City Council Work Session

Catherine ReadThank you. Good evening. I would like to call the special meeting of October 7, 2025 to order. I think we need to move right into consideration for remote participation by Councilmember Hall, pursuant to Code of Virginia Section 2.2-3708.2. Is there a motion to approve the remote participation by Council Member Hall? Council Member Hardy-Chandler?

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerIn accordance with City Council adopted policy and as permitted by Virginia Code Section 2.2-3708.2, I move to approve Council Member Hall's request, properly submitted in writing prior to tonight's meeting for remote participation, subject to compliance with the requirements policy and applicable law in all or portions of the City Council work session of October 7, 2025.

Catherine ReadIs there a second? Second. The motion's been made and seconded. A roll call vote.

Speaker 10Council Member Amos? Aye. Council Member Hardy-Chandler? Aye. Council Member Peterson? Aye. Council Member Bates? So, he's not here. Council Member Quillen? Aye. Motion passed unanimously.

Catherine ReadOkay, I will now recess the special meeting to go into a work session. first work session item for discussion.

Speaker 10Our first item is a presentation by ETC Institute on the community survey. I'm going to recognize Matthew Kaiser, our communications director for the discussion.

Matthew KaiserstaffWell good evening mayor, council members. We're excited to be back here before you. If you remember we were here this spring to kick off the city's very first statistically valid community survey which we conducted over the summer. I'm joined by the vice president Director of Community Research from the ETC Institute. That's the firm who conducted the survey on behalf of the city. And he is going to walk through ETC's findings report, which includes some identified priorities and recommendations for you to consider as we roll into budget season. So with that, this is Jason Murado. Thank you.

Jason MuradoThanks, Matthew. Good evening, Mayor and Council. My name is Jason Murado. I'm the Director of Community Research at ETC Institute. I was here in April to give an overview of the process we'll go through to conduct the statistically valid survey. And now we've done it. So today I'm here to walk through the key findings from the survey. The full report is very detailed and comprehensive. So today I'll walk through the key findings at a fairly high level. I have just a little background about ETC Institute. We're a national leader in providing market research for local governments. worked for over 40 years and in the last 10 years alone we've conducted surveys in more than a thousand communities across the country and that includes a

lot of work in Virginia some of our longtime clients include the city of Manassas Virginia Beach Norfolk Winchester we recently conducted a parks recreation survey for Fairfax County so this is the type of work that we specialize in this is just an overview of what I'll go through today I'll go the purpose and methodology of the survey. I'll walk through the key findings, summarize our main conclusions from the survey, and then I'll be happy to answer any questions as well. So there are several reasons to conduct a survey like this. One is to get an objective assessment of how satisfied residents are with major city services and to determine what residents feel are the top priorities for the community. Hopefully this survey will

also serve as a baseline for future surveys. A lot of communities that we work with conduct these surveys on a regular basis. The most frequent time frame is every other year. And the idea is that you ask a lot of the same questions, that way you can measure trends over time, and then also know what the current priorities are for your residents. And then we're also able to compare your results with other communities across the country. So this This survey was a fairly lengthy survey. It was seven pages in length, the printed and mailed version of it. On average, it took residents about 15 to 20 minutes to complete the survey. The survey was administered by a combination of mail and online to randomly selected households

throughout the city. And that's our standard methodology for these statistically-avowed community surveys, is a random sample by mail and online. Our goal is to receive at least 400 completed surveys, which is a good sample size for a We had a good response to the survey, and we ended up with 425 completed surveys. The results of the 425 surveys at the 95% level of confidence has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.7%. Essentially, that means that if we conducted this survey the same way 100 times, 95 times the results would be plus or minus 4.7% from what we're reporting. So the results are never perfect even for a statistically valid survey, but the margin of error is small. So here we have a map of the city. The red dots are households that completed a survey.

We had a good distribution throughout the city. You can see we didn't have many surveys from the eastern side of the city. For the most part, that's a non-residential area, although there are a few residential areas kind of in the northern eastern part. Now, we did send some surveys there, but didn't receive any responses. But overall, we had a good response throughout the city. And as you were administering the survey, we made respondents reflects the actual population of the city, especially when it comes to key demographic areas such as age, race, ethnicity, gender, and household income. So here's what we learned from the survey. We found that residents have a very positive perception of the city of Fairfax. Over

90% of respondents rate the city of Fairfax as an excellent or a good place to live and to raise and educate children. You'll see in a little bit when we compare your results to other communities that much much higher than our the regional and national average we also found that satisfaction with city services is much higher in Fairfax than in other communities we'll look at this in more detail in a little bit as well but I wanted to mention that Fairfax rated above the US average and 46 of the 47 areas that we compared and in most cases your ratings are significantly higher and there were two areas that especially stood out one is that satisfaction with the overall quality of city services rated 37 percentage points above the US average.

And that's one of the most important questions on the survey because here we're asking residents to take into account all the services that you're providing and really give an overall satisfaction rating for how well you're doing delivering services. And then the area on the survey where you rated the farthest above the US average is customer service provided by city employees which rated 47 percentage points above the US average. Overall priorities are traffic flow and ease of gain around the city and economic development. So first we'll look at some overall perceptions that residents have of the city of Fairfax. Here we ask residents to rate their perceptions of the city in a number of different ways.

You can see the dark blue are rates of excellent. The light blue is good. The gray is neutral. And we interpret neutral as average or median expectations. It's a rating of a three on a five-point scale, so it's not a bad rating. And then the pink are those who give a rating of below average or poor. So overall, you can see that the positive rating is far away than negative. If you look at the top of this chart, over 90% of respondents rate the city of Fairfax as an excellent or a good place to live and to raise and educate children. Other areas that are rated very high were the overall quality of life in the city and the overall image of the city. This is another question about more perceptions of the city.

see the dark blue are those who are very satisfied light blue is satisfied gray is neutral which again is at three on the five point scale so average and then pink are those who are dissatisfied or very dissatisfied so overall again the positive ratings far away the negative the item in here that stands out to most the most to me is that top row the overall quality of city services which again that's one of the most important questions on the survey and you can see that nearly 90% of residents are either very satisfied or satisfied and only 4% are dissatisfied or very dissatisfied typically when the ratings are high for the overall quality of city services it obviously means that residents are

satisfied with a lot of the more specific services that we asked about in the survey the other most highly rated areas were the overall image of the city the acceptance of diversity and the overall appearance of the city the only area that had more dissatisfied and satisfied responses was the of affordable quality housing we'll get into that in more detail in a little bit but that's a trend we've seen all over the country especially over the past couple of years so not really a surprise on this question we asked residents how satisfied they are with major categories of city services so here we're asking residents to rate these areas at the big picture departmental level and then later on in the survey we asked about some more specific areas within some of

Once again, the blue are the positive ratings, the gray is average and the pink are the negative ratings. And once again, the positive ratings far outweigh the negative. If you look at the top of this chart, the highest rated areas are fire and rescue services, trash recycling and yard waste, the overall quality of voter registration, library services, police services, customer service from city employees, and then parks and recreation programs and facilities. The lowest rate area you can see is the overall flow of traffic and ease of getting around the city. But even for that, you had more positive than negative responses. And a lot of cities, when we ask this question, there'll be at least two or three areas that

have more dissatisfied and satisfied responses. But here you can see that's not the case. We had a question on the survey that asked respondents if they've contacted the city within the past 12 months. 59% of respondents have contacted the city in the past four months so for that that group we then had a follow-up question that asked respondents to rate often city employees display these various behaviors you can see these results are very very positive the vast majority of those who have contacted the city in the past year felt that see employees were courteous and professional feel that it was easy to find someone to address their request high ratings to respondents being satisfied with their overall experience,

that they felt the response time was reasonable. Most respondents felt they were able to get their question or concern resolved. And then the most awful feel that City of Fairfax employees went the extra mile. And these are people who contacted the city, which means they probably had a concern or something they were, some issue, which is why they contacted the city in the first place, which makes these results especially impressive. So we also found that satisfaction with city services is high in all parts of the city. So here again we have a map of the city, and we broke the results out by census block group, and the dark black line shows the boundaries of the census block group. We created a map like this for every question on the survey asked on a five-point scale,

so there's over 100 maps in the report. This map is for the overall quality of city services, and you can see the entire map is blue. so this tells us that residents in all parts of the city are satisfied with the overall quality of city services there's an areas in dark blue are the highest possible rating but the light blue are positive as well so what sometimes what happens is even if the results are very positive overall once you break the results into these smaller geographic areas sometimes you'll see some pockets for residents aren't dissatisfied or feel like they're not getting as good of service as people in other parts of the city but you can see here that's not the case at all. This map is for how residents feel about the

city of Fairfax as a place to live. You can see not only is the entire map blue but most of it is dark blue which is the highest possible rating. So this shows that residents all throughout the city get very high ratings to Fairfax as a place to live. And this shows how respondents feel about Fairfax as a place to raise and educate children. Again the entire map is blue with almost residents throughout the city feel that Fairfax is an excellent place to raise and educate children so I mentioned earlier that satisfaction with city services is much higher in Fairfax than other communities the city of Fairfax rates above the US average in 46 of the 47 areas that compared the only area that's not above the US average is traffic flow but that's actually right

at the US average so it's not even below and then the city of Fairfax rates significantly above the US average and 44 out of these 47 areas so in other words 5% or more above the US average and then you also rate above the regional average in 42 of 47 areas and significantly higher than 38 of those areas so as we go through these next few charts the dark blue line are a city of Fairfax residents were either very satisfied or satisfied. The light blue are the satisfaction ratings for those in the Atlantic region. That includes Virginia as well as surrounding states. And then the gray bar are the satisfaction ratings for residents from all across the country. And this is based on a national survey that ETC Institute conducts every one to two years

with about 10,000 randomly selected residents all across the country. So this first charge is for some perceptions of the city. these I put blue arrows by the places where Fairfax rates significantly above both the regional and national average red arrows would be for places where you're significantly below the regional national average but there are there's nothing like that so you'll see there aren't any red arrows in this so you can see Fairfax rates much higher than other communities as a place to live as a place to raise children as a place to work as a place to live is one of the areas on the survey where you rated the farthest above the US average you can you have a 94% satisfaction rating,

and the national average is just under 50%. Your ratings are also higher than other communities as a place to visit and as a place to retire, but not as much higher, so they don't have the blue arrow. They're higher, but not significantly higher than other communities. Here are more perceptions of the city. You can see in all four of these areas, Fairfax rates significantly higher than other communities. One of the areas that really stands out is the top row, quality of city services which I mentioned is one of the most important questions on the survey you have an 86 percent satisfaction rating you can see the regional and national average are right around 50 percent if you look at that bottom row overall value received for city taxes and fees

you have a 58 satisfaction rating which is lower than some of the score you receive in some of the other areas but you can see that's the case in other communities as well because the regional and national average are barely above 30 percent so you're almost double the regional national average when it comes to the value residents feel they're receiving for city taxes and fees this is that question about major categories of city services so here again we're asking residents to rate these areas at the big picture departmental level and you can see in every area except traffic flow your ratings are significantly above the regional national average this include solid waste library services if you look at the third row down customer service provided by

city employees that's the area on the survey that rated the farthest above the u.s average you had an 86 percent satisfaction rating the regional and national average are just under 40 percent you're also much higher than other communities when it comes to parks and recreation the maintenance of public buildings and facilities sanitary sewer utilities maintenance of streets and sidewalks public education communication and enforcing codes and ordinances traffic flow is the only area that's not significantly higher than other communities but you can see the ratings aren't bad they're just a little bit below the regional average right at the national average here are comparisons specifically for public safety in most areas your ratings are much higher

than other communities what especially stands out here are the high ratings for the overall quality of EMS services the overall quality of fire and rescue services and the overall quality of police services when it comes to visibility of police and neighborhoods visibility of police and retail and enforcing local traffic laws the ratings aren't bad in those areas but they're more on par with other communities as opposed to being significantly higher like you are in these other categories this shows how safe residents feel in various situations you can see compared to other communities residents in Fairfax feel much safer and this is all situations including how safe residents feel in their neighborhood during their day in their neighborhood at night in

retail areas in community parks and if you look at that second row down just the overall feeling of safety in the community 94% of respondents just overall feel safe in Fairfax you can see the regional average is 71% national average And then when it comes to community appearance, you can see your ratings are much higher than other communities when it comes to trash and garbage collection, yard waste, leaf and brush pickup, curbside recycling, the cleanliness of streets and public areas, the condition of sidewalks and enforcing sign regulations. For the other three areas, the ratings aren't bad, but they're more on par with other communities. And you can see that includes enforcing the cleanup of trash and debris on private property,

maintenance of residential property, enforcing mowing and cutting of weeds on private property. So now we'll look at top priorities. We showed earlier how satisfied residents are with major categories of city services. As a follow-up question, we asked which of these services should receive the most emphasis from city leaders over the next two years? And respondents could pick up to four items from this list. You can see by a pretty wide margin, the top two priorities are traffic flow and ease of gain around the city, and then the overall quality of economic development. Then you have several areas rated closely together, with the next highest priorities being the overall quality of public education, maintenance of street sidewalks and infrastructure,

and enforcing codes and ordinances. So this is something we call the important satisfaction analysis. And this rating is, this analysis is based on two different types of data, both of which we've seen already. First, we ask residents how satisfied they are of services. Then we ask which services are the most important for the city to emphasize. So we factor in those two things, satisfaction and importance. And then we have a mathematical formula that determines which items should be the top priorities, based on that combination of satisfaction and importance. So this is for major categories of city services. the top overall priorities in pink are traffic flow and ease of being around the city and economic development the next highest priority is enforcing codes and

ordinances we create these types of analysis for more specific areas as well this is focused on transportation and mobility you can see the top priority is how well traffic signals provide efficient traffic flow second is the ease of getting around within the city and then third is the availability of sidewalks it's in that green area the medium priority but it just barely missed being in that yellow section this focuses on planning and economic development we saw earlier that economic development was a high priority overall this gets into more detail on that the top overall priority is efforts to improve existing commercial corridors by redeveloping blighted or vacant and shopping centers next highest priorities are efforts to manage and

plan for growth and development and the ability to attract and promote retail businesses and restaurants this focuses on public safety there's nothing in pink in this area which is the very high priority because the overall satisfaction was so high for public safety but there are several areas in yellow so the highest priorities are efforts just overall efforts to prevent crime and it satisfaction ratings were very high when it comes to efforts to prevent crime but it's still an area that residents feel is important which is why it rates this high the other top priorities are visibility of police and retail areas visibility of police and neighborhoods and efforts to enforce local traffic laws such as speeding and then when it comes to community

appearance you can see the top priority is enforcing the removal of blighted and abandoned buildings next highest priorities are enforcing the cleanup of litter and debris on private property and enforcing mowing and cutting of weeds and grass on private property when it comes to culture and recreation you can see there's nothing in pink or yellow because the satisfaction ratings were very very high for parks and recreation and cultural items but the highest availability of walking and biking trails and the quality and amount of public art in the city and then when it comes to health and human services you can see the top priority is efforts to preserve and increase the availability of affordable housing and that's been a high priority

really nationwide especially over the past couple years next highest priorities are the availability of services supporting persons with mental, physical, cognitive disabilities and or substance use disorders in the availability of services to people on a low or fixed income. And then here we asked we asked respondents about keeping the current two-year term or going to a four-year term you can see 55% of respondents say to keep the current system which is the two-year terms 34 percent said switch to four-year staggered terms and then the other 11 percent said switch to four-year terms where everyone's elected at the same time so that's everything that i had just a quick recap we saw that residents have

a very positive perception of the city there are a lot of examples of that throughout the reports but one of the areas that especially stood out the high ratings for the city as a place to live and as a place to raise and educate children we saw that satisfaction with city services is much higher in the city of Fairfax and other communities a lot of examples of that as well but a couple of areas that especially stood out where the overall quality of city services and customer service provided by city employees and the top overall priorities for traffic flow and ease of gain around the city and overall economic development. So obviously very, for your first survey, very, very positive ratings overall in many, many different ways.

And with that, with anyone who has any questions, I'll be happy to answer them.

Catherine ReadThank you so much for the presentation. So are these done generally like every other year? Since this is our baseline starting out, on what kind of recurring basis would we expect to do this?

Jason MuradoThe most frequent time frame is every other year. Some conduct the survey every year, some not as often, maybe every three to four to five years. But every other year is the most common time frame. And I think that's a good time frame because it gives you enough time to make changes and see how it impacts the results. But then also, if you wait too long to do the survey, you don't really know why the results change if you only do it every five years, say.

Catherine ReadThat makes sense. Comments, Council Member Amos.

Anthony AmosThank you very much for the presentation and for this information. I wanted to highlight and then follow up with some questions. One of the things that stood out to me was question 30 where it says where do you plan to be living in the next two to five years and 93% of people said City of Fairfax and I think that's a testament to our staff and the incredible team that we have here so just wanted to thank everyone for your hard work that you do every day. My follow-up questions would be so question 22 mentions and I don't know if you have comparative data available here for tonight. It says, for example, how many city council meetings do you attend or watch each year? 50% said zero. And I can't say

I'm too shocked by that, but I wonder how does that compare with other jurisdictions?

Jason MuradoDr. Joe Sopcichiro That's not a question we ask super often, so that's why we didn't have that benchmarking data. But we've asked it before, so I can check and see how that compares. It's typically low. Like that, those results didn't surprise me a whole lot but I could look for some other examples to get some more more detail.

Anthony AmosAnd another benchmarking question, question 40, in what decade were you were born? I noticed that it said between 1991 and 2000 it was only 4%. Is that traditionally low? Is that consistent with Northern Virginia but inconsistent outside of this region? Do you have comparative data for that?

Jason MuradoWell for that type of question we're really trying to compare your results to the US Census. So that's typical. The questions related to age, race, gender, household income. For those we did compare the representation on the survey versus the actual U.S. Census and we had a good representation for those areas. So that's, yeah, that number matches up with what we would have expected.

Catherine ReadSo how many surveys were actually sent out?

Jason MuradoWe mailed the survey to 3,000 households. And the reason for that number is the typical response rate for a survey of this length is 12 to 15%. So we mail surveys usually to about seven to eight times the number of households as completed surveys that we need. And our goal was 400 completed surveys. So in that case, we typically mail it to 3,000.

Catherine ReadRight. So going back to Council Member Amos's question about why maybe so few people between in that age group. A lot of people don't self-select to fill out paper surveys. They just don't. I mean, we, we, I, I, people self-select certain things, and if you look at the demographics, they tend to just skew older. Homeowners, white, English-speaking, which is, I mean, that makes up, that is, makes up a lot of our city, but there are also people who tend to fill out paper surveys. So I do think it's representative. Look at the demographics and you look. It is, but people just self-select how you approach them. If you did it on TikTok or Instagram or something, it might have skewed the other way.

So just understanding how people self-select what they participate in had a large impact, I think, on who participated. Questions, comments? Council Member Peterson?

Thomas PetersonJust to build on that, how much do you know about the difference between respondents and non-respondents?

Jason MuradoAs far as how they would answer the questions or? Well,

Thomas Petersona combination of both the demographics and how they answer questions. I mean, there's a large non-respondent group, obviously. And the question is, how different are they than the respondent group?

Jason MuradoThey shouldn't be very different at all. We consider these results statistically valid, and there's two things that have to happen in order for results to be considered statistically valid. One is households are selected at random to participate in the survey, and the other is that the demographics of survey respondents need to reflect the actual population of the city. So if you do those things, these results should reflect the entire city within that margin of error I mentioned early on. So it's not perfect, but definitely a smaller margin of error. So these results really should represent the entire city, even though it is just the 425 completed surveys.

Thomas PetersonAnd that's both in terms of demographics and responses?

Jason MuradoDemographics and as far as how they answer the questions, too, yes. Is that what you mean? Should the responses reflect the actual population of the city? Is that?

Thomas PetersonYeah. Right.

Jason MuradoYes. Yeah, absolutely. Yep.

Thomas Petersonthis is something you've taken a look at as you've done these in other areas, whether you've gone back into the nonrespondent pool and done comparative analysis. But is this a pretty typical result where you find that based on this kind of a survey, you have effectively represented both demographics and response?

Jason MuradoYes, absolutely. Yeah. Yep. Yep. We pay super close attention to the demographics of survey respondents, that really is one of the keys in order for these results to be considered statistically valid. So for every survey we do, no matter what city or county or part of the country it is, we're making sure that the demographics of survey respondents reflect the actual population of that area based on U.S. Census. So we're tracking age, race, ethnicity, gender, household income as we're administering the surveys.

Thomas PetersonChair Greg Musilkamp And I just have one more question right now, although maybe we'll circle back after others here. The ‑‑ is this available for public review? Have we posted this to the website or do we have a plan to do that? I appreciate that we're doing this through an open session this evening, but is this going to be available otherwise?

Brian FosterstaffChair Greg Musil Yes. It will be posted tomorrow. And you may not remember, I thought I shared last week, you all got an advance copy so you could prepare for this, but we send it out early without context, which is why we wanted to wait until the presentation. You could ask questions, et cetera. The full report, all the maps, copy of this presentation, all will be on the website tomorrow.

Thomas PetersonThank you.

Catherine ReadCouncil Member Hardy-Chandler and then Council Member McQuillan.

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerThank you. I think the findings are very validating in terms of the quality of service that our city staff provide and certainly the safety services and all of that. I think issues around the traffic is, again, validating a concern that we're very much aware of. I'm curious about the qualitative data. So there's a, all of the comments are included and I'm just wondering if there was a qualitative analysis to identify some of the themes from comments and if those would be synthesized in a digestible way. Right.

Jason MuradoWe haven't done any analysis like that, but we could do something like that. Just looking through the comments, they generally reflect what we saw from the quantitative

Matthew Kaiserstaffdata,

Jason Muradobut the open-ended comments do always tend to skew a little more negative anytime time, any community where we ask that. So that's typical. But we could do some type of, yeah, more analysis to kind of break out some summaries. But just looking through it, it really just kind of gave it a little more in-depth detail on what we saw with the quantitative results.

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerThank you. I also noticed that there were several areas where people were both very satisfied and identified those same areas as in need of attention. What is the typical interpretation of that? Is it that the need of attention is to maintain that level of satisfaction or because it certainly can be both, right? Things can, for example, services to seniors was identified as something that people were generally satisfied with but also wanted to be a continuing area of attention. How do you interpret that when it shows up in both categories?

Jason MuradoYeah, well, I would interpret that as residents in that case are very satisfied with whatever service we're talking about, but they still want to make sure that level of service is maintained. Another good example of that would be efforts to prevent crime. We saw that residents were very, very satisfied with that. Residents clearly feel safe in the city in all situations, but that was still rated as one of the most important areas of public safety because they want to make sure that that remains that remains as a top priority okay

Stacey Hardy-Chandlerand I think my last comment is not so much to you but to my council members is just thinking about the high priority or the very high priority areas and how we might look forward to aligning these with strategic goals and bringing them back to a broader sort of governance view because I feel like this information is extremely helpful and to the extent that we can not just review it as part of a report but actually integrate it into strategic planning, I think that would be a great way to use some of those priorities. Again, just wanting to say how wonderful it was to see those areas that were significantly higher than our region and the nation and to thank the staff for all they do to provide

that level of service to our city.

Brian FosterstaffMayor, may I just interject one thing? So, Council Member Hardy Chandler, you asked about the open-ended comments or the written comments. I've already had the discussion with staff. They have not yet seen them, again, because we haven't distributed the report, but I've already prompted them that they'll need to review all of those for things that may affect their area or comments relative to their area so we can, if there are things that may maybe need attention or things that we need to respond to, we'll be able to do that. So that I just want to let you know that is going to be taking place, but has not yet.

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerAnd I definitely appreciate that. Just a heads up, of course, as with any information, some of it says, I love this. I hate this. Right. So, you know, while some of that is contradictory, I do think that there are probably some themes that can surface from that, that may be helpful for discussion. at least to flesh out the quantitative data.

Catherine ReadCouncil Member McQuillan, then we'll go to Council Member Hall.

Rachel McQuillenI too agree with those sentiments that we need to take this information, use this data to update our strategic goals. That's vital. I agree with that completely. Were any non-English speakers sampled?

Jason MuradoThe survey was available in multiple languages. I think all the surveys were filled out in English, but I can go back and double check. And that's pretty typical. Usually, most households have someone in the house that speaks English, so usually that person will fill it out on behalf of the household. But the survey was available in multiple languages. But I'll go double check, but I appreciate they're all filled out in English.

Rachel McQuillenWonderful. I just was curious. Thank you. Council Member Hall.

Jordan HowardYes, thank you. I think there's

Stacy Halla lot of really, really great data in here. And I think, you know, we can go through and individually dissect each one of these pages and kind of identify areas where, you know, we might need more attention, let's say in lawn maintenance or code enforcement or things like that, which I think is really, really critical information for our staff and certain areas where I think, you know, maybe we don't have efficient traffic flow and obviously areas where sidewalk improvements might be needed. So I think while we might be able to identify some of these on our own and with our transportation staff, I think these are some really key areas to be able to help zone and hone in on where we need to do things and where we could maybe enforce speeding and other traffic laws. A lot of my

questions have been asked already, but I was curious. So the 425 total respondents, and you said that, correct me if I'm wrong, you had sent 3,000 surveys out. And I know I personally did not receive a survey, but I went online and I completed it anyway, as did other people that i shared it with so i'm curious of the 3 000 households that were targeted for lack of a better word how many of those actually responded to the survey

Jason Muradoso the the 425 completed surveys are from that sample of 3 000 households that we randomly selected to participate now we did receive 37 completed surveys from those who are not part of the random sample um so they didn't receive a survey in the mail but they took the survey online either they saw through social media or you know just saw the link wherever they saw it those results are not statistically valid so we didn't include them in this report but we can provide those results separately just as kind of basic tabulated data then you can always compare those results to these sometimes the demographics for the non-random sample are not necessarily representative of the city so the results could be skewed but sometimes they are a good representation so that's

kind of a separate set of data that's not a part of this but we'll send those results separately

Stacy Hallokay so just just to make sure i heard that correctly the people that responded that were not invited to the survey are not part of any of this information this is just the statistically valid survey respondents

Jason Muradoright that's exactly right yep

Stacy Hallokay thank you that's really helpful to know. Yeah, I would definitely be curious to see that information because as we all know, some people take surveys for a reason because they want to share their opinion or be heard. So I think that's really helpful information. I did have one other question and I am certainly not a statistics person by any means, but I did notice that on the map, it appeared that like you had said on the, I'm going to call it the right portion of the map. I don't know if it's north or west when we're looking at it. I guess that's technically the eastern side of the city. It seemed like there were very few respondents from over there. But, you know, of the handful of people

that responded there, it seems like their responses essentially colored the whole section of those neighborhoods. So everything kind of over along Pickett Road. And it just makes me wonder how accurate, for lack of a better word, that representation actually is of those number there. And I don't know if that's information that you can provide of, you know, let's say there are 1,700 houses over there and we got responses back from eight of them. Is that a statistically valid sample for that section of the city or is that on its own then not considered something that is statistically valid?

Jason MuradoRight. For those maps, we broke the results out by census block group. So those are fairly small groups as far as population goes. Now the one area to east is much wider because it's a much less densely populated area, whereas areas that are more densely populated, the census block group is smaller. It's interesting to look at the results broken out by census block group, but each group by itself I would not consider statistically valid because the sample is probably too small to look at it that way. But it does just give you a good feel for how the responses vary across the city is the way I would look at those maps.

Stacey Hardy-Chandleryeah

Stacy Hallokay well i'm happy that 425 was was what was received back out of the 3 000 obviously i hope it i wish it was going to be more but um i think it's valid and and very helpful information overall so thank you

Catherine Readcouncilmember

Anthony Amosamos and and just a quick comment because i know uh the number one issue overall cited was traffic flow we are doing the old town circulation study uh so that Shout out to Chloe in the back hanging out. But wanted to make sure that there are a number of items here that were flagged as concerns that we are already in the progress of examining and potentially having solutions here shortly. So just wanted to bring that up as well.

Catherine ReadAny questions? Mr. Foster.

Brian FosterstaffI just wanted to say and I appreciate the comments from council members about the work of the staff. I think for me, I think the two things that Jason highlighted, which were the overall quality, the high ratings for overall quality of services and then the actual customer service provided so far above the national average and the actual, I believe he said the customer service, the difference between what our folks are rated and the national average was the highest a difference of all the things on the survey. I think that is a testament to the staff, the work that's done. You would not have high quality services without the staff and the fact that the community recognizes their hard work and recognizes the quality

of customer service that they provide is I think one of the biggest takeaways. So I appreciate the comments that the council members shared this evening, but I just I wanted to to make a point of saying that this evening. And then the other thing I would say is, as you know, we have our our budget open house coming up. There will be survey results information that'll be a part of that. And then at your upcoming budget retreat, we will also use this information to inform the work that we'll be doing there. So your comments as far as updating strategic goals and objectives are, from our perspective on staff, is right on point as far as how we should be using this data. And we will already be making steps to include that in the work that we're doing

to help you with your decision-making. So I just wanted to point that out as well.

Catherine ReadThank you very much for those comments.

Thomas PetersonPeterson. Going back to the open-ended responses, would it be possible for those to be crosswalked to demographic?

Jason MuradoThey could be, yeah. They could be cross, they could cross-reference those with the demographics. Yeah.

Thomas PetersonThat might be helpful. There's a lot of them, right? I don't know how many pages all

Jason Muradoright yeah there's about 20 pages of open

Thomas Peterson-ended

Jason Muradocomments so there there is a lot

Thomas Petersonbe nice to know how that kind of summarizes and what the pattern is and how it crosswalks back and then I think I already have half of the answer to this next question but I'm curious what the experience has been post survey and I know this is beyond what you do as a matter of scope but for any of these They potentially are a starting place for exploring further why the response came out the way it did and what that really means. We have, you know, very highly summarized information here. So on page 9, the one observation that came out, the lowest of that entire group was a city that is moving in the right direction. So in addition to kind of taking that back for further discussion, council level, I'm just curious if you've had any experience on the methods and mechanisms that have been used by the recipients of this work in other places to dig deeper in these areas.

Jason MuradoYeah, that's, I mean, one thing we can always do is run cross tabs, which we've talked about already, where we break the results out by demographic groups. if there are differences based on newer residents versus long time residents or based on the age of respondent, you know, those types of things. Um, I think a lot of cities staff reviews kind of like you've heard already reviews the kind of reviews, the results of the department level, and then it kind of uses that to decide which areas they, they should make improvements in. Um, but as far as drilling deeper just into this data, some of the crosstabs I think are a way to do that to see if there are differences on the type of people who responded to the survey.

Thomas PetersonA follow-up, which may be for city manager, is whether you are able to scope to do that kind of follow-up and, if so, whether the council might flag some set of these things. I'm not suggesting everything, but some set where we think possibly it would be helpful to get a little bit more on any particular item.

Brian Fosterstaffalready talked about the cross tabs which he's was Jason's mentioned and he is going to provide that we just haven't discussed the ways in which we want the data parsed. There's only certain ways it's not like it's not unlimited there's only certain ways we can parse it as basically based on demographics and so they're prepared to do that. So to your question about digging deeper so that we could certainly do that I think I think I agree with Jason. I think that the crosstabs will get us some of that. But then in a survey of this type, you know, to get to probably the level of detail perhaps that you want for certain things or what you might be interested in, it probably would require more focused

survey questions or follow-up survey on specific topics, specific questions. So certainly I think that we could get ETC to do some follow-up things if that's once we have a chance to digest get get additional feedback so like Councilmember Hall said we'll get the feedback from those who completed the survey but aren't considered to be statistically valid because they self-selected and see how that compares and just like if we get feedback whether it's at a public public hearing at the budget town hall we do something online on survey monkey it's data points that we can collect may or may not be statistically valid but it's still information that we can use but if you're if you're wanting to get something more more valid from in that perspective then i think

probably the way to do it is to do some additional focused survey so get to get etc to do some follow up. But this is something we could certainly do. And we should I'll have to double check with our CFO. But I'm sure that we've what we allotted to do the survey I suspect there's some additional funds left that we could do some follow up if that's the desire.

Thomas PetersonThat's helpful and it sounds like the next step would be there's just kind of a first level of looking a little bit further that is already kind of in process. But I guess my last question, which is maybe a hard one for you, is big picture for this survey, any survey like this, do you have any guidance for us or members of the public who read this in terms of caution about reading too much into anything? not reading enough in? What's your guidance in terms of how people should interpret this kind of information?

Jason MuradoWell, I would keep in mind these results, they're statistically valid, which means they do represent the entire city. And they are residents' perceptions, you know, residents' perceptions of these various services. So I would just keep that in mind. And those important satisfaction tables show the areas that we determine that residents feel the top priorities to focus on. And then I just would also mention how positive the results are overall. They're extremely positive really across the board in all different areas, especially a lot of the areas we talked about. I relate to customer service and the overall quality of city services. So those are just some of the main things I would take away from the survey.

Catherine ReadAny other questions or Councilmember Hall?

Stacy HallThank you. Just one other question that popped in my head. Based upon where the 3000 surveys were sent to of the 425 that were received, are there any areas that were not that didn't complete them that would have helped with additional data? I mean, I recognize on the map where things are, but are there certain areas that you feel were underrepresented or didn't respond that might have made this more useful from an overall perspective, or it's statistically valid and that's sufficient?

Jason MuradoI don't think there are any areas that were significantly underrepresented. We had fewer surveys from the east side, but that's also a far less populated area, so I think that was to be expected. So I don't think there's any areas that were vastly underrepresented, either geographically or demographically. And that really is the key for these results being statistically valid is that the demographics of those who fill out the survey reflects the actual population of the city.

Stacy HallOkay,

Catherine Readthank you for clarifying. Any other, Council Member Bates.

Billy BatesThank you, a couple of things. First off, your comment about perception kind of makes me think of as, you know, Many others here probably recall reading about surveys where they would ask people about their perceptions of Obamacare versus and then ask them about their perceptions of the Affordable Care Act. And the results ended up being wildly different, even though they're the same thing. So that, you know, something to kind of keep in mind and, you know, that we've kind of seen that before. but overall I think that it's very clear that residents are very satisfied with the job their employees do public works first responders parks and recreation you know across the board it seems like they're very you know it comes across that our staff are very dedicated and care about the

city so I want to thank our staff for that thank you

Catherine Readall right any other questions or comments all right well thank you very much for the survey and for the presentation and I think all of us feel pretty good up here for being validated by the 425 households who think the city's doing a pretty darn good job so thank you very much miss Shinnaberry

Matthew Kaiserstaffyeah thank you our

Speaker 10next item is discussion of possible charter amendments I'm going to recognize Brian Foster and City Manager for the discussion.

Brian FosterstaffAll right. Thank you. I hope to keep this very brief. I raised this issue. We've this has been a topic before just conceptually about amending the charter or not. What is driving the discussion this evening is that there is as we as you we learned and as we discussed during the budget process last year there is a charter restriction on the ability to increase the transit occupancy tax, which is the tax you pay when you stay in a hotel or motel in the city. And so that's, so if we want to have the option to raise that as potential for revenue in the coming budget for next fiscal year, then now is the time we need to go through the process of amending the charter. So if, Melissa will go to the next slide.

So there are three things that we heard in prior discussions. Transit occupancy tax, which is capped at 4%. We would remove language that says provided that such tax shall not exceed 4% on the amount charged for the occupancy of any room occupied. That's what the charter says. We would just suggest that that language be stricken. There was also in previous conversations there seemed to be a fairly unanimity among council about removing the compensation limit for boards and commission members. That's capped at $50 per meeting. If that's desired, we would strike the language in an amount not to exceed $50 per meeting. And then the third item is which we've referenced is if we're going to go and do a charter

suggest cleaning up the language and which is in sections 3.1 and 5.5 that's still referenced that we have local elections in may and new council members take office in july um there's you know it's as you know november elections are in effect but it's one it's just a it's a would be a cleanup provision um the only so staff has um i say no opinion this is all obviously would be council driven if you want to do it from a process standpoint if you wish to pursue this any of these or any others that aren't on this list we would we after we have discussion and there's there's consensus then we would put a resolution on the consent agenda at your next meeting to introduce no action it's just you introduce it you would set a public hearing for your october

28th meeting at that meeting you would take public comment on the proposal and then you would take a vote to approve or or not as the case may be but assuming you approve that you want to move forward then that gives us time to then present that to our legislators and they'll have time to introduce in the upcoming general assembly that starts in january and then if assuming that it passes It would become effective July 1 of 2026, which means we would know that at the end of the session, whether it's been approved and the governor signs it. So from a budgetary perspective, specifically related to the transit occupancy tax, we would know well in advance of adopting our budget whether that's an option for us or not.

So we are not suggesting any other changes. And really the only one we are focused on and the reason we're bringing this up is strictly about the transit occupancy tax which based on prior discussions that seemed to be everybody would like to have that option doesn't it doesn't Obligate you to raise it. It just gives you the option to do it by removing the cap Happy to answer any questions

Catherine Readcouncilmember Amos

Anthony AmosThank you for bringing this forward and I am in favor of all of these I guess my question would be just Clarification of process for the boards and commissions when it comes to compensation.

Brian FosterstaffSo

Anthony Amosif we remove that language What would go in its place? What is the compensation would that be if would that be something we discuss next budget?

Brian FosterstaffYeah, you would counsel would then have the option to set that for at whatever level that you feel is appropriate and you would do that by either, I don't know if that's a resolution or ordinance, but you would do that. You would take action at a future date to do that. All of this would do, just like transient occupancy tax, there is an absolute cap. So if you wanted to pay, say, for example, Planning Commissioner $75 a meeting, you can't do that because the charter has a cap of $50. So all this would do is remove the cap and then you could, once it's approved and becomes law in July of 2026, you would then have the option to then take action at that point to set a different compensation level should you so choose.

Anthony AmosOkay.

Brian FosterstaffThank you.

Anthony AmosThat's all I wanted to know.

Thomas PetersonCouncil Member Peterson? Two questions. First, to build on the last one, presumably at that future point, we would take up the question of which boards and commissions are eligible.

Brian FosterstaffThat's right. Because

Thomas Petersonas everybody knows, it's very low right now. On the first question, just a clarification, and perhaps this is a question for the future, and that is the treatment of short-term rentals, Airbnb, et cetera. Were they to be allowed? would this cover them or would it require something different in order to cover them how are they treated they

Brian Fosterstaffwill currently as you know they're not I believe they're not allowed right in the city but should they be allowed then yes this would apply or you can have this apply to them as well so that could be a future income source if that's a if that's an option that council wants to do but it would apply it would apply to them as well.

Thomas PetersonAnd I think along the lines of the first question we talked about with boards and commissions presumably the way in which that would be implemented would be up to the council through resolution motion whatever means so we could decide to have differential rates but absolutely

Brian Fosterstaffyou can you can have there's no obligation for due to do compensation if you wish to do compensation you're currently limited to $50. So you remove the limitation, you can do whatever you see fit, and you do not have to do the same for each Board of Commission.

Thomas PetersonWell, but for transit occupancy, let's say at some point in the future we do allow Airbnb type things. It would be up to us to decide whether they are treated the same as hotels or differently.

Brian FosterstaffI would want to consult with the city attorney, but I believe it is a, because it's a transient equally to all when you levy the tax. So it's like, I don't think it makes a distinction in that regard. So like hotel versus motel versus Airbnb, the transient tax, the rate would have to be the same for all.

Thomas PetersonBut that's something we would double check in any event at the appropriate point in time. We would

Brian Fosterstaffneed to double check that, yes. But again, you wouldn't be making any decisions on that for several months. First, you have to decide whether you want to ask for the cap to be removed. And then you then have to have a public hearing and a vote. And then General Assembly has it. So there's multiple steps to get to that point. And so this would not be a decision point for you until next spring before you adopt the budget. If you want to change the rate, that's the earliest you could make a change, assuming that a charter amendment is adopted.

Thomas PetersonWANT TO GET TOO FAR IN THE WEEDS AND WE MAY HAVE COVERED THIS EARLIER, BUT WHAT IS THE DURATION THAT DEFINES TRANSIENT IN TERMS OF

Brian FosterstaffLESS THAN 30 DAYS. GREAT.

Catherine ReadCOUNCIL MEMBER HARDY CHANDLER.

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerAND THANK YOU FOR THE REMINDER THAT IT ISN'T A COMMITMENT, RIGHT, IN TERMS OF THE AMENDMENT. BUT A QUESTION WAS RAISED ALSO IN TERMS OF PERHAPS COMPARISON OF THE TRANSIENT OCCUPANCY TAX VERSUS TRAVEL AND TOURISM. speak to that is there any relationship or implications of these one versus the other

Brian Fosterstaffin in mean in can you clarify that make sure I'm sure there is

Stacey Hardy-Chandlersome tax

Brian Fosterstaffright oh you're talking about the email you receive they're one in the same so what she's referring to is so you received correspondence from one of your EDA commissioners who happens to be the general manager of one of our lodging facilities supportive of this supportive of this change what she was asking is or suggesting is that you could dedicate a portion of an increase whatever that portion council so would like to designate you don't have to but if you were you could designate a portion specifically towards tourism related activities so it would give it a sort of an essence a guaranteed funding source wishes to do that. Not obligated to. Not obligated. But you could do that should you desire.

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerOptions.

Brian FosterstaffOptions. And you could, quite honestly, you could, if you wanted to do that today, a portion of what you currently levy, you could do that. Right now, just is all of the revenues generated, it just goes to the general fund as a general fund revenue to help pay for all of the services that the city provides. Excellent. Thank you.

Catherine ReadCouncil Member Hall.

Stacy HallThank you. Can you please remind us what roughly a change from 4% to, let's say, 10% of this tax would be revenue-wise? And then, let's say we consider this proposal of 2%, what that number would equate to?

Speaker 13Sure. So, Council Member Hall, currently, we are capped at 4%. That 4% is equating to about $450,000. So on average, 1% equates to about $110,000, $112,000. So if you go all the way up to 10%, it would be a little bit over $1 million in potential revenues associated with the transit occupancy tax.

Brian FosterstaffIn total. So a delta of like $600,000.

Stacy HallOkay. And then roughly 2% of that would be about $220,000 or thereabouts. okay sorry I might have misheard you so okay thank you of

Catherine Readcourse I would point out that changing the tax rate is one thing if a hotel closes that impacts it if we open new hotels that impacts it so setting the rate and having projections is based on nothing changing from what it is today but should a hotel close that would mean less and if we add hotels that would mean more so it's a Councilmember Amos.

Anthony AmosJust for a quick point of clarity on to follow up on Councilmember Hall's question does the state have a cap because I know we kind of have a self-inflicted cap on our end because of the charter does the state have a cap for I

Brian Fosterstaffwould need I would need to double-check but I do know that there are localities that are in the 10 to 12 percent range so okay if there is a cap I would assume it's at least or it's no less than that but I would need to follow up and double check for you thank you

Catherine Readone of the things that we talked about previously that is not on this list it related to boards and commissions we had had a discussion earlier this year about the requirement to be a registered voter in order to apply for board and commission and when When we were talking about the diversity pool of our applicants, you know, I made the observation that our residents are often long-time green card holders. So they are not eligible to register to vote, but many of them own homes and have lived here for a very long time. But that one requirement of being a registered voter does not allow them to apply for a board or commission. and we had kind of a discussion it's not on this list so i'm just checking in to see if this is

something you want to add to this list or just kick it to the future council member bates

Billy Batesdefinitely something i'd like to add to the list

Catherine Readcouncil member amos uh

Anthony Amosme as well i won't bring up the year thing i'll let it go but yes uh yeah

Catherine ReadHardee Chandler?

Thomas PetersonCouncilor Peterson? Just a clarification. What does it mean to add it to the list?

Catherine ReadOf charter changes. We'd have to change

Brian Fosterstaffit. Right. So there, yes. So what the mayor's referencing is I believe that's in section three. There's a provision for both elected office and appointments to board and commissions a requirement that you must have been a resident for a year and a registered voter in order to be a point so you technically by charter you cannot appoint anybody to a boarding commission that is either lived here less than a year or is not a registered voter and so if that's the desire we would just ask that that language be removed as well and so we would show that so there were three things on the chart if you're if council is an agreement of all three we would have that and then this would be a fourth thing that we

would put in the resolution and what i would suggest to council if there's you know if there's anything else that or anything else now's the time to do it because you're you're you'll in essence be time barred if you don't if you don't go through the process now you will have to wait an entire year before you'd have the option again to potentially amend the charter for any other So if qualification for appointees is a desire, it's easy enough to add to the list. And what we would do is we'd include it in the resolution. It would be part of the public hearing. You would get public comment. And then you would vote on the resolution to forward that for inclusion in a charter amendment.

Thomas PetersonAnd the specific proposal is simply to remove the requirement to be a registered voter. reminder what is or are the requirements to be a registered voter?

Brian FosterstaffYou have to be 18. You have to be a U.S. citizen. And I think you can't not be a convicted felon. I think that's off the top of my head. Those are the three major things.

Thomas PetersonSo in this case, we're waiving the requirement to be a U.S. citizen effectively. Is that what we're proposing?

Brian FosterstaffI'm not proposing. That's the discussion. Yeah, essentially. So if you think about the demographics, you think about of this community between probably George Mason faculty, spouses of faculty, things like that, there are likely a large number of residents, and I think that's what the mayor alluded to, who cannot vote because they are not U.S. citizens. They are green card holders. They are, you know, they pay taxes. own property, et cetera, but legally you could not appoint them, um, to a board or commission just by virtue of the fact that they are not registered to vote. So in that case, and it's a legal issue for them, not just because they haven't chosen to register to vote. They are not eligible to vote.

Thomas PetersonPresumably, uh, if this went on the list, we'd have an opportunity for further discussion.

Brian FosterstaffSo sure. Sure. It's all it would be. So what I'm asking, what we're asking for this evening is basically consensus that you want these to be in the resolution to get public comment. And we would have a public hearing. You still have to vote. You would vote on October the 28th. And much like the others, it does not obligate you to appoint people who aren't registered voters. It just gives you the option because you are barred right now from doing that. So that's all any of these changes are doing is basically removing a limitation and giving you more flexibility. But it's not obligating you to do anything. It's whether council then at a future time chooses to avail itself of that option.

Thomas PetersonI mean, I'd honestly love to hear what the other council members have to say on this Council Member McQuillan.

Rachel McQuillenI think I would like to know more about the history as to why that was a requirement for our boards and commissions in the first place. And so I can actually I understand the appeal to be able to make use of some great talent here. So I'm not completely adverse to it. But I think I would like to know more information about the history of why this wasn't done previously.

Brian FosterstaffI'm not sure we can provide any history. I would have to go back and look. I believe it's been in the charter since it was enacted in 1976. And so it's the same reason why I couldn't tell you why we have a limitation on transit occupancy tax and other communities don't. It goes back to in part because Virginia is a Dillon rule state so you can only do what state allows you. No two charters are the same. And so why some places can get to do something and others don't, I can't answer that. It's just generally it's what was asked or not asked of the General Assembly. If I had to guess, a lot of places it's like when it's time to, we base it on somebody else. So if I had, my experience tells me that a likely answer, I'm not saying it is the answer,

but a likely answer is that we copied this from somebody else, some of these charter provisions, and that's what they had, and nobody really questioned it at the time. So it's been in the charter since this charter was adopted in 1976.

Catherine ReadCouncilmember Amos.

Anthony AmosBefore I go, I don't know if Councilmember Hall, did you, I can't tell if you have your hand raised. I wanted to check with you before I talk.

Catherine ReadOkay. Councilmember Hall.

Stacy HallThank you. Yeah, I didn't have my hand raised. I just, I thought I would be next. So thank you. I don't think I'm opposed to it, but I just would like, I think, a little bit more time to think it through and process it just to understand exactly what the downsides would potentially be. I can understand the upsides of it, but I just want to make sure there's not something I'm missing by just agreeing to put it out there and then not being able to take that back without having additional thought behind it.

Catherine ReadThank you. Councilmember Amos?

Anthony AmosJust for additional context on why I support it, as many as all of you know, my wife, she only became a citizen a couple years ago, but she had already had her master's in international relations. and he's a director. Her mom transitioned over here and she was a lawyer. So we have this talent pool that now we're not able to tap into for our BACs with extremely qualified people. I mean Moreno was essentially working for the county and then trying to see if I got the timeline wrong or not. Was she a citizen already? That's my bad. But so we're missing out on the like a county employee, someone with a master's in international relations and all these qualifications because of one requirement, she wouldn't be able to serve on, for example,

our health board or any of our vacancies that we're still trying to fill. So it's just a bit of a personal note for me. I completely understand where Council Member Hall is coming from as well. I don't know if the process for that would be, can we add it with these, and then if we feel uncomfortable that day, we can remove it on October 28th. I'm assuming that's what the process would be like, because I know this is a bit of a timeline issue.

Brian FosterstaffThat's correct, Councilmember. You don't have to. So, again, this is not obligating you to do anything. This is a process. This is a timing issue. If you want to have the, again, all, at least to what you're discussing so far, not that you might come up with other ideas, but what you're discussing so far, all of these are limitations that you would like to be removed. limitation on the ability to levy a higher tax, a limitation on being able to compensate board and commission members, a limitation on who you can appoint to boards and commissions should you desire. It does not obligate you to do any of those things. You don't have to raise the tax. You don't have to raise the pay for boards and commissions.

You don't have to appoint people who aren't registered voters. You still have that option even if you were to Have this change to the Charter so if if and I understand You haven't maybe discussed this one as much as the others and you may want more time to think about it That's perfectly acceptable. My suggestion would be if you want the opportunity Then I would suggest that you put it in the resolution that's introduced have your public comment you can hear what residents say whether they are for against it or they choose not to weigh in and then when it comes time to vote you can then choose to either approve it or not approve it so you're not again it's not obligating you to do anything it's just giving you the option melanie reminded me that you also i think have some you have uh

I say internal but of council approved Processes or things that you want requirements for board and commissions when people apply and so forth So if you want to put that limitation on your yourself, you can certainly do that But it's not a charter restriction. So again what I would say just in general about the charter is anytime you can Anytime you can remove a limitation It just gives you the option to do things that you don't have the option to do today Does not obligate you to but if you want flexibility to do other things then removing These types of limitations gives you that ability

Catherine ReadThank you councilmember Hall

Stacy HallIf we were to do that is that something that then would need four votes like all individual items of these would need four votes in order to pass or is it a 3-3 that gets a split tie? How do charter changes work? Can you please remind me?

Brian FosterstaffIf it's a resolution, so I believe I will want to verify with the city attorney and we can have that for you next week or actually I can send it to you before next week. But for resolutions, I believe a resolution those present and voting so in this case if there were a tie the mayor would be eligible to break a tie if that's if that's how the votes um landed okay

Stacy Hallthank you yeah i'd like a little bit more time to think about this before we add it and then have to vote or not vote for it

Brian Fosterstaffwell you don't have to unfortunately council member hall you do not have time to think about whether or not to put it in the resolution because we need to introduce get that introduced next week to meet our timeline as i've said before doesn't obligate you not requiring you it still gives you that time to think about it but if it's not in the introduced resolution then it's not possible to even consider it it needs to be in the introduced resolution that's advertised for public hearing so that's really all we're asking about tonight.

Catherine ReadCouncil Member Hardy-Chandler? Yes,

Stacey Hardy-Chandlerand I would support getting it into the hearing so we can have the public hearing and have what we talk about a lot and that is the community input. So I definitely support that. My question is about when you say present and voting on the 28th, does that include virtual presence? It does. Okay.

Catherine ReadCouncil Member

Thomas PetersonDo we know if and if so how many other jurisdictions in Virginia have done this?

Brian FosterstaffI don't have that information. I

Lucas Mullermean, it

Brian Fosterstaffwould take a review of every charter to see if there's restrictions such as that in other charters. So I can't speak to that. I mean, it's something we could attempt to find out, but it's not a, I would say it's not readily available. But it's information we could ascertain.

Thomas PetersonI mean, my reaction is that really if there was a way, it would be helpful to have a little bit more time to learn more about this and understand what to do with this. This is the first time I've certainly heard anything about this this evening, and it's a sufficiently a big issue that I think it needs some homework behind it.

Brian FosterstaffAgain, none of these are staff driven other than the transit occupies tax is not necessarily staff driven. We are just making sure that you are aware this is you've talked about this and this is a requirement if you want that option. If you want the options for these the same rules apply in terms of the process for amending your charter. If you care to amend the charter, whether you include one, all, or none, and if, of course, the answer is none, then we won't we would not put anything out. There would be no public hearing. So we just need direction to know to help you have these options available to you.

Catherine ReadCouncilmember Hardy-Chandler?

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerSo for the original three, can I ask my colleagues if there is consensus around those three? Just to start. Right? There's consensus there. So what we're really talking about is potentially adding this fourth element as a limitation removal. So we have that on the three. It's the fourth.

Brian FosterstaffOkay.

Catherine ReadCouncil Member Peterson.

Thomas PetersonAgain, this is on the possible fourth one. We're, I think, challenged by the limit on the amount of time we've had here to look into this. I just did a quick search for what it's worth. Virginia law states that to serve on a commission a person must be a qualified voter. I think that may be just for a state commission, but there's actually language here about local commissions as well. Just be nice to understand a little bit more clearly, I know the city attorney is not here, where things stand in terms of state law, and then there's local practice, but state law on this. And I don't know the answer, but I wonder.

Catherine ReadWell, it sounds like it's not the will of the council to move forward. So in a 3-3 situation, it fails anyway. So I think we just won't worry about it. Council Member Hardy-Chandler?

Stacey Hardy-Chandlerjust to offer a possible option. Could we put it in the resolution with the caveat that pending legal review or, you know, Brian takes a look at it and says, okay, this is not possible. Could we do that?

Catherine ReadI think, again, it has to be the will of the council, and it would appear that there are 3-3. So I don't see that anyone's going to do that. Councilmember McCullough.

Rachel McQuillenIt's a shame it wasn't included on this staff report because if it had been, then I would have had a little bit more time to do some research on that topic. And I would have felt a little bit more comfortable moving forward on pushing through to the resolution, even though we don't have to adopt it. It was just clarified that it wouldn't take it would take a three three three vote broken by the mayor who we know wants this. So we know what will happen if it gets there. So at this point, I'm comfortable not moving forward with that, but with the three that we have already known were going to be discussed this evening. Thank you.

Thomas PetersonCouncil Member Peterson. I just have a quick clarification, if I might, not that it changes my support for the transit occupancy thing, but the other thing just to clarify, transit occupancy versus tourism, And again, I'm disadvantaged by doing iPhone research here, but Fairfax County, just to clarify, the total transient occupancy tax for business in Fairfax County is calculated rate of 7%, 2% for general transient occupancy tax plus 2% for tourism plus 3% for regional transportation. Can you help maybe me understand whether any of that has any bearing on what we do here because there are three different taxes that seem to be related to transunoccupancy in the county of Fairfax.

Brian FosterstaffThat's the nuances between cities and counties as far as so what because cities have authority that counties do not. And this is one of those as far as how it's because they're getting their, their authority through state code, whereas we get ours through our charter. So, again, it's another question we can double-check for you. But as far as I do not believe there's any legal obligation for us to direct any portion of our transit oxy tax purpose unless council wishes to do that. The question is whether or not you want the ability to have a rate higher than 4%, which is what this amendment or this proposed charter change would do.

Thomas PetersonI support that, but I also support doing whatever extra homework we need to do so that when we sort it out, we do that in an informed manner.

Matthew KaiserstaffSo.

Brian FosterstaffOkay. So, Mayor, if I may.

Catherine ReadOh, sorry. Council Member Amos.

Anthony AmosSorry, I was just saying that I was just clarifying that it was a three moving forward. I think you were about to ask that anyway.

Brian FosterstaffNo, I'm just, I'm just looking for head nodding. So this is what, this is what I'm hearing and what we are planning to do. The city attorney will be preparing resolutions to do the three things we had on the chart, which is to remove the limitation on transitocracy tax, to remove the limitation on boards and commission, and then the clean up language that still is referencing May elections and June assumption or July assumption of office. that's what we will we will prepare and those will be on so you've already seen your preview of the agenda for the 14th this was not on there because you hadn't had this discussion but that will be on your consent you are not taking action on the resolution the consent agenda item is strictly to introduce it

as it's our normal process once it's introduced as part of that motion you for october the 28th that's where you will be getting public comment on those three items and then you will take action after the public hearing on those three items whether or not you wish to move forward as part of this and what we will have for you and we will send out is these the questions about the limitations if there's any limitations or requirements on the transit oxy tax in terms of if you were to raise it or do we have to obligate it or anything like that that's what i that's what i believe i've heard this evening according to my notes and i'm seeing head nodding so that's how we're going to proceed unless anybody says anything else

Catherine Readuh council member

Billy BatesCouncil member Bates. Thanks. Just one more thing to think about here. In the Charter 2.8, we have the year in which the Board of Architectural Review's powers kick in with regard to certain buildings that that they can basically protect it's set at 1900 but that was set in 1976 so that's something that i think it might benefit us to look at either updating the year in which that kicks in or possibly just doing away with that and instead having an age in years, maybe as a placeholder, 75 years, since that's about how old those buildings that they would have been, that this applies to when they first would have put that in there in 1976. But curious to hear others' thoughts.

Catherine ReadSo just to restate it, you're basically saying they pinned it to a year back in the 1970s they pinned it to a year which was 1900 but now it's 2025 so you're looking to protect buildings that are at least 75 years old by unpinning it from the year 1900 i

Billy Batesmean we can certainly uh change that as you know when it comes up um but as a placeholder i think that since that's what they were originally looking at buildings that were 75 years old or perhaps in 1976 as a placeholder until we kind of make a final decision on that but something I'd like to hopefully see considered.

Catherine ReadCouncilmember Amos.

Anthony AmosYeah that's that's interesting I would be curious on what the BAR stance is on it I know one of the things ironically that was brought up during our discussion on the community survey was a concern with blighted or abandoned in properties which tend to be older. So that could be something worth considering. I don't know if for this round, but I think that should be explored more. I would be interested in what BAR thinks on that.

Catherine ReadCouncilmember Peterson?

Thomas PetersonInteresting idea. Philosophically not opposed at all, but I think it does fall in the category of needing maybe a little bit more homework. Just one of the reasons why in my neighborhood, Club Hills in a couple of years, the entire neighborhood will meet the 75-year threshold. So we'll all be historic. And maybe that's a good thing. I just want to say in one fell swoop, a pretty large chunk of our city is going to become historic.

Brian FosterstaffWhat I had to pull it up. So what it actually says is it talks about old and historic districts. is buildings in such district that was erected prior to or during the year 1900. So it's not 70. So if it's older than 1900 or older is what that applies to. So if you were to change, if you were asking for it to change, you basically would be, you know, I guess you would be saying that you want to consider other buildings to be a part of that. you would in essence be adding that would be in essence I think rather than removing a limitation you would be creating a limitation by making it harder for to do things that apply for how it houses maybe that you wouldn't necessarily consider historic they just happen to be 75 years old

Catherine Readso Councilmember Bates?

Billy BatesJust, you know, further for context, some of you may be aware the Lake Ann Village Center in Reston is now a historic district, and that's something that is kind of a local icon, but it's much, much newer than 1900, and so, you know, if that were in Fairfax City, then it would not you know not even remotely this section would not even remotely apply to it so but again I mean you know my understanding was this was when we bring up things that we want to be considered we don't necessarily have to put all this in the charter and decide on that tonight and I did also recall discussing previously taking the voter registration requirement out and I THOUGHT THAT WAS WITH THIS COUNCIL, BUT PERHAPS I WAS MISTAKEN.

AT ANY RATE, I WOULD CERTAINLY BE GLAD TO GET THOSE THREE THINGS DONE THAT WE'VE DECIDED ON AT LEAST HAVING IN THERE FOR CONSIDERATION. I LOOK FORWARD TO FURTHER DISCUSSION ON THESE.

Catherine ReadALL RIGHT. IT LOOKS LIKE THE CONSENSUS IS WE'RE MOVING FORWARD WITH THESE THREE ITEMS. THANK YOU. All right. Ms. Shinaberry, our

Speaker 10next item. Our next item is an update on the Q Transit Development Plan and Parence TDP. I'm going to recognize Wendy Sanford, Transportation Director, for the discussion.

Catherine ReadYes, absolutely. We're ready. Welcome. Welcome.

Wendy SanfordstaffAll right. Thank you. Good evening, Mayor, members of the City Council. The item before you this evening is an update on the Q transit development plan. Before we get started, I would just like to introduce the team that is here with me this evening. I'll start down there. We have Chloe Ritter, our multimodal transportation planner, David Summers, public works director, Charles Kuhn, Jr., our general manager of Q. And we have Lucas Muller here in person with Kimley Horn. And then we also have online James Gamas who is working on the Kim Lee Horn team and he is out of the state You will see him at the next work session when we discuss Q fairs, but for tonight He's joining us remotely And I'd also just like to mention that Amy Lynn Denny from the Planning Department has also been working with us on the Q

TDP effort The purpose of the discussion this evening is to review the TDP We've had a we had a work session when we were first kicking off the project and where we are tonight is that we have some draft recommendations that we would like to share with you. And we are sharing these recommendations with you this evening and pushing them out to the public for comment tomorrow. And so tonight is really when we're releasing those recommendations. I just want to point out that we are not discussing the fair policy tonight. That is on the agenda for early November. Tonight we are discussing the route recommendations that are contained in the transit development plan. With that, I am going to pass it on to Lucas Muller, who I, as again, is with Kim Lee Horn and who's leading this effort for us.

Lucas MullerThank you, Wendy. And good evening. Thank you for having us. My name, as Wendy mentioned, is Lucas Muller with Kim Lee Horn. I've been working with other entities around northern Virginia on transit improvement projects, many of the local systems here, as well as WMATA, helping them with the bus network redesign. be a part of this with you all and talk to you about it today. And so as Wendy mentioned, we'll be going through the recommendations and how we got there. But before that, I just want to give a brief refresher on Q and the overall process of a transit development plan. So Q, the bus system for the city of Fairfax, has been around for about 45 years. There have not been major changes to the service nor a holistic look at reframing the service to align with latest plan development and travel patterns.

And so some of you may be a little bit more familiar than others, but just to give an overview and reminder, four routes today, two loops throughout the city that operate in both directions seven days a week. The frequencies and the time frames are listed here on the slide. I wanted to point out that even at peak times, the most frequent bus we're seeing is scheduled to come about every 33 minutes and can sometimes be a little bit later than that, depending on congestion. And then during the evenings and the weekends, the frequency is less often as well. Q is operated under the city government headed by general manager Charles Kunz here and all the drivers and the supervisors are city employees. It's shared from a facility perspective

with the overall fleet yard in the city. So as we, whoops I had the wrong button.

Speaker 10Sorry. Just hit on the...

Thomas PetersonWill that work? No.

Speaker 10There you go. Just call it presentation. There you go. Okay. Just minimize that.

Lucas MullerGot it. Okay. Okay. As a development plan, it's really an opportunity to talk about Q's future. It's a great time to be doing this effort, an opportunity to define what Q's purpose is and create the plan for the system that will create a 10-year horizon that meets the needs of the community of the City of Fairfax. Mentioned Metrobus just redesigned its service throughout the whole region. Those just went into place at the end of June. so again it's a good opportunity to see how the queue system can fit into that to those changes as well as the development and the ongoing planning that's happening within the city it's an it's an effort that involved a lot of technical analysis combined with feedback from the public from riders from

stakeholders and ultimately develop that blueprint as interesting to hear earlier just that top priority of people getting around the city timely to follow on with presentation. In terms of the TDP itself, just a little bit of a process administrative components. Ultimately, it is a state government requirement to receive federal, to receive state funding for transit operations. So the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation governs that and has developed a set of guidelines for what is included. The last TDP was done in 2017. agree a lot has changed since then with COVID and changes through in the

Brian Fosterstaffcity specifically.

Lucas MullerThat's a 10-year planning horizon, but understanding that things change, so there is flexibility to update as we go, but the plan guidelines do call for a 10-year horizon of cost-constrained recommendations. I want to focus in on that, that we are looking at what can be reasonably achieved with those cost constraints using our existing resources. So something really important to consider throughout. Ultimately the plan must be adopted by the governing body. That's you all. So after we present our draft recommendations, get feedback, we would plan to come back to you likely early in the next year to seek adoption for the plan. And then that gets revisited every five years. When we talk about recommendations, so that can mean primarily changes to the bus service,

so the routes, how often they run, when they run, where they go, stops, things like that. Can also include studies or other elements as well as the infrastructure that needs to go along with it. new buses that might need to be purchased to either keep up with maintenance or for new buses, as well as potential studies that might want to be done in the future to

Brian Fosterstafflook at things in more detail.

Lucas MullerThere's a lot that goes into developing these recommendations. The really high frequency and coverage of all areas in the city would be great, But there has to be tradeoffs because of what we're talking about, about being cost constrained. The items in blue here are the technical data. So looking at the market, what's there, where it can support transit. This is more the forward-looking piece. And then the retrospective of looking back at the existing service, we look at a lot of different performance measures. How is the existing service doing? How can it be adjusted? in. Take those two technical components and combine it with feedback that we have received thus far from public and stakeholders and another piece of really important feedback

from the queue operators and supervisors themselves understanding how that service looks on a day-to-day basis. And we've really done a lot of iterating with the project team with other staff departments to understand people's perspectives and really gotten to a proposed that we think will benefit the community. So as we look back, one of the most important things that we look at from an existing service perspective is the ridership hotspots. So this is a heat map showing where there's the most boarding activity, so the most people getting on the bus. Obviously, it's a little bit generalized here with the kind of the heat map shapes, see areas, GMU, the Vienna Metro Rail, and some other areas generally aligning with some of the

city's small area plans as the hot, as the more popular boarding locations. I also want to flag a couple locations that aren't necessarily showing up as red here, along Chambridge Road, some along Central Fairfax Boulevard in the north so keep keeping those in mind as we continue right here this is just showing the queue boardings so not factoring in WMATA connector and the shuttle as well another really important chart from our existing conditions analysis is this one so the blue here the blue flat line is showing revenue hours, basically a fancy way of saying how much service is out there today, how much bus service is provided. The green is the operating cost. So what we're seeing really here is the amount of service has remained flat, but it's costing more to operate that same amount

of service. And so that's a factor of general inflation, wage increases, and some other factors. Other agencies are seeing similar challenges, but it makes it even that much more challenging to try to come up with recommendations that are cost neutral. So needing to get into those tradeoffs and look for opportunities for how to be more efficient. So when we talk about the challenges, our team did a comprehensive evaluation of the existing conditions. facing the system really boil down to those headways, the frequency, how often that bus is operating and having some difficulty meeting those schedules due to congestion and and other factors around the city. There's limited service on weekends despite indications for demand a lot of the buses although

there's less service on the weekends a lot of those buses are we're seeing those as more full on the weekends. And the fact that many of the ridership hotspots are spread around the city, as you saw in that heat map. Transit works most effective on a street grid. And so some of the areas of the city, we have that. Some we don't, which is another challenge in terms of routing. But there's a lot of opportunities in terms of how to improve the system. And so, you know, at one of our discussions with the larger staff in different departments, we talked about reframing the paradigm to thinking about bus service in the city holistically. There's a lot of service already there. And a lot of people, frankly,

aren't too concerned about which bus they're getting on as long as it takes them where they want to go. And so how can we leverage those other bus providers and use Q-service effective way to focus on what's most important for the community. We heard from riders and discussions with the bus operators that sometimes those loops, the two-way loops, can be a little bit confusing in terms of which direction to go on, where they're going first. Sometimes they just get on the opposite way just so that they can be on the bus rather than waiting outside. And so looking at opportunities to get more direct service and direct connections to major points. So in that first phase of outreach that happened right before our last discussion with you

all, we had a series of six in-person outreach events held across the city during February really focused on reaching current riders. So we had five what we call ride-alongs. multilingual brand ambassadors riding the buses to talk to actual riders. And we were actually able to engage over about 400 total riders, a quarter of which of those interactions were fully in Spanish, as well as having a presence at the pop-up event, the Chocolate Lovers Festival, which were able to get another 240 interactions. So we got a lot of really good input and spreading awareness about that. Then I mentioned the discussions of getting feedback from the queue operators. This helps us understand, you know, okay, hey, I tried to make that left turn onto this street,

but there's no way you can do that. Or, hey, I always get questions about this one particular stop. Those are the things that you can't see from a data perspective, but it's really helpful to understand from those who work on the front line every day. time. And so during that phase of outreach, we heard a lot of different priorities. This looks a little bit similar to the survey you were just talking about, right? But those two top priorities are very common with other agencies that we're seeing around the region and around the country. More frequency on existing routes and adding service areas to not serve by queue. Those are overwhelmingly the things that we hear and somewhat unfortunately

they can be at odds and especially being at odds with cost being remaining cost neutral. And so that's really where those important trade-offs come in and seeing how we can leverage. So again going back to those components of the recommendations. We have the rider feedback. We have the technical analysis. We have goals for the TDP itself. And so how do we make sense of that? We tried to develop a set of very simple recommendation development priorities. So when we're thinking about our recommendations, what do we really want to accomplish? And how can we help make some difficult decisions about tradeoffs? It really came down to these four things. Expanding access to more frequent service. That was overwhelmingly the top thing we heard from the community.

More direct connections, not trying to have to figure out complicated routes, but knowing that a route will take me from point A to point B with not too many deviations or circuitous routes. Seeking efficiencies, we have to remain cost neutral. We also really want to be very sensitive about areas that would be losing potential service areas might be able to be served by other providers or maybe there are areas that just may not, you know, need to be served going forward. So keep those four things in mind. We're going to talk, I'm going to kind of build up to the recommendations, the draft recommendations and then talk about how, how those help achieve, achieve those things. So just going back one second to the existing queue service.

So these are the two routes, the green and gold routes. You see coverage largely most of the city. There are, there is some kind of indirect routes that can result in some long travel time. We have some infrequent service, especially in the nights and weekends. We also do see that all trips do serve Vienna Metro and GMU, which were the two hot, the top ridership components, but there's a fair amount of deviation in between those. So we mentioned those other providers. I want to take a minute to talk about the other service that is out there, because this is other existing bus service that's already happening in the city. Mostly provided by WMATA Metro Bus, but there is also some Fairfax Connector service that's

operated by the county as well as the GMU shuttles that are operated by the University and is only open to students you might have heard the better bus network redesign and mention that some some areas of the city's similar to what was previously present we have some 40 minute all-day service generally along Fairfax Boulevard and Main Street but I want to highlight that middle route the That's a new service. It does not have late night or weekend service, but during the day, it does provide service that was not there previously. So that was one thing we talked a lot about during our discussions. One important caveat, and I know we're going to talk about FAIR at the next session, but important when we think about these different providers that currently Metro Bus is not FAIR-free,

whereas Q is fare-free. So when we layer those two on top of each other, we have the existing, so this is showing existing Fairfax Q service as well as the Metro bus and the connector. We see some areas that are numbered, one, two, three, where those are only served by Q. And then there are other areas, more areas that are overlapping between Q and Metro bus. So this can be a good thing. Overlaps can provide additional frequency. And if you have three buses that are both, that are all operating at 40-minute frequency, you can combine that to have more buses that are coming more frequently. But we also want to be cognizant of not duplicating, especially if there's not that demand for this service.

So kind of for those areas of queue-only service, is there value in keeping this? and for the overlaps or their opportunities to maybe put Q resources elsewhere. So our team went through, again, a lot of thinking and iterations of concepts with the project team and ultimately are recommending as our draft proposing to go from two to three routes that provide bi-directional direct service. So these provide one-seat rides between Metro, GMU, and Old Town. and offer an increased frequency on the western route to every 20 minutes during the afternoon peak. And then also looking at stop locations, ways to improve transfers, especially at Old Town and GMU where those routes intersect, as well as looking at where we might be able to consolidate some stops

that may be to make service more quicker and reliable. And so first we're going to just talk a little bit about the queue service specifically, and then we'll talk about how the other networks come on. I think one of the most interesting outcomes here, and one of those network development priorities that we identify, was to increase access to frequent service, which we're defining as 20-minute service or better. And so with this new network and that West Route operating at that 20-minute frequent service, we're able to provide frequent service to about 20,400 people and about 16,300 jobs that right now only have service in that 35-ish minute frequency. So a significant increase in the amount of buses that would be coming.

I should note that the numbers here are not limited to the city boundaries. This does go into the county, and this is just showing queue service. There's a lot of numbers here. You may also be appropriately wondering, you know, seeing that some of that overall access is going down. We're going to talk about that in a little bit more detail. but again one of these kind of trade-offs that we look at as the in terms of the benefits of providing more frequent service to two areas certain areas we talked I mentioned the stop consolidation a bit so on the left you see the existing stops and on the right are the proposed stop locations and so stop consolidation is always a difficult topic frankly it's one of the the most

of looking at bus network, people have a lot of personal connections to their bus stop. And that's certainly understandable. People have been using it for a long time. And even just walking a slightly longer distance can be a challenge for someone or frustrating. But consolidating stops can also have a lot of benefits. Speeding up routes, making service more reliable so there are fewer stops. And so in order to determine which stops were proposed to be removed, we looked at a few different factors. One, if you look at how closely spaced some of those stop pairs are on the left side, general practice, you know, looking at, you know, a quarter, around a quarter of a mile is kind of that max spacing that you want.

There were a lot that are just within 600 feet or less of the next stop. We also looked at ones that were quite low boardings, so tried to identify with fewer or five daily boardings. And then we also looked at the potential pedestrian access. So if there wasn't a crosswalk that was close to the stop, that was another area that we looked at. So of about 40 of the stop pairs that are proposed for removal, about 15 of those would be because they're not along a queue route anymore. And then 25 are due to more of those, kind of the safety, the spacing, or the low ridership components. So in terms of the third and fourth priority that we talked about, about trying to remain cost neutral while limiting the loss of service and leveraging other providers, we really

aim to focus Q resources on serving those main activity centers and increasing frequency and direct connections between these here. We do want to be upfront about the areas that we are saying that would lose Q service. Three out of those four areas that are numbered here have service that would be provided by other bus service providers, so Metro bus. The only one that doesn't is that area of Chambridge Road north of Old Town that about has five total boardings combined in that section. But the other areas up by the close to the metro really wanted to provide some new service on Baden Drive there, looking at the new development that has happened there, as well as making a direct connection to metro.

And then the other areas here, the third is around the courthouse. That one is served by Fairfax Connector. And then the area number four, up in Eaton Place, while there's a short deviation there, still within a quarter mile of the proposed service. And so ultimately, what we're looking at here, we're able to provide some more frequent service, direct routes and still be able to maintain about 96% of the existing queue boardings within an existing stop. So the bubbles, the dots that you see on the map here, that's the concentration of existing boardings. So you can see we're still focusing in on those higher, those larger circles and in many cases, increasing service to there. While the areas that are removed service are either covered by

others or small amounts of overall boardings. So again to recap those four priorities, expanding access to the frequent service, focusing on direct shorter connections that are easier to understand, remaining cost neutral in our fiscally constrained environment here, and looking at opportunities to leverage the other bus providers. So these are our draft recommendations. We, again, as Wendy mentioned, we're going to be taking this out to the public. We have another phase of outreach that is kicking off tomorrow. Really what we want to do is educate and seek feedback regarding these proposed changes. It's really the most important audience is those current riders to understand how this could impact their trips.

So we're going to be doing additional ride alongs. So members of the team will be out talking to people, giving them tailored information to what route they're on about how those could change and seeking feedback. And so there will be opportunities to provide feedback that way. there's also an online online comment map where people can view the map the routes and provide their feedback as well so we want to hear from riders but we also want to hear from city you know city residents workers students anyone that you know either does or could potentially interact with the system in the future so primarily this will focus on the bus ride-alongs we also will have stop chat so talking to people at high

boring locations like the metro rail and GMU to talk to people and then also directing folks to the comment map. I believe we're going to have stickers on the buses and on the bus seats so everyone will be aware that this survey is available. And certainly would appreciate any support that you all can offer in terms of spreading the word and seeking feedback from constituents. So that will take place the majority of October, concluding in early November. And then the next kind of steps there, we're going to do that. We're also going to be doing, we're looking at what comments and tweaks we might need to make. and then Charles and his team are going to be going out actually in the field with the buses

and doing that operational testing of the routes to making sure that those are feasible to do. So we'll spend that time later this year and then depending on the amount of changes we need to make but hoping that we will be able to come back in January to seek counsel of an adoption, counsel adoption of the plan where we can talk about here's the final networks, here's what we changed and seek your adoption of that. So appreciate the, appreciate your attention today and certainly happy to take any questions, comments that you have. Again, we're going to be taking feedback that we get from you all, from the public, and really combining that and then going through it in detail to understand what might,

what changes we might want to make for the final network.

Wendy SanfordstaffI just want to emphasize, and I think it comes through in the presentation, this has been a tremendous undertaking in looking at what our current routes are and how we could really optimize the money that we're spending on Q today to make it less confusing, more frequent, and so really tighten up the service. And so it's been a tremendous amount of work, and I feel very good about where we are right now. I do think that we will get some great comments as the public goes out. I do want to mention, so on every seat, every other seat, we have a big QR code that says Q routes are changing. Please take a look at what's proposed. And one seat's in English, the next one's in Spanish. And so these are going to be on every single bus in addition to the ride-alongs.

We're also going to be at the Fall Festival right next to the bus over the weekend. So the hope is really to get a lot of input and make sure we really talk to the riders.

Catherine ReadWell, thank you so much. I appreciate that. And I would just like to make a comment on one of the pie charts in our survey that I believe asked about people who had ridden or who ride the Q bus. And I think the vast majority have never ridden the Q bus, if I recall that pie chart correctly. So this is something to just keep uppermost in our minds is that you're going out to speak to people who actually take the bus. Correct. Correct. But there's a lot of people in the city, a lot of people in the city who've never ridden the Q bus. And so it's important for us to figure out how to meet the needs of the people who use the service, how to talk about this as an asset to people who are like, I never ride the bus and don't intend to,

and how this fits overall with our plans for the future of the city, which is, as we do high-density development, encourage people to take transit because it's available. So to me, every time we have a development that's multifamily, people are like, cars, more cars, more cars. The fact of the matter is having a bus route and having done it so strategically that even if it's not the queue, it's the connector or the metro bus means that we are meeting the overall goals of being a more walkable city, having better traffic flow, which was also mentioned in our survey as the top priority for trying to figure out how to get around the city. Less cars, more bus riders. All of this is of a piece. All of this

is of a piece and we just happen to have both the survey top of mind right now and then looking at how we're trying to make the bus service better not just queue but how to help riders use transit who are residents or employees in the city and with that i'm going to ask a council member hall for her question or comment thank

Stacy Hallyou um this is really interesting information um and i I feel like I need a little bit more time to absorb it, but I think it looks like something that really could be functional and could really serve residents maybe in a different way and hopefully alleviate some of that feeling like where you get on the bus and you kind of stay on the bus forever until you get to your destination. And this could be, you know, kind of bisecting some areas of the city. We learned a little bit about the WinReady program in Winchester with regard to how they kind of implemented more of an Uber style as opposed to a bus model. And I was curious if that had been considered at all for the city. It sounds like, you know, some of the perks of that are that, you know, maybe someone is less

inclined to get on a bus and then go to the grocery store if they have a bunch of things to take home with them. But by using, in this case, the WinReady system, they would then be able to arrive home with still frozen ice cream. So I'm not saying that this shouldn't be considered with regard to the bus option, but I'm just curious if we've thought outside the box with some other alternatives.

Lucas MullerYeah. So the WinReady is an interesting implementation of service in the city of Winchester. Essentially, they've launched an on-demand microtransit system. And so microtransit can be an option that some cities and areas are looking to implement. One of the benefits, as you mentioned, that it can provide a little bit more of a personalized trip and have some dynamic routing. One of the lesser or one of the potential downsides is that it tends to be more costly on a per rider basis. The, getting philosophical for a minute, but the idea of providing, you know, providing public transportation, especially on an individual or one or two people shared around is a very costly exercise. And so what we're seeing on the queue is ridership that is quite impressive compared to other systems

and exceeding the thresholds of where normally we would see that type of microtransit be effective from a cost perspective. And so, you know, it is something that areas are looking at, but it's really important to understand how it can relate to what we call fixed route transit. And if you can operate fixed route transit in a way where frequencies are accessible enough, it tends to be a more cost-effective solution.

Stacy HallOkay. Yeah, I feel like I would be interested in learning a little bit more. if that is the will of counsel to explore this as well. But I will obviously wait for others to weigh in on that. Are there any additional buses that would be required for this? And have there been any considerations for a fair, for charging a fair at any point? I know we've had the no fair for a number of years now, but I wasn't sure where this stood with other considerations, especially losing, I think there's some additional funding sources that we're losing coming year that will were previously applied to the Q bus

Wendy Sanfordstaffcouncil member Hall I will I will speak here the idea is that the service hours actually will remain constant with this alternative meaning that we don't need additional buses or drivers to run the three routes the three linear routes instead of the two circular routes so one of the directions that we did give to the consultants was let's try to stay cost neutral so how can we utilize the existing resources to to be more efficient and so that is what we're proposing here so there are no so the short answer is no new buses are required to run what is proposed in terms of the fair discussion that is a separate discussion and we will be discussing that at the work session in November so a month from now is it is on

the agenda to have the discussion about the fair free policy okay

Catherine Readthank you councilmember Amos

Anthony Amosthank you very much for this discussion just a couple of First, I noticed that I think there was a reduction in stops around that Fairfax circle area. Just wanted to confirm that there's, I'm sure you've already looked at this, but any concerns with safety? That's typically, there's typically a lot of people in foot traffic to access some of those bus stops. Would any of those be removed and would that be of concern?

Lucas MullerI'm going to let my colleague James speak to this a little bit about that specific area. But, you know, generally, again, with the stop, when we looked at the stop consolidation, trying to focus on areas that were within a short walk to other stops and trying to remove stops that were generally did not have safe or available crossing facilities. But, James, maybe you can add a little bit of context to that specific area.

James GamasYes, I can just add, again, James Gunn, this was with Kim Lee Horn. One other attribute that we looked at in addition to the potential ridership impacts were also the operational safety, just the overall pedestrian access to the bus stops. So that was something else that was considered within those areas. And things that we take into account to that are just the access to some of the key destinations in and around those stops. So that was factored in for the proposed placement of the bus stops in that vicinity.

Anthony AmosThank you. I appreciate that. In addition, we have the Old Town Circulation Study going on. I'm assuming that these recommendations were examined in comparison to that, or are we concerned about any of the recommendations coming from that committee potentially causing hurdles for this new design?

Wendy SanfordstaffI can jump in and just say so we have not started we're just right now starting the evaluation for Move Fairfax in the circulation. Our consultants for that are aware of this project so if there are going to be any updates that need to be made to this once that evaluation is done we will do that but this project is a little bit further along.

Anthony AmosIt sounds like I heard you say that there's a Move Fairfax meeting tomorrow at the library from 6 to 8 p.m. I thought you said that. Oh, that's good to know. And just a quick comment. I would highly recommend, which I'm sure you've done already, but sharing this with apartment complexes. For example, Layden Hall, primarily Spanish-speaking, the flats, a lot of international students there as well, just to get their feedback. I know the bus stop in front of Layden is one of the hot spots in the city as well.

Wendy SanfordstaffYes, again, we'll be doing bus ride-alongs just like what we did with the initial engagement. people in our initial engagement by riding along the buses that we're literally getting on the bus, getting off the bus, standing at stops. So we will be at those stops as well and we will be chatting with people.

Jordan HowardAnd as Wendy mentioned, we are putting stickers on all the buses. This is the first time we've done that. So I think anybody who sits on the bus is going to see it, unless all of the seats are full, of course. You

Wendy Sanfordstaffcan't miss

Jordan Howardit. There are eight by eight stickers.

Wendy SanfordstaffThat are on every single seat on the bus.

Anthony AmosAs a former QBus rider over at George Mason when I was going to school there. The only reason why I don't use him more consistently is because I don't have time to wait 40 minutes for a bus. So I think this is greatly appreciated.

Catherine ReadYes.

Anthony AmosExcellent.

Catherine ReadCouncil Member McQuillan.

Rachel McQuillenThank you for all that wonderful information. First, just some comments. I love the holistic approach. I really appreciate you taking into account all the other systems that we have going on. 640 total participants with over 27% in Spanish is phenomenal. Thank you for all of your efforts, because I know that's a lot of work to just gather all of that information. You had mentioned that the majority of the stops being removed were five or less riders. Do we have an estimate of how many riders potentially could be negatively impacted by these new routes?

Lucas MullerSo about about 96 percent of the existing boardings are within a quarter mile of of the proposed stops. And I believe it's about like a bit of I believe it's about less than half of a percent would end up with no service. James, maybe you can help me with those numbers. But basically it would just be the stops along the Cambridge Road. So I believe it's like 0.1% of the entire system that would no longer have any bus service.

Rachel McQuillenOkay, thank you. And then were there any considerations with our ADA riders as far as in the movement of those stops since traveling can be more challenging for them just in a pedestrian level?

Lucas MullerIt's a great question. The way that we approached that was, again, looking at crosswalks and curb ramps. I certainly think that that would be feedback on. And I think, you know, before this becomes the final final, we would want to look at those stops and make sure that, you know, that we are not negatively impacting, especially people with physical disabilities.

Rachel McQuillenThank you. I appreciate that.

Catherine ReadQuestions, comments? Council

Thomas PetersonMember Peterson? Thanks, because it looks like you guys have been busy.

Lucas MullerYes,

Thomas Petersonwe have. For a while. Lots of iterations. Yeah, absolutely. And so I want to thank you for that because I know it's a lot of work. I want to build also on the question that Council Member Hall asked and maybe ask it by just asking as you identified solutions, if you will, here, I know you did a ton of analysis of the city's particular situation and what to do about it. As a part of that, I'm guessing that you, because you're professionals in this area but otherwise as a matter of practice, you did consult with best practices and options that exist elsewhere. It kind of gets to the win ready question and you know I can imagine lots and lots and lots of things potentially could be under consideration but I'm assuming that what you did as a process

to kind of comb through those and determined what really looked like it fit best here. Is that a fair characterization of what you did?

Lucas MullerYeah, there's certainly an element of a peer review to look at both from a performance perspective of, you know, one of the, some of the most relevant performance measures, you know, a cost, you know, cost per rider, cost per hour of service that is being provided. So compare those against Northern Virginia entities in general. Again, Q is quite outperforming other systems in the region. I will say Q is quite a unique system in that just being surrounded by a county and then also having WMATA and Metrobus on top of it. So certainly it's a unique space, but did look at other peers as well for how people are approaching it.

Wendy SanfordstaffAnd I'll just add one other thing. So one of the points that Lucas made a few minutes ago is that when you're able to have a fixed route system that functions effectively and has high ridership, it's much more cost effective to have a fixed route system than an on-demand system like what's in Winchester. And so we are, as Lucas mentioned, and we can talk about this more also when we talk about the fare, when we have our fare discussion, but our ridership is very high and has increased more than any other transit, any other bus provider in Northern Virginia. It's one of the things that NBTC has been waving the flag about recently, that our ridership has increased 50% since 2019, which is more than any other bus agency in northern Virginia.

So our buses are full. We're doing well. And so fixed transit service for us works. And, again, on-demand service, it does work, and it is an appropriate solution for some jurisdictions, but it's very expensive. And so right now where we are, our fixed route transit service is really what is recommended for us.

Lucas MullerYeah, and if I could just give one kind of local example, too. So Prince William County, they have a bus service called OmniRide. They operate commuter bus service into the city. They also have local service in the county. And they introduced microtransit, but they approached microtransit looking at the lowest performing most rural areas as an opportunity to expand coverage to areas that did not have service. So that's another kind of use case where microtransit can be effective that we don't really see in the city given the coverage of the other networks. it's generally I think it's in the like their existing routes that they chose to replace with that were kind of in that order of three or four boardings per

hour whereas queue is much higher than that and would generally be associated with fixed route and they've actually worked in their policy guidance to say if that microtransit even starts doing so well that those smaller vans back, converting it back to fixed route transit.

Thomas PetersonAll good and all appreciated. Just so I understand that also and so that people who may be watching understand in terms of the outreach process that you're doing, if I understand it correctly, you'll be sharing with people what this proposal is to be able to get reaction from them. I'm guessing at the same time you will be welcoming any additional ideas that people may have or tweaks or whatever so that you can have the benefit of that in case there are any other designs out there you want to incorporate.

Lucas MullerYeah, absolutely.

Thomas PetersonSo

Lucas Mullerwe want to, A, explain what changes we're proposing, and then B, see comments about that. But then there's also, you know, open-ended feedback that people can provide if they have other ideas or suggestions.

Thomas PetersonI think that's very, very important. And I suspect people will want to share experience and out of that their thoughts. My last question is the fair conversation and this conversation, do they connect? And if they do, how do they connect? Are they completely separate or do the dots connect in some way here?

Lucas MullerI would say they are related but separate. As part of the TDP itself, we're really focusing on trying to adopt the service and the study and the technical recommendations. And then there are certain assumptions that will be made in the final plan in terms of how those revenue sources will come in. But that can be flexible. And from a city process perspective, it will be handled separately. But as part of the TDP document, we can document different scenarios that looked at either charging a fare or not charging a fare.

Thomas PetersonAnd just to build on that, in terms of those scenarios, and I don't know because I'm not really, I'm not in the same position you are to sort of look at the analysis here but would a shift in the policy on fares potentially enable a more strong design here for instance? I mean there's some cost considerations and assumptions here and I don't know whether fares impact them and as a consequence whether you've got a different set of assumptions and circumstances you can play with or whether these are really separate and walled off.

Lucas MullerWe'll be diving that we'll be diving into that a lot more in the in the November discussion. I will say that it can have just two two quick things is one is that in the overall scheme of the the potential portion of revenue that FAIR can make up. It's quite small in comparison to the overall operating expenses. It also can have ‑‑ we've also seen a lot of ridership growth since the going for FAIR free. And so there's a lot of factors that could push things up or down that I think we'll want to dive into more in the next discussion. And we'll have some more analysis and peer to share as part of that discussion.

Thomas PetersonOne last question. It's a mode shift question. Do you have any idea whether the system now and these improvements that you are proposing will result in people not having people who are existing drivers who get around by car not having to do that as much? And do you know whether it will actually help people avoid the need to have to purchase a car? at all on it?

Lucas MullerI mean, from a, from a quality, we have not done a quantitative analysis of that, but from a qualitative perspective, I think it's what we see in, in more urban areas is when frequencies get, get so that you don't have to look at a schedule and say, okay, I'm going to catch the 820 bus. You can go and on average, you're waiting a few minutes. That's, that's what can really cause the behavior shift. Especially, you know, if you think about, I'm sure there's, I know there's a lot of people in the city that, for example, might be driving their own car to the Vienna Metro and parking there and driving in. If we can get frequency to a point where people are comfortable hopping on the bus and maybe it takes them four, you know, four or five

minutes longer than driving, but they don't have to pay for parking and they can, you know, or doing whatever they want to on the bus, you know, that has the potential to shift behavior. And so I think there's that. And then the other piece, which I would say is outside of the scope of the TDP, but a really interesting thing, you know, for the city is we had a really good discussion meeting with the staff department about how do we communicate these changes, to your point, Mayor Reed, we get people that are not aware of this service to use it. There's a lot of good, I'm sure there's a lot of people if you asked, hey, do you know how to, do you know how to get on the Q bus to somewhere else in the city?

I would say a good percentage of people don't. And so one of the forgotten or lesser, lesser stressed elements of these network changes is the communication. So I would really encourage you all to think about, you know, how you put both staff time and money resources towards communicating about these changes because that can make a huge impact on the awareness of that. I think, you know, Metro saw that as part of the bus network redesign, and they put a lot of effort and focus into that. They were able to get to a 74% awareness. They did a statistically valid survey, and 74% of the people in the region knew about the bus network redesign, which is quite impressive considering how many people know who their, you know, state senator is or something like that.

I wasn't going to call you specifically.

Catherine ReadCouncil Member Hardy-Chandler.

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerMy first question is I too love looking at all of the systems together and how they can complement one another. From your information, and I know there was a focus on one seat rides, right? But is there information on people who are transitioning from other bus systems to Q or from Q to other bus systems? Do we have a sense of that? And part B of my question is, does that lend itself to some sort of additional coordination with those other systems beyond Q?

Lucas MullerYeah, so in terms of the first question about transfers from different systems, there's, when people do use Smart Trip, you're able to get that. that. It's somewhat less available when it is fare free. I mean, largely we see the transfers at the hubs where the lines intersect, whether that be Vienna Metro Rail, there's a lot of connections there. GMU, Germantown area, we've talked about some routes going west. There's some Fairfax connector routes that go out to West Docks area. And so, you know, that's certainly factored in from the more operational perspective of how do you kind of, we often get that question. I think there was actually someone had asked it via email, but how do you coordinate schedules and making sure that if you actually do have those

services, they are coordinated. coordinated. And so there are efforts and the Northern Virginia transit operators are very coordinated and meet very often to coordinate these types of things. There are some constraints from a logistical scheduling perspective when you think about Metro bus routes that go from here to Ballston or, you know, it's hard to focus just on a portion of the corridor. But there are certainly efforts that are made to streamline those schedules and coordinate

Stacey Hardy-Chandlerthem. I appreciate that. And my second question is about one of the things that makes the Q-Bus very convenient is the app. So my question is, does the plan also upgrade the app for accuracy or make any other kind of informational improvement so that people can track where buses are and have that better fit their planning and their schedules. I think that just is a very handy tool that could be instrumental in both the bus schedules but also maybe information. I don't know if that's factored into the planning as well.

Lucas MullerIn terms of specific technology requirements, that would be a little bit outside the scope of this TDP but we can certainly make either recommendations, you know, to have a more focused technology study or include high level recommendations on how technology can be used to implement them.

Wendy SanfordstaffI think also your question gets to that our apps would be updated with the new routes. We would provide updated files and that would be loaded into the software so that it would be seamless.

Lucas MullerSeamless, yeah. Thank you. And now, you know, with the apps especially, there's a lot of different apps out there, especially that are integrated and more focusing on that, you know, going from A to B, it will tell you the best option regardless of who's providing that

Stacey Hardy-Chandlerservice. Absolutely. And I'm just wondering if that might be helpful to communicate out in terms of convenience because we find it very convenient to know. Matter of fact, timing, leaving outside of the house based on what the app is saying. Thank you.

Catherine ReadSo I will just add, I think I'm going to go out on a limb and make the assumption I'm the only person who's ridden the bus in 1981 and to 2025 and the intervening years. So they're at the beginning, they're now. And I think there's a great tradeoff to have more direct routes. I think even people who are like the bus stop doesn't come here or the tradeoff is for the people who take the bus all the time, the more direct routes and shorter trip times. So, you know, when I take the bus to something, it's very stressful if you have to be there right at noon in D.C. in your seat at the start of a meeting. Coming back the other way, not as stressful. and I noticed that the Q bus still goes through my neighborhood on Warwick Drive

so I still get dropped off like a block away from my house when I was coming back from the convention center for the GFOA conference I took the metro back and the bus and from leaving the convention center to my front door was exactly one hour which was great so I posted about that So when you talk about how do we help people understand how you might use the Q bus system, the other thing is taking it to National Airport, which I did in 2007 frequently, is to get on the bus in my neighborhood to get to National Airport to get a plane to Georgia every month for a long time. So people don't, you know, to me, helping people understand not just getting on the bus or how you use the bus, but why would you use the bus?

Why would you use the bus instead of driving and parking? the bus to get to the airport. Why would you? So to me, part of this, and that's incumbent on all of us who live in the city, is to help people understand that this solves a problem or it gives you an option or it's just something you may not have ever done before, but there's a reason to give it a try. And so I do try to post about my trips on Metro so that people know, you know, I try to say hello to the bus drivers too, like usually when I'm getting off, like, hi, I'm your mayor. So it's important. I mean, it's important to walk the walk and talk the talk and eat your own dog food. So if I'm not willing to ride the bus, why should anybody else ride the bus? So

I ride the bus. But I do think that what you're doing, the coordination with other bus lines, shortening the time so that they can be more frequent, these are good trade-offs, even if you're reducing the number of bus stops. And to me, this is how we need to be talking about it. any other questions anybody okay councilmember bates yeah

Billy Batesjust uh one more thing i well first off i'm very excited about the changes and thank you all for uh for all your work on this i think that the proposed changes to my mind at least uh would be an improvement over how things are right now um i will say that i actually mainly use the new f50 line to get to the metro station because of just, you know, the lack of frequency right now with the queue lines, but with that additional, I forget what it's called on the map, but, you know, the Blenheim Boulevard route, that would make things even easier. So the one I wouldn't really call a concern, but just a thought, is that there may not be a whole lot of demand for bus service to and from North Fax right now,

but we are seeing a lot of new housing projects there and I would just be curious to see if you know there has been or will be in discussion of how to make sure that that's not too much of a loss not having a direct route between North Vax and Old Town anymore I know that we will have of course Q West going kind of the long you know roundabout way and hopefully that won't be so long and roundabout with more consolidated bus stops along there. But so I would be curious to explore that a bit further.

Lucas MullerYeah, thanks. That was certainly one of the areas that, you know, that we looked at a lot and balanced the tradeoff of, you know, continuing to serve that area or going direct. And, you know, certainly this is a 10-year horizon. And certainly, you know, as development continues to come online, you know, there's opportunities to update that plan and determine to serve that in the future should that development come online. But we'll certainly hear, see what we hear as well from the constituents. That's good to hear it. Thank you.

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerAll right. Any other questions or

Catherine Readcomments? Thank you so much. This has really been a wonderful presentation. Very excited about

Speaker 10this.

Catherine ReadChair Greg Musil. Great. Thank

Lucas Mulleryou all.

Catherine ReadChair Greg Musil.

Speaker 10All right. Our last item is an update on Germantown Road Improvement Project. I'm going to recognize Wendy Sanford, Transportation Director, for the discussion. Thank you.

Jordan HowardThank you.

Wendy Sanfordstaffon the Germantown Road multimodal improvements project. And so, and before I begin, let me introduce the team that's here with me. We have our capital projects manager, Sandy Sarna, our traffic engineer, Kurt McCullough, our public works director, David Summers. And then we have our two consultants here with AMT. We have Datno and we have Jordan Howard. And you will be hearing from, from mostly from me and Jordan during the presentation, but the whole team will be available for questions afterwards. So I'm going to get started on the presentation. And the purpose of this is to really update you on this project. This has been going on for a few years at this point, and we are really approaching now

sort of our midway point on this project. And we want to bring you in and talk about the project background, the goals, why we're doing this project in the first place, what the outreach has been, how that has informed the design to date and really talk about the our next steps our status and next steps so first in terms of background just to acquaint everyone with the corridor we are looking at germantown road between route 50 and then the city line right by the by i-66 it's about 0.8 miles right now this is what you see on the screen here is an image of germantown road it is a two to three lane roadway it is one lane in each direction and in locations there's a two-way center turn lane there are two schools there are a number of multi-family residential properties

and one of the things we're going to talk about more is all of those red dots all of those dots represent access points so there are a number of of driveways on germantown road and we'll be talking about that more in a few minutes in terms of the goals one of the goals are listed here to operations to improve congestion to reduce congestion to plan for the future maintain the connection to the county and this is something that's very important and i'll speak to this more on the next slide which is that this connects right into the county you go over the bridge and that was recently just upgraded as part of the i-66 outside the beltway project using concessionaire funding to upgrade that bridge and so we want to maintain that connection this was

discussed at and has been discussed over the years as being sort of a roadway around the city you can go Blake Lane to Germantown Road and to come around and into the city that way we want to maintain and improve transit operations and also improve pedestrian bicycle connectivity and make this more of a multimodal corridor as I just mentioned as I just mentioned one of the goals is that regional connectivity and so what's shown here is just some of the letters the county back in 2016 when we were when the concessionaire funding was coming and one of the things that the city council had asked for was to work with the county to improve that bridge and and have a nice wide path going over that bridge having a wider section and so now that that is

complete we it connects to the I-66 trail and so one of the things that we are looking at in doing this Germantown project is connecting to the county and utilizing that connection with the bridge. So in terms of the project timeline, there have been some other projects that have improved other parts of Germantown Road. So in 2008 and 2015, there were earlier projects to improve Germantown Road south of Orchard Street, so a small portion of our project area. And then there was more More recently, a project along Route 50 between Bevan Drive and Germantown Road to widen that area and improve that intersection. And then moving into 2017, this project area, the Germantown corridor between Route 50 and

the city line, was included as a priority in our multimodal transportation plan. That was then adopted into the comprehensive plan. So then moving from there, it was adopted into the two-year transportation program as and look forward for funding. So starting in 2018 is when we started putting together our concept plan, having some initial public outreach, and then subsequently, next slide please, moving into applying and receiving funding. And so back this, so now in 2023, we had funding that came online for this project that we had received from the NVTA. We received $21 million. So at that point, we then really kicked off the project again So, again, it's the work on the concept plan, apply for money, and then sort of wait for that money to become live.

The money becomes live, and we re-kicked off the project. And we had a public meeting at Catherine Johnson Middle School. We had a walking tour, and we have been up and down the corridor meeting with individual property owners. And that's what's really been happening over the last, I'd say, two years. And that is when we brought AMT on board to really help us with all of this work. And as I said, we've had some well-attended meetings at the middle school, and we've really received a lot of input from the community. Some of the themes that we heard, and this is now going back to 2023, but I want to bring you up to speed sort of what we've heard along the way. We heard about some bicycle pedestrian issues.

We heard about those access issues. Remember the red dots? That it's difficult to turn right onto or left out of onto Germantown Road. desire for improvements at the Carroll Street intersection and we heard about some of the congestion issues and some of the lane configuration issues and in terms of some highlighted areas in terms of high comment locations was at the eight mark at that H Mart Kuttner Park Germantown Road intersection we're going to talk about all of these but this is what we heard so we already knew that some of these from the data really were some of these difficult locations but we also heard this from the public as well at the Katherine Johnson middle school entrance at Carroll

Street and at Orchard Street so that really is it was a brief but sort of overview in history of where we've been and so that walked us through the road and it really it puts us to where we are now which is step 10 where the arrow says we are here but I want to back up a little bit to step eight because that's really when the 2023 process kicked off that I mentioned when we had the walking tour public meeting at Katherine Johnson the money had come online and this is when we really re-engaged and started this project in earnest and so now here we are we are at intermediate plans and so what we are here tonight to do is to talk about what we are proposing for Germantown Road and walk through some of those those difficult areas and and what we're proposing and this is an

anticipation of a public hearing this project is not funded by VDOT and that public hearing is as part of the VDOT process. That said, we still follow that process for all of our projects just to have consistency and transparency in the process. So we are building up towards that public hearing step, which we are proposing to have in the December timeframe. So with that, I am going to pass it on to Jordan to really get into more of the technical analysis of the

Jordan Howardcorridor. Sure. I'm gonna lead you guys through some of the corridor challenges that we've seen and what we're proposing currently as improvements. So as far as challenges, Wendy mentioned the access points already, but there's sort of four key things that we see in the corridor. One is that there's a history of rear end and angle crashes. The second is that we know and have heard from the public and can see from the traffic data that there's some congestion and traffic operation issues. 14,000 vehicles a day is not like I-66 level, but it's also a fairly high volume for a more local arterial road. We know there's some peak hour congestion. is sort of a congestion point. We use the term access management

to talk about all of those access points and the number of driveways that are out there, how closely they're spaced. That creates some issues with safety and operations in the corridor. And then from a multimodal standpoint, the bus transit folks just spoke, but there's bus stops in the corridor. We want to have a safe corridor for pedestrians, for bicyclists. Today, there's limited bicycle accommodations. There's no bike lanes. small section that has a shared use path but it's not consistent there's no connection to the I 66 trail yet so those are things that we are looking at as challenges in the existing condition and I'm gonna walk through sort of each of those individually along with some of the things that we're going to do to

make improvements so the first slide that I have here is about the crash history looking from 2020 to 2025 when we study crash history we typically look at a five-year period there's 38 crashes in the corridor none of them are fatal but that rate is not necessarily higher than the statewide average, but we also know that with Vision Zero and some of the other initiatives around travel safety, we want to get that number down to zero. So angle crashes make up 45% of the crashes. That's typically the most severe crash, and those crashes occur most often when people are turning. So you see those at unsignalized intersections and driveways a lot. One vehicle might be going straight and hits a car that's turning.

The second most typical type of crash is a rear-end crash. That one's a little more simple. You hit the person in front of you, right? We see those often when the lead vehicle slows or stops. So that's often when there's congestion in a corridor or, again, when there's many access points and you might be slowing because the person in front of you is turning. So ways that we look to address those two types of crashes are to improve traffic operations, meaning there's not as much start and stop occurring, and managing access. and unsignalized intersections in the corridor. So from a traffic operations standpoint, just giving you a little bit of background, I'm not sure how familiar everybody is with this,

but we look at something called level of service, and level of service evaluates a street based on seconds of delay per vehicle. It's graded A through F. There's sort of a visualization up here. A means traffic is pretty free-flowing. F is like you're stuck in stop and go, and you wish you weren't. We also look at queue length, and that is looking at how long a queue is if you're stopped at a signal, like how long is the backup in feet. The issues that we're finding on Germantown Road and that we want to try to address are that the queue at many of the signalized intersections is longer than the turn lane. So ideally your queue would be contained in a turn lane, so people trying to turn left are not blocking people who are trying to go through.

that when we look at the future so we look at level of service today but we also look 20 years out so we want to make improvements today that are going to be you know effective for the future we don't want to do a project today and have it not be effective tomorrow so LOSF in the future if we don't do any improvements to the corridor 20 years from now there will be LOSF at many of the intersections and then school kiss and ride so the Katherine Johnson and Providence Elementary are in this corridor. That just complicates traffic a little bit, right? And I'll talk about that more in a minute. So some of the proposed improvements that we're looking at. We want to add dedicated right and left turn lanes in the corridor. Wendy mentioned

in the existing condition you have a two-way center left turn lane through much of the area. When we add dedicated right and left turn lanes, it removes vehicles waiting to turn, and it decreases the number of conflict points. So with the two-way center turn lane, people from both directions are using that same lane. When we can separate them, it reduces the conflict points. So as we're looking at all of these improvements, I'm going to talk about something that's called a crash reduction factor. It's down there in the little green box. That's a way for us to represent how we expect safety to be improved when we implement something. So adding dedicated right and left turn lanes has a crash reduction factor associated with it.

rear-end crashes are expected to be reduced. So we're looking at turn lanes at Orchard Street, at Providence Elementary School's North Driveway, and at Carroll Street. In addition, I mentioned the two-way turn lane. We want where we're able to to replace that with a median and dedicated right and left turn lanes, that has a CRF associated with it of 35% of angle crashes being reduced. So Cavalier Core and Katherine Johnson Middle School are both candidate locations for that improvement. In addition from a traffic capacity and operation standpoint, we know that Route 50 intersection is a challenge, but that's first it's a little bit outside of our project limits and second it's a VDOT Road. So we don't have complete control over what happens there. But looking at Germantown

itself, one of the things that we can do is extend the northbound merge lane. So when you turn from Route 50 and head north on Germantown Road, today that lane ends at Kuttner Park driveway. And we're looking to extend it just a little bit further to allow people longer distance to merge and maneuver so that you're not doing that right in the first block when you make your turn. We're also looking at optimizing signal timing throughout the corridor. That's sort of the second graphic there. All of those intersections highlighted and numbered. So they're not all signalized intersections, but we look at traffic operations at all of them and where we can optimize the signal timing. That allows us to get a future condition LOSA at all of the signalized intersections in

20 years from now, so in the 2040 timeframe. You'll notice the second bullet there. The Route 50 intersection operates at LOS E and F today, and it still is going to operate at LOS E or F in the future condition. That's the one intersection that's not fully improved by what we're doing. And then I mentioned the school peak hour operations. So we're extending turn lanes on Germantown Road into the school driveways, and we're also looking at better defining those turn lanes with signing and pavement markings. that should help alleviate some of the traffic congestion but we don't design roadways for the 15-minute school drop-off and pickup point and Wendy always uses the example of that's like mall parking lot for Christmas shopping

versus like the rest of the year right so we're trying to balance making operations better but not over designing for just this very short period of the day and then for the schools the peak period traffic control would happen with the crossing and traffic guards that are there today as is standard at most schools. So the next thing I want to just touch on is the access management. So I mentioned before access management is spacing between intersections. It's not just signalized intersections, it includes unsignalized intersections, so kind of side streets, it includes driveways. You can see in this graphic here, this is from VDOT's road design manual, but it really represents the fact that we want a certain spacing between signalized intersections,

access points where you can make right and left turns and then what we call partial access can be closer together and those are driveways or entrances where you only maybe could make a right in or right out so the thing to know about the corridor right now is that it really doesn't meet any of the state or city access spacing requirements because there are 30 access points in less than a mile so partial access is something that we look at and it you'll see in the that allows for safe, more safe operations in between those signalized intersections. So again, we're looking at the closely spaced entrances on Germantown and the fact that one of the results of that is that there's very short turn lanes.

So that leads back to what I mentioned before about the queues exceeding the turn lanes that are available. As far as the proposed improvements go, so one of the things that we want to look at is converting full access driveways to right in, right out configuration. CRF associated as well 45% of all crash types are reduced with that typically comfort in the H Mart northern entrance and Gainsborough court southern entrance are three locations where we're looking at that and I'm going to walk through each of those locations separately in a minute we're also looking at the Gainsborough court area that's right near Orchard Street at shifting an entrance to create a four-legged signalized intersection and I just wanted

to touch here where it says conflict points at driveways. The top image is a full access entrance and you can see if you count the yellow dots there, those are conflict points where two vehicles turning could potentially hit each other. There's, I think, seven or eight of them shown on that top drawing. If you look at the bottom one, which is a right in, right out entrance, there's only two points where people can kind of be in conflict with each other. So you can see we're right there. That's much less opportunity for a crash to occur. Another thing that we look at from an access standpoint is what we call the functional area of an intersection. So in the lighter gray image here is the physical area of an intersection. That's what most

of us think about. That's sort of in between the stop bars what you would consider to be like the middle of the intersection. But from a traffic operation standpoint we also look at the area that drivers need to make their decision in. So that extends throughout the limits of kind of all the turn lanes approaching the intersection and is a bit of a larger area. Ideally there's no that. There's no other intersections in that. You want to be focused on looking at the signal and making your decision about what lane you need to be in. You don't want to be focused on the fact that somebody next to you is making a right turn into your space. And so, again, we see in the existing corridor that we don't have the functional area that we would want at all of the intersections.

So, I'm going to walk through the existing conditions at a couple of the locations that were highlighted by the public and that we know to be sort of the biggest issues in the corridor. Today at H-Mart, Kuttner Park and 3900 Germantown, there's an offset intersection. The traffic signal only serves H-Mart's northern driveways, which means that 3900 and Kuttner Park are just outside of that signalized intersection. We also see that there's a crosswalk just south of the H Mart entrance, which is a little bit of a conflict between delivery trucks leaving the H Mart loading dock and headed towards Route 50 and pedestrians trying to cross Germantown Road. So again, we've got sort of three or four driveways and side streets in the functional area of this signalized intersection.

So our proposed improvements are to shift the signal just a little bit to the north to create a four-legged intersection with Kuttner Park, 3900 Germantown Road, and Germantown Road itself, and to put a median along Germantown Road, which would therefore make the H Mart northern entrance and Comfort Inn have a right in, right out configuration. In doing that, both of those parking lots do also have other access points. So although we're making it right in, right out from Germantown, they would still be able to access Route 50 from other points within their parking lot. And we would also relocate the crosswalk to the north side of the intersection to provide that sort of safer crossing location for pedestrians.

So that, in the green, I'm not going to go through each bullet here, but in the green on each slide is going to kind of highlight what this benefit of this is. At Gainesboro Court and Orchard Street, this is further north in the corridor. So at this location, it's another situation where the traffic signal serves Orchard Street, but within very close proximity, we have the intersections of Gainesboro Court north and south. In addition, Providence Elementary School is just north of this, and so there's a shared turn lane right now where vehicles in the northbound direction who want to turn left into either Gainesboro Court north or the elementary school are sharing the same lane. That makes it a little bit difficult for other drivers to know where they're turning.

And then south of that, near Cavalier Court, we have the shared two-way center left turn lane, and there's also sort of a short turn lane from southbound Germantown onto Orchard. In our proposed design, we're looking at relocating the north entrance to Gainesboro Court to provide that four-legged intersection that I mentioned before. The existing northern entrance would be converted to a right-in only, but if vehicles wanting to leave that community making a left would use the signal now. We're also providing dedicated right and left turn lanes on Germantown Road in the northbound direction, adding a median and converting the southern entrance at Gainesboro Court to a right-in, right-out. So that addresses many of those same things.

It's still a signalized intersection. We would be enhancing pavement markings for pedestrians in this area as well. Looking at multimodal access, again, that's addressing pedestrians, bicyclists, transit users. We know that dedicated space improves safety and access for these users. We know that the city wants to encourage biking and walking. We want to provide safe crossing locations, especially in this corridor where we have the park and two schools. It's important that we're providing what we call an all-ages and all-abilities facility. We want to reduce conflict points in general. So I've highlighted some of these issues already, but there's uncontrolled pedestrian crossings. That means locations where pedestrians are crossing not at a signal.

We have some areas where there's a gap in sidewalk. There's limited bicycle accommodations, and previously there was no connection to the kind of county side of things. So our proposed design is to close the network gap. So between the existing sidewalks, the I-66 project, that's already essentially existing condition now, not when we started this project in 2023. And our project, we wanna make sure that we have sidewalk on one side of the street, that's proposed along the west side, and then we would have a shared use path for the full length of the project limits along the northbound direction. The shared use path is 10 feet wide in asphalt, the sidewalk is more your more standard, five foot wide in concrete.

Each of them would have pedestrians, would serve pedestrians, bicyclists in both directions. So this is what we call a typical section. It just sort of shows you see the roadway and right here we're showing a northbound turn lane and then a grass buffer area and then the 10-foot shared use path. So again really just trying to provide space for all of all ages and abilities. Another proposed design element is to enhance the crossings in the corridor. So We can do that in a number of ways, but what we're proposing is to have high visibility markings. So you can see in these two examples, the markings in the top photo are a lot more visible than the ones in the bottom marking. There's a crosswalk in both, but the top one is more visible.

So we would use that type of pavement marking. We can add rapid flashing beacons, which are shown in the top photo. I believe you all have those at several other locations in the city, so people are familiar with them. We want to put those in at the schools and at Carroll Street. We're also looking at a pedestrian island, as shown in the second photo, at Carroll Street, and we want to provide lighting throughout the corridor so that multimodal users are visible to drivers. I want to address Carroll Street for a minute. So residents have requested a signal here, and so we performed a signal warrant analysis. That is a kind of standard analysis that's prescribed in the MUTCD, which is the Manual for Uniform Traffic Control Devices.

It's a national standard. that you look at, they're called warrants. They address all different things, vehicular volume, pedestrian volume. You look at things from a peak hour standpoint, you look at things from an all times of day standpoint. At this location, it does not meet the criteria for our signal, either in the study year, which was done with 2021 traffic, or the future year of 2041. There is the potential that it could meet warrant four, which is pedestrian volumes, once the path is constructed, volume of pedestrians. So you can see in the green box there you would need a hundred and twenty-five pedestrians per hour to cross at Carroll Street in order for warrant four to be met. So I'm not going to say that's impossible but it's

probably not very likely. So because we don't meet the warrants we're looking at other safety improvements that can be implemented there. That includes dedicated turn lanes, the pedestrian refuge island, and the rapid flashing beacons. And this is an image of the proposed design at Carroll Street. So we would be adding a southbound left turn lane today. That's an area that's sort of painted and patched out. That will help pedestrians crossing here be able to identify who's turning and who's going through. We're going to add a northbound right turn lane. Again, that helps vehicles move out of the through lane, but also helps pedestrians to know what movement a driver is going to make. We're going

a refuge island so that people crossing only need to look in one direction so you would look to the left make sure nobody's coming cross to the pedestrian island then look to the right and make the second part of the crossing we're also proposing the RRFB that I had previously mentioned so that will help bring attention to people who are crossing I know that the previous group talked a lot about existing conditions of transit so I'm not going to spend a whole bunch of time on this other than to say that we are looking at stop and ridership in the corridor. There are a couple locations, WMATA and Q run in this corridor, and so there's a couple locations where there are duplicative stops, like where WMATA has a stop on the south side

of an intersection and Q has a stop on the north side, so we could combine those stops. And I think that's something the other group is probably looking at as well. We wanna be consistent with whatever that document is going to propose. to be trying to provide as far as amenities go that kind of enhance the comfort for people who are riding is you know trash receptacles provide benches at most of the stops where ridership is a little bit higher we're looking at providing shelters and potentially bike racks and there's additional changes that could be recommended by the TDP there's a couple of maps in here that show what we were currently proposing again I think potential changes based on the TDP but essentially at stops would be located at the Kuttner Park H Mart area

then at Katherine Johnson Middle School moving to the north then in the vicinity of Orchard Street and at Carroll Street I mentioned lighting earlier as a safety enhancement that enhancement is for both vehicles and pedestrians but we want to provide lighting throughout the corridor we have a combination approach. So there is some existing decorative lighting in the corridor. You can see an example of that in the photo with the black, we call it a post-mounted pole. And then we're also proposing some shoebox fixtures and arms, which is a higher level vehicular lighting. Spacing for those lights is approximately 75 feet on center, and that would be throughout the corridor. And we do look at protecting residents' homes when we're doing that. So there's a

on the back of those so nobody's house is going to be impacted. We're also looking at landscape in the corridor so with the current design 53 trees are impacted most of them are on private property but we would be proposing mitigation plantings there's sort of a list here number of shrubs and ground cover about 95 ornamental trees and nine larger shade trees anywhere areas that are disturbed by the construction would get grass placed back if they don't have kind of planting and that's just a rendering there of what some of the improvements could look like

Wendy Sanfordstaffthe

Jordan Howardproposed design does include some retaining walls so we're widening and anytime that you do that you have to tie to the existing grade at the outside of the roadway the largest wall that we're proposing is at Katherine Johnson middle school if you can picture that it sits up quite a bit higher than Germantown Road so a wall is necessary there when we widen it's approximately 500 feet long and 10 feet high. The other two locations are shorter walls, both in height and in length, less than 100 feet and three to four feet high. Those are at Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witness near Orchard Street, and then 3623, which is just north of Orchard Street. That's a residential home that has a retaining wall today, so we're impacting that. We would essentially be

putting it back. And there's an image there just of the proposed wall aesthetic, which is a dry stack. So the wall is concrete, but it's made to look as though it's stone. I'm going to turn it back to Wendy for project funding and next steps.

Wendy SanfordstaffThank you.

Jordan HowardThank you.

Wendy SanfordstaffSo in terms of where we are, we are at our 60% design, and now you can see what is proposed. And our next step, what is shown up there is December 9th to have a public hearing. So the idea is between now and then to get the word out that these that we are at this that this point in our in our process make plans available to the public and then have a formal opportunity for a comment as part of the City Council meeting on December 9th. And in terms of right-of-way and utilities that would happen after this the 60 percent I'm just telling you sort of what comes next as we near into the 90 right-of-way acquisition. There are 18 properties that would be impacted with, that would require drainage easements or temporary construction easements, and we would also begin working

on any kind of utility relocation that would need to occur. But this would all be occurring after the public hearing, after we really get into the more finalized plans. And in terms of the cost and the funding, so right now we're looking at a cost of about $18 million, which I think is unbelievable given that it's less than the funding that we have. That's very unusual that we are actually under budget. So as of right now, we have $18 million proposed and we have $21 million available to us through NVTA funding. That concludes our presentation. We'd be happy to take any questions. And again, the whole team is here if you have any questions.

Catherine ReadAll right. Council Member Amos.

Anthony AmosI just got to say when I saw that it was 42 slides, I was like, oh, man. But you always impress me with how efficient you are in your presentations. Thank you very much. I only have one question, and it may have nothing to do with this, but since it's in the proximity, I figured I'd ask about Fair Oaks Business Park. Have there been communications with the county since Pender Drive in that area is not too far off? Is

Wendy Sanfordstaffthat the property behind that backs up to Germantown Road?

Anthony AmosYes.

Wendy SanfordstaffAnd they're redeveloping in the county?

Anthony AmosCorrect.

Wendy SanfordstaffYeah, I just didn't know the name of it. We have been working with the county because there have been discussions about potentially making a connection through there. So we were showing them our plans and talking about where a potential connection would be.

Anthony AmosYeah, do we have an idea of what that, how those conversations have been going?

Wendy SanfordstaffThat

Anthony Amosmight not be, this might not be the appropriate venue.

Wendy SanfordstaffYeah, I'm not, I'm not, I don't know. information

Speaker 11just preliminary just preliminary conversation so far letting them know about our plans with this project their current plans are sort of evolving as to which parcels it will include and there will be doing traffic impact studies as part of their project

Anthony Amosokay part of the reason I ask is just because someone sent an email today and it reminded me that that that project does have public hearings coming up this month and next month for their comp plan. So I was just curious. But otherwise, great work. Sounds like it's a major community need and that they've been waiting for this for a while. So great work as always.

Catherine ReadCouncilmember McQuillan.

Rachel McQuillenThank you so much for that presentation. As someone who has driven that route almost every single day all school year for 10 years, this is very much needed. I can attest to that. I have a question regarding the crosswalk at Carroll. You mentioned that it doesn't warrant the light. Will that crosswalk be raised by chance? Just because I know having crossed that bridge, especially depending on the timing, because of the way the sun comes in, it can be really hard to see pedestrians after you cross that bridge. I recognize that you're going to add signs and lights and all of that. But have you considered maybe raising or is there any kind of talk to make the children that are going to be crossing that to go to Providence?

They're all going to be elementary school children, so they're going to be really short. So that's my thought process. Have you considered that?

Jordan HowardIt is something that we look at as a kind of standard thing at most of the intersections that we're looking at. Germantown Road is classified as an arterial road, which is usually not a candidate. it means that there's enough of a high volume of traffic that raised crossings are typically not ideal. But that doesn't mean that we can't study it a little bit further and see what the options are. It's not shown in our plans currently, but we can look at it further.

Rachel McQuillenEspecially since there's going to be a development that's going to be built on the other side of that bridge that's going to increase the amount of traffic, I believe, coming through. So I would like to just know a little more information on what could be done to ensure that those children are highly visible when they cross. I also wanted to make a comment about the 53 trees that are going to be impacted on the private property. I just wanted to, instead of a comment, I wanted to ask what the plan for outreach, I know that Wendy, I'm sorry, Ms. Sandberg, you had mentioned it previously a little bit, but could you go into a little more detail on that as to what we can expect as far as the communication to the public?

Sure.

Wendy SanfordstaffSo the properties that we've had individual communication with thus far have been the properties where we're looking at access modifications. So it's been with Gainsborough Court. We've met with the Comfort Inn. We've met with the H-Mart representatives. So those are mostly who we've met with. As we proceed into the right-of-way phase, what we typically do when we just did this with Cambridge and Eaton, we will set up property owner meetings and meet with them ahead of them just getting a letter that says, hey, we're coming to your property to do a survey. And so we will meet with them and show them the plans and indicate what the impacts to their properties would be, be it if we needed easement or if there are landscaping impacts.

Rachel McQuillenThank you. I remember that process from previous projects, but I just wanted to hear it out loud. Thank you. I appreciate it. And I appreciate all the time and detail that you've put into this presentation. Thank you.

Catherine ReadCouncilmember Hall.

Stacy HallThank you. Wendy, I specifically want to thank you for all the outreach and meetings both with our community, with our neighborhoods, the meetings that you've done at Kuttner Park, the walkthroughs that you've done. I know this has been an extraordinary amount of outreach and I just think it's very much appreciated and it has really brought a lot of information to light for the communities that are going to be really directly impacted. I do have a lot of questions and I'll try to go slide by slide maybe just to keep them contained. So if you can go to slide 17 for me is that possible sorry I'm trying to do this on my laptop and I'm just I just don't have mine printed and I didn't download it before

so I was just kind of following along as you were making

Wendy Sanfordstaffsure we can share the presentation and have you also up on

Stacy Hallthe screen thank you very much if you can't see me that's totally fine can you see the

Wendy Sanfordstaffpresentation

Stacy HallI can Okay. There we go. Great. Thank you. Okay. So one thing I just wanted to point out on this slide is that at the very bottom there, it says peak period traffic control by traffic guards. So that is no longer the case unless something has changed since the beginning of the year for the schools. We previously had traffic guards that were at the schools, but now they're, well, I guess it's not totally true. They were directing traffic before. Now they're really just managing the crosswalk at these schools. So I don't know if that is new information or different information that was considered when this presentation was previously put together or the information was drafted, but I just want to make sure we're still on the same page as far as what is actually being provided to assist the kids with crossing.

because it is different than it's been in all of the years that my kids were at those schools.

Jordan HowardSo when we previously walked the corridor and were out there at school, pick up and drop off times, the guards were directing traffic as well as pedestrians. So if that's different this school year, that's different than what we saw when we were out there. And we can kind of have a discussion about that, I guess.

Wendy SanfordstaffLet me just follow up. When we were out there, we had a long conversation with the crossing guard controls traffic, also works with the pedestrians that are crossing, and she really does more of the former, it seemed, which was the vehicular traffic control. So if that is different, that is something that we would need to understand, but that was not our understanding when we chatted with her last year.

Stacy HallYeah, and that has totally changed effective this school year, effective August 14th, and it was a very confusing first couple of weeks of school, using the most accurate information when making these decisions. We will follow up on that. Thank you. And then slide 19, please. I was just trying to understand this here. So I'm looking at the right in, right out. So can traffic not turn left into Gainsborough Court here because they'd have to be going up to that new shared light? Was that how that was going to work?

Wendy SanfordstaffThat entrance is moving. So if you're coming southbound, you can turn right into the entrance, or you can go up to the signal, which is going to be two-way. So we're right in that front lawn area. We're adding a sort of a new access driveway to them. Is that what your question was? Okay.

Stacy HallYeah, I think so. I think the median here, it's clear now that the median is there. I think it wasn't as clear in the previous photo or the previous slide my notes.

Wendy SanfordstaffAnd so for the south entrance, that used to be a full access. So now if you want to leave though and make a left, what you do is that south entrance connects around the back of the community and will come out at the north entrance. So if you're trying to make a left out, you'll go around to utilize the signal. Okay. Does that make sense?

Stacy HallYeah, no, it makes sense. Yes, it makes sense here conjunction with the other information thank you sure um on slides 29 and 30. and for your consultants this i live here so this is kind of where i go frequently my kids have gone to both these schools here walkers bikers bus all that um so i think when it comes to carroll street residents have requested a signal not because it's hard to cross there as a pedestrian although that challenge and I'll get there in a minute. We've requested a signal because it's very hard to make a left-hand turn currently with just one lane of traffic in either direction. So when you go onto slide 30 and now it's looking like we're going to have to cross left turn, essentially cross three or four lanes of traffic there, that's a big challenge.

It's already difficult there with the way that they did that new bridge, which I'm not a fan of, but it's very difficult to turn left on a Germantown here with current conditions. So I really think that needs more vision on that. And when it comes to the crosswalk there, most parents, me included, don't allow our kids to cross there because there is no crossing guard. So we have always told our kids to stay on Germantown, to go up in front of the school where there was a crossing guard, and that they would cross there. So you're not seeing 150 people cross here four hours out of the day because it's too dangerous. Because nobody sees you coming over that bridge and nobody slows down and stops.

And that might change with the RRFB, that's the beacon lights, right? Yes. That might change there, but I don't, we don't ever use that one on purpose.

Jordan HowardUnderstood. I do think, so the combination of the RFB and the pedestrian refuge island is supposed to make it more safe for pedestrians to cross here. I do understand that letting your elementary school student cross here by themselves maybe is not the right location. And there is a crossing guard at Providence Elementary. So staying on the northbound side of the road and then crossing at the school is definitely safer for students. But there are other people who might want to cross here. And essentially, the shared use path, if you would like to connect to the I-66 trail, this would be the location where you would cross to be able to do that. on the north side of the bridge the I-66 trail connects at Phoenix Drive. I don't

know if you want to add something to that Wendy but. Well you can you

Wendy Sanfordstaffcan cross here or go over the bridge and cross at Phoenix.

Jordan HowardYes so but this crossing obviously is in the city and Phoenix is in the county so we wanted to provide a location for people to cross and do what we could to enhance it. To your point ABOUT THE NUMBER OF LANES OF TRAFFIC. THERE IS STILL ONLY ONE THROUGH LANE IN EACH DIRECTION. AND PART OF THE GOAL OF ADDING THE TURN LANES IS TO MAKE IT SO THAT PEOPLE WHO ARE ON CAROL BETTER UNDERSTAND WHAT TRAFFIC IS DOING BY GIVING THEM A DESIGNATED LANE. I DO HEAR WHAT YOU'RE SAYING ABOUT IT BEING DIFFICULT TO MAKE A TURN. I HAVE DRIVEN THROUGH THAT INTERSECTION AS WELL AS part of our you know site visits the one other thing that this does that's not entirely clear from this is that we're doing a little bit of widening in this

area so when you come off of the bridge today there's a little bit of a well there's a curve and your traffic is kind of coming off the bridge and it it feels like you're turning a little bit there to go straight that still is going to be the case but it's going to be less abrupt i guess i'll say um and so that should help with some of the visibility issues that exist right now as well

Stacy Halli'm certainly no intersection or traffic expert but i can tell you i've lived here since 2011 and this intersection has always been a very concerning one and now i have a 16 year old driver who will probably never be allowed to turn left there for the foreseeable future. So I'm letting you know that I'm not questioning your judgment or your expertise, but I, as someone who lives there, still continue to have very, very strong concerns about that, not having an opportunity for a light. So I would like that to be noted and to be highly paid attention to with the ability to maybe do some changes shortly after it's implemented if it's not going to work. So

Rachel McQuillenthank you.

Stacy HallAnd then on slide 37, it talks about a 10-foot wall across there at KJMS. And I understand from the picture what it's going to look like as far as it's intended to look like a stacked stone. Is that supposed to essentially cover all of that existing hill? Is that going to take away what you see visually with the hill and the sidewalk that's there, and you're just going to see big stone and then the school above it? what that is going to look like?

Jordan HowardDad, do you want to answer that?

Billy BatesYou'll still be able to see the green

Speaker 14space up. The wall only cuts in to allow the space for the shared use path and the buffer. So I think it's only, I think, 15 feet total. But the green space on top of the, leading up to the, I guess, the access road on the school is still going to be visible there.

Jordan HowardAnd there will be a railing on the wall. green space outside of Katherine Johnson sort of at the top of the wall there'll be a fence and railing so that nobody could you know jump down to the shared use path but then the shared use path would be at street level and we can provide a maybe a better visual for that if that would be helpful yeah

Stacy HallI'd like to better understand what what's going to be there that would be appreciated And my final question, I think at least for now, is the fact that the shared use path is intended to be on the west side, which is like the Providence side, and then the sidewalk is intended to be on the east side, which is the Katherine Johnson side. It's opposite

Jordan Howardof that. I'm sorry? It's the opposite of that. so the shared use path will be on the katherine johnson side and then the sidewalk will be on the providence side

Stacy Hallokay okay so then i guess in theory then kids that are biking from the neighborhoods that would come onto carroll street would be able to continue on that same side of the route on the shared use path and then cross over to providence at some point okay yes um the other thing i will back to providence for a second is i haven't i don't have kids at elementary school I don't know if based upon the changes with the crossing guards, I don't know if there's still a crossing guard in front of the school or if they're now forcing the kids to go up to Orchard Street and cross with that crossing guard and then double back. So that might be something to inquire about as well, just to make sure we're still comparing apples and apples with what was discussed previously.

Jordan HowardOkay, we can definitely, I think we'll definitely just follow up on crossing guards in general to make sure we have a better understanding of what their new operations are.

Stacy HallThank you very much for the information. That's all for me at this time.

Catherine ReadOkay. Other questions, comments? Council Member

Thomas PetersonPeterson. Thanks for everything. I'm really happy to see the shared use of bike path. I've ridden that, and that'll be a really big improvement. I'm curious on that. It ends at Carroll Street. Is that basically where it? How much farther? Where is it on?

Jordan HowardEssentially, at Carroll Street, so instead of you would cross the street and then you can connect at that point to Phoenix Drive and the I-66 trail and then from there I believe in the county there's shared use paths on that side the opposite side of the road I guess the southbound direction at that point so it connects on the north end of the project to the I-66 trail at Phoenix and then to whatever shared use path facility exists in the county

Wendy Sanfordstaffcorrect

Speaker 13okay the

Wendy Sanfordstaffsidewalk of going over the bridge is 10 feet wide on both sides. So if you can you can cross and stay on the bridge or you can stay on the east side and then cross at Phoenix.

Thomas PetersonGot it. Good to hear. Does the project begin at the intersection of Germantown or 50 or does it begin closer in where? So then the Bank of America spot that's not in. Okay. Well, even though it isn't in, it may still be related because I think the way that is set up is to get out of Bank of America. You can make a right turn onto 50, right? Or you can make a right turn onto Germantown. But if you want to get back to Camp Washington, you've got to go down Germantown and then do a U-turn and come back. How will that, in a different way in the future after this, or are people still going to have to find a U-turn? That U-turn, and the closest you can do that is H-Mart, but that's a bit of a zoo to do that.

So just a note that that is an issue.

Jordan HowardOkay. The project limit is just a little bit south of H-Mart's, I don't, I guess northern, I'm going to call it like middle entrance, but their first entrance from Germantown. is kind of north of 7-Eleven and north of the Bank of America.

Thomas PetersonSo just to refresh my memory, when you start heading down Germantown from 50, when is the first point at which you hit a light?

Wendy SanfordstaffThe H-Mart.

Thomas PetersonOkay. So that would be where you could.

Wendy SanfordstaffRight. And that signal is moving up, is moving up from the H-Mart driveway up to Kuttner Park entrance.

Thomas PetersonOkay. Great. Thanks.

Catherine ReadOther questions or comments on the Germantown road improvements? Well, it all looks wonderful.

Wendy SanfordstaffThank you.

Catherine ReadThank you.

Brian FosterstaffMayor Reed. Yes. Before you go back into the regular meeting and have your motion for closed session, a couple of things uh preferably discussed beforehand but i guess you could discuss it afterwards um legit uh is we had sought feedback on work session items for the 14th did not hear back from everyone as to whether you want us to leave them on or push them given the public hearings and anticipated attendance so it would just it would be helpful for us to know so we can staff and change the posted agenda if you want to push. I would say that none of them are necessarily time sensitive as far as needing to happen on the 14th. That's just when they are scheduled.

Catherine ReadCouncil Member Hall.

Stacy HallYeah, I was looking at that earlier, but I didn't get to you by noon today. so I didn't send anything. I think it's a lot on that agenda, and I'm worried that it's going to be too much. So I wanted to pull up the agenda again. I think there was one work session that I was proposing that we keep, and I think the other two, I was going to suggest that we move. But again, I figured I had missed the window, and you had already heard from others, so I was leaving that alone. um i think it was the affordable or the adus i think we could was maybe a push and i think the other ones i was suggesting keeping i'm just not remembering what they are at the moment

Brian Fosterstaffthey are the three are adus um video testimony and uh rule council's rules and procedures Those were the three that are currently being scheduled. So again, all of those require staff that would not have to be here otherwise. And so again, don't know how many people may come. We're making it, but educated guests would say there'll be a lot and it's going to drag your meeting out to an hour, say, such as this or later before you would even have started the work session.

Catherine ReadSo would we roll them to the 28th? I don't remember what's on there. Or would we roll it to the work session in November? These items.

Brian FosterstaffOur plan would be to discuss on the 14th during the future time. I wasn't necessarily going to decide now. That would be part of the discussion that you normally, on future agendas, when you might want to have them. But the question for us is just whether or not you want to

Catherine Readkeep them or move them. But we don't have to decide when we're going to move them

Brian Fosterstafftonight. tonight is just whether or not you want to go ahead and push them so we can change the agenda accordingly and advise people.

Catherine ReadOkay. Let's start with Council Member Hall. What is your feeling about the three items?

Stacy HallI think we probably should move them where staff is going to be there all night.

Catherine ReadOkay. Council Member Aquilon?

Rachel McQuillenI defer to anything that the city manager has recommended in this case to have staff waiting that late I'm comfortable with pushing everything to the next council member Bates

Billy Batesyeah I'd already reached out but yeah I'm okay with moving them

Catherine Readokay council member Peterson agreed council member Hard Chandler I

Stacey Hardy-Chandlerguess I'm the outlier I was in favor of keeping it my question is can we keep it and opt to move those out that night

Catherine Readbut you've got staff you're waiting for us yeah that's the

Brian Fosterstaffissue we'll have to have staff here until you and so that's in their interest I'm fine with moving it out

Catherine Readcouncil member Amos I concur

Brian Fosterstaffokay thank you we will we will make that change the other thing we had there have been some two requests for a couple of different public communications from the council and we are waiting to hear back from council as to how to proceed we provided those to you several council members have on one or the other. But not everybody has commented on both. And so we just can discuss it tonight, not discuss it tonight, but they're in limbo until we get further direction on what council wants to do. Comments?

Thomas PetersonCouncil

Catherine ReadMember

Thomas PetersonPeterson? One of them has to do with the federal situation. which sounds to me based on what I saw looks like we have an agreement really on what folks would like to see in that communication and if that's the case I'm certainly in favor of that being shared. Any other communication?

Brian FosterstaffOn the George Snyder trail.

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerI commented on that and I'm in support of the draft as it was written. And my only question was about dissemination.

Anthony AmosYeah, I think I also commented on both. I'm good.

Catherine ReadCouncil Member McQuillan.

Rachel McQuillenSo I'd like further discussion on that in a setting that I can freely discuss that with you all. I'd like to some of it and some of it I thought could there's some opportunity to convey information a little bit differently with a different tone so

Catherine ReadCouncilmember Bates,

Billy BatesI've already commented and supported both as well

Catherine ReadCouncilmember Hall

Stacy HallI do not support the proposed wording with regard to the George Snyder Trail, I was pretty clear that I didn't want to call out the two residents. I think it's fine to say it was an op-ed piece and refer to the newspaper itself, but I think it sounds like a personal attack. And as much as I want to support staff, I think the wording on that is just way too aggressive. I think it is coming across as very combative and argumentative. And I think it sounds like we're trying to full on put up a fight and defend something. And to me, that was not what the original intention of this was. I also, you know, I went back and I read the op ed again, and I'm not sure that we're totally answering or responding to what is actually being asked in there and what is actually being

questioned so i think we're just saying yet again nope this is what we said this is it but i don't know that we're fully responding to it in a way that is sufficient

Catherine Readwell i think what we're saying here is that we're not unified in this so um we're not unified in member Hardy Chandler?

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerMy understanding was also that we were given the opportunity to edit it. Correct. So I was fine with it, but I did not see any other iterations that I might have also been fine with. So I don't know what our process is for offering those possible edits. I'm open to that but I also know that we talked about getting a response out quickly so you know what is what's what's been offered as an alternative wording I'm willing to look at that and consider it so long as the essence of the message communicates what we talked about in our last discussion

Catherine ReadCouncil member Amos.

Anthony AmosI'm good at this time, but I thought, well, one, are we good? I thought that was a closed item discussion, but the second thing I'll point out is that I don't think we hit a deadline. I know we said sooner than later, but I know part of the conversation was, do we want to set a deadline for ourselves for edits? I didn't see any edits either, but if we want to give ourselves a deadline just to submit edits by, I'm fine with that. If we want to do like Friday.

Catherine ReadCouncil Member McQuillan.

Rachel McQuillenSo being the person who brought this up and had requested a closed session on this topic, since we're bringing it public, I'll just flat out say that my

Stacy Hallpurpose. Wait, we're public right now?

Rachel McQuillenYeah, we're public right now. This was brought out publicly. This is why I specifically didn't make that comment. we're still in work session.

Stacy HallMy mistake, I thought we had entered into a closed session. Well, it's

Rachel McQuillenalready out there, so I'll just go ahead. My purpose was to bring transparency. It was to create more trust. It was to, there's a way in which we could approach that communication, but what I received was not de-escalating. It read to me as very accusatory. And as it was stated, and I agreed with Councilmember Hall in our closed session, I agreed with what she just mentioned on the record, that it wasn't meant to be a tip for tat thing, that we didn't want to publicly go off and blame certain individuals. That wasn't the purpose of that. So it completely did not align with a lot of what I thought the purpose of what and the intent of what we were doing to put that out there. are not on the same page when it comes to that because I'm not going to get into a

back-and-forth it was to provide transparency regarding the process regarding the fact checking it was to receive all the information and and make sure that we were all standing you know to provide that and yeah that's not what's happening here and so no I'm not I'm not in agreement with that statement Thank you.

Catherine ReadSo if we set a deadline of Friday, if people want to make edits, you know, and again, if we can't come to an agreement, I guess that people can make their own statements if we cannot come to an agreement, but we can set a date of Friday if people want to make edits. Councilmember McQuillan?

Rachel McQuillenI have very little trust in this process right now because initially I was told that As a council, we don't bring things out of nowhere like this. And so for this to be handled in this manner is completely unacceptable, and it goes against everything as a council that we in the very beginning established and said that we would work this way together. So I am already very frustrated that this discussion has occurred this way because it has completely eliminated the ability for us to speak in a trustworthy, confidential way, and that's what closed sessions are about. we're talking about it right now, but I think it's completely inappropriate, and I'm very, very frustrated that I'm in this position, and that Council Member Hall was actually

put in a position as well to be stating where she thought she was in a closed session or it wasn't public, and now it's everywhere out there. So I don't agree with that. I think there's a way in which you communicate to the public when there's something controversial that comes up, and it should be done in a way that shows respect for the community, for different opinions, but that also then explains the information and the processes and conveys the manner in which we handled things. And that's not what the statement that we were provided said. It felt like it was just an attack and a huge defensive. It went off on a completely different thing. And I wasn't given the opportunity to discuss that with you guys personally in a closed session.

And I'm not happy about that. So I'm just going to say that and put it right out there.

Catherine ReadOkay, so why don't we get, if people want to continue pursuing this, we can set it up for Friday, and if it just doesn't gel, then we will just not go there, I guess.

Thomas PetersonSo. Well, yeah, so I am also a little bit surprised at the way this has been handled, and I think the issue bears more consideration, and I'm not so sure that the consideration that it by Friday, I also think the public deserves a better way for us to be able to expand our understanding of what's going on here. I had a hard look at everything. I'm not an attorney, but the harder I looked, the more questions I had. And I think many people in the community are in the same situation, and I don't think we've The examination of this issue so as a consequence of that I'm also just very uncomfortable With where things stand at this stage

Catherine ReadOkay Councilmember Bates.

Billy BatesWell, it was very clear to me that When the city manager said that we wanted you know before we go into closed session and And also that this was simply a reminder that, you know, they're waiting to hear back. I didn't hear any requests specifically for us to have a full-blown discussion on this tonight. I mean, that could have been by email if people didn't want to discuss this tonight. I didn't see the statement that way. but certainly again as Councilmember Hardy Chandler mentioned open to edits and look forward to seeing that by Friday

Rachel McQuillenCouncilmember McQuillan with all due respect Councilmember Bates our mayor the leader of our meeting tonight took that and brought it out publicly to all of us so that's how that got discussed thank

Catherine Readyou council member hall yeah

Stacy Halli would just like to add i'm virtual and so i'm i'm picking up most words but did not recognize that and i also saw from the owl that most people had cleared out there i did notice that jc was still there which i thought was slightly interesting because he wasn't in the closed session but uh you know we don't always seem to get a conversation on who's supposed to be present or not. So had I known, I certainly would not have said what I said. And I don't appreciate being put on the spot like that to ask what I thought about something. So at this point, I feel like the residents are owed some sort of conversation. And so I think the bigger topic here, trying not to hit on any closed session stuff,

is that we are trying to draft a response to the op-ed. And there's some disagreement on what that should look like and who it should be called out and how aggressive it should be and what our supportive staff should look like. So cats out of the bag on that one. So thanks.

Speaker 10Okay.

Catherine ReadWell, if that's all there, we're going to discuss on this, and I think it probably should be, we will now go into a closed session. Uh, the city council convene a closed meeting under 11.81 of the Code of Virginia to discuss personnel matters. All council members in favor of the motion, please signify by voting aye. Aye. Those opposed to the motion, please vote nay. The vote is unanimous in favor of the motion. The city council retired into a closed session at 1044 p.m. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.