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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2005 01-18 Pre Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting January 18. 2005 The Meridian City Pre-Council meeting was called to order at 6:30 P.M. on Tuesday, January 18, 2005 by Mayor Tammy de Weerd. Members Present: Mayor Tammy de Weerd, Keith Bird, Shaun Wardle, Christine Donnell and Charlie Rountree. Staff Present: Bill Nary, Brad Watson, Anna Canning, John S., John Overton, Kenny Bowers, Ted Baird and Will Berg. Item 1. Roll-call Attendance: Rollcall. X Shaun Wardle X Christine Donnell X Charlie Rountree X Keith Bird ---2L- Mayor Tammy de Weerd Item 2. Adoption of the Agenda: Bird: Mr. President Wardle: Mr. Bird. Bird: I move we adopt the agenda as published. Rountree: Second. Wardle: It's been moved and seconded. All in favor? Opposed? ALL AYES. MOTION CARRIED. Item 3. Presentation on the Downtown Transportation Plan: Siddoway: I will lead you off and Mr. President, members of the Council, thank you very much. Then Tom Hudson and Tim Taylor will take over for the main part of the presentation. I was before you a month ago, if you will recall, giving you an interim update on the status of this project and at that time, I handed out the public comments that we had received to date. You will also recall that we had at that time, narrowed the choices down to three, but we were wanting to do quite a bit of in-depth analysis on those three alternatives before making a formal recommendation on the preferred alternative. Over the past month and one half, two months the Fehr and Peers and Hudson team have been doing a lot of analyses and in conjunction with the Steering Committee. The Steering Committee, which has the memo that you have, the first item that I handed you is Melidian city Pre-Council Meeting January 18. 2005 Page 2 of 11 a letter from that Steering Committee making a formal recommendation to the City Council and the ACHD Commissioners on the preferred alternative. There has been a tremendous amount of evaluation and a tremendous amount of scrutiny placed on these alternatives by this Committee and I am very comfortable in making this recommendation to you as one that has been done with a lot of analysis and a lot of objectivity and with that to present the update and the selection of the preferred alternative to you I will turn the time over to Mr. Hudson. Hudson: Mr. President, members of the Council, nice to see you again. We have a brief agenda that I will move through with your permission. We would like to outline very briefly the process we have gone through to arrive where we are today, outline the finalist alternatives, recommend a preferred alternative to you. We would like your feedback and guidance for moving through the next 24 hours. As you know, we have got a joint meeting of the Commissioners and Council tomorrow morning, so we would like your guidance for that and then we also have a public meeting tomorrow night and any of your recommendations for that would be most welcome. So, if you are comfortable with that, we are going to get right to it We began this process really in late August and contemplated how the community has been challenged by addressing downtown circulation for years, certainly as long as a decade and the kinds of difficulties that the communities has faced in identifying the right way to go. All things considered, one of the biggest challenges I think that we have had is the kind of detail that the process that we have been engaged in over the last few months has provided us. I think that is why one of the reasons Mr. Siddoway is as pleased as we are in that we have been able to get a lot more detail than we really even anticipated last September. That is in part due to the outstanding support we have had from Ada County Highway District. A really excellent insights from their staff - they volunteer to go above and beyond the call of duty and we now have such information as estimated costs for not just one, but three different alternatives and a great deal of more information, numbers of structures impacted, properties, linear feet and so many different kinds of things that help all of us have a great deal more comfort with the recommendations that we are coming forward with. I would like to just emphasize one primary point before we go into investigation of the three alternatives and that is the dramatic personality split that this downtown area sustains today and is expected to sustain in the future. As you move from the freeway, which is the redline at the bottom of this aerial image toward Franklin - in that first area that is shaded in the - what did we call it violet? I am colored challenged so purple is usually my - this is a very auto-oriented district, strategically designed for the purpose of addressing auto-oriented commercial economy and we anticipate as part of your own community strategic plan and certainly in support of all of the work that we have done over the last two years, that it will continue to have that kind of orientation; whereas, the dark green toward the top and right in the downtown is more of a pedestrian oriented city center. Very different needs in terms of managing transportation. We cannot Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting January 18, 2005 Page 3 of 11 under-emphasize the importance of this particular distinction - that in order for the lower end of this aerial district. To work well we need to make sure that we are providing the right kinds of circulation systems for it, but a very different set of priorities for the northern end. I mean, contemplate the size of your community today of over 50,000 people moving very rapidly in growth upward and yet you have a city center that has lacked and is the city center that was about the same size and the same density as it was in the early 1970's. So, it hasn't caught up yet Yet, all the opportunities, the demand of the community, the demand of the region, the economy and certainly social demand for sense of community are saying to us the opportunity is very substantial for pedestrian oriented urban center. So, with that as context we would like to take a few minutes to move through the three alternatives, but before we do that and I am going to turn to Tim Taylor from Fehr & Peers to share that with you. I would just like to say that we all know that no matter what alternative might be chosen, there cannot be - we cannot anticipate a unanimous support and it's one of the difficulties that all people of good faith regret that in a community this size, we can't serve everyone as effective as every other individual. But, having said that and having gone through this kind of challenge for upwards of a decade now, we can come to you and say that as a team the Steering Committee that you have chosen that has representation on it for many different perspectives from transportation to historic preservation, from small business to city staff we have a unanimous endorsement and recommendation to you for one preferred alternative. I think that demonstrates the value of the process that we have been through, the value of the level of detail and the value of having a broad team approach to investigate our various alternatives. We have all learned from each other, each individual on the Steering team, each citizen that participated in the public meetings so far has had a voice. As you know, we collected every written item from the public and shared it with you as Council, we have given a lot of thought to what our citizens have to say and with that all of those sorts of insights and input, we come to you with a unanimous recommendation from the Steering team. Tim would you like to move to the next slide? Taylor: Tom had mentioned that we have three alternatives and we do. We actually have four if you were to consider this one, which we are calling the baseline condition. Now, that is looking at things in the year 2030 if we were just to keep the system pretty much the same as it is except for these major improvements to the overall regional network. So, you would still have Main and Meridian as it is today, but all of these alternatives assume that there is a Ten Mile Interchange in place; that there are crossings at Locust Grove and Linder and we have also included this extension of W. Corporate Drive in this particular area. So, this is the base condition and everything that we have done with the other three alternatives also include these same assumptions. Now if we were to just look at this on it's own, obviously, this is a very inexpensive alternative as it relates to this particular corridor, certainly these are not necessarily inexpensive Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting January 18. 2005 Page4of11 improvements regionally, but it doesn't serve the demand that we are looking at needing to serve in the year 2030 or beyond. It doesn't meet the downtown priorities in goals and objectives and we know that it doesn't do anything to make improvements to this Central and Waltman intersection that we have. Hudson: In the public meeting that we had last fall on looking at alternatives, we asked the citizens in the room and there were well over 120 people is there anybody here who believes that doing nothing is the right approach, keeping the current course? There was not one person that raised their hand in support of that baseline - just to let you know. Rountree: Tim? Taylor: Yes. Rountree: I would suggest in references to the baseline that you not put it in terms of it's inexpensive. It might be in actual construction dollars, but there certainly an economic impact on the City of Meridian if we don't do something. So, there is an expense there. Taylor. Yeah, it would be a negative expense. Thank you. So, using that baseline and judging these other three finalist alternatives, which were the one- way couplet, the widening of Meridian Road to five lanes and then what we can the split corridor and I will go through that as we go through the next slides. One of the keys here is that all of these alternatives also address increasing public transit and alternative modes of transportation. They will look at Broadway and East Third and Pine and how those relate to circulation in the downtown area as well as the Central and Waltman intersection and then the key connections at Fairview and Cherry lane. So, any of these alternatives will also include or address these important issues as well. So moving on with alternative "A", which is the one-way couplet and you are familiar with this. The advantages that we have seen to this particular alternative is that you really don't need a lot of right- of-way in order to implement this and so because of that, it's fairly easy to phase. It's striping, re-striping and some signal modifications. With it you would be able to gain better traffic operations at the Waltman, Central intersection based on the way it would be reconfigured. It actually assists in complementing the auto- oriented nature of the area to the south as Tom was mentioning and the construction costs associated with this are moderate and we will go through those costs at the end of the presentation. The disadvantages are that it's inconsistent with the goals and the objectives of downtown and it would also require significant change in the way people drive in this corridor now because of the one-way system. Alternative "B" looks at taking Meridian from the Central - Waltman intersection and widening it to five lanes all the way up to Cherry, Fairview and leaving Meridian or Main Street as it is today. It would also require Mendian City Pre-Council Meeting January 18, 2005 Page 5 of 11 that the intersection - I have kind of blown this up, but the intersection there at Central and Waltman would be changed such that Main Street would somehow have to "r in to Meridian north of this congested interseáion and so it's - I guess what I am doing now is talking about just one of the main disadvantages is that this is a very complicated reconfiguration of that intersection and in order to make this alternative viable it resuRs in also excess right-of-way because now and with "t-ing" in Main Street, we have this very wide section of Main Street south of Franklin that you really don't need it to be that wide any more because you are accommodating the majority of your through traffic, your heaviest traffic volumes on Meridian instead of on Main Street. That's one of the primary benefits of this alternative is that the regional traffic going from the freeway all the way north on Meridian is accommodated in that one single corridor. So, those are some of the advantages and disadvantages of aRernative "e" - widen Meridian. Now the split corridor, many people at first blush have said that this appears to be more complicated than the others and really it isn't. We have prepared some additional graphics to help you to really understand this particular aRemative. What we are looking at would be one-way traffic operations from Waltman - Central up to the Railroad corridor, which is right about in this area. We would be looking at two-way traffic operations on Meridian and Main Street north of the railroad tracks. What we would do in order to get it from one-way to two-way is provide a transition from Main Street to Meridian, north of Franklin and South of the railroad. So, the key here is that where we are needing to accommodate these auto oriented businesses and heavier traffic volumes to the south we do that through a more efficient one-way couplet where we want to focus on a pedestrian oriented downtown. We are able to do that by shifting a lot of the traffic or a majority of the through traffic to Meridian, which would be a five lane facility north of the railroad tracks and then the downtown area of Main Street we'd be looking at traffic volumes in the 6 to 10,000 range, which is what has been thought of as a target in order to maintain the vibrant pedestrian friendly downtown area. Now the advantages - I have gone through a few of the advantages in terms of it shifting that heavy traffic volume in the area north and through the downtown to Meridian - the two traffic we still are able to accommodate on Main Street, it's the through traffic that we would be able to shift over to Meridian. It addresses both, again the issues in the south in terms of auto oriented businesses and also the pedestrian focus in the downtown area and we are able to like the one-way couplet, realize more efficient traffic operations at the interseáion of Central and Waltman because of the one-way oparations and really the construction costs were found to be moderate on this particular alternative. The disadvantages are the right of way acquisition costs are high. That's also the case with the five-lane scenario and again it would require some fairly significant changes in driving patterns as to what people are used to today. I want to focus on two key areas, number one the transition area which people have had some concern with. This graphic doesn't necessarily do a good job of portraying that. The second area is the Waltman - Central area intersection. So, we have prepared a graphic that kind of shows this split corridor Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting January 18, 2005 Page 6 of 11 transition. The redlines that you see represent traffic that would be going in a northbound direction; the yellow would be traffic going in a southbound direction and this is on top of an aerial so you kind of begin to gel a feel for properties that might potentially be impacted; where access might be; how people would make specific turning movements, but all of this is just illustrative. Once a design team went in they would figure out exactly what the radius of curves needed to be and they would look at right of way acquisition more carefully. This was prepared so that ACHD would be able to prepare cost estimates. But, if we are coming northbound - this is Franklin - if we are coming northbound, we would have three lanes just prior to where Main Street exits and one of the options would be able to provide a straight through movement onto Main Street, but just probably a single lane based on the traffic volumes that we have looked at and two lanes would continue off and connect up into this five lane Meridian section. If you are coming southbound on Main Street south of the railroad tracks, you would have the opportunity to come down, make a right turn, go north or be able to make a u- turn and continue south. If you are anywhere north of the railroad tracks you could also do that or there are many opportunities for you to go from east to west and access Meridian Road in order to travel south to the interchange if that's what you desire to do. So, this provides an opportunity for people to make u- turns, I think it gives people a better feel for what just exactly is going on in this particular area. Hudson: I would just add that in that northbound right hand lane where you have got a bit of a triangle left here we would become a major gateway to the downtown. It's so important to differentiate between "to" and "through" traffic. We are not trying to take all traffic away from downtown, we are trying to make downtown a highly desirable destination so that people come to it, park, get out and conduct their business and so on. These kinds of intersections as well as the east connectors that are on Meridian further up become opportunities for improving the gateway orientation inviting people to come in and making it very easy for them to do so. Taylor. The way that you treat some of the movements, for instance, this northbound through movement are key in order to not - it discourages traffic, yet it also doesn't discourage it too much. If you were to take this movement and rather than it being a straight through movement, bring it up here and make it a right turn movement, you would likely discourage more trips from going into that area. So, that's a key element of being able to allow people a straight movement into that Main Street corridor and into downtown. Are there questions related to this? Next graphic then is in relation to the Waltman and Central intersection. I have tried to color this so that you can follow it a little bit easier. Again, the yellow is southbound, red is northbound, green is westbound ¡;¡nd then what did you call if, Tom, violet? Violet is eastbound. One of the key things that we have provided here that you can tell is access over into this Waltman Lane area, which the other alternatives that have been looked at back in 1997 and since then have Meridian City Pl'e-Council Meeting January 18, 2005 Page 7 of 11 really focused on eliminating access to Waltman, taking it up and around and connecting into Corporate. We really feel confident that we would be able to have this be a full movement intersection in all directions, which would provide for development opportunities in this property. All of the movements would continue to be provided, left turns and right turns. If you are coming southbound on Meridian and you want to go northbound on Main, you would go into the left turn lane, which would allow you to make a left here or else make a u-turn and go back up the other direction. Again, these areas depicted in green provide for a great gateway type potential treatments and meet entry features into the city. Hudson: One of the first things that I noted when I began working on the downtown marKeting strategy in an aerial was this remartæble empty space on the northwest corner of 1-84 and Meridian Road. Irs the sort of area that would be very early developed in most urban locations and especially high growth places like this and yet it's basically barren and the challenge is that intersection. Irs really a difficult place to move around today. The feedback that we have been getting is that there is a lot of sizzle here in a sense of a capacity to open that area up and still allow all the different directions of traffic to move to and through this particular intersection well and by doing something approximating this the community can move forward with the development of that very viable land, which has so far been really stifled up to now and in your urban renewal this is going to be a very significant improvement to your overall development opportunities, this is increment Taytor. Because we have a one-way couplet in this southern area, based on what we have today you can see that we have eliminated many movements that need to be accommodated today that wouldn't need to be in the Mure because this is one-way south and this is one-way north, so you are able to gain a high level of efficiency in this type of a configuration because basically it's just your typical four legged signalized intersection, which is very different than what we have today. We are able to maintain traffic operations through here during peak periods that are satisfactory in the year 2030. Any questions about this layout? Okay. Hudson: One of the greatest challenges that we have as a community in moving forward with any alternative is an objective analysis process that gives us the confidence that we are doing the right thing. You can imagine how many complications there are to something like this. We are dealing with not just dollars, we are dealing with safety issues, we are dealing with pedestrian character, we are dealing with road widths, we are dealing with, well in fact, 19 different sets of issues according to the cities and ACHD's, let's say, priority documents, the planning documents, your comprehensive plan and so on and also the input about priorities from the community. So, we have used a process called multi-aiteria evaluation that allows us to look at all of this kind of information in a very systematic way. We took the 19 different priorities or what Meridian City Pl'e-Councll Meeting January 18, 2005 Page 8 of 11 we are calling evaluation criteria and organized them into three distinct sets of components. One is transportation impacts. One is community impacts and the third is fiscal impacts. Then we weighted those using the combined insights of your Steering team because as you can imagine not all criteria are equal. Some things are more important than others so we used a very democratic process, which was unanimously endorsed by the Steering Committee. So, again we have listened very carefully to the historic insight of the community itself. These aren't things that we are just making up ourselves. These are from our own community documents. We then scored or lefs say evaluated each of these alternatives according to those very explicit criteria. Using multi criteria evaluations, which is a method that allows you to compare each set of scores in each criterion and then combine them so that you end up with a combined total score to get what you see here. The higher the score the better. What you see is at the base in the base condition that is more or less what we have today except for regional improvements, a score of 29. That score. is not out of 100, it's 29 in comparison to the other alternative's performance. So, it had the lowest at which I am sure why intuitively the community said no, we don't want to go there. The next lowest was 47, which is relatively similar to the widened Meridian Road or in the relatively similar scoring area; split the corridor, however, stood substantially above all of the others given all three areas of transportation community and fiscal impacts. Now, we spent months going through this and then after we spent months, we decided we needed about another month or five weeks to look at transportation costs. That is the implementation cost of acquiring right of way and also construction. So, the cost. that you see at the bottom here are estimates that were provided by our associates at ACHD and they are included in the evaluation under fiscal impacts. So, this isn't separate. It's included, but we knew that you would want to see the numbers, so we have shared those here at the bottom: 5.6 million dollars for the couplet; 9.9 million dollars for widening Meridian Road, which is the most expensive and then the split corridor at 8.3 million dollars. So, all things considered, 19 explicit criteria carefully evaluated by all members of the team. These were city representatives, ACHD representatives, downtown business people, citizens, historic preservation, two members from your own transportation task force, the city's Transportation Task Force, etc., and the unanimous conclusion was endorsement of these figures and a recommendation to City Council for support of the split corridor. I believe that Mr. Siddoway has a letter from the Steering Committee to City Council. Has that been distributed? Donnell: Yes. Hudson: Thank you. So, now for the next steps. We are forwarding our recommendations to you. We have got a draft interim report that we have handed over to Mr. Siddoway for his review. He will then provide that to City Council, but we are saying to you orally what will be in that, but you will of course have more detail. We will then be providing you with our final report and then it Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting January 18, 2005 Page 9 of 11 would be in your hands to evaluate as a city's leaders our own investigation and research and determined what you believe is in the best interest of the community. Then our understanding is that your recommendations will be forwarded to ACHD for I would say a collaborative discussion because there are lots of opportunities here; a lot of ways to approach the implementation of whatever preferred alternative you think is appropriate. ACHD, of course, has it's own process for decision-making. That's under evaluation. A final decision regarding the system and the implementation timing and then implementation. We are not able to put a timeline on that, but ifs our understanding that this is a high priority both to Council and to ACHD Commissioners, so we don't think that this is going to take dramatically a long time, depending only upon what you might see as complicated or controversial. I would just conclude again with the key point that we have people from abroad range of backgrounds who have come together to unanimously endorse the split corridor concept Having said that we do understand, fully recognize that no matter what we would bring forward there will be people in the community who would feel less well served than with another alternative. That's one of the difficulties of such a substantial challenge as the one that you face today. I would end by saying, but how would things be today if only we had been able to make a decision ten years ago and implement it. How much better would things be? With that, we would be happy to take your questions or guidance. Wardle: Thank you, Mr. Hudson, Council, Madame Mayor, we are at our allotted time. If anyone has a pressing question, I would take just a short moment for that Madame Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. President. I guess, Council, do you have anything that you feel needs to be presented tomorrow at the joint meeting? Any suggestions, as well? Rountree: Did you say in terms of recommendation and endorsement by the Council? Additional information presented by Tom and company? De Weerd: Additional. Wardle: Tom I have just a question and that is - that might come up and has come up in my mind is we have got a recommendation forward and we will be meeting with ACHD tomorrow and then in addition holding a public hearing or not a public hearing, but a public meeting and inviting the public to comment Some members of the public might wonder where their comments are going to go after tomorrow evening's process if this recommendation is already in place? Hudson: Mr. President, we feel that it's important for citizens to continue to be a part of the process and we will emphasize to citizens tomorrow night, unless you advise us otherwise to share their views with Council. Having said that, we have had a number of public exchanges. We have done a lot of outreach in other Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting January 18, 2005 Page10of11 ways. As you know, we have spoken to a number of community organizations in addition to our public meetings. We have forwarded to you citizen input. It is time contractually and morally for us to have the Steering teams' opinion about forward as well. So, you have it. We have done the best work that we can possibly do as a Steering team and as a consulting team. We bring forward far more information than we had originally anticipated that we would be able to do in the short time that we have had. We feel confident that this is the best alternative for the city. Having said that, this is a difficult decision and we think that it's entirely correct to encourage citizens to share their views, whether they support this alternative or not Thank you. De Weerd: Mr. President. Wardle: Madame Mayor. De Weerd: I guess at the last public meeting, they took public comments and then typed it up and made those comments available to Council. We would like that feedback from the public meeting. I will be in attendance, but I think it will be helpful as well. Hudson: Mr. President, I would also like to say that in straw poll taken at the end of that last public meeting, by far the largest number of votes for an alternative went to the split corridor. It was only a straw poll and I would not say it was scientific, but I think it's safe to say that despite of being a new concept to the community there was significant support there. Wardle: Mr. Siddoway? Siddoway: I understand we are short of time, but just answer further the question about the public process. Our intent tonight was to Just gage the Council's level of comfort with taking this forward to both ACHD Commission tomorrow and the public tomorrow night. But, you will see that our recommendation from the Steering Committee in that letter is that even once this plan is done and we have a preferred alternative developed, we would recommend that it be taken through a public hearing process to be adopted as part of an addendum to the Comprehensive Plan. So, we would propose that there would be a full public hearing process added on to the back end of the development of this plan. Wardle: If there is nothing else I would entertain - Bird: I move that we adjourn. Rountree: Second. Wardle: It's been moved and seconded to adjourn. All in favor? Opposed? Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting January 18. 2005 Page 11 of 11 ALL AYES. MOTION CARRIED. MEETING ADJOURNED AT 7:07 P.M. (TAPE ON FILE OF THESE PROCEEDINGS) APPROVED: ~::~ ATTESTED: Á#-:P WILLIAM G. BERG, J .,