Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

It is 4.30 p.m., and I'm calling this meeting of the Design Review and Preservation Board to order. Recording secretary, please call roll.

Thank you, Chair. Board Member Anderson?

Here.

Board Member Bisbee?

Present.

Board Member Ennis? Present. Board Member Fagent?

Present.

Vice Chair Sharon?

Present.

Chair Jones-Carter?

Here.

Let the record reflect that all members are present.

Item two, we have none. Item three, approval of minutes. Does anyone have any changes to the minutes?

No.

Seeing none, let the record reflect the minutes for June 4th, 2026 are approved as amended. According to Secretary, do we have any public comment on item 3.1, approval of minutes?

If you are in chambers and would like to make a comment on this item, please make your way to the podium. Seeing no one, Chair.

I'll close public comment on approval of minutes. Item four, public comment, none agenda matters. We are now taking public comment on item number four, non-agenda matters. This is the time when any person may address the Board on matters not listed on this agenda, but which are within the subject matter jurisdiction of this Board. Recording Secretary, can you please provide instructions to the public?

If you are in chambers and would like to make a comment on this item, please make your way to the podium. We have no comments, Chair.

I will close public comment on non-agenda matters. Item five, board business. Statement of Purpose. The Design Review and Preservation Board services the City's authority on design review and historic cultural preservation. The Board is charged with considering the location, design, site plan configuration, and the overall effect of proposed projects upon surrounding properties and the City in general. as well as considering proposed alterations to properties within the city's preservations districts and designated landmarks the board shall compare proposed projects to the general plan any applicable specific plan applicable zoning code standards and requirements consistency of the project within the city's design guidelines, architectural criteria for special areas, the Secretary of the Interior's statement for the treatment of historic properties, and other applicable city and state requirements. Before we proceed, I'd like to briefly go over the Brown Act meeting procedures. As each item is introduced, the public will have an opportunity to speak during the public comment or public hearing portion for that item. Each speaker may comment once per item for up to three minutes. During the public comment period, the board does not engage in back and forth discussions with speakers. After everyone who wishes to speak has had an opportunity to do so, I, as a chair, will close the public comment period for that item. Once public comment is closed, there will not be another opportunity for comments or questions from the public on that same item. Any further discussion or deliberation will be limited to the board members, staff, and project applicants. Item 5.2, board member reports. Are there any board member reports? No, thank you. I will close public comment on Board Member Report. Item 5.3, we have none. Item 6, department reports. I would like to ask staff if there are any department reports.

Thank you, Chair Jones-Carter, members of the board. I'm Jessica Jones, Deputy Director of Planning. I'm just letting you know that I am filling in as your liaison today. Monet Chikali is out of the office, so you have me for today. And I just wanted to quickly remind the board that we do have one vacant seat for your board. It is the seat that would be filled by a historian, historic architect, or archaeologist, so if anybody knows anybody, please, if you could help us get the word out, we will be doing more outreach on our end as well, but just wanted to put that reminder out there so we can hopefully get a full board here soon. And that's all.

Thank you. I'd like to open public comment on this item.

If you are in chambers and would like to make a comment on this item, please make your way to the podium. Seeing no one, Chair.

I would like to close public comment on item six, department reports. Item seven, statements of abstention or recusal by board members. Are there any board members absent or recusals on item 9.1? Thank you. I don't believe I have to ask every single one on this. Item eight, we have none. Item nine, scheduled items. We are moving on to our sole scheduled item, transportation impact analysis requirements, purpose limitations and considerations for updating local guidelines. This item will be presented by Dan Hennessy, Director of Transportation for Public Works.

Thank you, Chair Jones-Carter.

Could you move a little closer to the mic? Yes, I can. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you for the opportunity to be here. Dan Hennessy, Transportation Public Works Director. In discussing some of our recent projects and TIA analyses and requested representation at both this board and the Planning Commission, discussion with the leadership team of the Planning Commission and your chair led us to believe that it might be a good opportunity to do an overview of what these documents do and don't do, and how we as staff use them. So this is about a 15 minute presentation to give that oversight. And during this, we'll talk about the role of transportation impact analyses, both the strengths and limitations of those studies, how they influence land use and development patterns, and then also how they can be in alignment or out of alignment with larger city goals. And really the key question that we come back to is do these analyses provide any meaningful information without creating unnecessary burdens on staff, on development applicants, on the public in terms of understanding them? So what is a TIA? It is frequently seen to be a forecasting tool to determine the changes in transportation movement, both for the development itself and the nearby transportation network. It's evaluating the existing conditions, changes to those conditions with presumed demand. We are now required in the state of California to be analyzing not just transportation or traffic operations, but also vehicle miles traveled as a proxy for environmental impacts related to transportation. Local requirements can vary, but some Jurisdictions require access and circulation review, both on the current network as is, including any planned changes related to the infrastructure. And so there's a process that both staff and applicants are clear about to move through one of these analyses. There has been an evolution, though, in this process. If you look on the left side of this slide, and starting with the analyze vehicle travel time portion, that is typically how these analyses are done. You start by assessing the impact to the transportation network. And historically, the transportation network has assumed to be the vehicle transportation network. In particular, delay at the local level happens at intersections. So at stop signs or at traffic signals, we have traffic control that affects the throughput of vehicles. We do analysis at those locations to determine if there's an impact based on our own understanding and thresholds for what determines an impact. The mitigation to move past those impacts is frequently widening intersections. That is how we increase capacity at signalized intersections. At unsignalized intersections, a way to increase capacity is to signalize them also. So there are a couple of different opportunities to change operations, but frequently, especially at built-out signalized intersections, the mitigation is to widen them. We know from research over the last two decades that widening transportation facilities, intersections, roadway segments, freeways induces more demand. If I've created a better situation that is going to attract more people to that, both in terms of diverting traffic from other routes, but also generating new traffic out of the blue. that is a proven effect of additional vehicle capacity. And so we get into this cycle of kind of always chasing ourselves and it becomes an unsolvable problem. The current approach has evolved so that we're still doing this conventional analysis frequently, but we are also observing it within the context of the environmental impacts of those decisions, but also our other mobility goals. We're not only serving peak hour vehicle traffic, we are also looking at pedestrian, bicycle, and transit, travel, and we are looking at the impact of safety outcomes on these decisions. So understanding these potential changes in those contexts provides different answers than the previous approach did. These analyses can be valuable because, like I mentioned, they do provide a consistent evaluation framework, so everybody's on the same page from the start. We've got our guidelines written down. The applicant will still need to go through an analysis process to determine what the impacts are, but they know what that process is from day one when they are considering a potential development. It also does establish a methodology for estimating project travel demand, and collaboratively between us and the applicant, we determine based on the location, the transportation network, and that demand, how much of the transportation network we wanna review. And then as we've done that, the analysis continues and we determine those impacts. So that becomes predictable in terms of we're limited to these locations that we've identified with respect to the scope of the study. And the decision making can be traced back from step one to step 200 in terms of how we got to where we got. So these are all steps in helping to inform our judgment. It does not replace it. This is all contextual information. They are excellent as screening tools, as network planning tools, as the framework for considering transportation improvements, for identifying potential transportation improvements, for generating discussion among staff about what impacts are and are not acceptable and what mitigating those impacts would mean in terms of some of our other transportation and land use goals. But they are, again, done in context and as an input to decision making. In the coming slides, we're gonna talk about how these are not precise forecasts, despite reports saying this will generate 79 peak hour trips and the average intersection delay is 27.6 seconds per vehicle. Those are numbers that have wide air bars attached to them. So as a result of imprecise forecasts, they are not guarantees of future conditions, nor should they be the sole basis for making any decisions related to the project. There are a number of assumptions that go into determining what the estimated travel demand for a new development would be. The development itself is just one piece, but surrounding population growth, other changes to the transportation network, changing travel behavior, we've seen that a lot over the last 10 years, and particularly during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. And economic conditions at any given time, both at any different scale, nationally, state, regionally, citywide, all affect this. And the impact of these relative to each other change. So some pieces of the pie become more important than others during different periods based on what's happening within our city, both controllable and uncontrollable. Like I said earlier, they are based on the fact that we generate one number for all of these estimates and cascade that down. These appear more precise than they really are. We are starting with intersection operations, we are developing delay estimates, we are using future traffic volumes, all of these are based on assuming that the step that came before it was correct. And as these errors, you know, they all have margins of error and they don't, they're not completely independent of each other. So they do cascade as we get farther and farther from existing conditions. So real world conditions constantly change. Models contain uncertainty. I don't think that's a surprise to anybody. But the results also need to be interpreted that way. And I think that is, frankly, where we as a transportation profession come up short. We frequently use these to defend ourselves and say, well, the analysis said the Institute of Transportation Engineers gave me a handbook that says this is how I should do this. And this is the Bible for our profession. And this is what it means. There are other examples of people using models to forecast uncertainty, such as hurricanes. As people identify where those have started, the path about what's happening in the next six hours is pretty clear. as you project out what's happening 24, 48, 72 hours, that cone gets wider in terms of potential outcomes. A similar pattern happens for impact analyses. When we start with what we know right now, we can have pretty good idea of the range of conditions that might be, but as we start to project out both the development, the uncertainties of that development, but also the time, everything else that's changing around us, that cone of possibilities gets wider. and we are projecting one path through that cone and presenting it in a report as though it is a precise vision of the future, which as great as that would be is not true. I'll actually spend 30 seconds here to highlight that I'm part of a working group right now with the Institute of Transportation Engineers rewriting the trip generation handbook on this exact topic to determine if there needs to be a revisiting of how we present this information at the handbook level so that professionals can communicate that uncertainty. It would certainly be better with respect to acknowledging that imprecision and planning for a variety of scenarios It's going to mean complicated analysis and trouble communicating what is already a complicated topic to decision makers, to local jurisdiction staff, and to the general public. So it is not without trade-offs. The term significant impact means something different to me than it probably means to most people who would read one of these impact analyses. That means that based on our criteria, we have exceeded a threshold that should generate some further review for potential mitigation. But the term transportation impact means something different to a neighbor who's lived in their house for 30 years and the corner lot is gonna become 20 apartment units, right? That is a significant impact to them. That doesn't mean that it's a significant impact to me, but these terms are, they have a technical meaning and they have a colloquial meaning. And I think we should acknowledge that as well. These impacts though, very frequently are small relative to daily fluctuations you know the basis for these analyses is often one day of traffic counts we pick what we think is a representative day but we know from data that we have at that is daily over time that those variations can be 10 15 even 20 on a given day Most of the time with locations that are well below capacity, that variation doesn't matter. But as we get closer to capacity, that starts to approach a vertical horizon where it does matter a lot. And the change in terms of delay does matter or does change much more quickly as you approach capacity at different locations. the trade-off that we get for that is increased cost increased complication more analysis doesn't always mean more useful information so we can we can over analyze this it doesn't necessarily mean that we're reducing the uncertainty in any meaningful way one of our biggest challenges is how we communicate this to the public and in public forums they You know, in a CEQA document, this is one of more than a dozen different categories that somebody needs to review. This is also one that is very easy for people to latch onto. We all travel throughout our community. I joke that the city has 180,000 people, it has 180,000 traffic engineers, right? Everybody has an opinion about this. And everybody likes to tell us what they think and how to do our jobs. And that is just part of the profession. I don't walk into a bank and tell a banker, I think you're doing it wrong. But people tell me that all the time. And that's just part of it. But I do think that that traffic framing is often used as a proxy for a different discussion, because it is something to latch onto. It is a metaphor for the change that is happening. And frequently, it means something else. There has been recent research shown reviewing public comments in forums like this in planning commissions and city council hearings around the country that frequently what's meant as the subtext of traffic discussions is, I don't like this land use near my property. I don't like this as change. I don't want these new people living near me. That was both surprising that somebody could sort through thousands of public hearings and quantify that result and not surprising because we frequently hear that in situations that we know to not be near capacity presenting any sort of reasonable quantitative impact. So again, I think We as a profession need to do a better job of communicating that in forums like this, presentations like this, hopefully is a step in that direction. But even at the professional level, the organizations such as the American Planning Association and ITE are recognizing that they need to give their members better tools to communicate what these things do, what they don't, and how to be able to couch public response in terms of facts and meaning related to why the traffic analysis is actually happening in the first place. We've talked a lot about thresholds and standards and not too much about what they are or what they can be. We as a city have a fairly standard set of thresholds, but we could be pro-development to the point where there is no threshold at which we would identify an impact. We could also set a threshold of one second of delay per vehicle as an impact. and have every development identify as a significant impact and have to go through a sequel process. So these thresholds and these analyses are not neutral frameworks. They do reflect values. Our transportation impact analysis thresholds are very different than the city of San Francisco's. They're also very different than Sonoma County's. We have different goals and standards. We have different expectations of our network than either of those jurisdictions. And that is reflected in our analysis guidelines. Usually what has happened is that the delay-focused analysis has made filling in where stuff is already happening harder, and it has attracted people to the outside of cities where nothing's happening. So it has encouraged and incentivized outward growth rather than upward growth. That has led to the continued expansion of roadways. That has led to VMT impacts. Different development patterns then were potentially identified in general plans, specific plans, things like that. Again, these framings are not value neutral. They should reflect our community's goals in a much more broad way. So why are we shifting past just that congestion? Again, there are more than one thing in terms of transportation goals that we're focusing on. We want to decrease VMT. Our focus has been increasingly, we want to limit serious injury and fatal crashes. That is the goal. We know that wider intersections, faster streets do not serve those goals. And I'm looking for every reason I can find to not widen streets and create additional risk where I don't need to have it. That doesn't mean that the city streets are locked in amber, right? Just like the land use patterns and the traffic opportunity for parcels to develop isn't stuck forever. The transportation network isn't there either. So this is just recognition that roadway capacity can induce travel and the congestion relief that we identify is frequently temporary and has outsized impacts on other goals. On the left there you see what's called the Safe System Wheel that is adopted in the California Strategic Highway Safety Plan and it identifies all of the different puzzle pieces that have an impact on safety outcomes. New to this most recent version that was adopted late last year is the Safer Land Use puzzle piece. Identifying that development patterns and the exposure that people face as a result of how far they have to go to access different things in their communities plays a role in safety outcomes. So all of these things are policy choices for us to consider. What metrics do we wanna measure? Which ones do we wanna try to mitigate? What do our standards should be? And again, making sure that everybody's clear on the connection between transportation outcomes and land use development is really important towards any number of our different transportation goals, not the least of which is safety, mode split, and congestion management. So aligning with our city goals, documents through and through support compact infill development, connection across the transportation network, multimodal options, safety, efficiency in terms of land use patterns. And so we think that our transportation analysis requirements should also reflect that, and increasingly we're modifying those to reflect the importance of transportation safety and multimodal access. We don't want these to be performative and creating a discussion around impacts that we don't feel are reflective of our community values. Up here on the screen, I have a couple of images to share just to maybe more directly describe what I'm talking about. On the left is an image of a street segment and an intersection that would show a level of service A. to a traffic engineer, and on the right would be one that shows a level of service F. To a traffic engineer, that's true. To an economist, you might flip those grades around and suggest that the street on the right is far more successful than the street on the left. The image on the right shows a project that I worked on early in my career for a jurisdiction in the Central Valley that was undergoing some growth. And their long range impact scenario and their assumed land uses showed growth to the point of not consistent with their zoning code, but they wanted to plan for everything. And their impact analysis requirements were also very stringent. And as a result, you get the doubling of an intersection size while that is happening during a peak period. That is a peak period aerial showing traffic congestion at that location. and all that pavement that's being added while three of the four corners of that intersection are vacant. It's an image that has always stuck with me as just inconsistent decision-making that leads to outcomes that would be hard to explain. So just in summary, these are important technical tools but they need to reflect what we want out of them. The information that's going into them is a series of estimates and so those estimates coming back have uncertainty with them, they're imprecise. These requirements do influence development patterns and we need to be sure that we're not, creating undue influence on development patterns as a result of our transportation impact requirements We want these to align with city goals. We want them to be meaningful But we also need to have our eyes open that the analysis that we require or don't require can be misused by the public either in support or in opposition to individual projects and everybody's a traffic expert, right? Everybody has an opinion about this and it frequently is a crutch without being a useful crutch. So with that, I am happy to answer any questions you might have and describe our processes in any more detail you'd like.

Thank you for the presentation. Do any members have any questions for Director Hennessey or?

Yes.

We'll start.

Thank you so much for presenting this to us. And I don't know, maybe it's because I'm an engineer. I find this stuff super interesting, nerd out on it. And I think it's extremely important as my experience on the board, if there was one topic that was used most consistently, like you said to before against a project, it's this topic. I might come back with more, but a couple of initial questions. and ultimately trying to understand, this presentation is informative and I'd like to get more feedback on how we deal with this in the upcoming general plan, but a few questions ahead of that. One kind of, I think, specific thing to our community is the impact of the Tubbs fire. I'll call it PTSD, the trauma around that. And I relate to that. During the fire in Coffey Park, there was one moment, trying to get out, where I got caught in a little bit of traffic, and there was five minutes of like, oh, jeez, I'm stuck here. A lot of people had that experience that night in 2017. It's almost 10 years ago. But that experience, I notice, is used almost on every single project in opposition around not just traffic, but higher level of concern safety on fire. And I'm concerned that that one, like, why did I get stuck in traffic? Well, I lived in Coffee Park, and I was like, well, you know, and I saw a fire was coming, but I obviously knew that, like, fire wouldn't jump the freeway and come into Coffee Park until... I realized, oh, shoot. And then it was. So in other words, a lot of us had never experienced that before. And so one of the reasons was Travis, because we all kind of too late, like got an excavated or left. So I guess I think that's an extremely important, specific thing to address as a part of this is. not just the congestion, not just the traffic analysis around general safety, but that specific fire escape. And frankly, what I'd like to see is something around, I don't know, in other words, I perceive that as a less risk, because we're now all much more aware. If there's a fire, someone like me isn't gonna wait as long as I did to evacuate with my family. And I can see that fear being used as a, like you said, usually in a negative way towards projects. And so my question finally is like, can you incorporate that specific topic around fire evacuations into this?

Yes, and it is. We also learned quite a bit from those several about evacuations. One of the things that we do in concert with any potential roadway change is discuss them with the fire and police departments and understand what this impact would have on all sorts of emergency operations, including evacuations. The impact of a development itself on an evacuation, though, is poorly estimated by general condition, day-to-day conditions, right? So now on our system, we have what are called flush plans, where in several directions, we can set a series of green lights continuously to get people out with a couple of clicks of a button, all the greens show up in one direction to the freeway, away from the freeway, just get people away from whatever the hazard is. That wasn't in place in 2017. We also have, this is frequently a topic around road diets are conversion of streets from four lanes to three lanes. One of the nice things about moving to three lanes is that middle lane can be a lane in either direction and with support from emergency services that can be communicated to people. There has also been research shown on that, that it both does not slow down emergency evacuations and it actually speeds up emergency response because nobody's in that lane as a dedicated user. So, yes, it is included in these analyses, but it is often assumed to be or not assumed to be. It is well within the realm of what we've already planned with respect to emergency cases or evacuation scenarios.

And I mean, that makes sense to me. I feel like the job is to try to get that message to the public. and support the board, you know, it becomes awkward as the board, like, you're not sure, it's kind of a side question, like, are you supposed to respond to someone on that, or just take their feedback, you're just taking their feedback, but it's a prevailing opinion from a lot of people in the public, and I guess my question is, how can that message get to them, either through the process, you know, that they go through, through the projects, or another way, like, you know?

Well, you mentioned the trauma of those events. And I think we try to strike a balance between communicating our preparedness and not reminding people of that trauma as, you know, frequently as maybe we might if we were communicating all of our preparedness strategies the fire department has now you know a dedicated emergency operations manager who's thinking about this as his sole job and is working across departments to make sure that we're ready We do drills several times a year to walk through different scenarios and to make sure that these systems are ready should situations like 2017 or 2019 arise again. Yeah, that is a challenge. And maybe we need to do a better job of being more forthcoming with exactly what we've changed since that time.

I appreciate like you're not wanting to like to bring up every horrible thing to plan for and freak everybody out. So I totally appreciate that. I do think this specific topic, it's not every single project. This is a it's not just traffic. It's. I was in the fires, we couldn't get out, people were gonna die. If you build this project, that's almost a quote. So I don't know how we can, I think it might be worthwhile to address that specifically in this community, just this fire evacuation topic.

If I could just quickly add, so just kind of to address that, I think we, for most of the development projects that would ultimately come to this board or to the Planning Commission, we hold pre-application neighborhood meetings, which gives an opportunity for people within the proximity of the proposed project to come and hear from both city staff on process and also the applicant on what they're proposing. As part of that, we have representatives from each of the departments, from planning, from TPW, from fire, to help answer questions. And we had a good example earlier this week on Monday. Or was it last week? Anyway, recently, we had a pre-application neighborhood meeting. those were exactly the topics that come up. And so we had somebody from transportation and public works as well as fire coming to talk about all the things that Dan was talking about, all the things that the city has done to try to address the issues that we all dealt with in 2017. And then we also bring those same folks, as you guys know, to the review authority for those meetings. And there's lots of websites that the fire department has created to address a lot of this information. So there is information out there. We're doing our very best to get it out early to the folks that live in proximity to these developments. A lot of times, The folks don't necessarily agree that changes have been made, but I think we're doing what we can to try to get that message out.

And to just follow up on a point I made earlier, the identification of an impact is different to different people. I might think 20 more cars in a neighborhood, that's fine. We'll get them out. That's marginal. To the guy who's lived on that street for 25 years, that's otherworldly change that he never saw coming. our individual perceptions of our local streets are very widely from me seeing 500 miles of streets in the city. I mean, my perception of things are vastly different.

I might have more questions, but I wanna give other people a chance.

Okay, good. Ingrid, do you have any questions?

Yeah, I'm largely concerned with some of these similar issues. I see traffic coming up and almost needlessly dampening projects that already have an approval from the planning department through the process of appeal, and often traffic impact is used I think somewhat falsely to bring these projects back to the floor after they've been approved and to the great expense of the developer and causing delays that sometimes break the project in the end. So I'd like to see somehow the North Bay being able to produce, for instance, empirical data that shows that parking at a lesser ratio can be supported as opposed to just analyses and models. And also how long do these traffic impact analyses Well, how long will they last in this very fast-moving technological environment we're in where people are predicting that we won't all own cars, that we can depend on public transport and self-driving vehicles, taxis, et cetera? How soon will it be until that day comes to this area? So those are some of the reactions I have to this.

Okay. Nathan, do you have any questions?

I have just one question. Thanks for your presentation. It was really great and really clear. On the challenge part with small projects, the slide that you presented, I understand that completely. I see these, you know, working on projects, I see a different, I can kind of see the spectrum of projects from small to large, medium. And I could understand how the public generally wouldn't necessarily understand that, especially a homeowner. If there was a tool, maybe there is, at the city to define, to provide a little definition that's available to the staff and the public so that those, that communication could happen early on, even, you know, just after a pre-app or something early in a project and folks would kind of understand that it's very likely a project won't have significant traffic impacts, that might be helpful in kind of dissuading efforts that might not go anywhere.

Thanks. Thank you for that question. We have two thresholds in our requirements that based on the estimated demand that the project is gonna generate, how much analysis we expect you to do, we are actively considering raising those thresholds because of that exact point. We went back through a series of analyses over the last few years and found that more than 90% of them didn't tell us anything that we didn't already know. And so those are simply documents for the purpose of creating documentation and protecting everybody legally, writing down the paperwork to say that we did it. But frankly, I'm trying to find ways to lessen the burden on my staff too. These are challenging times and I'm increasingly asking more of people. So when I can ask less of them, I'm trying to do that. And this is maybe one little take in that direction.

Chair, do you have questions?

Hi. Thank you for the presentation. The other day I was driving down College Avenue, and as you know, it's gotten much narrower recently. And I appreciated that the barricades that were up don't appear to be, like, permanent. And I was kind of wondering, OK, if in the event of a big having to get through there with more traffic than normal, do those come out relatively easily?

Kind of. They can also be run over. So I hesitate to say that in a public forum. But yeah, it's not going to dent your vehicle. They're there visually to create a separation. People do react to them. If we wanted permanent protection there, those would be concrete. Not that high, but yes. And the fire department knows that too. Run them over, we'll fix it when you're done if you need to. So yes, that is, and that is part of one of the reasons why the fire department has been a great partner in this is that they know that while we're reducing the day-to-day capacity for people in passenger vehicles and trying to control operating speeds to decrease the risk of crashes, the road the curb we're not moving curbs the same amount of space is available in an emergency scenario for an evacuation or for them to do whatever they need to do i really appreciate that it's not permanent thank you adam do you have questions

Yeah. Thanks very much for the presentation and for bringing this to us. This is really informative. And I think it'll really help us as a board in our analysis and then also in terms of that communicating as we're talking to the public, representing the public, you know, doing all the things that we do. And so this is going to be really, really, really helpful for that. And I think that we're all kind of keying in on that messaging component of it. It's great that we're getting this, and I may have missed this. Is there a component of this sort of being out to the public as well?

We have been back and forth with our colleagues in planning about how exactly to do this. Again, both between like... Does our presence at these meetings on individual developments invite questions that might otherwise better be served by transportation and public works staff is not here because they don't think this is worthy of their consideration or all of their concerns have been answered and that should be the stock answer? That is something that we've had back and forth about and we haven't gotten quite there to the point where we're comfortable not showing up and saying our absence should tell you our answer. We've thought about providing written responses for questions that we might predict ahead of time so that they're in your backup and you could respond maybe a little bit more confidently or with the context of the project in terms of answering some questions from the public. There's a whole suite of scenarios that doesn't require me or my colleagues to be here necessarily.

Definitely. And yeah, I mean, even even like thinking that it like that part, like the education part should be, as people have been saying, like early on in the process to like we figuring out how we can do that just so these questions don't come up. You know, as frequently, I mean, they can be brought up as a concern, but it's like, yeah. And so I've just been thinking about that as well, how you can do that. Like, so you're presenting to boards, commissions, this is really great. Are you presenting also to the council? I'm wondering, you know, all decision makers, because one of the messaging things is that, you know, it's, you know, we all get feedback from the public, including our board. council members, and so having them know really what these are about, and so they're out talking to people on the street, and people are like, I gotta tell you about traffic, and you can have a conversation about it, and so if everyone's really informed, everyone can kind of answer, knows how to answer a question or can get to something, some resource. I like the idea of getting some kind of like, yeah, the empirical data or something that can be, that really sort of grounds some of this in, in reality. Yeah, any of the other presentations kind of happening as part of this?

Next week, I'll be discussing with the Planning Commission, same presentation you just saw. And we'll discuss afterwards about potentially doing this to council or creating some kind of, you know, one pager or, you know, clear explanation of, you know, the 15 slides I just walked through and why we do what we do and what it does and what it doesn't.

Yeah. Yeah, because, I mean, in some ways I feel like it's, there are, like, all these, there are concerns that people have, and a lot of it comes from, you know, either feeling like you don't have all the information or you don't understand what the information means. And so something is clear that can just say, like, what the analysis is, what the role is, and, you know, it can tell people what they're really evaluating and what we're evaluating. So, yeah, it's challenging. You know, I don't, yeah, it doesn't seem like this is the end of the conversation. Like, it seems like this is great that this is happening internally and it's just, it's encouraging and it should be encouraging for the public that this presentation and this conversation is happening because it shows that we're trying to be able to message and talk to the public and have everyone have all the information. So, yeah, thanks a lot for it. Thank you.

I just have a couple of questions. I think to piggyback off of what some of them have said is that I understand the parameters and time constraints on you and your staff, but the level of comfort that people get from having someone from the department here when, I mean, when they look at the written document, but to have somebody say something and they can ask that question just adds a level of reassurance and validates really what they're reading. So I'm always for that one, sorry. And the other question I had was that you said you typically take one day for the traffic study. How do you determine that one day?

Every day has additional cost. And so what we've found is that when we collect data on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, when there's no in a week without a holiday, when school's in session, that is pretty representative of a normal day. And that kind of 10% window in either direction doesn't drastically vary outcomes. What you do typically is you take those counts and model them and then go out again and see if the model reflects what the counts tell you. So you don't observe the counts. You observe what the model and the counts tell you. And if you validate that against... You know the conditions that you're seeing on a second day You can be pretty confident that the model is representative of a typical day and move forward. There are scenarios particularly in more Complicated or complex analyses when multiple days of analysis are used I mean most jurisdictions us included use a peak period where we're counting, you know in the morning 6.30 to 9 in the afternoon, 3.30 to 6 or so, analyzing one hour in those windows when the counts are the highest. There are scenarios where a noon or an afternoon peak makes sense. There are scenarios where weekend peaks make sense when I've done analysis for, you know, event venues. And we've done analysis at 11 o'clock at night for what that looks like in terms of, you know, flushing people out of event venues and things like that. So it does get tailored. But for most analysis, and for most projects that we have, both in the city and of the scale for this board, I think you're typically seeing a weekday am and pm peak hour and those tend to be relatively stable.

Thank you. And then how long does a traffic study last? So the reason I'm asking that is because we've had some projects where people will talk about the traffic study was done during COVID or a certain particular time, and it becomes a point of contention that the traffic study is not valid.

Yes.

Yeah. So how long?

If it's within two years of our acceptance of the study, it is definitely valid. If it's past that, we have to determine if anything has changed that we would like to see reanalyzed. So being beyond that two years doesn't automatically make it invalid. It's just that it needs our concurrence that it's still representative of the conditions.

And do you ever go back out to, if a project is coming up and it's determined that it could be a difficult project to get approved and do a reevaluation to confirm the numbers?

Yeah, we have a series of counts that we are taking, we as the city are taking constantly and comparing over time to see what's happening with respect to patterns. We also know that, you know, Different projects will require different levels of analysis, not just for us, but for the public, for the board, for planning staff to be comfortable with. We don't treat the 20 unit apartment complex the same as we'll treat the Sinead redevelopment. Those are different levels of complexity with different eyes on them, different intensity of the review. And we're aware of that and we scope the study to be able to respond to that too.

And that's all I have.

Just add on to that a little bit. Yeah, like one experience, the board, I remember, I guess the theme is that where there's a vacuum, people will, you know, fill in narratives, right? There's a lot of narratives. So like project comes in, you know, one thing to consider, uh is that you know they're hiring a traffic engineer well already the public may not trust that person because it's hired by the developer right so your perspective is an objective part of the city i think is important in that sense and then you know then the first point was like oh the traffic study was old and then the traffic person made the comment that like well actually um it was pre-covered which was higher numbers than it is now and And then I think someone else came up with another thing. But I guess my point is that I think the default for a lot of the public is, oh, they're trying to get away with something. This is going to impact my life. Like, I need to stop this. When that may not be actually true. To your point, anecdotally, in their experience, have an impact, but not community-wide. So I guess, again, how can we also... Communicate like the relative facts like you know my head. I'm making something up, but it's like would traffic studies have Do traffic studies have like historical data says okay? This is what generally this was in 2010 2020 2025 like because frankly I'm wondering if some of that would actually tell the bigger story which is like oh wow actually like growth Santa Rosa's is shrinking like Or actually, you know, the narrative of it, you know, is actually the opposite, maybe. So I guess, question to you is like, is there a way to bring in that scientific transparency to help counteract the narratives that are already like in full force?

Yeah, and to your point, we could adopt a series of policies that closes the doors to new development and makes traffic great and have a dying city. I don't think that's what any of us want. We would face repercussions that we're not considering to make that happen. We do have historical data. This does become an emotional topic for people, right? Because you're telling them about their street that they know, their commute. And that additional 60 seconds of delay across four intersections on their way to the freeway feels different to that. It is different, right? It's just, it's one minute, right? Like, that's your minute every day, right? And that's real. So I'm not discounting that. But it's also, okay, the fix to that comes at a cost that we need to be aware of. And are we willing to bear that? I think the other thing that, I'm very comfortable talking about topics like this on our collector streets and arterial streets that are shared amongst so many people and are so vital to the community. It's much harder to do this on residential streets where we might generate 40 new vehicles in an hour on a street that only has 80 vehicles per hour. So we're increasing it by 50%. It's going to look different. There's no way that we would quantify that as a significant impact that we would mitigate against. But again, to the person who lives there, it's a different street now. And so we have to kind of be sympathetic to that without over-empathy to the point of trying to mitigate something that's not a problem.

Yeah. I support just more data that, yeah, like you said, recognizes the individual's experience, but the bigger picture. And then just adding to that, as a board, when they come here, theoretically, these boxes are checked on the traffic piece, but the public uses it as an opportunity often to bring it up. What's our role on the board when they bring up traffic issues, particularly if we feel like they're not really following traffic? the study correctly, are we supposed to respond to that or just keep in our lane and not even part of the fun?

I think that's up to you in terms of your comfort, reviewing and potentially approving or evaluating whatever's in front of you, right? So that is why we come here is to answer your question so that the public can hear that the professionals are comfortable with it. I do, you know, that question actually reminded me of something else that I wanted to say is that the requirement to do this paperwork, especially in a setting where we're completing the environmental documentation is actually the burden of the city, right? So the developer is paying a consultant traffic engineer to do this work so that we can include that on our behalf. Everything that comes to you that's a traffic study has been reviewed and approved by us. So it is as though we've done it, right? We just don't have capacity to do it. If we did, we would just do them. That I think is something that doesn't get brought up enough that the hired gun traffic engineer, they've gone through hell and back in terms of our review and our comments sometimes to get to an approved level. And we could show you the five copies that we reviewed and sent comments back on. So it's not a check the box activity for us either because we know that becomes our document that the hired gun engineer is going to show up one time and potentially say whatever he needs to say. But the document itself, our approval of it is our stamp that this meets our requirements.

Yeah. I think that's another thing just valuable to share that, you know, that it's not a developer hired gun person making these judgments. The city is back having to take responsibility for the outcome.

Yeah. Yeah, no board is seeing a traffic study that hasn't been reviewed and approved, right?

Sorry, I'm jumping in. It might be a good idea, I'm just thinking, when we have the planners do their presentation, Traffic is not really brought up much in the presentation, but if there was just, if there was an outside survey done that the statement was made, it has been done and it has been approved by the Transportation Department, it might kind of alleviate a little bit of questions along the way, just thinking.

Yeah, I think typically if there are issues that are brought up, we do include that in the staff report. And oftentimes if it is a major issue, the planners will include it as part of their presentation. If it's not necessarily an issue that has been brought up, it's then typically identified in the environmental analysis section. But that's certainly something that we can work on to make more of a priority as part of the presentation.

Because I think when the presentations happen, the people who the project is near and dear to that are in the audience, they're seeing the presentation, and that's what they hear. So if there's some kind of validation, if there's validation of what has been approved and what processes the project has gone through, it might reassure the public a little bit more. Does anyone have anything else?

I just, I had one additional thought that is somewhat related to what Drew was just talking about with, that these, and I, it's somewhat related and then I also was just thinking that, that what I found really valuable with with about talking about these traffic impacts analyses is the information that's involved in them or that's included in them but also talking about the limitations that you really brought up the limitations of them and limitations not in terms of like a negative but more saying that it's a focus tool that this is just a tool and and part of the challenge of of the person sitting in the planner's seat is to communicate that none of these are like, none of these little tools are the silver bullet, but it's this whole spectrum of information. And so, and people can focus in on certain pieces of it, but saying that each of these, each of these pieces of information have a very specific role. And so, it's almost part of the messaging challenge with these impact analyses is is how can you how can you Talk about the macro and the micro at the same time and and that's a challenge And so I think talking about those limitations of saying this is really focused is it can be really valuable. So Yeah Interesting to see how it evolves, but thank you Any more questions

Going once. All right, thank you very much for coming out and giving us some needed information on your department. Recording secretary, do we have any comment on item 9.1?

If you are in chambers and would like to make a comment on this item, please make your way to the podium. Seeing no one, Chair.

I'd like to close public comment on 9.1. All right, no questions. Thank you very much. I'm sorry, are you saying something to me? Okay, sorry.

Find my sheet here.

The meeting of the Design Review and Preservation Board is now adjourned.