Airport Commission - Regular Meeting

Okay. It's 01:31PM, so we'll call the meeting of Transportation Environment Committee to order. We'll start with roll call, please.

Council member Salas absent. Council member Campos absent. Council member Ortiz? Present. Foley? Here. Chair Cohen?

Here. Thank you.

And since our computer systems are down, we'll be voting voice vote today when we need to accept reports. Are going to go right to item d one, which is our first committee report from this is the semiannual report from Climate Smart. So I think, Sina, you're gonna start us off or

I will kick us off. Okay. My name is Julie Benavente. I'm the deputy director for the Climate Smart division in the Environmental Services Department. I'm joined today by Sina Ektadar Cenas as well as Kate Ziemba. Sina is from my team. Kate is from the energy department and Ramzi is from the Department of Transportation. We're proud to be here to present the Climate Smart San Jose Plan semiannual update highlighting the vital progress and momentum we've built in advancing the city's climate goals. This will be an update covering the September 2024 through the February 2023 reporting period. And I'll pass off to Sina to kick us off.

Thank you, Julie. Today we'll give a quick background on Climate Smart, provide updates on Climate Smart core activities, community engagement, and programs and policies, and look at what we have in the works on the horizon. So some context on Climate Smart. Briefly, who we are, what we do. Climate Smart San Jose was a plan that was approved in 2018.

A climate emergency was declared by council in 2019, and by November 2021, city council adopted a resolution setting a carbon neutrality by 2030 goal. In June 2022, Council adopted Pathway to Carbon Neutrality by 2030, identifying four key strategies. Strategy one, focused on zero emission vehicles. Strategy two, focused on reducing vehicle miles traveled by 20%. Three, electrifying appliances.

And lastly, the fourth key strategy, carbon neutral electricity, which means ensuring our electric supply is sourced from 100% carbon free sources. It's helpful to know that Climate Smart is part of the environmental services department. We collaborate across the city with staff leading, facilitating, and supporting climate mitigation initiatives to ensure a unified citywide approach to achieving our carbon neutrality goals. This next slide is gonna show some funding and resources. Climate Smart staff work with many departments to go after private, state, and federal funding support initiatives.

Since July, the city has secured over $1,100,000 in new funding with 23,000,000 pending execution. This includes support for transportation focused projects like EV charging in East San Jose, new charging infrastructure and extreme heat resiliency efforts. Our energy, environmental services and transportation teams are leading the way on these grants. As you can see on the slide here, during this reporting period alone, staff applied for over $67,000,000 and we're planning to pursue another $8,000,000 next reporting period. This next slide is gonna show some highlights which include the San Jose Climate Chronicles, the Electric Home Tour, and Equitable Mobility Initiatives.

So we launched the San Jose Climate Chronicles newsletter in October 2024. It focuses on increased engagement with San Jose residents, highlighting local climate action in the city, and provides opportunities and resources that support the city's climate goals. This newsletter was sent to 1,870 people, and this is a subscriber email list that we try to promote through social media to gain new subscribers before each issue. So we offer this newsletter in three languages which include English, Spanish, and Vietnamese. Now the next highlight is gonna be the electric home tour, is sponsored by San Jose Clean Energy.

This one's pretty interesting. We had 730 people tour these homes. These homes made the switch to Electrify. And 31% of the 730 attendees expressed high interest in adopting heat pump HVAC systems and heat pump water heaters within the next three years. And lastly, equitable mobility initiatives.

These include two areas. First one being the Mobility Wallet Pilot and two, the Micro Transit Grant. So the Mobility Wallet Pilot is a $1,300,000 initiative scheduled for summer twenty twenty five. These subsidies that will help offset the cost of regional public transit, things like Amtrak, Greyhound, Uber, EnLyft, e scooters and bike share and so on. So the Mobility Wallet pilot is intended for transit dependent families in East San Jose.

The second one, the micro transit grant. So DOT submitted a 3,500,000 grant application to fund a micro transit pilot program in East San Jose. Now passing to

miles reduced by 20% is quite a big feat right. And to be able to do this we need to take actions at a lot of different levels at the same time right. One working with the community to make programs that actually work for people is kind of primary and getting this mobility wallet and that's part of the East San Jose equity project which does not only the mobility wallet but many other things like getting education out there, getting more folks involved in the active mobility economy through training folks being able to get into running bike shops or repairing bikes things like that. It also takes reshaping our streets, right. Every inch of our street is a statement of value, what do we want to do with that inch of the street right.

And the more we can accommodate bike ways and other modes of getting around, the more we're able to support that. Now there's also many other values you have to balance out with that. But in the last year we were able to add 7.4 miles of new bikeways and upgrade a bunch of our older bikeways into our new standards per the bike plan that we have on hand at the moment. We're also really working to create the ability for folks to use other modes even if they don't own them right. So making those bike share systems expand, we've been working with MTC and Lyft to add about 500 new e bikes and 32 new stations spreading out mostly to the East Side, spreading that service area out and covering so much more of the city and bringing folks into that.

Some other elements are also about managing things better, making sure that we're able to take our assets and use them to the best we can. So we were able to using federal grants launch a current management pilot that's downtown, that's giving us data on the actual usage and allow us in allowing us to build transaction models on top of that to better manage our curb space allowing that curb space to be used in a more proactive way. And also on the management side, we've just finished a data subscription and are about to finish a contract for large scale analytics that allow us to look at a lot of different metrics across the city. You may have heard of this as part of move San Jose piece and it's called the decision support system and we'll be reporting that out to you annually actually at this body. I believe it's in the last meeting before June or the July recess, we'll be talking about that.

So really excited to see this, changing our streets, changing our management practices, changing the city over to this vision. Pass it back over.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Kate Ziemba, Senior Environmental Program Manager with the Energy Department. So we'll start with some updates on three EV charging programs run by the energy department. Through the California Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Project Rebate Program, participants have installed 197 level two and thirty two fast chargers.

This is 50 more ports during this operational period as projects rush to get finished before the deadline by the end of the year. In October, we launched a new multifamily EV charger incentive pilot, and so far 11 properties have reserved about 280,000 in rebate incentives for 78 level two ports. Finally, we have an RFO out for our fast charging hubs pilot, and we're seeking a developer to install and operate four to seven hubs at libraries and community centers in areas with little to no charging infrastructure. In terms of energy supply, in 2025, SJCE customers are receiving 62% renewable energy at 8% lower rates than PG and E on average. We're continued to invest in new renewable energy and reliability resources, and so far we've contracted for over one gigawatt of resources.

And we're also on track to offer 100% carbon neutral electricity as a base option by 2030. At the 2024, the energy department sunset two energy efficiency programs that were funded by the CPUC. Our residential program offered discounts on home appliances and free energy saving items to income qualified customers. In total, customers bought two eighty one appliances and ordered 1,056 energy saving items. Our commercial program provided rebates on HVAC and refrigeration improvements to 778 businesses.

And in total, the two programs achieved 11,000,000 in customer savings and avoided 35,000,000 kilowatt hours of energy. In December, we launched a heat pump incentive program for SJCE residential customers called Eco Home Rebate and Eco Home Payment Plan. As of February, 325 customers reserved or received more than 1,200,000 in rebates and 25% of the rebates have been paid out to customers in environmental justice communities. We are on track to achieve our goal of installing 500 heat pumps by the end of the fiscal year. The payment plan program provides zero interest on bill financing up to $5,000 We have 14 approved payment plans with customers.

And then finally, we continue to add contractors to our Eco Home network. And I'll now pass it back to Sina.

Thank you, Kate. So EHSJ is pretty similar to ECO Home. So EHSJ or Electric Home San Jose. Electric Home San Jose funded over 162 project measures, which includes 65 heat pump HVAC systems and nine heat pump water heaters. There were 56 project sites.

This rebate program helped fund 53 which went to single family households and three were multifamily properties. It was over $250,000 that were paid out in incentives, Approximately 30% or 28% to be exact was dedicated to equity communities. And we define equity communities as defined by Cal EPA's disadvantaged communities census tract map. Cool fact is the most common electrification measure was the switch to a heat pump HVAC. And then for beyond benchmarking, this is part of the city's energy and water building performance ordinance or BPO, and it applies to a set of buildings every five years and requires those buildings to meet energy and water efficiency standards.

So this was the second year of beyond benchmarking requirements and you can see the numbers up there. It was three eighty buildings out of seventeen ninety. The compliance rates were 85% for annual benchmarking and 59% for beyond benchmarking. Looking ahead, so between March and August 2025, the items on the slide here, we're expected to reach these milestones in the next reporting period. And these some of these items are for city council consideration.

And that will conclude it. Thank you.

Alright. Thank you so much for the report. Do we have any members of the public on this item?

Yes. We have one request to speak. Diane, please make your way down to the podium. You will have two minutes.

Good afternoon. My name is Diane Solomon, and I'm here on behalf of your BPAC, the ICE Competition Advisory Committee. We appreciate our city's climate smart goals for energy, water, transportation, and local jobs. Last one, we submitted a comment about San Jose clean energy programs with our recommendation for the budget priorities that are needed to improve safety on our city streets. Please enable our city's upcoming budget to fund the programs that have a proven record of reducing carbon emissions, that improve air quality, that reduce other pollutants, and reduce the gasoline and electricity that's used to power motorized vehicles.

These are the Vision Zero program, the annual bikeways program, Better Bike Plan 2025, transit first, vehicle miles traveled goals, and the programs that maintain our bikeways, trails, and pedestrian safety accommodations. These programs not only get us closer to carbon neutrality, these programs enable individuals of all ages and abilities to walk, wheelchair, and bicycle safely within our city. Today, we remind you of the following. In November 2021, our city council set a goal of community wide carbon neutrality by 2030, thereby accelerating our city's climate smart program. At this 11/20/2021 meeting, our council members also approved the initiative called Pathway to Carbon Neutrality by 2030.

And just reminding you again, as our presenters did, this 2030 is only five years from now. Thank you for your consideration.

Thank you.

Okay. Thank you so much. Councilmember Ortiz, we'll start with you.

Thank you, chair. I also wanna thank everyone in the box for the presentation. I always appreciate the opportunity to learn from DOT, ESD, climate climate smart, clean energy, about just what the city is doing in order to make sure that we're ready for the future and making sure that we're gonna have a earth to pass on to our next generation. So I really appreciate the work that's being done both before I was on the council and the work that's being done now. I especially wanna elevate the language regarding the application for MTC, the grant, specifically for the charging stations in Eastside San Jose.

I think that will be vital especially as federal funds are being frozen. So crossing my fingers with that, hopefully we'll see. I do have a question, very straightforward question in regards to the mobility wallet pilot. I know that I was looking in there and essentially the mobility wallet pilot will be providing subsidies for different types of public transit, e scooters, bike share programs. I wanted to ask, given our goal is to reduce vehicles miles traveled, is it kind of counterproductive to also include those sort of subsidies for ride shares or apps? What were the thoughts behind including that?

Yeah, thanks for the great question councilmember. Research shows that those who use those app based transportation solutions actually are less likely to own a vehicle and are more likely to take more trips outside of a vehicle. So if someone is using those app based services, they're less likely to own a car, and if they're less likely to own a car they're less likely to add VMT over the general collection of all of their trips right. You have to kind of look at all needs and sometimes people need things right. Sometimes they need to get to school with their kids or sometimes they need to get to a place that transit doesn't take them or is outside of bikes reach right.

So when we try to do these things we want to provide the totality of needs within the transportation piece and this one does show reduction in overall VMT when these things are used.

Okay, thank you. Appreciate the science behind that. Thank you. That's it.

Alright, thank you. Vice mayor.

Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. Always, good to hear where we're going and how we're improving our EV charging stations. And, I like to hear that we're looking at, trying creating partnerships with people who can install these at libraries and community centers. Where do we stand there?

Thank you for the question. We have an RFO out right now for the developers. It's closing Friday, and so we'll be reviewing those offers.

Okay. So several it'll take a few months before it actually comes back to counsel with a proposal?

We received counsel approval negotiate and execute.

Okay, great. Thank you. I do have some concerns about the grant funds. I know we're looking at MTC and we have some funding grants from the federal government. How much of the funds are with the federal government and how sure are we that we're going to get the grants that are already award awarded? And as an alternative, are there other sources of grants available for these projects? Public Maybe

I'll start out and then if you guys wanna jump in. Yes. The federal funding transition and the freeze of some of the funding is definitely a concern and impacting several of our grants. So from the awarded grants that we have out of the 23,000,000 approximately 22,000,000 is federal funding, so that's quite a bit. Then also from the submitted grants that we had, think there was about 78% of that which was the 52,000,000 out of the 67,000,000 is federal funding.

And then for some of the forthcoming ones, the 8,000,000 that we're planning to submit for about 30% or 2,500,000.0 is federal funding. So each of these has their own kind of issues with them. So for example, ones that we already have like the EECBG is one of them, which is already underway. You know I don't know if we can ever say a 100%, but we have a lot more certainty around those ones where it's an allocation of funding and it's not, it's coming from particular sources that are of less concern that there will be a freeze on. However some of the ones that we have outstanding have kind of gone dark to be honest in terms of whether they'll move forward.

We've gotten to the point where we've done negotiations and we're basically just waiting for contracts on that $22,000,000 that were awarded but have not been fully executed. And so those impact things like our planned policy for looking at the building performance standard, which other cities in the Bay Area also have pending awards. San Francisco and Berkeley was one that we're partnering with on that. And then there's also a large transportation grant that I know that you guys are waiting for as well to see whether that comes forth. So you know it's a significant impact just from those numbers alone, and some of it we don't have the answer to, right?

But we are looking at other sources of funding in terms of like private endowments, and just trying to pursue those sources like state grants that are moving forward, that we haven't executed fully, but are moving forward for contract. And so we'll continue to pursue anything that comes forward on that side as well. So I don't know if you guys have

anything else.

Yes, I'll just add DOT is basically same situation, some are moving, some aren't. We did there was a memo put out by the transportation of secretary saying get some of these things out, Sorry of transportation, secretary of transportation saying get some of these things out. We haven't really seen movement on it yet. We're hoping to start seeing it. So we'll see but some of them are called you know the government to government grant for social or for environmental justice.

There's a lot

of words in there that make other people uncomfortable. We'll see which ones we get and which ones we won't. Luckily we live in a state that cares about these issues and there continues to be ample state and regional funds that do push in this direction. And four years ago it was similar. So we were very able to, we were still able to produce and deliver projects under the last time this thing happened. So we're keeping our fingers crossed.

So you're not encouraged at the federal level, which I think we're all no one's encouraged or comfortable at the federal level, but at the state level you're comfortable that there's some funding that might be available for us, Ramses?

Yes, yeah. I mean a lot of our funding for climate focused transportation actions comes from state and regional funds already. Okay. And so there's a lot of funds there. It's not as big and as wide as it could be, but it's still there.

Okay. Good. So I have questions about the better bike lanes bike path when we come back later in this in this in this committee. Thank you. I do have a question about the mobility wallet. I I really like that idea, but you didn't mention VTA. You mentioned Uber and Lyft and e bikes and e scooters, but VTA was not a component of that. Are we partnering with VTA on that?

Yeah. That's an oversight in the writing. Eco passes are part of the

program Okay. For I think that's really important. Alright. How that how do we get the word out about those funds and how do we allocate them?

There are processes of finding those folks. You're really looking for folks who are already getting public assistance and things like that. I actually have to talk to the program manager to know exactly what we're doing, I can't give you an exact answer on that. And then the allocation will be done through the overall grant program.

So have we started that program yet?

We're just booting it up, so we're not Okay. Ready And

then I have a question about the electrification of appliances with, the ban on gas water heaters as of 2027 and furnaces as of 2029. There's a concern that elderly couple on fixed income who lives in an old home won't be able and then their water heater goes out in 2027, that they won't be able to fund the replacement of electric water heater. So are there sources of funding to assist? Are we looking at sources, or is there state or federal funding? Or is this a state policy?

So are there state funds?

Thank you. That's a great question. And, we are concerned too, and so we're working with a group of community choice aggregators in the Bay Area to advocate with the Bay Area Air District about their rules, to look and see if there could be a carve out for financial hardship and to also identify sources to scale financing and funding. We will, with council approval, recommend offering the rebate program into subsequent years and look into developing, a program that further aids those with low incomes.

Oh, okay. I I appreciate that. Are we we reaching out to partners who be who may or stakeholders, I should say, who may have access to homeowners such as the realtors who may get you know, as a former realtor, I'd get called all the time, hey, my water heater's out. Who do you recommend that I can replace it? So are we reaching out to them to figure out a program that might they might be able to reach out? Because they're the ones who really, in many cases, the front lines with the property owners.

Yes. CCAs are organizing around not just realtors and landlords but contractors especially. Good.

Okay. Thank you. I support the electrification but I'm concerned about the rollout with people who are on fixed income. Thank you.

Yeah. Thanks for raising that important point. And and that's why we've I've been talking about, programs to be proactive about going out and evaluating ahead of time who's gonna need extra assistance and make sure this available. And that kinda raises a good point that we ought to publicize, at some point, set up some kind of helpline or something for that so that when this happens, people you know, we might we can offer a rebate. We can offer a financing plan.

But if people don't know that it exists, then it won't it won't help anyone. Or if people don't know how to quickly because people, when they need the replacement, need it quickly. So we have to make sure that people will have that direct access immediately when they need it to quickly set up the financing and the rebate that they need once we, in two weeks on Earth Day, approve the moving forward with the programs that are being proposed by clean energy. Yes. So anyway, back to the funding question.

I was going to ask similar questions about federal funding. Obviously a lot's at risk. Maybe we can't get into these details now, but are we having conversations with others who are going to be victimized by this about what our legal recourse might be? You know, we we've been money's And been approved and allocated based on preset criteria that now the administration is saying they don't believe in, but the criteria existed and we followed them. So we should be able to take some legal action to make sure we receive the money that we've been promised.

Hi, council member. Thank you. Steve Stamos with the city's intergovernmental relations team. You know, we are actively monitoring what, other cities are doing and looking at our options. Know speaking with our federal lobbyists and our federal delegation. We're looking for the opportunities to push back potentially legally but I can't speak to any particular specifics to this point. I don't know if the city attorney's office would like to add anything but.

It's right now so much is in the air and there's been nothing conclusive on any specific grants. When we get actually conclusive facts about what's going on with regard to any specific grant then we'll be in a better position to evaluate what our legal recourse would be at that point in time.

Yeah I just want to make sure that we're proactively preparing for that moment because we know it's coming. And by the way, there are some grants that have already been clawed back. We were just talking council Morantes and I were talking about a a grant that the city had received to do environmental work and and tree plantings and and vegetation cleanup at Alum Rock and Overfell Parks that's been pulled back specifically because according to their explanation, because they were for climate and environmental justice, they're no longer going to give us the money that we had reached out for. So it seems to me that if we had if we had received promise of money under a grant proposal where we had followed all the rules of the grant, which said that it should be for climate and environmental justice, then we should be able to to file a lawsuit of some kind or get involved in some legal action that would try to compel the government to give us that money.

I I absolutely agree and this will all have to be looked at on a case by case basis.

I don't want to tip our hands on the legal discussion at this public setting but I think we ought to at least be thinking about that.

Yeah, thanks John. And just to further, there are things

that are going on in parallel. While that planning, I'll just say generally while planning for something we're expecting to happen unfortunately is in the early stages. We're also looking at other forms of funding to make sure that the service delivery and we're keeping up with that in addition to looking at our options on the legal front.

Obviously we ought to be looking specifically at climate bond which I know everybody is trying to get pieces of but I'm assuming that the teams are looking into that climate bond because this is directly relevant work that voters I think were supportive of when they passed the bond last year. Was that micro transit grant that was listed, is that a federal grant?

The micro transit grant is a state and regional grant and there's a VTA one that we're applying for.

Okay so that one is not dependent on the federal government?

Well how do you say? There is much regional money that's actually state money that's actual federal money. So the trickle down may disrupt things but yeah not so far.

Alright thank you I'll ask for a motion to accept this report.

So moved.

Second. Alright no other comments so let's oh yeah all in favor say aye. Aye. That vote carries three to zero. Alright. We're on to we're on to the second item which is the BART Silicon Valley extension status report. More good funding news, I'm sure.

Good afternoon. My name is Jessica Zink, Deputy Director for the Department of Transportation. Alisar Aoun on my team is going to very briefly kick this off and then turn it over to guests from Valley Transportation Authority.

Good afternoon committee. City staff provide an annual report on the BART extension project to this committee every year in addition to quarterly updates. Staff have provided a written memo for this committee meeting. We have VTA here with us today, so they're going to deliver the presentation. So I will turn over to Erica Roakes.

Good afternoon, council members. I'm Erica Roakes, the Interim Director of External Affairs for the Bart Silicon Valley Program. Sorry, went too far. VTA's BART Phase two project is a six mile extension with four stations starting from the Berryessa North San Jose Station, which opened in 2020, where it will go over excuse me, it will dive into a tunnel and go underneath U. 101 with three stations with underground boarding platforms and above ground fair gates and curves around to daylight north of 880 with an at grade station at the Santa Clara Station.

This extension will ring the bay, complete the ring of the bay with rapid frequent rail. This project is largest of its kind in Santa Clara County and has unprecedented local and state support making up over half of the funding sources. In August 2024, we received notice from FTA that we entered into the new starts engineering phase of the federal investment grant program with an award of nearly $5,100,000,000 We're very excited about that as but that was not exactly the amount that we were requesting. So now we are working to align the project scope with the available funding to close the gap there. We're exploring some up to 100,000,000 in non local funding sources through some additional grants we're waiting to hear back from and going through an extensive cost savings effort.

Three main considerations of our program at this point are to work through our cost savings to align the project scope with the funding that we have available closing a gap of $700,000,000 to $1,200,000,000 To work with our current contractors and the contracting industry to determine the ability for us to move forward with a project that we can afford and build. So not only with those we're working with now, but we're doing industry outreach to have discussions with various contractors to get a better understanding of requirements that we could both move forward with together. And in addition, we need a path forward to signing the full funding grant agreement with FDA. So once we received word of our new starts federal grant investment grant amount, we started a cost savings effort to reduce the cost of the project. What is we're now calling level one is what we initially started with and worked on the first through the end of last year.

Working with BART, we were able to change some design criteria and reduce the cost there. We were able to convert the parking spaces, providing the same number of spaces at the 28th Street Little Portugal parking BART station with surface spaces instead of in a garage. We were able to work with city staff and stakeholders to refine the station design with passenger experience at the forefront of our mind. And we've met several times with community groups, our community working groups and various stakeholders and it's been well received. I'll show you some graphics in a minute.

And after that time in December, then we continued advancing in what we're calling Level two to develop multidisciplinary task forces to further study and advance further refinements. In addition, we have just started kicked off advancing what we're calling Level three and we'll have more details in the coming months on that. This here is a conceptual rendering of the 28th Street Station. You can see it's a rounded head house above ground station entrance building and there's a plaza in the foreground. This is a view from the corner of 5 Wounds Lane and 28th Street adjacent to Christa Ray High School.

This here is a conceptual rendering of the iconic Downtown San Jose Station. You can see some future buildings in the back. VTA has developed a design development framework for future transit oriented development both at the 28th Street Station and that we saw in the previous slide as well as downtown. And here's the Dierdan Station, which is located across from SAP Center. You see there's a D shaped station entrance building here.

We worked in an effort with the city to provide availability for future transit oriented development just to the south of the station entrance, which is to the right off of the page, which would be directly across from the future Caltrain station. Here there will be fare grades on Cahill, Montgomery as well as on Santa Clara Street and this is the view looking from Cahill. And lastly, have the Santa Clara Station here which is our above ground station where we'll be providing 500 parking spaces. We went through a significant effort with engagement with various stakeholders to work on the design of the station moving forward. So in addition to cost savings, there's a lot of different things going In the fall of last year, we developed this scheduled as all of our design milestones, construction, our engagement board decisions that need to be made and milestones are all interrelated.

Couple of key items to highlight here were we had a workshop with FTA and our project management oversight consultant in December and got confirmation that the cost savings that we had identified at that time in level one are within the NEPA guardrails. We're moving forward with those. The VTA board approved the construction of the launch structure at the West Portal, which I'll get into in a minute. So that construction is underway. The areas that are in the green dash are areas that are uncertain and we know have some flexibility and may move.

And so we're working through based on the to advance everything that we can that's within our power to be ready to apply for an FFGA when all of those three program considerations that I mentioned earlier are all aligned. I'm just going to show here with some animation, the interconnectedness of all of the different aspects here that have to take place in order to mobilize the tunnel contractor to start the heavy construction in the tunneling. As I mentioned, we've been out we started construction in spring of last year. The area in yellow is VTA's new haul yard facility that's located on the east side of the rail corridor between Brokaw Road and Dunnewhall Drive by PayPal Park. Construction has been going on for the past year, early construction activities and construction of the launch structure, which is the area shown in purple on the screen, is kicked off and we'll be ramping up with extended work hours in May.

There will be a temporary noise curtain, that's the blue line on the screen that will be installed to help support the residences on the west side of the rail quarter for those extended work hours. There will be truck traffic on the roadways Broca, Coleman and Newhall. These are the same as what San Jose City Council approved in June 2023. We will continue to work with the cities on future construction transportation management plans as we're ready to advance that work. Couple highlights from our recent construction, we installed a courtesy screen adjacent to the San Jose Earthquakes practice field.

And the contractor has installed wheel wash systems to ensure that their track out onto the street does not include a lot of mud and debris. They currently have street sweepers as well, but now they also have two wheel wash systems. I wanted to give an update on planned demolition, knowing that there are some very key sporting events happening in the city of San Jose in 2026. We will be postponing the demolition of the two buildings in purple, the Chase Bank and the Gold Rock Building until late twenty twenty six, but we'll proceed with the demolition of the Grossen Homes Building and the Good Life Building in 2025. And BTA has provided funds to the San Jose Downtown Association for their beautification effort and we're working actively already on beautification of the Gold Rock And Chase Bank's buildings.

Last one to touch on our thriving business program. We're working with the Office of Economic Development in coordination with them to develop a program that supports small businesses during construction based on lessons learned from other case studies and various economic analysis. It has three different areas. The Eat Shop Local, which is a marketing campaign to encourage foot traffic, a local resource network where we're partnering with we'll partner with community based organizations to provide financial and technical assistance and direct financial assistance to eligible small businesses. VTA board approved an authorization of $3,000,000 per year for five years thriving for business program overall to assist small businesses during construction.

The definition of a small business is consistent with the city's definition of a small business of having 35 full time employees or less operating with a business license within the city. We will be kicking off our Eat Shop Local marketing campaign in the Newhall area later this summer. And the other as we get closer to construction in the other areas, we will kick them off in the other areas as well. And we are continuing to advance the local resource network and the direct financial assistance programs. And we'll be going out with a series of surveys that we have vetted the information with our small business task force as well as our community working groups to gather information in preparation for this.

With that, happy to take any questions.

All right. Thank you so much for the report. Do we have any public comment?

Yes. We have two requests to speak. Diane and Jordan, please make your way down to the podium. You will have two minutes.

Again, good afternoon. I'm Diane Solomon here on behalf of your Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee. We support and look forward to the extension of the BART system through Downtown San Jose to the city of Santa Clara. We wholeheartedly appreciate the heroic effort this team is making needed to keep this project on track. Please ensure that during the tunneling of the extension, there's minimal disruption to our underserved neighborhoods, traffic lights, bikeways, and crosswalks, and that this project's interactions with our city's pedestrians, wheelchair riders, and bicyclists are as safe as possible.

Last August, Grant Brokl and Erin Sheeland gave us an update. We learned that bike lanes, a shared use path, and bicycle facilities will be key elements of the new stations, as well as making sure that these stations' interactions with their adjacent roads will be as safe as possible. We appreciate that intersection signal improvements will be made at the new BART stations to facilitate pedestrian access. Elevators will be large enough to accommodate cargo bikes, and all stations will have a 190 to 270 bike parking stations. Given the new budgeting constraints, we ask you to do whatever is needed to ensure that these elements remain part of this project.

If this isn't being done already, we ask that the reimagining Santa Clara Street initiative be coordinated with VTA on the timeline and construction of the Diron Station. Please enable BART's Silicon Valley stations by bicycle parking areas to resemble the train stations our members have visited in other nations. On weekdays, they have many hundreds of commuters parking their bicycles at them. We respectfully request that every effort be made to connect bikeways from our city's most traveled streets to Bart's new stations and more bicycle parking either be added to these stations or adjacent to these stations. Because these stations will connect to commuters to Amtrak, Caltrain, and VTA options, safe way making to these stations and adequate bicycle parking will convert many motorists from stressful bumper to bumper work commutes to a greener transportation option, and will help our city achieve its climate smart plan goals.

Thank you for consideration and attention.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Hi, Jordan Muldow here speaking on my own behalf. Thank you staff for the report. Definitely excited to see BART coming through San Jose soon and excited about the potential cost savings. I wanted to talk a little bit more about the pedestrian and bicycle circulation plans. Again, as Diane mentioned, we hope that a lot of pedestrian and bicyclists will access the station.

As part of that, they're gonna need to cross the street or bike through parts of downtown. And so as part of that, we wanna make sure that the areas within a certain vicinity have infrastructure and really excellent bicycle infrastructure and I know that that is being planned for sure. Just wanted to mention it to make sure that we keep the eye on the ball. I know that in Santa Clara, the city of Santa Clara, I believe they have some sort of working group. I don't know if it's their b pack or if it's a separate, group, but they have a group that is constantly looking at the on the street circulation plans, for, the Santa Clara station.

And so my ask is that to be able to get the citizens involved in that in San Jose as well. Looking at our Barriessa Station, they definitely have good pedestrian bicycle access, but it could have been great bicycle and pedestrian access. Access. And I'd like to make sure that for the new stations we have great access. So just hope that the council and staff will consider bringing the pedestrian and bicycle community more involved in that.

And then finally, just to elaborate on the bicycle parking. Yes BART, you can take your bicycle onboard which is great, but they don't necessarily have room onboard for everyone and you definitely want to make sure that the people have priority in bar cars as opposed to bicycles. So we have a lot of bicycle parking that does enable a particular transportation mode that we wouldn't have otherwise. Thank you.

Back to the committee.

Alright. Thank you so much. And many of us may have different definitions of the word soon, but we are excited about the, idea of Bard coming. Let's start with vice mayor Foley.

You used my line. I thank you for the presentation. This is a presentation we receive as a BART director. We receive updates on BART phase two regularly, and I appreciate optimism of the bicycle coalition, but I feel soon is not soon, and I'm it's it's a relative term. I'm more concerned about the funding gap we have of 700 to 1,200,000.0, and whether the funds that have already been somewhat committed to us, not completely committed to us from the federal government, whether they'll actually come through.

So I I appreciate the report, and the update, and I do appreciate your enthusiasm. Know, it's as a director, we get a lot negative thoughts or information about BART, so to hear your positive looking forward on BART and the bike lanes makes me centered a little bit and makes me think, okay, this can really, really happen. So I I we need BART, we need it to happen, we need it to be successful, and we need it to be successful for all of our commuters and, benefit our small businesses as well. So with that, I will move acceptance of the report.

Second.

Alright. Thank you. Councilmember Ortiz.

Thank you, chair, and, thank you, vice mayor, for your comments. As someone who's not I don't sit on BART or I don't sit on VTA, I may have less insight into some of these discussions. Before I go into my questions, I do want to show my appreciation that we are taking into consideration how small businesses will be impacted as Jessica knows. That's a major concern of mine. And I have a long history of working with VTA and just to get support for small businesses.

So I wanted to ask, I saw some language in the presentation and then through the memo in regards to that. How did we come to I guess the number? I think you're saying up to 10,000 per business I think, possibly 10,000 per business. What thought went into that?

That was done based on some case studies and the current definition of the project with various aspects in surveying and such went into determining that amount.

Okay, case studies and how? If you could just share a little insight to that.

Evaluating from other case studies of other programs that have implemented a business interruption fund, evaluating looking into those studies and there was a report done, a study done to evaluate to determine how we received it, how we landed on that.

It'd good for us to be able to look at those studies. I'm just concerned about just understanding how construction happens and there's how we want it to happen and then the reality of how it actually happens. And just having seen and experienced construction disruption for small businesses. A lot of the harm is way over $10,000 and so I'm just trying to think like why is are we trying to make them whole? Are we just trying to give them some number that was generated? Like I'm trying to get I guess a little bit more concrete data that supports that number.

Yes. Can definitely follow-up with more concrete data for you.

Okay. Alright.

If I might very briefly just to add to what Erica said about the definition or the scope of the project. I think it is important that as VTA has worked through this question of what is the appropriate compensation. They are looking at what is the potential impact on businesses with these construction methodologies. And most of those are very intentionally off street rather than infringing on the public right of way. So I just wanted to bring that up because it may not have been clear that that is part of the thinking and if anything were to change for a business where really the public right of way was much more disrupted than is anticipated in these case studies, that assumption would have to change commensurately.

Okay. So there could be an opportunity for another discussion if there are a more sizable impact to the businesses. Okay. Because I in my in my, you know, historical organizing experience, you know, a lot of these these impacts aren't as easily measured. Right? If there's lot of construction on the street, people aren't gonna go to those businesses anymore at all. Why am I gonna go to Alum Rock? Why am I going to go to you know that's where they're building everything. I'm going go to Eastridge or I'm going go somewhere where I could easily get out of my car. I'm not going to have it's not going to take me thirty minutes to find parking.

And then I would say if whole groups of people are avoiding that area it's easy to say that that impact would be way over $10,000 And so I just want to make sure that this number isn't arbitrary and that we're actually looking at data and the impact that each small business is experiencing because I love transportation. I want this to happen but I don't want my entire community erased for these public transportation opportunities. Next I just wanted to just ask going back to me not being on VTA, me not being on BART and with our new federal administration who they are, what their funding priorities are which obviously isn't the same as what the state of California and what we're doing here is. Like what I guess how are we thinking about this like feasibility? Is this changing our timeline or will we like going back and readjusting what our next steps are going to be?

How are we responding to that I guess?

Yeah so we've received some advice from our lobbyists. And as I mentioned, there's the three program considerations. We've got to close the gap in our funding. We've got to ensure that we can build the job with the contractor. So we're working through all of those, taking the advice seriously about when's the right time to apply for our FFGA within the New Starts program. So we're working through that, trying to figure that out at this time.

In order to make this feasible, are we relying federal funding like we can't do it unless we get federal funding? Correct. So then we may not move forward for another four years then. It could be worst case scenario.

We don't know what will happen.

But

I mean it is a standard program that capital investment program.

A lot of just demolish the Department of Education. There's a lot of standard stuff

that That's we're true.

Very true.

Yes. We don't. Alright. That sets things into perspective for me. Appreciate it. Thank you. That's all my questions.

I saw the light come on. Did you want to say something?

I was just going to make it clear because it's not normally that conversation we were having during the last report about a grant award and then a grant that is agreed to and obligated, that is where this project is, right? It was awarded technically the $5,100,000,000 but it does not have the grant agreement. So just for anybody, I think that that's an important analogy to kind of our normal process. So wanted to make sure that was clear. Thank

Thank you for that. And I won't since I sit on the VTA board and I've been very, very vocal about my views on counting on this money, I won't say it anymore to me here except to say I'm not counting on this money. Yeah. We won't have it. But I'm hopeful that in about four years, there will be some attempt to make whole all these OA agencies parts of the country that are being destroyed in these four years and that we can count on it later.

So that leaves me my only question I wanna ask today. On the slide with the timeline, you had a little animation with the boxes that showed the checkpoints. And I saw that the FFGA is considered a checkpoint before starting construction. That's probably been the current direction that the board has given as far as what to do. I assume that that may be a discussion we will have going forward as to whether or not we want to proceed given that we have $7,000,000,000 to spend that can be enough runway to get us through this administration. We could remove that as a checkpoint. Is a fair assessment?

Yes, that is something that is being evaluated in different scenarios on paths to move forward. I think Tom mentioned that we'll be bringing that to in June discussions timeframe as we're looking into that. So that is something that will be evaluated and brought back

to the board. I think the worst thing we could do is just pause the whole thing for a period of time. I mean we have to figure out a way to move forward in my opinion. I appreciate Great. The Thank you so much. We have a motion and a second. So all in favor say aye. Aye. And that was three. So motion carries three zero. And thank you for being here. Obviously, you know, for those of us who sit on the board, we've heard this report. We were hoping we'd have a few more people here to give some input from San Jose's side but certainly we we'd appreciate the annual report.

Thank you.

Alright, we're on to our third item on today's agenda which is the bike plan 2025 and Trail Network Annual Report. All right, Sarah, you can kick us off.

Hey, good afternoon. We're excited to be here today to present the Bike Plan and Trail Network Annual Report. My name is Sarah Sellers. I'm the Division Manager for the Capital Improvement Program in Parks, Recreation and Neighborhood Services. Joining me in the box today is Liz Sewell, Trails Program Manager Ramses Madhu, Division Manager for Department of Transportation and Ryan Smith, the Active Transportation Program Manager.

Before we get started, wanted to highlight how great this partnership is. As many of you know, our dedicated class one trails are opportunistic in nature, often following waterways and former railroad corridors. By partnering with DOT, we're able to view a holistic network of active transportation which connects trails to on street bike lanes to provide routes across the city. Today, we're gonna look at each, to look at updates for each program and the combined efforts. With that, I'm going to hand it over to Liz to kick off the presentation.

Thank you, Sarah. My name is Liz again, I'm from the Parks Department and I work again with our Department of Transportation to coordinate bike lanes and other on street infrastructure with our off street trail network to make sure that people in the city of San Jose can get around pretty seamlessly without the use of motorized vehicles. Next slide. Oh, sorry. Thanks Ramses.

Today we're going to go over the I'll be reviewing the Trail Network implementation status and then Ryan will review implementation status and then we will go over any questions you have. So this slide, we review it every year during annual report and it shows the progress we're making toward the full implementation of the 100 Mile Trail Network. So overall trail development activities including planning, procurement, design, grant writing, real estate acquisition, it results in about one mile of trail being built per year. This last year we did complete two miles of trail and actually our final site visit was this morning, so I was out on a trail this morning doing a quick review and there's a couple of things we need to finalize opening that trail to the public, but we are very close. So again technically the city did complete two miles of trail this year and I'll share them now.

So this map shows the Coyote Creek Trail and it's color coded. So in orange you can see the trails that were completed or almost completed. In blue are the trails that are in another phase of planning, and in green are the trails that are open. So starting at the northern end in orange, you see the Mabry to Watson Park section of the Coyote Creek Trail, so that will connect Berryessa Bart to Watson Park, and that is almost complete. We had a final site visit a couple weeks ago and there's a couple of remaining details that we have to flesh out before opening it to the public, but it is very close.

The next section down in light blue is Watson Park to Julian, we're finalizing procurement for design of that portion of trail. And then if you follow that blue line, the green line is complete and it goes from William Street now all the way down to Morgan Hill, so that's an 18 mile completed section of trail which took collaboration and coordination of so many city departments and outside agencies, but that orange section that you see at the southern end of this map is the portion of trail that we did a final walkthrough today and that will be opened hopefully within the next couple of weeks as well. And you can see on the left is Mayberry To Empire and on the right is Phelan To Tully so they've kind of got different they're optically different. Mayberry is more of an urban feeling trail and the Phelan To Tully is more of a rural feeling trail, but they're both getting use already even though they're not technically opened. So this year we are kicking off quite a few trail projects.

Design of Coyote Creek Watson Park to Julian Julian Street as I mentioned was shown in the last slide. 5 Wounds Trail from Santa Clara to Story, we are beginning master planning and environmental for that project. In CD5 we're beginning, we'll hopefully be beginning design of Lower Silver Creek. There are a couple of regulatory agencies that we need to continue working with and get initial approvals from before we kick off design but we are hopeful. And in nine we have the design of Guadalupe River Trail for which we're finalizing procurement for that project as well and we hope to kick it off in the next couple of months.

So this is just an overall map that I'll review pretty quickly. It just shows the grand scheme of things and what we hope to have completed within the next five years. We can't guarantee any completion within the next five years just because of the way that trails work and the things that can kind of pop up and halt a project, but hopefully the blue segments will be completed or at least well on their way to completion before 2030. Also as we have beefed up our staffing, we have kind of kicked off signage improvement projects. So this slide shows proposed signage projects that we worked on with our Department of Transportation folks.

Those are in pink and there's significant improvements that are being proposed and in blue you can see projects improvements that have been completed. So all along Penitentia and some of Guadalupe have been completed. And with that I will hand it to Ryan.

Thank you Liz and thank you council members. So yeah, we're to shift over to discussion of our on street bikeways network, specifically the implementation status of our bike plan. These first two slides are going to give background on the plan, and this is something we share every year during this report. And then I'll share accomplishments from 2024 followed by some key upcoming projects. Just really quick background on our bike plan for everyone's benefit.

In October 2020, City Council adopted a new bike plan, Better Bike Plan 2025 with three high level goals, safety in our bike network aligned with our Vision Zero goals, equity in planning project development and implementation, and mode shift aligned with our general plan and climate smart goals. The vision is a five fifty mile on street network for people of all ages and abilities, and backgrounds to bike in San Jose comprised primarily of protected bikeways and bike boulevards. While the plan focuses on the on street network, as Liz and Sarah both mentioned, the on street network and the trails network really complement each other and provide residents with a single interconnected system. The two primary bikeway types in our bike plan, something I've shared in the past, are protected bikeways, which we see on the left, and bike boulevards, which we see on the right. So just a couple of examples of different types.

Protected bikeways, as seen on the left, are designed for exclusive use of people riding bikes and feature some kind of vertical physical separation from moving traffic, and they're typically on higher volume streets. We use quick build materials like you see in the upper left on Quimby Road, and we can use permanent concrete and landscaping materials, which you see at the bottom left on San Fernando Street. And then bike boulevards, which are seen on the right, are typically lower vehicle streets using elements to calm vehicle speeds and emphasize bike use, though they are shared spaces. And it's the San Antonio Street in the upper right with a traffic circle and some markings, and San Fernando Street on the bottom with traffic diversion. Okay, so the next two slides will provide an overview of work completed in 2024.

2024 was our most successful and prolific year in terms of building out our bikeways network. 2024 saw a major leap in network implementation, particularly with protected bikeways and bike boulevards, and much of this work was accomplished via our pavement maintenance program and by use of one time grants. The map shows the geographic spread across the city of all of this work in 2024. Pink showing the new bikeway segments we built, and blue showing where we were able to upgrade existing ones. In 2024, the city installed 7.4 miles of new bikeways and enhanced 32.8 miles of existing.

New and enhanced mileage together added 29.7 miles of new protected bikeways, more than doubling all previous year's efforts combined, and we also added 4.4 miles of new bike boulevards, which moves us much closer to our goal of completing our bike plan. We have 48 miles of protected bikeways of the three fifty planned, 20 miles of bike boulevards of the 100 planned. We have four eighty four miles total of bikeways, although this includes basic paint only bikeways. So a lot happened in 2024. Some of the key things include 11 new bike boulevards.

This is part of the grant funded East San Jose Multimodal Transportation Improvement Plan, also known as a Move Me Into San Jose, providing low stress connections between East San Jose and downtown. The photo on the upper left is Camaro Avenue in the Mayfair neighborhood as an example. As I mentioned, 29.7 new miles of protected bikeways. This is on 41 corridors in all 10 council districts. Upper right photo is Almaden Boulevard, which used more quick build materials.

Same with the bottom left is Murphy Avenue in North San Jose, also using quick build materials. We also completed six lane reductions across the city. The bottom right is Taylor Street, but we also did this on Moorpark Avenue, Snell Avenue, Vista Park Drive and Wynnfield Boulevard and part of Almaden where we took streets that were four lanes and converted them to two with bike lanes. Okay, now I want to share some upcoming projects. The next two slides will have a few key upcoming projects.

First, DOT has an exciting set of projects currently under development in the downtown area called Better Bikeways Phase two. These are going to upgrade several miles of the quick build bikeways, the green bollards we see throughout the downtown area, replacing them with permanent materials such as concrete islands, 3rd, 4th, San Salvador and San Fernando and the downtown core near San Jose State, plus Taylor and Mayberry connecting up to the various BART station. You can see kind of before and after examples of this on the top of the screen. Additionally, we're going to upgrade the existing painted bike lanes in the Spartan Keys neighborhood south of downtown to bike boulevard frontage lanes, similar to 10th And 11th Street, is shown at the bottom. These are funded from state and federal grant programs, and planning and design at Mount Reach have been occurring over the last couple of years with anticipated construction starting summer and fall this year.

And then continuing upcoming projects, StoryKey's Complete Streets project will convert existing bike lanes between 3rd And Keys and Story And King to a protected bikeway. Project's also going to feature upgrades for people walking and taking transit. This project follows the StoryKeys complete street study completed by VTA in 2018. The photos show examples, Keys at the top and Story at the bottom. The design examples are from the VTA study.

This project's fully funded for construction with $36,000,000 in federal and state funds. Construction is anticipated to begin in 2027. Speaking of story and keys, we want to give a shout out to Viva Caye coming up this Sunday led by the Parks Department. The tenth anniversary will include the entire project segment for this project in the route. Very excited about that.

I'll just mention that our annual pavement maintenance program continues to be the best way for us to implement on street bikeways cost effectively. We're in the process of developing the bikeways we'll implement with our pavement maintenance program this year, which will be typically implemented in the fall. We also have several planning grants to help us develop improvements across the city for people biking. Notably, we have funding from VTA to do a study similar to that that was completed on Story Quays, continuing from King all the way to Clayton on Story. Additionally, we are currently conducting a study funded by Caltrans to make improvements to help residents use bikes in the vicinity of the Guadalupe River Trail during flood events when portions of the trail are impassable.

We're also pursuing funds to update our bike plan. The update will not create a new plan or a new bikeways network or redo any work we've already done, but rather would help us identify policies and programs to help us continue to achieve our goals. We recently applied for state funding for that and expect to hear back in August. Second to last slide, I'm going talk a little bit about our funding strategies. As I mentioned, we use QuickBuild to get our network in place as quickly and cost effectively as possible with the goal of upgrading these as soon as funding becomes available to something more permanent like concrete, focusing where there's the highest need and where we're expected to see the quickest shift to more people using first.

The bike plan is unfunded. We only have one guaranteed non competitive funding source, which we receive about a million dollars annually from the state. A number that varies each year is its state sales tax, As such, we must compete with other agencies for limited funding. Implementation also occurs by leveraging other city efforts. Paving maintenance is the big one.

We also coordinate very closely with the Vision Zero program and their projects. We work with the regional highway projects and coordinate with private development. Then I'll also mention the cost of the bike plan range from $236,000,000 to $370,000,000 for the network as adopted by council, and this range is based on quick build versus permanent materials. Despite the available funding sources, there's a significant shortfall. And then finally, I want to touch on some of the operational challenges we're having and just share some of what we've done to try to address this.

As we continue to build out our on street network, concerns have increased regarding competing right of way uses, especially with collections set out above bikeway corridors. Staff from DOT and from the Department of Environmental Services have been coordinating pretty carefully or pretty closely on this together for the last year, and I just want to share some examples of what our two departments have been doing to coordinate. We are now reviewing new bikeway designs for potential set out conflicts as we develop our programs each year. We've made a lot of improvements, especially in downtown for dumpster set out. We've been coordinating on educational materials.

An example is the Environmental Services Department's twenty twenty four set out Guidelines, included updated photos to help people better put things out in the street for collection where there's bikeway corridors. We're also working on identifying locations for a potential pilot to do additional targeted outreach for set out education, and that's gonna be based on locations from community feedback that both of our rep departments have received. That concludes our presentation. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. Let's start with public comment.

Thank you. We have two requests to speak. Diane and Jordan, please make your way down to the podium.

Again, good afternoon. I'm Diane Solomon here on behalf of your Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee. We wholeheartedly support our city's goal of building a high quality interconnected network of on street bikeways and off street trails. This advances our city's humanitarian and climate smart goals for safety, equity, and transportation mode shifts away from automobiles and other large motorized vehicles. We appreciate that this plan has been implemented in coordination with the DOT's pavement maintenance program, the Vision Zero program, and regional highway projects.

We're clear that funding for this plan has been a huge challenge because the cost of road diets, new bikeways, new trails, new paving, and their maintenance and repair are very high. And because these projects aren't capital budgeted, our city must compete for federal, state, and local grant funding to achieve bike plan twenty twenty five's goals. Despite this fiscal year's financial shortfalls, we urge this committee to do whatever is necessary to stay on track for the completion of Bike Plan's 2025 most noble goals, and thank you for this plan. Thank you for our staff member, Ryan, and thank you for our council liaison member, Kyle representative Kyle Lavaroni, and thank you for making San Jose a great place to live.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Jordan Moldow, District 3, speaking on my own behalf. Thank you for the report. I'm very excited about all the trails. I've visited them both. They look great. Excited for the next rounds. Two things I hope we could maybe hear about in future years' presentations. One would be maintenance aspect, which I believe is handled by a different team. It'd be nice to be able to hear from that team and talk about how do we address drainage and cleaning the, trails after storms. And also grade crossings.

Some of the trails in in the Penitentiary Creek Trail in particular have at grade crossings with dangerous roads. Penitentiary Creek, I think, crosses four Vision Zero corridors between BART and Alum Rock Park, and none of them are pleasant. If there's anything we can do to upgrade those, that could be something to think about as funding becomes available. On the bike plan, I'm very excited about the progress and folding it into the pavement program. I still think there's a lot more that we could be doing on that front.

We have a complete streets design guide that we follow during implementation of bikeway projects, and I've been asking Ryan if it's possible for us to update that because it's about seven years old and there's been a lot of better design practices that have come out in those seven years that I think we should be taking advantage of so that we're spending our money most effectively. And look for two for one efficiencies. While we're paving these roads and adding bikeways, we could also be adding daylighting and bike parking at the same time so that we don't have to come back in a few years ing and such. Finally, I want to call attention to the policies part. There's a part that talks about how we want to incentivize the right infrastructure and part of that is making sure that biking is easy.

Right now if I want to use a Baywheels bike, it costs $4 to unlock and then 30¢ per minute. Whereas we give ninety minutes

Thank you, back to the committee.

All right, thank you. We will start with Council Member Ortiz.

Thank you, Chair. I want to just start by thanking staff for their great presentation, definitely exciting, As well as your, I wanna thank you guys for your continued attention to the health and safety of East San Jose residents. Including the Story Quays Complete Streets project which is very exciting. And then something that's very exciting to me is the funding for the Lower Silver Creek Trail project which would be the first trail in District 5, city official trail. So really happy about that.

Definitely wanna make sure that by the time I'm done with my terms that that project is on the way and hopefully we could do a ribbon cutting. Who knows? A lot of opportunity there. I do have a question on the Measure B funding secured for the multimodal improvements on Story Road east of the planned Complete Streets project. I wanted to ask if you could speak more to the scope of the project. Is this an additional Complete Streets or is this something that's going to be a little bit more streamlined?

There we go. Thank you for that question council member. This is an addition right. So this is extending the corridor beyond what is already planned and going under construction planning right now and extending it further east to make sure we're integrating the whole corridor into that Complete Streets vision.

That's great. And what is that if you could just talk a little bit about what that process will be like?

Yeah. Just like all of our Complete Streets work, it's a community based effort. We go We always start with community leadership interviews. Try to bring together those who are active in the community to help us plan through it. We then work with this is still kind of high level conceptual planning.

So then we work with consultant to come up with concepts, work with your office or whoever council members offices want to be involved in it, and those public groups. And then internal stakeholders as well as usually VTA and other major institutional stakeholders to create an initial vision and then concepts that meet that vision and then we go through a cycle or two of revision on those based on the input. And then usually we could come back here or at a council if we need to adopt those and that's kind of the process in a very short nutshell.

What does that timeline look like for that?

Usually it takes a year and a half to two years to get through all of that. We try to do it faster when we can. But a lot of the time is in the process of making sure that we're actually producing those kinds of materials to work with the public. Right it's easy for us engineers and planners to get lost in our detail and translating that out making sure folks can actually engage takes a lot of work. Then setting up all those meetings and getting it all done is honestly most of the time that 10 takes. But yeah that's about right.

That's great. I'd love to partner as you guys are doing that outreach. Know it's all going the way to Clayton. Right? This the project is There's going be going all the way to Clayton a charter school that's right there, National Hispanic well, it used to the National Hispanic University. Now it's a Hispanic Foundation for Education Excellence. There's been a few scares in in regards to traffic in front of that school. I'd love to maybe see if we could spend maybe we could even have a meeting at that school since it's right there off story to get some good feedback.

Looking forward to working with you.

Alright. Thank you.

All right, Vice Mayor,

go ahead. Thank you for the presentation. Really liked hearing the updates about the trails and the bike plan. Liz, I have a couple questions for you about the Guadalupe Trail, as you might imagine I would ask about that. We've been talking about that for a long time, and unlike council member Ortiz who has a little bit more time than me, I only have a year and nine months, is it likely we will be making progress on that in that timeframe?

So thank you for that question, councilmember. We have been working together for the duration of my employment with the city on moving this trail forward, and we started when I began, we had to re finalize the master plan, and then we received some funding, and now we're going through procurement for design. So we do hope to get that design complete to 95% and have at least site into construction over the next two years. We're hoping actually over the next one year to complete 95% design. But that said, stuff can always come up with trails.

This one has been pretty thoroughly vetted. So again we hope that design will be complete in the next twelve months and we'll able to move forward into construction. But but yeah. That that can always be kind of up in the air as well. And I'm also happy to have a conversation with you offline if you'd like if you'd like to ask any other questions.

I think that would be helpful. Appreciate that. I did wanna ask, that is also the area of the Valley Water Resources Protection Zone. So are you working with them on the unhoused around

the

Guadalupe River and the EIH that's going in and then the trail will just enhance all of that area? So is there coordination with Valley Water?

We do coordinate with Valley Water's permitting team and I am aware of the EIH and all of the work that's going on in that area to make it better. But I don't work directly with our Beautify team or the Valley Water maintenance teams.

Okay. Did you want you look like you wanted to say something.

I was just gonna add, we're gonna to have a quick check-in now that you mentioned it because as Liz mentioned, lots of different teams in motion, lots of different teams of Valley Water. So thank you for the note because that to just click off one of my light bulbs to make

sure we're checking in on their progress.

Okay. Great. Thank you. I'm I'm glad I I triggered a a thought process of of checking in because there are a lot of people working on the EIH and Valley Water, the water resources protection zone, the trail goes all they all go together to really make that area accessible and beautiful, and the neighbors, all of them will be very happy when when it gets through. I do have a couple questions about the Better Bike Plan.

And one one thing, there's enforcement of the bike lane obstacles, you know, trash in in the bike lanes and, waste bins, parked cars, that sort of thing. There's a a implementation of AB three sixty one that allows us to, install cameras. Have we considered doing that? Are we thinking about that? And if so, where might that go?

We have been looking at that. We've been talking with VTA in particular about it because it is potentially the front of the transit vehicles that can help us do it. There are some technical questions about how tickets can be processed and charged through that what the bill allows that we haven't been able to out just yet. But we are very interested in seeing that happen because as you know we don't have enough enforcement muscle to kind of do the enforcement through our officers. Being able to write tickets without an officer present is a pretty big deal. So we are continuing to look at it. We don't have an answer on it yet.

Thank you. I would be curious how that progresses and working with VTA how we might be able to help make that happen. I think it's important you have the same people, the same businesses probably who are putting out their yard waste in the bike path and putting out their garbage cans, and worse yet when it's a commercial property putting out their garbage cans or whatever they are, Thank you, bins. It becomes a lot more dangerous, especially when their bicyclists are passing them in the nighttime and don't and don't see that they're in their bike lane. So any anything we can do to make those bike lanes safer, but I'm just curious, I suspect that it's the same people who are always creating the problem, so if we could even shame them into better behavior.

Don't know if that works. Works with me. I don't know if it works with them. Funding is a huge issue for the bike better bike plan, and we have a lot of really nice bike lanes. Some of them are being built as we do the road diets, as we narrow the streets, we put in the bollards. But after a few years, the bollards get old. The drivers who don't like them there knock them down, and they have to be replaced. Is there do we have funding to continually maintain those? And how do we maintain our bike our bike, protected bike lanes like that?

So the estimate is about 10% go a year right. So we need to, I mean you do need to keep those up. There is some funding in the maintenance budget to keep up with them and we do have teams who do take calls to and keep up with it. But as you can imagine as budgets are getting tighter, these kinds of things kind of fall on the edges. So right now we're still okay. We're keeping them maintained and again we have teams who are able to respond and we have a whole bunch of extra bollards sitting in storage right now. We just got a grant for those. So it's working right now.

Okay. Always need more money, and it sounds like grants and are uncertain, but we're doing the best that we can with the the money we have, and I appreciate it. And Diane, I just wanna thank you for shouting out, both Ryan and my staff, Kyle Laveroni, for his involvement with the Bike Ped, Commission. With that, I'll move approval or acceptance of the report. Second.

Alright. Just wanted to highlight one thing. When I look at this map and I see it says San Jose Trail Network potential construction. Potential is in all caps. So I assume that that's warning to us that we that this is this is sort of our dream but that hitting these goals by 2030 is still questionable?

Yes, that's that's correct. We're all hopeful but we we just wanna curb curb people's enthusiasm a bit.

So the map kind of does highlight what's always been a concern of mine which is that East West is not as easy as North South. We have North South natural corridors. We have some trails from the East Hills to Coyote Creek, but getting from Coyote Creek to Guadalupe River, the the things in between is not as as easy. In the north part of the city, and I raised this several times, getting people people across 880 is very difficult. But I am encouraged by this map that shows a lot a vision for Coyote Creek to have a to have a trail because you could get to Coyote Creek and then go north and then off where you need to go in North San Jose.

But I see that on this, the blue which is the twenty thirty trails is Tasman to Montague. But there's a large gap that then will remain from Montague to BART. And that's in Orange which basically I assume when it says planned trail in Orange that's beyond 2030 sometime even further in the future? Or is that sooner than 2030?

Thank you. Yes that would be likely further into the future. The Tasman To Montague was already built as an interim trail, so what we're looking for there is paving and a few other smaller details. For the other sections between Montague and the flea market, there are a couple of bridges that we would need to build and there's also significant right of way issues with that we would need to kind of work on with for example our real estate team.

Yeah I was wondering I guess I hadn't seen what a plan is, it would be great to see what that looks like.

Sure.

But obviously, it's the it we won't really have that good connectivity over to North San Jose without that section being done, and that's years off according to this. So I just wanna flag that, I guess, as part of Not sure there's more to say about that but just

I'll just add when we got the bike plan 2025 approved, one of the primary messages we got from council was work on East West connections. And you can see a lot of our project selection and that plans milieu is trying to fill out the same direction that you're bringing up now. Right? And the trails network and the on street network are intended as a single system. I mean everyone likes to be on a trail it's a nicer environment always. But we are of the we're trying to fill in those gaps through the bike plan as well.

Right and we haven't come up

with a good solution for the cross of eight eighty on the on on street network yet. So even that part is still and you know, maybe we can count on work at Montague 880 Interchange with a dedicated separated bike lane to actually come sooner than this orange section of the trail here. But but, you know, that will certainly help if we can get people to Guadalupe River on Montague with a bike with a lane that looks like what we now have done at Trimble and 101. I know that's in the works. Alright. Thank you. Now, we'll move on to a vote. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Alright.

Motion carries three zero. Thank you all. We're on to our fourth item today. Jeff is going to update us on our water supply.

I lost one member. All right, well thank you. Good afternoon, Jeff Provenzano, Director of Environmental Services Department, and with me is Eric Dunley, the Deputy Director of Purified Water and Regulatory Affairs. Our item today is just a status update on water supply. We don't have a presentation, but we'll do a quick verbal report and then be available for any questions. Eric?

Thank you. Thank you, committee members and thank you, Jeff. Eric Dunleavy, Deputy Director for Regulatory Affairs and Purified Water and ESD. I'll start us out with a verbal update on program, which is a collaborative program with Valley Water. This is a is an exciting program that's going to take a portion of the treated wastewater from the regional wastewater facility and purify it for the purposes of potable water supply.

So in August 2024, Valley Water and the city entered into a master agreement, which provides, city staff support through funding from Valley Water to to pay for city staff support to help support this purified water program that is Valley Water's project. So it allows for technical and logistical support and coordination by city staff and pays for us to conduct ongoing negotiations with them for current and future agreements related to various phases of Valley Water's purified water program aspirations, and provides support for regulatory coordination, review, strategy development, and developing a pathway towards management of the waste streams that are generated from a purified water process that uses reverse osmosis technology and generates a waste stream. So, developing the pathway towards managing that waste stream and and disposing of that waste stream appropriately. So where we're at right now is we are actually focused on a direct potable reuse demonstration facility, which is a necessary step, that Valley Water needs to take in order to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of the advanced treatment technology needed to meet the newly adopted direct potable reuse regulations that were passed by the state in October 2024. So we are helping support the well, this project, the direct potable reuse demonstration facility, will support the permitting and helping to demonstrate we can meet the regulatory requirements.

It will also help us investigate any data gaps, which will involve conducting a number of different studies. Last count I heard was 27, but it's probably even more than that, to investigate the impacts of the new treatment train, and that includes, like I said, the management of the reverse osmosis concentrate, looking at costs of various options, impacts to water quality, any effects on bond capacity, and even potable water system capacity constraints. The the demonstration facility will also provide a visitor center to support public outreach and education to inform the public of the safety of purified water and provide opportunities to actually sample the water as well. So, that's an important component of advancing any kind of purified water program for direct potable reuse. So, to accomplish this, we are currently modifying three existing agreements, and these agreements allowed for the construction, operation, maintenance, and put the revenue sharing framework for the existing purification center, the Silicon Valley Advanced Water Purification Center, which currently takes up to 10 MGD of regional wastewater facility treated water, purifies it, produces up to eight MGD, and it puts that into the non potable recycled South Bay water system along with treated wastewater from the regional wastewater facility.

So those three agreements are the operations and maintenance agreement, the ground lease and land use agreement, and the integration agreement. And the integration agreement is what determines the cost share and revenue sharing. So we are pretty darn close with all three of those agreements. I'd say between the three we're anywhere from 95 to 100% agreement with Valley Water. We've come to terms with almost all of the business terms, and now it's really just dotting the i's and crossing the t's and making sure everything is legally okay.

So our attorneys and their attorneys are also have been involved in this process throughout. Demonstration facility is likely the actual construction and and operation of it is probably about three years, maybe as long as five years away from full construction and operation. And then that would need to be operational for at least two years, and then the follow on, assuming all of those studies that I mentioned, point the way towards feasibility of a full scale facility. This would all lead to Valley Water envisions a full scale DPR facility that would produce up to 24 MGD of purified water for direct potable reuse. And that would send that purified water directly into the potable water distribution system.

For context, that's probably about 10%, maybe a little bit more of of their overall water supply needs. Valley Water has not begun design of the full scale facility. So at this point, it's conceptual aspirational, but we're putting in the steps needed to to lay the groundwork for that. Procurement of a technical consultant team by Valley Water is expected to be assembled later this year, and the planning work for the full scale facility would begin after that. That's it for the purified water program update. I will turn it back to Jeff for the other two updates.

Thank you, Eric. The second item in that memo is a technical feasibility study on a South Bay, San Francisco South Bay desalination project. Valley Water had completed high level feasibility study and this would be a deep dive in how that potential project could be constructed, the cost and the feasibility and the environmental impact, and we'll be working with Valley Water as they proceed with that study. Then the last item in the memo, back in August we signed an amended agreement with San Jose Water Company to agree to sell San Jose Water Company an additional 5,000 acre feet of recycled water. That's in line with our previous goals to increase usage by about 10,000 to 15,000 acre feet a year.

5,000 acre feet is the equivalent of about 3% of our San Jose water supply. It's not a large amount, but it offsets potable water usage and saves that water for drinking. That agreement is in place. San Jose Water Company's next steps are to look at doing a long term master plan for recycled water expansion and then slowly build out that system over the next ten years. And with that, we are available for questions.

All right, thank you so much. It doesn't look like we have any public comment remaining for this one. Okay. We'll go to Vice Mayor Foley first.

Thank you. Just briefly, thank you for the presentation, but I wanted to thank you for the briefing on Friday too. That was really helpful in me understanding what you were gonna be presenting today. I appreciate that. And with that, I'll move acceptance of the report.

Yeah. Motion. Alright. Well, thank you. I don't have much to add. I I always appreciate that we're, you know, moving forward with purification and recycling. We need to close the loop as much as possible on water. I've said that over and over again. And water delivery in San Jose is a complicated business because we have two different wholesalers for water. We have two different water companies to deliver to our residents. And so I really appreciate the work that your teams do to make sure that that we have safe, reliable sources of water for everyone in San Jose. So thank you. With that, we'll move to vote. All in favor say aye. Aye. Alright. We have a three ayes. Vote's unanimous. Three zero. Alright.

Number five. Today's agenda is our shoreline levee and sea level rise update.

All right, good afternoon. Jeff Provenzano, Director, Environmental Services Department and with me is Kevin Ice, Director of Real Estate in the City Manager's Office. Today we're here to talk to you about the shoreline levee and a sea level rise status update. The South San Francisco Bay Shoreline project, as a general background here, provides a one hundred year coastal flood and risk management for parts of the Lower South Bay for us including Alviso, North San Jose, and protects a lot of our critical infrastructure in this area. Overall, the project will restore about 2,900 acres of former salt pond into Tidal Marsh, and also provide a South San Francisco Bay Trail connection connecting up all of these parcels as they get converted back into habitat connecting a bike trail for residents to use.

Project is the main project sponsor and the manager of the project is the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Right now the Corps has approximately $219,000,000 awarded for this project. There's two local sponsors. One is the California Coastal Conservancy from a habitat restoration perspective, but then the local non federal sponsor is Valley Water. The way that works, the cost of this project, anything above $219,000,000 would need to be picked up by Valley Water as the local sponsor.

So good afternoon committee. Kevin Ice, director of real estate, assistant to the city manager in the city manager's office of economic development and cultural affairs. The regional wastewater facility or RWF owns land that the shoreline levee project must acquire to construct reaches four and five of the shoreline levee project. So that's the portion that spans across the northern boundary of the facility between Artesian Slough and Coyote Creek. The RWF is one of the largest advanced wastewater treatment plants in the Western US, serving eight cities in the region and 1,400,000 residents.

The city of San Jose is the majority owner and administrating agency of the plant, and the city of Santa Clara is a minority owner. City staff is have focused on engaging the project to transfer the required property interests while ensuring the plant receives fair value for all assets and plant operations are protected. So the Army Corps bid out the

project in 2021 and these bids came in well over estimates, which resulted in a significant funding shortfall. As a result, Army

progress with reaches one and three one through three. However, project stakeholders including the city and Valley Water lobbied congress for additional funding, and in 2023, the army corps was awarded an additional $91,000,000 to bring the total, as Jeff mentioned, to $219,000,000 in federal funding. The Army Corps has now restarted work on Reaches 4 And 5 and and is undertaking a value engineering exercise. This exercise has focused on reducing the cost to construct the project by utilizing existing high ground and constructing less new levee structure. This value engineering exercise is not complete at this time, so total project costs are not known.

The RWF in the city have strong interest in collaborating to ensure project success. Coastal flooding and sea level rise are an existential threat to the RWF, Alviso, and parts of North San Jose. Shown here is the value engineering proposed realignment of reaches four and five of the project. Pond 18 is shown at the top of the picture, which is the majority of land that the project must acquire from the RWF. The legacy lagoons are below the pond, which are important to the project, and the lagoons that are north of the pink line are to be transferred to Valley Water to support the project.

And the existing high ground that is highlighted in yellow will be utilized by the project. And that is the primary cost savings of the realignment is that instead of constructing new levee along the white line, along the southern boundary of the pond, they will tie into the high ground that's highlighted in yellow. The realignment is being evaluated by staff to ensure that our key elements of one hundred year flood protection, public access, and protection of RWF operations are maintained. The revised project will further define the land interests that must be conveyed by the RWF to the city of by the RWF and the city of San Jose, excuse me, to Valley Water. Currently, the project requires approximately 895 acres in total from the RWF, as well as easements for access and construction staging and a license for early access to begin stockpiling soil to be used as levy fill.

Staff are focused to ensure that RWF operations will continue unimpeded both during and after construction because the RWF is subject to regulatory obligations that must continue to be met at all times. Staff are also considering current and future future capital projects to protect plant operations and ensure that construction access is provided in as safe a manner as possible. The result of this coordination is set out in an executed letter of intent agreement between the city of San Jose, city of Santa Clara, and Valley Water. This non binding LOI will inform a binding memorandum of understanding for the project that staff are now negotiating, which will be presented to TPAC, Santa Clara's Council, and San Jose's Council for authorization. A key term of this MOU will focus on protecting RWF operations, in particular design related to the operation of the RWF outfall channel where a 120,000,000 gallons per day of treated water discharges into the bay.

Other key terms include ensuring the RWF receives fair value for transferred assets and establishing a method for Valley Water to compensate the plant by providing either cash or wetland mitigation credits for the cleanup of the RWF's legacy lagoons. The legacy Lagoons predate the Clean Water Act and must be cleaned up, and this this cleanup requires the RWF to secure roughly 60 acres of wetland mitigation credit. City and Valley Water staff are engaging project partners and the water board to secure credit from the projects ecological uplift to pond a 18 to offset the impacts of the Legacy Lagoons cleanup order. This payment flexibility could drive significant value for the RWF in a manner that limits the cash outlay for Valley Water and the project. This helps the effort that we all share in seeking to reduce costs to bring the project into budget and enable it to move forward.

Staff will continue to engage Valley Water and the Army Corps to provide all necessary support and agreements on the project's timeline. The land transaction between the RWF and Valley Water cannot proceed until the Army Corps enters into a design and construction agreement with Valley Water, which is anticipated in the 2026. With that, staff are available for questions.

Thank you. Do we have any members of the public? Alright.

There's no request to speak.

Alright. Thank you for the update. Actually there's some information here that I wasn't fully aware of so I appreciate the update. I want to ask a question about, I think it's on the, I don't know what slide number it is, where the map which shows the difference between the white line and the blue line. The white line, what you're suggesting is that because of the Zanker And 9 Par landfills that those are elevated and therefore can be natural parts of the levee without needing to go around the current pond. Is that where the ponds are currently?

Yes, that's correct. Looking at the original white line alignment, that was one of the original focuses. The cost was escalating based off of their experiences in building the other reaches around Alviso. So with that learning experience in mind, they were looking at using high ground which is those landfills as the sea level rise boundary. Part of that of course is how far does the garbage extend out underneath the toe of the landfill and leachate and a bunch of other engineering challenges that come along with using landfill as sea level rise buffer.

And that's where the core is right now is evaluating those unknowns.

Okay. And the current reaches that are being done, how do they tie I mean they would have tied into where the white line ends on left. Where do they tie in if how do they get down to protecting that all the way down to the landfill area?

There is a green if you see artesian slough there, there's a green line on the left hand side that would go from approximately where

Okay.

Where the current one ends. It would pick it up there.

So there would be some levy there, the green levy.

Green levy.

I see. And that's where the outflow from the artesian slough is where the outflow comes from the plant. Right? And that has to be built in where the green levy is to make sure that it can still flow out to the bay. Correct. Okay. Appreciate that. So we had just a I don't remember when it was. A month or two ago, Valley Water was meeting to discuss the reallocation of some money that was supposed to be used up in the northern part of the county near Palo Alto because that project is less crucial than this one. And they had voted to reallocate money to the Alviso levies. Is that correct?

Yes.

And is that part of this two nineteen or is that in addition to that?

The two nineteen is the Corps of Engineers. That is their federal award. Valley Water would have to come up with the remainder as a local sponsor. Their primary funding source is that tax measure that they collect. That's correct, the levy up into some of the cities in the county heading up the peninsula there, those levees the court has determined don't need to be constructed for another thirty to forty years.

That's why some of the money that was originally allocated there got moved down to this project. Even then, there is a funding shortfall that Valley Water is looking at for this shoreline project. That's why they're focused so intently on value engineering, tying into the landfills and finding any other cost saving measures at

the camp. So even with that reallocation, we're not fully funded for project and that's what's being worked on now is to use the current money Valley Water had set aside plus the Army Corps money plus the new money that came from the northern part, northern levies and then make sure that we can get it all done under that cost structure?

I think even with that there's a funding gap. Right. And Valley Water is looking at financing for the remainder of it.

Okay. I appreciate that. Alright. Go ahead.

There's a funding gap for the current estimates, but we're all waiting for the Army Corps to come out with those final numbers. Right. And then at that point, Valley Water will nail down their plans.

Great. We'll get an update at that time or I'll certainly my office will be interested in an update at that time. Alright. Do we have a motion to accept this report? Move for approval.

Second.

Alright. We have a motion and a second. All in favor say Aye. That's three zero. Thank you so much for the update. Thank you. And we're on to our final item today which is our city generated tow services status report. Rachel and

Good afternoon. My name is Rachel Roberts and I'm the deputy director of code enforcement. Presenting with me today is Nimrata Bhattra Agarwal, product and products manager with the information technology department. Also here in the box with us, we have Rosanna Carrasco, tow program manager, and lieutenant Jermaine Thomas with the police department. And we're here today to present to you the city tow services model status report.

So the purpose of today's presentation is to provide you with the status report the contract and the status report on the contract services implementation. To provide some context and background, city generated tows are tows requested by city departments to remove a vehicle from public property, which is primarily happening through either the police department, Department of Transportation, or housing. In January 2019, City Council accepted the audit of towing services, including 17 recommendations and the administration's plan to address those recommendations. The administration's plan included four primary goals: address all audit recommendations, develop a new city generated tow services model, develop and issue a request for proposal for a new tow services model and award of contract, and transition the new program model and oversight from the planning, building, and code enforcement's code enforcement division to the police department. Between January 2019 and August 2023, staff worked diligently to improve tow operations and address the 17 recommendations, including city council approval of six amendments to the tow services contracts to improve tow performance and service delivery until a new program model was in place.

Since August 2023, staff has taken critical steps to implement the new tow service model and complete the four primary goals. In August 2023, city council awarded a tow administration contract to Artura to manage tow operator contracts, monitor performance, and enhance service delivery. Artura's services also included tow management software providing real time tracking of tows and a public portal to locate vehicles and pay fees. On 03/04/2024, staff provided an update to this committee on the administration's progress in achieving those four primary goals, noting that all but one audit recommendation had had been implemented and that the onboarding of a Toro was underway. From March until February 2025, staff established a cross departmental team including the police department, department of transportation, code enforcement, and our ITD department and began implementation including requirement gathering, software integration, testing, and training all while maintaining our daily tow operations.

In January, a dedicated senior analyst was hired to oversee the tow program with the police department. This addition strengthened program oversight and accountability. And then in February 2025, the team successfully launched the first phase of the new tow service model, implementing key software systems for tow tracking and management, improving transparency and efficiency in tow service operations. Next, Nimrata will share key accomplishments, operational enhancements, and challenges since implementation of the new model and software as well as our next steps.

Thank you. Some of the key accomplishments of this project are the project introduced third party vendor to oversee and manage city generated towing operations. This includes managing contracts with tow providers, ensuring compliance with city requirements and supplying the necessary infrastructure, tools and staffing to support efficient service delivery. Additionally, a new cloud based tow management software system has been implemented to track tow vehicles from tow dispatch to vehicle release. This technology enables the city to administer and oversee the tow program more effectively.

The city transitioned away from city managed tow operations addressing key audit recommendations and improving overall efficiency. The new model ensures a structured approach to resolving refused tours and specialized tour requests while integrating advanced data collection and analytics. Additionally, online service capabilities were expanded through partnerships with vendors, enhancing service delivery and oversight. It addressed long standing operational challenges by implementing a new structured contract that increases service flexibility, strengthens vendor accountability, and enables data driven decision support where the city identified past issues and where blight and lived in vehicle issues have created new needs for the city of San Jose. The project introduced several key improvements including enhanced data tracking for towed vehicles, automated billing to streamline financial processes and advanced reporting tools to support operational oversight.

The program shows strong early results between the Phase one go live of February 3 and 03/15/2025, a total of ten fifty one vehicles were successfully towed, 400 vehicles were released and seven lived in vehicles were relocated to safe parking sites under the new system. Next slide please. The new model has also created operational enhancements like the program has enabled the transition from using a three page manual CHP180 towing slip to a streamlined one page digital tow slip. This new process encourages tow slips to be submitted online and attached to the vehicle record, improving efficiency and reducing paperwork. The digital system enhances accuracy and enables faster processing of towed vehicles.

Officers can now monitor assigned tow trucks in real time using mobile devices and MDCs just like you can track an Uber. This capability enhances coordination and ensures timely responses to towing requests. Real time tracking also improves efficiency and accountability in tow truck operations. The system enables end to end tracking of towed vehicles capturing key details such as vehicle information, tow reason, tow slip, photos of the vehicle, associated violations and fees. This comprehensive data tracking improves record keeping and ensures transparency in the towing process.

By maintaining detailed logs, the system enhances accountability and facilitates more efficient towed vehicle management. The system includes automated functionalities to streamline billing functions, ensuring accurate and efficient financial management. This automation reduces manual work, minimizes errors, and enhances accountability in the billing process. The system now offers in-depth performance insights through advanced reporting tools. Regular reports track key metrics, highlight trends and will support data driven decision making.

The oversight of the TOE program has successfully transitioned from PBCE to San Jose PD for improved management and enforcement. Next slide please. Some of the early challenges encountered were system related challenges like a software notification failure caused errors in vehicle storage and impound records leading to operational challenges. As a result, some towed vehicles were not properly logged, creating discrepancies in tracking and enforcement. To address this issue, a temporary manual verification process was implemented by SJPD to double check all vehicle impounds.

This additional layer of oversight ensured accuracy while the software issue was being investigated and resolved. Moving forward, system enhancements and stricter monitoring will help prevent similar failures. Tow company compliance challenges. Some tow companies refused to tow oversized vehicles leading to service gaps and delays. This non compliance impacted enforcement efforts and the efficient removal of large vehicles.

To address the issue, coordination with vendors has been strengthened to ensure compliance and improve towing capacity. Operational adjustments like adding more tow providers to the vendor pool of tow providers are also being made to streamline processes and prevent future disruptions. Let's look at what's next. Phase two, we are targeting April 2025 for the work on Phase two to begin once all the open issues are resolved. A dedicated public portal will be introduced to improve transparency and accessibility for residents.

This portal aims to enhance the overall customer experience and will allow users to find information about their towed vehicles online. Customized reports will provide more detailed insights into tow operations and performance metrics. These reports will help track key data points, identify trends and support data driven decision making. Improved reporting will also increase accountability and operational Ongoing improvements. The program will continue evolving with regular updates and enhancements based on operational feedback.

Ongoing adjustments will ensure the system remains responsive to emerging needs and challenges. This iterative approach will help maintain efficiency and effectiveness. Continued system monitoring will be maintained to quickly detect and address any technical or operational issues. Regular oversight will help prevent failures and optimize system performance. Proactive monitoring will also enhance service reliability and user satisfaction.

The program's effectiveness will be assessed through periodic performance evaluations. Key metrics such as response times and compliance rates will inform necessary adjustments to improve overall efficiency. Further system refinements will be implemented to enhance functionality experience. These refinements will address any inefficiencies, streamline workflows and optimize processes. A thorough budget assessment will be conducted to ensure the long term sustainability of tow operations.

Financial planning will focus on balancing operational costs with available resources. Strategies will be developed to maintain fiscal responsibility while supporting program growth. I'm going to hand it back to Rachel to take us through the next two slides.

Thank you. So in conclusion, we are very pleased to report that the team has now successfully completed the four primary goals. We've addressed all 17 toe recommendations. We have completed the RFP and awarded the new contract to Artura. With the launch of phase one in February, the new city generated tow service delivery model was implemented, and with the onboarding to oversee the tow contract and the police department, the program has transitioned, from code enforcement to the police department. So this brings us to the end of our presentation, and we are available to answer any questions you may have.

Alright. Well, thank you so much for the update. I'll just confirm that there's no public comment. Alright. Do you have any comments or questions from the rest of the committee? We have a motion to accept the report.

Move to accept. Second.

Alright. Have motion to second. Let me ask you a question. There was the comment that said something like 1,000 and something toes. That was from 2024 until March. That was in one month. So just since February 2025 through what mid March?

That is correct.

So like in six weeks that was over a thousand tows. Wow that's a big change over what we've experienced in the past. When a vehicle gets towed and brought to a yard, I mean presumably a fraction, you said there was something like 400 have been released. So that means 400 have been claimed but another six, seven hundred are not I guess I don't remember the number exactly but like 600 of them have not nobody's coming to claim them?

Good afternoon. My name is Rosanna. I'm the new tow program manager with SJPD. Thank you for your question, chairperson. It could mean a variable of things, it could be that perhaps maybe the vehicle was in a collision where the insurance is going to pick it up, so the registered owner no longer has possession of it.

So they basically get rid of all their rights to it. It could also be that there's an investigative hold on the vehicle, so that's another reason why it hasn't been released yet. It could also mean that they are in the process of they just don't want it. The cost to retrieve it outweighs more of what the vehicle is worth. So they leave it in the yard.

Understood. Okay. And so what's the policy that is in place about how long it has to be a vehicle has to be held presumably at some point the tow yard sells it for scrap or does something else with it. Right? So is there a policy about how long it has remained there?

Thank you for your question. It could be they can start the lean process after fifteen days. So it could take anywhere between thirty to forty five days for it to go throughout the entire process, the lean process.

Given that number of vehicles, are these tow contracts do they have the space for this? I mean is this something that's

Thank working out for you councilmember. So actually on average, well prior to COVID we were averaging about 15,000 tows a year annually for city generated tows and then post COVID it's gone down a little bit, but it's still in the range of like anywhere from 11 to 13,000 tows annually I believe. So the thousand number actually is pretty on par with that and the operators are used to that volume. As we noted in the presentation that one of the advantages of having the third party contract now is that they can actually bring in additional tow operators if they find that the numbers are increasing and it's a challenge for them to meet the demand.

Pre COVID is pre pre my time, so I guess I wasn't aware that we had that we that numbers were that high before in terms of the number of tows. Thank you for that. And then I see the seven lived in vehicles were towed to the safe parking side. I think probably this was an early number because there are more many more were towed in the last couple weeks. And then we're also gonna see what happens next week as we begin on some of the Olive Streets to start well, we've already done that at a couple of Olive Streets, but we'll be towing more non compliant vehicles from some of those Olive sites. So we'll we'll be we'll be watching for sure. Okay. I guess that's it for questions. All in favor of accepting the report, say aye.

Aye.

Aye. Alright. That's three ayes. Motion carries unanimously. Thank you so much for the report. That brings us to open forum. It looks like we don't have any open forum. We are adjourned. We will we will have a special time and date for our next meeting on Monday, May 19 in the morning for the May T and E meeting. Meeting. We will see you then. Thank you.