Town Council - workshop

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Final order, Town of Prescott Valley, study session September 3rd, 2026. Everyone please log in via tablet. Councilman Thornton, are you, you're good. Yes, that's good.

Is Councilmember Brown coming? We have a quorum, Mayor.

Thank you, ma'am. Moving on moving to item to a refresher on emergency management.

Good afternoon everyone still not high enough for me. Good afternoon mayor vice mayor town council wanted to come and speak with you briefly tonight about refresher for emergency management. I know many of you have heard most of this before, but just wanted to go over kind of what I'm doing what what I have going on. So the main phases of emergency management that I work on pretty regularly are mitigation and preparedness. Mitigation might be generators for hospitals, stormwater drainage, things of that sort. Preparedness might be training first responders, promoting building emergency kits for residents, conducting exercises and drills, which I'll talk about a little bit more. That's kind of one of the bigger spots I focus on. Response as far as opening emergency shelters, coordinating emergency responders, setting up and organizing food and water distribution should we get to that point. And then as far as recovery, we have recovery is usually the longest aspect of emergency management having to do with restoring power, restoring infrastructure, getting people connected with the resources that they may need for Red Cross, United Way, other sources like that. There's a lot on here. Obviously, I won't go through and read every line. You have this in your packets. But big parts of this, too, that you'll see in another slide or two is the RAVE emergency notification system that we really stress to push hard. RAVE says that if you can get more than 10% of your population signed up, then you're doing really well. And as of when I wrote this, we have about 8,300 residents signed up for opt-in notifications. The other big part of that is our Genesis Protect app that we have that informs everyone of what their evacuation area is and what they should be doing. There's a lot of plans that need creation and then continual updating, continuity of operations plan, the emergency operations plan. and I'm constantly going through IGAs, intergovernmental agreements, mutual aid agreements, and trying to condense those, make those a little bit more efficient, shorter, and make sure that those are all updated. There's just a few other things on here that I go through pretty regularly. Emergency management, I always joke with people, is kind of a continuous cycle. I can get every single thing on this page checked off, and then three months later, I'm gonna have to redo every single thing on this page. It wouldn't be a presentation for me if I didn't have a slide about our RAVE emergency notification system and the QR code to sign up. And then likewise, we have our Genesis Protect evacuation notification system. As far as that, one of the most useful times I get when I'm presenting about emergency management is the opportunity for questions. That usually drives a conversation and I spend a lot longer answering those questions and going into that than my presentation.

What can I answer for you all? Joel, I just want to say that you do a great job. I've been out with you multiple times when you present to the public, answering their questions. You bring a great amount of experience, and you keep doing what you're doing. Thank you. Any other questions or comments for Joel?

I mean, I saw Joel in action on July 20th, and during our massive storm event that we had that day, and he did a fantastic job, and I just wanted to say thank you.

Yeah, of course. Speaking on that a little bit, there were some people asking where we were going to set up our EOC, what we're going to do as far as our EOC. And that was such a short-lived event that we didn't feel the need to set up an EOC and staff an EOC for that. I was actually out in the field helping to block roads and helping to deal with some of that flood mitigation. And then towards the end of the day, I was responsible for getting the Red Cross to come out and work with those homeowners that were impacted. They were out there later that evening and uh we were going to have a shelter opened up but every resident i talked to wasn't interested in going to the shelter they would rather stay at their home and work on the cleanup and that type of thing and red cross came out the following day and i think they offered most residents a check for a thousand dollars to kind of help with the cleanup and help with some of that and i know other public assistance entities have been in touch with them as well so awesome thank you sir all right thank you have a great day next up item 2b traffic safety presentation chief you're gonna lead us off

Thank you, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council, Bob Tyser, Chief of Police. I appreciate your time and I concur we have an excellent emergency manager. We appreciate that partnership with Joel. So today we're here to talk about one of the three key goals that we operate under at the Presque Valley Police Department. We have three key goals that we challenge our officers and professional staff to work on every day when they come to work. First one is reduce crime and fear of crime, goal number one. Two, community education. And three, traffic safety. Not in that particular order. That can fluctuate on a day-to-day, but that's what we charge our officers with every day to try to make a difference in our community, keep our community safe. So today we're here to give you an annual update on traffic safety. And as we go through this presentation, I'll handle a few slides, and then we're going to turn it over to Assistant Chief Edelstein, who is the Commander of Field Services. and then we'll finish it up with our traffic engineer, Mr. Parker Murphy, to talk about that. So as we go through talking about traffic, there's three, we call it three E's of traffic safety. You'll see it on the screen there, enforcement, education, and engineering. If any one of those three are missing, you're not going to have an effective traffic safety program. So it's not just about writing tickets, not just about enforcement. You have to have all the components. If you don't have a safe roadway, that's going to be a factor. Education is a big deal, especially when it comes to students or in our community in general. So those three have to be there, and we're going to focus on that today. Key objectives that we have, reduce traffic collisions and injuries. That's what we're focused on every day out there, not just our traffic enforcement division, but also patrol, which is the backbone of the department. promote safe driving behaviors, enhance community education, we're going to be talking about that significantly here, and utilizing data. When I say that when it comes to data, we're going to show you where the crashes are. We know where they're at. We're going to put that up there. You're not going to go, wow, I didn't know that. You're going to be like, yes, we understand there's a lot of crashes in that area. There's other areas of town that are really safe roadways where we do not have a lot of crashes on. But we do get complaints in those areas. And we try to effectively take care of our residents in those areas with patrols. But we do have to focus on the data. So most of our energy is going to go in some of those higher impact areas. Enforcement strategies, traffic stop goals, I'll let Assistant Chief Edelstein talk about that, and patrol. We also focus on those factors that cause the majority of our crashes, especially the serious injury ones, and those are speeding, distracted driving, red light violations that our officers are proactively looking for those violations. DUI enforcement is a big deal. Over the last several years, we've significantly increased our DUI arrest in this community. And when we say DUI, we're not just talking about alcohol. We're talking about drugs that impair or a combination of. So many people that we pick up for DUI could be under the influence of alcohol. They could be under the influence of illegal drugs or even legal drugs if they're abusing in them and they're under influence or sometimes the combination of all of those. So with that we have two officers right now that are drug recognition experts. I'm also sending two more of our traffic officers to the next drug recognition expert school. We call it DRE up in Kingman here in October. So we'll have four. Pretty much the whole traffic division will be drug recognition experts getting that program back up and running. We also do multi-NC enforcement details in our area. We're very fortunate in the state of Arizona that every police officer, state trooper, deputy sheriff in the state has full authority inside the parameters of the state of Arizona. That means officers and deputies, troopers can work back and forth jurisdiction to jurisdiction, no need for IGAs, no need to ask permission. Officers can go back and forth. So what we do here in this community as we partner with the chino valley police department the api county sheriff's office prescott police department and the arizona department of public safety and we do multi-agency uh task force details in our areas be able to saturate um the area so that there will be times when you'll have those agencies working right here in prescott valley to support our community and some some of the high crash areas and then trash crash data is very important that we track and i believe we're doing a really good job here in our town but we know when you're impacted in a car crash the numbers don't matter. So it would be great if those numbers said zero, but they do not. So we look at the crash data rate, 12.94 crashes per 1,000 residents is where we're at here in 2025. And we're talking about the comparison today, 2024 to 2025. James is going to give you a little update of what's coming on in 26 that you're going to see next year and some of the trends we're seeing primarily based on the volume of traffic and the road construction that we've been having in our town that we've seen increases in car crashes. THE NATIONAL RATE IS SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER AS WELL AS THE ARIZONA WHEN IT COMES TO CRASHES PER 1,000. SO WE'RE DOING BETTER THAN OTHER AREAS. STILL, IT WOULD BE NICE TO BE AT ZERO. THE PVPD EXCELS IN EMERGENCY RESPONSE. BENCHMARK CITY SURVEY IS CONDUCTED ANNUALLY BY OVERLAND PARK, KANSAS. THEY LOOK AT A COUPLE DOZEN LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES ACROSS THE COUNTRY WITH ALL KINDS OF DATA TO BENCHMARK. AND WE OFTEN AT THE POLICE DEPARTMENT, I DO IT MYSELF, Go to that data to see how we're doing with others. And when it comes to response time, which is really important, and I know you get that report on the dashboard here in our town, where we're at is about three minutes and 50 seconds on emergency responses covering our footprint. That goes all the way from Dewey, close up to Mingus Mountain, and all the way out west here. So our officers get into emergency response calls very fast in comparison. Still, three minutes and 50 seconds is a long time when you're waiting, but we still have a lot of ground to cover. Next slide here on traffic data, some important numbers. DUIs, we had a nearly a 10% increase in DUI arrests from 2025 to 2024, which was 241 people that were taken into custody by this police department for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs or combinations of, and that was an increase even with a more significant increase in 23 compared to 2022. We're very much focusing on this area. Traffic citations significantly increased more than 6,000 and over 10,000 traffic stops that our officers are involved in. And I do want to point out that this is just one element of what the Presque Valley police officers are doing on a daily basis. They're handling nearly 16,000 calls for service. Many of those are 911 calls. They're out in the community. This is just one element of it. Our traffic Detail our motorcycle officers are handling a good lion's share of the traffic enforcement But patrol when they're not tied up on calls for service. They're proactively enforcing traffic laws as well Fatalities there was no change there was three in 2025 same as in 2024 we've seen some increases this year So we'll talk a little bit about that in a little while even with the heavy Arrest data that we have on DUI arrests, we've still seen a slight increase in DUI arrests, so there's plenty of work to be done in that area. And total crashes went up a couple percent. We talk about this daily. We look at it, what's causing that. We believe there's a significant volume increase in our community. We try and look at crashes per 1,000 residents, but that we can just focus on our town. We have a lot of people. coming up to Prescott on the weekends, passing through our community. So the volume is very significant. So 2% increase there. And this is just one example of one of those traffic details. And we do this in addition to our regular patrols, just in a one-week period. This is just one snapshot here to give you an idea. When we get focus complaints from the community or our data shows where we need to be, we'll put officers and saturate that area. So just in a one-week period of traffic enforcement on a Glassford Hill enforcement detail, you can see the numbers right there. you know, more than 70 traffic citations issued, civil speed violations and, you know, a handful of insurance violations, but a lot of enforcement that goes into that. And I will tell you that typically when those multi-agency details come into town and we go do those, it's typically gonna be a zero tolerance. So more than likely it's gonna be traffic citations. If somebody gets a warning on one of those details, they probably had a really, really good excuse that day, because it's gonna be a typical enforcement detail with traffic citations. And I will say that, um, our officers use excellent decision making discretion in our town. So it's not about the tickets. It's about changing driving behavior. So when you look at our data data and I don't have the warning data in front of you, but it's approximately 50 50. So when our officers are enforcing the law out there, there's a path, a chance that a person may get a warning or a ticket is just going to be dependent on the seriousness of the traffic infraction and, uh, you know, the officer's discretion. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to Assistant Chief Edelstein to focus a little bit about education, because we know that's a key component when it comes to the three E's. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Welcome, sir.

Thank you, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council Chief. So I'm going to start off talking about education. I guess we could maybe substitute education strategies with prevention efforts, because really that's what this is about, is getting out in the community. You'll see a lot of things listed up there that have to do with our youth and teaching them things that they can do proactively to avoid being part of a traffic collision or getting a ticket as a result of a violation of traffic law. DUI awareness programs work with the event center pretty regularly with officers who are given individuals who want to blow into the portable breath tester and see what their Blood alcohol concentration might happen to be at that point where they're at. Kind of give them the opportunity to see, hey, if I have a couple of beers, I really shouldn't be driving because I'm pretty near a .08, which is that legal limit for alcohol content. So lots of events listed. I'll highlight a couple more. Car seat safety programs, 24 a year. So lots of opportunities for community members to come out. and have the opportunity to make sure that the child seats that they have in their car are properly secured in addition to that we have a supply of car seats if folks can't afford one for themselves that will give out and that's partly due to we'll talk about it later some funds that the governor's office highway safety grants to us to do those events back to school night's a big deal every year we go out to the schools again talking to the youth trying to get them information that might help them to avoid being in a traffic collision or get a citation for a traffic violation. Due to great partnership with our comms department and our community services team, we've got a traffic education and enforcement plan that includes public safety awareness announcements. So not every month, but most months throughout the year, we have a program that we're talking about Some of you may have seen, I hope, some of the funnier and kind of amusing PSA videos that we're putting out, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, et cetera. So a really good program engaging the community through different means to get that message out there about traffic safety. So the next slide we're talking about, sorry. So that's the one I just talked about, apologies. There we go, engineering solutions and traffic hotspots. So I'll talk about our partnership with Public Works here, Parker, and here's representing them tonight, but it's a whole team effort. I'll go to cops and us first. Lieutenant Corcoran there in the back, thanks to him and our traffic team, we have a great partnership where we're working with our engineers to address those traffic safety problems. Again, enforcement education and engineering, because a lot of what we can do to impact traffic safety is about us talking to each other to have that proactive impact on the community. Go back to speed trailer placement. We've got a few speed trailers we can bring out. Folks can call in to request those. And then one last thing I'll do is I'll talk about deployment and then Parker in a minute will talk to you about what the results are of traffic measurement devices. So we get pretty regular complaints about speeding in different places in the community. A lot of complaints along 69, Glassford, Hill Road, arterials, right? But we get some complaints in other areas too. in order to intelligently deploy our traffic and patrol teams to enforce the law where there's violations occurring mostly regarding speeding we put this device out that measures speed through over a period of time and then gives us a report so we know the days of the week and the times of the day that we need to be out there enforcing the law so versus just kind of a shotgun response to complaints we've got an intelligence led response uh the bottom part of the slide details the top five collision locations for 2025 no surprises there it's highway 69 and then glassford and quarantine let me talk about crashes and the the data this report's not complete but the the data that we pulled was from comparing june of 24 to excuse me july of 24 to june of 25 and then july 25 to june of 26 so 12 months over 12 months A LITTLE BIT MORE RECENT DATA THAN WHAT CHIEF THEISER WAS TALKING ABOUT EARLIER, WE'VE SEEN A 14.3% VOLUME INCREASE IN COLLISIONS. NOW, A PART OF THAT IS ABSOLUTELY DUE TO SOME OF THE CONSTRUCTION THAT'S GOING ON AROUND TOWN BETWEEN GLASFORD HILL ROAD AND THE FIBER INSTALLATION. BUT ANOTHER PART OF IT HAS CERTAINLY TO DO WITH JUST A VOLUME INCREASE IN CONTINUED BEHAVIOR OF WHAT WE SEE BEFORE AT THE SAME LOCATION. SO WE'RE NOT SEEING ANY SIGNIFICANT CHANGES IN PATTERNS AS FAR AS THAT CONTINUED VIOLATION AT INTERSECTIONS AND THINGS. only real difference we see in that comparison is construction traffic so i do think that'll go down as that construction gets cleared out and then we'll see what the patterns are that we can report next year i believe this will be my last slide and i will turn it over to parker but we're talking about grant funding here our partnership with the Arizona Governor's Office of Highway Safety continues to be strong. You'll see the bolded figure there, 158,000 and change awarded to us fiscal year 25-26 to support the programs as listed there. Happy to report that 26-27, our award is 244,000 and change. And that's gonna fund that additional enforcement efforts that you see listed up there, clicker tickets, speed enforcement, pedestrian, bicycle safety, and so on. Again, I want to thank the Governor's Office of Highway Safety for their support, and I'll turn it over to Mr. Murphy. Thank you, sir. Thank you.

Welcome, Mr. Murphy.

GOING INTO THE ENGINEERING SIDE OF IT, AS ASSISTANT CHIEF MENTIONED, WE DO COLLECT DATA ON ADOT AND TOWN ROADS. WE'VE DEVELOPED A GOOD RELATIONSHIP WITH ADOT'S PERMIT AND ENGINEERING TEAM FOR THEM TO ALLOW US THESE DEPLOYMENTS. THIS WAS THE LATEST ONE THAT WE DID BASED ON A REQUEST FROM PD, WAS OUT 89A NEAR MINGUS WEST. A little bit different from what we collected last year, we actually saw a little bit of an increase in speed. And as you mentioned, this is, we get the data based on the complaint and we give them a timeframe of when people are coming through at those high speeds so they can use their staff effectively. And then moving on to some of the engineering things we've done, this is kind of taking into account the safety action plan and some of the items in there that we've moved forward with. On the left there is our little black box that's called a black cat. That's the radar device. It's very discreet, so people don't really know they're being recorded as they go through, opposed to the tubes, which people see. They might slam on their brakes or stop because they know they're there. So we get a lot of good data out of those black cats compared to the tubes. We also added some new school crossings out on Luce at Mountain View Elementary School. They requested a second yellow crossing at Hoffman. They had one at Katy East. We got those out right before school year, got those going, got them ready for signs, working with the school resource officer, Sergeant Lawrence. Everything seems to be going fine. We also added a new section of sidewalk connecting Katy Circle West at the park entrance to connect to the multi-use path and all the inner workings of the park there.

The open stretch of dirt there, you can see that desire path through there.

We recently completed sidewalk through there. We had a lot of people on Robert between, so that's Lakeshore between Winsong and Victor. We had people closer to Robert Road saying they wanna get, have easier access to the multi-use path, the central core that leads to the dog park. They didn't feel comfortable crossing the street. It's really not a good place to cross in the middle of the street. So this provides more access to that central core for walkers on the path and getting to that dog park area. A couple other things is Jasper Parkway and Copper Hill. There was a little bit of a bump through there. That completed at the end of July. Getting that all fixed. So if you've driven through there, hopefully it's been a lot better experience for everyone. And then going back to our safety action plan, getting our crosswalks well lit and well marked, is we had new streetlight installations at Old Black Canyon Highway and Stone Ridge Drive. It's an all-way stop with two multi-use path crossings. Got that all INSTALLED BEGINNING OF JULY. AND THEN THE NIGHTTIME PICTURE THERE ON THE TOP RIGHT IS VIEWPOINT AND PARK VIEW. THERE'S TWO EXISTING LIGHTS THERE THAT WERE UNDERSIZED. THOSE STREETS ARE BOTH MINOR ARTERIAL ROADWAYS. WE HAD A COMPLAINT FROM A COUPLE RESIDENTS OUT THERE THAT IT WAS TOO DARK AT NIGHT. WE WENT OUT AND INVESTIGATED AND ENDED UP UPGRADING THOSE LIGHTS TO THE CONDITION YOU SEE THERE IN THAT PICTURE. In April, we did the update for our safety action plan. So we're doing annual updates to that. The original data looked at 2014 to 2023. This update looked at the two missing years since we completed that study. We did have one fatal crash in each of those years. And this data is a little bit different from what PD looks at. We're looking at town roads, town controlled only. PD is looking at all their enforcement area, which includes ADOT and 69 and 89A. AND BOTH OF THOSE FATALS WERE BICYCLE COLLISIONS ON VIEWPOINT. PART OF THAT UPDATE INCLUDED SOME OF OUR COMPLETED IMPROVEMENTS SINCE THAT PROJECT. SO WE GOT THE FLASHERS DONE, THE ONE OUT HERE BY THE HIGH SCHOOL RIGHT ACROSS SCOOG AND THE ONE AT ROBERT AND NACE THAT PROVIDES CONNECTION TO THE PARK AND DOG PARK AREA. We also included, did a project for audible push buttons at Glassford and Longwood for the high school and Glassford at Lakeshore kind of for some students that go between those two schools for classes. AND INCLUDED THERE ON THE BOTTOM IS THE CIP UPDATE, KIND OF WHAT'S GOING ON. RIGHT NOW CATTLE TRACK IS ON THERE. THAT'S BEING DONE RIGHT NOW. GLASSWOOD, WE KNOW THAT'S BEING DONE RIGHT NOW. THE LAKE VALLEY MILL AND FILL, THAT WAS ALREADY COMPLETED. AND A COUPLE OTHER THINGS ON THERE AS WE MOVE FORWARD. WE HAVE THE VIEWPOINT MULTI-USE PATH EXTENSION ON THERE THAT'S MOVING FORWARD RIGHT NOW. AND THAT'S ALL I HAD. IF THERE'S ANY QUESTIONS FOR ME.

NEW SPEAKER THANK YOU, SIR. COUNSEL, ANY QUESTIONS, COMMENTS FOR THE TEAM? You guys do a great job. And I mean, we hear it all the time. There's speeders. That's just every community is out there. So we just hope you just keep doing what you're doing. And we know you have the interests of our residents in mind at all times.

Thanks guys. Could you just take a little bit of time to explain? Cause we get so many different phone calls and I exchange emails with you all the time about, you know, requests that we get from residents and, uh and it you know they may ask for a crosswalk or they may ask for a different you know signage or four-way stop the process that you guys have to go through to be able to justify being able to put in that it's not as simple as hey we observe this you know at this particular time and location go you know go put in a four-way stop type thing so maybe just a little bit of there's a lot of analysis has to go into and then the risk to the town which is really the public that if we put in something that didn't have the right justification, what could happen?

Yeah, of course. So for always stops is a good one is there is a set prescribed method of studying when and always stop is warranted. And that's in the manual for uniform traffic control devices, which is adopted. It's a federal document adopted by the state. And so we follow that as the guidelines for those warrants. RECENTLY THAT WAS UPDATED. THE WARRANTS PRETTY MUCH STAY THE SAME. THERE'S SOME FLEXIBILITY IF WE HAVE KNOWLEDGE OR WE HAVE OBSERVATIONS THAT CAN BE A CONTROLLING FACTOR, BUT REALLY WE LOOK AT THE VOLUME, THE CRASHES, THE CONNECTIVITY OF THE ROADWAY, SPEED, THOSE TYPES OF THINGS. SO IT'S NOT AS EASY TO JUST hey, if one crash happens, go put it up. We need to have that crash trend as Chief NAC mentioned to move forward with that. With the crosswalk, the town adopted crosswalk marking guidelines back in 2023, very similar to every jurisdiction in the state. that looks at, does it provide connectivity? Are people actually using it? It's also important to mention is that the state of Arizona is a yield for pedestrian state, it's not a stop for pedestrians. So a car approaching a crosswalk only has to slow down enough to yield to you if there is a risk of collision, they don't have to come to a complete stop. So there are a lot of factors that we look at before we go and add signing, add marking, do anything, really, just to make sure that we are, I don't wanna say covered, but we know we're making the right decision, we're not making a rash decision.

Awesome, thank you, sir. Thank you. Next up, potential e-bike regulation. Bobby, are you taking over on this one? Yes, sir. Welcome.

Thank you, sir. Tracy's under the weather this afternoon, so I'll be presenting the e-bike ordinance discussion for you. For the potential ordinance, we set up a task force with a number of different departments working on it. Why the group was formed is due to the increasing nature and usage of e-bikes on our multi-use paths, trails, everywhere else. So making sure that we're staying ahead of things and ensuring that we're putting out the proper information to our residents and those visitors to our community. We have, since January of 2026, there have been five reported e-bike incidents. There is an increase in public concern regarding the safety. We sat down and reviewed all of the state and municipal regulations for e-bikes and things of that nature around our area, and even looked outside the state. We evaluated the local safety concerns, and then we did community input gathering, and then developed some recommendations for council to consider. For today, we do not have any action, just, excuse me, discussion only. SO AS A GROUP WE REVIEWED THE ARIZONA STATE LAWS, RESEARCHED THE OTHER MUNICIPALITIES, CONDUCTED A SURVEY THAT HAD A LITTLE OVER 200 RESPONSES FROM OUR COMMUNITY MEMBERS, EVALUATED THE ACCIDENT TRENDS, DRAFTED A PROPOSED TOWN CODE THAT IS ATTACHED WITH THIS ITEM, AND THEN REALLY WANTED TO MAKE SURE THAT WE WERE ZEROING IN ON WHAT IS A DEVICE. THERE'S A NUMBER OF DIFFERENT OPPORTUNITIES FOR MOBILITY ASSISTED DEVICES, BICYCLES, SINGLE WHEEL, THREE WHEEL, JUST A NUMBER OF DIFFERENT OPPORTUNITIES. SO WITH IT MAKING SURE THAT WE'RE DEFINING THAT WITHIN THE ORDINANCE THAT WE'RE PUTTING BEFORE YOU FOR DISCUSSION. From our community survey, highlights were that e-bikes are recreational use only, or for the majority of them, the primary usage. Riders use our multi-use paths. 88% of people supporting helmets for those under age 16. And most of our respondents supported a speed limit on our shared use paths. Education and trail etiquette were the recurring theme within there, as well as shared throughout the departments, making sure that everybody knows proper etiquette rules and regs. And then the other common themes that we saw were improvement in rider education, increased the trail etiquette and awareness, installing more signage, improving connectivity and infrastructure, which is one of our huge priorities, as always. distinguishing e-bikes from some of the electric motorcycles that you see around and utilized in other avenues, and then being able to enforce rules. For the draft town code, defining what an e-bike is with the Class 1, 2, and 3, establishing where e-bikes can operate and where they are going to be not able to operate. Class 1 and 2 being on sidewalks, bike lanes, roadways, and multi-use paths, so that's 500 watts or under. And then a class three can only be on bike lanes, roadways, and not on our sidewalks or multi-use paths, which that's already implemented in state law. Posting additional signage to prohibit some of these other devices in our specific areas and making sure that we're continuing on with that educational component. Then we worked a little further into it, making sure that we're establishing those safe riding requirements, reasonable and prudent speeds, no reckless operation, yield the pedestrians, which is that etiquette that we were talking about, audible signal when you're passing, so whenever you hear the bells, when bikers are coming by and you're jogging on our pathways, and then requiring helmets for riders under 18, because safety is paramount even when you're recreating. There is an opportunity to establish violations and penalties, a civil traffic offense being between $25 and $75 and a fine. And then additionally, adding that parental responsibility for minors and required nighttime equipment, having the flasher on the back of the bike so that people can really see you when you're out on it. For our recommendation as a working group, we want to really make it education first. We're not trying to catch people doing something improperly. We want to make sure they know how to operate safely. Then the trail etiquette component, which also plays into signage within our pathways and the established rules. So making sure that our residents know how they can safely operate on our trails, be able to get to and from their house to the recreation spaces and anywhere else in our community, and then preventing that unsafe behavior and not just regulating it. With that, that is the current update, and I know you have a copy of the proposed code that we have put together. Are there any questions that I could answer for you or any additional directive at this time? Questions for Bobby? Councilman?

Obviously one of the problems is speeding, but if they're on multi-use paths, for example, there's no speeding enforcement on those. So how do we clock them?

That's a great question, sir. In our discussions when we had PD and everybody else has been in our working group, that is a common recurring theme where we're not going to be able to have somebody sitting there watching every individual person going down the multi-use paths and trails, but ensuring that we have something within the code that is enforceable if we do decide to add in a violation. If there is an incident, somebody gets hit by an e-bike or two e-bikes run into each other, there's signage posted, there's the etiquette, there's the rules, and that opportunity moving forward.

One other question. With the wattage requirement or limit, what a lot of the kids do is they put larger motors on their bikes and they soup them up and then they take the labels off. How do we deal with that?

That is another fantastic question, sir. Even the labeling on a lot of the bikes is really difficult to see to even begin with. Talking through different opportunities with that educational component and ensuring we're not making it just a infraction-based code is what we want to make sure of. We can't ensure everybody operates properly, but ensuring that the majority of our community knows and they're helping us with that as well. So telling these people that may decide to make an improvement to an e-bike, that that is not allowed. It's illegal. And letting us know if they need to.

I think we should also include, it's very simple and very inexpensive, a requirement for some kind of a signaling device on these bikes, you know, a bell or a horn or something. It can be as simple as one of those little things you push with your thumb or a little squeeze ball or, you know, or an electric one. But so that people, when they're coming up on people, they can give them a little jingle and let them know that they're coming. That's all. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Councilwoman? Go ahead.

So what is the current law right now for bicycles being on the sidewalk versus being in traffic? I don't know. I've never ridden any bike, but if ever I want to get one, I want to know what the rules are.

Yeah, that's a good one. Chief, I'm sorry. Mike has been in all of our meetings as well and with the laws and things like that I don't want him to speak so I'm going to turn that one over to Mike.

I know in other places as long as you're riding with traffic you're allowed to be in traffic even as an unmotorized vehicle on a bicycle if you're doing the speed limit so that's why I was kind of questioning that if we have that here I'm not aware.

Yes, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council, Town Manager. So yes, we've been having many of the discussions reference the drafting of our policy, and we've been reviewing with the Town Attorney the different ramifications that go on. So currently, people can ride bicycles on sidewalks riding bike lanes everything else what we're classifying is the uh class one two and three bicycles for speed and the reason is we're going to have integration between e-bikes and pedestrians on these roadways so that's where the classifications come in because they're they're based on levels of speed so you can ride a bicycle on a sidewalk

And then is there a statutory limit for riding with a helmet, especially if you're going to be in traffic? Like I know on motorcycles there's rules for riding with a helmet if you're a passenger.

Yes, I'm not aware of any laws that require you to wear a bicycle helmet, but there are for motorcycles.

And I'm not up to speed on all that either, so thank you.

Councilman? So I was curious the speed of the level three bike Because I somebody approached me saying people are driving 35 miles an hour on the sidewalk the level three bike would that put them into the street and so the they would be going much slower on the sidewalks and

Councilman, thank you for your question. The class three e-bikes, those are the ones that are 28 miles per hour and over. So yes, that would be slowing people down on our sidewalks, on our multi-use paths, making sure that only class ones, class twos are legally able to be out there as more of a mobility-assisted device or just recreational usage. The class threes are definitely, to Council Member Freund's point, they do have different opportunities to make some improvements to them, which that extends their speed.

And I want to thank you for looking at putting, requiring helmets for children and also getting the flashing lights for nighttime use. I'd like to see those safety measures.

Thank you, ma'am. speaking of safety measures one of the things that i was looking at today was signage at our trailheads and just other crossings one of the things that happened yesterday was i was coming up and literally out of the corner of my eye someone just sped by on a bike now thankfully i saw them but i had to break very hard when you know i'm sure maybe some of us when we were younger we were taught any type of bike, you stop at a crosswalk and you walk your bike across the crosswalk. That's the proper way to do things. I'm just wondering if there can be more yield to oncoming traffic signage that can go up on some of our trailheads as well as crosswalks. And then I would like to see us partner with the school district and some of our charter schools for a just general safety campaign on e-bikes and bikes for that matter.

Vice Mayor, thank you for that feedback. We can absolutely work on those things.

Thank you. Awesome, Bobby. Thank you.

Thank you.

Anything else for the good of the order? Seeing none, hearing none. See you, everyone.