City Council - workshop

Madam Chair, roll call was taken at the previous special meeting and we continue to have a quorum for this special meeting. The special meeting agenda is as follows. Number one, roll call. Number two, agenda. Three, discussion is five points roundabout project. Number four is public comment. And number five is adjournment. And the motion would be in order to accept the special meeting agenda as presented. So moved.

Support.

That's been motioned by Ms. Abdo, seconded by Mr. Jones. For the approval of this special meeting agenda as presented, Ms. Abdo? Yes. Mr. Jones? Yes. Mr. Bullock? Yes. Ms. Roscoe? Yes. Mr. Wilesworth? Yes. Mr. Wilhite? Yes. Chair votes yes, motion approved.

Thank you, council. We are now in discussion, which is number three, the five points roundabout, and it looks like Director Cappuccino is going to lead that discussion.

Mayor, do you want to give any words right now? Okay.

Yes, thank you, Roberto. The reason we're here tonight is to start these discussions with the roundabout project at Five Points intersection. Those of us who've been around here for a long time know that's a dangerous intersection uh the locals know how to navigate it but most people who are travel directors do not know the right way to navigate that we repeatedly see receive phone calls about people uh not negotiating the proper or the proper turns in that signal um as well as near misses so roberto's team and our grants team applied for some funding for safe streets and uh intersection work this um checked those boxes so we received funding towards it um and we thought We started having conversations first with the newer businesses we have in our downtown because we're hypersensitive to that. We all have seen what construction projects in the road can do to businesses in our downtown. They've already been through two reconstructions that were... ANNIHILATED EVERYTHING IN OUR DOWNTOWN. SO FIRST THING WE DID WAS WE THOUGHT, WELL, WE CAN PUSH THIS FUNDING BACK UNTIL 2028. SO WE WANTED TO WAIT AS FAR AS WE COULD TO LET THESE PEOPLE BECOME MORE ESTABLISHED. WE HAD COMMUNICATIONS TO MAKE SURE WE HEARD WHAT THEIR FEARS AND CONCERNS WERE. AND WE'RE AT THAT POINT NOW TO START HAVING MORE DISCUSSIONS ON THIS PROJECT AND HOW WE MOVE IT FORWARD. SO THAT BRINGS US TO ROBERTO IN THE PRESENTATION TODAY TO START, YOU KNOW, OVER-COMMUNICATING THIS PROJECT THAT LOOKS LIKE IT'S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN UNTIL 2028, BUT WE WANT TO MAKE SURE WE SMOKE OUT ANY ISSUES. Roberto, take it away. Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor. Good evening, Council. I actually handed out a packet, a paper packet, and I wanted Council to have a paper packet because the project is becoming more and more publicized. We talked about it at the State of the City We've talked about it in various stakeholder groups, and I've had a lot of people asking me details about it, and I figured that if council had the packet, you could be at home. If you have a question, you could flip through it and talk to your residents about what we're proposing. But in a nutshell, the mayor kind of summed it up. We have the intersection at five points, and I'm gonna start the slide presentation here. The intersection right here that we're talking about is, if you can see my person, five points. It's a five-legged intersection. That's not a standard intersection. A standard intersection is a four-legged intersection, a standard T. That's the safest intersection there is in design and geometrics. With this being a five-legged intersection, it poses some problems. And I want to make sure I hit all the bullet points on the agenda here on the presentation. But as the mayor mentioned, we had a public outcry for improvements. Since I started here 15 years ago, every year somebody is complaining to me about the five points intersection. whether it's to place another sign out to direct traffic or direct the motorists on what to do. And by all means, I can tell you, I can put a lot more signs out there that's not going to solve anything. The real solve is the geometrics and what's happening out there. It's a five-legged intersection that is only being controlled by a signal for four legs of the intersection. One leg operates on a turn arrow that nobody adheres to. So the three critical movements that there is out there that poses the problem is there is basically, I can't find that laser beam. What's that? Basically here on River Drive North, okay, here on River Drive North can go left, right, straight, or diagonal through Goddard. And a lot of times what happens is, When Huron River Drive motorists going north want to go up Osga, they have a green light. But they don't know that that means it's controlling Goddard and not Osga. And what they do is they crisscross the oncoming traffic. So very dangerous. photos of basically the school bus almost getting t-boned by a driver and it's like that was like three or four years ago and I'm like okay you know what what can we do you know we looked at different things we looked at a slip ramp but it didn't solve the rest of the turning movements that's problematic too the other turning movement that's problematic is Osgoode Road going southbound that traffic wants to go instead of going right it wants to cut in front of northbound here on River Drive and go straight through down south down here on River Drive. So that's also problematic, but that traffic also wants to go down Grand. So as the mayor mentioned, most of the locals know how to mitigate through that intersection. It's the transient traffic that's dangerous. That's not going away. Anytime there's construction in the area, they all seem to kind of head towards five points. And it just is a problematic situation. So what I did is about a year and a half ago, two years ago, I started bringing the concept of a roundabout to MDOT and SEMCO. Because it's obviously we don't have the funds to be able to do such an improvement like this. We have so many things going on in our local roads. and other categories of our major roads, that this was like, how can we get some help? We didn't create it. It is what it is through time. It's probably been like this for 150 years, this five-liggett intersection. What can we do? And the solve was a roundabout. And SEMCOG really latched onto it. They went out there. Their personnel, along with MDOT, went out there and said, yeah, if there's ever a place to put a roundabout, that's it. So they granted us $2 million to build it. Now the cost of this project we think is around $3 million or three and a half. And some of that work includes water main work that has to happen, sanitary sewer work that has to happen. We definitely want to get the underground taken care of before we build the road over top of it. But in a nutshell, that's kind of the preface to this project. This kind of shows a little bit more of the dynamics of the intersection, the five-legged legs coming into the intersection and how problematic it is. You can see the diagonal portion right there, which is the signal. So this is kind of a concept of what we would be doing. This is the conceptual that we have. We're going to talk a little bit about how this is set up and the geometrics. You can see that one point we wanted to do, and here we go, and is build in these islands. These are curved islands right here. Each leg of the intersection would have a curved island. That is for pedestrian crossing. So you can see there's only a short distance a pedestrian has to cross before they can get to a recovery area and then cross to the next stage. So if you consider what we want is a walkable community, this is a safer intersection than what was there existing. Also with the roundabout, I'd like to point out that there's obviously the center island. THE CENTER ISLAND. AND THAT CENTER ISLAND OPENS UP THE OPPORTUNITY FOR SOME SORT OF AMENITY. LIKE, WHAT DOES THE CITY WANT? THE CITY COULD CHOOSE JUST BRASS. THE CITY COULD CHOOSE JUST PAVING IT. THE CITY COULD CHOOSE TO PUT SOME SORT OF STATUE OR AMENITY THERE. THAT'S KIND OF UP TO WHAT THE PASSION IS THAT THE COMMUNITY WANTS. ANOTHER POINT I'D LIKE TO MAKE ABOUT THIS ROUND ABOUT IS YOU CAN SEE THE SCHOOL BUS IN IT. So it's being designed so like a standard delivery vehicle or a school bus can navigate through it, but not necessarily an 18-wheeler or a semi. That's not the traffic we want down there. So that's another strategic implement that we put into kind of the design of the geometrics. So now we're gonna talk about some of the property takes and what would necessitate the property acquisition to make this happen. So the Northwest property, there'd be a full take and we'll get into a couple other slides that show us exactly where those properties are. There'll be additional easements on the park store, the auto park store on both sides of the road of Grant. Here we go, and here kind of shows the depiction of where we need property. You can see that square up in the northwest corner. We need that whole parcel. So that parcel is not part of the bowling alley. That is an individual that owns that parcel. It's not buildable. He currently has it on the market, and we're pursuing with a land acquisition attorney who is interfacing for us. He's getting market rate studies, and he's going to approach the property owner and try to purchase the property. There's also some smaller pieces of right-of-way that we need right in front of the parts store, the Goodyear store. And then on the opposite side of the corner where we need the larger parcel, there's another triangular piece that we need as well. Some of that is easement for the sidewalk and some of it is right-of-way for the road. This kind of gives you an aerial view of the roundabout and what it would look like. So it just offers up a really good corner or bookend to the downtown. Now I mentioned that part of the cost included some underground work. And what we're planning on doing is we're planning on replacing all the old water main underneath the intersection so that we build the new road and the roundabout over it. So if there's ever any break in the future, we kind of mitigate that. We don't have to tear it apart, especially if we do something in the middle of the island. But you can see right there where all the existing pipes are. This depiction kind of shows you what you could do with the island. It kind of shows you what ours would look like. Ours would not be two lanes in each direction. It'd be one lane in each direction, so it wouldn't be as wide as this one. But you can kind of see how the setup is and what the geometrics would look like. They've got the signage, you know, the yield sign, the directional arrows. There's some directional arrows in the middle of the roundabout. There's a landscaped area in the pedestrian crosswalk areas. And there's some landscaping and vegetation and brickwork in the actual roundabout itself. Here's another example of a roundabout. This is a smaller one. This community just happened to build like a decorative brick wall and they put accent flowers and some vegetation and some trees in the center of it. As the mayor mentioned, we're very cognizant of the businesses and the impact to the downtown that construction would have. This is a maintenance of traffic conceptual plan. So you can see all the red, green, and blue line work. Those are all the directions that traffic would be going through our downtown and how they would intersection so they're not going through the intersection now a big kind of bullet point I want to talk about is that those those orange signs that are in that slide they're indicating businesses are open to the public businesses are open we want to make sure we over communicate that we don't want to take pedestrians and traffic away from the downtown We just want to keep the transient traffic that wouldn't normally stop and has a route to go versus the locals that do want to hit these businesses up for some commerce. This shows the maintenance of traffic stage one. So as the mayor mentioned, we met with several stakeholder groups. We met with the DDA a couple times, actually I think three times, the DDA board. We met with property owners in small groups. We met with property owners in large groups. We had a night meeting where basically all the property owners along Goddard were invited in. And we talked about kind of the staging of the construction. And the staging of construction is a big impact. It could be a big impact to most businesses. And what we decided and what we kind of all have come to an agreement on is that the water main portion would happen first. So as the mayor mentioned, this project is slated for 2028. The spring of 2028 is when we would start road construction. The winter of 2027, 2028 is when we would start the underground work. So we'd get in there, open up the ground, replace the water mains, put in temporary pavement, open the intersection back up, which the intersection will not be entirely closed. They'll just be intermittent flag control and a lane drop or something like that, just minor inconvenience. Then what we decided was we met with the stakeholder group several times, and we brought up closing the entire intersection. That wasn't an option. That wasn't an option from the mayor, and that wasn't an option from the business owners either. Then we thought of maybe opening it up to two phases of construction. And then we started looking at the access and the access to all the businesses. And two stages of construction seemed a little bit that it didn't address all the access points to all sources of the intersection around the businesses. So we decided to break it out into three sections or three phases of construction. So here I'm going to talk about phase one or stage one. Stage one would be Asga, Huron River Drive West, and a portion of Huron River Drive South be closed down and opened up Once that portion is built, or once that's under construction, they'll be through traffic through Goddard Road and Huron River Drive, both north and south, and then also Grant Road east and west. The next stage of construction, stage two, would be the southern portion of Huron River Drive with a portion of Goddard Road on the west side of the intersection. but there would be through traffic going north and south on Goddard and Huron River Drive and also north and south on Osga into Huron River Drive and then south on Huron River Drive as well. As we move into stage three, Grant still would be shut down and it would be reconstructed, but there would be access to both of these auto facilities from Grant to their property line or from the south while the last leg of Huron River Drive is being built and the north stage of Goddard is being built. While that is happening and there's those closures, there would be full north and southbound Asga, full north and southbound Huron River Drive, full west and east access of Huron River Drive west and also Goddard south and north. So that pretty much bundles up kind of the three stages that's been developed through this process. We kind of talked about a timeline. Water main would be ongoing with design. It would be bid in late summer of 2027. Water main construction would be October, fall, winter of 2027. MDOT letting for the road portion, we have two separate contracts. The city would retain the water main contract, and the state of Michigan would let the road construction, that would be fall 2027, and the intersection construction would begin spring of 2028 and summer of 2028. And with that, I'll open it up to questions.

So my first one is like a small traffic thing that I see here that could pose a problem. This auto parts store, the auto mechanic shop right here, it's on the third page. But you can see that he has all his parking in the front of the building there. You can keep, yeah, we can see it in that one. So you got all the, his, everyone's pulling into his garage right there on Goddard Road. So as they're coming around this curve here, he's going to have people backing out kind of into the traffic as they're coming around a turn almost. So I don't know if that's going to be something that we're going to have to address with the mechanic shop. Maybe he has to change his routes of.

So right there?

No. So there's only one garage on this side, one bay, and then there's a large bay in the middle. That's where you see all these other cars parked at. Right here? Yep. That's his main bay he uses for all his mechanic work. So I don't know if that's going to cause a problem or maybe have to have a discussion with him on, you know, does he have to reroute his whole building and have them come through the back and then out traffic. So that kind of concerns me a little bit that that's going to be – a lot of people in and out there backing into people coming around a curve.

So your concern is during construction or after? After it's open.

Because from the picture here, you've got the bend, you've got the round there. And as they're coming around this circle here, you're making one turn, making another turn, and then you're going to be looking back to your right again, and these people are backing up.

Right. Well, the only thing, and that's something we can take a look at, but what I'll tell you is right here, that width, We're not making it any wider than it is. It's going to be the same width that it is today. So I know the real portion of it, I think, where we're going to impact it is right here where he's got parking lot that we're actually putting in a sidewalk. Yeah, he might lose a couple. He's going to be impacted there. And I think we did talk to him about his operations off of Grant. God, this printer doesn't work. off a grant but as we move on and progress with those some conversation. There's going to have to be some conversation even with this auto mechanic. Basically, we have to build a sidewalk in Kirby, give him a drive approach. Right now, he's parking in the right-of-way. That's not even legal either. There's definitely going to be some changes, but I think this plan... pretty much can address everything, and we can probably make it work for all these folks. Okay.

The other thing is more of a business standpoint. So I think the biggest problem or the biggest concern individuals that are going to be impacted by this would be Walters. Obviously, it's, like, right on top of where they're going to be at. Then you're going to have these two mechanic shops, and then you've got Captain Nemo's, which is right on the edge of it, which, you know, they could probably still get access from – you know, southbound or, you know, door dash and stuff. I'm just curious as if there's anything that we can do to help them out while they're going to be, they're going to lose some service, especially someone like Walters where you see in this, was it phase one, where the whole road in front of Walters is going to be, you know, shut down. People are just naturally just not going to want to go there and have a drink or go bowling that night. So I'm just questioning us, I guess, is there any way that we can look into anything that far as grants or anything to help them stay afloat for these 10 weeks of possible no visitors, no guests coming into their facility.

Yeah, I can't speak to grants for the business end of it, but for the construction portion of it, there's going to be a rigorous plan to allow traffic in and out. Even though I showed it shut down, during construction, there'll be gaps where part of the parking lot will be open, then they'll move to another phase and open up a different section and then reopen them up on the other approach.

Yeah. I know this needs to happen. I just think we need to make sure the whole time we're doing it to be really mindful of, like, These four people, basically, they're going to be really affected by possible decline in sales or decline in attendance to anything that they're doing for the next 10 weeks, which it needs to happen. It needs to get done, but we need to try to... I guess start the conversation of what can we do to help out to make sure that they are able to be open after the project's done. Because that's the last thing that we want is we do the project, it looks beautiful, and then now we've got three shut down abandoned buildings afterwards that they just couldn't survive. So not really something I guess that you have to answer. I think it's just something that we need to have a conversation.

Yeah, absolutely. I think we have some ideas on what to do. That is a publicity campaign. Media blasts of the businesses that are open and how to get to them. But we can go more than just our internal cable and media. We can go to outside channels where it catches a bigger audience. But I think, yeah, there's some things that we can do to ensure that the businesses are not as impacted as they could be, but try to mitigate some of the impact that they would have.

Thank you, James. Mr. Wiseman?

If I can, first of all, I think this is good for the intersection. In my younger days, I handled two fatal accidents there a couple years apart. In fact, one time they took a See, it was OSCA, and they blocked it off with barricades. That didn't work. People went around the barricades. But the only thing I wonder is, is we're just going to purchase one piece of property?

No, we have to purchase, like, three small. So let me bring you back to that slide. Do you see that the properties in yellow is what we have to purchase? So it's the full property to the northwest, It's a triangular piece on the southwest, and it's that little yellow piece in the auto parts store.

And what if these people don't want to sell?

That certainly could be a potential. There's channels that we can go through.

Okay, fine. I think it's a good project. Thank you.

Anyone on this end? Mr. Jones? You got to hear about the water main. We know you have to replace it. I'm not sure how old it is, whether it's ductile iron, whether it's cast iron. Okay, you're going to come through there. You're going to replace the water main. What are you going to do about that? I know the storm soil is going to be put in along with the roads. You've got to replace it. But what about your sanitary? You have a sanitary running down there in the middle of, I know it's on the west side of Huron River Drive, and it depends on the condition of that pipe, which is a lot deeper than the water main. That could be a problem if it, for some reason, this pipe go bad or whatever later on after you done finish this. What are you doing as far as considering that?

Right now, we're out there videotaping the pipe. We have a company that is cleaning the pipe and videotaping it. Our plan is to line up the route the joints first. We'll do that, then line it. But we're looking at everything, including storm that may stay out there. We're videotaping the sanitary sewer. and the storm sewer, because some of the storm might stay, and we might reutilize it for the road.

Okay, because I know when you're redoing this, you know, you got to have your storm sewer on the outside of the road where water can run. But I know that sanitary is a lot deeper, and you say you're probably relying on the sanitary. Now, is the sanitary that's going to be going up, is it adequate for any future expansion in that area, whereas... If any dispatcher comes through there, is the sanitary there big enough to handle whatever might come through there?

Yeah, it's got enough capacity. I don't expect a whole lot of development further south or west of this, but it has the capacity that it needs.

Well, we know west you can't get too much because you run 275. Right.

Anybody else? Thank you, Roberto. Great job.

Thank you.

Number four is public comment. This is the portion of the agenda for those who are in the audience and who would like to address City Council regarding tonight's special meeting study session regarding the five points roundabout. project. To do so, please raise your hand. And after being acknowledged by the chairperson, approach the podium. We ask that you state your name and note that you will have three minutes to speak. Additional time will be upon the consent of the chairperson.

Is anybody able to speak on this matter?

Thank you, Madam Chair. Number five is adjournment and the time is 7.12. So moved. Support.

The motion by Mr. Wasworth, seconded by Ms. Roscoe for the adjournment of this special meeting. Mr. Wasworth. Yes. Ms. Roscoe. Yes. Mr. Wilhite. Yes. Mr. Jones. Yes. Ms. Abdo. Yes. Ms. Bush.