. It was generally school improvement, and that's what's funding the ones over by Montgomery related to the Almond Drive improvements, and then some of the

money we spent each other this.

Yeah. I can send you what we have. I think it was a staff report to the city council.

I just wanna make sure it hasn't fallen off the list.

I mean, it's on the list, but I don't

know if it's a higher priority.

That doesn't actually seem like you have money. Okay. So that was one question. Then I was wondering, where do projects that come out of Safe Routes to School audits get captured? And maybe this is you if you wanna talk about capital improvements. But I was just thinking I participated in the Standard Roads High School walking audit, and then Tina sent out her report from that. And if there are follow-up items from that or other walking audits, how do those get captured?

Individually. So we need to program capital improvement funds to make those changes happen. The the walking audits are so very useful in terms of identifying the needs, but there's no dedicated funding source at all. So those needs are competing with everything else, and and we'll see a little bit more about why we need to get away from the Jennings and the Beepaks of the world as much as everybody loves them so that we can focus on some of the

Yeah. Yeah. I think might do the trick or some of the

Absolutely. Right? You'll we'll we'll talk in a few minutes. Okay.

And then oh, you mentioned the huge volume of work being done by relatively few staff. Related to that, do you have an update on when you might hire someone in Brock's position? No. I think that listing closed, but I don't know if you

Listing closed, I'm I'm happy to say that we have 25 applicants. I haven't seen the list yet, though, so I have no idea. Quality, who was I will say optimistic. You know, the the previous deputy director position that we had open, it took seventeen months to fill to find one qualified applicant, and we didn't get that many applicants either. So to have 25 people apply right after rewriting the class specification and job description, I'm I'm optimistic. And just from some of the conversations I've had with folks who saw it, I think we're gonna get a quality candidate.

Well, let us know if you need to talk to any finalist to tell them that

this would a great place

because they're gonna. Okay. I think those are all my questions on this round. Any other questions from board members before we go to public comment? Yes. Zach, you look like you might have your hand up. Oh, no. Okay. It looks like you were thinking about it.

I'm just thinking.

Okay. Yeah. Great. So that seems like that is questions from the board. So let's move on to public comments. So we're taking public comments now only in person on item 7.1, and each speaker will have three minutes. Do we have we have Alexa and I'll go. Okay.

Hello. Alexa Forrester again. I just wanna say that we really appreciate the focus on the protected bike lanes separated from the traffic as opposed to the class two e. So good on that. And just I because I forgot to say it, we rode a little bit on college without that on our ride on Sunday. And then when we got to those lanes, it felt wonderful. We crossed Marlowe, and we got to the lanes. And then it was so much more relaxed, and we were able to pass a cyclist that was going slower in front of you know, because there was plenty of room. So that was great. Second thing, just a comment in response to the Bikewood or the Redwood Bike Share.

If we can possibly keep that program going until, like, for as long it takes to open in the pedestrian over crossing, I think that will spike riderships. Because I work at the JC, and I see those bikes being used by students. And I know that once that bike bridge is open, there are just a lot of students that would hop on the bikes to ride over to the smart station, the bus stop to get something from Target, a notebook or something that they need. So whatever the city can do to help support that program to keep it alive for that long. And then finally, I just had a question about really excited to hear about the bus only lane.

I'm just ignorant about the laws that apply if a cyclist are riding in a bus lane and the bus comes up behind them, what what is supposed to happen in that situation, if you could clarify that? And then also if we know how that might interact if they do build the driveway for for DoorDash for Chang's.

Okay. Thank you. The

the B Street design is independent of the Chang's driveway with with or without. The the way the bus bike lanes work is that their shared interactions, we train our drivers. They'll it'll be signed also allowing bicyclists. There shouldn't be any overtaking, and there shouldn't be any coming right up on a cyclist from behind. That's your space too.

K. Dwayne.

Thank you. Hello. Dwayne Dewitt from Roseland. I'm especially grateful that you're making these advancements, if you will, and improvements on Sebastopol Road, Stony Point Road. I've ridden bicycles around there most of my life, and it's very dangerous.

Drivers don't really care about bicyclists, especially over there in those areas. It's the kind of thing where no offense intended to anybody here in the room, but some drivers are willing to perhaps save a second and yet kill a person. They're willing to basically just hit somebody. And I've I've seen some really close calls over there, especially at the Joe Rodona Trail where it crosses Stony Point Road and where Sydney Valvo was killed some years back now. I think it would be a good idea for you folks to use those portable islands and slow up the traffic at those types of sites, drivers are gonna be like, oh, how could they do this?

Well, it's the thing that you could advance it forward. The previous deputy director who appears to now have left only did things that were warranted. That was his big words. It's got to be warranted. And this is the kind of thing where they wait till somebody to die, then it's warranted.

Patrick Jerome Scott killed out on Bellevue Avenue. We asked the city beforehand, put safety measures in. And, basically, it was only after he died that people started to pay more attention. So my hope, especially because our new director here is more tuned into a lot of these things, that we can actually combine Vision Zero and Safe Streets,

all

kinds of good stuff on Sebastopol Road, Stony Point Road. I'm especially glad of the improvements that are happening right now as we speak perhaps at the corner of Burbank Avenue and Hearne Avenue where the traffic signal is going in and the people are out there doing work. It's slowing traffic down because you have the big orange plastic road protectors. And I thought, wouldn't it be a great idea to just leave those out there? Okay.

Like, put them right along the vacant land right there at Burbank And Hearne that's owned by the Lazini family and just ask Lazini, say, can we store these here for a while? And then people will see them, and they'll slow down. I'm gonna have to talk with the director about perhaps changing some of the signage for Westwood Drive, which you can't see as you come up because they put it behind the telephone pole. Anyway, with this new improvement, this could be the spot that slows what we call the Hearne Avenue Raceway down. Thank you kindly for all your time.

Do you have any other public comment? Okay. This ends public comment for this agenda item. Do we have any statements or comments or recommendations? Paul. Before

I joined the EPAP several years ago, whatever it is, I live over off Fulton at Greenville or. And I thought, you really need to have a walk through this process street to go on a creek trip, and now they're doing it. And I just wanna say thank you very much. I don't expect that I didn't, but I'm

just glad

to see that this happened, so thanks very much.

Anything else for the board? Okay. That is the end of agenda item 7.1. Let's go on to 7.2, which is the Vision Zero implement implementation plan annual update. This again is.

Thank you.

I will be a little bit quicker with this one. Alright. So our when our go to the next one, please. When the council adopted the Vision Zero action plan from the county, at the same time, we they adopted the Vision Zero implementation plan for city staff. It has 47 actions to take to reduce traffic deaths and severe injuries within a city to zero by 2030, categorized into those six categories.

And the other nice thing that we did at the time was create this data dashboard where data feeds in from as it was from processed through CHP and police reports and gives us a up to date or just slightly lagging visual of where crashes are happening, what time, and information about those specific crashes. Excellent. In the Vision Zero implementation plan, so the the actions are categorized by those six overarching themes. There are metrics for each actions and time frames. I'll say, I think 32 of our actions are education, marketing, enforcement, stuff that's not entirely in our control and not the most effective.

We have been focusing on those dozen or so that have been shown to get results, and you see some of those on here. Changing speed limits, slowing people down, creating infrastructure that reinforces those speed limits, starting a cycle where we bring the speed limit down, we put infrastructure to enforce that speed limit, we can bring the speed limit down again and get them to safe speeds. Now we're we're lucky in this community that we don't have six lane roads. We don't have that many forty, forty five mile an hour roads. But within an urban area like Santa Rosa, I know that there's a there's a real wrestling match between the rural character, especially in referee, and the realization that we're a city of almost 200,000 people.

And it's not the Santa Rosa of 1980. And I think that this plan is helping to reinforce that it's time for the city to grow up and and acknowledge that it's a place for for that many people that needs to act like a like a bigger city. Next slide, please. Within in the attachment that you have, you have updates for each of those implementation items with with different updates to share the status. Toreen selected a a set here where we've we're actively working on. There are also some in there that we have punted and acknowledged that we're not effective, don't have capacity to do, are finding better results elsewhere.

Next slide, please.

I do wanna share some things that may not be direct directly tied in there about what we're doing. So we're constantly evaluating speed limit citywide. In the last three years, we've reduced speed limits on more than 80 streets. Some of those have been complemented with infrastructure changes to reinforce those new speed limits. I will say it has been very refreshing that the police department has been a great partner in this.

Not over relying on police enforcement to solve our speeding issues, but being targeted where we see issues and really wanting to understand why we're doing the types of things we're doing. They have been nothing but supportive and have also, I think, understood that this is an area where we can have just as big, if not more of an impact that they can. That's not true in every community. The police department frequently thinks of themselves as the traffic enforcers. Know, chief Grieghan and I have had a number of discussions about how we can make their lives easier by doing a lot of this for them through design and infrastructure changes.

So we've been focusing those efforts a lot on the high entry network where we know that crashes happen. However, we have a lot of streets that look exactly like those streets where crashes haven't happened in the last ten, twelve, fifteen years. They exhibit the same characteristics. It's a random sampling, and we're attacking those ones just the same.

I do wanna skip down

to the bullet on pavement maintenance. Before I started, we were mostly prioritizing our pavement maintenance efforts based on the quality of pavements and that alone. We don't have enough money to just do that. We've gotta be smarter and make our pavement maintenance dollars do more than one thing. So we're now focused on high injury network, active transportation plan streets where they've identified improvements so that we can pave streets while making streets safer while providing for all the little connections.

New crosswalks, new bike lanes. That is clear priority now for us in organizing those streets. It's not just worst streets or most cost effective streets based on pavement maintenance, but we've added variables to that to make those dollars do more for the community. And I think you've seen that you know, on college. Those weren't streets that a couple years ago might have been picked, but they were picked very intentionally this year.

We have continued to grow or or regrow our capital projects team to help us make these projects into reality, get them through city contracting processes to a contractor. That's been really helpful. To the question about deputy director Sprinkle's position, mentioned briefly. But

one of the signals that I wanted

to send about what this department is about and what that position is about is retitling it from the deputy director of traffic engineering to the deputy director of transportation safety. That was really important for me to provide both internal and external signals about what that's about and and the type of person we want holding that position. It was an administrative hurdle, like, you would not believe to get that done to change those two words. But but I do think that, you know, seeing you know, without having seen them knowing that 25 people applied for that job indicates that that was the right thing to do. In Sonoma County, there are only so many licensed traffic engineers.

Removing that requirement to be a licensed traffic engineer to hold that position opened that up to a whole swath of people who have a different perspective, and we have licensed traffic engineers here who can do the stuff that actually requires that. But having the option for for a different perspective in that position is is really validating, I think. And then lastly, we're working with planning and economic development and updating our standard details and really expanding those so that projects that we don't see implement this type of infrastructure. So for instance, when development comes in, they're providing the types of not just sidewalks and bike lanes, but curb radio and designs of the frontages that supports active transportation and safe mobility. But also things like when the water department goes and digs up the streets and and put it back, they see how to put it back how we would like to put it back, not just how it was.

Most standards have been updated in at least a couple decades. Some of them are as old as 40 years old. Things have changed. So those will be adopted later this year, and I'm really looking forward to to that also so that a lot of things happen without Alexander and I even know about it. We are working now on as one of our action items was to institute a review team when a fatal or serious injury crash happens.

We have developed a template for that. We had the first meeting of that team, unfortunately, last week after the crash on College Of Clover. We wanna learn from from those those incidents. They might tell us something about that specific location. They might tell us something about other locations in the city. Frankly, participating on this in in previous cities, very frequently, they tell you nothing. I mean, they there are just these are random things happen. But we don't want to assume that they all are in. Right? There are infrastructure and built environment issues that that create conditions that lead to these crashes that we wanna learn.

And then lastly, we have an on call

contract out right now for active transportation projects. To the point made earlier, our crews are busy. And very frequently, we've got ideas. We get grant funding. We have small pockets of money to do something, and we wait months, years to do that. We are soliciting for a contractor to do those kinds of small projects on our behalf much quicker. We know it's going to cost more, but there's also a cost to waiting. And we'd like to have the option of evaluating those costs. So, yeah, we're working with the contracting community right now to try to recruit contractors to be interested in that in that contracting

opportunity. Please.

Okay. So updates

on collision data. I track using that that dashboard I mentioned earlier. This graph, it's fatal and serious injury crashes on local streets. So when you go into the database, you can click on Santa Rosa, and it'll give you every crash that's happened in. I then filter down to crashes that have been labeled fatal or serious injuries, and then I filter further to things that did not happen on State Highway. I don't wanna know what happened on 101. I don't wanna know what happened on 12. I can't do anything about it except complain to Caltrans,

which I do.

But those are not my responsibility or within my purview to fix directly. Everything else that's happening, we can do something about. For the last twelve years, we've had between twenty five and fifty five fatal and serious injury crashes a year. Last year, fifteen. Do I think that we did enough to cut that number in half? No. There's some randomness in here. The database is also not quite complete. It's more complete than we might think. We know that there's two or three hanging out there, but I don't think there's more than two or three. I don't think we're gonna hit 20 when the final numbers are are confirmed for 2025. So seeing that kind of progress is

Can I ask the clarifying question? Yeah. When you say all crashes, is that all crashes involving bicycles

and pedestrians, or does that include cars on car? Yeah.

Car on cars. Yeah. So those sub lines at the bottom are the subcategories of pedestrians and bicyclists only for in those types of crashes. So what you what you're not seeing there is that that number of pedestrian and bicycle crashes drastically dropping. Almost all of our crashes last year had a vulnerable road user involved in serious injury, a fatal crash.

I think that shows us two things. One is that our speed mitigation efforts are working and that the vehicle vehicle crashes are getting less significant, but we're not doing enough yet to protect people not protected by a several pawn metal box from outcomes that we'd like to avoid. So moving in the right direction, optimistic. It's far better than the graph going the other way. And if nothing else, frankly, we should celebrate that there if, you know, if you had asked me at the start of last year how many I would have guessed, I would have said 35, 40.

You know, I don't think a a number of the things that we've done so far have really been taken hold yet in terms of getting improvements on the ground and changing our strategies. And so there's 20 serious injury or fatal crashes that didn't happen last year. And even if that's a

fluke, that's a

fluke we should celebrate. So, you know, this is a chart that you'll continue to see year after year. We yeah. This is it. This this is the thing that I'm here to do, frankly.

If we get those numbers down to where the our goal is, then I'll celebrate my tenure here as a success whether or not anybody else will. We we also did some before and after collision data on specific projects just to kinda show the effect of what we're doing and and also the scale that we're dealing with. So we looked at couple years preconstruction of recent projects, couple years after. All collision severity is just to get a sense for what is happening. And then we have a list of about eight corridors that we had enough data both before and after to track.

Go to the next, please. Let me let me just get one. Yeah. No problem. You know, one of the challenges of trying to be targeted with reducing crashes is that for a city with 500 miles of streets and a 180,000 people, twenty fatal and serious crashes a year.

There's not a lot of data to go on about where to go, which is great. I don't want any more data. But, you know, pretending that there's not an element of randomness in that is would be a fool's errand. So you'll see through some of these, you know, these are some of these are just repaving projects. On the bottom, you see the Santa Rosa Avenue improvement project that was completed at the end of twenty twenty four.

Yeah. Some of these do show increased crashes, but you also see that we're dealing with a couple of incidents a year. Right? So there's there's some randomness there. However, the the the overall across all eight of these is that if we if we sum them all together, crashes are down, fatals are down, serious injuries are down, heads and bikes are down.

Right? So on any individual corridor level in a two year time frame, you know, there are millions of potential interactions between cars and pedestrians, cars and bicyclists, cars and cars, bikes and peds. We end up with a handful of incidents, and we pretend like this is telling us something that is big picture. At an individual level, it's not. Right? We have to get back to, like, knowing that our first principles are correct and instituting those everywhere. You'll go to the next one. You see similar projects on Armory Drive, Steel Lane, the Mendocino paving project that was done at the in the fall of twenty twenty four. You know, again, similar patterns. Right?

Typically, reductions, but a lot of zeros up there. Right? We just didn't have crashes in those locations, but I know we know those locations are safer. Yeah. There's a couple of ways to show the final corridors that were done as part of that same set of paving projects on 4th Street and Sonoma Avenue.

Right? Here, crashes down on 4th Street, though severe crash is the same. The East Street to Bobby Lane on Sonoma Avenue is something that we are really paying attention to. I I don't have a good explanation for why crashes are up there. What I am optimistic about is that not a lot of those crashes are are severe, but it's something that we're paying attention to.

Did did we do something wrong in the design? Did we not optimize correctly? It looks like a lot of other streets in the city It's better than it was before, but, you know, this data tells us something about what's happening out there. And just to share that we're constantly reviewing even after we're done to learn about going back to those same streets or developing the next set of projects. So there's no action required.

This is just an annual update now that we have most of the 2025 data in and sharing that you know, especially when we talk about the next presentation and and and going back to the first one in the work plan, everything is centered on this. Right? Other other folks in the city would like me to prioritize other things, this is the thing that's prioritized. And we're we're not perfect, but I I'm very, very sensitive to being consistent with this messaging and not being hypocritical in the types of projects that we're developing, how we're spending our funds, and and solving this problem. We're we're in a unique position where our fatal and severe injury crashes are low enough that zero is a real number for us.

Like, you know, there are cities that have hundreds of every year. Zero's zero's ways away from them. You know? There's a lot of work left to do, but but zero is a number that I believe in so that work doesn't stop until we get there.

Thank you. So let's go to questions from the board. Any questions for Dan about division zero? We'll start with Paul and then next year.

Dan, when you started your presentation, you see these three topics would kinda interleave,

and so I'm gonna take a license desk and have

a project sort of a with and being a west center of the show business, it's gonna be about. Pulled between West third and West College, that's still vulnerable. And in terms of vision zero, it makes it discouraging to ride a bike if you wanna get onto the center center was a bike trail and come over here. What's the status of that potential for completing the niceness of the road?

You're talking about the section between 3rd And College or the sec okay. So the that section is pending water and sewer design. So we have money set aside for pavement improvements that will change to the characteristics of the street. Santa Rosa Water Department wants to upgrade all of those utilities, so they are currently in design. I'd like not to spend that money twice. So we're waiting on them. We anticipate that that will be ready to bid next year in 2027. So okay.

It could be a slight tangent, but I'm gonna throw it out anyway. So you you sort of brought up the point of Santa Rosa growing up. And so I just came back from a trip to New York City, which I know is extremely different than Santa Rosa. What I really noticed there was that I had time to cross the street always. I never felt stressed. There was plenty of time. When I'm here in Santa Rosa and I start to cross the street, the red hand signal comes up. Boom. I feel like like that. So how is that decided?

How much time is there? Because I just feel like there's not enough time ever, and I I walk fast. So, you know, I think about someone twenty years older than me. Like, how are you gonna do that?

So there is a minimum calculation that we have to do to provide a minimum amount of both walk time with the white hands and flashing red time across. There is flexibility on that, but there is a baseline minimum that we have to meet. Frankly, the city the traffic signal timing around here in most areas of the city is self prioritized for vehicle. We are increasingly adding time where pedestrian ham shows up, but no green time is available for any vehicle. That's called a pedestrian number one.

It's just a way to get pedestrians into the intersection earlier. That doesn't necessarily add more time for those pedestrians. You know, in our downtown, I think we've done a better job of doing a single timing where prioritizing pedestrians respect to that. Frankly, that's just something that we need to work on and a balance that we're, you know, trying to, I don't know, not call attention to it. I mean, to be perfectly honest, when when we do a road diet, like, college or on Dutton, nobody wants that to work more than me because as soon as we mess something up, we're gonna get an earful. Right? We got,

I don't know,

couple dozen emails or phone calls in a few weeks after we did that, but all of our data showed it was fine, and that died off after a couple weeks. Right? People got used to it very fast. When we

actually messed something up,

we're gonna hear about it. We're gonna hear about it from seven elected officials and a city manager who may all of a sudden become less enthused about our project in daily lives.

So, you

know, that frankly is important feedback for us to hear that we probably should continue to be more aggressive in certain areas, especially around pedestrian generators, but, like, downtown, like, junior college, like Montgomery Village, like, Yeah. It's it's just every time all time that's dedicated to pedestrians makes the signal vehicles. There's there's wiggle room to do that, though. It's just us getting comfortable and us making sure that the you know, we have that latitude and support from our our leadership to do so.

Is there a way to re work that doesn't involve just emailing you saying, took me too long? Especially, my dad's a very slow walker, but he walks everywhere. And I've encountered with him. I encountered, like, oh, I'm not sure we're gonna clear this intersection before it starts guards start coming.

So there is a opportunity in the Santa Rosa Three One One app to record signals. Yeah. That's that's how I log issues is that. It's a good list in the same log when I put it in for crews to look at for that same thing. A little bit different on the back end, but that's how

we get to Farmers Lane? Boy.

So that those are those are signals, right, that we don't control fully control the operation of.

Oh, okay.

Maybe you should still complain to me. She's upsetting complaints to Caltrans, and he just needs some fresh ammunition.

I would love Oh. Complaining how soon.

Farmers Lane is officially Highway 12.

Yeah. Oh,

I didn't realize that. Yeah. Okay.

From the eastbound off ramp to 4th Street. That is all Highway 12.

Okay. That's good information. Thank you. Yes?

So another self interested self interested question. I live in the JC neighborhood. I own a business that's on College Avenue just east of Mendocino. I'm kind of curious what the plans are, how that's proceeding with the the changes that were proposed.

You received notification of several several months ago. So

They're going slowly. We received quite a bit of feedback. And, honestly, the biggest issue was that we got zero consensus

on anything to do.

And one of the challenges is I I don't know that we can make a change there that doesn't just strike inadequate bicycle lanes, and I don't want that to be the answer. Right? So I I don't wanna put something out there that potentially incentivizes riding in a condition that I don't think it's like, especially with we're still not seeing speeds reduced there. We have another change coming as one of the as part of one of those paving projects that'll happen later this summer in the far east end of College Avenue, East of Brookwood, will be repaved and restriped. And we're optimistic that heading west, that will lead to some condition changes between Brookwood and the freeway that we wanna observe and see.

We also have that westbound approach to the freeway in the morning is a mess, and lane reductions there could create a situation where we're then blocking people getting through college. And what we found in our analysis is that that could extend all the way back to 4th Street by taking that lane away because the freeway can serve it. That was

that was that was that was one of my concerns knowing Normal. What the road diet that's happened on on West College having having been through there. I I I typically don't either bike or drive through there at Rush Hour. So I

haven't seen what those conditions are like, but I

could only imagine. I was

I I wasn't wasn't sure whether that was something that was in consideration Yeah. And and certainly had concerns about them.

Well, that's that's an interesting thing you bring up because those intersections at either end at Sony Point and at Dutton, we left the intersection configuration almost the same in terms of vehicle capacity. So getting into and out of that segment is exactly the same. It's within it that we have narrow, and the intention of that was not to add delay but to slow speed. Right? I don't want anybody to have more delay, but I do want you to go slow. Want that to take another thirty to sixty seconds to get through there. So that is intentional, but the the nice thing about is that on both sides, we control signal timing and the capacity to

help people get in and out.

Whereas at the ramp, it's less the signal as much as it is the ramp here going. Gotcha. More complicated projects there.

Oh, yeah. No. When when I received notification about that, that

sounded particularly complicated given the given the rush hour of the patient. So thank you.

Somewhere in here, I lost it now. It's was I mentioned working on some more programs in Oakmont. Is that

Yes. We so we have combined that project with a pavement maintenance project for the entire Oakmont neighborhood that will be bid this summer. You will start to see a curb ramp work in the fall, but it will really be in full bloom through spring and summer of twenty twenty seven. The entire neighborhood, curb ramps everywhere.

Entire Oakmont neighborhood? Yes. Oh.

All of it. Thank

you. Great.

I have a question that's deep in the weeds, and I apologize for not getting it to you in advance. At some previous meeting in the last two years or so, we discovered that there was a well and it was also an inviteable meeting. We discovered that there was a problem with reporting some injuries and crashes to the city because the police department wouldn't take a police report unless it had been bad enough for a police officer to actually come to the scene. And so I'm wondering well, I'm wondering if that has been resolved, and I'm also wondering if that might if some of the fixes that have been implemented might explain the increase in reported crash on Sonoma Avenue, which is where we had heard about Alexandria's crash, not Alexis, but Alexandria from Bikeville. And I feel like one or two other folks who've gotten hit on Sonoma, and we pushed at that particular Vicable meeting to report those.

Yeah. And I wonder if that actually is just the blip you're seeing here that is a methodological change. So my question that you could probably actually answer, though, would be, will police now take a report if they don't respond and if the person doesn't go to the hospital, or how is that making it into your numbers? Yeah.

So they our police department does not show up to the scene unless there is a report of an injury. They will take a report, and the when any claim is filed with any insurance company, that gets reported back to that database also.

So the Even if it's health insurance, they don't not a car insurance?

That's a good question.

Because if a cyclist get hit gets hit, I'm

not gonna file the claim. Yeah. It's my

car insurance.

Would probably That's a

good question.

So then, for those of you who don't know, Tanya broke her arm. I was just looking at her email back to me. She said, it sounds like probably a police officer did come when she got hit, but then she didn't she said, I don't know. Will that show up in the Vision Zero stats? Is my injury bad enough to warrant that?

We we asked that same question whether or not Tanya was gonna be part of the serious injury crash. Yeah. We'll find out in six months when I mean, I know where it happened, and I know what date it happened, and I'll be looking for it. So, yeah, I'm I'm Okay. Curious to know too. We do know I mean, there is a litany of research showing that bicycle crashes are underreported. Yes. Typically happens more on the lower end of the scale because there's not the insurance complications and and incentive to report them. Yeah. I've been hit on that a few times, and I haven't reported any of them. Right. No. No. Other than knowing that I wanted them in the database. Right. Right. But even, like, two of those three times, was on my way to go do something, and I could continue when I wanted to get there. Right? Swaining my own best interests by not reporting those.

Yeah. Okay. Well, then related to that, I was wondering, can you just remind us what constitutes a serious injury?

If it hurts.

Well, then my definition would be if it hurts, if it's life altering, and I'd argue a broken arm is. But, yeah,

I would think so too. So so there is literally a box on the reports for both the insurance companies and on the police reports that indicates the status of the people involved, no injury, possible injury, serious injury, dality. One of the reasons why the database isn't complete and particularly the fatal and serious injury crashes take longest is that CHP holds those reports as long as they need to to feel confident that they've got the categorization of the individuals correct. So we get the property damage only crash reports much faster sometimes than we do the serious injury while we're waiting to confirm all the details of those. Sure.

That's helpful. Thank you. My notes are a mess. Let me just look at the

I think I've asked all my questions.

Any remaining questions from the board? Or okay. Great. Then we are ready to go to public comment on agenda item 7.2. Do you have any public comment? Dwayne?

You folks here to comment? Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, I don't actually. Thanks for coming. It's good to have an audio. Right. Hello. My name is Duane Dewitt. I'm from Roseland. I was especially interested in the time to cross the streets.

Okay.

I've been a hospital worker all my life, and see a lot of people come in who've been injured, being hit by cars. And yet drivers are always in a hurry. They're looking at it like you're holding me up. What are you doing? Why aren't you going faster across that street?

I've had this idea for decades that the signal that turns to green should automatically also put up the white symbol or the green walk signal or whatever for the pedestrian, and that should be there all the time that it's green. Because drivers become antsy and look at it like, well, there's red up there, so I can hit you. I mean, seriously, they actually look at it like, get out of the way because that red sign, that red hand means you're not supposed to be out there. And the fallback on that is to actually put the timer up so that those seconds can be counted off by the person walking across the street, and that pedestrian has the safety in a sense that the driver will pay attention to that and know that, hey. I don't get to just rush across here.

Right? So this is a safety measure that could really help. And I often thought it would just be a matter of reprogramming the control of the light. And I do believe that might be able to happen now with new technology and all the good things happening. I've been especially appreciative of all the measures that this director has been taking, I hear people complain. What are those green ballards out there for? What are they doing to our roads? Right out here, people are like, hey. You're slowing us up. Well, that's the point.

And they they don't seem to get that. So I'm very glad that you're doing this. And I do believe one of the things you could do to fuck your own efforts is to put up a little sign that says traffic calming is working. Something along those lines. And just put a little thing there that says, hey. Calm down along with the traffic. Stuff like that. You know? And it's gonna be a better thing in the long run for all of us. I too have been hit on my bicycle.

I've called the police twice. Both times, they did not wanna do a report and automatically seem to assume, well, you're at fault because you're on the bikes. And we have to change that whole mindset, but that'll take time too. Excuse me. The weather is nice again. My bike's ready to roll, and I'll be out about. Thank you kindly for your time.

Okay. That ends public comment on this agenda item. So let's move on to any comment or statements from the board. Yes, Paul.

I got two. Number one, we talked about insurance reporting to the database. Even if you're driving a bike

and someone

hits you, you can report to their insurance company because they're the ones that are gonna have to pay.

Right. In Tanya's case, it was a hit and run.

Yeah. Well, that's that's oh, that's wrong. Right. You're saying you're you're saying that I don't I'm not gonna file a claim with my health insurance. I mean, so I'm suggesting you could file a claim, at least advise the other party's insurance company that you could get, and that could go in the database. The other thing Wayne just kinda gave me a Dwayne gave me an idea. You know? Again, in my part is down. There are countdown timers. I have. And I don't know why those aren't everywhere because that gives you a very clear signal of how long you've got to be in that thing and how and how long the car is gonna expect you to be just walking in there. That's it.

Any other statements from the board? I have two things. One Yeah. I really approach appreciate your focus on vision zero. And that was much my motivation for joining the board. It's my frustration at seeing potential for Santa Rosa as a cycling town, but they feel on it of carrying people away. So that's my first thing. My second thing is when Paul, Tanya, and I drafted the vision zero action plan, we did so because it seemed like it wasn't gonna happen any other way. It was not meant to be set in stone. It's the placeholder document.

So if you want us to update it, we can do it because we know more now, or you guys can update it. But that was really like, we don't know what we're doing, but nobody else seems to even be stepping forward to draft this document. So

I'll also say that the approach of transportation professionals has evolved quite a bit in the last five years based on really research from the CDC and public health professionals to not put the understand that the onus is not on the user, but on the system. Right? And the system means, you know, going down to street design, but also things like land use. Like, why are people at the places where they're at and how are they connected? And, you know, that's a generational problem to solve, and and, you know, we've got a hundred and fifty years of decisions to overcome to fix some of those those concerns.

Like, it's grown for any number of different reasons. But if you wanted to put a 180,000 people in Santa Rosa today and you were starting scratching what the city would look like it does. So, you know, there has been you know, my I would say in the last my point, maybe since I started here, right about that time, early twenty twenty four, I met some people who work at at the CDC and and have evolved what's called the safe system approach to transportation safety, and it's really about this holistic thinking that is trying to get down that health impacts pyramid that has been used for things like vaccines and eradication of diseases and translating that to transportation safety. And so, you know, the plan I would write today would it would've looked a lot different five years ago also. So, yeah, I didn't mean to imply that, you know, if we were to do it again, it would be better now.

That doesn't mean it wasn't as good as it could be in 2022.

Yes. I was not insulted at all. I just wanted to make sure you understood you were free

to do more. There you go.

Yeah. I I I hope you can tell that we have not been waiting for permission.

Yeah. Alright.

Okay. I think that ends this agenda item. So now we can go on to 7.3, which is the fiscal year 2627 proposed capital improvement.

I want Dan have a seizure. We'll be even briefer this time. So the CIP is an annual allocation of funds that we get to deliver projects. The CIP, though, the those dollars do a lot of different things. There is also some grant funding and minor amount of general fund funding on top of it, but it is mostly funds generated from development fees, gas taxes, some regional measures, and then support from the county transportation authority as well.

In the last seven or eight years, it it comes in somewhere 18 to $20,000,000 annually. It's it's a little bit different every year, but we we're getting to a pretty steady state, which is good in terms of predictability. It's not great in terms of buying power. Yeah. $20,000,000 is a lot of money. $20,000,000 today is less than $20,000,000 was five years ago. So that is frustrating. That is a systemic state and nationwide problem related to how we fund transportation improvements that we're

not gonna solve here.

Next slide, please. This year, it's a little over $21,000,000, and we broke up this pie chart just to show what that money is doing. So almost 60% of it is going to pavement maintenance. The vast vast majority, more than $9,000,000 of it is going to the Oakmont projects that we spoke about just a few minutes ago. But we also are dedicating almost $6,300,000 to two legacy projects that are finally off the ground.

Many of you might have heard in February when we received the bids back for the bicycle pedestrian over crossing that the low bid was 8 and a half million dollars over our estimate and over our funding loan. In the weeks between that bid closing and sending that contract to council, we did some accounting magic to scratch every dollar from every location that we had available, push a couple projects back into the next fiscal year to get that contract award. That did not mean fully funding the project, and we made sure that council was aware of that at the time. So another $3,400,000 of this year's capital improvement program fiscal year budget is going towards that project also. We also had finally got permission in December to build the Jennings Crossing, which is great.

Ten years of advocacy to to get that crossing back in place, full set of design plans, subject to smart building it for us. What we didn't have was money to do it. So we put a little bit of money aside last year, found some other funds to fund about 40% of that $4,000,000, but we're still short $2,800,000. So pavement maintenance, bicycle pedestrian over crossing, Jennings is just under 90% of our capital improvement program budget, and you see how strapped we get very fast to do this. The pavement maintenance is is a choice that we made, but it is also a commitment that I made to the city council when after being hired that was a priority for them, a priority for community members, and also something that we could do to attack the problems that we're interested in in this room.

Right? That we can do a lot with that to improve pedestrian bicycle and safety conditions by picking the right streets to to go after. So this number is a little bit high this year. There are a couple of previous grants projects that are finally ready to build also that are majority pavement maintenance. You go to the next slide, we'll talk a little bit about those. So

we have the Oakmont project that'll

start later this year and continue into 2027. We'll also be doing a bunch of streets in Bennett Valley. You've seen you may have seen the prep work for that happening already. We expect that work to start in July and be done around the time school starts using dollars that become available July 1. This is also part of that change in focus that we know that money is coming for this.

We've prepped for it. We're ready to make those dollars work as soon as we get We had as part of an affordable housing project, identified some sidewalk gap, curb ramp, and paving to be done in and around the downtown area. That's that one of those six or seven segments is that segment on College that I mentioned. There are other segments on E Street, on Brookwood, a couple other streets. That project is also finally ready to go, and there's a small amount in this to close the funding gap on that.

And then we will get our last distribution from the county for the annexation of Roseland to to improve pavement maintenance conditions on that. So we will have a final Roseland pavement maintenance project. It'll be our sixth sometime in 2027 with as many streets as we can get to with those dollars. That doesn't mean that pavement maintenance will end in Roseland. It just means that the dedicated stream from the county comes to an end on July 1.

Next slide. In the projects that we talked about, so that little over 1,500,000 or so that was left is split amongst the projects that you see on the screen. For almost all of them, we are closing funding gaps. The Corby Baker Cottonwood was a grant funded project that had previous allocations. We had a little funding gap that we needed to close.

Same with 3rd Street over Dota Trail, same with the Piner Creek Hawk. We have one new project this year, which is pedestrian bicycle improvements on Maple And Veneta Valley surrounding Highway 12 that Terina and Alexander will be leading. The rest of the money is general fund money due to a settlement with the federal government regarding the Americans with Disabilities Act. So we get $1,200,000 a year put into a fund to approve conditions for that. That money has in the past been pretty nebulous and used by different city departments without much of a plan.

With the integration of parks into transportation and public works, pretty much everybody would spend that money now or or. So it's not I know. To spread across these different projects. There is almost $4,000,000 in that this year. We've already spent close to 2.

So we're we're creating a plan to get that money out into community and into city facilities much quicker. We're also paying for staff support from the water department for asset management. We pay for bridge assessments and repairs, and then a small amount for survey equipment. All of that money is paying not just for the stuff that you see on the streets, but our capital projects team is 0% funded by the general fund. So we whoever's bringing them projects has to pay them for it.

All of this money goes to support that, paying the similar, you know, the grants are used to do that. Funds from the water department for their projects are used to do that. Funds from the fire department for new fire stations and improvements to their facilities are used to do that. But $20,000,000, you know, is not nothing, but it's not all seen in construction contracts. Having said that, we had built up so many partial projects and, you know, desires beyond our means that so far this year, we've already bid and contracted $70,000,000 worth of construction contracts.

You know, some of that is waiting twenty years to build a $40,000,000 bridge over the freeway. But that that becomes a challenge in terms of delivering all of this work also. And it is it is a reflection of building larger infrastructure projects. I would like to get us more to a model of smaller infrastructure projects that can be delivered in the same year that the money is available. And I'm happy to report that after this, all previous previously funded capital improvement projects are off our books. So starting next year, everything that we bring forward to this board to council will be our fault.

Like, the

people that you see in the room, it will be our choice. You're not finishing anything that people picked five, ten, twenty years. But with that, I'm happy to answer any questions about the state of the capital improvement program.

Yeah. I think Kathy's ready to go. Just one more. I just this is the last question I promised about Opa. I know that you'd like to come bind in order to overall kind of save money, and I'm just throwing it out there that if there was any chance at all of putting in a blinking light for pedestrians at White Oak Drive and Oakmont Drive. I know last year, pedestrians were hit in that crossing more than one. I know, you know, the cyclist would not probably push that button, but that crossing is infamous. It's very dangerous. I hold my breath every time I cross. They're either on foot or with a bike.

So I'm just throwing it out. Sorry. It's okay. Alexandra, do you know if that is on the list or maybe did the list of high injury intersections? Because I think when we voted on how to spend TDA three money, we left it to the discretion of staff to figure out to pick up the highest entry periods.

That was to pair with the s s four a grade.

Okay. But Sales

I will say that we internally talked about the trees and these two, you know, add, like, daylighting or curb extensions to a lot of the intersections out here in Elkhart. So that's gonna be part of the plan, too.

Yeah. Similar to what we talked about earlier. Nothing's going back the way it was during Elkhart, every street. Is that that intersection stop controlled on all four approaches? So Well,

that's why I just looked

at it.

It's supposed to be. It's supposed to be. Okay. Yeah. But I can't tell you how many times. I don't know if it's a school driver or or the people contractors. But Other questions from the board? I have a question about the category of our desires are bigger than our budget. We talked was it at the groundbreaking ceremony for the bridge over crossing about a sweeper and then that could like a bike lane sweeper and then that could go into the next trash contract?

It is in the current trash contract, actually. We've we've negotiated with Ecology. They have added a sweeper that is able to fit within protected bike lanes. We have also purchased one using Parks Maintenance Fund to do to purchase one for park paths and some other tight areas in the city that we can also use in bike lanes as necessary too. So we now have multiple options. Now we just gotta figure out staffing levels to be able to use it everywhere we wanna use it.

So we could start recording through the My Santa Rosa app, but something needs to be swept

We do.

And it would actually be

That's right.

Okay. Great. Looks like there are no oh, any additional questions?

One one one question. I'm I'm

I'm new here. Understand trying

to understand the distinction

between you said something about that that parks are now part of transportation.

Yeah. So in last year's budget adoption, the parks and recreation department was split into two. Recreation went to our housing and community services, and parks portion of it, the capital projects, and maintenance came to transportation and public works. And now we've rearranged ourselves. Basically, every maintenance function in the city lives in our department now and under one deputy director, city facilities, streets, parks, and our fleet maintenance.

So those teams are now all we've actually rearranged where people sit. So all of the super crew supervisors sit next to each other, share resources, are able to respond as quickly as we can. Gotcha. Okay. Cool. Thank

Oh, I have another budget prior question. We mentioned Redwood Bikeshare funding. Is that all grant funded right now? How is that funded? How might this fit into I know it's not capital gains. That's Yeah. Desires versus funding.

Right now, it's currently all grant.

So And when does

that run

out? I believe this I mean, August. Fall? Yeah. Fall sometimes. So there you know, SCTC is looking at ways to fund it. I asked I've asked in the past if we could try to fund it somehow here to them, but then they also said that you would have to be the con like, you would have to own the contract pretty much. That's too big of a contract for us to to own. Right?

Especially because the existing contract is multi jurisdictional. So Yeah. Multi county. Right?

It's actually I've heard from other jurisdictions that it's better to have, like, multi jurisdictional because then you can, you know, use it in different jurisdictions as well. But, you know, it I don't think it's been as successful in other cities, so I don't feel like it it'll leave Santa Rosa anytime soon, but it might other places if we don't find a funding source.

County Transportation Authority is working on it there. Okay.

Great. Let's go on to public comments. Do we have any public comments about agenda item? Okay. Dwayne.

Hello again. Dwayne Dewitt from Roseland. And I've been coming here for decades. This is the first time I may have a chance to perhaps influence how some spending in Roseland could go because it's the last year the county's funding agreement, the annexation, ten years ago, completing Roseland County Island coming into Santa Rosa. A lot of folks out there are still curious about how the money's been spent.

Did the county give all the money? What's gonna happen? It would be really nice if you'd put together a short and small forum after working hours to invite the community to say, how should we spend the last dollars? This is really important because there's a lot of stuff that didn't get done, we thought would get done, and now it's going to be no more money. We understand that.

So maybe come out to the community and say, okay. We only have this amount of money. We got all these kinds of needs. How about the community helps us pick what it gets spent on? It's really important because under previous staff, that kind of communication didn't happen so well. But now you got a new team here. As we say in Rosen, they're kicking butt. This is good stuff. It's never happened before. Alright?

And so here we are with a man dedicated to safety, a board dedicated to listening and asking questions, not just being a rubber stampers. This is wonderful. It's it's so unusual. You just don't realize it, especially the new guy. You're you're gonna be like, what? Yeah. I gotta tell you, man. This is a different world than it was just in the past. And I have spent a lot of time trying to advocate for Roseland. Some people think that that's all I'm about.

That's not the case. I rode my bike to school at Santa Rosa High School as a boy from Roseland. I've been all over the town because back in the day, the only boys club was over Montgomery Village, and you rode your bike from Roseland all the way out there. And as boys, we'd ride our bikes all the way out to Sugarloaf Park, up the hill, all kinds of stuff. Bicycles, those savor back then.

Just because traffic was less, and people were more attentive to us, I believe. People are in a hurry now. They are just unsafe in so many ways, shapes, and forms. So, please, maybe you folks, as this body, be the hosts of the director of transportation and public works, which proudly has parks in its department. This is wonderful.

Come out there. Come to Roseland School, Shepherd School, wherever we could have the forum, and let the people come out and talk about the last money to be spent from the county on projects that would help Roseland and help their lives also. Thank you once again for their improvement at Burbank Avenue crossing Hearne Avenue into Southwest Community Park in the Bellevue District. With Lee Bro's gonna go to Bellevue safely now. That's gonna be wonderful.

Thank you kindly. I look forward to seeing all of you again in the future and talking with mister. About mister Messell again in the future also. All the best to all of you. I'll be leaving now. Bye now.

Thank you. Thank you.

That concludes public comments on this agenda item. So then do we have any comments or statements to the board about this agenda item? Right. Then that concludes agenda item 7.3. So let's move on to agenda item eight, which is chair or board member announcement. Any notes? Well, I have an announcement, which is last month, I just decided on a whim to sign up for Redwood Bike Share. I highly recommend it. If you sign up this month, there's a discount code. You get your first month membership for just $5, which gives you sixty minutes a day of riding.

The code is all caps bike month 2026. To do it, try it out. I did I've been riding bike share bikes instead of my own bike because I live just a block off the casino, so I just treat them like my personal bike. And anytime I need a bike, I walk over and get one. But I it's been fun.

Like, so on it's Mother's Day weekend, I carpooled with friends to Petaluma, went to a garden tour, then I needed to leave before they did. So I took bike share in Petaluma to the smart train, rode smart to Runner Park, then I was able to take bike share again over to the Green Music Center for my son's concert, and then I carpooled home with him, which I could've driven a little bit. I have a car. He's good with the economy. But this was just more fun and more social, and I got to spend more time with friends and my son and some really excited middle schoolers on the train who were so thrilled that their parents were letting them go out on their own.

They couldn't believe it. And they were had they had their bikes, and they were out going on some big expedition. Anyway so you should sign up for bike share for a month. It's just. And that's my note. Do we have staff announcements?

Actually, I don't think we have much because we pretty

much covered everything we're doing forever. I don't see no one else. Okay.

I do know, like, right, the the Bicycle Coalition's holding the Pedal Fest out there in Selma Village, and then there's also Child in the Wild on the same day, May 31. Where's Child

in the Wild again, Matthew? Howard.

Both are between eleven and four. Come out. Torino will be at Child in the Wild. I'll be at PedalFest. Yeah. We are actively starting to ramp up our engagement for a connection between Prince Memorial Greenway and the Southeast Greenway. So Torino will have boards at Child in the Wild, I believe, and looking for feedback on the different alternatives.

And maybe one more announcement. Next month, we'll be taking a contract to the city council for a master plan for the Southeast Greenway. We've picked a planning and design firm. We have funded it. All we've told them so far is that there we expect there to be a trail from one end to the other.

If you haven't been on one of the Greenway campaigns tours, it's really illustrative to see just how tight a space it is in certain areas and but it's not possible out there. But we have, actually, through our partnership with the cinema land trust, donors lined up and ready to spend on playgrounds and stuff. We just have to actually have a plan for what to do. So we're looking for not just a master plan, but early build projects so that as early as, like, 2027 or 2028, we're we're building stuff to start using that property that people fought so hard to to get us city parkland.

Excellent. Okay. I think that concludes our meeting at I don't know. 548, we'll call it. Okay. I do not know if we have a meeting next month. Terina, Tanya, I will talk.