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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2006 10-02 Joint ACHD Meridian City Council JointIWorkshop Meeting October 2, 2006 The Meridian City Council Joint Meeting with the Ada County Highway District Commissioner was called to order at 12:00 P.M. on Monday, October 2, 2006 at the ACHD Auditorium by President Councilman Shaun Wardle. Members Present: Mayor Tammy de Weerd, Keith Bird, Shaun Wardle, Charlie Rountree and Joe Borton. Staff Present: Ted Baird, Kyle Raddick, Matt Ellsworth and Will Berg. ACHD Commissioners Present: David Bivens, Carol McKee and Sherry Huber. Item 1. Update on Split Corridor Phase I a. Potential Fund Partnership with MDC (Break in tape - inaudible) Levihn: -- so it has just started and just marching along. It has just started. don't know what else you would like to know about the update, but- Rountree: Who is going to do the work? Levihn: Pardon me? Rountree: Who is going to do the work? Levihn: Ha, you have caught me. I am trying to think. I just got back from vacation. Six Mile Engineering, yeah. McKee: Okay, thank you. Any other questions? Then we can move to the update on the Locust Grove project. Who is taking that one? Is it Bruce Mills? Item 2. Update on Locust Grove Project Mills: Well, there were two Locust Grove projects. The overpass is actually opening tomorrow - the bid opens, so - and the Locust Grove, Franklin to Fairview project is actually going to start bidding tomorrow and so it will be open on October 18th, in two weeks. Any other questions? Bird: Madame Chairman. What is the expected start date on - 30 days after the awarding of the bid? Meridian City Council Joint / Workshop Meeting October 2, 2006 Page 2 of 13 Mills: Pretty much so - within 30 days (inaudible). De Weerd: Madame Chairman (inaudible--) the bids been coming in? Mills: They are getting better. Earlier this year in the spring we advertise for instance, Overland Road from Topaz over to Five Mile with a bid of $5.1 million. We advertised it and opened bids at public about three weeks ago and it came in at $3.6. Bird: And more bidders? Mills: We have (inaudible) bidders on this one and we have had a few other projects, little intersections and traffic signals and we are getting three to four bidders so far. We have heard that projects that are out right now that are going to open tomorrow with the overpass and the Maple Grove project have quite a bit of interest in bidders, so I think the law jam is starting to break. McKee: That is good news. (Inaudible discussion) McKee: Okay are we ready to move to the update on Ten Mile Interchange Specific Area Plan - that is Meridian's? Item 3. Update on Ten Mile Interchange Specific Area Plan Ellsworth: Last week was the Charrette of the Ten Mile Interchange Specific Area Plan and it was very well attended by agencies and also members of the public. Thanks to everybody that was able to come by and also Chris (last name inaudible) from your staff spent a lot of time with us while we were working through the weeks and we really appreciate that level of participation. If anybody has any interest I do have the draft that came out of that meeting here and would be happy to distribute those to you, if you would like to review it. Where we are on that process right now we are going to move on for an October 26th agency coordination meeting, which would be primarily staff members from different agencies and interested parties to come back and review what we came up with during the week - more comments, go through some revisions. We are also working in the meantime with our consultants to run traffic modeling and (inaudible--) just to make sure that things are going to continue to flow. The consultants are going to have to us the final draft if you will on December 1 st, which is going to be carried forward as a comprehensive plan amendment application on December 15th. Meridian City Council Joint / Workshop Meeting October 2, 2006 Page 3 of 13 McKee: Any other questions? (Inaudible discussion) Ellsworth: We allowed enough flexibility while we were ironing out different scenarios to plan for basically the two interchange designs that as we perceived are receiving the most support at this point. It was a single point at the Interchange and a standard diamond. So, with a quick glance at the land use map, we left enough room in here to allow for either. That is the sort of thing - I mean obviously we didn't want to preempt the process there and make sure there was enough flexibility to go either way. Bivens: Is there any figures on cost of that single point interchange verses the bold, normal interchange (inaudible)? Ellsworth: I am sure that there are. I haven't seen them. I know that broadly what it comes down to is the standard diamond is cheaper to construct, but obviously (Inaudible) ends up (inaudible) a whole lot of less land - right-away costs and that is the trade off. But, I haven't seen any direct cost comparisons, I would assume that is the sort of thing (inaudible). Bivens: (Inaudible--) a good (inaudible) even though it may cost more to hopefully convince them that that is probably the right one to do. Ellsworth: I agree and as I understand it that is sort of what came from that week, as most people seem to lean toward the single point of an interchange. McKee: Any other questions? De Weerd: Madame Chair. McKee: Yes. De Weerd: I guess to complicate our staff and your staff ITD was also present, we appreciated this collaboration and the approach to it - it is different and I think it is going to yield an exciting project and really show how land use and transportation can compliment each other and how we can better attempt these kind of planning efforts together in the future. McKee: Thank you. We appreciate it, it is a huge job. (Speaker unknown): Well, yeah, but it is the attitude of the city that makes it. You know, when we can all work together and have the attitude - that is the key to the success. Meridian City Council Joint / Workshop Meeting October 2,2006 Page 4 of 13 De Weerd: Well, we appreciate that partnership and just on another note, with the south Meridian we did the last public meeting together with ACHD and the efforts you are doing down south - they had over 200 people on attendance and so I believe that that was very successful as well. McKee: That is great. (Inaudible--). Ellsworth: I can if you guys are interested I would be happy to distribute them. Huber: I would love to have one. We can just pass them around. Ellsworth: Sounds good. Bivens: Madame Chair I would just like to (inaudible--) and the consultants and the job they have done in trying to envision what will occur with that (inaudible) area. I think they have done a great job and certainly will be (inaudible--). (Inaudible) three of the different presentations and they were very well done. McKee: Well good maybe we can keep this on a roll on all of the projects that we can get together and work like that. It makes it a lot easier. De Weerd: That would be our preference. Ellsworth: To echo what the Mayor said, the south Meridian - there has been a great level of cooperation as well. It wasn't an agenda item, but staff has been great to work with and things are coming together very nicely on that. McKee: Okay, if there are no more questions on that we will go to the update on signal timing plan and that would be Mr. Little. Item 4. Update on Signal Timing Plan Little: Commissioners and Council, Mayor and President the HHD hired DKS to do a signal timing plan to update Meridian's signals. They had done a similar project in downtown Boise and we saw some really positive results. (Inaudible) Portland has really got a lot of expertise, they are highly thought of up there and they have a lot of experience with our controllers, which is an advantage. Much more complex out in Meridian in the sense that the full eight phase signals - downtown Boise is a two phase system, you know this street is green and that street is green and you don't have the complexities of left turn timing and all of the things that you can put into the eight phase signals, but plans have been implemented, hopefully you are seeing some improvements. They are not - we have theoretical improvements at this point from our computer analysis - they are out driving the streets and started this last week, so I have it before and after, Meridian City Council Joint / Workshop Meeting October 2, 2006 Page 5 of 13 but the way the timing turned out, I am not sure how it is going to turn out because we did them before in the summer and (inaudible) this fall, so that is really testing their ability if they can do less with more traffic and get it down. But, it is showing things like hours of delay in the a.m. peak from 403 down to 362, that is one of the more significant improvements - the midday 313 to 296, that is not as great, probably about 5 percent and then again the peak is 642 down to 550, a little more significant improvement. In delay hours, not as big a change in stops. If you wanted to know how many stops occurred during the p.m. peak, theoretically, 38,247 and we got that down to 37,323 approximately. But, it is an important feature to get those things up to speed. There are some other things that are important. We increased some pedestrian timing, times up those to meet current standards and to provide a little more safety. We should have (inaudible) delays and our report done by the end of November so we can provide you with something substantial there at that point. We have some other things going on and right now this week we are pulling fiber to install a camera at Fairview and Locust Grove. We have had a lot of collisions in that area, which you probably are well aware of. We have a camera over on Eagle Road at Fairview and Franklin, the freeway and on down the road. This will be the furthest on Fairview - we are pulling fiber there and we have a project to bid in November called our Meridian Signal Controller Replacement and we will come in and download the timings that we have developed and those new controllers and the advantage there is being able to communicate with them (inaudible--) from here and we will put up a couple more cameras, one up at Fairview and Meridian, or Main probably, and then one about mid-town, about Pine or Idaho Street so we can see the traffic, make changes from the center as there are incidents and tweak the plans as well. You know as we see - you know are the peak hours lasting longer or things like that. It will make it more flexible. These controllers respond much better to the preemptions and the other controllers. We are able to get things back into sync, which makes a lot of difference along Eagle Road, you know as you go by St. Luke's. I went by Friday night and got caught by the ambulance, so it happens a lot out there. So, that is the main thing a camera coming this week, two probably by January in some key places and we are cranking up the numbers and seeing how it goes. The state also does congestion runs on our major arterials. They do them on an annual basis as part of COMPASS's program to measure congestion and I was informed that this corridor really came out not so hot on this round. Overall, the Communities in Motion - (inaudible). COMPASS this year has expanded the routes with the Communities in Motion that we are doing these on, so our numbers look better as a system. If you go back and look at what we evaluated last time verses this time, they don't and this is one that obviously we ought to think about a construction project out there, like a split corridor or something. That is the summary of that area because the numbers show that we are above COMPASS's thresholds for capacity and we have more cars than can go down a corridor. You are watching somebody else get your green light, while driveway people are pulling in front of you and keeping you from getting to it, so once it goes over capacity, the signal timing doesn't do a lot, really. You can't get to the Meridian City Council Joint / Workshop Meeting October 2, 2006 Page 6 of 13 - the green band may be there, but you can't get to it. That is kind of a laymen's rendition of our traffic signal timing. McKee: Do you have any questions (inaudible)? (Inaudible discussion) Little: Yeah, what happened there is we have had a lot of accidents at the driveway on Fairview in front of Fred Meyers that is the middle driveway for D&B. It is like Fred Meyers second driveway, the first one is covered up by an island and Fred Meyer called it to our attention and so we have got to cover this. So, we added to the island. D&B still has an open driveway with full access, however, their plan to run the trucks through the central driveway and right down next to the west side of the store and now we come through here and trying to weave a truck through that parking lot doesn't work very well. We are working over on the other side to work with them on getting them in. I have met with them and we are going to get back to them on that, but we are working on getting them in on Locust Grove. (Inaudible discussion) Bivens: They are cutting through Locust Grove, cutting through the driveway and not slowly, either. Little: Some people do that. We about got ran over when I was out there with the (inaudible) with somebody going through there about 30 miles an hour. McKee: Are there any other questions for Terry? Okay, thanks Terry. All right, intersection partnerships in north Meridian and Gary is going to take care of that. Item 5. Intersection Partnerships in North Meridian Inselman: Thank you Commissioners and Council, I understand that there were a few questions that were (inaudible--) and get those answered and any other questions that you may have. We do have an approved development agreement for the intersection of McMillan and Linder. It is under design now. We finished the concept and the final design should be completed by the middle of December and out to bid and hoping to construct and have it completed by the first of May is the intention. It does involve either extending or replacing the (inaudible--) along the (inaudible) canal, along the south side of the canal and we are working with them right now on the (inaudible) and need to upgrade that or extend it (inaudible--). It will be built to the full 4 x 6 intersection and then tapering down to the three lanes (inaudible) for McMillan and five lanes on Linder. There are four out parcels between McMillan and the future high school, two on the east and Meridian City Council Joint / Workshop Meeting October 2.2006 Page 7 of 13 two on the west. I am meeting with one of the landowners tonight to try to negotiate the right-of-way and get the road widened. We have an offer out for one verbal agreement and the other two we are waiting on the appraisal. So, it is our intention to take improvements and a full five lanes up to (inaudible) Creek, and Paramount to the new high school and get a signal installed (inaudible) projection for the new high school and at the same time working with the School District and Paramount to coordinate that with this project. If we cannot obtain the right-of-way from the out parcels, then we will have to make some adjustments and we mayor may not get enough right-of-way for the full improvements and sidewalks included, but we would at least have five lanes across the out parcels so they can develop and build the sidewalk with their development. The timing of the high school and hopefully that would be done before the high school opens, which is another year out. De Weerd: Gary, if you have any issues, please let us know and maybe we can help. Inselman: Sure. East and west we are not going to extend the project too far. Along with McMillan to the west we are probably going to go less than a quarter mile. On the east about the same, we are coordinating with Paramount in the last addition they made in Paramount South 60 or whatever they called it to try and get past their first (inaudible) and then on the south we will go about a quarter mile as well and coordinate with Bridge Towers (inaudible--). That will be the extent of that intersection. We are negotiating with the developers of Meridian and McMillan - actually I am meeting with them tomorrow to go over and draft a development agreement. The intention is to get that executed, hopefully by the first part of November and start design and construction begins May 1 st and be completed again by the third week of August before the middle school opens. It will be tight; we are hoping to make that schedule. There was one out parcel on the southwest corner that you discussed regarding - I think it was Amberwood or whatever that subdivision is called and I have already bought the right-of-way from them (inaudible) the sidewalk easement, south of the canal on McMillan. They are very cooperative. We have already taken care of that and the other - obviously the School District will dedicate right-of-way and the other two corners are owned by the developers, which (inaudible) already agreed to donate right-of-way and Paramount will (inaudible) work with us. So, I am very hopeful that that one will come to fruition along (inaudible--) laid out - that will be built as a 4 x 4 intersection with three lanes on one legs, we avoid widening the bridge that we just built in the late 90's. So, one of them with that will be restricted to three lanes and that would make the project a lot easier and cost effective and (inaudible--). (Big break in tape - not audible) Inselman: -- actually we don't need any for the road, but we need another 7 to 10 feet for the sidewalk. Meridian City Council Joint / Workshop Meeting October 2, 2006 Page 8 of 13 (Inaudible break in tape again) 'nselman: right-of-way is necessary and we have got some pretty nice landscape - (Inaudible break in tape again) Item 6. Amity Roundabout Study McKee: Okay to move on to the Amity Roundabout Study. Who gets to do this one? Oh, everybody is popping up. Man, I love this. (Speaker unknown): It is ACHD. Berg: Terry is outside. He is coming in. McKee: Oh, is Terry going to do this? (Inaudible break in tape again) Little: The first part is the concept and we have got a task force of Police and Fire and Public Works and so forth to look at the concept and to develop standards for our use because we need to plan these things ahead of time if we are going to build roundabouts because the type of right-of-way that we need is critical. We plan right-of-way and we can't go in later and say oh we want to do a roundabout and we have got a service station here and another shop here - you know we have to have a template for it for the future and that is kind of what purpose of the first phase and that is why we are having our third meeting in about a week or so and then the next phase would be to use Amity and just scope out all the way from Locust Grove to the county line. But one that seems to be working really well from my experience of going over there and looking at it in Canyon County there at Happy Valley and Amity. They really did a pretty good job of design and design is really critical on those things. It is not something that you just throw out on the ground because just changing the width a few feet you can cut the capacity in half or something. It is just amazing how sensitive they are. They are more of an art than science. So, we are trying to approach it on a little more different and careful basis. McKee: Thank you. Any questions for Terry? De Weerd: I have heard very favorable comments about the roundabout at Canyon County and Happy Valley. Meridian City Council Joint / Workshop Meeting October 2, 2006 Page 9 of 13 Bivens: (Inaudible) and I were out on a little escapade here two or three weeks ago and we came back through that way and it looks very good. I was very impressed with it. McKee: Well, and hopefully it can save us some money on these intersections, which would be great. Item 7. Transportation Priority List McKee: Okay, we will move forward to the transportation priority list and this is for Meridian. Ellsworth: On the course of the last several months the Meridian's Transportation Task Force has been developing sort of a wish list, the projection recommendations to forward along (inaudible--). Those were approved by Council roughly two weeks ago and they have been forwarded along to ACHD staff. With a formal submission I am working with staff on those (inaudible) none of it is in front of them at this point. Again, I have them here as a handout if anybody is interested in reviewing them at this point. (Inaudible discussion) De Weerd: We did color code them at this point this year so that the priorities of ITD, ACHD and intersection were more distinct, so you knew the priority in each of those areas. (Inaudible break in tape again) McKee: -- intersection through there. Were you doing an update on that area on traffic counts and - we talked about that a long time ago? (Inaudible discussion) (Speaker unknown): So, we have got two efforts going on next to each other right now. The south Meridian one has (inaudible) comp plan, but we are doing the same thing for southwest Boise as well. So, we will have the full picture there and I know Craig's studies coordinator just ordered new accounts down in that area and we will get those updated. McKee: Because I was getting (inaudible) Meridian citizens the other night and I have some strong opinions and they weren't all wrong, I am just not sure how we can do it, but they have talked about - especially people around the Ten Mile and Overland area about asking us to try and get systems in prior to the 350 homes Meridian City Council Joint / Workshop Meeting October 2, 2006 Page 10 of 13 and the 287 homes that were coming and that is why I asked about that. But, I think you will see intersections pop up based on some of that new information. De Weerd: Madame Chair, I guess it does raise interesting discussion, probably not tonight or today, but I know as far as access it has triggered - our Fire Department wants a secondary access once a certain number of building permits are issued. A lot of these subdivisions that are approved and they are not instant houses if there are trigger marks where once a certain number of building permits were triggered that the road improvements - because they do come in and say this road will be improved here and it would be anticipated that that road improvement would be done then, but I guess it would be something that maybe our staffs can talk about logic, sequencing or something like that to avoid a train wreck. McKee: And we have had some conversations similar to that with staff about the same thing, about if you know a developer says he is going to do something and for whatever reason it doesn't happen and it is further down in our plans that they are saying that they are going to update it or they are going to do it in advance with these homes going in and exactly that if we limit the number of homes until a certain improvement is done. Again, it is not a topic that we can solve today, but you are on the same course as we are at least with the discussion. (Speaker unknown): When is the Fire Department going to come up with that magic number? McKee: And that will be great to (inaudible) the Fire Department. De Weerd: They already do in some cases. On some of our subdivisions there is a trigger mark that can't be issued any additional building permits until that secondary access is available, so that is kind of maybe the model that could be discussed and involve the development community to see if something like that could be considered. (Inaudible discussion) McKee: But, with that discussion we could broaden it a little bit. We do include the road capacity period if you are going to have 500 new homes dumping on a two lane road - you know for a rural road what is the criteria that we need to say hey wait a minute this isn't developed, we have got these problems and we can't forward or some criteria and I am just throwing that out because I think it does need to be talked about. Bivens: -- preservation corridor to accommodate this. McKee: Well, until we can catch up with the infrastructure. Meridian City Council Joint / Workshop Meeting October 2, 2006 Page 11 of 13 (Inaudible discussion) Item 8. Other (time permitting) McKee: Well, we all have to be consistent, which you guys are. So, that would be great. Okay, do we have any other things that we need to discuss? De Weerd: Madame Chair I did notice in Item 1 and I saw that Clair Bowman was here. I don't know if he was going to speak to potential funding partnership with MDC or if that was his intent with his attendance. (Inaudible discussion) Bowman: Madame Mayor, Madame President and Members of the Council and Commission. (Inaudible --) that works for the ACHD as their person seeking funding and I have been talking at someone the last few weeks about potential funding partnerships. I think our most recent intent is that we will present a series of specific items where there could be financial contribution from MDC to the ACHD process for improving transportation in Meridian, primarily the split corridor, but not limited to that. We would then present that to the MDC Board for their review from setting priorities after which we anticipate there would be an MOA developed or a memorandum of understanding between the Highway District and their renewal agency for those purposes. Our current budget this year in draft form anticipated a $75,000 contribution to the phase 2 corridor study. A discussion at the last MDC Board meeting where we had - I proposed the acquisition of a property that will be 100 percent required for the crossover on the split corridor. The Board opted not to purchase that one, instead wanting to accomplish two objectives with their funds - they directed me to look at the west side of Meridian Road from the railroad tracks north to Cherry Lane, seeking to accomplish two objectives there. One is the aggregation of property to assist in its attractiveness to developers and the second was preserving some of the right- of-way that ACHD would ultimately need to widen Meridian Road. We can do that without knowing what your specific alignment requirements are right now. We could at least help out in that process. So I have had a realtor working on that. He and I will be going over that proposal tomorrow. I will be talking with the MDC Board Wednesday of next week about that. We have a number of avenues that are going on for looking at (inaudible) funding. The goal is to put those into a Memorandum of Agreement that each of your Board of Commissioners - Council and Commission, excuse me would adopt. McKee: That is good news. That is wonderful. Thank you Mr. Bowman. Commissioner Arnold, do you have any questions at all? Arnold: Nope, I am just listening and trying to stay informed. Meridian City Council Joint / Workshop Meeting October 2, 2006 Page 12 of 13 McKee: Okay. Well if there aren't any other questions, there is dessert over there and more food. De Weerd: Madame Chair. McKee: Go ahead. De Weerd: I did notice that last week you had your transportation and land use integration plan workshop. J saw Don jump up earlier and I thought maybe he might have been very anxious to maybe - McKee: -- give a report? (Don - last name?): Yeah I was going to update you on that. We had the - the consultants came in to begin working with some of the elected officials in planning staff on some of the functional classification. The big piece coming up will be a workshop we had planned in early December that is really going to get into the (inaudible) streets piece of that and we are going to work this week and next and nail down that date and get the notice out to everyone a little further ahead of time on this one especially because of the importance of it. So, be looking for that. We are going to have a follow up session, similar to what we presented last week and we are going to go through - some CCDC staff members couldn't make it and our project management staffs of our internal folks. So, in talking to Matt I invited him to that once we get it lined up, so we can get up to speed on some of the things. I know you guys had the Charrette and all of that going on and were very busy with that. So, we will get them updated on the piece of that. You know this - some of the preliminary results from the Ten Mile Interchange Charrette are inconsistent with some of the things that we have envisioned in that, recognizing it is going to take both a land use and design element as well as the transportation design element to make those two things come together. So, that is the big piece and the big thing that we were recognizing there, but also getting them to realize the function of classification just (inaudible) been employed by the whole country for the last 50 years is a little antiquated for the purposes that it now needs to be used (inaudible) very defined federal item that it is therefore and needs to be done, but we are looking to modify that at least in the local level to bring some of those things more into concert. I can already - you know I can look at the pattern of the streets and begin to tell you more levels than the typical arterial collector paradigm that we have been in. So, that was the jest of it. We did have a couple of sessions with some maps for people identifying some character areas and other ones that might warrant some special consideration in terms of some design elements in the future. That was just an attempt for them to now go out shoot some photos of some areas locally to help tailor some draft policies as we get into that little streets workshop in December. That is where we are. They are also working diligently on refining the COMPASS model for local use, the traffic analysis Meridian City Council Joint / Workshop Meeting October 2, 2006 Page 13 of 13 zones, especially after developing parts of Meridian are still pretty large and breaking those down so we can get better analysis within the square miles of collector needs and those kind of things. McKee: Well, great. Anything else? We did that pretty speedy, huh? MEETING ADJOURNED AT 12:50 P.M. 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