Director of Aviation - Regular Meeting

Welcome to TIA now. My name is Kevin O'Neill. I'm the chair. My colleagues.

Good morning. Melissa Robinson, 3rd District Vice Chair.

Eric Bunch, 4th District. John Donucan, 6th District.

Lindsay French, 2nd District at Large.

Staff.

Arthur Ross, City Clerk's Office.

Jeff Martin, City Manager's Office. Andrew Bonkowski, Left Bank.

Ken Morgan, Water Services.

Jaime Guillen, Creo Department.

Okay, we're going to hold 260535. And then we will go to... That held off doc, off agenda? For two weeks. Actually, four. Just hold it for two weeks.

Okay.

Oh, no, I'm sorry, off docket.

Yes, off agenda. Thank you, got it.

No problem. And we'll read our one and only ordinance.

260700, authorizing the Manager of Procurement Services to execute a term and supply contract for Archwood Environmental for contract number EV4375, Household Hazardous Waste Operations and authorizing the Manager of Procurement Services to amend the contract and exercise five one-year renewal options.

Good morning, Keeley Golden, Assistant Chief Procurement Officer with the General Services Department. I have Jessica Jensen, Operations Officer with the Water Services Department with me today. This ordinance request is to approve contract EV4375 for Household Hazardous Waste Operator and Operations for the Water Services Department. The request for proposal was issued on November 24th, 2025 and closed on January 7th, 2026. The city received two submissions from Arcwood Environmental and Clean Harbors Environmental Services with an award made to Arcwood Environmental. We did request the supplier be here today, but they were out of town and not able to attend. The $1,470,379.16 contract has an initial term of one year with five annual renewal options. I will now turn the presentation over to Jessica to cover more information on the scope and project requirements.

Good morning, Jessica Jensen, Operations Officer, Kansas City. So this contract provides the continued operation and management of Kansas City's household hazardous waste facility and related mobile collection events by Arcwood Environmental. On average, this facility serves approximately 1,035 vehicles or customers and processes approximately 120,000 pounds of household hazardous waste each month, demonstrating the ongoing demand for this essential service. Arcwood will provide the trained personnel, equipment, supplies, transportation, and technical expertise needed to safely collect and manage materials such as paint, solvents, pesticides, automotive fluids, batteries, fuels, and other household chemicals. The contractor is responsible for screening, sorting, packaging, recycling, transporting, and properly disposing of these materials in accordance with all federal, state, and local regulations. In partnership with the Mid-American Regional Council, Household Hazardous Waste and Arcwood also provide support for mobile household hazardous waste collection events in 10 area communities. We also have four mobile events within the city of Kansas City every year. The scope also includes cleaning the facility, completing required regulatory reporting and record keeping, supporting approved emergency response and illegal dumping activities, and collecting hazardous waste from city facilities. Arcwood will continue operating the swap shop and establish the recycled paint program, which promotes reuse, reduces disposal costs, and diverts usable material from landfills. Arcwood Environmental is the incumbent provider and has extensive experience operating the facility and mobile collection events. We have had no issues with their performance, regulatory compliance, or customer service. Awarding this contract will ensure residents continue to have a safe and reliable option for disposal of household hazardous waste. Thank you.

We're happy to answer any questions.

Any questions from my colleagues? Yes.

Thank you. Let's have a robust 20-minute conversation about hazardous waste, household hazardous waste. You said how many households? Is it 1,000 households?

It's approximately, this is just an average on what we serve monthly, is 1,035 monthly. 1,000, okay. That's approximately... We keep track of how many vehicles come through the facility, so it's not necessarily just households as people could carpool. We don't necessarily know that for sure. We just verify that they're an ID and a resident of Kansas City.

Okay, and how many mobile events does this contract allow for? So it's 14. 14 mobile events in addition to the monthly, or in addition to the... drop-off.

Yeah, we have one stationary location and that is open four days a week.

And the 14 events, are they all throughout the city and every council district?

So we make sure to, well, we don't do, sorry, the districts. The district that the House of Houses wastes, I believe, is in third district, so we don't do one there. And then we do the city-wide recycling one at the

manual tech which is in third district so then we try to represent the other um we have four of them so we rotate them between districts so this year we're having one in one two six and four okay great um and how how do people know what type of community outreach do we do to let people know about the service because is that a part of the contract where we're communicating the service to the public

not part of this contract no um so we let all the council people know when it's on their calendars um for the mobile events so it's um there's flyers that go out for that um we have like i said two in the first part of the year and then two in the last half of the year so we have one that's coming up in september and then we'll have another one in october so we'll start setting out flyers and let council people know we've also been willing to talk at town town hall meetings if people would like us to, but that's not part of Arcwood's contract.

It just seems like the size of, you know, having 500,000, more than 500,000 residents, it just seems like it might be low, and I'm not sure people really know about the service that is offered. And maybe there's a way that we can get the word out a little bit more. Yeah, I'm happy to work with communications on that. Okay, thank you.

Councilman? Thank you, Mr. Chair. Councilman Robinson's point, are some of these, because I know that when we do our district drop-offs, one of those of the two that we do includes hazardous waste. Is that part of this contract?

Yes. Yeah, those would be the mobile events. I'm not sure exactly what all you do in every one of your councils, but I know that we provide household hazardous waste for four of the pickups, so one in each district. I know that the one in Sixth District is coming up, and I believe that Burns and Mack is the location that we're doing it at for their parking lot, because we need something that's large enough to do that. Then the other one is at Ruskin. It's in October.

Just one other question. Um, Mr. Chair. So with, I mean, we've had a lot of conversations about solid waste and making sure the right things go in the right places as it relates to trying to preserve our landfills and all of the things, right? So would you, what's your, um, opinion about the number of households we serve? Do you feel like we're having adequate impact in serving the city? Or is there room, do we need to improve the number of folks who are using this service? And does this contract allow for that target?

I think we're doing an adequate job of serving the community. I always think we can do better. However, the facility is also aging, right? So we are operating at about 150% of what that facility should be doing. We just installed another loading dock, so that's allowed us to utilize the facility that we currently have. So we're trying to expand as much outreach and update the facility as needed, but currently the facility is undersized for the community that we do have.

Okay. I don't want to open up a can of worms, so I'll leave it there for this contract. Thank you, though, for that insight.

Any other questions? I don't think I see a hand up for Lindsay, so I would enter. Is there any public testimony on this? There's no public testimony for this ordinance. I would entertain a motion.

Okay, wonderful. Is Arkwood Environmental, are they here? Did you want to recognize them? Oh, I didn't see them.

No, we invited them, but they were out of town. Okay, sorry about that.

Yes. Okay, great. Sorry, I just wanted to make sure.

All right, Mr. Chair, are you ready for a motion?

I am. Okay, I move that ordinance number 260700 be reported out of committee with the recommendation to advance and do pass. Thank you. All those in favor?

Aye. Second. Thank you very much. Thank you. I might advise those in the audience that for the finance committee that starts at 9.30 or 9.35, whatever, the ordinances regarding the royals will be held today. So I don't want to, if you're here for that, that will not be held today. So I just wanted to notify you. They are not on the docket today. No. The finance will notify. We are off for two weeks, so it would have to be after that.

Correct.

Correct. Thank you.

Unless you can find votes.

We have a presentation.

Yes, we have a presentation. Are they here? Public Works has a... Here.

Thank you. They're right here. They're right here.

There they are. I thought everybody here was here to hear your presentation. You see it? I guess you didn't have to make a decision. You didn't have to make a decision. You saw yesterday on the KCA today.

Public presentation on safe across crosswalk campaign.

Good morning, Chairman O'Neill, members of the Transportation Infrastructure and Operations Committee. My name is Jason Waldron, and I'm the Transportation Director in Public Works. With me today is Selina Zapata-Burr and Angie Laurie. We're here to present on Ordinance 240987, which is also affectionately titled Vision Zero Road Safety Audits and Safe Across Crosswalk Compliance. Go ahead.

Do you advance this? Good morning, everyone. Again, my name is Angie Laurie. With me is Selena Zabata-Burr, and we're going to share with you some of the progress that has been made in implementation, specifically given the directives of ordinance 240987. That includes the identification of 10 high injury network intersections and 10 high injury network corridors for the performance of road safety audits, as well as implementation of a crosswalk compliance program. This is just a summary of that ordinance, which was approved in 2024. We'll start with a summary of the work that has been conducted on the road audits since that was a piece of our directive in addition to the crosswalk program. The goal of a road safety audit is to answer these questions. A road safety audit in summary is a formal review of roadway and intersection conditions. That includes operations and safety issues. The goal of that review is to identify potential safety concerns and opportunities for improvement for all users. That includes drivers, pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users, and in particular, vulnerable road users. The work involved in that is a pre-meeting and certainly first identifying the locations on the high injury network for that work. This slide summarizes the 10 high injury network intersections for which audits were performed. The road safety audit included data collection, analysis, and field reviews. First, for each location, there was a pre-meeting with the team performing the audit. And then a formal field visit, which in some cases, depending on the length of the corridor or intersection complexity, took hours or an afternoon. A few other details about that work. There was an ordinance required for the amendment to the consultant team contract. which was approved in May of 2025. That team consisted of Burns and McDonald with Trek Design. The audits themselves were identified very quickly after that approval and were performed across a two-month span last summer between July 25th and September 23rd. If we advance to the second slide for corridors, these are the 10 corridors. for which audits were completed as well. In the fourth quarter of 2025, we received initial reports, and those reports were reviewed across fourth quarter of last year and into first quarter of 2026. Those reports are now in a draft final state, and we are using the results of that work, which identified safety countermeasures for all of these locations to inform the work. implementing this fiscal year. Here's a summary of what that looks like so far. We are engaging with council district aides to share progress in honing in on coordination points for resurfacing, design updates for work that may be in process, and also pipelining work to feed into the city's capital improvement program. For this fiscal year in particular, we're targeting improvements on nine of the 10 intersections, and one of those locations, which involves railroad coordination, we're advancing for additional study. And we are targeting to make improvements in four or five of the corridors for which the audits were performed. We are updating a design, and the audits are feeding into those updates. And we will complete these improvements to the extent that our awarded budget allows us to, optimizing that opportunity. Are there any questions? All right. This slide summarizes some of the engagement that I have shared already. We have shared the Vision Zero 2025 accomplishments that I believe was distributed in February of 2026. And also, we continue to conduct Vision Zero quarterly meetings, the most recent occurring in March and June. And I did mention as we pipeline some of this work, that was informed by the audits achieved through the ordinance that you approved. We are fine tuning the list for next year's work and those improvements across the summer. We've had three meetings so far to hone in on that work and the scope. All right, we'll now pivot to the crosswalk compliance program and where we stand with that program's implementation.

Good morning, thank you for having us here this morning. Safe Across is the second part of the ordinance that, there we go, I can see the screen now. So the second half of the ordinance requires that we do a safety crosswalk compliance study. And so we are engaging in Safe Across, which is an educational campaign that utilizes compliance studies to measure changing driver habits. and uses the findings for social norming. It includes installations of statues that you see there on the right hand of the screen, as well as compliance studies. It also includes a public education and outreach component. So you may be wondering what a compliance study is. So a compliance study evaluates the human factor, such as the ability and willingness of drivers to yield and gives insight into a pedestrian's comfort level at a particular crosswalk. When we are identifying sites for compliance studies, there are specific requirements that we need to keep in mind, and we've been doing that. For example, none of these crosswalks can be at signalized intersections. They can be at mid-block crossings, uncontrolled, or they could be enhanced with rapid rectangular flashing beacons. They could not be at hawk signals. Another thing we need to consider is the amount of traffic that goes along the corridor with the crosswalk. Typically, we want more than 2,000 vehicles per day, but we also don't want so much traffic on the corridor that it could create a hazard for the staff conducting the assessment or corridors that exhibit high excessive speeds. So something in the middle is ideal. Ideally, we'd also have no more than two lanes of traffic If we do have two lanes in each direction, we should have a six-foot median for that crosswalk as well. So how are compliance studies conducted? First, we select the sites. We've been working towards that over the last couple of months. We conduct a site assessment at each of these crosswalk locations. A site assessment verifies that the crosswalk is marked, signed, and in good condition. We've done that informally for all the sites that we've been looking at so far, but we will conduct a formal site assessment right before each baseline compliance study as well. So some specifics about the compliance studies. We will be conducting them every quarter in the fall, winter, spring and summer. We will have 18 sites total. That's three sites per council district. However, we're not going to be conducting 18 compliance studies every quarter. The idea is to rotate the compliance studies throughout the year. So we'll have two control sites every quarter and four variable sites. These are the locations that we've proposed for the crosswalk compliance studies. There are three locations per district. They adhere to those criteria and requirements that we spoke about earlier.

So we just need to get we got a lot of people coming in. So if you could speed it up.

We'll do.

Sorry.

That's okay. Most of these are on our high injury network or near it. Signature element of the safe across is the student walker and Mr. Walker statues. These should be in high pedestrian zones. They should be highly visible. They're a reminder for drivers to yield to pedestrians. We've purchased and received 28 Mr. Walkers, 14 student walkers. This year in two phases, we propose installing up to four Mr. Walkers per district and two student walkers per district. The first phase of that will be two locations per district. We've come up with some ideas for these areas, these high activity areas based on Mid-America Regional Council activity centers layers. And we're looking for further input on where you'd like to see your Mr. Walker and student Walker. Implementation in 2025, we hit the ground running with the RSA scope, as Angie mentioned earlier. Also in 2025, some of our staff attended Safe Across training at the Mid-America Regional Council to get prepped on what the program entails. as well as what we can expect moving forward towards implementation. Earlier this year, we started regular coordination calls with Safe Across, as well as contract negotiations and modifications. In the spring, we issued POs to fabricate the statues. And then in the summer, we've been developing the locations that we just discussed, as well as received the statues. We've also been holding a series of coordination meetings with council district aides for awareness and input. Communications is a big part of this program. We've been working with city comms to develop a KCMO-branded Safe Across logo. You'll see the one on the right that Springfield uses. That's their city-specific logo for Safe Across. We've also been looking at how we can inform pedestrians and drivers with the signage for the compliance study rates. So on the side, you'll also see a sign that is on an existing pole. that we're also considering. This is a timeline, basically what we just spoke about. The main takeaway here is that there are a lot of activities to do before official kickoff, which we anticipate in September. And here are our key next steps, finalizing priority locations for the statues, doing our baseline compliance studies in late September, and in kickoff, focusing on communications and promotion of the campaign, and then continuing with our quarterly compliance studies. Thank you.

I didn't mean to rush it, but you know, Councilwoman Robinson has a lot of questions.

Thank you very much.

Any questions for my colleagues?

Just thank you for the presentation. I'd love to follow up and just hear more detail. I know that it's a busy day, so thank you for bearing with us through the noise and stuff and rushing. So thank you so much. We'd love to catch up more and appreciate the presentation on this.

Thank you. You got two minutes. Our chair said that because we're not taking up the Royals, that we will have a couple more questions. But no, seriously, this is important because it's a matter of life and death. My colleague and I, we got into an interesting conversation, and I appreciate his leadership in making sure that we have resources necessary to do adequate communication and engagement. My passion comes to this issue because the majority of the fatalities are in the third district so this is a life and death issue i just returned from denver and at every intersection there was a crosswalk there's no need to do an audit to figure out where the crosswalks need to be they're there their street design also requires a marker for where the car is supposed to stop so let's go back to your design

Which slide?

Where the design for the crosswalk. I think it's the site assessment slide. Yes.

Yes.

Where is the car supposed to stop? I think the next one. Forward.

There's one that shows shark teeth on there.

There we go, that one. Okay, so is this something that we're utilizing now? I've not seen it.

Yeah, I think you're referring to both a stop bar and a yield bar, and that is a standard requirement of a crosswalk painted intersection.

So our crosswalks right now have the shark teeth on them?

So most of them should have actually a solid stop bar. In some instances, we do have the shark teeth yield as well.

Do all of our crosswalks or our intersections have pedestrian crosswalks?

No, that is not. Not every intersection in the city has a crosswalk.

Can you please provide for us what the budgetary cost would be to have crosswalks? Are there crosswalks at every intersection where there is a fatality or has been identified by Vision Zero as a problem intersection? Do we have crosswalks there?

I would venture to guess there are locations where we've had fatalities where there are no crosswalks.

Okay, we need to know that, please. And we need to figure out a way to ensure that those locations are first on the list as relates to implementation of this work. The sign, the percentage sign, it's an amazing idea. Thank you. That's great to show, you know, the percentage of folks who are doing the right thing. And I was paying close attention to myself in driving in Denver and everyone else. They were stopping at that marker. But it's at every cross marker. And the reason why that's important is because sometimes you have to stop there, sometimes you don't if it's not at every intersection. So how do we change behavior if it's not standard at every stop sign, if we don't have the markers at every stop sign? So the investment in communication is great, but the behavior change comes where I don't put my seatbelt on some of the time. I put it on every time I drive. And so if we don't have this at each intersection, it's a problem as it relates to how people are going to behave behind the wheel. and that's concerning for me and I think that it needs to be at every intersection. Can you go back to the slide where it has the signage, the percentage of compliance? Okay, is that digital?

This one here?

No, it's not digital. Okay, so that's going to be lagging, a lagging indicator? So they have to figure out?

Yes, after the compliance studies are conducted every quarter someone goes out and updates the number.

Have we talked to KCPD about increased enforcement? for crosswalk compliance specifically. Is there a law on the books that requires people to stop? Okay. Okay. So that's the thing. I just want to make sure I'm covering the basis. Okay. Good question. So have we talked to KCPD about that? In addition to, you know, I always, you know, carrots are important. Like this is important to communicate, but we also need additional reinforcements. Has there been a discussion made about that?

We have a routine monthly coordination meeting with KCPD. I would say over the last couple years, that coordination you're asking about has really improved. And so public works and the police, like I said, we meet every month and we talk about these issues. And I've got to say thank you to them. They've been really supportive of the Vision Zero enforcement. Because to your point, we can engineer so much, we can educate so much, but we have to have that third leg of enforcement as well. Okay.

Thank you, sir. So just to wrap up to make sure we're on the same page, you're going to provide for us information about the intersections and the costs that's necessary to make sure that all of our intersections have crosswalks to help with that behavior change, right? And to make sure that all of those areas are safe. And then you're going to provide information about prioritizing areas where there's been fatalities and have been identified by Vision Zero. Again, thank you to Councilman Bunch for his leadership in making sure we have that data set from Vision Zero. So making sure that we have that information as well to the committee. Is that fair? Okay. Thank you.

For clarification, do you want all intersections or just signalized intersections?

No, I want to know what the investment is, what investment is required to make sure all intersections have the crosswalks. Thank you.

Thank you guys. Any other questions? With that, thank you very much.

Can I go for my two minutes?

Yes.