Metropolitan Planning Organization - Regular Meeting

We'll go ahead and call to order our Longview MPO Transportation Policy Board meeting happening on August 19th of 2026. Thank you guys all for being here and my apologies again for being late. First thing we will do is our invocation and pledge with Mr. Michael Shirley. If everybody would please rise.

Bow with me, please. Father God, we just thank you for the opportunity to come and represent our community, Lord. We just ask that you give us wisdom and discernment, Lord, as we look ahead for our community and make decisions for the future. Lord, we just pray that the decisions would honor you, God, and that our lives would show your love and glory. In your son Jesus' name that we pray. Amen.

to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you, Michael. Next on our agenda is citizen comment. I do not have any speaker cards. Are there any citizens here that would like to make a comment and fill out a card following? Seeing none, I will move on to the consent agenda. That is consider approval of our April 8th, 2026 meeting minutes. And a second?

Second.

All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Consent agenda is approved. Next is presentation and discussion of the complete street guidelines and recommendations. That's with Kevin. Jack is?

St. Jake's.

Jim, that is not close at all from Friesen-Nichols. Thank you, Kevin, for being here.

Thank you. Thank you. Again, Kevin, St. Jake's. I am a senior transportation engineer with Friesen-Nichols. And we started this process a few months ago and are ready to wrap it up here. So we'd like to share with you a bit of the process and a little bit about where we have brought this study so far. All right, so the framework is we've been doing some great Complete Streets work so far, but it's been kind of... little bit here, little bit there, there's been some great planning, a lot of plans in and surrounding everything so this is an opportunity to bring them all together kind of under one umbrella with a set of official guidelines that steer us on our next journey towards the next set of policies and a chance to adopt a policy that would basically say Do what you said you're going to do and so so it's basically the policy says we develop these these plans We're going to implement the plans and it identifies this set of higher priority things So that is the framework for where we've gone and where we come so I look to walk you through the process You may be familiar with complete streets, but for those that are not complete street basically is a way of looking at our public street right away and and considering the fact that we basically have focused on cars and commerce and moving goods and things around, but we've often forgot about the people. And so trying to get those missing elements in. Sometimes it's sidewalks, sometimes it's bike lanes, sometimes it actually is parking and some other things that really are missing in a corridor that we should be taking consideration for. So it's looking at all modes, all abilities, and bring them all together in balance. Everything doesn't need to go in one single street. Maybe there's a collection of streets that compass the whole mobility corridor. So that's the whole premise behind Complete Streets. And so the next couple of slides, I'll just kind of walk you through why are we doing it? What is it benefiting us to think about this? And we were doing fine. We got our cars, getting our goods everywhere and everything and people get around and so what's the big deal? Well, there are kind of other things to think about in our community. People like to walk around. They like to enjoy their community. They like to get places. And there are some pockets of neighborhoods that are close enough to restaurants and places to go that they could walk there or they could bike there. But if they don't have the provisions to do so, they'll have to get in the car, clog the streets with cars, and pollute our air. And so a lot of these things we would do to look at these other moods have benefits overall for the air quality, mobility. It actually brings maybe some traffic off the streets and put them onto bikes and peds. And then the signs of vitality in a community are what you see out on the street. So if your street just full of cars and no people, that's one vision of a community. But if you see your community and there's people out walking around enjoying their environment, that creates a sense of vitality. So a lot of benefits to looking at these And there are some people that really can't afford to have a car, can't afford to operate a car, and so giving them some more choices also in the mix. Next slide. So there is a great potential to serve these trips that are rather short in distance to take. Obviously there's some corridors that there's nobody living in them. You wouldn't want to focus on putting your sidewalks in there first. There's other areas that have these pedestrian trips, short-range trips that you should focus on and that's what this plan intends to help us focus on what we should do first and how we should get there. Next slide. There are tremendous health benefits to giving people an opportunity to walk and bicycle around the active transportation, we call it, and give them an opportunity to participate in active transportation, getting it around the community. Those communities that have focused on providing these opportunities have seen greater benefits in health, obesity, diabetes, all those things that are inherent when you have an inactive population. Now you go to a more active population and those communities actually see that benefit health-wise. Next slide. Economic benefits. There are people that look for houses in an area that have sidewalks and so the value of properties in an area that has these mobility elements increase. And so you have that differential in the community of areas that really support an active lifestyle and those that don't. And then, once you make your investments in these corridors and in those provisions, then you have the folks that live adjacent to these corridors start making investments in their property. If you have a share juice path along a frontage, well, by golly, I've got a store that sells ice cream, and so I'm going to make sure my store is inviting to the folks that are out there walking around. And so all those investments start happening once you start making that public investment in the street right-of-way mobility. And then finally, people like to live in a community where they feel they have options and opportunities to get around, visit other neighbors and so on. So great opportunities, great potential, great benefits to do so. Next I'll walk you through, and I won't go into great detail on these, but we did a peer review of other cities that have done Complete Streets programs, San Antonio, is one that's close by that has a lot of great examples and they have really fostered Complete Streets in their community. Others, there's MPOs that have done these at their level and facilitate things in their communities. And even at state level, there's some state programs looking at fostering Complete Streets and pushing that message on down. and the way that things get financed kind of works through the whole system. So we did a peer review of everything, and we came up with a bunch of things that they do right that we should think about doing here. So we've gone through these findings, and again, I won't go through these findings, but the findings from those peer reviews work their way into our policy statements that we've brought forward to you. Next slide. A few of the things that they have reported to us is about accountability and making sure you document where you're going and the fact that you are pursuing these things and report back and circle back to people about we've been able to get this much done and whether you count miles of bike lanes or linear feet of sidewalk. Reporting back to everybody how you've done, how you've accomplished these things. Let's zip on to the next one. We did an administrative view of policy you've had, the programs you have, the plans you've put together, and kind of stepped through what the process should be to kind of knit them all together. and what you would write in the form of a policy, what you need as far as guidelines for design and those things. So we put together these packages based on those findings. So we've prepared, if you can advance to the next slide, let's advance all the way through to the design guidelines that we prepared a set of design guidelines that would kind of give everybody an idea of what can be done and what are the opportunities for enhancement of those roadway edges and the process for working through the thought process and how much space to give to traffic, how much space is needed for accentuating bikes and peds. And then we did a little online survey to look at, well, what everybody else think? What are they always doing? Do they even know that we're doing completes in the city? And so it was part public information about the programs that have been developed, the bike plan and the ped plans, all those things that are out there, a little bit about their impression of the priority projects that have been put forth. So we let them kind of take the top 15 and put them in order and see how they were ranked. So a little bit of feedback on our process internally of what priorities should be set. And then kind of wrapping up with what the information they have about bicycling and pedestrians. And so that, we took the opportunity to do promotional elements and also receive some information about it. And then we took everything and put it into that policy statement where we tried to understand where everything is going. So go ahead and zip through this. Oh, they actually gave them an opportunity to map out some of their key issue areas, too. And so that became part of a bit of information. Any time you have the opportunity to grab people's attention, get some input, it's good to get everything you want to get after. All right, so the manual is, actually this is a manual that I've been working with for several years now. It started out over in Los Angeles County, California. A bunch of folks put together what they call a livable streets manual of what you could do in your communities to develop things. And they made that whole manual available for any community to adopt. bits and pieces or a whole thing for their own design manual. So we took that and went through each of the chapters, picked out the ones that were most appropriate for this area, and developed a Longview design, Complete Streets design manual. And so that really brought everything down into perspective and gives everybody a toolkit of things that can be done looking ahead to all the possibilities for our corridors. The manual doesn't prescribe what you have to do, but it gives you the information you need to think about what can be done. And so it is a manual that is good for adopting as your guidelines, and it gives you lots of information. So as an MPO, you can adopt the manual and use it as a guideline for everything you're going to do. evaluate proposals for projects regionally that would get pushed up for funding, and you can do all sorts of things. And then other communities can adopt the manual. Or, well, chapter is one through seven, but we don't care about chapter eight. And so they can adopt their own version of the manual locally. All right, so let's zip ahead now to, and it's got all sorts of guidance on how you evaluate streets and what they can look like, what you can do on the outsides. Then we have next the policy, and this is kind of where it becomes important to consider the fact that up to now, everything we got, we got plans, we got guidelines, we got everything. But once you have a policy in place of that you are going to coordinate all your plans and you are going to implement your higher tier programs of the bikes and for the peds. And so once you develop a policy around everything you're going to do, then you start getting serious about, well, hey, we're actually going to do this. And we're going to put some things in front of other things because we think, according to our policy, these are more important. So we ask you to look at this policy and make sure it does what you think it should do and that it doesn't overstep your authorities or responsibilities, but that you kind of think about the use of the policy to help implement the programs you've already planned to do and want to do. So safety, I think, is like the thread through everything, that everything we do has to be safe. We don't want to squeeze a five-foot sidewalk against a fast-moving travel lane just to be able to say we checked the box and we got something in there. Let's be safe about it. Let's think about the importance of it. So that's the components of the policy program. It refers to the bicycling recommendations. It refers to the pedestrian recommendations of your programs. And it includes the list of all those high priorities. And so that's all baked into this policy statement that you would adopt. And then, yeah, we look for implementation. And that's where you start looking at, OK, once we have this policy, what do we do? How do we implement all this cool stuff to do? We don't have enough money. Where do we get the money? And so you start looking at your programs of funding and all your other sources and start looking at how we're going to rank projects when they come into us and so on. All right, so in the end, we would suggest that we establish some measures of success at the staff level. So what could we possibly measure? What makes sense for us to track throughout the years and report back to you? And then these initial performance measures really set the stage for everything you're going to be doing here on out. And so it's important to start those measures and make sure you can sustain those measures. And I think that is essentially the Reader's Digest version of all the wonderful materials you have in front of you. But we're glad to answer any questions you have right now. And then Brian will come up later and kind of make you decide, yes.

Questions, comments, discussion? I drove back here from Letourneau on Marbury. I love complete streets.

Very good. Thank you.

Thank you. Next item on the agenda is to consider adoption of the Complete Street Design Guides and Policy Statement. Mr. McBride.

So thank you, Kevin, for presenting the details behind each of the plans and development behind the scenes of how that came to fruition. So historically, Longview MPO has consider complete streets and all modes of transportation when it comes to their project development. That started kind of very significantly in 2018 when we adopted our bicycle and pedestrian plan. And that was when we started saying, OK, when we have a TxDOT project that was identified or a highway project that was identified, we need to make sure to consider all modes of transportation. The state does it, but there's nowhere in our ordinances in the MPO that says we have to consider it. part of this there was a two-step process one the new iija the infrastructure bill required that we spend two and a half of our planning budget funds to come up with something and fulfill that requirement the second part of that process is i felt like it was needed in our system to say that when you consider all modes of transportation that's just It's a good nature thing to do. The state's already doing it, but we need to consider it at the MPO level as well. And so it fulfills the requirements of the federal requirements. It formalizes the MPO of actual commitment, and it also provides a regional toolkit in the sense of guidelines we know that not all of our jurisdictions within our boundary can afford you know an engineer to come up with the guidelines I'm not an engineer if I trade at all and so that's why we reached out to consultant firm to help produce this document so regions can use it to their own benefit but as well shows that we are constantly moving forward to include all modes of transportation in all of our planning studies and everything. So that's where you'll see it. I'll talk about 4th Street later on the agenda, but that's where you see when that was one of the questions. Do you want to see walkability, bicycles, any of that? That's why that component is there because we already do that, but we have nothing saying that we have to. In summary, that's from the staff level perspective.

Questions, comments, discussion from Mr. McBride? If not, I think that I need a motion. Have a motion? Second. I have a second. I'm judged with a birthday. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Item is approved. Thank you. Next is discussion on 4th Street Corridor Study. How's that going?

So, project overview. Kyle's going to advance the slides for me. We brought this to you all as a consideration last year to discuss what projects you want to study. We talked about freight planning. Brandy did mention that that'd be a good regional type of study we should look into. But at the end of the day, 4th Street kind of saw, as you might have seen in the social media and the news, how popular 4th Street has been. So it's the overall study area is You can see on the screen, as well as your agenda packet, the boundary itself, I've got a lot of questions about why is it an area, and so there's an area and then there's a corridor. The area you have to consider in transportation planning It all feeds into all the road networks, so you have to consider how whatever tube that street is going to impact all the other streets around it. So 4th Street in question, it's in the Longview area specifically. Walmart, Sam's, Lowe's, Fresh by Brookshire's, E.T. Tyler's, just north of Fresh. So that specific corridor. Things that we're considering is safety, business access, traffic flow, and multimodal connections. That's what I hinted to when we were talking about complete streets. And so that's the corridor in question that we've gone after and we want to kind of assess. Currently, we are in August, obviously. The next, we've had our public open house last Thursday. We had a good attendance there and wanted to let y'all know that I was talking to the consultants last Thursday that we had, I think it was 1,500, 1,551 survey responses. That's strictly survey. And then we have lots of comments on social media and on the news pages, City of Long Beach pages, as well as the news journal. So we've seen a lot of comments, questions, remarks. So we've got our hands full and behind the scenes. But moving forward in September, we should have another engagement with the public to kind of give them an opportunity to provide additional comments, kind of do one last stint. We want to open the survey for at least a month, month and a half, and give the opportunity individuals to be virtual but also in person because I always find joy in talking with constituents in person just because it provides that next level of you know what am i doing why am i doing it is this actually going to come to fruition type stuff so it's it's really cool we'll see and we'll have more we'll notify the board as well as constituents in Longview that when that has been identified we're supposed to finalize it tomorrow so I'm sorry I do not have that information in front of me With that, that should be 4th Street. So I'll turn it back to the board. Any questions, comments, anything you would like to say from the board's perspective, we'll take remarks from that way.

Excited to see the engagement. Always good. We'll move on to NPO staff updates.

Awesome. So you heard from Freese Nichols, heard from about the 4th Street, and then we have a model or travel demand model that projects a lot of the trends and how we identify roadway projects in our area we are tagging another consultant to assist with projecting demographics and so that will help identify the demand up to 2055 because we are a 25-year transportation plan and so that will help guide us through that path Legislation-wise, we do have, and textile officials know as well, the infrastructure bill is supposed to come to a conclusion at the end of this fiscal year. There's been rumors and it's gone through the committee talking about the build America 250 Act which roughly I put some projected summary of you know five hundred eighty billion dollars and this was would basically supersede that infrastructure bill the IIJ a so we're currently monitoring that seeing how it's progressed I haven't seen anything true movement on it we haven't got worth there will be an extension of funds and how that will look like but we're just staying abreast of that With that, that's all I have today.

Sounds good. Any other new business? Everybody is fine? All right. Good job.

Awesome. Thank you.

We are adjourned.