Transportation Committee - Regular Meeting

Good afternoon and welcome. I call the special meeting of the Transportation Committee to order on Wednesday, September 16, 2026 at 4 p.m. Next on the agenda is the roll call. Alderman Savage.

Present.

Alderman Shannon Meyer.

Present.

Okay, thanks for being present. Next on the agenda is approval of the agenda. Do I have a motion to approve the agenda?

So moved.

All in favor, can you say aye?

Aye.

Thank you. Shannon Meyer and Savage, who made a motion. Next on the agenda is the business and miscellaneous approval of the minutes. Do I have a motion to approve the regular meeting minutes from July 22nd, 2026 meeting? So moved. Is there a second?

Second.

All in favor?

Aye.

Please say aye. Thank you again for making the motion. Next on the agenda is general discussion section. The next discussion topic we have is ID 169-26, Safety and Mobility Plan Discussion. I would like to invite our Chief of Court, Comprehensive Planning, Eric Lalinski, and Bike, Pedestrian, Micro-Mobility Coordinator, Will Rau to the table. And whenever you are ready, the floor is yours.

Good afternoon. I'm Eric Leschinski, Chief of Comprehensive Planning. And actually, I'm going to hand it over to Alexis Robinson, our Senior Comprehensive Planner, who's the project manager for this initiative. So I'm here just to support.

Okay.

Yeah, I was just waiting for the presentation to get pulled up. But hello, everyone. My name is Alexis Robinson, senior comprehensive planner in the Department of Planning and Zoning. I am the project manager for our Annapolis Mobility Action Plan, which I am happy to say has been kicked off and is officially rolling. THIS PROJECT IS A SAFE STREETS AND ROADS FOR ALL GRANT PROGRAM. THE PURPOSE OF THIS IS TO IMPLEMENT OTHER ACTIONS THAT HAVE TAKEN PLACE. SO AS YOU KNOW, THE ANNE ARUNDEL COUNTY HAS A VISION ZERO PLAN AND HAS IDENTIFIED DIFFERENT AREAS AND GOALS TO REDUCE collision and increased safety around the county. Their plan does include the city of Annapolis, and that was a visioning process that the city was a participant in. We also have goals within the comprehensive plan, the Annapolis Ahead 2040, that outline areas of transportation improvement as well as safety improvement. FOR THE BETTERMENT OF ALL OF OUR CITIZENS. THIS WAS A GRANT THAT WAS AWARDED BY THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION AND THERE ARE OTHER SAFE STREETS FOR ALL PROGRAM FUNDS THAT ARE IN DIFFERENT ELEMENTS OF THE CITY BUT THIS ONE IS SPECIFICALLY FOR DEVELOPING A MOBILITY ACTION PLAN. Our partners in this include Nelson Nygaard, Roadside Harwell, and Fair Piers. They are our consultant team with expertise in multimodal transportation, safety, community engagement, and design for complete streets. So as you know, our roads are not simple from our historic district all the way out to the county. There are roads with different ownership and different levels of service as well as different levels of infrastructure. We have a culmination of city owned, county owned and state owned roadways, makes for a very complicated process in making improvements, but this plan is hoping to include prioritization and improvement levels for all of these roads, or at least for a way for us to coordinate between our local and regional partners for having those improvements documented and have a pathway towards funding and implementation. This is a picture of Forest Drive, something that most of us, at least all of us, are familiar with. It is a road that has a lot of traffic but is also very Dicey for pedestrians and vehicles alike. It's something that is kind of a prime example of where a lot of infrastructure improvement for signaling pedestrian infrastructure and connections to other modes of transportation come together. There are currently, as I mentioned before, the county's Vision Zero Plan, which was adopted or enacted in May of 2022, as well as the Forest Drive Safety Study, which is kind of the framework that the county is using in how they are driving improvements on Forest Drive. These are just examples of current plans that are in place that will be folded into this Mobility Action Plan as elements to coordinate with our county partners in improving mobility. Safety, as identified in the comprehensive plan, is a huge issue. This map shows areas of vehicle crashes, and as you can see, there are large volumes of it, especially on Forest Drive, but also downtown and our outer parole area where we would like to place emphasis and priority in developing improvements that can actually be implemented. Overall, the vision for Annapolis is to create an equitable, healthy, and resilient city. And the safety of our roads is something that is overarching in the health of pedestrians, not just people as they are moving, but their overall health as they live in the city. One element that was identified in the comp plan is also a map of social vulnerability. This is linked with the density of population, but also their social economic status, housing types and transportation options, what their languages spoken at home can be, and the household composition and disability. These things are also tied to roadway safety. As you can see in the comparison between these three maps, our places that are most socially vulnerable are also places that have the highest opportunity for vehicle crashes. This also shows the systemic disinvestment of infrastructure. So it is also a priority of this plan to equitably assess where safety improvements can be made. Another element of this, I'm sorry, go ahead.

You want to mind hopping back to the social vulnerability map, please? As I'm sure my colleagues can see there, one more, yep, there we go. As I'm sure my colleagues can see there, we got ward four, we got ward five, and we got ward seven in the darkest parts of that.

So this is what. Same thing on slide, socially vulnerable populations. Right there on the right, we have equal crashes.

Yep. Sorry for interrupting you. I just wanted to point that out for the record.

So another component of this plan is complete streets. This is also something that is identified in the comprehensive plan as a priority. These complete streets would include recommendations for increased facilities where, whether it be changes in how pedestrians interact with the street, bicyclists interact with the street, safety controls and modifications to the roadway, that can be implemented to change behaviors for the betterment of everyone. Another component is going to be the bicycle network. This is something that we already have, but this mobility action plan will help to update the bicycle network in places where we are still looking to have connections and also to Also to help to prioritize and be strategic in improvements, public facility improvements to include additions to the bicycle network. Transportation is more than just walking and driving. It also includes scooters, our micro mobility, on-demand service, and other alternatives to walking and driving. How we can prioritize and incorporate these elements into our transportation network are also things that are being considered in this mobility action. And so I just want to forward on to these project elements. This pyramid is kind of a reverse pyramid at the bottom is the public engagement the foundations of this will be comprehensive public engagement throughout the project we're going to begin with stakeholder meetings and community workshops incorporating the feedback and input of our county and state partners to make sure that we have something that is actually actionable and something that aligns with their goals and priorities since we do share responsibilities of our roadways. The next step in this process will also be the existing conditions analysis. We will have to take a hard look at what the conditions of our current roadways and transportation network are, looking at past plans and what their goals are in order to develop the next step, which is our goals and performance metrics. We will have a policy analysis as well as creating a vision and goals for this mobility action plan. and determining performance metrics that can help us to prioritize projects and create an implementation of this action plan. As I mentioned before, complete streets and the bike network are also being incorporated into this. It is a comprehensive look at transportation options. In the end, all of these elements will be put together to publish our mobility action plan, as well as including techniques for evaluation, financial planning, and strategies for helping us to get to our long-term goals in a day-to-day fashion. So this is a general project schedule. It is currently September. We are just getting started. We are just in the works for conversations with our county and state partners, understanding what public engagement may look like, how we can best reach the community. And we're also in the process of doing data collection of existing conditions so that that can be analyzed and incorporated into the future steps. We're hoping to have this project be on track to produce a complete mobility action plan in the spring of 2028. As I said before, we're in the process of incorporating stakeholders. This is kind of just to demonstrate that our stakeholders in this process are far and wide reaching. We may think of stakeholders as being our immediate partners in different departments, as well as the city council and the commission, but there are a lot of residents here that have a say. But then there's also the county. There's our neighbors at the Naval Academy and other installations, as well as St. John's and other local partners that run through the city. So any connections that are made through transportation, and other forms. Then we have our regional partners at the state level and regional level that collect safety data and have other safety metrics that we can implement and incorporate into this plan. And of course, as being so world renowned, there are always the general public and audiences that are far and reaching that can be incorporated and have an important part to play in this process. And so that is my presentation. Thank you all for your time and I am open for questions.

Thank you so much for that presentation. Are we still anticipating to build the Truxton green connector bike project in 2027?

I can speak to that. It is on track. Public Works is managing it. I've been supporting that. I think it's in the permitting phase right now. So I think they're anticipating a breaking ground late winter, early spring on that. But

And then I don't know if there's also anticipation on expanding that into Spa Road as well for additional bike paths. I'm asking just because we're getting a lot of road construction on Spa Road now and that's one of the big pushes.

What portion of Spa are you thinking or?

Connecting Hunt Meadow Drive to Forest.

Yeah, so that's an exciting shared use path that the developer of Villages at Providence Point is building. Between Forest Drive and Hunt Meadow Road, it's going to be a 10-foot wide hiker-biker path alongside Spa Road. A gap, actually it'll turn the corner on Forest Drive and connect to where that path ends at the Willows today. So the Willows put their section in as part of their adequate public facilities agreement, and so the path will just continue along and wrap Forest Drive and Spa Road. So that's under construction right now. It looked like they were putting in the curbs just the last couple days, and people can see it. Thank you. No further questions.

Okay. Savage, do you have any questions?

You know I do. But I'm going to be limited because we're tight on time today. So thank you. Excellent work. Really looking forward to this. And yeah, just super excited with it. I think the only thing I would add as far as Something you may want to consider adding would be having this report look at some of our internal processes. What I'm really interested in is how do we actually get this to the implementation and beyond phase, right? We had the 2008, 9, 13, whatever year, the plan, the first decade-old plus bike plan, and it just didn't work. Great plan, but it fell flat. I mean, I know, Mr. Luechnings, I'm sure you have implemented projects that are listed on there, but as far as the committee fell flat, didn't really meet regularly, and this predates all of you, I'm certainly not pointing fingers, but that's what I'm always thinking about with these reports, is how do we ensure that's gonna happen? Because the last report did also highlight funding mechanisms, And again, we had low-hanging fruit, like just putting up more signage, and again, it wasn't really done. And so I guess that's one question to you, is what are you, have you already thought about that? Like what's your plan for, or is this being done in-house or by, well you said it's being done by a consultant, right? But have you already spoken to them about that kind of implementation?

Yes, so this is something that we are considering, especially in the implementation part. We are hoping that a prioritization matrix can come out of this that can be incorporated into the CIP. You know, we are working with Public Works. throughout this process to understand what their methods for when they do street improvements or repavings and other things like that, how do we include these bikeways as part of when sidewalks are being improved, when roads are being restriped, and having them listed in a way so that they can say this is our priority, this is the bikeway priority, and the segments actually line up together so that they can be done at the same time.

Yeah, and I would also encourage you to look at, so we have a number of existing systems and funds in place to support this, right? We have a traffic safety fund. We now have a sustainable mobility fund. And we did for a short period have a complete streets fund, which I think was spread out into individual projects. So that's what I get by process, because I think we need to be able to hit the ground running. We have these money set aside. We did it years ago with intent of it being spent. And some of it is, but I just think there's a lot more potential to get it spent more quickly. I also think we should emulate some of the other talk with the state, do we need to locally to figure out how we can get blanket permits to install this infrastructure so we don't have to go and even get internal reviews. We adopt the standards, we adhere to the standards, that's what they're there for, we don't need to go and get standards reviewed because that's what they're, they get reviewed once, right? So let's see if we can get that incorporated into our practices and use this money. Ideally, too, Work through our procurement process. Get a pool of money set aside from these funds, and then you don't have to keep getting individual POs. Just get a blanket PO. Just speed up that process again. So just those kind of things I would really like to push. The last thing I'll say is just regarding the timeline, and that's one thing I... it does cause me a little bit of consternation as far as the timeline. Because it's now, it's not slated to complete until spring of 2028. That's pretty far away. Is there anything we can do to really accelerate that? Because I think that's just a long, we have a lot we can do in the meantime, right? And we are doing a lot of work, but I'm just wondering if there's something, is there some kind of interim report we can get done sooner? Is there anything we can do to get that sped up? I mean, how much? I don't know. I mean, how much more public outreach do we need to do? We've done it on the comp plan. We did it with the first spike plan. Do we really need to do an additional layer of outreach? Maybe we could trim that back a little bit. I don't know. Just thinking out loud.

I think that's a very interesting perspective to incorporate into this. I do know that I can say that different elements of this plan will be completed sooner than spring of 2028. It's more so the overarching comprehensive every single element will be complete. I think there is an opportunity that certain elements may be prioritized sooner in the timeline than later.

We did ask we asked if they could uh push up the complete street standards in particular i know that those were sorely needed so um they couldn't happen fast enough so yeah we hope that that particular element can come sooner than what's in that current schedule but

Well, because, for example, I have a draft legislation for Complete Streets. I was trying to group it into this larger omnibus, but I could easily pull it out based on other jurisdictions. I think if we have a basic framework, I think it would give you all flexibility, but that's just one example. We may not need to wait for them. I don't know if there are other policies we could do something similar on, but that's all I have.

Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair.

And I'm just going to piggyback off what Alderman Savage said real quick about delays and the time it takes to do this. It literally is life or death on situations. I had a constituent killed on Hilltop in a hit and run because he was trying to ride his bike home from work. Run over, left in the street like roadkill. I'm going to repeat that. Left in the street like roadkill, coming home from work. The faster we do this, the safer we keep our constituents in the most vulnerable parts of the city safe. Thank you.

Daryl, do you have any report?

There are a few projects that we're working on together such as the mobility action plan, but I wanted to pull out a few events that are happening in October and as well as this weekend that are bike pedestrian and micro mobility related. September 30th in Eastport, from one to five, it's called Eastport on the Move. And this is, Activities-based, it's focused on safety, focused on biking for all ages, but most importantly, children. And Fifth Street and Eastport will be closed off. So that's Sunday, this Sunday. from 1 to 5 p.m., and we'll be tabling, and we'll have information and be handing out things about our bike safety programs and information. October 7th, once again, is Walk, Bike, and Roll to School Day. It's a nationwide program that happens October 7th every year. We participate every year. I participate with various schools. This year so far we have Eastport Elementary and Germantown Elementary. There's talks for Georgetown East as well, but I'm in the process of that. And what we do, and I don't know if you all are familiar with it, but we essentially gather children that are walking to school, their parents and families, and make sure they have helmets, make sure they have safety materials, give them donuts. The police department is involved and we essentially make sure that they arrive safely to school. The awesome thing about it as well is what I use it for is to also do audits, kind of a walking audit as we do it, just to be sure that some of our crosswalks and ways in which that they, you know, get to school are considered and safe. And what we do know, obviously in Eastport, on Bay Ridge, excuse me, Chesapeake, that there are some areas in there in terms of crosswalks that need attention. The other activities and events that we did last year were senior walks, and these senior walks are with the Annapolis Senior Center, and essentially I take out our three-wheel electric scooter bike that we have um and let them ride it and it's really it's it's it's fun because at first they're terrified of it and they're like what am i going to do with this and then they get on it and they never want to get off so um that's always fun and then we walk the annapolis senior center we walk along the trail that ends up at spa creek or Spa Road, sorry. And that's usually fun. We also will do a popular trail walk, as we did last year, and our Spa Creek Loop. So that goes all the way from Eastport all the way around town, the trail system all the way through there, cutting up through the Chesapeake Children's Museum, behind Bates, all of that, all the way around to the Eastport Bridge. And then we'll also be doing walks with Forward Brewery. Look out for that and it should be posted and hopefully there'll be some videos on it too. So I just wanted to give you all an update on that. And let me, oh, and the last thing is we have essentially, fingers crossed, completed our contract with Drop Bike, which is our bike share program. Remember we talked about that quite a bit. The hope, we desperately wanted to get it on the ground and rolling. before the summer was out. Obviously, the summer has sunsetted, as they say, and we're moving into cooler weather, but our hope is that we can get it before it starts happening, that weather changes completely. So once again, we're still in the process of finishing the actual contract part of it, which I think has been, everything has just about been signed and taken care of, and then we'll begin planning what it will look like in the city of Annapolis. So stay tuned for that. There was also a question, just wanted to bring up the concern or question about Tyler and parking. Someone had elevated a question about Tyler and some of the changes that happened there. But do any of you all want to jump on what we did at Tyler? Because I don't know if you all, have you all been paying attention to what's going on on Tyler Avenue?

Yeah, well, the restriping on Tyler was a big request from residents. We had heard when we were doing our Tyler Avenue complete community zoning initiative, which was separate from the restriping, but essentially residents told us pretty bluntly that you know they couldn't really get behind any changes to zoning unless there were some um immediate uh changes to the streetscape and we heard them on that and um and it's been a long simmering issue and so um so yeah we we worked with uh public works to get that restriped and um seems like it's having an improvement on safety we we actually haven't heard

much in the way of negative comment we've heard a lot of positive comments about it but um about treat itself with the new bike lane i had some complaints i did and i submitted them so so

What happened, the larger part of it was creating kind of fly down the road and there's no delineated. Sorry. The idea, of course, was to create something that kind of marks that there are things other than cars that are meant to go or parked cars yeah that was the idea behind that and of course can you elevate some of in particular what some of those concerns were um well i was riding along down the street myself and

That bike lane seemed like it's too close to the road and people were dodging and, you know, yeah, it was kind of crazy, you know, and I said, oh Lord, here we go.

Is the bike lane on the inside or outside of the car?

It's actually not really a bike lane. So I wish Jeff Wentz from Public Works was here to explain. But essentially, it was intended to be a buffer between the parking lane that was striped and the drive lane. It was essentially a four foot remainder that looks like a bike lane. But it's not two-way. It's not wide enough to be a two-way bike lane. So it probably will not get the share row or the bike symbols printed on the asphalt. But people will use it as a bike lane, which I think is fine. But I think the primary idea behind the striping is to slow people down. Previously, it was essentially like you had 16-foot wide lanes with the occasional parked car. that people weren't expecting. And now, you know, we have delineated lanes. And, you know, I know that Anytime you have a dramatic change on a roadway, it forces people to adjust. I think over time, people will adjust. You'll probably get used to it. I can't speak for every bike rider and the way they ride. There's probably people on e-motos. We think it'll work itself out.

Was it considered? When I recently biked through Philly with one of their bike planners, they say they actually deliberately made a shift because they realized having the bike lane right next to the cars is not safe. It has the cars between the bikers and the traffic, right? That's what it should be for safety. And people are, because right now it's going to, people are going to be in danger if they're riding through. I mean, if we have, can we, I don't know. I'm just wondering, I thought we had details that specified

Yeah, if it was a true bike lane, we would have probably put it on the inside, but because it was... People are going to use it as one. Yeah.

So part of the Tyler Avenue process, there are long-term development implementations for expanding the streetscape. We would like to see with any kind of... redevelopment on Tyler Avenue to include better street facilities, as well as an expanded shared use path. Of course, that's not the immediate future. And honestly, the bike does have full right of way, the streetway on Tyler. They aren't subject to staying in that four foot buffer. That is not an actual bike lane. And that's probably the safest position for them at this time, but yes, future facilities to increase bike safety and separated bike facility is incorporated into that.

That's a good point. It actually ties back to the zoning initiative where we sent in the Tyler Avenue overlay zone that was adopted. There's a requirement for a 10-foot wide easement for any new development on Tyler. So within what is normally a 25-foot setback, we're requiring a 10-foot wide easement that will allow us to do an off-street trail over time. It will take some time, but that was basically the hope is that eventually, Bicycles are not actually in the street at all, but it'll take time, of course.

Well, that explains better for me now, so I can give them some insight when I talk with them again. Thank you all for coming out this afternoon to this meeting. Have a nice evening, and you feel free to stay if you want to. Thanks again. Next on the agenda is ID 173-26, parking work group update. Phase one that is being led by our city manager, Yolanda Lewis, and our transportation director, Marcus Moore. You may come up to the table and join us. I would like to just give a little background about the parking group before they start their presentation. Back in June, the city manager formed the Parking Reform Work Group after constituents' data showed that nearly 40% of all cases handled by the constituent services between March and June were parking-related, and the work group included nine city departments. It's chaired by Dr. Moore and was authorized by The mayor, a moratorium on a formal citation to missile was issued on June 22nd and has been extended through October 31st. And the Office of Law reviewed the city's authority and found that no legal framework exists For the administration to weigh parking fines, legislation is being drafted. So the workgroup has produced 12 recommendations across five objectives. Unified customer experience, enforcement reform, revenue sustainability, capacity and mobility, and long-term growth. And these items are already in motion, and the parking vendors have been preliminary agreed to joint RFP for a single management contract when current contracts expire at the end of 2027. So the vendor at Hill's Mills-Hillman is expected to convert to post-pay by the end of 2026, and a citation waiver legislation is being prepared for council consideration. So at this time, we would like to hear from you guys.

Good afternoon, Chair and the members of the Transportation Committee. For the record, I'm Marcus Moore, Director of Transportation and Parking. And with me to my right, you're left.

City Manager.

Vinod Abraham, Parking Program Manager.

So what we'd like to share with you today is a follow-up from our our meeting with you back in July. Last week, we did send you a report of our progress and where we are, and we want to just bring that all together and encapsulate what we've done. So since June 23rd, our group was formed And we've had several meetings in person, some were remote, but several subcommittees to really look at it holistically, look at it being parking and come up with recommendations for the full city council to consider. So we took the top 12 to take a look at for your review that we'll be presenting a little later. So as the chair made mention, our groups comprised of all city agencies to come together and look at ideas and ways to make our approach to you would be a consistency of how we deal with parking. Of course, customer services should be always at the top, but making it a transparent environment of how parking is handled in the city of Annapolis. So some of them that you'll see us discuss are quick hits. Along this phase, along this route, you can see the milestones that we did in these last about 12 weeks. Starting on June 22nd, the city manager through the Office of Law initiated a moratorium on how we handle citations. So we can take a look at what the code says and how we can very succinctly look at areas that would really require requests to satisfy the request of having a ticket waived. Finding that we need a little bit more time, and because there was no council meetings in the month of August, that moratorium was going to sunset in August, but it's been pushed to October 31st. So you can see here, our first meeting was on the 23rd, and we continued on with our meetings and our presentation to you guys about two months ago, and we are here at our phase two part of this whole group meeting, which is community involvement. So the group that I made mention that was formulated by the city manager's office, the mayor's concurrence, you can see transportation, office of law, finance, constituent services, and the like. And one of the big things at the beginning of your packet you'll see, What really made us look at this? Our ombudsman constituent service administrator found that over 40% of the cases that she's handling between March and June, I might add, had to do with parking. How it was used, how it was handled, how it was done in a holistic sense with two parking contractors. What we wanna do is look at the ease of how we can go forward and make this process a little bit more streamlined and seamless for the end user. So the progress that we've made the early on successes as you can see we in our report we talked about vendor consolidation so in the next eight to ten months we will be well we'll get out of RFP a lot sooner in the next two or three months but in the next eight to ten months it is our desire to have a single vendor parking contractor for the city of Annapolis And we're exploring those opportunities now with the consortium, the concessionaire, with the county. There's a lot of economies of scale of the garages, not just owned by us, but managed by Anne Arundel County. One of the big hits that you'll see is the agreement with the concession of a postpaid system in the Mills-Hillman garage that we fully expect for you to see at the end of this calendar year, which is November, December. Our goal is before Thanksgiving, but that's our point of progress there by the end of 2026. We'll talk more about the citation waiver legislation as we go through the rest of our packet. And we want to make sure we leave enough time to entertain any questions that you might have along the way, because we have a lot of statistics and things to unpack that we've sent to you, but we're here to answer any pressing questions you might have right now. I'd like to turn it over to our city manager, Ms. Lewis.

Thank you, Director. So before we get into the strategic objectives, let me do some level setting because I think it's helpful to give context as to why we started kind of internally. And you'll hear us move into phase two shortly. But it was very important for us to start internally. If you'll go back just one slide with the With the group that we focused in internally, we wanted to look at our internal processes. A lot of what we came up with was based in foundation from what we had heard from the community and from businesses, from residents who inadvertently were giving us information before we even asked for it by way of reaching out to our offices, including our ombudsman's office. And so that foundational context included at least something from each one of these offices. And so we pulled those offices together kind of as our base group and our core group. And we're not going to go through who those folks are. Some of them are in the room today. But suffice to say that they were very diligent in coming up with practical solutions that could be put before the council. And not only they weren't just kind of blue sky, they were real solutions that we could actually achieve and accomplish and so I hope at some point we get to recognize them and also thank them for being so thoughtful in their approach. So back to the strategic objectives. It was important for us to have a set of principles that we were working from. The very first principle, of course, for us and got it most of the recommendations was to really think about a really good customer service experience. Alderman Shandermeyer was in some of our meetings and I'm sure can attest that. we were really focused on how to make parking feel like it was a good customer experience. And so most of the recommendations will pivot from that point. We knew people felt that there were arbitrary actions, maybe even predatory actions for trying to park and So we thought about our objectives around enforcement. I know there are conversations about just make parking free all across Annapolis. That is not a sustainable model. And I think we have to have that conversation. And so part of our work was to understand what looks fair, what is based on thoughts around benchmarking for our region, and how we could, even if we didn't charge for parking, the cost of infrastructure does not leave. And so we wanted to make sure we were realistic in that approach. And then, you know, we have capacity and mobility, but most of what we hope to hear in phase two will really help us ground ourselves in what we should be doing long-term. And that's when we get into incorporating some of the feedback from our residents and our businesses. So I'll start with the first set of recommendations. I will say that these are draft recommendations. These are not final recommendations. We fully expect that they will expand. The number may grow. We may refine them as we continue to have conversations across the community. From an internal standpoint, we think we've gathered a strong set of recommendations. So just to give you some background and insight on the recommendations, I know you have the report, so we won't go through kind of each one of them in depth. But consolidated parking management contract, as you know, we have multiple parking vendors, as the director said. And part of the conversation that we have started to look at is what life would look like with one parking vendor, one point of entry for all of our parking needs. We are focused on not just having our city garages be part of that conversation. We've also reached out to the county to understand who their vendor is, to determine if there is a way or a world where all of Annapolis parking garages were managed by one single vendor and there's some level of consistency across the board. We're not there yet. Suffice to say, the conversations have started. On a uniform payment platform, I'll tell you, we think this is an important strategy for us. We have a lot of options for folks to pay. We thought that that would make it easier. It actually made it more complicated. One day on my way into work, I met a couple who was coming to visit Annapolis, and I was sitting in my car for a period of time, And they were just looking at the sign, trying to navigate it for a bit of time. And after a while, I got out of my car and said, can I help you? And the question was, which one do I pick? And so it really confirmed this idea that more options doesn't always make it easier. And so we really have to think about what a unified payment platform looks like. We're not only thinking about that from a single platform, we're thinking about what if Annapolis owned its own platform and all of the other entities on the back end fed into that. But essentially what customers would see is a parking platform that said, welcome to the city of Annapolis. So those things are on the table at this point in the conversation. I think the director mentioned about post pay in the Hillman Garage. I don't think we have to go through that additionally, but we're so excited about that, but I think we will ask some folks to help us as we start to test out the system. The vendor has been very courteous to give us a timeline, and then testing for that should start around November of this year. The citation and fine structure reform, part of what happens, I think we've mentioned this at the first meeting, is that whenever people feel like they have received a ticket or a fine or some type of fee, they often will come to the parking vendors or us to intervene. We haven't been exactly clear on the level of authority we have to be able to do that. And so we work with our Office of Law to have them draft an official opinion as well as tell us what needed to go into place from a legislative standpoint. And so that amendment to legislation will be coming to you. as we go into the end of the year. And I think we're clear that all people get tickets. I know I have certainly had one in my lifetime. And so the citation appeals process is very important. You should be able to appeal a ticket if you think that it is not issued fairly. But what I will say is that the administrative appeals process looks different depending on who you are ticketed by. And so part of what we have proposed in one of our recommendations, recommendation five, is really about standardizing the administrative appeals process, giving people ample time to be able to do that, ensuring that it is accessible, whether that is online, to make sure that people have quick access to it, and to ensure that the protocol that we use internally is the same as our vendors so that people have a single experience. The unified enforcement model, which is recommendation six. As you may know, we have our parking vendors that do enforcement. We also have our Annapolis Police Department that does some enforcement. There was conversation, which we have, our APD is represented on the Parking Reform Work Group, is to ensure that those enforcement processes and policies are similar, that you shouldn't get a different experience if the enforcement is by the vendor or if it is by APD. We are also working on to make this a more streamlined process and a more modern process, to be very honest with you. APD currently use paper ticketing as part of how they actually do their enforcement. Our vendors use handheld readers in order to do their ticketing, which makes it much quicker. We started the conversation around... a single enforcement process, it should all look the same, whether it's coming from APD or it's coming from an actual enforcement vendor. And so we are quickly moving towards that, including access to information. It is not always clear to our police department around permits, parking permits, because the information, there may be kind of a gap between the information sourcing. And so part of this is also using the same technology so everybody has information to parking permit information. So I'll stop there. I will turn it over to my colleague to go through dynamic and event pricing.

Good evening. As to dynamic pricing, we are still in the nascent stages of modeling it. And the goal is to redistribute demand. There are close to 100,000 parking sessions that take place in Annapolis every month and close to 1.2 million sessions a year. And at times there are seasons and times of high demand when occupancy goes up very high in the garages and it declines from Hillman downward up to Park Place. So the goal of that is to reduce prices where demand is low and increase prices where demand is very high. during special events and God's Court garage reaches 90% occupancy and Knighton is at 40%. So the goal is to try to redistribute occupancy into the underutilized garages. So we are working on a model for that and it's just in its nascent stages and We are evaluating it on those bases.

And just to add context, because I know it will be a question, is that these are all still dynamic conversations that are happening, but the committee, the work group, even in this modeling have considered what it looks like even during event parking to ensure that residents have access to the parking without being subject to dynamic parking part of what we do have to think about is that we have millions of people who actually come and use our infrastructure each year some are coming specifically for events that that is a one-time visit and while we would we want them to come back and we love them visiting We would also like them to pay for dynamic parking if necessary. And so that helps to balance out financially how we look at the picture of ensuring that we keep rates reasonable in the city, but also capitalize on the millions of people who actually come to visit the city for the purpose of tourism each year.

If I might add in and ask Mr. Abraham to fill in the blanks with us looking at number eight. So what we did was look at regional rate benchmarking. So when we look at local, we're probably mushing out about 50 miles from Annapolis, regional maybe 200, and then other like areas, of Annapolis. The one that comes to mind would be Newport, Rhode Island, up in New England. You know, town on the bay about the same size of what our city looks like. So we have about a dozen and a half looks that we've evaluated regionally of what the parking structure looks like. And right now, using the most expensive garage, which is the most used area, which is Hillman, we're right in the middle. we would be probably at the lower end as far as cost when you look at Gott's Court, Knighton, and Park Place Garage. So it's always good to know when you're benchmarking what are your areas around you. What does Fells Point look like? What is New Carrollton, Maryland, or BWI's Amtrak station, those garages? They want to turn people around, people picking up and going for a couple hours, 30 minutes to drop off, but it becomes increasingly more expensive if it's the overnight, as you've probably taken flights out of the three or four local airports. So we look at the regional benchmark, and we want to make sure that we are in tune with what the market will demand. Mr. Abraham, did you want to send anything else along with that?

So... Circling back on the rates, we have looked at historic cities and regular cities that are comparable to Annapolis, and we are striving to keep the rates moderate and low so that it's accessible for use for everyone.

Just to, so the information and the dialogue that we are having today is actually part of what goes into the report so you understand kind of where we are. What the report, the final recommendation is to actually do a benchmarking rate study. That study would be more robust. It would be a thoughtful approach that kind of gives us a view, not just current day, but how rates have shifted and changed over time in cities that we would be benchmarking against. Part of the discussion that we've had is that we understand that the county has not had a rate study since 2015, and they are also in conversation with us about, like, how to do this collaboratively. You know, part of the experience that you want to have whenever you come to Annapolis is some type of consistency and reliability, and so... I think it's ideal for us not to have folks kind of trying to go all over the city to get the pricing on the lots. We should have a sense of what you're gonna find with the level of consistency across the entire city. That might not be achievable, but that is what we're angling for, and that's why we're kind of thinking about a larger study. But as of today, we do have some information about what's happening in other places similar to ours. I think.

This is not a question, just a general statement and keeping in mind during rates. And this is per the study comprehensive parking supply cost and price analysis by Todd Littman in 2023. The average per year maintenance on structured parking is $5,000 per space per year. So for 586 spaces in Mills Hillman garage, the average month, the average yearly maintenance would be 2.93 million. For GOTS, it would be $2.7 million for its 540 spaces, and for Knighton, it's $610,000. Now, we don't spend that on maintenance every year, which is why two of those garages are a little rough and ready. So, rates are important to keep things standing. Just want to point that out.

Very good point. We're playing that catch-up game with central services to get us back in parity with what they should look like, feel like, and be, for sure.

In the old Hillman garage, we neglected maintenance to the point where it was dangerous. Like, we were lucky that didn't fall down.

Continuing on, our parking program manager has done a very good job with defining what it is that we need when we look at wayfinding. How do I get in there? How do I navigate around there? And how do I pay? The one that's the largest that has so many entrances and exits would be the Park Place Garage. So when you look at downtown wayfinding, we're working on that concurrently for outlying garages but also downtown with the help of our PIO created some very nice signage as you approach Hillman or as you're going up Main Street if you think you've noticed them with how to get there from here. So we have money in our FY27 budget to look at these directional signage and the approach that we're taking to make the feel, the look ease. And of course, branding is very important with what we're doing with our whole downtown look. And then keeping within the HPC guidelines of what it is that we actually can do. So as we move forward with this process, looking at public engagement is very important, and that's coming down the pike in our phase two to test what it is that we have done so far, look at what it is that they're looking for us to do, validate our findings, and moving forward. So we really look forward to this. It is a process. There is time that is needed to be educated to hear what's being said, look at what the top three things that our folks are saying, our employees of downtown businesses, our residents, our employees of the city. So the communication event and how we roll that out with the engagement is very important, and that's where we'll be starting in just a couple weeks, and we're pretty excited about what it is we'll learn. The red curve painting frequency, working closely with our Department of Public Works, we're gonna actually outsource that to a vendor that can take care of this for Public Works. Because one of the things we've noticed over the last several years, if you have a sign that's facing east or west, of course the sun is gonna fade that quickly, but not as quickly as it's gonna fade a red curve. And red curbs need to be refreshed probably every three or four years, and some of them have been twice that. So we're in the process now of those quick hits in the heavily densely pop areas of ward one and ward two, the old fourth ward and all, and then we're working towards getting that vendor for the replacement. Some places we want a sign and red curbs or a sign or red curbs, but that is really a an issue that's come up before and we really want to make sure that that stays on the schedule is how we go forward with it. As our city manager had mentioned about number 12, the intergovernmental parking coordination of how other municipalities like ours, which we're a part of, which would be the county, that's really important that we can get economies of scale as we work together and learn what they've done, and then also taking a look at how we're moving through our process of a parking reform. It's been really a great process to learn and hear from our residents and our business owners along the way.

All right, so phase two, the information that you had was really focused on phase one. As I mentioned, we want your feedback in phase one, and so that is more internal. Phase two is where we move to community engagement. This is the phase where we intentionally engage and hear from residents and businesses. You may have noticed that not a lot of the information in our 12 recommendations were focused on residential parking specifically. That was intentional. We wanted to wait for those recommendations until we had the opportunity to have conversations with our community. In the right-hand corner, thanks to our PIO, we have actual code that links right to our survey, the current parking survey that is active. People are pretty excited to take this survey. As we're walking in today, it's been up for about a week. We have over 600 people. responses, which is a lot for a short period of time. We would encourage people to go ahead and actually take that survey. It will close next week. So we want to make sure that folks are able to do that before it closes. So as you look at phase two, the residential and business survey is active. That was one of the first channels of communication and feedback we were hoping to receive. We have a community forum that will happen on October 8. It will be virtual. The registration for that will be open, I believe, next week as well. This will be an opportunity for us to encourage folks to come, whether they're residents or businesses, and kind of help us build out scalable solutions. As we will tell people, we have litigated the problem. We know it exists. October 8th will be about solutions and having those conversations around solutions. I would also note that in our survey, and Alderman Savage, you'll appreciate this, although the pilot for these recommendations started in Ward 1 and 2 based on the data, we're collecting feedback from all wards. So if you're you're in Ward 7 or you're in Ward 5 and you just want to take the survey, it's completely fine. It's available and we're documenting where that feedback is coming from. The last piece is we are having informal conversations with community organizations and individuals who want to share our channels of communication remain open. We've taken meetings with neighborhood organizations to hear their feedback. and also are happy to visit when we're invited. One, Wara has actually invited us to come and have a conversation with them on the 22nd of this month, and we've honored that and really happy to be able to join them. And then finally, just as we close and just ask for your feedback, questions and support. I mean, I think that where we, what we're sharing is that this is not a fast process. I think that the parking conversation has probably been on the top of the radar for a lot of people for a long time, which means that we won't be able to correct it in a very short period of time. And so this 12-month action plan, a lot of what we're saying is that we're pivoting and positioning ourselves that in the event that the council approves these recommendations, we would be ready to go. But we want to ensure you that it is not going to cure all the problems around even the area that is piloted. But it is, I think, a valiant attempt to ensure that we respond to the challenge. And we will spend the next 12 plus months trying to ensure that we do that correctly. So at this time, we'll take any questions, feedback, and anything you all believe the direction we should go.

thank you madam chair and thank you i so first of all i say i i owe you an apology both you city manager and uh director but particularly city manager because i know i was very dismissive of this originally and i just want to say i take that back Because you've clearly focused on ensuring action and not just more studying, which is what I was afraid of. And I'm really impressed that you do attach a number of these milestones and are continuing to try to keep the ball moving forward. And it's been a while since we've had that on this issue. And I've been on this committee for a while now. So kudos and thank you. And so some other things I love... So I love seeing the timelines you have on there for the recommendations. I like the idea of better coordinating with the state and county garages and their lots, because they're open at various times. I think it would be good to have that incorporated into whatever unified app we have in the future, if that's possible. I like the idea of the single operator idea. I do have some questions about specifics, but I think I'll save those for later since we're tight on time. But I also like the idea of dynamic pricing. We've seen what incentives can do as far as driving the change in behavior with the circulator shuttle, which has been incredibly successful, as well as when the courthouse has their incentives for parking on jury duty day, people use it. And the parking is really one of the few times the park place is actually filled. So we know it works when we have those kind of things in place. But a couple of big picture things I wanted to touch on. Well, you did mention how you're going to be looking at the rest of the city eventually. And I do think the one thing I'll mention that would be it would be I think helpful to do that soon because if you're looking to redo any kind of contract with, if we do go in the direction, I think you were saying in about a year or so, to have a unified contractor, I think there's some things we could work in. I know folks in my ward are concerned about what they're seeing as predatory, enforcement practices without many warnings, but also it's been difficult as you and I have had conversations over email as far as like trying to track down and trying to get some more accountability in the process. And there doesn't seem to be much in the contract to really ensure some of that. I don't know if it's the case for both contracts, but I know for some of them. But big picture, just wanted to mention a few things. So for the objectives, you had on slide seven. I've said this at the council meeting earlier, and I really, so for your objective four, you have capacity, access, mobility. I love the access and mobility part of it, but as far as capacity, I really, especially downtown, we have ample parking spaces. We always have vacancies in our parking garages. It's a matter of how do we get people, connect people to those facilities. And that's where, Director Moore, that's where transit comes in. That's where the circulator comes in. And then also with Mr. Leschinski's mobility plan. It's not capacity. And I think my colleague from Ward 5 will probably get into some of the monetary costs, as he mentioned earlier, as far as the cost to actually having parking. But if we implement the plan we just heard about, which is the mobility plan, we won't need as much parking, right? Because there'll be less reliance on cars. We'll have an improved cycling system. We'll have hopefully better, a transit system to get people around. We'll have perhaps one day a ferry system. And so, There are ways, I think as we do all those, our goal is really less cars downtown. That's why you have a number of jurisdictions, especially abroad, who are looking to get cars out of their downtown because that's where you have all the pedestrians. So when we're thinking about, again, what we just heard, safe streets, to have safe streets, you have to get rid of the cars or slow them down significantly. And that's where it comes to transit and cycling. And so I would just... I would just offer that to perhaps look at shifting some of these objectives. Again, personally, I just... I don't think we should be looking at expanding capacity or in your objective five, long-term growth or growth in parking, because that takes away space from housing, right? Ultimately, we want to, frankly, some of us anyway, want to weaken the parking restrictions so we can add more housing, more green space, more pocket forests, so we can put in more non-residential uses for residents so they don't have to drive everywhere That relies on getting people out of their cars and ultimately having a goal to reduce parking. We should not have to have as much parking if we want to have a dense urban area. So related to that, some of the other recommendations I think could have a clear connection to transit. So you had recommendation nine dealing with downtown wayfinding and signage. Again, I would encourage you to either modify that or perhaps incorporate some other new recommendations to be clearly connected to that transit. Because I think part of the question is, well, how do we get people from The outer parking garages, if we do the dynamic pricing, to downtown where they want to go. And that's, again, circulator. That's having a bike share that, again, we just heard about. Having a bike share station near the parking garages. Having a plan, if we can reduce cars, shifting some of these parking spaces to have bike parking. Because just today, whenever I go down to Maryland Avenue, there is no place on Maryland Avenue to park and bike. Sidewalks are tiny. I can't even fit it there. If we would just convert a couple of those spaces to have parking on Maryland Avenue, that'd be a good solution, I think. So anyway, that's just kind of the big picture things I wanted to throw out there as far as maybe having a little bit of a... I love where you're going with this, just having, I think, more connectivity to transit and having that aspirational goal in mind. That's it. Sure.

Any questions you would like to ask?

I've been part of the task force and the only meeting I missed was when I was abroad. Sorry about that. But I do want to say we've asked the legislation to allow administrative waiving of the fee or administrative waiving of citations to be drafted. Should be ready relatively soon and we're working on it.

Okay, I do have a question myself this time. How would a community survey be distributed and how will the work group ensure it reaches wards and residents in wards one and two who may be connected to digital channels?

Yeah, well... 600 survey responses tell us that someone is connected to it. And when we did a check, there were a lot of Ward 1 and 2 residents. We have pushed it out in a press release. We have insured. that we made it visible on our social media platforms. We have also made really good friends with the community organizations who have agreed to help us get the word out. And so we think we're getting there if we're not already there. But certainly, I think once we look at the results, we'll be able to tell you exactly where the vast majority of the surveys have come from.

Any more questions? Okay. Again, we want to thank Manager Lewis and Director Moore and team for all you have brought forth this evening in reference to the Park and Reform Work Group and the update on the Phase 1. See, we understand it works grouping together for the past three months. working on internal legal and policy review and has developed a set of draft and you gave us the information and this was a great opportunity to hear and discuss recommendations provided and since there is no vote or action item before us tonight phase two will bring the community in the process through a survey and at least one public forum before the final action is prepared so again we want to thank city manager Lewis and the director Marcus Moore and the team for coming out this evening to discuss our phase one. Great job.

Thank you for having us.

Great job. And also with that note, again, you know, we know this is all about the constituents, so... So before we move on, I would like to acknowledge the public comments that we have been getting online. And thank you for the testimonies. And thank you all so much as we look forward to learning more about the parking work group. Sean, you have a question? I'm sorry.

Unrelated to when we're ready to close out discussion on this, on ID 17326, when you're ready to close out conversation on that.

Okay. All right. Well, it's coming up next, so.

Well, what I was wondering, since Alderman Savage and I have a hard stop at 6 o'clock due to the town halls, would it be possible to move ID 1126 to the end, since we do have two pieces of legislation before us today? I'm sorry if that's disrespectful of your time, but we also have town halls and legislation that we want to try to kick through the process as well.

Are you willing to gamble with us that we hopefully get to you or? Sure, sure, we'll move around.

I'm sorry if that's disrespectful to your time, just poor timing of schedules today. Thank you so much.

I agree.

ID 01226.

Okay, the first piece of legislation is 01226, removing streets from Special Residential Park in District Number 5. The legislation was introduced by Alderwoman O'Neill. It is for the purpose of removing Forbes Street, Monterey Avenue from Special Residential Park in District Number 5 and generally relating to Special Residential Park in District Number 5.

OK. Alderman Shannon Maher.

Thank you, Madam Chair. So Alderman O'Neill is in London. So I shot her a text asking for a little bit of background on this. And basically what she said is these areas in Parking District 5 are on commercial streets. They're not really seeing the same pressures as some of the residential districts. And she just believes that putting the permitting in the residential districts here is unnecessary. Not my ward in the grand scheme of things. I think this is a pretty minor ask, so I'm personally gonna be supportive.

Do you have any questions?

I believe a member from the Transportation Board had some comments on it.

On it, okay.

Would you? Please come forward.

Please come to the table.

It's live or not, I can't tell. Yeah. Hello, I'm Kurt Regal. I'm a member of the Annapolis Transportation Board, and I would like to speak to you about O-1226. It is Alderman O'Neill's response to a recommendation made by the Transportation Board a little over a year ago, and we're happy to see that the Transportation Committee is taking this up. It will come as no surprise to you that Annapolis has something of a reputation for shooting itself in the foot by generating complexities that are unjustified by actual need. And in our view, Parking District 5 is one of those cases. I would like to dispose of this in really three points. The first has to do with the law. If you look at the law, what the law requires for the creation and maintenance of a parking district, you will see that need overcomes everything else. I mean, the exact wording is that parking districts can be established if there is an inability of residents of certain areas to obtain adequate parking adjacent to or close to their places of residence and to secure ease of access to their places of residence. Of all places in the city, arguably, Ward 2 and specifically that area which is contained within Parking District 2, Parking District 5 is more abundantly endowed with parking space than any other. Every residence in PARKING DISTRICT 5 HAS PRIVATE DRIVEWAY OR PRIVATE DRIVEWAY, I MEAN PRIVATE GARAGE OR OFF STREET PARKING. Furthermore, the businesses that are located in this district are magnificently endowed with commercial parking, which is off street. I counted the number of commercial parking spaces that are within this district, and it came out to 725. We are very happy to see the proposal for the removal of two of the four streets that are in parking district five, but point out that our recommendation was to completely get rid of the entire parking district, primarily for the reason that it does not satisfy the requirements of the law, and that is that there be a demonstrated need. I'd like to point out the difference between need and preference. It is true that sometimes people who have on-street parking in front of their house regard that as in a somewhat proprietary way, even though they have their own private driveway and their own private garage. But the better way of looking at this, and what I hope the City Council will adopt as a frame of reference, is that on-street parking is a public amenity, which should be available to all members of the public on an equal basis, unless there are good reasons to give special considerations to residents. And according to the language of the law, that special consideration can only be given if there is no adequate private parking available to them, a condition which does not apply here. So that second thing is that public policy should be generally that if a public amenity is available, it should be available to all of the public on an equal basis. In this case, denial only if the requirements of the city ordinance are met and they are not. And then finally I want to anticipate an argument that I believe is going to come up because it almost always does in these kinds of things. There is a concept which I think deserves a worse reputation than it has, and it's this concept of aldermanic courtesy. And The idea is simply this, that if you have an issue within one ward which has costs and benefits which are confined to that ward, then other legislators, other alder persons would do well just to defer to the wishes of that alder person. That has an appealing attraction to it. But in this case, it really does not apply. The denial of parking access in parking district five has benefits that are questionably legal for reasons that I already gave and They are not balanced by, they're not accompanied by costs that are entirely within the ward. The benefits accrue only toward two people in that parking district. The costs are to the citizens of every other ward. So the costs are outside the ward, the benefits are inside the ward, and I therefore come to the conclusion to recommend that you exercise the same degree of disciplined analysis and weighing of the priorities for this legislation as you would for a city-wide ordinance. So that is roughly what we had. By the way, a feature of parking districts is that residents can apply for a permit that does give them that special access to on-street parking within the parking district. Demand is exceedingly low. A total of nine permits were requested and granted in all of parking district five. And in looking over those permits, it appears that two of them may have been issued to persons who were not in fact even residents of parking district five. Three of the others have expressed to me a desire for the district to be removed because they'd rather not have to buy a permit to park in front of their own house so that reduces the number of nine and down to four active permits that uh that exist right now so in summary uh we would recommend that you not only delete two streets from parking district five, but go whole hog and completely eliminate parking district five as unnecessary and contrary to law.

I have a question.

Thank you, Madam Chair. No, thank you for taking the time, Mr. Regal. Personally, I'm good with what's being proposed to the legislation. I'm not prepared to have a debate today necessarily about just removing all the entire parking district because I just think that opens up a lot more of a line of questioning, which I don't think we have time for today either. But but I would like to talk with you separately about that larger issue. So if you have any understanding about why originally the district was created, you know, we can talk more about that at some point too.

Yeah, I'd be happy to engage in those discussions. But that's kind of where I am. I mean, I support the underlying legislation at the moment.

I don't want to get any questions.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Removing two streets versus eliminating of a district entirely, those are very different scales of legislation. I largely agree with you on the sentiments overall. It's just when we don't have the primary sponsor of the legislation here and we're debating how much do we want to widen the scope, I personally feel very uncomfortable making that decision without them. Just out of politeness, I understand there are certain aspects of courtesy that are overly burdensome on issues around housing, business development. I'm very gung-ho on greater good, but this seems like kind of a small scale thing to dip your toe in someone's bath over.

Yeah, I guess the argument again is if there is no demonstrated need as the law seems to require, one wonders why we are doing this.

I guess the question is do we want to charge forward or do we want to just delay this meeting and see if . Ask my colleagues what they think.

It's going to public safety on the 30th.

Public safety on the 30th, just postpone it one meeting.

Oh, there is one thing that I would recommend finally, and that is that the council obtain the counsel of your city attorney, because I think you should be advised by him on what the law requires and whether this conforms to the law.

Well, if we do... I'm just thinking if we should postpone or not without... checking for the sponsor. I don't think there's anything urgent, but I don't know. I'm a little hesitant to postpone, but I guess Mr. Regal, if you have, if you or the board have anything you've written up on this, previously as far as parking district because i mean overall generally i see the value of parking districts because it helps to provide some control mechanism on car ownership and assesses an actual cost to having parking and the cost in our roads it's used as a mechanism right to to to incentivize people to reduce car ownership but also use transit and alternatives to cars so they don't park in the neighborhoods if you get rid of districts you lose that ability so presumably that district was set up originally for that intent uh so before having a debate on that i would want to look into the original intent when this was passed which would require some discussion but at this point i don't i don't know I'm kind of more inclined to move forward, but I'm also not gonna block a motion to postpone.

Yeah, I'm fine with moving forward on this personally.

Madam Chair, what do you think? Can we make a motion to adjust?

Move a favorable recommendation. Yes. And we'll just try to bring another one when she gets back from the UK. So I make a motion for a favorable recommendation.

Second. All right. And we'll be happy to- All in favor. Oh, sorry. We'd be happy to come back to you with additional information so that at full council vote, you may be better armed to make another decision.

Thank you again.

Thanks.

Okay, our next piece of legislation on agenda is 01726, right to park in front of the residential private driveways. and this legislation was introduced by alderman smith brown and it's for the purpose of meaning the code section 12.20.0110 obstructing their our way to authorize illegal occupants of residential properties and their guests to park on the public streets permitted for parking on both sides of the roadway directly in front of a private driveway serving their property subject to specified conditions, then find a legal occupant, and generally relating to parking under Chapter 12.20. So do my colleagues have any questions regarding this legislation? Go ahead, Shannon Meyer.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Do we have anybody from Parking Enforcement here, or can we bring the Transportation Director and et cetera up to the table, please? I got a couple questions that'll hopefully be here pretty easy and answerable within a 20 minute timeline.

Okay, we're gonna have them introduce themselves and we'll jump right into it if it's okay by you.

John Kemp, SP Plus Metropolis.

Jason Parola, Market President, Premium Parking.

All right, question number one. Do you guys have the ability to actually tell based on what is spelled out in the legislation, is someone allowed to be parked in front of these driveways? Like, let's, for example, could I sneakily park in front of Alderman Savage's driveway without his explicit permission, but have tricked you all?

Yes, I think that this question is best directed at emergency services. And we certainly are a sort of tangent. No, I don't know who's in front of your house when you go to sleep.

I think, excuse me, Marcus, for the record, Marcus Moore, Director of Transportation and Parking. I think your question more or less is the legislation reads for the owner or approved visitor, would the parking contractor be able to tell who that is without calling APD?

Yeah. Would this be, is it easy to tell who is a legitimate guest or resident and allowed to park in front of that driveway versus who is just being a jerk?

Our perspective would be if those parties provided the necessary information to make that determination. But organically, if you were today to drive and park in front of someone's driveway, not knowing, you know, the vehicle information, the license plate information, not without APD, we don't have that power.

And the second is relayed to me by Alderman Thorpe. He had a great deal of concerns about the Eastport area. And does this apply to the Eastport neighborhoods or is this...

Yes, Alderman Shandermeyer. With this legislation, it's for the whole city, not broken down by ward or area. And I think that's where a bit of the trepidation comes when you look at public safety. Can they negotiate the turns, navigate the roads if you're out as far as you are? In some situations we've had, even in Ward 2, West Annapolis, somebody blocking their driveway to help someone get in, and it's near a school. So there's other things that come into play as well. But for the independent contractors to find out, to run that tag to see if it belongs to that residence, I don't believe you have that ability to do that.

So before I yield the floor, what I am going to ask on behalf of Alderman Thorpe, and I hope he doesn't mind me asking this on behalf, that after Alderman Savage and Madam Chair, you guys ask your questions regarding this, we postpone at one meeting, invite the sponsor, invite, no, don't make any recommendation, just postpone action, invite Alderman Thorpe, invite the lead sponsor, and invite anybody else who might have potential amendments. I'll give my time. I know Alderman Savage had questions.

Thank you. Well, can I have a comment first? So, yeah, so a few things. I will support the motion to postpone because I know I have two draft amendments and I think the sponsor has some amendments he was going to introduce and they just weren't quite ready yet with the law office. So, we'll be coming back with those. But just to give you a preview, one of my amendments would look to tweak some of the red striping language to clearly prohibit parking over top of red stripes the curbs even if it is in front of your driveway um because they're often there for ada or other issues as far as corners of the of the street they're there to allow for better turning radiuses the second amendment would would create administrative dismissal process for owners so if somebody does get parked in front of their driveway gets a ticket They just submit a request to, I don't know, ADOT or whomever with the city with proof of residence and then get it dismissed. That seemed easier than the alternative I was... I was thinking about, which would be having the parking enforcement companies verify registration of the vehicles. Because I think you currently go through APD to do that, and it might not be the easiest thing to do. So I'm certainly open if the director has other input as far as what direction that amendment should go, I can send that to you.

That would be a good idea because before, correct me if I'm wrong, gentlemen, cars towed, they would still go through APD first. So for something like this that is blocking a driveway, they would go to APD. To the wood or they would not? They would go through APD.

They would.

Yeah, they would have to. So calling them to find out if that plate is registered might be a second home, and it really is their actual residence. But your workaround or second opinion or second thought recommendation is a good one too. More paperwork on the back end, but let's see what we can do at the front end. When they approach a situation like that, that's not impeding public safety, because that's the other question. Because even if it's legal, is it right for some of the residents nearby to be not able to get services, health services?

All right, I'll talk even more about that. The third potential amendment, which if the committee has thoughts, we can chat about it, would be, I've had a number of requests from constituents to allow perpendicular parking in cul-de-sacs. They pull head into the curb because in some cul-de-sacs, they're kind of small. The residents like to be able to do that. But then again, I've had other constituencies who don't like that. And so what I'm kind of contemplating is an amendment that would allow for either community association or all the residents in a cul-de-sac to kind of petition the city to get an allowance so the majority of them say hey let's do it they submit a petition and it's allowed for that cul-de-sac i again that's i haven't i don't have a draft of that yet that's kind of just something i'm contemplating to respond to so if you have any thoughts let me know an hour later is fine yeah we'll draft up the um information for your consideration regarding that legislation

Yeah, we appreciate that. At this time, we're gonna make a motion to postpone this action until our next meeting.

So moved. I'll second.

Okay, thank you very much.

Well, we have to vote, Madam Chair. We have to go ahead and postpone it.

Yes. Let's have a vote to postpone it.

Aye.

Aye. Second. All in favor?

Aye. All right.

Thank you very much. Okay, we're gonna have it at our next meeting. Discuss at our next meeting. Oh, you have something else, Mark?

No, we did a run around. If we have 10 minutes, we'd like to try to get in a little bit more of what our contractors had to say. If it's okay with the chair, we have 10, 12 minutes. ID 11? Oh, the first one, okay.

All right, so we going back to ID 1126?

If we can, I understand time is tight.

10 minutes, you said?

15. 15, they said 15. 15. Okay, we'll start with a premium, talk about, I'm sorry, give us an update on the Golden Pass, and then Metropolis has some information to share as well, so we'll get going with that. Thank you. My apologies, Director Moore, I thought you were talking into that one.

So Jason Prolla, Market President for Premium Parking, and I will speak quickly. Stop me as you need to. Can't go quite full, there we go. Okay, so this is just quick overview of the garage over the last three months since we last spoke. So for mystery shops, trailing four visit score was 98.5 on the shops. The last was a 100. Sorry, peak garage occupancy is Saturday midday in August. I forgot that I changed this. 46 households participated in the Golden Pass subscription and 95% responded that they would like the program to run again. So this is just a high level for the secret shoppers. We had 100 in June, 100 in July, August we had a 96.7. That was actually a printer malfunction that was since repaired. how the garage is used, we'll share this deck with you if it hasn't already been. So here's some occupancy data for the garage for the last three months. I'll let you dig into that and follow up with me on questions you might have on those if you prefer to. This is the June occupancy. June was very busy. We saw a slower July, which is normal. And then August was a very busy month. So there's your occupancy stats there. Friday, Saturday, Sundays were quite busy. The Park Shop and Dine, this is something that you've asked to have recurring. We actually saw an 11x increase in usage over this three-month period. and then the residential permits have been pretty par for the course of what we normally see for usage and utilization in the garage throughout the month uh for the golden pass it was offered to downtown annapolis parkers in the commercial districts for two hours of parking each day at twenty dollars a month uh i believe we expanded version two of this to 55 and older i thank you and the pilot ran throughout the summer of this year we had 46 households participate 21 survey responses to follow up with the program and we'll get into the feedback that we received from them here 95 percent weighed in uh that it should run again 75 percent gave it a mps score of eight or higher which is a zero to ten and then um 20 of 21 successfully activated their passes for those that applied for the program and 85% of course that they would like to participate in. How often Parker's used it less than once a month was about one in 5 same for 9 or more times a month so we had some people that took a lot of advantage of this and then most were between the 1 to 3 times per month but with the survey responses, they still found it to be a good value and convenient for them. And here's just some quotes for some of the anonymous feedback that we got from the surveys.

Okay, you have 10 minutes left.

Yeah, questions at all?

Y'all have questions?

Maybe Mr. Kim can squeeze in.

We could always get this emailed to us, perhaps.

We did. I think, Director Moore, you literally just sent this to us, right?

It just did, yes. For premiums, we'll send it to the other way.

So we just have premiums.

Have you sent it to Kaylin, Ms. Jackson?

Yes, I will.

John Kemp, SB Plus Metropolis, and we can send this along as well. brief updates on some of the things we've looked at in this forum over time are our customer service scores at garages. So this would include Park Place, Knighton, and God's Court Garage, where the Metropolis drive-in, drive-out experience exists. Over the last two months, so July and August, 2,200 responses and 91-plus percent score which is great that beats our overall company average and is a slight uptick from prior months uh very very tiny less than one percent but um that's good to see one thing um setting aside the parking reform stuff which is obviously uh going to take a lot of everyone's attention one thing we're pointing toward looking at further looking at working with the city further is uh is another look at our ev charging set up across the locations we manage. In particular, the two at Knight and Garage are very old technology. So we look forward to exploring what we can do to improve those. And then in thinking through that, we said, well, what does utilization look like at these others? And should there be some expansion considered? So that's one thing we'll be looking at over the next period of time. And then finally, this is just really a teaser. We'll have more information on this as we meet further in the future, but this week we're in the process of transitioning over from the prior permit and enforcement platform to a newer version. To the user, it's relatively seamless. They're still gonna go to the same places and click the same buttons, and it intuitively leads them to either have to pay their citation, appeal it, PURCHASE A PERMIT. THE HIGHLIGHT HERE THAT WE'LL FOCUS ON AS WE MOVE AHEAD IS ONE OF THE ASKS FROM ONE OF YOUR COLLEAGUES IN PARTICULAR, BUT CERTAINLY ALL, I'M SURE, WELCOME IT, AND THAT IS HOW VISITOR PERMITS ARE ADMINISTERED. SO THEY ARE A LOT LESS CLUNKY IN THIS, ON THIS PLATFORM, AND user-friendly, and easier to manage for visits across multiple days or multiple visitors at a particular time. Less clicks, easier to manage, easier to administer from the user, i.e., the resident's perspective. So we're all happy about that. We're literally in the midst of the data coming over Monday, Tuesday, and today, Wednesday, so there'll be We'll share more detail on this as we, you know, in future meetings.

And that's it.

With respect to your time, go for it.

Good questions. Sean and Mike.

Yes, sir. When are we fixing the elevator in GOTS? That's a me question.

So as I made mention earlier this year through our Office of Central Services, a RFP went out for the design. That has been completed, I believe, and it's going to put an RFP out for the build. The design was for three locations, Gotts Court, Knighton, and 25 Shaw Street. And Gotts Court will be the first one that'll be done once the design has been put into the plan for the build. We fully expect, but I can give you an update soon at our next meeting or before, that that RFP for the build will go out before the end of this month or the first week in October. Our civil engineer believes that it will be out for about a month, come back and get the best and final, and work should start on it right around the Thanksgiving time. So working backwards, Alderman Schandermeier, to answer your question, we fully hope that have that elevator up and running in the early part of 2027. It has been longer than it should have been.

So maybe you're not the right person to say this to, but... This is the best case example of how we desperately need procurement reform in this city. I don't know if you guys can link up with the law office and procurement team and some of us because we got to get something drafted to make this a lot faster because that's been broken for over two years. That's just embarrassing. And I know you guys are also not feeling good about it either, like no one is, but... It's what's on our books, we gotta follow it, so. Exactly. We gotta change the books.

All right, next on the item on the agenda is adjournment.

Motion to adjourn.

Second. All in favor?

Aye. Aye.

Thank you all again. Be safe, have a nice evening.

Marcus, I hope you didn't take that as me yelling at you, man. It's just we've got to fix the fucking procurement.