Airport Commission - Regular Meeting

Alright. It's 01:30, so we will call the June 2 meeting of the Transportation Environment Committee to order. We'll start with roll call, please.

Council Member Salas absent. Campos?

Present.

Council Member Ortiz absent. Council Member Foley? Here. Council Member Cohen? Here. Thank you.

Okay. So we have no work plan review items today. So, we'll head straight to our committee reports and today, we're starting with our community forest management plan and urban forestry Annual Report. So go ahead, kick it off.

Thank you Chair, members of the committee. My name is Rick Scott, Assistant Director, DOT. We've got a little bit of a lineup change here today. With me I have Jennifer Sagan, Deputy Director over the Infrastructure Maintenance Division, Sarah Davis, our city forester and Nara Baker, our acting city arborist. And today we're here to talk about our community forest management plan update and provide you some news about what's happened over the past year and a little bit of a plan into what's happening in the year to come. So with that I will hand it off to Jennifer.

Thank you, Rick. Thank you so much. Okay, Jennifer Sagan, Deputy Director, Infrastructure Maintenance. And just I'm going to give us a friendly reminder of what the community forestry management plan is. So it was adopted in February 2022.

It set a new direction for forestry management for the city. And through that, we received funding to add staff in DOT and PRNS and has also established a twelve year pruning cycle. So that means that every tree that we manage would be looked at every twelve years, which was better than it was before. It sounds like a long time, but better than it was before. And then funding was allocated to plant 1,000 trees per year. And the DOT has also added additional funding to plant an additional 1,000, so for a goal of 2,000 trees annually. And then there we go. We went one too far, sorry. Can we go back one? I go back one?

Please press the red one.

We go. Okay, so the core themes of the CFMP as we call it are streamlining governance. So some of the forestry management activities are in DOT and some are in PRNS. And so we've been working together to streamline the governance of the plan, planning building code enforcement, other organizations throughout the city also participate. And then to ensure the sustainability of the urban forest support for diversity, equity and inclusion to make sure that all parts of the city get fair treatment and the canopy gets restored everywhere and then efficient and effective tree management and standardization of planning and development practices.

As I mentioned, there's a lot of departments in the city that touch on the urban forestry and so we're pulling together with a streamlined governance. And to talk about that, I'm going to pass it to Sarah. Push

the button. Hi. My name is Sarah Davis. I'm the city forester. I'm the first one that we've had. I've been here just a little about about two years so far. So I've been charged with implementing this management plan, so I wanna just touch on a couple of those topics. The first one was streamlining governance. Next slide. Oh, no. I'm not there yet. Oh.

Hey. There you go.

Oh, too far.

Damn it. There. Okay. Got it. So we're charged my work group is charged with enforcing parts of section 13 of the municipal code around landscaping.

And part of what goes with that is also enforcing the citywide design standards. So we've taken in about 240 development plans in the last two years. We also are starting to serve as a consultant for the other agencies. So we help parks and recreation as well as planning development code enforcement. Also, one of the things that we've done for streamlining governments is also sharing contracts.

So instead of having each agency go out to bid individually for tree services, we we do it all as one. So instead of having three different bid packages, we're just down to one. So that saves us all a lot of time. Alright. Our next theme area is around sustainability.

We do do tree planting and maintenance of public trees that are in medians and backups. Backups is a term that we use to address the area between the sound walls and the sidewalk, so those are trees that DOT takes care of. So in this last fiscal year, we planted about 2,500 trees between DOT and the parks department, and our goal for this coming up fiscal year is a little bit reduced, down to 1,500, because we have an invasive pest we're gonna have to deal with. So that'll come up in just a moment. And we were able to prune about 3,000 of our public trees.

So that was a big accomplishment. Okay. On to the fun stuff. So continuing on with the idea of sustainability, we were able to work with the federal government with the US Forest Service. And through the inflation reduction act, we were awarded a grant for $5,600,000.

The idea behind the grant was to prune 5,000 trees and then plant another 2,800 trees. And if you're looking at the map, the federal government wants us to work in disadvantaged neighborhoods. So this focuses on what the previous administration called the justice 40 areas. So we put together this great package. We got the award.

It also includes a component of job training for young people. So for our city forest as well as the San Jose Conservation Corps, those two groups are going to be our labor force to implement this grant. Unfortunately, that $5,600,000 was frozen. So we haven't been able to start our project, and we're not sure what's going to happen next. So there's been freezes put in place.

There's been different states have lawsuits in place, so we're just kinda over here hanging out. So as soon as we know if we can use those funds, we'll get started. So on the upside, the parks and recreation department was awarded a million dollars to work on projects in Alum Rock as well as Oberfelt. They have been able to spend some of that money, and then they were notified that their grant was canceled. Just not there anymore.

So the difference is we were getting funding to DOT directly from the federal government, and the Parks Department had a nonprofit pass through. So those are two different methods of funding, so they're a little bit different. And then so we talked about our city forest and the conservation corps. We also got the news that the AmeriCorps funds were being canceled. So our partners have been creative, and they've been able to find ways to continue funding their projects, which we really appreciate.

But, again, if our funding is unfrozen, our labor force may have shrank. Alright. How much more doom and gloom can I give you today? So we're looking at the efficient and effective way that we can maintain the trees that are DOT's responsibility. So this map is an example of how we track our data so that we can easily communicate with our contractors on what type of work we need them to do and where.

I don't know what the colors are. I don't know. So on that map, we have them all color coded for the different types of work that needs to be done to those trees. And, Nara, can you refresh my memory on which the colors mean?

Sure. So the dots in blue are trees being pruned. The brown dots do not need maintenance at this time, and the red dots are removals.

Thank you. Alright, so we have a new problem. So we have an invasive pest that we need to manage. So the invasive shot hole borer and fusarium dieback, did you ever think you're gonna sit in city council chambers and listen to me talk about fungus? Yeah.

I didn't think so. So the county agriculture agriculture commission identified that we have this pest complex. It's an insect and a fungus that work together, and that was found in 2023. So this has the possibility to affect about 15% of all of our street trees. So this is a number that we can put together based on our street tree inventory.

This does not take into account the numbers of trees that are in front yards or backyards. So we're thinking collectively just for our street tree population. We could be looking at asking the residents to pay about $20,000,000 to take care of their trees when this pest moves around. And just to put a little bit more emphasis on this, for example, if you had a large tree in your yard that's affected by this pest complex and you need it to be removed because now it's dangerous, we could be looking at residents paying in upwards of $5,000 to do that type of work, especially because it's difficult because we don't have alleys. So we would be needing to bring in cranes to pick up dead trees over houses.

So that adds to the the cost considerably. So what we're doing right now, I believe we just finished up. We've been surveying the entire city to determine where these infestations are. So all of the yellow dots, those are lightly infested trees. The orange dots are mediumly infested trees, and then the red dots are what we call amplifier trees, so they make more of this insect to infect more trees.

So our plan is to remove the red dots. I believe we had fifty one? Fifty six. Sorry.

I'm sorry, there were only six removals.

Oh, I'm sorry, I misspoke. There's six removals so far, but that doesn't mean next year there's not gonna be more than six. So you can see that it's the infestation is pretty much surrounding our waterways and our riparian corridors, and that's how that's how it's spreading. So we're collecting this data so we can make good decisions on how to manage the problem. Alright.

I'm gonna pass this over to Nara Baker, our interim city arborist. We've been doing some extensive outreach, and I'll leave it up to her to explain what we've done so far.

Thank you, Sarah. So as she mentioned, this was a pest first detected in San Jose a couple of years ago, and we are the first Bay Area city to experience this problem. And so we had to kind of write the path as we were on the path because this pest required immediate action. And in order to support the community members, we knew that we needed to be able to provide immediate notification. And so we created the door hanger that you see on the screen and it's translated into four languages.

And we've just been a resource for the public in how to manage this pest. We have received significant concern and interest from many community groups to learn about the pest because what we've learned through this process is we have many community members that are heavily invested in the preservation and protection of our urban canopy. And so we've attended over 22 outreach events, public meetings, neighborhood meetings and such. And so we've reached over five fifty residents during these presentations and we've received a lot of interested folks. So it's been great to be able to connect with the community.

And we have surveyed 339 routes totaling up to about 50,000 street trees to determine the number of trees that are infested currently. And so we do have right now mapped about 1,400 trees that are low infestations and low infestations only need to be monitored. They do not require treatment. They do not require removal. They just require annual monitoring.

And we have 53 moderate infestations. So these moderate infestations require a trunk injection treatment that kills the beetles and manages the fungus. And then and we we anticipate doing the treatments about every three years and we were able to secure or just reallocate funding from our budget for this year to do the treatment for property owners because this is a very specific treatment that we didn't feel was necessary to burden property owners with because we wanted to respond immediately. And then as Sarah mentioned, have six high infestations that are being removed and we do take every removal very seriously and we take the management of every individual tree in our canopy very seriously. So we wanted to inform the neighbors in the affected areas.

And so this image above is a postcard that we sent to 24,000 residents and we selected this area because this is the area of one mile from all infested cases. We didn't want to do a citywide mailer because we didn't want to be alarmist in neighborhoods for the beetles not yet present. And so we started with just the areas of immediate impact. And the other side of the postcard was translated into three other languages. And I will pass it back to Sarah.

Yeah. So we have a busy fiscal year coming up here. We have a lot to do. So our plan for 2526 is to plant 1,500 trees. We're going to work on our invasive shell hole bore problem.

We're updating portions of our street tree inventories to help us better manage the resource. And because of the current climate, we're going to be looking for new partnerships and new ways to innovatively fund what we would like to do in the city. So with that, we're welcome to any questions you might have.

Alright. Well, thank you so much. Very, this is a very important topic to me. I was seems like we've made a lot of great progress on our on our work on trees in the last few years since we started this conversation three or four years ago. So thank you so much. Do we have any members of the public on this item? Alright. No public comment. Then back to the committee. It looks like, vice mayor Foley.

Thank you for the presentation. And, Sarah, have a tremendous amount of enthusiasm, I appreciate that. Just a question, we have a lot of paving going on, and what goes with the paving is the ADA compliant ramps that are being put in, and in our neighborhoods, they may be, the ADA ramps may be coming in and requiring a tree to be removed. So in my neighborhood, I've had some removed, and then we've saved some. So I'd like to hear how you are proactively addressing retaining our urban canopy where we can in these, particularly in these, ADA compliant corners.

Sure, thank you for the question Vice Mayor. This has been an issue ever since the increased paving has happened throughout the city and you know we pave hundreds of miles per year and there are you know several dozen locations where these conflicts arise and the direction we've given. The good thing is that the pavement team and the arborist team sit 30 yards from each other at the Mayberry Yard. So they talk through each individual instance and the priority is to save the tree wherever possible. So there will be times where there's just not for traffic traffic safety reasons a possible way to preserve a tree that's kind of interacting.

You need to cross slope at a certain percentage to make the ramp appropriately accessible for residents that need that ramp. But I'd say the priority is to preserve that tree whenever possible. I don't know if there's operational any additional insights that would be added or if.

Thank you for the question vice mayor. I have an idea of where this question is coming from.

You know exactly where it's coming from.

Exactly. So as as we start to work more synergistically, we're building those relationships with our coworkers so we can more effectively problem solve and preserve as many trees as we possibly can while still delivering the infrastructure that the community needs.

Thank you. Of course, the ADA compliant ramp is really critical and saving the trees are critical, so the question or what I'm hoping we're doing is proactively when we're going out and looking at the intersections and knowing where we're gonna be putting these ramps that we're noticing trees and then we're bringing out you and the tree specialist to determine whether they can be saved or not. And I know that some can, thank you for working to save the ones in my neighborhood, but they should be saved everywhere that it's possible. I know it's not always possible because there's a lot of different factors that go into play, so thank you for that. Protecting the urban canopy is really important.

We have some areas that are tree deserts. So what are we doing to plant trees where we don't have trees, East San Jose for example?

I can start. So we do as part of the CFMP, we do have a sense as to the tree canopy throughout the entire city. And so in this last year, you look at the trees that have been planted, the majority, the plurality of trees have been planted in districts that are under canopied. So that there is an attempt to find opportunities where trees are needed the most. I think there is an inherent conflict in some of those East Side neighborhoods are quite narrow and there's not a lot of space where you can add actual right of way to add the trees.

And that's kind of couple that with the natural challenges of the fact that residents own that right of way or are responsible for that right of way. So it kind of makes that dynamic difficult if we're installing new trees. To that end that's why we work with PRNS to maximize any open space in the city that's not going to be used for other purposes to get tree plantings in place. So that's I think over the last three or four years that's one thing I'm really proud of what this team has done is really PRNS and DOT are really working together on tree plantings. It's not a separate silo thing anymore.

Wonderful. Thank you very much. That's the end of my questions and I will move acceptance of the report.

Second.

Alright. Thank you. Councilmember Campos.

Thank you, chair. And, thank you to our staff, for this report and the great work that, and the the great progress that has been made. I, could not agree with, chair Cohen's comments about how important it is to make sure tree canopy is increased as vice mayor said throughout the city. I just had a question, know, at the end of the presentation talked about the need for for funding and resources especially at a time where we there we're facing uncertainty and so are there any partnerships that we haven't explored yet that this might be the time and opportunity to do so?

I'll start and then I'll hand it to Sarah because she is in the space and knows a lot of our partners. I will say that people look to us as the city, as the partner a lot of times. So like our relationship with those CF, our relationship with Conservation Corps, we're kind of a big funder of those non profits. And so with the federal government, the challenges we're facing on that grant front, think we will have to be a little bit more creative in working with Cal Fire, kind of our more local partners. But I know Sarah has been already talking to folks. I don't know if you have anything to add Sarah.

Yeah. Sure. So I'm new to San Jose. I've been here for two years, but I've worked in a national space for a while. And a lot of the funding to urban and community forestry comes through the US Forest Service.

So each state gets a formula amount of dollars, and then they distribute it out to their state partners. So in this case, money has been pulled back from CAL FIRE, so they don't necessarily have funding to give it out. So we also have really strong nonprofits that function nationally too that can help us raise money, like American Forest, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, and the Arbor Day Foundation. So there are creative ways that we can accomplish the work that we want to accomplish fairly. We just need to be creative about it.

So sometimes there's special environmental project funds where an individual company, business, whatever, pollutes something, and they have to pay a fine, but they prefer to pour it into a local project to mitigate what they have done environmentally. So we're looking into those as well. So we just have to get creative.

Yeah. I will add also that I don't think you were here for the when this report was initially presented, but when developers are building in the city of San Jose, if they can't preserve trees on-site and they have to remove them, there's a mitigation fee that they pay and that fee pays for the planting and sustainment of a tree for three years. So we do manage funds in addition to our general fund which is new. The general fund expenditures did not exist prior to the CFMP. We only had mitigation fees. Now we also have, we have both. So there are other ways to get trees in the ground. It's just again it also has capacity dealing with invasive shot whole bore and all those things right now.

Thank you. And to your point, to your last point, what does the tracking look like for that developer mitigation?

We have, so we get, there is a little bit of work to track where the fees come from because we have a direction from the council to place 50% of the the fees back in the district where they were collected and then another 50% in canopy deficient areas throughout the city. We don't have that with us right now but we can talk with you offline and show you kind of how that disbursement happens.

I'm glad to hear you know of the already creative solutions that our city is implementing and look forward to more more creative problem solving because that's you know really the situation that we find ourselves in is going back and looking at opportunities that may not have have been opportune in the past, but now hope that our community partners are you know going to step up and hearing from the city about the the need that we have to ensure that we're able advance and maintain progress on these very important goals. I look forward to seeing what some of that creative collaboration looks like. Thank you.

Yeah, Thank you. And I was going to I was probably going to ask a question about those mitigation fees. When we started this a few years ago, we had discovered that a lot of those fees were collected but not really spent. Are we now presumably based on your answer, we are spending those down and using them and beginning to

It work remains a challenge. The fees are it's quite a lot of fees the city does collect. But we are spending it down and when you look at how the trees are being planted throughout the city it is very clearly going to the areas that are canopy deficient. But we'll work to get you, you know, any office that's interested a clear dispersion of how we're following that council.

When you say it's challenging, it sounds like challenging in a good way in that there's so many fees we don't have we can't spend them enough. And what does he mean by challenging?

It's the kind of the tension that's existed for a while in that we have a lot of money that comes in. We have a limited amount of locations that we control as a city. And so that's kind of like this is an effort that's sort of paused for now, but we were looking at like the free tree program to encourage residents to plant these trees in front of their houses possibly using the fees to supplement that work. But again, when we talk about planting on city owned locations, that's backups, it's medians and it's parks. And those areas are not evenly distributed throughout the city.

So that's kind of it's kind of like each and each planting requires a plan. So that's kind of what I'm talking about when I say there's a lot of fees. We've got necessarily like the dollars for planting isn't necessarily the problem. There's a lot of operational things that make this complicated.

So perhaps it's something for us to talk about. Is there a policy question could be can we repurpose some of those fees to help backfill some of these losses we're getting in other places for some of these projects we've

been I think that could be a policy question. Yeah. Okay.

What we were hoping to do was to use the inflation reduction act to plant in one third of the city and then use the mitigation money for the rest of the city so it would be fair and equitable. So it wasn't look it wouldn't look like just one part of town got all the services. So since that funding has been frozen, we're kinda having to rethink how all of that works. And I'd like to point out also that the mitigation fees are unpredictable. So I'll look at plans and track how many fees they need to pay per development, but that development might not get built, or it could take them three years to get to their building permit.

So like right now I kind of think maybe we have money coming in, but I can't confirm that until those building permits are pulled.

And you know there has been in the way past like ten years ago, was a little bit less oversight over how those funds were spent and I think there were concerns that like that's not the purpose of the mitigation fees is specifically to replace trees that are lost in the city. And so if they're going for like admin fees or something or admin costs for an organization or something like that, there is a lot of extra tracking that has to happen to ensure that it's resulting in the desired effect. So I think again the team is relatively new competency and we're trying to roll out again the Freetree program that we've been talking about here a little bit and get more plantings in place. So I don't think it's a long term problem. I just think we've kind of like Sarah said, quarterly we'll get a fee dump and then we're like, oh, well now we got to figure this out.

So it gives you and there's a little bit of tracking time and you only have so much time in the year where you can actually plant these trees. But I do think it's a policy discussion that is worth having.

It's maybe worth having the policy discussion. On the other hand, funding was kind of stuck for a long time. We weren't even spending it at all. And so the fact that we are spending it now and starting to see progress is great. The fact that 2,000 trees being planted in a year is happening and that wasn't happening before, that's real progress. And so just wanna appreciate that. On the on the infestation, a lot of questions were raised by that. Obviously, you answered some through the rest of the slides. But are these at certain point, do symptoms begin to show up on people's trees? Can people notice it if it's happening? Or is it something that you just have to experts have to find?

Yeah, I'll let Nara speak to this. It's complicated and the insect is super, super tiny. It's about the size of a ballpoint pen.

Yeah. Point.

Yeah. Here. Yeah. Yeah.

Thank you, council members. So there are visible signs, but again, the holes that the beetles make in the trees are the exact size of the tip of a ballpoint pen. And so we do have resources on ISHB section of our website that shows some photos of how folks identify what the infestation looks like. And then we also have a reporting tool where residents can fill out a form and say that they suspect an infestation and then our team is able to go out and confirm whether or not the suspected infestation is in fact an infested tree. And all of the infested trees are mapped on the website and all of the pending inspections are also visible on the website and so residents are able to stay up to date in real time via So our

is there a point at which after some amount of time the tree becomes visibly sick or damaged so that that point it's beyond saving, it has to be removed?

It kind of depends. So how many species does it infest? Sixty two?

Seventy eight.

78 different species of trees. So each one of them will exhibit different signs and symptoms, so it kinda depends. You have to know your tree, and make your plan with your tree care professional that's able to definitively identify what's happening.

There is one very visible sign on the majority of infested trees. And so the number one species that we're seeing affected is the non native sycamore tree or the London plain tree, is our number one street tree in San Jose. And the sycamores tend to have a pretty dramatic effect where they'll have a big stain right below where the hole is. And so if you start to see sycamores with big brown stains from the fungus then it's very likely that you have the shot hole borer. But you really have to get up close and really find the ballpoint pen sized hole to confirm that that is in fact shot hole borer staining evidence.

But once a tree is in severe decline from a shot hole borer infestation, the tree will have 150 or more entry holes and start to experience other signs of decline like branch dieback. And so it is obvious once a tree is in advanced decline, but our goal is to catch the infestations as they move from low to moderate so that we can treat those low the moderate infestations so that they never become high infestations.

And at the point at which it gets beyond saving, then the city offers a free permit for its removal at that point?

Correct. The permit to remove the tree is free but the cost of the removal falls to the property owner. And we do have financial hardship assistance if folks qualify that if they qualify then the city will cover the cost but otherwise the property owners are burdened with the cost of the removal and the replacement.

And the notices that you send out are about street trees but if people have trees in their backyard obviously you're not inspecting those so that's kind of up to property owners to sort of monitor themselves. Is that how it works?

Yes, exactly. And that was one of the goals of our postcard was to encourage folks to have their private property trees inspected by a tree care professional.

And can you and I know you said it was in a specific area of the city. You didn't say that in your presentation, but can you tell us what that specific area of the city was so we know?

Yeah. So the the map is live on the website so we can send you a link, but the majority of infestations are in Council District 3 along Coyote Creek. So pretty much from the San Jose Municipal Golf Course down to about Tully Road. But it also spans a little farther east and then barely to the west. But we've had a couple of rare instances in the Guadalupe Creek but primarily it's the neighborhood surrounding Coyote Creek.

Okay. Thank you so much. Alright. If I don't if there's no more questions, we'll we have a motion and a second so let's vote to accept the report. Alright. Prove three zero. Thank you for the presentation and the great work. Alright.

Thank you for your time and concern on this bigger issue. We really appreciate it.

Okay. Rick, you're staying to introduce the next one as well. We're going to move on to our Move San Jose Plan annual report.

All right. Good afternoon, Chair and members of the committee. Rick Scott, Assistant Director, DOT. I'm here today in the box with Jess Zank, Deputy Director for Planning and Project Delivery, Ramses Madhu and Wilson Tam and they're gonna be giving the majority of the presentation. So with that, I will hand it over to Ramses.

Afternoon committee. Ramses Madhu, Division Manager of Planning Policy and Sustainability. We're excited to bring you an update on the Move San Jose plan. And as you may remember, Move San Jose is our citywide transportation plan adopted in August 2022 that really is intended as an umbrella plan to the rest of our transportation planning work establishing overall strategies, key performance indicators, and approaches to the overall perspective on where we're going in our transportation projects. In particular trying to prioritize what we're doing next and making sure we're continuing to get community feedback as we do that.

As adopted with the plan, we ended up with nine goal areas. We're not gonna go through those today. We're really gonna be focusing today on kind of the progress since our last report to you a year ago and talking about how we have operationalized those 36 key performance indicators and how we have developed a deeper system that allows us to do that and do some exciting things with that. So since last year we have been developing what we call our decision support system two point zero, which we are just finishing right now. Our internal version basically launched last month.

And what it does is it takes big disparities. And then it allows us to take that information and then prioritize the 400 plus projects that we have on the books. And that's not even all the projects that DOT already has been asked to do by council. It then allows us to monitor the performance of those projects over time and continues to help us readjust which strategies we should be identifying as things change on the ground. Let's see next yeah and so this is a snapshot of the top 13 of the of the 36 key performance indicators by their topic area on the bottom there, and then by council district there on the left.

And here what we're trying to show is how diversified these are both by topic area as well as by district. And the way that these these inform many different types of decisions. So for example for starting a new plan in an area, we would look at these first and kind of help us understand what are the identified issues. And then if we're looking for particular projects to move forward in a district, let's say a new grant opportunity has come, we'd be looking at these to help drive that decision making. I'm gonna pass it over to Wilson who's gonna talk about a few of the highlighted metric areas.

Thank you Ramses. Wilson Tam, I'm the transportation planning manager for DOT. And I'm going to talk about three of the nine goal areas that Rams has talked about with some key performance indicators data to showcase how DOT have been using these metrics to evaluate projects and prioritize the next investments. So first, we'll focus on a goal area called transportation safety. Similar to the presentation that you heard at the Vision Zero Action Plan last month, the two indicators that we have been tracking are related to to pedestrian and bicyclists killed or severely injured in a crash, as well as pedestrian stress.

Not diving into the details here, but you can tell that despite the gradual decrease in pedestrian and the gradual increase in the total fatalities and severe injuries that happened over the last five years, the number that involved pedestrians and bicyclists are pretty stable. So that means that we have a lot of work to do in order to minimize fatalities and severe injuries involving vulnerable users of the road. Pedestrian stress is a metric related to measuring how stressful it is for pedestrian to walk on the street based on infrastructure quality and traffic conditions, such as are there any presence of street trees similar to what we heard from Sarah in the last item? Are there any street lights? And how far away is the pedestrian to a next available crosswalk?

The next

The difference between the two columns on that stress

Oh yes, definitely. Thank you. So in this chart we showcase a column in blue related to the stress level for the entire district as a whole. So we measure all of the streets in one particular district, whereas the yellow bars represent locations within the district that are what we call the equity priority communities, which are areas with a high concentration of people with low income and people of color. So we are able to identify what is the level of, you know, sidewalk or crosswalk quality when it comes to pedestrian movement in those areas.

So in District 6 And 9, despite their overall district wide stress level being lower than the average oh, sorry. I take it back. District 8 is actually higher than the city wide average, but District 9 is right at the city wide average. But if we just focus on the high concentration of low income and people of color areas, the stress level for pedestrians is actually much higher than citywide average. And these data are very important for us to kind of evaluate where should the next investment be because without this data, we won't be able to tell the difference between low income families in District 9 versus District 9 as a whole.

Great question. Thank you. The next goal area is related to air quality and the amount of driving. So in order to achieve the citywide sustainability goals, we need to increase our adoption of electric vehicles in the city. And right now, the proportion of vehicles, new or used, that are in San Jose is at 6%, and we are we need to achieve roughly 80 to 90% in order to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030.

When it comes to the amount of driving measured in vehicle miles traveled, the amount of VMT per capita has actually gone up over the last few years. And so and it's a it's a testament that, like, despite, you know, we we have moved on from the post pandemic or the pandemic period, we need to improve our infrastructure to encourage people to have more confidence and trust in our transit system and also find other ways to get to their destinations. For example, as you can tell on the right side of the slide, roughly 30% of the trips in a city are less than two miles. There are short trips that people can find other ways to get to the destinations other than driving. But today, as we know, most people drive despite the distance because of the perception of safety on the street today.

Last but not least, I'm going to focus on access and equity. And there are three key performance indicators related to this goal. One is related to the proportion of households that are within proximity to a high quality transit station. High quality is defined as transit routes that are fifteen minutes headway or better. And most households in San Jose are very close to a transit route that is that has high frequency.

However, the amount of time it takes a transit rider to get to a destination is much longer than a driver. Roughly speaking, only one third of the jobs accessible by a thirty minute driving is only reachable by a thirty minute transit trip. So the amount of time it takes a transit rider to get to a destination is almost three times the amount of time it takes a driver to get to their job place. And last but not least, when it comes to equity priority communities, we just define that as areas with high concentration of low income and people of color. The residents spend roughly 4% more of their total income on transportation relative to the citywide average.

So relatively speaking, on average, an average household spend roughly 10% of their income on transportation today in San Jose. But when it comes to low income families and people of color, they spend roughly 14%. So we have a long way to go in terms of how to narrow that equity bridge down. I'll pass it on to Ramses.

Thank you Wilson. Alright, so what is this all coming down to? How does this system of metrics actually improve or change what we in DOT are doing or we in the city are doing around this? As I mentioned, we've built this decision support system too. And what it's doing is taking all of the identified projects, again roughly about 400 plus right now, and that doesn't actually include a few plans that we're still trying to incorporate at the moment, into a single metric system that then for us pops out which ones based on which metrics we're looking at at the moment are most affected.

So you would see these top ranked ones and we'll look at a couple examples here in the next slide. We're seeing projects that really put safety multimodal access etc. On top. There we're looking at those overall general plan and move San Jose goals of reducing single occupancy use and addressing pedestrian stress. Alright other things that we're looking at are things like barriers and particular gaps in our networks.

So what does this look like in terms of projects? The tens of projects that are really floating up to the top in these in these metric system or in this metric system are things like the story Willow Keys Corridor. Alright. This is a very long corridor that is highly car centric right now and its adjustment to a multimodal project bikes, using transit as more key to what you can do on that corridor really starts hitting a lot of these goals. There's other projects there on that.

And then at these neighborhood scale improvements, we're looking at how do you make things safer, how do you think calm things down, and how do you make neighborhoods still connected as well. And you can see them in the Mount Pleasant and San Antonio safety projects. One of the other things you may have caught earlier in the presentation is that a significant part of our trips in San Jose are less than two miles. And that is kind of the I would say the the area or the universe of trips that we really need to be trying to change out of cars. These are trips that in many ways can be taken by other modes.

And so we've been very fortunate to be able to start following that up. You can see the metrics would lead us or lead us to these kinds of projects where we're seeing a lot of bike share expansion. I'm sad that council member Ortiz is not here today because a lot of this goes over to his district where we're really seeing all those purple dots are blue and purple dots are potential and planned stations that this new money coming in is going to do trying to address that metric. And with that, we will take questions.

Alright. Thank you so much for the report. Let's start with public comment please.

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

Thank you for letting me speak. My name is Anne Ferris, and I'm representing the Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Committee. We support and applaud our city's efforts to reduce San Jose's air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions by adopting move San Jose's aggressive climate action goals. Given the financial shortfall that now constraints many of our city's most worthy programs, we remind you of our city council's November 2021 decision to reach an equitable and community wide carbon neutrality by 2030. Our council members also approved the initiative called Pathway to Carbon Neutrality by 2030.

The year 2030 is five years from now. Please enable our city's upcoming budget to fund the programs that have proven and effective strategies for reaching Move San Jose's aggressive climate goals. These are city's Vision Zero program, the annual bike waste program, Better Bike Plan 2025, Transit First, our city's vehicle miles traveled goals, and the programs that maintain our bikeways, trails, and bicycle and pedestrian safety accommodations. These programs not only get us closer to achieving Move San Jose's goals, they enable individuals of all ages and abilities to walk, wheelchair, and bicycle safely within our city. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Jordan Muldown, District 3. Today, I'm here on behalf of myself. So thank you for the report. Always glad for the work that DOT does for us, but always very disappointed to see the VMT number going up. If we wanna do better by our citizens and also for our climate, we need those to be going aggressively down, which means we need to be much more aggressive in how we prioritize our transportation projects and how we fund them.

A couple of things that I wanted to bring up today. On your agenda tomorrow, you're talking about the general plan for your review. And, transportation and land use go hand in hand, so I'm glad to see that the city is thinking about how do we increase the density of housing and the density of jobs. But one thing I would request is maybe also taking a look at the roadway classifications during the four year review, see if we can be more aggressive about more transit priority streets and more bicycle priority streets. In general, again, we wanna be prioritizing the transit first policy, implementing more bus only lanes and other bus and bicycle facilities.

Just thinking about how we fund things and the incentives and disincentives that we give to people. So if you come to City Hall, you can validate your parking, free parking. So you're incentivized to drive to City Hall because you can go round trip for $0. If I wanna take a VTA bus, that's gonna be $5 round trip. If I wanna take one of the bike shares, that's $4 just to unlock the bike, and then 30¢ for every minute until I return it. So we have these weird incentives where we're always incentivizing people to drive, and so we really need to think how can we give monetary incentives for people to take transit and how can we make bike share cheaper for everyone around the city so that people make that choice. Thank you.

Back to the committee.

Alright. Thank you. I don't see other hands up yet so I will just ask the first question. I heard you mention street trees when you were talking about that, I'm drawing blank on the tight

Pedestrian stress.

Pedestrian stress. Was it it was in reference to the fact that the trees is that a positive or a negative? I wasn't quite sure I understood the way you with the way you said

Yeah. Trees is definitely a positive to

the stress. That was a reduction in stress. The more trees, the lower the

stress. Exactly.

Yeah. But it was interesting to me. The District 6 And 9 had the highest overall pedestrian stress. Probably, have the highest street tree coverage in the city. So I'm trying to is there I mean, I guess there's there's other things that correlate to that but can you just help me understand what goes into that pedestrian stress?

Yeah. So correlate yeah. You're right. There are many factors in a in a measure like that. Right? And so it's speeds. It's the ability to cross streets. It's how many accidents and things like that we've seen. Those are the other major factors that you're looking at. Yeah.

Okay, thank you. Councilor Mercampos.

Thank you chair and thank you to our team at DOT for that excellent report. This is a very important topic for residents in my district in South San Jose. I do have just a couple of questions. The first is how how is the city communicating our progress and also our need to our residents because we have made progress and there's still a ways to go and so you know there there will be more resources that are needed and so in advance of that how how are we demonstrating both that we're making progress but that we still you know are in need of more resources and preparing ourselves for those conversations?

Yeah I think that that's quite a complex question right because I think the city's telling its own story is actually something we're not always great at. And in this avenue I'll say we do a few different things. One at an on the ground level, every time we are going into an area to do planning, we're going to spend a lot of time researching and trying to figure out where things are and what folks want and we're going to be reflecting that back to the community. And then as we get through the planning process we're talking about what kind of improvements and needs are required to get to the goals and aspirations laid out by council and the community. Alright so that's kind of like one version of it.

What we're trying to do with this the move San Jose though is create a more direct and open tool that's talking about, hey look this 400 plus projects that we as the city have adopted as necessary or as important or as planned. And now let's go look at what those are in terms of what kinds of metrics those hit. One thing I didn't mention earlier is that one of the next iterations of the decision support system will be an actual public face for it. So the public will be able to see all of these planned projects, look at how they do affect these different metrics, and look at why we might want to prioritize certain projects over others. Right and that kind of I think speaks to a lot of what you're talking about right.

We need the public to be that much more informed as to what is needed, how we see the world, and how we might be able to adjust our actions to meet those kinds of things.

Thank you. That leads into my next question about how we as a city could be more proactive in educating residents about not just our great work and what still needs to be done, as we heard in the public comments, the very clear link between climate resiliency and housing, transit, childcare, right? We see VMT going up more this year and significantly since 2019. I don't think it's a coincidence that we also have more people returning to work that drives people to make additional stops whether it's childcare, schools, etcetera. And so is there any proactive education that the city can do to inform residents?

Yeah, I do think actually Jordan brought up a real opportunity coming up with the four year review of the general plan, where the data and the tool that we have can really inform those public conversations about what is appropriate in different parts of the city, what has synergies or negative ones, as the case may be, and where we have found ourselves and what we can do to change trajectory. I do think also that there's a real opportunity for kind of culture change or building new different habits, etcetera, sometimes we can effectively discuss those things in, say, an area plan when we're out in a specific community trying to get more deep into how different infrastructure projects or programs could really help them unlock a different way of of traveling. But sometimes it's things like VivaCay, like this this Sunday, right, that'll kind of show people, oh, it's it's actually not as far as I thought it was or things like that. But I think you all probably see more opportunities for those discussions than we do, so just, you know, let us know if if there's any times that you'd, you know, think, hey. This is a community that really would like to see, some of this information or would benefit from it.

We'd love to hear.

Thank you. I particularly find conversations such as building more high density housing close to transit corridors leaves residents with a lot of questions, feelings of uncertainty and I'm always communicating how important it is to be thinking about the future and how we're not necessarily building for today but building for tomorrow. And so if thank you for extending the opportunity to work with the council offices on these opportunities. I I think this this last question may be a little difficult to challenge, so but I'll still pose it because, again, what we're talking about is stigma, narrative change, and I think in order for this mobility plan to work, we really do need to start to break down some of those barriers that folks have. Particularly, what I've heard is that the bus service is only for working class families and it's not for folks of higher means and income and that's just not true, but that is definitely a, you know, narrative that is out there and so I'm hoping that in collaboration with transit agencies and partners we can work to reduce that stigma of who benefits and who these services are provided for because if we really want to make headway on something like mobility San Jose or move San Jose, it requires partnership from everybody in our city.

Thank you.

I agree. And just a short commercial to make sure that you get your pass, for anybody listening, you get your pass that is included for all city employees, not just city hall, of course, because it is, I think it there's nothing quite like riding transit to see how, broad the community is actually can be on the bus and to kind of do it yourself.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I just ordered my pass last week. I've only been here a little while. So I'm excited about that. Don't know if this is a question, but Council Member Campos mentioned schools. I think a lot of traffic in our community is is caused by people driving their kids to school. And I, you know, I I I know we have programs. I know we have the walk and roll program, and we have the the Viva, I can't even remember the word.

Viva Squala.

Viva Squala. Should have remembered that. The Viva Squala program and all that that are trying to encourage people. But I feel like we there's more room to do more in that area to make it so that people feel comfortable doing it. And whether that means investing a little more in crossing guards, although I know the crossing guards problem isn't just a question of investment, but of finding staff. When I have conversations with a school district like I did this morning and there's a lot of hoops to go through to get the study so that they know that they're justified to ask for a crossing guard, but then not having it causes fewer people to walk to school, it's a little frustrating.

If anybody would like to talk about organizing a middle school or elementary school bike pool, just come talk to me offline. I think it really, you know, kind of having, like, a supportive community makes a very big difference.

Yeah. Okay. Is there a motion to accept this report?

Move to accept the report.

Second. Alright. There's a motion and a second. I don't see any more hands, so let's vote. Alright, that motion carries three zero. Alright, we're on to item three which is the Diridon Station update. So, oh, it looks like we got the same folks holding on for that one. So go ahead and kick us off.

That's right. Good afternoon Chair, members of the committee. Rick Scott, Assistant Director, DOT. This is the Aggregated Diradan Station Alternative. And we have Jess Zeng here in the box again and Ramses Madhu, our division manager. And Ramses is gonna lead the presentation. So I will hand it over to him.

Thank you Rick. Again, Ramses Madhu, division manager planning policy and sustainability. Really happy to bring you another update on the great work that's going on with the Diradan station. We last brought this to you in August at a study session. And since then, a lot of really intense staff work has happened.

And importantly, the steering committee's meeting last month, did, produce a decision that we're hoping council will, would like to support. Reminding everybody, you know, this is a very difficult long term project with many partners involved and so we always bring our goals back to the front. We always want to make sure we're focused on what we're trying to get done here and what those goals are. Since the current process, we call it the business plan, business case development process, built off earlier visioning work and went through multiple steps bringing us from some initial assessment down through the refinement of different alternatives and we are now at a single alternative that we are looking to regress into environmental clearance. The work that staff has done, we're kind of boiling it down into two slides.

There are literally hundreds of slides we have produced to try to get here, but to try to tell this story most succinctly. We came down in our last piece of work to two different alternatives, The at grade alternative which left tracks at grade and built the station underneath those tracks and the elevated alternative which elevated the tracks and built the station underneath that elevated space. And in the end we can boil down all that work down to these major points. The at grade, know early warning here, generally where we're going here, looks like it's gonna take a significant amount of less time. And you can imagine how difficult it is and how complex it is to build a station around moving active train systems.

It's going to cost a great deal more allowing us hopefully to do it faster and actually get it done. And it reduces the amount of encroachment into others land whether that be PG and E's land or the neighborhood in particular which we really thought was important. But when it really came down to it, there was a lot of really great things about the elevated that we aren't discussing here. But when it came down to it, there's a fatal flaw. The elevated station design did not allow us to get into Seamoff.

Seamoff is the maintenance facility for Caltrain just north of station. If you remember it's just behind where the Coleman Shopping Center is. There's basically no way without adding many many years and potentially billions in cost to access that maintenance facility which kind of killed our ability to really develop that project further. Some other key comparison points that council in particular has been interested in is as we develop this project are what's going on with historic station. Historic station in both cases is being preserved in different ways, but generally actually staying where it is, but in the at grade option that we are proposing to move forward with, we're building an entire layer underneath.

Driving, keeping that the actual building itself there and incorporating it, whereas in the elevated was staying on the ground but still being incorporated. Importantly as we all are following with PG and E right now and the amount of power we're gonna need downtown, the elevated was significantly encroaching on the current substation that's right next to the station whereas at grade doesn't encroach on the land itself though there are still some construction buffers we need to work out. The next three are all crossings. And part of the story that we think is very important for the city is the development of what we call the program of projects. Jess will go into that in more depth later.

But basically really needed to make sure that these important crossings for the city were dealt in the right way and continued to be dealt with within the project. The elevated basically built itself over all these roads and created flat crossings for them except for West Virginia. It looked like we might still have to close it just because of the way that the trail the rail had to come back down at that end of the construction. But yeah in Azareas' case it does look like we're gonna need to go underneath and build the road going underneath the crossing, and then the elevator would have allowed that to go flat. With that, I'm gonna pass it off to Jess to talk about some more details.

Great, thank you. So at that August study session, we were really kicking off community engagement, right, making sure that the council had an update about the project before we took the two alternatives out to the community and did the constructability work that Rams has just discussed. In the fall, during that outreach, fall and winter, we heard a lot of positive and negative feedback about each of the alternatives. In general, people were really excited about the revised station experience in both cases. Probably the number one question we got was when is this actually going to start?

And people were pretty excited about it. So we disappointed some people with our answers, unfortunately. But generally, people liked the reuse of the historic station, especially in the at grade where because we're going underneath the existing station and tracks, you really kind of almost elevate the station. They also are feeling pretty practical these days. They liked the lower cost and they definitely, especially current transit users, liked the less construction impact and timeline.

People definitely are concerned about property impacts, especially near those train crossings at Osiray, West Virginia and near Stockton, which we'll talk about more. And they also don't like the quality of the access across the tracks as much in the at grade. So that's really where we've been focusing our time on those two. On the elevated, beyond what I've already said, they did like how the neighborhoods are really reconnected, and so that's also been a focus, how much can we get that experience in the at grade alternative. And they did give us some negative feedback on the elevated as well, though, specifically about another visual barrier, know, 15 to 20 feet up above the roadway, and concerns about whether we could collectively maintain and or program that new space under the tracks sufficiently.

So Ramses mentioned the grade crossings in the overview. Right? There are many places where the tracks pass either above or below or at the train train and road interfaces today. The two along this corridor that are not separated today are West Virginia in the Gregory Plaza neighborhood and Oser Ray, just north of 280. These crossings are where we've spent a considerable amount of time and energy as is very appropriate because these are the neighborhoods that will see most of the increased train traffic with the station and related projects.

They are very different crossings. West Virginia is very much a neighborhood street with less than 700 daily car trips per day, whereas Arthur Ray carries more than 8,000 trips on an an average day and is a key East West connector. So in conclusion, Ramses was mentioning we have recommended to the steering committee, and they have approved, and we're bringing to you today and to council next week, a recommendation to approve an at grade station alternative and to have that accompanied by a program of projects that will all go into environmental review together. A visual to help make sense of that. First, this is what we mean when we say the station at a high level.

We mean the tracks and the platforms, of course. They are rebuilt to allow for high speed rail, to allow a better system for Caltrain and the other providers, ACE, Capital Corridor, Amtrak, and even Union Pacific. They do involve the use of the historic depot. They involve new plazas on both the west and the east of the station, part of the entrance experience. They involve improved bus pickup and drop off facilities.

They include that concourse that you've seen in the past that really connects all these services together very intuitively, including the light rail, which is brought to the forefront right in line with the historic depot so that those transfers are much simpler and quicker than they are today. And it also includes a direct connection between the BART system and the heavy rail station. It also includes inherent to those track changes, crossing improvements all the way from Julian South to past San Fernando. And then on that topic, here's what the program elements are. Now these are made distinct because they are not physically necessary to occur at the exact same time as the station.

And so they are from south to north, closure of the roadway at West Virginia and the creation of a bike ped connection underneath it that allows for less noise in the neighborhood, greater safety, improving quality of life as a whole. Number four at Ausarray there, a full grade crossing that similarly is about prioritizing noise reduction and safety improvements and allowing those East West connections to continue to be made. The San Carlos Bridge, number two there, which we know needs to be rebuilt because it is functionally obsolescent at this point. Number five is at Park Avenue where the roadway is quite overbuilt, quite daunting, high levels of pedestrian stress going back to the the last conversation. And then at Stockton in the Alameda, because the station is much larger and the tracks and platforms are wider there, that area of Stockton and the Alameda is, at a minimum, really regraded and realigned.

So there's a lot of work to be done there. So we think it's very important for those as well as for strategic noise and sound barriers to be incorporated into this program of projects so that they move together and people have access to a great station, but also the local residents don't suffer as a result of this regional and statewide project. Our next steps, quickly, is that since the steering committee has reviewed it, we are taking this to all of our bodies to make sure that we get any additional feedback and hopefully concurrence. Caltrain has already led a procurement, and when we get approvals, we'll select and award an environmental consultant to do the next work. And we do have follow-up work, including community engagement, construction impact strategies and phasing.

Essentially, that means we're going to try to find a way to make impactful and shorter on the construction front. We need to also start thinking about how we want to proceed with project delivery, whether this will be a traditional design bid build type of project because that will inform how much work is done by who over the course of the next time frame. And then our environmental consultants will really define the project in environmental terms, take that out to the community to kick off the environmental review. And we are here for your questions and discussion.

Okay, thank you so much. Do we have any members of the public on this item?

Yes. We have three requests to speak. Anne, Roland, and Jordan, please make your way down to the podium.

Anne Ferris again. Speaking on behalf of the Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Committee. We support our city's plan for Dureden Station. We look forward to and are very excited about this project. But, given the uncertainty and budget constraints, we ask that you do whatever is needed to ensure that these remain part of the project.

Please ensure the key elements of this plan include bike lanes, a shared use path, and ensure interaction with the adjacent roads favors vulnerable roadway users in alignment with vision zero goals. If this is isn't already being done, we ask that the reimaging Santa Clara Street initiative coordinated with VTA on the timeline construction and planning of the Diridon Station. Given that the Diridon Station will connect commuters to Amtrak, Caltrain, VTA options, and there is local, regional, and statewide support for mode shift, please include bicycle parking facilities to serve the many hundreds of riders now and the thousands we expect in the future. We respectfully request that every effort be made to connect bikeways from our city's most traveled streets to Derrida Station as well as BART's new stations and to the existing VTA transit centers, especially those on the San Jose East Side and other underserved areas. Because Duradan Station is the heart of San Jose's downtown and will connect commuters to Amtrak, Caltrain, VTA, we have a golden opportunity to convert motorists now from the stressful bumper to bumper work commutes to a greener transportation option that will help our city achieve Move San Jose and Climate Smart goals.

And to do this, the station must be built for people, not for cars. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Good afternoon, chair Cohen, council members. Thank you for the opportunity. I'm not one of the neighbors, but hopefully, I will still be alive when this station opens and I will be able to use it. And could we back up to slide nine, please? My concern as a user is seamlessness.

It's how we're going to be doing shifting with all this mode of transportation. The issue that you've got right now okay, is that all these modes are all over the place. The light rail is on San Fernando. Believe it or not, the buses have moved to the other side of Santa Clara. Is actually okay as it is now.

This just doesn't work. And the reason is, is that you have lost a dimension. And there is another elevated, which is actually halfway between this old high speed rail, viaduct, whatever, and the so called grade, when they're basically taking the entire area between Barrack, Obama Boulevard and Cahill and regrading the whole the entire thing in the slope. That's what they're doing. There is no need for that. How much time? Got left. Okay. So I will be back at the Cauldrean board meeting. And what happened here is very clear.

There are three sets of consultants. There's the VGA consultants, which is Kingly Hall and MacDonald. And then there is obviously the high speed rail consultants. But the consultants which are most important to us were Googles, the Downtown West people. They had this totally figured out. Not only that, right now, they are the people who are designing and building the high speed rail station in Central Valley.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Jordan Muldown, District 3. I'm really excited for this project. I went to a bunch of the Deardon Station meetings, looked at all the models. I really liked the at grade design, nicer view of the historic station, lower cost and lower amount of time to build it, definitely also very attractive. So yeah, I'm looking forward to this.

Just some thoughts on my mind. Really excited about the bike and pedestrian accessibility that this will create. The Under San Fernando Crossing is I'm really looking forward to that. And I know there's some challenges with the grade of some of the slopes of the bike ped crossings in this model, but I know DOT has some innovative ideas for how to make that better, so I'm really excited for that. Hopefully, the sequel process won't take too long.

I know there's some state bills in the legislature right now to maybe make sequel easier for transit projects, so I hope that the city will be involved in advocating for those types of bills so that we can get this approved and start construction sooner rather than later. I have some concerns about the transition between the different modes, as the previous speaker mentioned, specifically between any of the buses that are going westbound and the train station, because you're gonna have to cross Santa Clara Street in order to get off your bus and into the station or vice versa. So I hope as we continue the community engagement and design process that we'll look for ways to make it easier for pedestrians to cross the street to get between the buses and the trains. And there's also a question I had from a fellow transit advocate who's looking at the slides from one of the other meetings, and it looked like there was a period of time where there wouldn't be light rail tracks available at Diarradon, so I'm curious what the transition plan looks like for light rail at that station. Thank you.

Back to the committee.

Okay. Well, thank you so much. As I serve on the Diridon, planning committee, I I've seen this several times, so I I not gonna ask any questions except just to say that I still have my skepticism about the eventual availability of funding to build this vision, which I think is great, but I'm I'm not yet sold that it's a a realistic plan. I understand why we have to continue preparing and hopefully, you know, the vision and someday in the future for Dearden being this Grand Central Station in in this area will be will come to fruition. Any questions from members of the committee or a motion to accept the report?

Move approval to accept the report and cross reference to counsel. Second.

Alright. We have a motion and a second. Thanks for the presentation. Let's vote. Alright. That motion carries three zero, and we will be hearing this, oh, on the meeting where we don't have anything else going on on June 10. Alright. We will move on to the last item on the agenda today, our Environmental Utility Services and Transportation Aviation Services Modernization Status Reports.

Good afternoon committee. My name is Eric Tierralla Jensen. I'm joined in the box by Jennifer Pioze and department leadership in the audience from the energy department, environmental services department, airport and department of transportation. And so today we are here to share our final update for the city's CSA performance modernization specifically for the two CSAs that fall under this committee for environmental utility services and transportation aviation services. So as the committee knows, the city uses a performance based budget as required by city Council Policy one-eighteen.

And so what we've done with this project is made sure that we could provide the council and the community and the administration with the most meaningful measures possible for decision making. Also core to the mission of this initiative is making sure that we can measure both outcomes and performance and so you'll see that reflected in the presentation today. We know that performance management is important to the council administration and so we're really grateful to have gone through this CSA performance modernization work. And I will turn it over to Jennifer to continue with the presentation.

Thank you, Eric.

Somewhere.

So on the administrative side, we're gonna talk a little bit about, the CSAs we're looking at here. So this project serves as a way to provide transparency into what the city uses its public resources to accomplish. In total, the measures identified for both the environmental and utility services and transportation aviation services, CSAs, report on the budgets for four departments and 21 core services. In terms of the budget you see on the screen from fiscal year twenty four twenty five, the CSAs represent roughly 20% of the city's budgeted workforce. We always like to show, by the numbers to give an idea of what, these folks are working on in our two CSAs.

So in the performance modernization work, we aim to reflect the identity of each CSA. For environmental and utility services and transportation and aviation services, these CSAs run vital utility and transportation infrastructure while protecting the environment. So first, we'll look at each profile that shows stories of impact and opportunity. For environmental and utility services CSA, customers save over $40,000,000 compared to PG and E, to serving approximately 340,000 residences for recycling and garbage services. And for transportation and aviation services, CSA, we have over a 160,000 airplane takeoffs and landings and over 3,400 pothole repairs.

So I'll now share the updated CSA structures, which will be reported in the operating budget that we are working through now. For the modernization project, we aim to systematically align both the qualitative and quantitative elements within the CSA structure to monitor and evaluate our services. We do this by assessing the existing CSA mission, outcomes, and strategic goals, and we propose updates, which you will see before you today. These draft updates are used to guide the creation of community indicators and propose updated CSA and core service performance measures and updated activity and workload highlights, which are outputs. The performance measures at the CSA and core service level, they measure how well we did something, and activity and workload highlights at the core service level measure how much of something that we did.

So it's like a measurement of scale. New this year are community indicators, which measure what impact we have on the community, and these can be disaggregated in some manner, usually by race and ethnicity or geographical location. The community indicator dashboards for both of these CSAs are published in the manager's budget addendum number 30, which was just released. The city may not be wholly responsible for community indicators, like high school graduation rates is my favorite example. We do play a part in the success of our students, but we are not wholly responsible.

The hope is that these updated tools, which we'll look at today, will more accurately measure the success of the department's service delivery and create tools to have more informed discussions about said service delivery and celebrate successes, as well as identify any resource gaps, whether that be things like staffing or budget, and how they can be addressed. And ultimately, we want to move the organization from doing performance measurement into performance management, whereby we use these tools in storytelling and to guide for storytelling and guide changes in program delivery, support data and reporting, and justify our resource allocations. So we're here. We're gonna be looking at our updated environmental and utility services CSA mission, outcomes, and strategic goals, and these are on the screen. So the mission was updated to read, provide excellent, affordable, and sustainable utility services, and this is supported by four outcomes.

First of which is utility services that protect the public health and the environment. The second, affordable, effective utilities with excellent customer care. Third, sustainable utility systems that meet future needs. And fourth, protected, restored, and maintained environment. And I won't read through the strategic goals that are on the screen, but outcomes are supported by the strategic goals.

And these strategic goals specifically outline our role as a city, and they are supported by performance measures, which we'll look at shortly, that show the specific actions we're taking and what we're measuring to show how well we're doing. So for environmental and utility services CSA, we have our community indicators organized under those four outcomes. Under our first outcome, measuring the well-being of our community, We have tap water resident perception. This is a new community opinion survey question that we wanna add to assess our residents' perception of how safe their drinking water is. And the second is average number of cooling degree days and heating degree days, and this is basically an indicator of how often do you have to turn on your heater or your air conditioner to be able to stay comfortable in your home and the relationship to our Climate Smart and other, programs.

I'm not gonna read through the rest of them, but these are the themes that you'll see through, our community indicators. And these include things like our greenhouse gas emissions, which we've been reporting on for, many years, and, electric vehicle adoption. Now we'll look at our CSA performance measures for environmental and utility services. So these are also organized under outcome. And the main we have all of the different performance measures, some that have more, some have less, and this indicates an opportunity for growth over time.

And this is true for all of our CSAs as our needs change and, what we wanna measure, but this is measuring how well we are doing at a a more collaborative state. And so our CSA performance measures show the collaboration between the different departments and their core services to achieve these ultimate goals. Some examples here are customer energy savings, landfill waste diversion, and sanitary sewer overflows. And these are, all in the attached memo as well as in the proposed operating budget, which is in circulation now. So we're gonna move on to transportation aviation services overview.

So the mission actually has not changed. They felt strongly that this was still a very workable mission and showed the collaboration between the team, so EAS. And then this is supported by three outcomes. The first is effective and equitable transportation that promote a strong economy. The second, users have a positive, reliable, and efficient experience.

And the third, safe and secure transportation system that enhances community livability. And this is supported by these strategic goals, which again are our role as a city to, achieving these outcomes as well as the mission. And so the community indicators for transportation and aviation are, again, underneath these three outcomes, and I'll highlight a couple. Vehicle miles traveled is an indicator. Additional time required to take transit compared to a private vehicle, which is very relevant to an item earlier today, as well as traffic fatalities and injuries.

On the CSA performance measure side, these are also organized by outcome, measuring how well the CSA is collaborating toward these metrics we have on the screen, where collaboration and then some of them are standalone, but a couple that I'll point out are, like, our bite network completion rate, our pavement condition index, and the passenger perception of airport satisfaction. And all this leads to the recommendation where we are asking you to accept the status report on the performance modernization updates for environmental and utility services as well as transportation aviation services, city service areas, including the mission, the outcomes, the strategic goals, community indicators, performance measures, and activity markup highlights. And just a couple next steps. So the all of this has been published in the proposed operating budget that is available online and will continue to be iterated on through the budget process, in the study sessions that have already passed. And I do want to have a moment of appreciation for all of our partnerships.

So we have some of our partners in the audience today from environmental and utility services as well as transportation and aviation, and all of their staff were very welcoming and helpful through this process. And we also work with office of racial and social equity, the budget office, and our IT department who are all, important partners for this work. And with that, we are available for questions. Thank you.

Alright, well thank you for that report. There's a lot in this, so it's hard for me to distill down to any specific questions because there's just a lot of different areas, a lot of measures, appreciate the thought that went into developing this new measures. And, we'll start with public comment.

There are no requests to speak.

Okay. Well, back to the committee. Do we have any

requests to speak?

If I could, that was a fabulous presentation, and I think this is how we're going to start seeing presentations of the focus areas as they come to our various committees. This was really impressive, a lot of good detail, so thank you very much for that. I don't have any questions, but I will move acceptance of the report.

Alright. There's a motion and a second. I just before we vote, I was gonna just ask one more question. So going forward, the idea is that at at some regular interval, this committee will receive then the, metrics in this structure we'll be seeing how we're doing for these measures. What's the plan going forward for how we get the reports?

Thank you for the question council members. So there are a couple different performance management tools that the city uses. So the updates today were primarily for the operating budget which is more of an annual tool for the city service areas across the organization. The other piece that I would mention is the focus area scorecard. So I believe we received direction to explore bringing those performance measures and outcome measures to committees on a quarterly or biannual basis with some cross references to the full council.

And so there is a relationship between the operating budget and the focus areas. The smaller subset, more focus for the focus areas as it implies and so this committee can expect to receive the focus area scorecards on a frequent basis.

Okay. Thank you so much. Let's vote. Alright. Report is accepted by vote of three to zero. So we are on end of our agenda and on to open forum.

We have two requests to speak. James Campbell and Jordan, please make your way down to the podium.

Jordan Muldale, District 3. As was mentioned earlier, Viva is on Sunday going through a bunch of council districts. So I hope everyone will come out on Sunday and enjoy Viva Caye and see how many people are excited when you give them a safe place to walk, bike, and roll. And in the spirit of Move San Jose, hope you'll consider taking transit or biking or walking to Viva Calle. Feel free to reach out if you'd like any suggestions for how to get there.

And then I've heard that the various council committees will be meeting less frequently next year, which is saddening, but I understand why that why you guys might wanna do that. I hope that your climate and your Move San Jose reports will still continue to come back frequently. You know, At least once a year, it would be nice to hear Move San Jose and Climate. Hopefully, at least every six to eight months would be good. And Move San Jose and Climate are deeply related.

Maybe it even makes sense to put those all into one giant presentation. But I hope you guys will continue to be very aggressive about hitting our very aggressive move San Jose targets. I'll keep it at that, thank you.

Thank you, next speaker.

I just wanted to bring up a couple of concerns that I have. All three are related to the previous topics that were discussed today. One is trash everywhere. I mean there's trash literally everywhere in the city. I mean mainly in East Side San Jose, District 4, District 5.

It's getting overwhelming. Recently I've been doing it in Morgan Hill, Gilroy, San Jose and even San Francisco. Just literally going around picking up trash with a trash picker upper and I've noticed some differences. I've noticed that it's actually making improvements like I've noticed the streets are cleaner, those areas are a little bit cleaner. And I think adopt a street type of program would be very beneficial because I've noticed that also residents and even homeless individuals have actually after I've left the sticks on the trash cans, they've actually I've seen people use them.

I've seen people like start to clean up and be aware of the trash everywhere. And even people thanking me and just like just it's really good to see but at the same time there's just so much trash. Mean I just I've been noticing it more and more and I just hope that in the future more investments, more resources are given to like save our forests and the environmental agencies who are going to be cleaning up all of the trash everywhere. And and also like leaf blowers and and it just throws trash on other people's property and it's just a waste of of

Back to the committee.

Okay. Thank you so much. We are adjourned at 03:11PM.