Mobility Committee Meeting Transcript – 11/16/2015 Title: ATXN 24/7 Recording Channel: 6 - ATXN Recorded On: 11/16/2015 6:00:00 AM Original Air Date: 11/16/2015 Transcript Generated by SnapStream ================================== [9:05:32 AM] >> Kitchen: Good morning, everyone. Good morning. I'm going to call to order the mobility committee. And before we get started, just a piece of housekeeping. To let everyone know that we're going to take the agenda out of order this morning. Councilmember Gallo had an engagement she couldn't change, so she's going to be here in about an hour. So we're going to take some items first that are primarily briefings before we start to get to the items that we'll be voting on. So ... so with that said, let's start with the approval of minutes. Do I have a motion to Council member Garza moves and Councilmember Zimmerman seconds. All in favor? >> Aye. >> Kitchen: Okay. Minutes are passed. Okay. The first item on our agenda is citizens communication. [9:07:15 AM] This is general general testimony. Now, I want to remind everyone that speakers signed up for general testimony will be speaking on concerns about items that are not posted on the agenda. So this is the part of our this is the part of our meeting where we where people come and speak about other items that are not on our agenda. So with that said, I will start to call let's see, Michael Fosom. >> I have a time donation from the next speaker. >> Kitchen: Okay. Let's see. So that would give you six minutes. >> I'm waiting for my slides, please bear with me. >> Kitchen: Okay. Good morning, committee members, my name is Michael Fosom, I'm here to speak to you today about the Austin Animal condition recommendations that are asking for fundamental changes to our current code and policy. Our current policy for management of aggressive coyotes includes. Hazing, education, outreach and limited targeted humane removal of aggressive coyotes to protect public safety. The AAC recommendations are similar, but reserve lethal control only for human attack and as approved by chief of animal services officer. [9:09:35 AM] If adopted, this will impair mobility through trail closures, which is in your purview. It will endanger public safety of citizens, particularly children and pets. Cause citizens to lock themselves in their home and not to go out because of fear of coyotes. In Austin, pets are family and the community wants them protected. Please vote against the AAC recommendations when they come to council and ask for the mobility committee to review this jointly with the human health and safety committee to address concerns with trail closures. As I go through the material, please note the citations for source materials, you can review these online if you would like to. Our current policy works. It's behavior modification, trapping reinstills the fear of humans in aggressive coyotes. According to Doctors Baker and Tim removal of afew bold individuals will restore the fear of humans and the entire group of coyotes sometimes causing them to leave the entire area. This effect can [9:11:45 AM] persist for months, or even years. The coyote people ask how this will work. They say they make unusual vocalizations which potentially communicating fear and danger to. Become specifics. More needs to become more about that. This could explain why trapping is a more effective method for reversing coyote habitation than other methods. Behavior Modification. Last week the Travis County Commissioners approved radification of the inter-local aggreement. That supports our wildlife management contract. They rejected the recommendations from the Animal Advisory Commission. Our current policy. How does that work. Well. The way it works is. We monitor coyote activity. When aggression increases beyond a safe threshold we do a field indebted investigation and the wildlife biologist does. Talks to area residents. Discusses this to the land owners. Options are outlined. If trapping is selected. Then only aggressive coyotes are removed. The removal is humane. They use rubber lined traps. They have exclusions. So no cats or dogs are removed. Our current program is 100% successful. There have been no human attacks in ten years. This is not a coyote radification program. [9:13:08 AM] Less than 10 to 20 aggressive coyotes are removed from the city each year. The risk is primarily to children. Evidence shows that coyote behavior is changing and becoming more aggressive. Children are the primary targets of predatory attacks which results in the most serious injuries. They view small children as potential prey and may be stimulated to attack due to their movement and sounds that they make. The movement of attacks on children occurred during daylight, while the victims are playing outside in their backyard, front yard or driveway. Sometimes the habituation is so severe that the coyotes are considered an immediate threat especially to children and pets. How do our plans compare? Our current plan as you can see on the right-hand side is listed and the humane society society of the U.S., which these folks want to adopt is on the right. The first six areas are the same. There's a difference in response. We remove aggressive coyotes before they become a problem. Their plan claims to have an effective response, but the results say no. We prioritized human safety, the safety of pets and consider targeted removal of aggressive animals. The results at the bottom. Human attacks, zero in 10 years. In the Denver area, their attacks have increased by 200% yearly since they adopted this program. Another example in Boulder, Colorado, they had several incidents where coyotes nipped at people, pedestrians and bicyclists initiated a hazing program. They hazed for four weeks and there were no reported incidents during those four weeks. The weeks after that program ended, a five-year-old boy was bitten and the two coyotes were killed by [9:15:09 AM] Colorado parks and wildlife to protect public safety. The last line on this slide states hazing programs will be considered in the development of future coyote management plans. That's the way it should be. You have to have a balance as we do now. In our current program we promote hazing, we educate about hazing, but we also remove aggressive coyotes when it's necessary. Hazing does not work on habituated or aggressive coyotes. There is no data on studies. Researchers have questioned the effectiveness of hazing. Tim stated it's ineffective for coyotes in an urban setting. The assessments for the effectiveness of hazing on coyotes are based on more speculation than data. Our program is based on years of research. Hazing is not. Looking at mobility, what happens in Denver? The coyotes get so aggressive they have to close trials for weeks at a time and even then children still get bitten. The change in the coyote policy will have a drastic affect on mobility. How many people will drive a car versus biking or walking if that was an option if they're afraid to go out of their homes and get on the trails? Finally the results. They show that really overall our policy is more humane than the recommended policy coming from the aac. And that's because we stopped the aggressive behavior before it gets out of hand. If you look at the bottom of the slide zero human attacks under the aac recommendations. Those are going to increase. You saw it on those slides up here and earlier. Please vote against those recommendations. Thank you very much. >> Kitchen: Thank you. Our next speaker is Malcolm '80's. Yates. [9:17:13 AM] And then after Malcolm will be Neal tanner. >> Thank you. My name is Malcolm yatess. I'm the chair of the east Riverside oltorf combined neighborhood planning process team. I'm here to talk to you today about the proposed restriping of east Riverside drive between I-35 and Ben white. I believe that mobility funds would be better spent on other bike projects on the east side. East Riverside drive is a highly traveled major arterial road that funnels traffic from the dense development in southeast Austin into downtown, taking lanes from east Riverside drive will make the traffic situation worse for all drivers while benefiting the few bike riders brave enough to risk riding next to cars going 35 miles per hour. I propose instead to finish the pedestrian underpass under east Riverside drive east of south pleasant valley road. This underpass has been unused for years because the approaches and ramps on either side are not completed. By spending a small amount of mobility funds to build the ramps for this underpass, the thousands of residents south of Riverside would be able to safely cross Riverside to access parks, shopping centers and trails north of Riverside. And this photo is a -- one of the preliminary engineering review drawings showing the ramps that would be completed up to street level from the underpass. Are there any questions? Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Good morning. [9:19:14 AM] My name is Neal tanner and I'm here as -- to talk about the restriping proposals on Mesa drive in northwest Austin. I am kind of every /the city/constituent there would be for that area it seems like. I'm property owner on Mesa drive, I'm a father of a child who bikes through that area and I'm a cyclist myself. I appreciate all the work done in the neighborhood for the last several years where the city has come in and put dedicated bike lanes on a bunch of the key roads and alternated dedicated parking on either side of the street. It works well in the neighborhood and people are getting used to it throughout the neighborhood. One was done last year. The city proposed that exact same plan on the south end of Mesa drive this year. I was really appalled when after the initial community meeting that was pretty successful, a small handful of very entitled residents managed to get the city to change the plan and remove the -- remove bike lanes and put in parking lanes for the houses that are along that section of Mesa. Just to throw out a couple of Numbers and points, all of these houses have garages and large driveways and the original plan with parking on alternating sides of the street was designed such that no house was more than three houses away from dedicated same side onstreet parking. Which I feel is a very comfortable compromise between people wanting to park in front of the house and mobility concerns of the entire community. So when the proposal got changed to remove the bike lanes that scared a lot of us and we started to quickly try to gather community feedback. In about one week we raised over 600 petition signatures in support specifically of dedicated bike lanes along [9:21:16 AM] that section of Mesa. The support was both broad ground of the city. As I heard from so many people they bike through that area as part of their commute as well as a lot of support from the neighbors themselves, especially parents of doss elementary school kids, which is right across from the proposed area in question. I am here to encourage the city to go back to the original plan. What the transportation department originally proposed of dedicated like lanes with dedicated parking on alternate sides of the street, is a good proposal, it's consistent with what's done throughout the rest of the neighborhood so people are accustomed to it. And I think it works well and I would like to go back to that. And in fact, I'd like to see that expanded with proposals such as what's I believe going to come up later today of far west boulevard is kind of a major connection from Mesa to the whole bike network on the other side of mopac. So I would like to see -- voice my support for that as well of continuing the dedicated bike lane space. >> Kitchen: Mr. Tanner, can you tell me again the segment that you're talking about? All the way to spicewood? >> The segment currently being discussed is from cat mountain to far west. And that leaves one remaining section from far west to spicewood that's kind of the unfinished gap between the north section that was done last year, the south section that's proposed right now and I believe that middle section is due for restriping in a couple of years. >> Kitchen: Okay, thank you. >> Zimmerman: I have a quick question. I'm curious where did the original motivation or the original push come from to make the original changes? Did that come from some hoh group or neighborhood association or did it come from city staff. >> All of the opposition that I have heard to the [9:23:17 AM] original city's plan -- >> Zimmerman: I was looking for the original motivation, the original impetus. >> For striping it at all? It was the city because the road was up for regular resurfacing and so since they had to put stripes down, I believe it's the city's policy to go down with the latest and greatest plan for how to stripe whole access striping for these streets. >> The reason is when I campaigned in district 6 in far northwest Austin there was overwhelming opposition to these stripings, but I think it changes depending on where you are in the city. And as you get more to the city core you have more living and development there's more motivation to restripe and put in bike lanes, but it is still a divisive issue and I think if we want to talk about it it would be appropriate for a future meeting. >> Kitchen: Okay. That is all of our citizen communication so we'll move now to our staff briefings. I believe the folks from glass house policy are here. >> Yes. >> We will start with you. And thank you all for adjusting your schedule and being first for us. And really excited to have you here to till us what you've been out to. >> Looks like we're before the crowd too so that's exciting. First of all to start our presentation we want to tell you about who we are. Tom and I ran an organization called glass house policy. It is an austin-based non- profit. We are a crowdsource organization. We work on a variety of issues at the statewide and municipal level, our process regardless of what policy issue we work on is the same, that through a [9:25:18 AM] combination of both online and in person engagement we solicit policy opinions from the general public around substantive policy issues facing their community or state and work with stakeholders like yourselves to provide a conduit for the public to shape public policy. Again, most recently the most recent iteration of our work has been mobility atx and the advent of that was the failure of proposition 1. The ideas that proposition 1 failed last November by 20 points in the absence of any kind of clear leadership in moving the city forward around a mobility conversation we thought at that point working at the statewide level that this could be a nice place for to do our work and still have dialogue with what the future of Austin mobility could look like. The result was a program we launched last April called mobility atx that functioned through online personal engagement to provide a clear conduit for citizens to provide for what the future of infrastructure mobility would be like here in Austin, Texas. We worked with many groups, the idea being that by both providing an online forum for people to post ideas and exchange ideas and upload ideas they liked about what the future of Austin mobility could look like and also hosting community conversations, town hall events, online livestream conversations and otherwise we could start developing a new prioritization of market source ideas about what the university of Austin mobility could look like, whether it be infrastructure changes, policy changes, microand macro. What we saw was exactly what we hoped, is that there was a real 30's to have these conversations, not only about mobility, but everything else. People in Austin are immensely engaged in the future of their city and want a voice, and mobility being one of the most important issues facing our city was a clear way for us to channel that interest. So I'll push it over to Tom to talk about the actual initiative. >> So we released our [9:27:18 AM] findings report several weeks ago. The findings report details 10 of the most up voted ideas from the community. Overall the community online was 1,065 people who submitted over 365 ideas. These ideas were up-voted by fellow users of the site to show a democratization of our users. It went from fully funding the bicycle master plan plan to fitting the road from highway 183 to remoot booting the now defunk dillo that capital metro used to operate downtown. Overall glass house policy is extremely pleased with this process. As Francisco said, austinites are demonstrated they're ready for an active and ongoing conversation about what mobility policy in Austin looks like. There's also been significant up take across the state of Texas. We're moving a process very similar to probability atx over to Houston which shows that many other municipalities are following after Austin's innovative example of how to engage citizens in an ongoing public dialogue. >> So again next steps what we're looking for on mobility atx we published a policy report that has top 10 ideas sourced from the general public. In addition we're moving this process over to Houston, but in terms of mobility atx itself, I think what we would like to see moving forward is if there's any way for us to support your efforts in the city council or mobility committee or around these issues, around stakeholder engagement, community engagement district wide or citywide we would be glad to have that conversation and welcome it. In addition that what we've seen as I mentioned prior is that there is a real hunger in Austin to have these sorts of conversations about substantive policy issues facing the city and there are many other issues fashion the issue ranging from permitting to otherwise that this process could be applied to. If that is of interest to city council, again, in this committee or otherwise, we'd be happy to have that conversation about how that [9:29:19 AM] could best be implemented in the city. So moving forward there's a lot of process to continue. We have a set of prioritized market set ideas about what the future mobility policy could look like and we would be happy to continue to support your efforts and actively welcome so in moving either these policies forward, another initiative forward or otherwise. Thank you for all your support in making sure this did become a large community wide dialogue across all districts and if there's anything else we can do for this committee or for council as a whole please donataries at a time to reach out. >> Kitchen: Thank you. Do we have any questions? I center a question. So you all are -- have learned a lot about reaching out to the committee and I have to say that's very much appreciated. This was an area with transportation and mobility that is really important for us to talk to people about what they're interested in in terms of options. Is there any observations you would make in terms of this point. I know that the mechanism reaches a certain segment of the ability. >> With regards to how best to engage folks? >> Yeah. We paired the online process [9:31:19 AM] with conversations, conversation core, partly managed by the city and several other online in person engagement opportunities. I think the key observation is that a plurality of community engagement methods are necessary if you want to get an accurate snapshot of what the city is thinking. >> I would agree with that and I would also talk on as an overarching philosophy is in our experience, that partnerships are paramount to success to any kind of community engagement activity. There are a plethora of groups across the city that already have their own constituencies, already have anywhere own list of things. Ours as well as council in terms of doing community engagement activities like this to tap into those groups and take part in the infrastructure that they have existing, to make not only community level [indiscernible] But across all recommends of activity. >> Thank you all very much. >> Zimmerman: Quickly about Anderson mill road. Our city staff came to one of my town hall's in district 6 and I thought they did an excellent job talking about the Anderson mill congestion. And what came out of that to me is staff is aware, they understand the congestion issues and they're keenly aware of how badly Anderson mill road needs widening, center lane. The issue is funding and what priority is going to be. To me the idea, the pedestrian and bicycle and urban trail is a different policy direction than taking care of the congestion needs we already have. We've known that road has been congested for a decade. But there have been urban trails built, but Anderson mill hasn't been widened. So it frustrates me to hear the community saying we need to draw attention to this area of congestion. We already know it's congested. It's a matter of priority. We can only one direction. [9:33:21 AM] We'll go in bicycle, urban trails or we can relieve congestion. And we've been going the pedestrian and bicycle path. We've been doing that for a decade and our roads are getting more congested. There are decisions that need to be made. And I see this suggestion that we can doing everything all the time and we can't. >> I think that makes sense. I would say in addition is we need to not only see a change in ideas of policy change or infrastructure change, but because we do geo tracking on our website we can see priortation of ideas even within single-member district districts. We can come in and talk to your office about what kind of ideas came out of your district in particular and what ideas affect your district particularly. >> Kitchen: Thank you very much. We appreciate that offer. I would like to take you up to that offer. >> Absolutely. Happy to do it. The final thing I would like to say to your point, councilmember Zimmerman, is absolutely there are difficult choices to be made in Austin. The public is clearly aware of that as well. I don't think mobility atx was an issue or referendum to organize what those priorities are, but a way to better understand the landscape in each individual district as well as a city as a whole of what the public is thinking about those mobility challenges. >> Thank you very much. >> Good morning. I'm SHAWN bill with the central Texas regional mobility authority. Thank you very much for us to give you a briefing on the mopac south project. We've had a lot of activity since we came out and briefed the mobility committee at our last [9:35:24 AM] meeting. A key focus since we came out and briefed the mobility committee is preparation for our fourth open house. We actually had that in person open house on November 10th. At that open house we were able to present six different configurations for the express lane alternative. We were able to present a lot of information about each one of those configurations, and present overall travel times within the mopac corridor for those sexton figure rations. We were -- those six configurations and see what it meant for downtown traffic. We were able to show renderings of the six different configurations so folks could see where it would sit within space and finally we prepared models that show where the different cars would sit, how they would get through the different connections for those alternatives. Another major initiative was launching our virtual open house. And that launched on open 21st. In advance of the actual open house which we held on November 10th. A big advantage on launching this virtual open house is that we allowed stakeholders and community members to go get the information for these different configurations prior to the open house and that way it allowed them to get an opportunity to drive through that information and then certainly be prepared for some in-person questions on November 10th. Again, the things we presented at the virtual open house and in person open house we wanted to provide folks some background information, basically providing them information about the past -- the priest couple of years of our environmental study. We wanted to communicate what as changed since our [9:37:25 AM] third open house in February. We wanted to communicate what the university of Texas, the center for transportation research, what their findings were as we evaluated impacts to the downtown core. We really wanted to hammer home here's the operational pros and cons for each one of these configurations and we also wanted to begin the context sensitive solutions process. That's basically engaging the public to determine what the esthetics and what the amenities of this project should be. The open house itself as well as our virtual open house was a very big success and a big reason we're successful is the initiative we received from the city of Austin, both the transportation department assisted us in development of those concepts, but also assisted us in staffing the open house so we're grateful for that participation and that assistance. At the in person open house we actually had 180 people that came out to view those different configurations to get the information I listed before about the operational pros and cons, the esthetics in the different elements of the configurations. We've had actually 2,115 folks come out and visit the virtual open house and all the content and information that we were able to provide at the in-person open house on November 10th was also available at the virtual open house. This is just a snapshot of some of the information we showed at the open houses for all of the configurations. This is again the overall corridor travel times and again this was just one of the data points that we wanted to provide the public for each one of these different operational configurations. >> Can you take a minute not to go to any detail, but take a minute to highlight those six options for people? >> Absolutely. As you will see in this [9:39:28 AM] column to your left you're lifting the no billed concept of top and that would be basically the do nothing alternative. And then as we talk down that road, there is the one express lane without a direct connection to Cesar Chavez configuration. That would be one express lane in each direction. Below that we would have that one express lane in each direction with a direct connection to Cesar Chavez. Two express lanes with a direct connection to Cesar Chavez and then below that you will see the wishbone concept and that's what we're affectionately terming our concept that would have two express lanes in each direction and it would have elevated ramps to get the downtown express lane over to the right lane. Those elevated ramps will be built near Barton skyway and bee caves road. And basically this wishbone alternative is an alternative that would get the express lane users out of the median of that express lane into the outside lane and have that elevation change occur near Barton skyway and bee caves road and avoid an elevated structure near town lake. And finally we have the city of Austin concept and again this was the concept that we developed with city of Austin transportation staff. And as you will see here we're presenting travel times for each one of those concepts. And if you would like I could walk you through those. It's at your discretion. >> Is it for the minutes? >> It is. This is a trip from slaughter lane where you would enter on to mopac and then where you would exit on to Cesar Chavez and then vice versa in the P.M. Direction. And we're trying to present those overall traffic times for both the A.M. And the [9:41:30 AM] P.M. Peak period. And we are trying to present them, just kind of walking through those columns, we have all of our concepts on the left. As you walk you see today's travel times for those trips. Basically in the morning it would take you 23 minutes to get from slaughter lane to Cesar Chavez. And in the P.M. It would take you 16 minutes to get from Cesar Chavez down to slaughter lane. And that's today's travel. As you move over to the right in 2035, those would be the express lane travel times. That's how long it would take them to get that same trip in the A.M. And P.M. And as you move over to the far right we're seeing the 2035 general purpose. That's basically the main lanes of mopac and what those corresponding times will be for each one of the build option. >> Garza: So looking at this list if I'm reading it correctly, it says in 2035 one of the express lane is tolled and then if you do not pay the toll? >> Yes, ma'am. >> What I get from this is it's getting worse even if we build these extra lanes. The time gets longer. >> Yeah. As you see those columns in the right those are going to be the 20 I-35 travel times so that's after our region has experienced 20 years of additional growth and additional traffic. If we chose to do nothing, if there is a no billed option that is picked it will be those travel times in the top right, the 52 minutes versus the 51 minutes. In 2035 certainly you can see the express lanes since they have that dependable travel speed, there are faster travel times there, but a key thing to notice is on the general purpose lanes, all the main lanes, [9:43:31 AM] they are benefited relative to that 2035, that 52 minutes and that 51 minutes of travel times. >> Okay. >> Kitchen: I think the other point is that what you're comparing is no activity that you would project it to be. But I think it's clear for the public to understand it's still worse than it is right now. >> Absolutely. And that's something that I'm sure this mobility committee is certainly aware of that mobility for this region is a huge challenge. >> I think the point is simply that this is an option, of course, that we're all discussing, but it's not a panacea by any means and it's not going to fix travel times on mopac. So I think it's important for the public's expectations that what you're going is mitigating the projection for worse, but it's still worse than it is today. >> We are certainly not trying to couch this project as a silver bullet, but certainly we're hoping to provide some reliability within the mopac corridor. >> Kitchen: I understand. >> Zimmerman: To that point that councilmember kitchen just made, I know you don't want it to get too busy, but if you put in a column that said a hypothetical tomorrow with today's traffic load if these things were built and ready to go tomorrow, how would it drop the time? That would be useful to put on here because if you're looking at 20 years of speculation of how the city's going to grow, that's kind of tough too. You might be off. It might be worse or it might be better. Don't know what's going to happen in 20 years, but if you put in a hypothetical what would happen tomorrow based on our load, that would be helpful. >> Yes, sir. >> Garza: This is a very interesting chart because I think the general public thinks if we invest in these roads and we build these roads it's going to improve [9:45:32 AM] our traffic situation and this chart shows that that is not the case. That it's going to continue getting worse. I firmly believe that it's -- our road system is unsustainable. It's unsustainable to keep building roads when it's just going to continue to get worse. And to councilmember Zimmerman's point earlier, that's why it's important to invest in multimodal options because it will get getting worse and worse and worse. And even investing all these money into these roads people will be in worst congestions. So I hope the public understands that building these extra toll roads and building these roads is not going to improve traffic in the long-term. >> Kitchen: Yes. I think it goes back to what we've been saying is we have to have options for people and have to be multimodal options. So let me ask a question just to clarify. I think I heard what you said, but just to clarify, the last two options do not involve elevated lanes or did you say the wishbone is an elevated lane, but it's not over the lake? Could you tell us that again? >> Yes, absolutely. The wishbone would provide for that elevation change as we get folks from the express lanes to the outside lanes, that elevation change would occur near Barton skyway and bee caves road and there would be no additional elevated structures over lady bird lake. And that is the same for the city of Austin alternative as well. >> So the last two do not involve an elevated -- I should be able to picture it, but I'm trying to picture it. But they would not -- those would would not involve elevated lanes over the lake anywhere? >> The wishbone would simply widen the exist is bridges at the same elevation that they are today. And the city of Austin [9:47:32 AM] alternative would construct additional bridge structures at the same elevation of those bridges outside the bridges where they sit today. >> Kitchen: At the same location? >> Yes, ma'am. Just to go back, a key point of the mopac south project is to ensure reliable travel times for transit vehicles and registered van pools. All capital metro buses will be able to ride for free within the express lanes. And providing a reliable route for transit is one of the key purposes for this project. >> Kitchen: Thank you. You can keep going. >> Another one of the key metrics that we presented at the open house was the downtown -- the impacts to the downtown grid and the key findings that the university of Texas center for transportation research, one of their key findings was that for all of the build alternatives there were benefits to travel times within the downtown study area. And you could see the study area as shown above -- it's flanked by mopac on the west, congress avenue to the east, Enfield road on the north. And the university of Texas endeavored to really get a good understanding of what the overall travel times would be, but also would there be effects to any of the individual arterials within the downtown study area. One other key finding was for each one of the build alternatives there are benefits to travel times within the study area. And also that with the P.M. Peak there are substantial benefit to travel times within the downtown area. As we move forward our next steps are to gather all the feedback that we are receiving through the open house and all the of the stakeholder engagement to essentially use that feedback to determine what's the best operational configuration for the express lane project. And then hopefully come out in the early spring to communicate to the public [9:49:33 AM] what our findings were, what we heard through these open houses, and what the public feels is most important. We are targeting our public hearing on what we're -- getting ready for in the summer of 2016 and hopefully marching towards an environmental finding in the fall of 2016. And with that I'd be happy to answer any other questions? >> Kitchen: Just for clarity for everyone, what's the process after the environmental finding? Following the environmental finding if it is approved for construction, following that there would be a series of steps that occur. The campo board would then get together and if it is approved for the next steps would approve that within the transportation improvement plan and then this project, once it obtains environmental approval and that approval from campo could then move forward into final decision. >> Kitchen: And the environmental finding is done on which options? All of them? >> Ultimately we're going to use this feedback from the open house to come forward with a recommended alternative. It would be one configuration, one build alternative that is ultimately recommended. >> And so the timeline for that is after the public hearing, I assume. >> Yes. >> Or you will come out with your recommendation and there would be a public hearing on that. >> Yes. And I may have misspoken. What we'll do is use the feedback that we are receiving right now, basically vet these alternatives against the purpose and need for the project, and what the community feels is most important. Using that feedback will then generate what is one recommended alternative. We'll prepare a draft environmental assessment that speaks to the impacts associated with that one recommended alternative. Then we would hold a public hearing on that draft environmental assessment as well as that recommended alternative. [9:51:35 AM] >> Kitchen: Okay. Other questions? >> Zimmerman: Just a quick comment, if I would. I don't think I agree with the idea that a city is necessarily going to grow infinitely in size, so I want to push back against this idea that you shouldn't build anything because no matter what capacity you build, it's always going to be outgrown. I don't buy into this philosophy. I think maybe using a pedestrian example, this would be as silly as a mom that looks at her little boy and says I'm going to stop buying you pants because you keep out growing them. It's not a rational way to think. We have to satisfy the demands of the people we have here now and I think at some point the city will stop growing. Detroit's a good example. But you don't have to be Detroit. You don't have to be mismanaged, necessarily, to stop growing. You can get to some point where it doesn't make sense to grow anymore. So I don't buy the argument of infinite growth and we shouldn't build anything because no matter what we >> Thank you. >> Kitchen: Okay, thank you very much. [Applause]. Next we're going to move to the agenda item related to the staffing contract for the transportation management center. >> Morning, commissioners, I'm Jim dale, assistant manager for the transportation department. I'm excited to talk about this contract with you. This is getting down to something we are wanting to do more of on a daily basis and this will be a contract that will have a request for council action that will come before the council it looks like in probably January or February of this year. As you know, transportation department is pursuing many strategies to keep Austin moving. This contract is just one of [9:53:37 AM] those strategies. And what we're looking at doing is hiring a consultant to come in and manage the city's transportation management center so they would provide not only management resources, but also some staffing to supplement the city's staff. So we would -- that would result in expanded services, expanded hours of operations, which we'll talk a little bit more here in the next couple of slides. And then the contract duration is a one-year contract with three one year renewal options. I'll talk about why we're structuring it that way here in a little bit as well. The qualifications we already have this out on the street. The consultants are submitting qualifications. Today is the deadline. We'll start reviewing them and January and February is when we look to have an rca to council. So the future is what we're really focused on is the future and actively managing our assets that we have today. Some of the expanded services that will come by activating our activation and management center with more hours and more people is looking at actively monitoring the critical arterials to look for those issues that happen that may be there everyday, but also the ones that happen like incidents, lane closures and so forth for construction like we see a lot downtown as well as special events and managing those. We will be coordinating through this contract that will allow us to coordinate more with our partners. You heard one here earlier, ctrma, and then also with txdot, a very close partner. And then a number of the other ones in the community as well, capital metro and so forth. Also one of the other strategies that we have available to us is to disseminate travel information, very important to get information out and that can adjust folk's travel behavior partners, but also some of the frustration they experience with congestion and the incidents as well. And the last one there is really important. We get some additional services to monitor the health of our system and really what do we need to do to maintain, what does that equipment break? You can see the expanded hours there just to highlight a couple of things. We are expanding to Saturday and Sunday. We have about 1 special [9:55:38 AM] events in downtown every year that creates a lot of activity and also a lot of opportunities to improve mobility for the people attending those events. And 50% increase in operating hours, and then we have a significant increase in our staff. We're looking at three to four staff during the peak periods to deal with multiple incidents that may occur during those time or multiple events that need to be managed. It will be a blended staff. We will -- the consultant will be bringing in staff and so will the city be providing staff. Some of the related services to those I mentioned before, a big one is performance metrics. With the investment we're making here we want to report back what value the public is getting for this investment. So we're looking at going outside the city, going outside the consultant, having more of an independent look at that and looking at possibly university to help us evaluate the performance and what benefit, what's the return to the public. Also part of that contract will be developing standard operating procedures. We're really basically starting from a level where we have a maintenance TMC that's focused on maintaining the system, but not operating it. And so with these -- we need some operating procedures to be developed that now take staff and -- keep doing the maintenance part, but also focus on the operations. And then also some enhanced software tools, we'll need to just manage the overall -- the management center better. Benefits, obvious ones, delay savings, emission reductions, fuel consumption. Enhanced travel reliability is one that we're going to be focusing on and benefits as well. Yes? >> Kitchen: Can you speak to those items, the improved travel time reliability and the safety benefits, just to help people understand what a tmd system is and how what you're doing translates into what they see when they're driving? >> Sure. [9:57:38 AM] I'll use a couple of examples to do that. For the improved travel time reliability, is when an incident happens is sometimes we have opportunities to change the signal timing when those happen to help move more traffic through. And so by being able to activating the TMC we have more folks looking for when those incidents occur and see if we can make the adjustments to improve the travel times. >> Kitchen: By incidents you mean a wreck? >> Yes, like a crash, a crash at an intersection or maybe a rear end crash mid block. So that's one example. So for the safety benefits, the other thing too is one of the things that by having A.P.D., Austin police department in our TMC now as part of the traffic congestion action plan has been really beneficial, but have them in part of this center too to where they can respond more quickly to incidents and moving those incidents off the roadway reduces the chances for the secondary collisions that may 'happen at the back of the queue. There you will see a lot more of that on the freeway side and us working with them, txdot. And A.P.D. As well to help manage that. In terms of the benefit costs, this approach has been successful around the country. We have Houston here, palm beach county, Florida D.O.T. Are some examples. But for every dollar you invest, there's about a 10- dollar return in benefits to the public. One of the things that differs between these -- between these locations and ours is right now we're focusing on arterial streets and these locations, they're focusing on arterial streets and freeways as one system and we're working with our partners in the community going that direction as well. >> Kitchen: Thanks. >> So why are we contracting instead of doing this in- house? One of the first things is we have this asset in our TMC by activating it allows us to unlock some value and with a contract we can do that more quickly. Also it's a specialized set of skills that we do not have at this time in our -- within the city, but by [9:59:39 AM] blending the staff we look at it as an opportunity to build those skill sets up and then reevaluate in a couple of years what do we do at that point? Do we continue with the contract or do we move more of this in-house? Knowledge transfers, what I was talking to there. And then very importantly is this flexibility for staffing for the future. As a community when I say community, txdot, ourselves, central text regional mobility authority, capital metro and others, we're looking at changing how we do business or at least having that conversation to go towards one system. So instead of the city managing arterial streets, txdot manage the freeways, ctrma managing their future managed lanes, is bringing that all together and so this contract allows us that flexibility instead of staffing up and having additional city resources in the TMC and then when we come together, if we do come together as one system, how do we move that staff around within the city? What do we do with those additional resources that txdot would be bringing in to other partners? So it brings us some flexibility there for the future. And just some other examples of agencies that are utilizing a consultant to manage and staff their TMC. You will find ones that do it in house as well. Different agencies may do it 24/7, just Monday through Friday, just during the peak periods, just during special events. Thank you. Are there any questions? I'll be glad to entertain them. >> Zimmerman: Thank you, chair kitchen. If you could back up to the slide that talked about benefit and cost. I'm so happy you put that in there. I think when you do these projects the cost is a lot easier to quantify than the benefits. So if we're talking about staffing and we're talking about 2.25 million, there would be a certain number of experts that we would bring in, a certain -- you could probably do a cost per hour if you look at the value of the consultants coming in. And then on the benefits I guess you would be talking [10:01:40 AM] about faster travel time, less idling in traffic. >> Yes, the delay savings, fuel reduction savings, travel time liability, and the safety benefits, too. This is one of those things that we do want to look to this independent -- not the consultant or city staff, but a third party to come in and evaluate what performance metrics should we be looking at, to tell that story. Then we'll go forward and develop those performance metrics. >> Zimmerman: It would be be --like a bit of horse before the cart. I could use some helps getting the metrics. We have a certain number of traffic deaths per year, a certain number of collisions, time lost. We would establish those and say, if we spend 2.2 million, here's what we think they'll be after we bring in this expertise. Fewer deaths per year, less time wasting idling in traffic. We would set those up and say, okay, what is it going to take us to get there? Here's the metrics we think are achievable, here's the cost. I'd like to see more detail, but you're going in the right direction. >> We can provide more detail. >> Zimmerman: Thank you. >> You're welcome. >> Do we have any other questions? Okay. Do I have a motion to move this item forward to the full council? Councilmember Garza moves to have a second. >> Zimmerman: I also second to move it forward for more discussion. >> It's up to -- >> Zimmerman: What did you want to move? >> I would move a recommendation that we approve staff's recommendation. >> Okay. Is that your second -- so the motion is to move this forward to full council with a recommendation that the full council adopt it. All in favor? >> Zimmerman: I'd like to speak against that motion briefly. >> Kitchen: Go ahead. >> Zimmerman: I'm not ready to recommend it. I'm not against it, but I'm not [10:03:42 AM] ready to recommend it, because I need additional clarification for what our metrics are before we recommend it to the full city council. We should probably did into that with some more detail, from my point of view. >> Kitchen: Okay. >> Zimmerman: I would be comfortable having it up for discussion at the full council. >> Kitchen: Okay. >> Zimmerman: I guess the motion as it is, to recommend, I would vote against. >> Kitchen: We can make a note of your reasoning for that. All in favor? Okay. We'll also -- and opposed? And we'll reflect in the minutes that councilmember Zimmerman had asked for more information. And he would like to have that information by the time of the council meeting going forward, so that he can do his analysis. >> We'll do that. >> Kitchen: Thank you very much. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and proceed with item number 7, and then we'll two back to the top of the agenda. And that's the discussion and possible action on the 2.5 million lane striping contract. >> That will be me as well. >> Kitchen: Yes. I thought we'd go ahead and let you finish, so. >> Sure. Thank you again for your time. This is another area of operations that we wanted to bring forward. It will go to council early in the year. And so we wanted to make you aware of this. So, the long-line striping contract F. This is a great picture of one of the streets. Those are the long lines, those are the lines that go for -- usually, many miles at a time. You have solid lines, and you have skip lines. So, who else is doing the long line striping contract? There's a number of agencies across the state as well as the country that are doing this. It's being done locally, San Antonio and txdot contract out their long line operation. That contract, just some background real quickly. It will be a one-year contract [10:05:43 AM] with a one-year extension. Where our budget is shown there. It will -- the contractor will do the long line installation, but we'll continue to do the short line and the legends. You can see those in the lower right- hand corner, the arrows, crosswalks, detailed work, city staff will continue to do that. So, one of the questions that comes up -- maybe -- I'll go through this really quickly. There's two different types of materials. We can use paint or thermoplastic. And really, I can talk more about this if there's questions, but, the tradeoff is, how long does thermoplastic last, about twice as long as paint. But, thermoplastic here locally is about 2 1/2 times the expense of paint. So, that's why we're choosing to go, on our contract, with paint. We're pursuing paint. We will evaluate that, monitor the performance of the paint during the contract, and see what life we're getting out of that, and then adjust going forward. So, our goals are up here in the upper-left-hand corner. To re-stripe the arterial streets once every two years, like Lamar boulevard. They get a lot of traffic, more wear. The paint wears out sooner. Then our collector streets, say, like, sec, some of our small -- they don't carry as much traffic. They don't have as much wear on the paint, so we can go longer with that. But that's our goals that we're establishing to start with. Through the contract, we'll actually increase the amount of re-striping work that we do on an annual basis by about 40% to reach those goals. So, some of the benefits to contracting, it limits the need for some specialized equipment. We're not purchasing the equipment, some of which we [10:07:43 AM] already have, but, maintaining it is very important. Like I mentioned earlier, we're increasing our striping capacity. Also, another big impetus for us doing this effort -- you are well aware of the challenges with transportation in the region -- we're going to be moving some of the staff from striping to other areas within the Austin transportation department where we have a greater need, or a very high-priority need. Some of those things with in signals, with detection repair, is one example of that. So, our schedule. Mid-january we'll have bids turned in and open those up. We look to come into council in March, maybe a little bit before that date there, and then start that contract in April. And we will -- during the summertime, starting in about April, as we get into full swing of doing the striping work. All right. Thank you. Any questions? >> Kitchen: Do we have questions? Councilmember Gallo. >> Gallo: Thank you. I have a question on the funding source. The backup information didn't indicate whether this was funded out of the current budget. >> It is. It is out of our operating budget. >> Gallo: And so, the funding out of our current budget would just be for the year that's in this budget, and then you would come forward next year? >> Right. That would be part of our budget next year already. >> Gallo: We mentioned this at the council meeting. I think it would be really helpful if in the backup information -- as we try to become familiar with, you know, is this something we've already approved within the budget cycle or not, that's really helpful to have in the backup information. We're all learning how to figure out how to make this work. Thank you. >> Understood. You're welcome. >> Kitchen: Other questions? >> Zimmerman: Just a quick question. Along those same lines, if we just had a link -- you know, an [10:09:43 AM] internet link to documentation on what's being proposed, so I could go and peruse that. It's 2 1/2 million dollars. I'd like to have some links where I can skim through some more about information. >> We can definitely provide some details and get that to you directly. >> Zimmerman: I think we all have a problem with the amount of information we're trying to process. The councilmember is right, we get tremendous volumes in information. I'm not asking for big printed stacks, but key links to information. >> Yes. We can boil it down to a put pages we can share with you that give you more explanation and may lead to more questions that we would be happy to answer. >> Zimmerman: That's great. An executive summary, with links to the details. >> Yes. >> Zimmerman: Thanks. >> Kitchen: I just want to clarify. I think I know the answer. I think you've said this. So, this will be the first time we're going to contract out this work, is that correct? >> Yes. >> Kitchen: Okay. And the thinking, as you presented -- that this makes more sense as opposed to trying to do it ourselves. >> Robert spillar. We've had contracts for long line painting or striping in the past, to supplement our own projects when we've had extremely dry years. We've added resources to get more done in a given year. But as we look forward, we're cognizant of two things. In San Antonio, they're able to get the long lines out at a cheaper rate. One of the challenges we have is that you can't paint when it's raining. So when staff is assigned to that project, they're doing other things, but we sometimes run out of useful things, if it's an extended rain period, for them to do. This will allow us to do that contract, and that becomes part of the contract, that you're paid on how much you get done. The other side of that, though, is, absolutely, I don't want to [10:11:46 AM] underestimate the need that this staff be assigned to the short lines, because the short-line stuff, the legends, the crosswalks, are really about safety of the people, vulnerable users in the street. And so we'd like to shift that staff to that focus and be able to get that much more done. And then, as vacancies become available, reassign those to the highest and best usage. Some may be in signal crews, some may be in data collection, as we try to do more with less on your behalf. >> Kitchen: Okay. Thank you. >> Mmhmm. >> Kitchen: Any other questions? Does anyone want to make a motion? Okay. Go ahead. >> Gallo: I'll make the motion to forward this to council with the recommendation of this committee to follow staff's recommendation. >> Kitchen: Second from councilmember Gallo. Any discussion? Okay. All in favor? All in favor? >> Yes. >> Kitchen: Okay. This is item number 7. And the recommendation from the mobility committee is to bring this forward to full council with approval. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Kitchen: Okay. Next, now we'll move back to item number 3 on our agenda, which is a briefing and committee discussion related to rocky mountain institute, selection of Austin as their mobility transformation project. So, if you guys want to come forward, thank you so much for being here. >> Thank you. [ Off mic ] >> Kitchen: If you could come up to the podium. >> Greg is going to be leading the charge here. He's going to speak with you. John is here, one of our managers. Happy to spend time with you guys afterwards if there's any questions. >> Kitchen: All right. Thank you. [10:13:47 AM] Mmhmm. >> Good morning, councilmembers. It looks like we've got some formatting issues here at the beginning, so I'll work through those as necessary. >> Kitchen: Okay. >> On the slides. So, just to start out, a little bit about rocky mountain institute. We're a mission-driven nonprofit, and we identify market-led solutions that can transition today's fossil fuel-based energy systems to more renewable and efficient ones. When we think about doing that, with respect to mobility -- because rocky mountain institute has a full scope on anything related to energy. If we think about mobility specifically, one of the first things we did when we looked to start the mobility transformation initiative and identify a place where we could do it was, what does this vision look like? And when I will be walking through this vision, just keep in mind that this is something that we share with our industry partners, several cities that we've reached out to, including the city of Austin, and we're seeing tremendous elements about the conversion. What do they look like? >> Kitchen: Before you do that, I should've set the stage. I want to say for those of you who are not familiar, we were honored to be selected as the lead city for this mobility transformation project. And that was announced to the public, I don't know, maybe two months ago, a month or two ago. And we have entered into an mou with rocky mountain institute to help us move towards this transformation. We're very excited about that. And they're going to be working very closely with the community and our transportation department. Today, they're here to talk with us more about the details of how that project will proceed. So, sorry. >> That's good, thank you. So, what exactly are we talking about in terms of this vision? Again, this is something that I would say is unprecedented in other transitions we've looked at from an energy transformation [10:15:48 AM] stand point in terms of how much alignment there is among mayor industry, private, public sector partners that we've reached out to. So, what vision are we talking about? Electric, autonomous, mobility as a service in cities designed for it. I'll walk through that more. The electric and autonomous piece is basic, moving away from internal combustion vehicles toward electly-powered one, and the advent of autonomous and self-driving vehicle technology, as opposed to vehicles that are driven by human drivers. The second piece, mobility as a service. This exists today. You can get mobility and pay for it by the mile from a taxi or a tnc vehicle, but we're talking about an interconnected system that's much more cost-effective. Today's service-based mobility is very expensive. People of lower income are unable to access or use it on a reliable basis. We're looking to interconnect those systems more and move toward a series of options that are available, depending on whether you want to save cost on a particular trip, whether you want to save time, or other preferences. And maybe -- make that system available to a broad base of users. That's mobility as a service, the way the system operates. In cities designed for it. If you look at electric and autonomous mobility delivered as a service, that can be done with dramatically fewer vehicles than the number of vehicles on the road today. And that has implication for the city design. Instead of having three to four parking spaces for every vehicle in the United States, or in the city of Austin, for example, you would have almost, maybe, one parking space per vehicle, or less than that, because these are service-based vehicles. You end up with an urban landscape that's dramatically transformed. We're talking about electric, [10:17:49 AM] autonomous, mobility as a service, in cities designed for it. How we get there, we've developed a series of projects to move us toward that future while delivering wins that show progress. First, fleet electrifycation, electrifying commercial fleets, special high-mileage vehicles. The higher the mileage, the more sense is makes to electrify today and to save cost on maintenance and fuel. Autonomous vehicles, developing a road map and a regulatory framework to introduce autonomous vehicle technology. Those are the two projects that lead us to electric and autonomous. Then we have mobility as a service. We have a project defined around that, starting with commuting, commuting being the highest-value starting point. It's a market of people that are ready for a change. They're not open to sitting in traffic many hours a day, wasting their time. It's a predictable start and end point. It's something that employers are increasingly interested in. We're starting with commuting. And then, interoperable is another way of saying we need better information on the options available to people, and we need to connect them better. Those services don't interoperate very effectively. We have a project that is geared toward making them more discoverable to the user and allowing them to interconnect a little bit better. Then we have a mobility-oriented development project where we're thinking about developing city and land use codes that set the stage for an advanced approach to city design that takes into account the advantages and some of the characteristics of this future mobility system based on electric, autonomous mobility as a service. In a nutshell, that is the entire project as we envision it. And why do this? Well, I mentioned before that today's mobility system is extremely costly to have households spending $8,700 a month -- those that can afford a car. Those that can't, simply, often don't have access to affordable mobility. As we move toward the future [10:19:50 AM] system, it's a 70% reduction in the cost associated with it. Also, CO2 emissions. I mentioned that rocky mountain institute focuses on solutions to lead us toward this energy transformation. Our motivation is energy and emissions, but we recognize that that's note the motivation of most of the general public, and that these solutions need to be market-led. It just so happens, with a 70% reduction in cost, it can be market-led, and you get an 80% reduction in CO2. We're excited about that. In addition to that, you see reduced congestion when you look at the advent of autonomous vehicles, and the fleet size, that has implications for solutions to congestion. We talked about expanding road use and accommodating Austin's growth. It's the fastest-growing city in the nation, especially of its size, but a full percentage point. Really important to address congestion, not just through building additional infrastructure, but using demand-side measures such as this new system we're talking about. And, improved convenience with more mobility options available, and the ability to custom-tailor the type of vehicle that's required for any given trip. We're also talking about safer and a more healthful city. There's an opportunity to redesign cities around people rather than cars. Three or four parking spaces per vehicle, cities are designed to accommodate unused vehicles. And as we think about designing cities for vehicles that are used regularly, those cities can be designed to be more walkable, more dense, more more --transit- friendly. Ann covered the background of how we selected Austin. We did a national, comprehensive search, a combination of research and analysis to identify success factors for the system, as well as an extensive [10:21:55 AM] outreach process to establish relationships. We established working relationships with the top five cities. From the standpoint of the relationships and the welcome we received in Austin, as well as the presence of the tech and entrepreneurial community, the strength of the research-based intellectual capital with the university of Texas at Austin, in particular, Austin rose to the top. We selected it as our lead implementation city. And we've kicked off, as Ann mentioned, a partnership with the Austin community that will be multiyear in nature. And then we are in the process now of defining our year one outcomes, which I'll walk through very quickly here. So, I'll return to the chart here on the right with our vision, electric autonomous, when I say we, we're talking about the city and its business partners and stakeholders, and the broader industry partners we've reached out to across the board that are converging on that vision. On the left are the projects, five specific areas. In the next year, we'd like it achieve the following in the city of Austin. We'll have electric vehicles deployed in four higher vehicle fleets, the transportation network companies and taxis. And we've spoke on to the major transportation network company providers and the major taxi police, all three, in the city of Austin to engage on that project. We want to have an autonomous, friendly, regulatory environment and infrastructure that is geared toward enabling the rollout of autonomous vehicle technology initiated in year one. We want to have better mobility options tested with respect to mobility as a service, and an integrated solution deployed with employers. Two pieces to the mobility as a service outcomes. Interoperable transit data offering more options and providing improved experience for users to enable the multimoddal optional people need in order to have cost-effective mobility. And we want to initiate the most advanced U.S. City planning and [10:23:56 AM] development framework in the city of Austin, as well. Tie that into the codenext effort, as well as other infrastructure planning that we would like to engage on. So, in all cases, we reached out to public and private partners within the city that would be involved in these efforts, and the private sector businesses that we see largely leading a lot of this transition. As I mentioned before, with the market-led approach that we pursue. In a nutshell, that's our program, with the outcomes in the next year. There's a couple other pieces I'd like to cover. How is this going to work from a management standpoint? Well, we've identified a need for an advisory council, a non-governing body of community leaders apprized of the major developments on the program, and kept up to speed, probably on a quarterly basis. We've yet to identify the specific members of that board, but today's -- the purpose of today is to approve the framework. As a followup step, we'll identify the actual members of that council. We want to have a joint executive team that consists of a city of Austin representative for -- two representatives, and then a representative from rocky mountain institute. Under that team, we have an operational leadership team. That would be the principal mobility team, and rob spillar. And then under that, you have integrated project teams that are germane to each of the five project areas I covered earlier, the same names you saw earlier in terms of getting to the future vision of electric autonomous mobility as a service in cities designed for it. Then we have a collaboration team. This is critical to our success. This is the entire business community that will help lead the transition with respect to each of these five different project areas. That will be a loose structure, exclusive -- sorry, evolving, nonexclusive network of stakeholders, business leaders, and project partners. We want their participation to be value-driven rather than membership or exclusive-driven. [10:25:57 AM] So, hopefully their motivation to be part of those projects -- this is borne itself out to some extent with respect to the project teams -- will be driven by how much value they derive from being part of these efforts and participating in them. So, that's the organization and management structure that we've set up. Then, in terms of communications and engagement, it's important to keep the community as a whole updated on progress with respect to the program itself. And, of course, the people who will be participating in some of the pilot programs we're talking about, their opinions are incredibly critical to the success of building from pilots to full-on project initiatives. And so, we've got a combination of online platforms, community forums, standards, media and social media outreach, and plugging in with efforts to maintain community engagement with respect to our program. I want to lay out that we have a strategy for that. And that's definitely part of our focus over the next year, is to maintain communications and engagement with the community as a whole, and our partners who are part of the integrated project teams. So, in summary, that's something we're calling a code development agreement. We've laid out the elements I walked through in a document we separately did, a very thoroughdocument with a work plan for each area. The first bullet, alignment of expectations and ambition is the purpose of the document. We have organization and management, which I covered. Communications and engagement plan, and a resources plan. Just for context, we made that document available separately. We're looking to get it signed this week. That's what we're looking for approval today, at the committee, to move forward with city council approval this week, as well. >> Kitchen: Thank you very much. I would also like to emphasize that this is a matching program [10:27:58 AM] in the sense that we are going to get the benefit of the dollars and the resources that rmi is bringing to the table within our existing budget, and without even having to redirect the projects we're working on. I'll ask Mr. Spillar to speak to that. >> Thank you, madam chair. The rmi proposed work area is uniquely aligned with goals within our current transportation program to get people to use more options. Clearly, to continue to clean the fleet, if you will, from an air quality perspective, get people to travel different ways, so demand management. And certainly, interlinking with the land use code to support the new -- I like to call it tidal wave of new technology coming to the transportation industry. There's a lot of other cities looking towards us for leadership. So, because of the lines with our current programs and current interests, we're able to use the current programs to match our responsibility with rmi. And then the other thing that's unique about this program is that the local match, if you will, can also be made up of private participation. And so we've teased each other that when we say city, we have to say, there's city corporate or city in general. So, when we talk about that match, it really is the community matching, not just the city of Austin. >> Kitchen: Okay. Thank you. Do we have any questions? >> Zimmerman: A quick question if I could, and maybe for either. On the section titled "Purpose," and the funding, I want to read here on page 3. It says rmi has a goal to raise sufficient funds through philanthropic and other sources. It says the city commits to provide resources within the [10:29:59 AM] broader stakeholder community to solicit incoming resources from the community. What does this mean? And how much money are we talking about? I guess if rmi raises 500,000, is it the expectation that the city is going to raise or contribute 500,000? There are no Numbers here specifically. >> So, again, councilmember, we're not expecting this program to change our budget proposals going forward. So that the programs we were already going to spend money on that are matchable to theirs, we will continue to move forward with that investment. That's where I was talking about, that that local match is really the community at large needs to match that. In terms of city employees, of course, we're not going to advocate. But by our stepping up and participating and joining in this program, I think that in itself will attract private investments from the entrepreneurial community as well as other agencies. So we're not expecting this to be funds other than what have already been approved in our budget. If there were a future need that would require a specific change in program, we would come back to council for that individual approval. >> Kitchen: Yeah. And let me just add, we're not talking about raising dollars. >> No. >> Kitchen: We're talking about matching the time that's already built into our budget for our transportation staff. So that's what that means. It's not -- from the city's perspective, we're not out there fundraising. So -- and the expectation is, as you recall on that chart, there's a huge role for the community to participate on a number of teams. And so the matching is all their time, essentially. You know. So it's more a matter of looking at the resources in terms of the time and expertise that people in the community and our transportation staff are bringing to the table to match the resources that rmi is bringing to the table over the years. And the order of magnitude is -- [10:31:59 AM] I don't know if you guys want to say, but it's a lot more than 500,000 that we're getting the benefit of. So, I think -- from my perspective, we're getting a match without having to change what we were doing. >> Zimmerman: Let me present a brief view of why I object to that. In theory, your elected city council is supposed to be setting policy as an elected body. The staff is supposed to implement that policy. What we're setting up here today is the exact opposite. What we're setting up today is city staff is deeply involved in policy now, but we're going to bring in a think tank. You guys are 6 million a year and 40 employees. So, it is a very sizable, significant organization. And your organization now is going to be partnering with city staff. So the policy is right here in front of me. So it's no longer the elected city council that's driving policy, it's a nonprofit organization teaming up with taxpayer-funded staff. >> Kitchen: Councilmember Zimmerman, I don't think that that's -- I understand your perspective. Let me talk about that for a minute. Neither the staff nor rmi is making policy decisions. It's the city council that makes policy decisions. What is being brought forward to us as part of this co-development agreement is the policy. And that's what was presented, you know, the goal and the vision of this project. And that's what the council is being asked to move forward with. So this is not a substitute. And also, this is just an example of additional resources that we have available to us to help us carry out the policy that the city council has already decided to move forward with. So, that's really what we're talking about here. I think that we can all respect your concern that we don't want -- you know, we don't -- you know, the way that this works is the council is charged [10:33:00 AM] with setting policy, and our staff is charged with carrying out that policy. This project is not changing that approach. >> Zimmerman: I appreciate that. Let me make one more point, and then I'll give up on this. I want to look at the memorandum of understanding. In the background, it says that while technological progress is laying groundwork to make this possible, pioneering cities are required to drive this transformation. Here is the fascinating irony about that statement. If you turn around and look behind you, you'll see the community behind you. They are wearing Uber and Lyft t-shirts. [ Cheering and applause ] >> Zimmerman: And I think -- you know, for me, the bitter irony is, there's your community engagement. And they're here to stop the city council from squashing their technology, and their organization is providing choice, as you said. So the technology is here. The choice is here. [ Applause ] >> Kitchen: Councilmember Zimmerman. >> Zimmerman: Sorry. In our next item of business, it's going to be imposing city government regulations that are going to squash the invasion -- innovation, so I'm done. >> Kitchen: Hang on just a second, folks. Councilmember Zimmerman, that's an unfair characterization of what we're doing here. >> Zimmerman: I think it's fair. [ Applause ] >> Kitchen: Could we please ask people to let us make our point? We will be getting to the item on the tncs. As Mr.-- >> [ Off mic ] >> Kitchen: As Mr. Rux explained, part of this project is mobility as a service. And as he explained, also, that will be working with tncs and taxis, and all vehicles for hire. So, this project is not a project that is counter to anything else that we're doing [10:35:03 AM] in the committee, or in the council. And the item that you're raising is a separate item that we'll get to in just a minute. So. Okay. Any other questions from the committee? >> Gallo: You know, there was this was a very competitive process. I'm assuming there were some other really remarkable cities that Austin was competing with to do this. And I think the advantage to this process is that we have an organization that brings new ideas and thoughts, and vision, to our communication and to our policy discussions. It doesn't necessarily mean that everything that's brought forward will end up in policy, but it does give us the ability to have an entity that comes forward to help us move forward in the right direction. So we're really excited about it. We're absolutely pleased that we beat out the other cities in this competitive process. And I think that says a lot for our community. And I think it says a lot for your view of our community, and the process, and the progress that we can make forward working together. So, thank you very much. We're delighted to be at the top of that list, and look forward to seeing all the great things that are going to happen. >> Thank you. And, you know, we're very excited to have been welcoming by the community to the extent that we were. And just a couple of clarifying points in response to councilmember Zimmerman's comments, just to be totally clear, we're a 150-member organization, $30 million a year. But to your point, bringing significant resources into the city. And then, I'll also say that when we say the city, and pioneering cities are required, you can think of that as city with a lower -- not capitalized C, right? It's the broader community. It's the business community. And as I mentioned with respect to each of our work areas, we've done extensive outreach to the private sector and to the businesses associated with delivering mobility as a service, including the public transit agencies, and then both [10:37:05 AM] taxis and transportation network companies whose motivation to deliver these types of solutions is critical for us. And we're not aligned, we're nonpartisan. One of the things that allows us to operate in these types of environments pretty effectively is our lack of alignment with any one particular sector, and our ability to work across boundaries between public and private, engage universities, businesses, other nonprofits, and forge collective solutions. So I think our effectiveness comes from our Independence and our ability to select both public and private sector partners that are part of delivering a solution. Again, very happy to be here, very excited to have been --welcomed by the community to the extent that we have, and we're ready to get to work. Thank you. >> Kitchen: Thank you very much. So do I have a motion from the committee to move forward to the full council with the recommendation that we approve the agreement with rmi? [ Off mic ] >> Kitchen: Do we have a motion? So, councilmember Garza moves that we move forward. Do we have a second? Okay. All in favor? Okay. Thank you very much. We appreciate you. Yes, I'm sorry. Thank you very much. We appreciate you being here. [ Applause ] >> Kitchen: Okay. The next item -- we're going to go ahead and take the quarter-cent item, item number 5, so we have plenty of time with our last item, with tncs. We don't want to cut off the time available for the tncs. So we're going to move to the quarter-cent funding next. Which is item number five, discussion and possible action on a recommendation related to proposed projects available to use the quarter-cent fund. So, I think we have a presentation, and then questions. And we have a few people that wanted to speak on this. So, I think what we'll do is [10:39:06 AM] take our presentation, and then ask our speakers, and then we'll have some discussion. Okay. >> Good morning. My name is Annie, I'm a capital program manager for the public works department, and also presented today is the systems development division manager with the Austin transportation department. We are here today to present our staff recommendation in the quarter-cent fund. So, our staff recommendation meets the criteria outlined in both the interlocal agreement between the city of Austin and capital metro, as well as the council resolution that was passed on June 18th of this year. The quarter-cent program is a one-time payment to the city of Austin of $139.4 million. And this represents a quarter of a penny of sales tax revenue generated by capital metro from 2001 to 2004. So far, we have built a variety of projects and $21.8 million remains of this fund. So, some of the projects that we have already built are reconstruction projects and roadway improvement projects throughout the city, citywide sidewalk improvements, citywide signal improvements, railroad crossing improvements, the crestview station pedestrian improvements, the hike and bike bridge as part of the lady bird lake system, the lance Armstrong bikeway, 23rd street project, and the bicycle improvements. Our staff recommendation today focuses on low-cost, high-benefit types of improvements, which include sidewalks, pedestrian hybrid beacons and signals, local area traffic management, as well as bicycle facilities. Since July, we have developed a [10:41:08 AM] comprehensive mobility project development process, and we have also met with the mayor, councilmembers, and their respective staff on an iterative basis where we have discussed our process, our staff recommendation, as well as councilmember priorities. At the beginning of October, we finalized our staff recommendation and sent it to the city manager's office. Last Tuesday, we presented to the urban transportation commission. And then today we're here at the mobility committee. Our generalized ten-step process was developed for any funding source, and the steps -- these ten steps outline our process. Those four steps that have an asterisk behind it are the steps that we modified for the quarter-cent funding source. So, steps one and two, we identified the assets and the mobility of programs that support those assets. For the quarter-cent funding source, again, focusing on the low- cost, high-benefit improvements. We did not include new street construction or street segments. We did not include street streetreconstruction or rehabilitation, bridge improvements or urban trails that cost more than $2 million, because these are very high-cost improvements. In step number 3, we did a mobility needs assessment of all the mobility assets and programs that support those assets, again, not including streets, bridges, or trails more than $2 million. And that mobility needs assessment revealed that we have $2.5 billion of need throughout the city. In order to create the $21.8 million recommendation, we needed to prioritize and sort the $2.5 billion of need. So, in step five, the exception factor first is the councilmember priorities that fell outside of our project [10:43:09 AM] groupings, but still met the criteria of the interlocal agreement, as well as the resolution. The prioritization factors included identifying whether or not any improvement fell on a metro rapid service route within an imagine Austin center corridor on a critical arterial, in a high crash area for bicyclists and pedestrians, or if it's been identified as a small area neighborhood plan. In step number 6, organizing needs into project candidates, we looked at identifying improvements within completed corridor studies, as well as improvements that fell within service areas of both schools and transit stops. So we used a quarter-mile distance to define this service area. And the reason why we chose transit stops and schools is because those improvements serve a dual purpose of serving those -- accessing the transit stop as well as those accessing the school. So, after step six, we had a list of $100 million of improvements. And then we were able to select the projects that we included in our staff recommendation. So, some of our goals included, on this development process, we wanted to meet the criteria outlined in the interlocal agreement, and in the resolution passed in June. We also wanted to build improvements together in order to complete routes and make transformable outcomes in school and bus areas, as well as completed corridor studies. And now I will turn the presentation over to annick, who will present the summary and an example of a comprehensive mobility project grouping. >> Thank you, Annie. Good morning, chair and [10:45:10 AM] councilmembers. So, I'm going to go through a description of the programs that manage the projects that staff considered for the quarter-cent funding, and which compromise the $21.8 million recommendation. So, I'm going to go in alphabetical order, starting with our active transportation program, which is responsible for planning and design of our bicycle and pedestrian network, and assets included in the staff recommendation are protected by school lanes as well as quiet streets. Next, we have our advanced transportation management system, which includes technologies and communication assets that improve our advanced traffic management system infrastructure to reduce the impact on roadway travelers during peak commute times. Examples of assets in the staff recommendation include video detection such as traffic cameras, as well as signal communication equipment that allows that information to be relayed back to our transportation management system. Next, arterial metric improvements, looking at improvements to intersections to improve mobility and safety. And projects that we looked at and considered for the quarter-cent project recommendations included adding or extending turn lanes, for example, and also access management in the form of closing and/or opening medians. Next, we have our local area traffic management program, which is traffic calming improvements that can come in varying improvements such as speed cushions. Sometimes jacains, and also bold-throughout. -Outs.next, the sidewalk program addresses infrastructure needs in our pedestrian network. [10:47:11 AM] We looked at sidewalk gaps in our sidewalk system, as well as associated curb ramp improvements, safety features as needed such as railings and curb and gutter improvements. Next, we have our signals program, which looked at new signal needs throughout the city, as well as new pedestrian hybrid beacon infrastructure, as well as upgrades to our existing signal system. And finally, as Annie said, we didn't look at large-scale tier one urban trail improvements. We looked at those smaller connectors that can provide nonmotorized mobility choices for bicyclists, walkers, runners and others that link to the on- street pedestrian and bicycle system. Considered in the staff recommendation are the completion of the construction of the upper boggy creek trail, improvements to pleasant valley over lady bird lake, and a rail crossing that's related to the Seaholm. These are for the supply end. We are recommending a program that addresses the demand side of the equation. So, transportation demand management or tdm are strategies that increase the transportation system efficiency. And essentially, it's a toolbox of a lot of different mechanisms to use to work on the demand side. So, these include addressing parking, addressing land use, addressing infrastructure needs in the transit, bicycle and pedestrian realm, and it also includes education and marketing techniques. So, we have well-developed programs in those first three that I mentioned, but we haven't maximized one particular marketing strategy that is in the individualized marketing area called smarttrips. And this program has this successful results in a reduction of three to upwards of [10:49:13 AM] 15 or 18% in some cities of reduction in trips. So, how this program works is it leverages past investment in transit, bicycle, and pedestrian infrastructure by working with communities on a neighborhood level, you know engaging with community leaders and community groups to educate communities on how they can best -- better-use the mobility choices that are in their neighborhood. So, the return on investment in a program like this, I'd like to point attention to the cost of actually building new roadways. A new four-lane arterial to build where we would have the space to do it is about $12 million per mile. To add a lane to an existing urban highway, so, for example, south Lamar, south 1st street, even if we had the room to do that, is anywhere from two to $7 million per mile. Reductions of anywhere from three to 15% in single-occupancy vehicles, it's really a cost-effective way to add capacity to our roadway system. South Lamar, for example, has about 30,000 cars per day traveling along it. That's about 1500 vehicles per hour. And so a 5% reduction is about 1500 trips. So, in the peak hour, a program like this could be the equivalent of adding a lane on south Lamar or Barton springs, or north Lamar, or any of our critical arterials where we're really looking to squeeze the most out of the capacity that we can have on those roadways. So, that's our overview of all the programs that were considered in the staff recommendation. And now to the Numbers. So, the first part of this chart talks about a way to look at how the staff recommendation is split with 31% being, as we're categorizing as system-wide [10:51:14 AM] improvements that improve the entire mobility system. And 96% is focused -- 69% is overlap for schools and transit stops, as well as councilmember priorities that we heard as we met with councilmembers through our process. Another way to look at this, however, is that some systemwide improvements that improve those system modalities can also squarely be attributed to a district. So on page 2 of your backup, there's a summary table that actually puts the systemwide improvements that fit squarely in a district allocated to that district. And when looked at the recommendation in that way, recommendations that go beyond any one district or two or more districts are 13% of the total. So, it's just another way to look at how this breaks down. And then finally, the last part of the chart shows the percentages allocated to the programs that I just described, on the supply end, and also on the demand end. You'll see that the sidewalk program leads the way with 34% of the staff recommendation, followed second by our signals program, and our advanced traffic management system, together, over 20% of the recommendation in those areas. So, the next slide is meant to show you the data-driven approach that we took to this process. We used our geographical information system software to look at all the needs. On the left side, you'll see that salmon color is the quarter-mile walking service area and the overlap of transit stop and school areas. This is at north Lamar and rundberg, the grouping scored project in the staff recommendation. And then on the right side, you see those five quantitative factors being displayed, such as high crash areas for bicycle and [10:53:16 AM] pedestrian crashes over the last three years, whether the area is in an imagine Austin center or corridor, whether it's on a critical arterial, and so on. So, again, just to show you the data-driven approach behind this visual, is the actual projects that, when done together as Annie pointed out, create a full outcome for a very comfortable, low-stress walk, bike ride, and access to school or transit stop. In this particular example, at north lamar-rundberg, we have a group of projects ranging from sidewalks to intersection improvements including a westbound turn lane at rundberg and north creek, a new pedestrian hybrid beacon recommended, and a local area traffic management program on north creek for a total of $744,800. To give you an idea of how these groupings were carefully put together through the data and the analysis. That concludes our presentation. We're happy to take questions. We're anticipate our next steps being the council formally approving a package, at which time the transportation department and the public works department will look at efficient ways to deliver the full program. Some work will be contracted out, some will be done in-house. We'll look at coordinating work with other ongoing cip projects planned in our five-year plan, and we will, of course, have regular updates to council. I will also mention at this point that during this process, the camper policy board approved two transportation alternative program grants that had projects that are in the staff recommendation. We have kept them in at this point because that money -- those funds have not funneled through yet. And we anticipate variances in the final cost of what was estimated in these projects, so we anticipate after a year of delivering the program, that we can, through our regular intervals, come back and speak to that. It's about a million dollars [10:55:17 AM] that has been freed up in the upper boggy creek project, as well as many pedestrian hybrid beacons that were approved in a campo grant that was titled pedestrian safety that included a lot of pedestrian hybrid beacons. With, I'll conclude my presentation. Thank you. >> Kitchen: Thank you very much. I want to thank you -- both of you, and all the work you have done with Mr. Derr, and the transportation staff. You have done a lot of work, and brought a lot of information to our councilmembers and to our districts. I know we're going to have some questions, but what I'd like to do, if it's all right with the members, I'd like to just take the public testimony. And then we'll come back to you all with questions. I would like to ask, again, if it is okay with the committee, to -- for those of you making remarks to keep those to two minutes so that we can move quickly through this. We're allowing testimony on this one because this information has not come back to us before. So, we'll start with Malcolm, and then Elliot after him. If y'all can line up and be prepared to speak. And if you could keep your remarks to two minutes, that would be helpful. >> Kitchen: Okay. I don't see Malcolm, so, Elliot, and then David king after him. >> Thank you, councilmembers, my name is Elliot Mcfadden, I'm the executive director of Austin B cycle. I'm here to just give you an update on a presentation I made at your June meeting regarding the recommendation from the bicycle advisory council to use a million dollars in the quarter- cent fund to fund [10:57:18 AM] expansion of the Austin b-cycle system. Just a quick reminder, it's a public/private partnership between the city and a local nonprofit, since December 2013. It's been a great success. We've had 318,000 trips, 862,000 miles. We expect to hit the one-million-mile mark early next year. And 35 million in calories burned by our riders, making it a healthy option for Austin. We also set a national record for the most checkouts per bike in a single day during south by southwest 2014. This system is really changing the way people look at transportation, as well as offering a low-cost, short-trip solution. A third of our riders are new to cycling. They haven't ridden a bike in over a year. We're using new people back to using cycling as transportation. We avoided over 82,000 car trips. We're taking vehicles off the road and replacing them with bikes. Folks are more likely to use transit. 43% say they're more likely to ride the bus or train because of b-cycle, and a quarter of our folks combined b-cycle with another form of transportation like the bus or car 2 go. The expansion plan was a 32-station expansion across five council districts, including six new neighborhoods. As we look to grow the program, we want to expand outward and serve more and more neighborhoods. So, as we look at a goal of being bicycle platinum here in the next couple years -- [ beeping ] >> This is a key part of that. >> Kitchen: It's a wonderful program. I know that many of us have used it, so thank you very much. Okay. Next, we have David king, and after David is Miller nutle. [10:59:18 AM] If he's here, if he would come down, also. Go ahead, David. >> Thank you, chair, vice chair, councilmembers. I really appreciate you working so hard on this initiative to help our neighborhoods. We need sidewalks. And we need some traffic calming strategies in our neighborhoods, particularly the central Austin neighborhoods. So, I really appreciate you working through this project here, and looking at these opportunities to help address some problems that we have, and long-term problems that we've had in our neighborhoods. I urge you to keep moving on and thank you for your work. >> Kitchen: Thank you. Next is Miller. After Miller we have -- I'm sorry, round? Is he here? I'm going to apologize that I can't pronounce your last name. Okay. You'll be after Miller. Go ahead, Miller. >> Great, thank you, councilmembers. I'd like to also commend the staff and members of the city council for sorting through a forbiddable list of projects, and boiling it down to an exciting array of projects that will improve overall. I think both -- you know, we came out with two really good outcomes. One, the mobility projects like protected bicycling, far west boulevard, knuckles crossing, these projects will help kids get to school safely, and incentivize healthy, sustainable transportation. I want to also really high light the importance of the systemwide improvements projects like studying the feasibility of adding better facilities on the dam, these types of big-picture projects that we need to get people out of their cars, riding bikes and walking to alleviate traffic problems. And the same goes for transportation demand management systems that will encourage people and educate them on the best practices for getting around so we can relieve traffic on an overburdened system. Thank you so much for your work. We're looking forward to working with you to make them all happen. Thankyou. [11:01:26 AM] >> Good morning, councilmembers. My name is anan. I want to thank you very much for looking at the transportation improvements. As an avid bike rider on Riverside, I take my life sometimes everyday on that street. So I appreciate the opportunity to see that Riverside is considered as a staff recommendation. For a protected bike line. I also volunteer with bike Austin and I've been working with the Riverside campaign to put a bike lane there. We have about 750 participants supporting that. We have letters to various businesses that have signed on to sort of support that aspect. So we ask you consider that as we move forward. >> Kitchen: [Inaudible]. >> Good morning, councilmembers. My name is Leo Anderson and I live in the northwest area of district 10 between spicewood springs and 183. I'm a bicycle commuter. I've commuted that way for the last 15 years. And I also commute to downtown Austin about an average of three times a week from that area. It's about an 18-mile commute. And Mesa drive and far west are major corridors. And I know that the city has plans to put a protected bike lane on far west really encourage to you do that, even though I ride it quite a bit, my wife is not that comfortable on far west and I would really like to see those kinds of things done to do that. Changing these things is tough and I think it's important in the future to support these alternate modes of transportation. [11:03:29 AM] I appreciate the work so far and please keep it up. Katie pace is next and then sari. >> My name is Katie pace. I live in the 78702 zip code and I'm a member of the St. David's communication garden located just off of mlk and right next to the proposed boggy creek trail improvements. I want to support my proposal for the quarter cent plan. I think it's a well thought out plan. I want to reiterate some of the proposals made that encourages alternative transportation to make our city's liveable in terms of reducing traffic to promote public health and also in response to the environmental concerns we have today in particular urban pollution and climate change. I wanted to speak in particular as a member of the St. David's foundation community garden as well as a resident of M station, which is one of the city's largest affordable housing complexes in the area. A lot of the residences and people in my community don't even know that the boggy creek trail exists because it's in such a rudimentary state and a lot of folks don't know that the community garden is there because it's difficult to access. It is unique and one of the few concerns in the area provides a portion of its lots for low income areas and has a sliding scale. I think there's a lot of potential for this creek to be revving historically usual conserved and presently under served [11:05:32 AM] proplations to that is a part of civic involvement and much that area much more liveable than it is at the moment. Thank you for your time. >> Kitchen: The next person after you is alba soreno. >> Hi. I work with sustainable food center as a grow local program director. I wanted to speak in general of getting quarter cent funding to these trails and other improvements, but I wanted to speak in favor of allocating some of the funding to finishing the already planned upper boggy creek trail. Sustainable foot center is located adjacent to that sail and they were built with the idea in mind that this would be a hub of connectivity. We are bringing programming and services to this neighborhood and if this jail is completed then residents in the surrounding area would have access to valuable youth programming, youth arts and social emotional development. We thought it would it be accessible by the trail, but it is out of the way. A road that leads to the garden is just a dirt road. Any time it rains the road washes out. People with mobility issues, including an active gardener who lives in M street cannot reach the garden even time there's a substantial rain. This can truly fulfill its potential. Also the garden is the first [11:07:33 AM] component of a larger community park like area that is going to be developed and is only being held back by the trail not having been constructed, so a bmx bike park that will add physical activity among kids will be added as well as an amp pa theater that will allow action to carry out more programming than youth. >> I'm speaking on behalf of the go Austin coalition, a organized coalition of residents in 78744 and 78745, across districts 2, 3, and 5, our residents have met multiple times and hosted staff to their annual coalition meeting to submit residents input for the quarter funding. They seek improvements for complete streets, traffic calming and pedestrian hybrid beacons, highly focused around school areas and areas where arterials are overflowing into small neighborhood areas and causing problems for children and families nearby schools. We ask that you consider this submission along with the submission of the transportation department and consider the hard work that residents have put into providing this input as they learned about the input process a bit later, but have rallied to come and meet with y'all many times to host their own meetings and become organized and express their own interest. Thank you. >> Kitchen: Thank you. Our last speaker is tod hemmingson. Is he here? >> Good morning, council, chair, members of the committee. I'm Todd hemmingson, vice-president for planning and development at capital metro. Our thoughts today on this project or the package of projects are quite simple. [11:09:34 AM] Overall I think we recognize the tremendous mobility needs in the city of Austin. We recognize the quality work that the staff has done and don't question the process. I think our concern, however, is that these are not just any funds, these are funds that were collected by capital metro through the public transportation sales tax, and to that rationale we simply would like to see a greater focus on projects and initiatives that directly improve public transportation services. So again in sum we recognize that the tremendous needs in this community for mobility, but this particular association of funds we feel like would have made and we have projects for the remaining quarter cent funds for staff and council consideration. And again we would have liked to have seen more of those make the recommended list. Those are my comments. I thank you for your time. >> Kitchen: Okay. That's all of our speakers. Does anybody have -- thank you. I want to recognize councilmember Houston. Thank you for joining us. I know you have to leave. Do you want to go ahead? >> May I ask a quick question. Do you all have capital metro's recommendations that he was talking about? And if so could you share those with the rest of the council so we can see that? >> Kitchen: Sure, we can do that. We can make sure that we share those with the rest of council. >> Houston: And I guess the other thing is sometimes when we have this conversation with transportation we hear about three years, five years and 10 years of crashes and I wish there was a set number so that we were using the same metrics every time because sometimes it's 10 years of crashes, sometimes [11:11:35 AM] we use five years and then sometimes we use three years. And I think it depends. It's so flexible and variable that it would be nice to have a set number that we look at when trying to make decisions. And the last thing is are there any other cities other than Bellingham and Seattle, Washington that we can use as our peer cities because I was in Nashville a couple of weeks ago and it seems like that they're more like us than either St. Paul, Bellingham or Seattle. I would like something similar in size and temperature. >> Kitchen: Temperature, yeah, that's important. Thank you. Okay. Let's see. Councilmember Gallo, then councilmember Zimmerman. >> Gallo: I think we have an -- we have a motion that we go to the clerk's office to be able to put on the overhead. >> Zimmerman: It was titled chair kitchen -- there it is. That looks like it. >> Gallo: As you read this I'm going to just preface this with a few comments. This has been such -- all of us -- certainly all of us sitting up here are new at this leadership capacity with the Austin city council. And it's been really such a great process as I've worked with our wonderful staff to -- and become more educated with this quarter-cent fund and the potential for funding some really needed safety projects citywide. I've also spent the last month in my district visiting with the community that I represent. I've met with school principals and pta members at the schools in my district to focus on how we can improve the safety of our schools, but I think the part of that process that's so important is actually asking the people that are living in the neighborhoods [11:13:38 AM] that understand the traffic safety problems and the mobility of their streets because they live there and deal with the traffic and safety issues day-by-day. I think that's a really important thing about the new 10-1 plan and representation is that we live in these areas and we've raised our families in these areas and we know the people in these areas. As we reach out and talk to our constituents in our districts, I think we understand because we are understanding the questions of them what is it that you need? Where is it that you see the problems? Where are your priorities? Where do you feel like your kids aren't safe getting back and forth to school? What intersections need improving? What do you need in your districts? We've really been listening and I think this fund gives us the ability to answer those questions and answer those concerns in a way that's never been done in the city because we haven't had district-wide representation. So I'm really excited about this process. My community is excited about working with my office to determine and target the needs because once again, they recognize and they understand about the needs of the areas of town that they live in. So what we've proposed is the amendment that's on the screen now and I will read it. The mobility committee recommends that the council adopt a resolution setting the following process for determining the quarter cent infrastructure improvement projects that address district specific and/or citywide priorities for improving mobility as determined by each councilmember and the mayor. No later than December 31st, 2015, each councilmember shall submit a list of priority infrastructure improvement projects for their district, totaling no more than $1.9 million, and that is for each district, to the city manager and atd that meets the purposes for the use confident quarter cent funds as identified by atd [11:15:38 AM] staff. All funds remaining should be used for citywide priorities as prioritized by the mayor that meet the purposes for the use of the quarter cent funds as identified by atd staff. The city manager and atd with expend $21.8 million remaining quarter cent funds to pay for the improvements as identified by each councilmember and the mayor. What this does this, resolution, is it takes the quarter-cent fund, it divides it equally between the two districts so that each of the councilmembers can go to their district, work with their community to prioritize the projects that the community sees as needs, but it also gives a certain portion of the funding to the mayor's office so that as he has the ability to address citywide needs from the mayor's perspective. That's not to say that each councilmember may not also work with some of the citywide projects because those impact their district, binge this allows us to reach out to the community and listen to our community and really target some of this money that we have the ability to use to our communities. >> Kitchen: Any other comments? Councilmember Zimmerman? >> Zimmerman: I would like to second the motion. I would like to focus on the second paragraph we have here, the last sentence. It's talking about no more than 1.9 million, which I think makes perfect sense, to the city manager and atd. It makes purposes of the quarter cent funds as it says as identified by atd staff. With that in mind, with that phrase as identified, we have worked in collaboration with atd and it absolutely makes sense, but I have another overhead I want to put up briefly to show what I'm talking about and I hope we're able to read this because it's pretty small print. Are we able to blow that up? So we've worked -- in district 6 -- that's [11:17:39 AM] terrific. In district 6 we worked with Austin traffic department on an improvement to Anderson mill road which we think would add to the widening and adding a turn lane to relieve congestion around the strip centers and we estimated at 1.28 million. So with that line item right there, owe whoa that line item right there fall under what is described by atd staff because we did it in collaboration with atd? >> Kitchen: That's my understanding of the amendment is the process that we've been going forward -- councilmember Gallo, is that your understanding of the amendment? >> Kitchen: My thought being that term as identified by atd staff -- we've already received -- the staff has done a great job of going through an analysis and bringing forward to us the kinds of projects that work and that are aligned with the quarter cent. Yes, I think that's what we're talking about. >> Zimmerman: Terrific. And the same holds true in other districts in district 10, we have signal controls. I trust it holds true for all these on this list. Thank you. >> Kitchen: I would also say from my perspective there's a number of the districts may have put forward some of their priorities, but not all their priorities, to me it makes sense to put that December deadline to allow for additional work between the councilmembers and the staff to identify those priorities up to the amount that we're talking about, so there's some clarity that relationship between the councilmember district amount. >> Gallo: Let me make sure because I think this is complicated and confusing. I think we want to make sure that we're all on the same wavelength here. When I look at this the amount that was in district 10 would actually be part of my allocation of the 1.9 [11:19:41 AM] until and the balance of that we're working with the schools and the other community members to determine how the balance would be spent. >> Zimmerman: I'm excited. We're in agreement! [Laughter]. >> Gallo: I would say happy agreement. >> Garza: For clarification, I don't know what staff could answer this, but was this remaining because prop 1 didn't pass? So had rail passed we wouldn't have access to this funding, is that correct? >> Councilmember, Robert spillar. We actually had access to this money before the discussion of the city and the region about rail. As we were building towards prop 1 we put these monies on hold so that had that passed we would have recommended using this as part of the ongoing funding of the operations. But that said, prop 1 did not pass and so it is now a discussion of how to redistributed it. The origins of this money go back to I believe the original 2000 election on rail when cap metro went up from three-quarters penny up to a penny. When that vote failed, the board -- I'm not trying to give exact details, I'm summarizing here, made the decision to withdraw back to the three-quarter cent to spill those members back over to the city and capital metro. When the subsequent, I believe, 2006 rail project which related in the red line resulted in positive and those funds were no longer available because they were being used for the greater operations. So it was a one time windfall period of time. >> Thank you. I think it's important to -- you can -- in the context of [11:21:43 AM] this conversation on how this money would be allocated, it's important to know the history of that because the majority of austinites decided to not support proposition one, the rail, because what I heard is they didn't feel like it was helping their part of town. I understand that eventually the thinking was rail would get to them eventually, but I think that's important when we're talking about how we want to distribute this funding. And my understanding of the intent of the distribution of this from councilmember kitchen's original resolution was that it would be equally. I appreciate -- staff has done a wonderful job and thank you for meeting with our offices and I love maps so I really enjoyed all that. When I voted for this resolution I never thought that over a third of it would be not -- would be staff's recommendation and not for the separate council district. So that's why I'm supporting this amendment. I think it's very responsive to what austinites have been asking. And in fact, another context is the previous council could have voted on how to allocate this, but I'm very grateful that they said let the 10- 1 council vote on this. It's a lot of money. Let's let them vote on it so they be responsive to this new system and to their austinites. I will support this amendment. >> Kitchen: I would like to say also I'd like to reiterate that this provided the opportunity for the councilmembers as well as the transportation staff to work with the folks in our district and to respond to what many of us heard during the rail election was people's concern with those close to home issues that they deal with everybody. So to put some dollars that we had available to go towards those. And we've had the advantage of working with the expertise of our staff to [11:23:44 AM] help identify what makes sense from a transportation perspective and so it's been a really interesting and very helpful process and I know that the members of my district that have participated have really appreciated that process. So I want to-- the other thing we're doing here and I think my colleagues feel this way, it's not for me to decide or indicate the priority in someone else's district. So this process leaves that identification of the particular items between the councilmember within the realm. Technical expertise that we've gotten the feedback on. So that's also what we're doing. We're not -- I'm not going to make a judgment call on what's in anybody's district. Any other comments before we vote? >> Garza: Thank you, Todd for being here. As a capital metro board member, I would like to add that a lot of the projects that are suggested really do improve connectivity in general, which would -- some of the priorities in my district were bike lanes, sidewalks, and improving all those little, in my opinion improve people's accessibility to our public transit. So anyway... >> Kitchen: I would add that particularly in discussion of sidewalks we talked about connection to schools and also connections to bus stops. So that was an important part of the discussion. All right. I think we have a motion and a second. So all in favor with moving forward with the resolution that we put up? Thank you. Okay. We'll now turn to our last item, and -- which relates to -- I thank you for everyone's patience as we [11:25:45 AM] worked through this. I want to start by just saying a few things about -- just to remind everyone, I'm sure everyone is aware, but to remind everyone the scope of what we're addressing today and what brought us up to this, and then we'll move into it. As you know, we've had previous discussions about certain items related to fingerprinting and also to fees. And we've gone through the process where our council voted 9-2 to request that our staff bring back information to us and some proposed language. So those two items will be addressed by the full council. We don't have the exact date, but the expectation is that will be on the council's agenda in December. So what we're doing today is we're following up on the other items that we did not get to at our last mobility committee meeting. Let me just say also that the reason the mobility committee is taking up these items at all and taking up the issue of regulation of tncs is twofold. First there was an interim ordinance that was passed last year. That was an interim ordinance that had language in it for the new council, the 10-1 council to review that ordinance and also to review certain issues that were discussed at that time that needed to be either finalized or reviewed again. So that is the reason that mobility committee is going forward with looking at these regulations. We were charged by the previous council and also charged by the ordinance that was passed by the previous council to take up this work. I would also like to say that I would really like to recognize the value that all of you as our tnc drivers for Lyft and Uber bring to our community and I hope that you understand that there is absolutely no reflection on the value you [11:27:45 AM] bring to us by what we're discussing. We appreciate your opinions and your willingness to talk with us. This is not about any one company. This is about what is the appropriate level of regulations. It is our responsibility as a city to consider what regulations are appropriate to tncs just as we have done with all the other vehicles for hire that the city regulates. So one of the things that we have talked about from back from the spring when we first started talking about vehicles for hire was the fact that there is a difference right now between our regulatory structure for all ground vehicles for hire and tncs. So it's incumbent upon us both to consider the degree degree to which those regulations should be comparable so we have equity on all kinds of vehicles for hire and drivers. I know many of you probably drive for more than one company. So that's part of our consideration. The other responsibility we have as a council is to consider public safety. So. There is no magic bullet for public safety. There is nothing that is going to make everyone 100% safe, but the judgment call that we have to make is what is the appropriate level of review for background checks. And that's all I'm going to say at this point because to get into that we'll have more discussion about that item when it comes back to council. I do want to point to the fact that in recent-- there's been recent news articles about a problem we have in our city related to public safety and related to assaults. So we're going to go forward -- assaults both that the police department has been investigating as well as safe place has been involved with. [11:29:47 AM] So -- I mentioned that specifically because there are a few items that we have in front of us today that do speak to public safety and so we'll be talking about those also. So the items that we have on our list to come up with to talk about today are items that were first put forward several months ago. So these are not new items. And in fact, a few of the items that were originally put forward for the committee to consider are not on our list for today. Would you like me to read out the items? Do you want to go through them? >> If you wouldn't mind I'll do it because I will do it in a specific order and save the best for last. >> Kitchen: Okay. Why don't you go ahead then. >> Zimmerman: Point of order, if you could. Could we put this on the overhead? >> Kitchen: Yes. So that people can see. >> Good morning, councilmembers. So with our experience over the last year with the transportation network companies, my name is Gordon durr, assistant director of the Austin transportation department. I waited until the camera came on me before I proceeded. [Laughter]. So there's some specific areas where we feel that the current ordinance doesn't speak to our needs in the long-term so that's what we want to bring up as potential discussion items for the mobility committee as we move forward. And I want to start first with operations. One of the things in the existing tnc ordinance that didn't address the operations of the vehicles. One of the requirements we have in the taxi ordinance and we're looking again at [11:31:51 AM] how do we level the playing field among all the vehicles for hire is one cannot stop and stand and wait for a fare in an active travel lane. We think that's appropriate for transportation network companies. We think also with the acl fest we need a mechanism, and I don't have a ready answer at the moment, at the end of the evening there were literally hundreds of vehicles around Austin high school. And it's not real easy when you have a lot of vehicles in the area to really organize the passengers and the vehicles. I think that's something we want to work with the companies and the drivers to see if there's a better way particularly for high impact locations and really have times of heavy operations to sigh what we can do to better organize that so that everybody gets the trip that they want and have a little chaos. So next, the current ordinance talks about 10 cents a trip. It says the tncs have to do a plan. It didn't require that they provide the city with that plan. We think that might be good. So we think we need to have reporting and some metrics so that we understand the activity going on. We've heard it's very successful but we have at this point -- we don't have a mechanism to get the data from the tncs. So will proposal would be that we require them to adopt a plan and of course provide it to us, obtain city approval and implement and report include updates on meeting progress accessible goals and activity levels. I think insurance we wanted to wait -- because we need to really discuss that with the risk management folks within the city so let's set [11:33:51 AM] that to the side at the moment. Next is reporting requirements, which is on the back of that page. So for our existing tncs they provide us with quarterly reports. They provide us with dropoffs and pickups by zip code and information about average trip length. We get more specific data from the traffic companies as a data geek I would like more more data so I could understand how the entire system looks and how it's operating. So we would be asking for more specific data by time of day and how really we want to see about coverage and economic justice and some of those issues. It's not readily -- we're not readily able to see with the existing data. Geo fencing, we've had some success working with the companies to geo fence for south by southwest and for acl. We want to put in place a process where the companies work directly with the Austin center for events. To not create greater congestion with folks just moving into an area with hopes of moving a ride. We need to designate certain areas and do proper signage to get people to those areas. And as I said earlier we need some way to probably better manage getting riders with drivers. Trade address doesn't address it in the existing tnc ordinance. We think there needs to be some type of vehicle trade addressed. Seeing stickers on back windows, maybe that's part of it, but something you can identify actively that is vehicle is being operated as a transportation network [11:35:51 AM] company. And finally, back to the first one on the first side. I think this was discussed previously. The background checks was previously discussed. The current ordinance calls for state and motor vehicle inspection. Our state law says if a vehicle is being used for ground transportation purposes there's some additional requirements on that. We think those should be inspected also, potentially by staff or through a third-party. So I think those are the main things that we have before us. >> Kitchen: Is it fair to say that these are -- that these are recommendations from the staff. I think I heard you say that. And that these are comparable to the regulations that are in place right now for our other vehicles for hire? >> Yes. >> Kitchen: Okay. Do we have questions? Yes. >> Zimmerman: I know if we put the slide back up quickly we have scratched out the dps background checks because we talked about that extensively, but to go back to that quickly, was the -- what we meant by that was the fingerprints were tied to dps background checks. We couldn't do a dps background check without fingerprints. >> It's looking at the appropriate level of background checks. We're looking at a report, and it was due today. We have not completed that. The city of Houston did a pretty comprehensive report. We'll be looking at that, but we should get that to you the next week or so. >> Zimmerman: Next week or so? >> Yes. >> Zimmerman: Help me, did that request come from staff or did it come from councilmembers? >> That's part of the resolution from council. [11:37:53 AM] >> Okay. So do we -- let me just reiterate the ones you brought forward just to make sure it's clear to everyone. So from an operations standpoint, which I think is fair to say is a traffic safety issue, we're talking about spending to tncs the same requirements that we have in place for other vehicles for hire, which involves loading and unloading should occur at the curb and not in an active travel lane, right? >> Yes. >> Kitchen: So that's one item. Accessibility, this item is just to clarify what are existing requirements in the tnc ordinance and that relates to having the plan -- the information about the plan shared with atd so that you all can understand what's happening and consider that in your transportation planning. Would that be fair to say? >> Yes. >> Kitchen: Okay. The next item, the insurance item we won't address today because that's a more complicated item and we need to dig into that in more detail. The reporting requirements, I think that you out -- you outlined some additional reporting requirements that would be important for tncs that clarifies what you are supposed to be receiving right now, is that correct? >> Yes. >> Kitchen: The geo fencing is to cooperate with the city during large special events in terms of what works in terms of pickup and dropoff locations, some of which is happening right now, but some further clarity around how that happens would be appropriate, is that right? >> Yes. >> Kitchen: The trade dress again is another safety issue that goes to making sure that if someone's called a particular tnc that it's clear that that's the car they're getting into. And there's a number of ways to address that. Okay. And then finally, I think [11:39:57 AM] was the vehicle safety inspection, correct? >> Yes. >> Kitchen: Is there any questions about any of these items that anyone might have? >> Gallo: So I think you mentioned this already. Are any of the items you're recommending different from what we already require of other transportation companies? Again, we he don't allow vehicles to stop in an active travel lane. They do have to have accessibility plans. They do report. They -- we haven't really worked with them. We'll be working with them in the future on geo fencing. Of course the taxis are certainly identifiable. And they do the state inspection. This is about getting things into alignment. >> Thank you. >> Zimmerman: On the issue of data, I agree with you that data would be very, very interesting of the trips -- the mileage and the zip codes, all the stuff you mentioned would be very, very helpful. Let me tell you the problem I'm struggling with. I'm the only councilmember that has studied in detail these Texas bio mass plant that Austin energy, a public utility, Austin energy is a public utility, but they did a contract that has protections where they don't have to release certain details that the public would really like to know. And those details are protected under Texas law that they don't have to release them because of competitive concerns with the utility. So my question is if a public utility is protected from releasing information the public needs to know, how can the city demand that the tncs release private information? [11:41:03 AM] [Applause]. >> All I can say is we do require companies and these companies operate within the public right-of-way, they utilize the resources of the city for their business so what should be the balance point between the information about what they do and the resources they utilize of the city? >> The other point I would make is what we're talking about is comparable to what taxis and other vehicles for hire report. So what we're talking about -- and they're private companies also. So we're simply talking about the information that is necessary for our transportation department staff to do their job with regard to our transportation options in the city. >> Zimmerman: It's fair enough. The point I'm making is there's already legal precedence for protection of information with a public utility that you would think would have to disclose information. So there's already precedent. I guess the other thing is we keep talking about the difference in business models too, the very big difference. And the taxi franchises are kind of creatures of municipal government. They're franchises and they're licensed and they're set up that way, but the tncs are not, a very different business model. So I guess we're back to that same argument, apples and Oranges comparison. >> Kitchen: So other comments? Do we have a motion? >> Gallo: I would like to make the motion to forward to the council the staff's recommendation as presented today and with the items that we've deleted that you're waiting on to do. [11:43:05 AM] >> Kitchen: Do we have a second? Second from councilmember Garza. Okay. Any discussion? >> Garza: The information, if we require the companies to release that, it could just be shared with our transportation. It couldn't necessarily -- it could be that we just really send to you guys, not to the public, is that correct? >> That's correct. The companies are saying it's proprietary information and we have not made that available outside of transportation staff. >> Okay, thanks. >> Zimmerman: That's a great point. Do we know under government code have public information requests come into you that you've denied already for the information you have? >> We'd have to get the city attorneys to really address that. I think there has been some request for information. I think there's been rulings related to that, but I don't know the details of those. >> I think we could pick that up later, but it's a very important point. Very good point. I think that we would of course need to operate within the law with regard to any company's right to proprietary information. It's state law. We can't, nor would we want to override. >> Let me say when -- we dug into into this extensively with the attorney general and the ag's office pointed us to specific language that said a public utility power purchase agreement could not be subject to open records so it called that out and exempted it specifically. I don't know if there's anything like that for tncs, but it's probably that we haven't tested it yet. So that would be a useful piece of information to get back from legal. >> Kitchen: Okay. We could get that. >> Garza: It's my understanding there was already a legal opinion that said their information was [11:45:06 AM] proprietary, so it's already been determined that it's proprietary which means it wouldn't be subject to open records requests, I thought. >> Again, the city attorney's office would need to address that. I know there's specific data points that have gone through that check, but I don't know the details. >> Kitchen: So councilmember Zimmerman and Garza, I think the recommendation that we would be bringing forward would include that point that you're making that any reporting, of course, would be subject to what the attorney general or what the law says with regard to proprietary information and not making it public. >> Zimmerman: Would it be okay with the committee if we got a very brief 90-second comment on this issue from some of our tnc representatives? Very quick specific question on the matter? >> You're talking about these specific items? >> The very specific item about data. >> Kitchen: I think we have representations from both tnc companies here. We'll start with Lyft. If we could have if you would like to speak to this. You don't have to. [Applause]. >> Kitchen: Did you have a specific question. >> Zimmerman: I did. The question is you heard the conversation here and there's a request for information about the trips and what have you. And so is that information considered proprietary and can the city's publicize it. >> I'm sorry, April could not be here today. She had a medical emergency. But we have had conversations -- Lyft is coming at this -- yes, there is an opinion in terms of what is and there is information that the company does deem proprietary. The conversations we've had with your offices is to get a better understanding of how the data would be used. [11:47:08 AM] And if there is a role that we can play, we certainly want to be compliant with what is required by the transportation department. Our fear is just that going out to the broader audiences. So if we could have a conversation in terms of the goals of the transportation department, the problem we're trying to solve, we would welcome that. >> Kitchen: Thank you very much. >> Gallo: I was just going to make a comment on that. This is the goal of all of ours, is to make sure that the tncs have the conversation with the transportation department so that we can work through. The council is really a policy group, the operations. We depend on our wonderful staff to be able to work through that with you. So it's the concept that we're working on and the details the transportation department should be working with the tncs to accomplish something that works mutually. But getting everyone on an equal playing field from the standpoint of the requirements is the policy area that we're all trying to address. >> Thank you. >> Kitchen: Did you want to ask the same question? >> Adam glen. Thank you very much. Just to echo the sentiments, we're always happy to engage with city staff, cities to help provide them with the information for the purposes of city planning or any which way we can be a better partner with the city we look to do. We think that that's a discussion that's better had between the two parties who find out the best way for that to happen. Often times we don't know what information they're looking for or why they're look for it. And we have had an incident in Austin where we released information requested by the city staff. We did it under the expectation that it be kept confidential, explicitly so, and that information was released by the city staff. So we do have concerns around this proposal. We are happy to engage with the atd and discuss how we can be a better partner when it comes to data for their purposes. [11:49:08 AM] >> Kitchen: I think some clarity would be helpful and that's our goal here is clarity for the staff and for you all. And with a recognition that under the state law there's certain information that's proprietary. >> Gallo: I would say too if we need to bring legal, city legal into this discussion also, which it sounds like may be appropriate so that everybody understands the legal ramifications for the information we're getting and also the public's access to it, I think that would be a good component of this dialogue. >> Zimmerman: I do have one more follow-up yes on the idea of the need for the data because the tncs use the Austin city streets for -- I guess for delivering people and passengers and ride share, but domino's pizza use cases the roads to deliver pizza and the ftd, the flower company, they use roads exclusively. Delivery companies, ups, fed ex that use our streets. And I wonder if we asked to collect the data for tncs, why not a demand from all companies that do a delivery as a business? [Cheers and applause] >> Kitchen: Councilmember Zimmerman, we do require data from all of our vehicles for hire and that is the purpose of our discussion today is this is not -- we're engaging in an apples to apples comparison with vehicles for hire and that is something that we do today and that's why we're having this discussion right now. >> Zimmerman: Sure. I just wanted to get a quick response if I could. >> Kitchen: I don't think that's a question. Is that a question that you had for them? >> Zimmerman: Yeah. What is the difference or why could that data not be demanded from more and more and more companies. >> Kitchen: Then my question is why would you be different in the data that you make available to us from other vehicles for hire? >> Just to be clear the current ordinance in place does have data requirements of us and we are complying with those data requirements. We are filing quarterly [11:51:09 AM] reports with the atd and providing them with trip information from zip code to zip code. I just wanted to be clear that the current status quo in existing ordinance has robust data sharing provisions. We don't know to what degree they're being used by the city, but we are providing them on a quarterly basis. In terms of proprietary information we are a technology based company, we're global in scope and our information is extremely available to people. And there are also privacy issues with riders and drivers depending upon the type of information requested. It's not to stamp out any dialogue. We think there should be room for a very constructive conversation with cities? Which we can determine what information they're looking for and how we can best actually share it for whatever purposes they're looking for. But we think it should be more based on a partnership and a collaboration rather than just a list of items that we have to share without any kind of understanding of what's being looked for. >> Garza: I just want to add the point you were trying to make earlier before we got too deep into this, there is a mechanism now that allows people to exempt themselves from this information. So the city would only be asking for information within the boundaries of that and if either company felt that it was outside of those boundaries they can make that legal argument proprietary. I also want to add I don't see how we can compare this to pizza delivery when we're talking about comparing -- comparing a pizza to a person, which is our most precious modty in the city. It's two different things. [Applause]. >> Kitchen: Let's just take a vote. We have a motion in front of [11:53:09 AM] us. All in favor? Any opposed? Do you have a question for someone or what? >> Troxclair: I just had a question for our atd staff really quickly. Thank you for letting me ask a question. I know that y'all have a lot on your agenda. So do you have an extra copy of this? >> No. I passed that out. >> Troxclair: There is a mention in here of the tnc impact on drunk driving. I do think that that is an important metric for us to use when we're talking about public safety and how tncs and taxis -- >> Kitchen: Councilmember troxclair, that's not within our scope today. As you know -- would you please let us speak? I'm trying to explain as we talked about earlier that kind of information, the resolution that the council passed 9-2 requested that kind of information to be brought back to us. As Mr. Durr explained earlier, they're in the middle of preparing that report, which they do not have ready for us today, but we will receive that report before this comes back to council. >> Troxclair: Okay. That's all I was going to ask is when we could expect that information. >> I think within the next week to 10 days. >> Troxclair: Okay. And I just wanted to know, and you probably have already explained this because I missed the opening. Is there going to be public comment taken on these specific changes at some point or will that be at the full council level? >> Kitchen: These changes are the same changes that were put out by the mobility committee a couple of months ago and we've already had public comment on them. There will be public comment -- as we -- in line with our traditional -- not traditional, but in line with how the council takes public comment and just like we did on the other two items. So when it gets to the full council, yes, there will be comment. [11:55:13 AM] >> Zimmerman: Point of order. I was recorded as voting against, and -- was it 3-1 the vote we just had. >> Kitchen: I think we stopped in the middle of it. Can we please take our vote? All in favor? It's three. And one against. Thank you very much. Before we close, it's not quite noon, but I wanted to go ahead and say this before we close. Governor Greg Abbott is asking all Texans to pause in silence for a minute at noon today to honor the memory of the victims of the Paris terrorist attack. So I would like to take a moment of silence right now as part of our mobility committee to remember what happened to the victims in Paris and to send our thoughts and our best wishes to all the folks in Paris that have been impacted by this. [Moment of silence]. >> Kitchen: Thank you. I think that it gives us a lot of perspective about what we're dealing with around the world, and it's important for us to remember and do whatever we can to help our -- to help our friends and neighbors in Paris. Thank you very much. With that I think We stand adjourned. OK. Thank you. [11:57:12 AM]