Transportation Commission - Regular Meeting

Commission meeting for Wednesday, 04/30/2025, a special meeting. We will begin tonight's meeting with a roll call. Take it away, Lisa Foster.

Commissioner Dara Abrams? Here. Commissioner Gloyn is absent. Commissioner Kim?

Here.

Chair Weitzey? Here. Commissioner Johnson?

Present.

Vice Chair Suthan Thira? Here. And Commissioner Nochtigal?

Here. Having quorum, we will move to agenda changes. Any agenda changes proposed? Seeing none, let's move on to item three, staff communications. Staff communications with Lisa Foster.

Good evening Chair Weitzi and Transportation Commissioners. I'm Lisa Foster, Transportation Planning Manager. I'll start with the city council actions this year on items reviewed by the transportation commission. So since our last meeting on March 18, the city council approved the Fernside Boulevard traffic calming and bikeways concepts with direction to conduct the planned traffic study for the Gibbons High Fernside Intersection and return to them, after that. And then on April 1, they accepted our annual report and also adopted the 2025 climate action and resiliency plan mid cycle update.

And then on April 15, they approved the Stargell complete streets corridor design concept and accepted funding for that project. Our upcoming transportation commission meetings are May 28 and August 27. Upcoming agenda topics include, hopefully, a Caltrans Otis Drive update. And then events that are coming up, it's a bikey month. So tomorrow, I think tomorrow is May 1, the bike commuting basics workshop.

May 11 is a family cycling workshop. May 14 is this is not bicycles. But Alameda County Transportation Commission is hosting a virtual workshop for their Oakland Alameda Access Project. That's for those who missed the in person ones that happened earlier today and on April 24. And then on May 15, it's Bike to Wherever Day and Bike to School Day.

And the Alameda TMA is hosting a Bike to Wherever Day after party that evening. And then on May 16, there is a Transportation one hundred one event for seniors and people with disabilities that includes signing up for senior clipper cards. Project updates include the fact that the Northern California section of American Planning Association recently awarded our Oakland Alameda access or excuse me, our Oakland Alameda water shuttle, a transportation planning award of excellence. Yay. So yay.

And since launching, you know, mid July last year, the water shuttle has carried 73,000 passengers. The project team is currently evaluating options to expand service in July. And then for neighborhood greenways, the team hosted a successful San Jose Ave and Versailles Ave pop up event on April 19. And people who couldn't make it can still provide input via the web page until May 4. And then the Pacific Avenue Neighborhood Greenway broke ground on April 18 with an all new excuse me, with new all way stop signs, high visibility crosswalks, and daylighting at Willow Pacific and Willow and Pacific and Walnut.

And this is the first phase of construction for the neighborhood greenway segment from Pacific Ave to from on Pacific Ave from Lafayette to Oak. And I understand that went out to bid for construction today. And then also paid parking and increased security at ferry terminals is planned for Harbor Bay Ferry Terminal in late spring this year and Seaplane Lagoon Ferry Terminal in late summer. It'll launch just Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday at $3 a day with lots of options for how to pay. The idea to opening up parking spaces on those busy days and offsets the security costs.

We have completed a communications plan and we will launch that in the weeks leading up to that beginning. And then, you know, I wanted to share some Vice Chair Suthan Thira pointed out that we hadn't talked about. The mayor is now Vice Chair of the full commission for the Alameda County Transportation Commission. And she's also serving on the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. And actually, she's also selected to participate in the twenty twenty five Mayor's Institute on Pedestrian Safety. She's headed off for a trip for that right now. And I'm gonna now pass along to we have a guest staff for staff communications joining us today.

Thank you, Lisa. My name is Sarah Henry. I'm the city's communications director and I just got back from the Oakland Alameda Access Project Open House at the College of Alameda and I also attended the open house last week at the chamber. And I just wanted to give a quick kind of update on those events and then the status of where the project is at in terms of being out to bid and construction and timeline. So just in terms of the meetings, they were both really well attended.

The one at the chamber and the one at the College of Alameda tonight were set up in a way that they had they were open house style so you could come during the hour and a half that they were open. And they were set up with easels and boards and with staff around all of them. So you could walk through and you could decide where you wanted to focus more, whether it was project benefits or construction, and then talk to the right folks and get your questions answered. So it was really well done. We had a lot of people that were very concerned when they were coming.

Most of the people had specific questions about traffic and about getting on and off the island, about safety concerns, if they're waiting in traffic in Alameda or on the Oakland side, if that was going to impact them. Folks were wondering what the city was doing with regards to the single lane closures. So we've had a lot of conversations about the advocacy that the city has been doing with the County Transportation Commission and Caltrans to reduce the single lane closures and to increase communications. People were asking for more public transit, more buses, more ferries, more water shuttles. I heard tonight a plea to to not start paid parking at the ferry terminals until after this project is done, not at Harbor Bay but at Sea Plains specifically.

So all sorts of comments and suggestions for folks in order to kind of reduce the impacts on Alamedans. But it's great. The California or the Alameda County Transportation Commission did a really wonderful job organizing the events. And then once the construction starts, it will be moving forward moving on to Caltrans in terms of the communications with the community goes. So yeah, I wanted to share that and then just the latest update from the Transportation Commission is that they have gone out to bid on the project.

They're expected to have identify a contractor by this summer and then they would move into construction if everything goes well in the fall. The virtual presentation that Lisa mentioned on May 14, that is they're going to run through the slides sequentially that people have been able to kind of stop by. So it is a little bit different from the other meetings, but people do have to register. So they have about two ten people that are registered right now, and we're going to continue to promote that so that people have that opportunity. And then a recording of that presentation will also go up on the project's website.

The construction activities include work in both tubes, both the Webster and the Posey tube. The first will the be Webster tube, and then followed by work in the Posey tube. So during the first six months of construction, the Webster tube entering Alameda will be reduced to a single lane for about about six months. And then when that work is complete, construction moves to the Posey Tube which will be reduced to a single lane for around twelve months. And the Webster I was given this information today Webster is going first because the sidewalk in Webster needs to be constructed first before the Posey Tube sidewalk can be demolished.

But they wanted me to emphasize that at no time will both tubes be closed at the same time and that Caltrans has committed to giving advance notifications prior to any types of closures. And of course the benefits after the project's complete, that's the real kind of selling point when we're out there talking with folks is explaining that you won't have to travel within Oakland neighborhoods anymore to get onto the freeway, that it's going to reduce congestion, it's going to reduce you know, injuries and fatalities, and it's going to make things much better. It's just going to take it's going be some pain points in the meantime, but we'll get through it. That's my report, and thank you very much. I appreciate you all.

Commissioner, go ahead.

We also have a public comment on this, which is

I would say that first.

Never had public comment on staff communications. I don't know if that's

a Why don't we move that to non agenda public comment?

What's Go ahead. Oh, all right. Okay. Sure. Just a quick question. Thank you for the update. Was really well done. Are we informing, how are we planning to inform the public or the residents in this area and the businesses? I think most businesses will know for sure, but you know, some And may majority of the residents may not know because they'll be just flying through and then coming back in, right? I know for a fact a couple of people, they have no clue. Yeah, it's a

really good question. It's actually one that I heard tonight from one of our residents, Sister Pat, who lives on Lincoln and she was wondering, you know, she was telling me that so many people that she knows that live in her area haven't heard of the project yet. I think part of it has been, folks have been working on the design of this project for twenty years and now we're kind of moving into the next stages. But because we don't have because they haven't secured a contractor yet, we don't have the schedule construction and all of the different impacts. We think we know if everything goes according to plan what we're likely to expect, but we won't know until we have that contractor in place really what folks are looking at.

So what we've been focusing on in terms of the city's communications is sharing about these information sessions sessions and these open houses so that people can understand more about the project and the benefits once it happens. And then as soon as we have any additional information about, okay, construction's going to start in two months and it's going to, then we will aggressively start sharing that information to the community. In the meantime, our base reuse and economic development department has been working very intentionally with our businesses to let them know, the ones on the West End and at Alameda Point, what to expect. And so they're actually creating a webpage specifically for businesses that share resources. They're going be giving our businesses reports to let them know when people are coming in, where they're coming from, and all that kind of thing so that the businesses can tell their patrons in real time, hey, we're going to have this event at this time, but this might be going on and maybe take this route or whatever.

So they're going to be working really hard to reduce those impacts as much as possible to our businesses because we're very concerned about that as well.

Just a quick follow-up. Will there be like postcard thing? I understand that we are waiting but when it when really you receive all the information will there be kind of a postcard or something like that to be distributed to the residences or the homeowner association or something like that? Yes.

So Caltrans will be leading the communications once construction starts. And they are putting together it hasn't been published yet, but they're putting together a comprehensive communications plan for what their outreach will be. So I can't speak to their outreach except to know that we, the city and myself, we will supplement and do as much as we possibly can to make sure without a doubt that residents that nobody's going to go in that area and not hear about it. You have my word. Thank you.

Thank you, Sarah. Appreciate that. Let's move on to non agenda public comment. If you want to speak on the staff communications at that time, that is also fine. Again, these are for non agenda items for public comment.

We have two speakers. Speakers will have two minutes three minutes, my apologies. First is Jim Strelow.

I wasn't allowed to speak on three.

We're going to move it to public comment. You can speak on this. I appreciate it. If you could go ahead, this is your time to speak.

Jim Strelow, I've been attending the Broadway Jackson project originally now called the Oakland Alameda Access Project since about 2014. So I've been very interested over the past nine years and gave a lot of comments over the years and was very pleased. I had attended the Oakland meeting first last week and asked some questions. And they said, well, we're not too sure about one subject. I'll bring it up in a second.

But the other thing that I was deeply distressed about was is that there were a lot of Oakland people that are saying, I live at here, what's the effect on me here? They didn't know the other points of interest around the project. The different residences, the apartments once said, how does this affect the Oakland museum? Where's the Oakland Museum? I was surprised and very distressed that the people that were representing the project didn't know the local effect in Oakland because this was the workshop was for Oakland that they didn't know.

But the main reason I'm here is that I had asked this council, this commission, either at the last meeting or a couple of meetings ago to have information for the OAP regarding the bridges schedule. So I asked that of the people there in Oakland and they said, well, we don't know about that. Are you gonna be in Alameda? I said, yes. So they said, we'll have somebody there in Alameda.

You can a question. So I went to the chamber. And there was a lady named Remy who seemed to be in charge of the project and said, you know what would be very useful to have is to have a schedule of when the bridges are opening or closing, however you want to close because they open up and it's closed to traffic. Then, you know, and she said, wow, that's something I hadn't really thought of. Is there any web page currently doing it?

Saying, no, I don't think so. But I think it's something that is really important because if you're going to have things affecting traffic here in Alameda for the next three years, three and a half years, that if you published at least the known times that the bridges are going to be open so that, let's say that it's at 02:00 and one scheduled, I could try to cross the bridge at 01:00 instead of a 02:00 or vice versa and stuff. That's a very interesting thing. So I'm just giving you an update because I asked this commission at one of the last meetings to do that for me. And then I was able to do it on my own here at the chamber meeting. So I just wanted to give you an update on the OAAP from my perspective.

Thank you for your efforts Mr. Strelow. Additional public comment.

Next public comment is Vicki Tang.

Hi there. Thank you for your time today. My name is Vicky Tang. I'm a homeowner in the East End. You might have seen a letter that came from me a couple weeks ago, and I appreciate your response.

Thank you, staff member Foster. But just wanted to come here, voice again some of the concerns around the Fernside and the Gibbons Intersection. And just want to reiterate the fact that we really want to see some community engagement, some input on what's going on there and also before the, study is done just to understand and make sure that the scope is really, comprehensive of the full corridor, Cambridge, all of those areas that affect, the the commute to schools around in the area and just all of the members in that area. So again, just want to make sure to encourage more input. I have not seen anything yet to request input on that specific area or for this study.

So just hoping that that is still forthcoming before any decisions are made because I think there was a very big group of people. I think we had about 80 people that were signed on for that letter to really encourage input because a lot of voices want to be heard. So appreciate your time again today. Thank you.

Thank you for your comment. Any additional public comments?

There are

no more speakers. Thank you. Jim Strelow.

Good evening, commissioners and staff. I'm here. I just donated blood at the American Red Cross today, and I'd rather donate there than on the streets. I was westbound on Santa Clara Avenue in a bike lane on my bicycle somewhere around Sherman Street. And I was in my bike lane.

And then all of a sudden, there was traffic on the left of me and there were parked cars to right of me. And out comes a jogger straight at me. The question is, is that who has the right of way? Because I'm in my bike lane going westbound properly, and the jogger came straight at me. And I actually had to kind of swerve to allow it because these are designs that the city and the state are designing.

And there should be something like, well, joggers need to give the right away to the bicycles because that bike lane is given in a certain direction. And anyway, they can squeeze in between parked vehicles and I can't. So that there needs to be a clarification, I would say maybe even at DMV or the vehicle code saying that joggers that are going against traffic in a bike lane need to yield the right away to bicycles because it practically caused an accident for me. I just wanna give you that update. But the other thing is education that jogger should have been educated enough to get out of the way, but didn't.

So I was surprised that my niece's daughter got a scooter for Christmas and had a helmet and started just riding around, ignorant of the laws and stuff. And I told the mother, niece that, you know what she needs to learn about the traffic codes and stuff like that in order to be on her bike on the streets. And so the next month I visited and actually brought a DMV handbook and bicycle handbook to them so that they could start studying up on the rules and regulations and stuff. Because she hadn't even thought that she needed to tell her 10 year old daughter about the rules of safe riding. And so my point is, is that if it seems like there's a lack of education among the general public on a lot of things regarding transportation.

And that if we've got money being spent on projects, I was glad that Lisa Foster announced some of the workshops, but announce it more, get more people out there and get the word out. Because the safety is not just safe infrastructure design, it's safe behavior. And that would help reduce a lot of the accidents and confusion out there. Thank you.

Thank you for your comment. Seeing no other public comments.

No further comments.

Item number five, the consent calendar. Move to item 5A, approve the draft minutes of the February and I believe the commissioners that are not here need to recuse themselves, correct? Great. Do I have a

I wasn't.

Yeah, correct. Does anyone want make a motion to approve?

Make a motion to approve.

Second. Second.

No revisions. All in favor of the motion please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion to approve carries unanimously. Let's move on to item number six, regular agenda items. Moving to 6A, discuss and provide comments on transportation projects to be included in the capital budget for fiscal years 2025, 2026 and twenty twenty six, twenty twenty seven. This is a discussion item and we will have a presentation by staff. Thank you. Scott Wickstrom.

Good evening Chair YC, members of the Transportation Commission. Scott Wickstrom, city engineer. Happy to be in front of you tonight to present our proposed twenty five-twenty seven capital budget. I'll figure this out.

Right. Susie, please. All right. There we go.

This is a general purpose slide here. Really kind of relates to all of the various things and activities that the city has. Obviously at the top is the general plan. Then there's below that is a tier of transportation related direct plans that feed into the transportation work plan. And really at the end of the day, nothing becomes real until it gets funded and then gets constructed. It's kind of just a little general slide to kind of show how the whole thing interacts and works together. Next slide. And our timeline and key dates for how we approach the capital budget. Capital budget is done every two years. We really start working in earnest in the fall kind of talking through what projects, what are candidate projects, keep things where we're at.

But it's in November, January we understand what the fund balances are. February we start doing initial allocations. We have a department meeting or department head budget retreat that happens in March in which our goals and our dreams and all the things we ask for tend to get trimmed back down a little bit towards reality. And then we're here in front of you tonight to present this proposed budget to you and get your feedback and input. And we intend to bring basically at this point it's the exact same budget to City Council on May 13 and we will certainly include any input that this commission has onto that agenda item for there as well with the intention of the budget adoption in either the first or second meeting in June.

Suzie? So capital budget by type. Just short of $87,000,000 is proposed for the two year cycle. That includes all things. I've highlighted transportation enhancements and pavement signal street lightings, all things related to road. Those are the two items on the right half of that pie chart. And they total a little bit over $41,000,000 so just a little bit less than half. Big chunks, obviously building facilities is a major component of what we do, all the buildings we do, all the parks, all the park facilities I should say. A lot of money goes into our sanitary sewer and then below that some storm water adaptation parks, etcetera. So Susie?

All right. One more. And I love this slide. I'm going to keep showing it as often as I can. Nobody can read a single thing about it. But what it really does is says we've got a lot of things going on in the city, and we've got a lot of things going on in the entire city, both the West End, the East End, and on Bay Farm Island. Anybody I know you guys have seen this before with the transportation work plan. Anybody who may be listening to on web is recommended to go to the 2025 transportation work plan and pull up this document. There's a lot of information here. In fact, the entire work plan talks to the details going through that.

Here is the transportation related funding. I showed a very similar pie chart in September. We were talking about payments and I said here's all our transportation funding. I think at that time I had it for a single year. The number was about $13,000,000 12,000,000 or $13,000,000 This is for the two year cycle.

It's now $31,000,000 And highlighted in there and very significantly, if you remember back in September, I pointed out very directly that we had zero general fund dollars going towards transportation related projects in the last two year capital budget when it was adopted. This year we are recommending and are gonna bring forward to council a request for $4,600,000 of general fund money to support the transportation related projects. And one of the reasons why we're making that request is basically the same pie chart with a big gigantic $16,500,000 wedge added onto it which represents grant monies that were some of which have already been appropriated, some of which are going to be appropriated. We want to kind of capture them here so we have a good sense of it because if we don't capture them here they get lost, right? And I'll say that $16,000,000 does not include the additional $16,000,000 that is part of the Lincoln Marshall Pacific project.

So if you were to include that money as well, that pie chart grows to $32,000,000 of grant funded projects. We have been doing a lot to I'll say increase the amount of money available to do these extra special transportation enhancement projects. My world maintenance first, take care of what we got. I see the smirk by This is an internal little joke. I always try to find the acronyms. I had to make this one up. Payments, sidewalks, signals, signs and striping, street lights, storm sewer, sanitary sewer, and then traffic. Have a meeting every week. It's the meeting. Also known as streets

and town.

Payments, $10,800,000 is what we're proposing for the two year cycle. I'm happy and feel good that we are not reducing that budget down any. I was concerned that if we didn't have some general fund support that a lot of the pavement projects that would be the first area to suffer. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a couple of seconds here. Sidewalks $2,500,000 We have sidewalk replacements. We have sidewalk where we grind the edges down. Most of it's related to trip and falls to prevent them from occurring. We have a lot of street trees. We love our street trees. They're great for the environment, but they also do lift the sidewalk.

So a big chunk of money goes towards that. Signals, we do have 90 I got to redo the count. We're losing signals. We already lost one on central. I think we're at 97 at the moment. They take 1,700,000 and then some we're really kind of doing the best we can with that. Signs and striping, we love bike lanes. We love green striping. We love all these extra striping through the intersections. Thermoplastic striping lasts about seven years on average.

Then it needs to be just restriped and that's just money that comes out of the maintenance budget to regular operational expense. So as much as we're doing to enhance our road transportation facilities, also need to be mindful that we have some back end costs that come with that. And then street lights, it's a benefit to road. Transportation enhancements. So these are the big kind of fun exciting projects.

There's a whole bunch of them on here. There's a little more detail in the staff report for each of these. The transportation, the 2025 transportation plan has also a lot of write up on each one of these things. The big one that you see up on top, I did them in order by amount, really it's the top two. Stargill Complete Streets, that's a $10,000,000 of new funds for essentially adding a two way cycle track on the North Side Of Stargill from 5th to Main and then also including roundabout at 5th Stargill as well.

Lincoln Marshall Pacific, that's their $6,100,000 of new money. That's to complement the money that we've the grant award and I'll come I'll talk about that in a minute here as well. Neighborhood Greenways, 3,600,000.0 to kind of get that first phase to transition all the slow streets into neighborhood greenways and then start the process of the Phase two, the next round of those as well. We got a grant for some public EV charging that's really exciting. Some of those will be in our city parking lots, others will be at select locations curbside.

So we're excited about that project coming forward and the funding we got for that. Street safety is basically what we use for our rapid response if we have fatal collisions and also it's a pot of money that we use for just areas that need attention that don't fit in the paving program, don't fit in these larger corridor projects. It's just a little flexible. It's really valuable for us to use. Westline Q jump, that's a bus improvement. The Estuary Bridge has some grant money coming forth for further study. That's the Ped Bike Bridge across the West End. And then as we come down

the road here, these are the ones you can find. Susie?

Here I was theme is pie charts right. So here's the pie chart with all the appropriations. We've got of that $48,000,000 it's about 16,100,000.0 in maintenance, 20.25 in enhancements and 6.5 in operations that includes our traffic signal operations and also our urban forest operations as well. Next slide. And I want to spend a little bit of time on here and this is just kind of part of the 11 by 17 fold out that came in the packet.

This is kind of a focused version of that. And really what I wanted to kind of highlight is where we are proposing council basically use general funds to help supplement our funding for transportation. So neighborhood greenways, we are basically looking to make sure that we can act on that project quickly as we promised. And I know we're a little bit behind what our proposed schedule is, but we want to make sure we can actually get the slow streets converted in the next fiscal year. So we have $1,200,000 that we're pulling from Measure BB, local streets and roads.

The additional $1,200,000 will make sure that we can get all the slow streets converted in the first year of work. And then as we hit the Stargell Roundabout and also the Lincoln Marshall Pacific Corridor, those ones are really for some grant matching funds and also to facilitate and advance some design components of that. And if we don't have that money from the general fund, the logical place, it comes out of Measure BB, local streets would be the other place. And so it means that some of our pavement management funding would likely suffer. So that's kind of a highlight of where that 4,600,000 of general fund money comes in.

And then I also kind of highlighted the grants to show where that $16,000,000 of grants at least that we're accounting for with this capital budget here. Susie's reading my mind. She's right here already. And all that work that's upcoming in the capital budget is not to say that we don't already have projects that are fully funded and getting off the ground. Central Avenue safety improvements that is in construction. Grand Safety Improvements, the preconstruction meeting was a couple of weeks ago. They're going to break ground on the first phase which is Shoreline Otis, yes, shoreline to to Otis. That work has already been awarded. The construction is going to start soon. It will be done this summer.

We are actively designing the next phase, which goes from Otis to Encinal with the intention of that work being bid and constructed hopefully next year. No additional funding required for that. Tilde and Clement safety improvements that we if all goes well we'll be out to bid with that next week and hopefully back at council toward that in July and with that construction starting later this fall as well. And not to forget the Gene Sweeney open space connectors that's been funded. We have a little bit of a hiccup with some contaminated soils that we're working through with DTSC, but that is also a project that's ongoing and coming. With that, any questions, comments, discussion?

I'll start with any clarifying questions from commissioners, questions of fact. Mr. Kim?

Thanks for the presentation. Questions about kind of I guess overall transportation budget. Kind of curious how similar this is to the last two year budget? And additionally, you mentioned that last time there was no general fund as part of the transportation budget. Is that typical to not have any general funds as part of this budget? Or is historically has this budget had general funding in it?

Very good question. So historically we have not had general funds coming towards transportation projects. And I think if you were to compare not so much the last budget but several before, we've been extremely successful with grants. Grants are wonderful. They allow us to do these big corridor projects but they always have some sort of a matching requirement.

And there's often sometimes where we get a grant amount in our project. Want to spend every grant dollar. It's hard to land exactly on a $16,000,000 project so you design a little bit more. And that overage has to come from local funds as well. So the fact that we have a lot of grant funds creates that additional need for the local matches and for that additional front end design work and that's where we're making the request for the general fund.

So that's the biggest difference. If you were to look to compare 2325 to 2527 on the maintenance side of things, it's going be very similar. The numbers went up a couple of $100,000 for some of the smaller maintenance ones. The payment budget frankly is all the money that's left. This year, it's a little bit more than it was in twenty twenty three, twenty twenty five. But I can also tell you that construction costs have gone up dramatically in the last two years as well.

Thank you.

Commissioner Darrell Abrams.

Could I just follow-up on that by just one little aside one of the places I'm aware where council has successfully decided to give general funds to transportation was attached to the Vision Zero action plan. That context, just I I all that to say, council has a history of when the timing is right and when there is an interest, they will do so and I'm glad. I'll hold my opinions on this, but I just wanted to say that it's not unprecedented. It's not unprecedented.

But we don't often get $4,600,000

Fair enough. Yeah, I think that was two maybe, but I did want to follow-up on if you could just give some rough ballpark figures for the rise in construction costs.

Going back from 2020 through early or I should say late twenty twenty four, right when the pandemic hit inflation and other stuff like that, there's something known as the California Construction Cost Index. It's available online. And you can look at they basically give a dollar amount for each month or a numeric figure. It's roughly 40% over four years.

So can we say you're buying 40% less effectively? Is that the layman's way of putting it? Or what if we were to say Yes. This to the general

And paving gets to be a little bit different because that's also highly dependent on the price of oil. But in general, yes, we're getting 40% less with our dollar.

Okay, thank you.

Any other clarifying questions, questions of fact? Commissioner Nachtigal.

Thank you. I am wondering if because I don't see it anywhere here, the Cross Alameda Trail done? Or is what little bit remains folded into the ATP portion of the budget?

So there's

I know there were lots of different projects

for it.

There's two parts that are left for the Cross Alameda Trail, right? And I'll say three parts. We'll focus on two. The first one is the stretch immediately west of Grand. That is a developer project And there, as you if you drive by it, they're actively building the units.

And before they get occupancy on the first unit, they will have Clement Avenue punch through along with that little gap in the Cross Alameda Trail, okay? The next big kind of gap, if you will, or missing piece is Tilden Clement. And that's what I mentioned earlier. We're going out to bid next week on that project with construction starting later this summer and fall. If you wanted to kind of say what's next, it's like how do you get across the Fruitvale Bridge. And that's a different challenge in its own right.

So all of the safe crossings and all of the connectors and all of those pieces are now done, we wouldn't expect to see that here. It's enough. There's just a few remaining projects.

I'll say the primary East West will be complete all the way to the Fruitvale Bridge. There's always been talk about additional enhancements particularly within Gene Sweeney. So the Gene Sweeney open space connectors and then there's even some additional thoughts about coming through some of the business parks to connect down that way as well. Those are ongoing and yeah. But the main East West Trail will

be done soon.

Okay, thank you. And one other clarifying question. Are there enough staff resources to manage this capital work plan that these funds will support?

I'm going to say yes with a little bit of a qualification to that. So we, in the last year, were able to hire five engineers and it's made a huge impact on our ability to deliver projects. It's been a wonderful thing. Started with a backlog, right? When those engineers arrived, we had a lot of work that we needed to get going and get through And we're starting to get through that backlog, things that have been taking a little longer than we would have liked to have seen.

I'll say the McCartney Avenue, the RRFB is going across McCartney Avenue. Yes, that's taken longer than we would like to have seen that. Those are in construction right now and the foundations are being poured for those as we go. So we're moving through that backlog and now we're coming forward. So we're looking pretty good. Now I'll say it's a blessing and a curse when we get a lot of very large grant projects because when those things go to construction, they take up a lot of staff resources. So we have Central Avenue going on right now. We're going have Tilden Clement going later this fall. It won't be too long after that. That will have Stargell and Lincoln Marshall Pacific. It's going to be a challenge. I think we've got the right amount of people for it. But yeah, it is definitely a lot of work.

Thank you.

I'm going move us on to public comment. So if there are any public comments on this agenda item.

We have one in person and one on Zoom. So speakers will have three minutes. First speaker is Jim Strelow.

Good evening, commission and staff. Regarding the budget, this is mostly about Central Avenue projects. I was going on Central Avenue trying to get to Buena Bay and discovered all these one ways. I had to go all the way down to Pacific Avenue to get around back to Bayena Bay to go to one of the businesses there. The businessman said, gee, we had no idea that they were going to put in one way streets in this design portion of Central Avenue.

So my question about budget and stuff is just simply, is there any budget to notify people about these unexpected things? As I attended all of the Central Avenue project updates and I don't remember one of them mentioning that it would be a one way eastbound for Central Avenue in order and then you'd have to go way out of your way to go to Pacific Avenue and around. And so how many other residents in Alameda don't know about updates to these projects? And then a friend of mine who lives on Central Avenue, East Of Webster said, all of a sudden there were some changes happening on Central Avenue right in front of his house and no notification. That no advance, no signage, nothing.

So how much of this budget can be spent to notify the citizens about the projects that the city is doing because the citizens are not being updated, the businesses are not being updated and they deserve to know about it. Thank you.

Thank you for your comment. Any additional public comments?

Next speaker is Cindy Johnson.

Good evening, commissioners and staff. I'm calling on behalf of Bike Walk Alameda to reiterate points we made in the letter we sent you last week. We encourage you to recommend fully funding the projects in the active transportation plan, specifically the projects listed in the 2030 infrastructure plan that should be complete, well underway or getting started soon in order to meet the 2030 target. These are prioritized projects designed to achieve the plan's goals of safety, equity, mode shift, connectivity and comfort and community in service of broader city goals. Examples of projects that we understand may need more funding include Grand Street North Of Otis, our commercial streets our commercial districts and neighborhood greenways that are on the 2,030 low stress backbone network beyond the slow street conversions and the mile mentioned in the staff report.

Please help ensure these important projects are built as envisioned and our key targets met by recommending additional funding as needed. Thank you for your consideration.

Thank you for your comment. Any additional public comments?

No further comments.

Okay. Seeing no more further comments from the public, let's move to commissioner discussion. Take it, Derek. Mr. Derek Abrams. Well,

just to put this request for general funds into overall context and first, I'm glad to to hear planning and public works are asking for that funding. The city despite what the national and international headlines look like is looks alright right now. It's a my understanding is there's, what, dollars 20,000,000 in residual funds as of present. That's on top of a 25% reserve mandated by policy. I'm not a finance person.

I just, like, actually wanted to understand, well, what are what is the city working with here? It it goes down after a year to $10,000,000 still in residual funds. And so it's in this context that the city has some flexibility to meet the needs of its stakeholders. And so I think it's good to be prudent. It's especially good to be prudent when the Trump Musk administration is going after funding sources.

At the same time, funds are available to deliver services and to, even when it's appropriate, expand the delivery of services for key needs. So glad to see staff requesting more resources. Also against that context of buying 40% less end product for these capital construction projects. I know that's just the reality. It's just the way things work in the world.

But against that backdrop, know, it just speaks to the importance to not go overboard, but to use the resources that are available to wisely deliver important projects. I did also want to echo Commissioner Nachtigal's concern about staffing resources, because even though and maybe staff can speak to how sort of some of this is a little fungible of whether it's a consultant doing the work in the context of a capital project or in house staff. And, you know, I did note that see requests from planning and public works for more staff that didn't look like they were moving forward currently. I know that's out of our context here tonight. But, you know, think, again, just as using the city's resources to deliver on the ground projects, it's, you know, hiring staff who can wisely oversee these projects.

The benefits compound and, you know, couple $100,000 on staff can deliver a whole lot more above that. So I know it's beyond our scope tonight, but if staff want to speak to the staffing aspects, I could turn that into a question. Got it. Shall I turn that into a question? It concerns both public works and planning.

Yeah. A couple of things. And I'll start with where you started with, which was the general fund contribution and the general fund balance. That is something that I'll say our city manager and our finance group, watch that very carefully. That is the lifeblood of the city.

There's a lot of stuff riding on that. And as you mentioned, there's obviously if one word to describe our economy right now, it's uncertainty. And so I think there's a little bit of conservatism that they do have extra money. But they're being prudent about what they're doing. I will say we did ask for more and I'm also pleased to say we were at this point is being brought forward to council as a recommendation of $4,600,000 As it comes to staffing, the way we typically operate is we have a core staff and then we'll augment with consultants.

Most of our design, I'll say all of our design for our big projects, we will go out and hire a design consultant to do. But as anybody who's been in the industry in the process recognizes the owner still has to make decisions, right? And that's us and that's our staff. If it was just Lisa and I, we would be just as one massive bottleneck and we never get the work done. That's where Susie comes in.

There's a whole group of staff behind me that helps out as well that does that. We do have a big change over last year about having that capability and those resources in house. I feel very comfortable and confident about that. As it goes to construction, when we do grant funded projects, we are almost always going to pull on a construction management firm that's going to handle the bulk of the day to day work. Grants are wonderful, but they also come with a lot of requirements and a lot of strings attached to them and a lot of the reporting requirements get to be pretty detailed and pretty intense.

And it's not the kind of things that we do on a regular basis. We're far better off hiring out a construction management consultant that has that expertise. So when we have the Central Avenue project, we do have a full time consultant project manager and engineer out there. Then we have one staff member that kind of runs along with it because again the owner always has to make some ultimate decisions here and there. So yes, we look to augment with consultants as much as we can.

And then the other kind of big picture when it comes to staffing is and this is something that every public agency looks at is every public agency is going be concerned about their FTE count. What's the total number of FTEs? A lot of it because there's pension fund issues and liabilities associated with that. And so that's something they're very mindful about and very careful about when you ask for additional FTEs. So what we're trying to do is to make sure we have an appropriate staff level for what we think is right sized for the long term workload that we're going to see as a city.

And then as we get to periods where we have extra work, we can bring on additional staff for that. And that's where we look to our consultants to help out with that. And so I'll say from my end of it, in the last year we've got the staff on board. So I feel comfortable that our baseline staff is built up. But we're also coming into a situation where as I mentioned, we're behind on delivering some projects. So we're catching up. And we're also coming at the same time, we get these big projects coming up. So we're running, running but I think we're right sized for the long term. And so it makes it a little more challenging to ask for a full time staff and how are we going to keep that person busy three years from now or four years from now. That's always a question that comes up.

Can

Answers your question. If you want to

Thank you. Thank you, Scott. Yeah. I can add context from the planning, building and transportation department. It sounds like you've been looking at the posted agenda for the May 5 city council budget workshop.

And so I did want to mention that date for everybody who might be listening. And then there's also a budget workshop on May 13 focusing on the capital budget. And so in the May 5 one, sounds like you saw that the planning building transportation department did request a two year limited full time position for another senior transportation coordinator with the idea to focus on the wooden bridge and on outreach. We put in that request with the idea of like let's show what we would need to achieve everything that we could do. But we knew that this is a hard year for the general fund.

There are a lot of requests on it. Revenues are down. I think Scott's already gone over some of the constraints. So we are continuing to work forward on our existing work plan that you all saw. We were trying to be additive and to be able to respond to some of the things that are coming up that would require more time. But we are continuing that we were staffed up for the work plan that we laid out for ourselves.

Okay. Thank you both. I appreciate that that level of detail because I agree with Commissioner Nachtigal here that that it's important not just to line up the capital funds and understand where those are going but to also think ahead on the staffing bottlenecks And so, I'm sorry to hear the PBT request in that case isn't being recommended, but it's good to hear it's additive rather than for that work plan itself. I have some other questions and thoughts, but I'd be glad to. I think you might want to go ahead. Sure. Commissioner Noticol.

Thank you. Just because it builds on what we

were just talking about, I wanted

to say thank you for lifting that up because that

was the basis of what I was asking, of course, when I asked the initial question. And I appreciate hearing the details, so thank you because I think as a commission, we're generally quite interested in all of the different projects that we provide input on coming to fruition, actually being built, actually being available to the community to use and benefit from. And so, it's one thing to fund them, but it's another thing entirely to know that we have the resources at the staff level, whether it's staff actually doing work or oversight of work of consultants so that these different projects can be completed. So it's really good to hear that that has been considered. And, you know, hopefully we'll be able to see some of these moving forward significantly in the next couple of years.

Other commissioner comments? Commissioner Ken?

Yes, go. Okay, Stu. I'll raise my hand later. Please, We'll

jump around. Yes. So I was curious if the support plan is I guess prioritized because I'm wondering if bids keep coming back higher than expected and something has to drop off, do we have a sense of what that is? Or if grant money magically falls out of the sky, do we know what we may add to this list? Yeah, I'm just kind of curious if there's or if that has been thought about yet.

I'll happily answer the first part and I'll let Lisa answer the second part. But we are very mindful about construction costs and they like as I mentioned they have gone up 40%. That's basically right on the construction cost or California construction cost index. In the last year, we're starting to see that turn a bit. It used to be you'd get one or two bids. We've been getting numerous bids but the prices have been a little more competitive. So that's a good thing. It's not necessarily a great thing. That means that the contractors are hungry, maybe not good necessarily for them but it's good for us when it comes to bidding time. What happens when the bids come back high?

Our big thing is to really keep tabs of where the current estimates are and make sure we have a very strong engineer's estimate before we go out to bid and to value engineer before we get there. That's our biggest thing that we do. We just went through that process for Tilde and Clement and value engineered a few $100,000 out just to make sure we felt confident that we could afford the project. What happens then if it comes back above? Well, we have really two choices.

We can reject all bids and value engineer again and go out to bid again. That's time and you don't know what the economic conditions are going to be six months or a year from now. That's generally not preferred. If it's a relatively small amount, we might look to ask the council for some additional funding, transfer from different pots of money. So we have options to do it. But our primary way to address that is to make sure our engineers' estimates are as accurate as they can be and then value engineer before we go out to bid. Then Lisa, you want to talk about the grants, additional grant money?

There are examples of places where we're looking for more money that would enable us to kind of expand the

scope. Susie, do you

want to address the opportunities for Stargil?

Sure, yes. So as we presented in the last meeting, we have like a cost estimate for Stargill currently that includes this modular roundabout construction. Since then we've been applying for even more grant money including with the affordable housing sustainable communities grant. So our planning level costs are sort of set at a level where we're being a little bit conservative about the construction methods and then we are still looking for money to kind of improve or enhance that construction assumption later on. But that doesn't really speak to the prioritization part.

I think in terms of prioritization, meeting our grant obligations would probably be our first priority. And then after that, we'd probably go more toward value engineering than trying to drop things. And yes, we are always looking for funding opportunities. If somehow we ended up having more money than we we ended up funding a project beyond what we expected to be funded at and we didn't need the general fund,

can give that money back.

To be clear about that, almost all most grants, not all but most grants will have some sort of a matching amount and sometimes it's 90% grant and 10% match. We would have to meet the match minimum no matter what. But again, our goal is usually to we don't want to give grant money back once it's been awarded to us. So we basically look to make sure our project is big enough to cover all that grant money. Ideally, we then supplement the project more than that minimum, we'll say 10% local match.

And if there's that extra money goes back to its fund source and gets reallocated in the next capital budget. Right off the top in the November through January phase, we get updated fund balances and that's where we basically monies that we didn't spend on the last capital budget projects that closed out, that money goes there The money that's not spent is returned to those source funds whether it's gas tax or Measure BB and then we reappropriate it with the capital budget again. So we always recycle those funds. Thank you.

Abrams. So

I'm curious, Gippens High Fern side, where would that where so that this is that is planned for this two year cycle, right? I sorry, I'm just refreshing my own memory. This is tied to the first phase of the Fernside paving project, right? Well,

little point

of Actually here, I'll just say the question I'm going to go to is that is there sufficient budget for the realm of possibilities that could be considered in this budget here? So I'll go back to your context you're providing, but that's just the question I wanted to get at.

Yeah. Point of clarity, because I think Lisa is probably the same thing. What we've committed to do at this point is to do the first phase of Fernside from Tilden to High Street. Going to basically do that striping project. We've committed to study, to do a traffic engineering study about the intersection and how we might modify that intersection, reach out, do public outreach after we do some study, come back to this commission, come back to council for a decision for the possible inclusion in 2026.

That how does that get funded? That's all part of the paving project. So some time ago, it was actually a couple of years ago, we made a determination that we wanted to that portion of Fernside was in line for a preservation treatment. And so it got on our list, our candidate list and then as we started looking at it, we decided, hey, let's we need to do more in light of what we recently went through with Grand Street at that point. And so that's how that project was formulated and how all the public outreach was formulated for that.

That project will be paid for with the paving project. And the way the paving project works is we design a project that spends as much money as we got. And if that means we're doing 22 streets, great. If we can squeeze in 23, even better yet. Or 24, you know. We basically design the project, the amount of money we have available. And so if we end up doing some additional work, just say that Fernside High Intersection, we have some back of the envelope kind of estimates that we need to definitely refine. But it basically would come out of that paving budget and it may be at the expense of a part of another street somewhere. It is funded in that context.

The supplementary memo that the city council reviewed that night, March 18, when they were reviewing the Fernside Boulevard traffic calming and bikeways project. It did show an additional cost for near term improvements at that intersection with the idea that they would find, you know, that they would allocate money for that in addition to the regular paving project budget. That night, the the council direction was proceed with the study that you're planning and come back to us. So, you know, this biennial budget doesn't reflect that additional funds because they haven't given direction to do that yet. They want to see this study first, which is quite reasonable.

So I think at that point, it would probably be a one off budget request if they decide to move forward with that. Or yes, it could happen in a couple of different ways, but that would be one option.

Okay. Thank you both. That's very helpful to understand how it does or does not fit into this. And it sounds like it does not fit into this two year cycle here.

It's not explicitly recognized in

the Okay. Cycle. So the main final set of questions I wanted to end on was thinking ahead past this two year cycle. I did see the staff report calling out assessing how to pursue the next phases of the ATP and it also hints at the next phase of neighborhood greenways. On ATP, I saw mention of 5th Street, but I'm curious to hear on the ATP front if staff have any thoughts working backwards from the 2,030 low stress network and how this two year cycle gets us closer to that.

Good evening chair and white seating commissioners. I'm Rochelle Wheeler, senior transportation coordinator. So we are looking at that list and those additional projects and I think looking at in the next couple of years, we kind of looked at what we need to deliver and what we have the staff resources to deliver. And I think we have kind of maxed out what we feel like we could deliver with these two years of funding. I think that for the projects that you don't see construction monies for, the idea for a lot of those, like 5th Street, potentially is to go after grant funds.

And so that's something that is kind of built into our standard work program, that when grant funding sources become available, that we're applying for funds. So things like 5th Street, neighborhood greenways, we've already applied for some grant funds. We'll continue to do that. The Park And Webster Street planning efforts. So I think that's where we're at for the next couple of years is knowing oh, and also the Grand Street one that was mentioned, the kind of Upper Grand Street from Ensenault to Clement.

And so we would be looking at getting grant funds for those, potentially doing some early like planning and design work. We have a pot of funds that's called ATP in the CIP which is flexible for kind of initiating some of those efforts like doing some early design work and concept planning, potentially hiring consultants to help us with submitting grants. So that's kind of the big picture for that. Fifth Street actually specifically is I think we put that in there under the ATP as a possible pot of funding which is about $500,000 additional I believe. I can't remember what we landed on, maybe $2.50 per fiscal year, but to do some additional planning work for Fifth Street Design.

However, that also, Susie mentioned the affordable housing sustainable communities grant that we're applying for or that we are asking for some transportation funds for. 5th Street is included in that. So there's also a neighborhood greenway on 3rd Street that is included in that. So there's a lot of places where we're kind of continuing to try to bring in additional funds because we know that our general fund asks can't always be this high, and so looking for other funding sources. So I feel like we have our eyes on the prize for all of those 2,030 projects.

I can't tell you for each one specifically when it will happen, partly because we're going to need to find the outside funding, which is what we're working on.

Do these proposed resources give planning and public works sufficient resources to kind of prime the pump to sort of have, I know you have your workloads full for now, but thinking ahead to the next cycle out. I

think so. Like I said, for applying for grants, that's kind of built into workload to be doing that. And then we do have these other kind of more flexible sources like the ATP budget. It's the ATP implementation budget, and so we can use some of that for doing that early design work. Don't know, Lisa, you want to add anything to that in terms of resources?

Yeah. We definitely have time planning as part of our work plans for grant applications. You're noticing we don't have a lot of wiggle room like that's why we put the we wanted to be able to respond more requests for outreach and do more work on the wooden bridge. No, applying for grants is part of our bread and butter.

So we

continue to do that. Okay.

And then can I ask and thank you for all this detail, Rochelle? Can I ask kind of the same question for neighborhood greenways in terms of the thinking out phasing and if you could maybe just provide some context of how will the current work is putting in place a toolkit that can be reused for some of these other corridors, right? So if you if it's possible to speak to will you know, these two years and then a similar two years and then where are we at? Like I know I'm asking sort I of beyond

appreciate the question. If we could keep this part short only because we are trying to focus on the two year budget, not the budget beyond that, if that's okay, just from the scope of conversation.

Yes. Can I rephrase? What I'm trying to get at is the slope of the line here. Is the slope of the line if what you all are aiming to accomplish and hopefully we'll get budget for in this two year cycle? Are we talking two of these, three of these, four of these to reach the networks that have been planned and that other documents like the CARP kind of assume are happening?

Yeah, well just starting with this two year budget, if the council makes this the recommended allocation, we would finish in this next two years converting the slow streets to neighborhood greenways, which is a little over three miles. And then we would design and implement another mile of greenway. So that would get us almost to half of the 10 miles that are in the 2030 plan. So then how rapidly we can implement the rest of those in the next three years after this budget is done in 2027, between 2027 and 'twenty three, I think we'll have a good kind of pathway for what those designs would look like because we will have the toolkit, we'll have the experience, we'll see how things have gone, but then we'll need the budget for it. So again, that's where applying for grants is really important.

Okay, thank you. So those are all my questions. And just to sum up, just I hope you all know where I'm coming at here is it's asking over and over again, how can we help city staff get the resources that are needed to deliver these services to the general public? Because, you know, there's a demand here. They're they're, you know, from the carp to the to Vision Zero to traffic safety to just everyday people on the street.

It will benefit all of that. So that's the place where my questions and feedback come from. I'm pleased to see the request for general funds go to the council and wish you luck with that. That's it for me. Great.

Vice Chair, Susan Theriagh.

Thank you, Chair. Just to follow-up on Theragolong, the last question, not getting into too much far out, but just on we're staying on the work plan here. I do see I'm pleased to see there are like three in the planning design phase to be included here in the capital improvement for the next two cycles. But then this cycle, the two year cycle. So I would like to hear a little more about what's the plan for the other projects. It's like the Grand Street resurfacing we heard from the public comment as well, like what's our thoughts about? Are we planning on looking at it from the next cycle?

It's here. Wanted to clarify that capital projects work plan that's that was or I guess you could call it a work plan. Those are our current capital projects. They're not directly tied to the two year budget that Scott presented today. So it's a little it's not quite apples to apples in terms of how we're I understand that.

Are some in the planning phase that we move into the construction phase. At that time, some of the capital I mean, it will get into this is my assumption. So in that context, how are we looking at having the Grand Street resurfacing and Alameda Point adaptive reuse and there is Fernside Boulevard traffic coming. And certainly, I'm looking at the wooden bridge deck maintenance in Bay Farm connecting Bay Farm and Main Island. And the shuttle stop improvements, probably we could request something from the businesses, but the rest of the four at least. I would like to hear staff's thoughts. Did you

want to go one at a time?

I can touch on a few of them. And now I'm going regret that I have a really small copy myself of this document. For the Grand Street, and this is where I was saying I'll talk one at a time here. For Grand Street, we are in construction for Shoreline to Otis. When council basically gave the authorization a couple years ago to move forward with Grand Street, they gave sufficient funding for Phase one and Phase two.

That was four years ago, costs have gone up 40%. We're looking at that very carefully right now and are actively designing it and we're looking how we can provide what council is expecting and also at the current budget. We believe we can actually deliver on that project with our current budget at this time. So that one's it's blue, the upper part, because it's in design. This is the 2025 work plan and the 2026 work plan.

Hopefully, that will become orange and that we will be thinking about what's ahead in 2027. You were asking about the ReShape Phase two project. That project is funded through sales of buildings and property on Alameda Point. So as we sell buildings, we will then have the funds to construct that project. We have 35% design complete.

Our intention is to start rolling that forward to basically 100% hopefully by end of this year. And I can't speak to where we are with what the market is for sales out there. But we should be in a position to be ready in hopefully 2026 and if not, definitely by 2027 assuming that we are able to make the real estate sale. So that one the funding source for that is identified, if you will. And then Fernside, I think what's a little bit maybe confusing how this is set up here is Fernside, we did a planning study and we a couple months ago, we had both the short term plan and the long term The short term plan is going to happen next calendar year, right, with our paving project next calendar year.

The long term plan is going to require grant funding. And that one, we don't know. We don't know. It's unknown as to how successful we will be, what grant monies will be available and that kind of stuff. So that's definitely a planning case.

The wooden bridge deck maintenance.

One is, I'll let maybe Rochelle can speak to that one because that was a little more complicated because the East Bay Regional Park is definitely as a part of that.

So that one, we are working with the Park District, but we really see that as their facility. So we are encouraging them to make improvements to it. But we see as our role, and this is something Lisa mentioned, the new position request could have accelerated our work on a long term replacement for that bridge, which is what we believe is most likely needed more than, you know. So how much do you invest in the short term in a infrastructure that is not really sufficient and kind of doesn't have a long life left to it, especially with sea level rise. That bridge is already at risk right now when there are tides, southern king tides.

So that project to look at doing the long term planning, I believe we have some time allocated I mean, for that, for the next two years. Is that right? Have we planned out that We're building

way at it this year, and we haven't planned the next calendar year.

So for 2025, we have small pieces,

but not a big project.

Right, right. So we do have we want to keep that moving, but that is something where we don't have as many resources as we would like. We would like to be dedicating more to that right now than we're able to.

Okay. We are making all these improvements on both ends, right? And then we are trying to reduce the VMT and then improve the bike and ped movement. But then this is the connection. And people are not able to bike because of the very the bottleneck and the shape of it.

It's really difficult for the kids. So this is my third year here from the first year onwards, the first probably two months I've been talking about this. And we have to make some headways. It's probably East Bay, parks, if we is there we have to find a way to make a request to them. And being a transportation commissioner is not easy sometimes because people, once they know that you are there on transportation commission, then they do ask questions like, okay, can you why is this why is it this way?

And then you have been there for three years and then you didn't even ask and I'm saying the same thing. It's not it's kind of the jurisdictional issue, but we need to make headways. So I'll leave it at that. I hope we can make headways on this.

It would be nice if commissioners could write checks for projects. I totally agree.

Or at

least we can make

it look We should change that role. Any other commissioner questions or comments?

Okay.

Seeing none, let's move on. So that was just a discussion item. No vote needed. Let's move on to item 6b. This is an action item. Is to review the City of Alameda Transportation Program Plan for older adults and people with disabilities for fiscal year twenty twenty five-twenty twenty six and endorse a one year extension of pilot programs. And again, this would be an action voteable item. And I believe we'll have a presentation by Lisa Foster.

Good evening. Thank you. I am, pleased to present our city paratransit program plan and I'm here with Susie, Hefstadter who's been doing some technical work on this and Liz Escobar is our paratransit coordinator who actually implements these programs, who is our most important person on this. But she's not here because she focuses on the day to day. Yeah, that's different.

So, yeah, so we have the two major program elements of our paratransit program are our free AC Transit Bus Pass program and our Alameda Independent Mobility program. I'll go into those in more detail later. We also do travel training and outreach that provides community education and one on one sessions and also monthly almost transportation one on one workshops including trip planning and transit planning and help with people signing up for their senior clipper cards. We do outreach that includes multilingual customer service. Liz happens to be fluent in Spanish and we have a volunteer who speaks Cantonese on Fridays.

And then we also have our group trips that includes trips for Mastic Senior Sender members and most often our leisure club transportation for adults with developmental disabilities to take trips and do fun things. And then our Alameda Point Collaborative residents receive subsidized Clipper Bay passes through this program or Alameda TMA provides them, this program subsidizes them. And then when we have fund balance, are able to use it for capital projects to do ADA access improvements and bus stop access improvements. So we launched both of these pilot projects in mid-twenty twenty two, and they are reaching the end of their three year pilot in June and we would like to continue them. The free bus pass program provides unlimited free rides for our pass holders throughout the whole AC transit system, throughout their whole schedule which has some coverage 20 fourseven.

It's open to low income residents of Alameda who are 65 years or older, and also to low income residents aged 18 to 64 with a certified disability. We currently actually we're now I think at nine seventy membership. There is a wait list at the moment because well, I'll get into that more. Next slide. We have been seeing participation and ridership growing continually since we launched.

In December 2024, there were 18,000 rides taken by six forty one unique users. Is we're assuming 18,000 is starting to be our sort of average. So we are having a lot of people take a lot of bus rides, go a lot of places. Next slide. These are the demographics for the free bus pass program.

Note that nearly three quarters of our participants self identify as Asian and nearly half of them speak Cantonese. Next slide. It's an incredibly popular program with high customer satisfaction. We do a survey every year, for people who utilize these services and they came back with glowing things to say about this program saying it helps them achieve higher independence, financial stability, improved mental health. They use it to travel between Park And Webster Streets to Oakland Chinatown, grocery stores, the food bank, doctor's appointments, recreation and fitness both in Oakland and Alameda.

So with that popularity, we currently pay per ride at the senior ClipperCard rate and so we are currently at the top of what we can afford with our existing funding. And then AC Transit Board of Directors adopted an upcoming fair increase that will hit our contract with AC Transit. And so basically without a little more infusion of cash, we wouldn't be able to continue the program at its current size. So the way we're responding to the situation where within the budget that we have, we're prioritizing budget for a free bus pass program. We do an annual renewal, which helps, that'll help, get some people off the roles and then we'll be able to add some of the people off the wait list.

This summer we are also going to add an income verification requirement beyond what we have done in the past to help make sure we have the right people enrolled. And then importantly, you may have noticed on the May 5, city council budget workshop agenda item, there is a general fund request for this program to be able to basically that will allow us to clear that wait list and absorb the increased cost from the fare increase. Next slide. So we interesting. This might be an old presentation.

We are currently looking at program alternative B for now, which is to have a moderate general fund budget addition and being able to maintain the existing program size, which means continuing to have over 900 residents taking advantage of this, taking 200,000 plus rides per year. We have been looking into whether we could convert to the E ZPass program that AC Transit does. We are not an obvious fit for it because it's usually with a given population like a university and you pay for everybody in that university. And then it's a flat rate and sort of built into their structure is assuming that not everybody's going sign up. So you know we still think it's worth continuing to talk about whether we could restructure this program in the future to serve more people, but the feasibility of that is uncertain and it would be in the future.

Next slide. Our other pilot program, is the Alameda Independent Mobility Program that provides a concierge service for Uber and Lyft rides that are subsidized for now all Alameda residents age 70. That's an eligibility expansion that we did based on requirements from our funder from the Alameda CTC. And then also all residents 18 who are enrolled in East Bay Paratransit, which means they have a certified disability. And right now, we have over 170 participants.

And ridership has continued to grow on that program as well over the years. Next slide. And here our participants in this program are not quite the same demographics but still quite diverse. Next slide. People, like it as well.

Though we have had some participants who have had issues bringing their mobility devices and service animals on Uber and Lyft and others note that they wish there were more we offer six rides per month and some people would benefit from more, would wish there were more. Next slide. And then we also have some kind of evaluation needs for this program. One is that when we created this program, Uber was promising that they would have wheelchair accessible vehicles available in the coming years. That has not panned out very much, not to the extent that we need, so we're looking into solutions for that.

Our current vendor, the per ride cost is higher than some of the other vendors. So we're looking into they offer a more high touch service, but we're looking into whether we could potentially change vendors, be able to afford more rides with less of a high touch service. And then, of course, looking to see how that eligibility requirement hits our budget. Next slide. Our recommendation is that we continue both pilot programs, that we continue our regular services.

And next slide. I have a slightly updated recommendation for the wording here, and you as the Transportation Commission can go back to the previous wording or just use this one. But the recommendation would be to review the City of Alameda Transportation Program Plan for Older Adults and People with Disabilities and endorse a continuation of its pilot programs. The previous one said endorse a one year extension. The reason we are now recommending this is just based on as we continue on, we thought we were going to get a little further with the EZ Pass program concept.

So we thought we would work with the current for a year and then be able to change over to EZ Pass a year from now. But that's looking less likely. So now we're thinking of extending our current contract with AC Transit for two years because why do the same thing twice while we continue to look into options. So we'd like to just kind of these are good programs. People like them. They're providing important services and we would like to continue them. And happy to take your clarifying questions. Thank you.

Any clarifying questions from commissioners?

So the E ZPass program is a that is a purchase for all of your population but at a much smaller rate with unlimited rides? Following? Yeah.

Yeah. So it's an AC Transit product. It's mostly universities, housing complexes, that kind of stuff. And yes, you pay for your whole population a flat rate per pass and then that pass includes unlimited rides.

And is that comparable to the Clipper Bay Pass in effect that you had mentioned that the TMA is serving at least the pricing model.

You mean in terms of cost?

No, not that. No. Just in terms of the pricing model of pay for, am I comparing apples and oranges? If not

Yes, you can answer.

SUZIE: I'm Susie. I can chime in. It's very similar. Bay Pass with the TMA, I believe, is also done where they have to pay per head of the defined population. And for us, it's especially challenging because low income seniors in our community is actually a much larger group than would be riding the bus. And so that would have us paying far beyond what we can. And we actually would not even be able to define a population in the way that AC Transit prefers for this type of program. But yes, the model is very similar to Bay Pass, but not as expensive. Because it doesn't serve BART and everything.

Oh, And also, this is me as a president who's unfamiliar with the Mastic Senior Center. You mentioned a membership. Could you just

tell us

a Basically, little bit about

age 50 can join the Mastic Senior Center. And the reason we require people to maintain a Mastic Senior Center membership to participate is that we can piggyback off of their renewal process. So they send letters every year for people to renew their senior center membership, and so we can kind of join that. And then when those letters come back with bounced addresses, then we know somebody might not live in Alameda anymore, And therefore, we can start following up with removing them from our roles.

Could I ask a clarifying question on top of that question? So we mentioned that EZ Pass only works with defined groups. Is not is Mastic Center itself not a qualifying group? Because it seems like that's a built in population. I understand it's a little more flexible, but

We have a lot of research to do to figure out how to if we were going to try to move forward with this to figure out how to do our pool. Mastic Senior Center membership, you don't have to be even an Alameda resident and you also only have to be 50. So we would have to

Winnow down that.

Winnow that down a bit. And also

And AC Transit would be unwilling to take the 70 plus population that is also mastic members. That would not be a defined population that they would use for E ZPass as we understand it.

Like I said, we have more work to do to kind of figure that out.

Sorry. Other clarifying questions of which I've already jumped the gun. I apologize.

I have a quick one. Sorry. I'm trying to figure out what is the typical annual budget for this program? Because I know you mentioned the increase. And I think in the memo, listen, I'm trying

to Yeah. That's a good question. We get that it's Measure BB, paratransit specific money. And we get about half 1,000,000 per year for all of our programming. So we have a part time staff member who it, Liz Escobar. And then more than half is going to the free bus pass program at this point. But

then so the 25¢ increase is increasing the cost by almost half that amount?

Per ride.

Right. Yeah.

It goes up. We we pay for every ride. So with you know, like last year we had 200,000 some rides. So I think I actually did the back of the envelope math presentation. It's about 60,000. If assuming 230,000 rides, which were

Oh, so up. So the increase would be 60,000 or okay.

The increase, if we when I assumed 230,000 rides, the quarter increase per ride came out to 57,500.

Got it, okay.

Additional clarifying questions. Commissioner Johnson?

I don't think

my question is correct.

My question is clarifying for sure. So you mentioned that the program the AIM program is one of the two programs that is popular. But do we actually have survey results on that? Because to be perfectly blunt, if I notice the bubbled comments, I would say at least a third of them are not particularly positive, whereas the other I mean, again, limited sample size. But like do we have actual outcomes from users that supports that it's a popular program?

I can speak to that. Yeah. The program is significantly smaller. So, you know, like, the survey responses from the bus pass program have, like, hundreds people just being like, thank you, I love it. And the AIM program serves a much smaller group who are people with disabilities.

It's supplementing paratransit for them in many cases. And it involves a little bit more, you you talk to someone on the phone and then you have, you have to like get an Uber ride and there's limited hours. And so people, it's just a little bit more effort than just kind of like getting a clipper card and it's much smaller. So yeah, it's a small sample size. We have some people saying this is a game changer for me and we have other people who have just had like little issues with it or bigger issues with it related to the service So what's breakdown then?

Like you're

would say it was maybe like sixty, forty, like 60 just like thank you, 40 I had an issue, but it's really small sample size compared to the bus pass program.

So sixtyforty positive to negative, is that that's there?

Yeah. That's just kind of like my memory of sifting through this spreadsheet, yeah.

I'm going to add, you know, I said we expanded our eligibility for that program to everybody 70. We used to require that people were fully enrolled with East Bay Paratransit, which is a pretty high bar. So that is part of why we have a relatively small group and some barriers to entry.

Thank

you for the presentation. And I'm glad you're going with Mastic Senior Center. I have worked a lot with them. I've been working with them a lot and then very impressed with their work with the seniors and all that. One quick question, probably you may have responded. There was a question on this. The AIM program, the mobility program, is it for low income people too or is it just 70?

Everybody age 70. That is Alameda CTC's latest guidelines for this kind of curb to curb service. Okay.

And all the requirements, maybe I should just I'll wait for my detailed question.

Getting pretty uptight about these clarifying questions. There clarifying questions from the commission? Good. Let's move to public comment and then we'll move to discussion.

There are no public comments on this item.

It sucks being the villain. Let's go to the discussion items from the commissioners. Commissioner Johnson. Lisa, thanks for the comment. Can you come back up and put up the

your chart that that you had? Because I'm looking at that when for the passes for you it had the percentage of the ridership. Go back, let me see. Pipes, yeah. Go back one more. Let me see. There was one that showed the uses, yeah. I don't think that's the one.

Which program? Free bus pass program?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me see. Is that the right one? No. Well, was a slide that showed that said that seniors had to have a membership at that senior center and it showed the usage of with the PASS program and it had like it was a large percentage of the Asian American population. And

the demographics?

That was another one. That's not the one but neither here nor there. But I'm wondering if seniors are required to be a member of this senior center. I know nothing about this senior center.

Oh, it's delightful.

What does it mean for seniors who are not part of this senior center? Like seniors who are on the West Side of the island or because when I looked at that pie chart, it was a huge population huge participation of the Asian American population in very tiny slices of the other groups. And to me, in this equity climate, that just sets off red flags for me like in terms of that didn't look right. So I'm just trying to figure out how do we mitigate that. That just, you know, I don't know. That just kind of like I was like, woah, that's off to me. So in terms of outreach for other groups, so

Mastic Senior Center is right in the middle of the island. And I think I think this program has just had a really strong word-of-mouth popularity among people who are part of a broader community. So I think that's part of what has happened. I would say the people walking through Mastic Senior Center's doors are a little more diverse than this.

Okay.

And anybody can be a member. It's really easy to join.

I mean

There's very little barrier to that.

I'm thinking of seniors who are sort of like we know how seniors can be. They're not really into the, you know, phones and all the other stuff. I'm like, is the word-of-mouth out there for the other seniors, you know, in terms of them knowing about this program? What sort of outreach is being done to for the other seniors who might benefit from this?

Yeah. I mean, we have I think Liz, in addition to the monthly Transportation one hundred one events that happened at the Mastic Senior Center, I think she went to four different senior housing facilities to present about transportation options including this and maybe a few other things. I don't have the information right in front of me. We did have a period last year with, in between staff and so there's a little less of this kind of outreach happening last year than normal. Although I do have some hesitation about advertising a program where we can't add people right now.

So I think that once we do our renewal and see where we're at, I think there's a lot of room to try to reach other communities and I appreciate that comment.

Yeah, just wanted to be inclusive and that chart didn't look inclusive to me, just my

$02 Could I ask a follow-up directly related to that? Do we have a sense of how many seniors on Alameda are part of Mastic? Because it seems like that kind of gets at his question. Like is it 50% of the senior population is part of Mastic? Do you have any idea what that number is?

I think the Mastic membership is like 4,200 or some it's in the 4,000 range. And I think that's probably nowhere near all of the seniors in Alameda, but that's just a guess. I don't have the senior population in front of me, but I think that's relatively moderate.

Commissioner Nachtkol is very excited for her questions, so I'm gonna call on her. I have a follow-up. Please.

So with, as I understood from reading it, it's not simply you have to be a member of Mastic to participate, you also have to qualify at the income level as well. Correct?

Correct. Okay,

thank you. It was a

clarifying question on what we're talking about.

But I do have question. Please. Can I go away? Oh, I

have a follow-up question off that.

It's a follow-up, Jayden.

So I and I guess the this probably would take a lot more to figure out. But do we know how much this relates to Alameda senior demographics that are under that income threshold, right? Like is this is what we're seeing here similar to that? Or is there a big kind of gap?

I can tell you what we're doing about being able to answer those questions is we're looking forward to moving forward with a consultant contract to look at this program and research demographics and be able to answer questions like that. I don't have that question, that answer right now. Thank you. Because

I have a question that I felt wasn't quite a clarifying question. But the the previous loop shuttle, as I recall, that was just in Alameda. Correct? Mhmm. So in that regard, I can see why having access to free AC transit rides that take you to Highland Hospital, Oakland Kaiser, Oakland Chinatown, an SF Dental visit, BART connections, and the Oakland YMCA, which we're in here, is a real draw for this program because it's not just a loop shuttle place on the island.

And so then you can see how word-of-mouth would be a real benefit. So then I have another question, really, which is if it was a three year pilot, why wasn't the analysis done a year ago, looking at the final year of the pilot, for these different, you know, evaluations? Why wasn't it done a year ago to say, okay, we did our analysis and we've made improvements, and therefore this pilot is a success. We want to continue it. Why are we extending?

Yeah, that's a great question. Sadly, the answer is logistical. We, like I mentioned, that staff gap, you know, we had a very embedded, staff member who had launched these programs, and then she went to a different opportunity that would fit what she needed better. And then it took us a while. We focused basically our extra energies for the paratransit program last year went into hiring that position.

Okay, thank you. Other

commissioner questions? Commissioner Dara Abrams, we'll just

jump Well, I'm just going to say this is like a case study that deserves to be in a textbook over the last few years. You don't see charts like this in too many aspects of the public transit world right now. I know it's also old news, but just the way this was rolled out in terms of outreach for the passes. I love that it was combined with the addition of benches at key stops. Just thinking of it like everyone who wants to say, why can't the public sector deliver seamless services in the same way amazon.com can?

Well, here we go. I just want to like speak positively of the fact that city staff, you know, took this in city only shuttle that was not terribly popular, pretty expensive to operate, and have the numbers going up into the left and hitting this artificial cap. And then even looping in a Civic Spark Fellow to help site those benches so older residents could have a place to sit. So I just think this is a great story to keep on telling, and I hope telling that story can help get the funding to whether it's framed as a pilot continuation or onward, whatever the framing is. I think the story is there and the you know, and it's clearly meeting actual needs.

So those are my comments I wanted to share. That's it. Thank you.

Well said. Commissioner Nachal?

I just want to build on that, please. And I agree. And there's really let's see the valuation bring positive benefits to more people and to improving the AIM project so it meets the needs of everyone so that people can get the rides they need so that people can bring their service animals or have their mobility devices or ride on the weekend, right? Thanks.

Commissioner Susan Theria.

Very briefly, I just want to second what he said and what she said. So it's a much needed program and as people age more, you know, and we need this to grow better. And I think Citi is in the right path in being creative and attaching yourself with actually. Mastic is a great idea. I have seen their work.

I do work with seniors a lot. The people over there are very passionate and very compassionate about what they're doing. And so that's the right place you have chosen, given the lack of other the work that you need to be doing separately otherwise. The lack of resources, for that I meant. But you do need to pay a little bit attention to Commissioner Johnson's point on why it's kind of one sector is using this fabulous facility, which is really our amenity that we are offering.

And why not others? And if you go to the senior center, like you said, it's really diverse. So why not everybody is using that? But this is a fantastic program. I hope it grows more with more funding and more people get to use. And then AIM is much more needed and with all their comments in terms of what their needs are, it needs to be really supported. So we need to really look at providing that as well. So thank you.

Yes, I just kind of want to add to that. Like this program seems fantastic. And I think my original question was going be why don't we just re up it for multiple more years. But I think when you explained it that we wanna get have some more flexibility to kind of figure out our options and flexibility moving forward, I think that's the right way to go. Because I think, as commissioner Daragher, everyone's saying, like, is kind of a win win, I think, in a lot of ways just both for AC Transit in terms of increasing ridership as well as for Alameda.

And it'd be great to figure out if there's some other program that makes sense that AC Transit could work with, like, that isn't the easy pass. Right? Because I understand there's a lot of difficulty in trying to figure out how to, like, put like, merge that with this program. But if there is another program at AC Transit or a different just some flexibility that they have with us, that'd be fantastic to try to figure out because this is, like, completely a win win, I think, for both us and AC Transit. And, yeah, I think to second some other thoughts, like, be we've I feel like we've talked a lot about staff resources tonight, but this seems like one of those programs where if there's more staff resources, that'd totally be great because we're seeing this as very successful.

And so just having more staff resources for kind of analyzing both getting people on the program, but also analyzing kind of the data that we're getting out of it and figuring out how to keep improving that this program, like, I think we would be all for. So

Other commissioner questions or comments? Commissioner Nachtigle. I want you to ask your question.

So when we get to the point that we're voting, are we voting to change the language as well that was up here?

Yes. Read the Okay. Guess my only comment, and I can be very brief about this. So again, it sounds like the AIM program serves a need, but in and of itself is not serving all the needs of the program. I think that's fair. I mean there's no wheelchair accessibility. There's mixed feedback. I assume that that is an Uber Lyft issue, not an Eden provider issue, although it sounds like some of it is just the logistics of calling through Eden per the comments. Is that fair? Yes, I assume. I

think it's like primarily the limited hours. And there might have been one or two comments where they had to wait on hold or something like But you know.

So Eden works with Uber and Lyft. And I understand extending a continuation of the pilot program. But there is no other option at this point that Eden or we would specifically be able to use to because again, they're not really accomplishing the goals of the program. The goals of the program are, in addition to providing rides, it's to provide wheelchair accessible rides. That was the assumption when we started this program. They are not providing that service the vast majority of times. So I would like to just briefly understand, are there additional options we should investigate? Is that the next year? Like where are we going to end up on this? Because if we come back in a year and it's still not providing that service, it's great to extend this pilot. But like if there's clearly no other options, what are we doing?

So for background, the Alameda Independent Mobility Program replaced the taxi scripts. Taxis are not famously wheelchair accessible either. And we are definitely not alone. Many, many cities, maybe they're not all using Eaton I and R specifically for their vendor, but many cities are relying on Uber and Lyft for this service, this kind of service. They're curb to curb on demand service and they're hitting the same issues and trying to figure it out.

That's one of the things we're going to have that consultant work on is figuring that out and we're definitely not going to drop that issue. It's on our minds. We want to see how we can solve it. City paratransit programs augment East Bay Paratransit, which is by nature a wheelchair accessible, fully accessible service. It has its flaws in terms of ease of use.

People have to schedule in advance, so sometimes what they'll do is they'll use East Bay Paratransit to get to a doctor's appointment, but then when they want to get home, they use our service because you don't know what time you're going to be leaving. So we will continue to work on trying to solve that. But I will say it's not like we're the only ones who are having this issue.

And I'm definitely not criticizing staff or alimator. I understand it's just it's honestly an issue of just availability. It's just if there are other options to investigate because it does not seem like this option specifically with these two providers of transportation services are actually going to be in a better place in a year because we expected them to be in a better place now. And that's one of the reasons we started initiated this program. Anyway, have no other comments on this. If it's okay, I'm going to move to let me make sure I get this right. To endorse a continuation of the of the pilot programs.

Perfect.

Can anyone think of that?

Second that.

All in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Aye. Motion carries unanimously. Let's move next to item seven, commission communications. Are there any commission communications on transportation related issues?

It's very minor. I wasn't here at the last meeting where the transportation program update was presented. So I kind of quickly reviewed it before coming to this meeting. And then one point I want to mention, it's very well done. And update is really well done.

One very small minor point is that in terms of the PCIs, there was just a statement saying that, okay, PCI is 66, it's about it's fair and it's very close to the county average of 67 or 68, but it's much better than the neighboring cities. I think we cannot really compare it like that. So given the so we don't want to say the jurisdiction, adjacent jurisdictions are very different in many different ways. And we are just an island. We create our own problems in terms of driving over our wear and tear of the roads and how we improve it.

So I think we should just stay away from comparing with others and probably just the county average, just a presentation.

Thank you for your comment.

But it was a well done report.

Any other commission communications? Commissioner Derry Evans.

Quick from my my time out and about around the city. I just wanted to speak to over on Webster Street, the corner of Webster And Haight Street. There are there are bollards in the middle of that sidewalk right in Webster Street. They've been there since January. And I know that the city is aware of this.

But I think it's unfortunate that a business has installed its own impediments in the middle of that sidewalk there, and they've been standing there since January. Dispensaries. It doesn't matter what the business is, but just that they were in they were installed by a business, not by the city itself. And so I I my understanding is the city has been working with the business to find a an alternative at the same time. It's a it's a private an unpermitted private impediment in the public right away that affects people in wheelchairs with strollers and so on.

So I just wanted to speak to that and that I hope the city will not just take the businesses needs into account, which are important, but also the general public that uses that sidewalk. So thank you.

Thank you for your comment. Any other commissioner comments? With that, I would move to adjourn. All in favor of adjourning. Aye. Anyone opposed to adjourning? Let's all

go home.

Good night, everybody.