good morning and welcome to the January 18th meeting of the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission. Could we start with a roll call? Commissioner Bertrand, Commissioner Brown, Commissioner Johnson, Commissioner Rios, Commissioner Caput, Commissioner Alternate Schifrin, Commissioner Friend, Commissioner Leopold, Commissioner McPherson, Commissioner Chase, Commissioner Batorf, Commissioner Low, I'm sorry. Okay, don't forget her. She's your right hand. In our last meeting there were complaints that we didn't get to the meet of the meeting until later on and so I'm gonna move oral communications to the end of the meeting so we can get to the items that are on our regular agenda as quickly as possible. So I'll look to see if there's any additions or deletions to the agenda. Good morning, Mr. Dondaro. Good morning, Mr. Chairman and commissioners. Yes, we have a replacement page for page two of the agenda. We have a handout for item 17, a handout, public comments on item 20 and we have a handout of slides for the presentation that will be part of item 20. Okay, thank you. Then we'll move on to the consent agenda. These are items that are considered non-controversial and be taken as one motion. Is there anyone who would like to pool an item off the consent agenda? Yes, please. My name is Gail McNaltin. I'm executive director with Greenway. Actually, I've got a lot of things I just wanted to speak to on the consent agenda. First of all, under budget and expenditure items, number 10 for approving storm damage repairs, the civil engineering services. I realize that that may go hand in hand with Supervisor Friend's letter that he wrote about the needed maintenance that homeowners are requesting and that this is perhaps addressing that, this thing that came out here today. But I believe that both item number 10 under budget and item number 13b relate to item 20 on the regular agenda, so I would request that you would pull those off. I think it's important that when we talk about going forward with a fair unified corridor study process, we really look carefully about how we're spending our money. We are still trying to figure out how to pull it. If you're asking to pull it, we will wait to tell us about it. I'm just justifying that I think it relates to item 20. It should be included in that discussion. Item number 13c, I just would like to make sure that everybody has had a chance to take a look at that, the elderly and disabled are complaining. I think looking for help on metro fairs, and that's something that I think is also part of our overall discussion that when things are put through on the consent agenda, you may not have a chance to really think too much about them, and it's important because it relates very much to how we spend our money. And then going down to item number 15, accept information items. I'm really confused as to why this is always all new stories about rail, and we don't ever seem to have the op-ed or anything for anything other than rail. So just again, what you're projecting as a regional transportation commission that is currently doing a unified corridor study that is looking at different options, if you're going to accept any of these information items, you really should be representing all of the communication that's going on in our community. It's very subjective to be choosing just these. Thank you. Thank you. So we will move item 10 and 13b to the, we'll make them items number 20a and 20b. Is there anyone else about items on the consent agenda? Seeing none, I will ask for a consent agenda as amended. Motion by Schifrin. Second. Seconded by Chase. All in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Any objections or abstentions? Motion passes unanimously. Then we will move on to the regular agenda. Here we will start with commissioner reports. Are there any commissioners who would like to report? Seeing none, we will move on to item, oh, good morning Mr. Bertrand. So last Thursday at the capitol of the city council meeting we had a presentation by Fort and Greenway and as you could imagine it was quite filled, our auditorium, excuse me, our city council chambers was complete full and we had an overall room, overflow room. So by and large the discussion centered around waiting for the completion of the unified quarter study which is what the city of capitol chose to do at that point. One person was not there and also making a statement which we chose not to do. So we feel in capitol that the unified quarter study is only important in terms of making decisions for Santa Cruz and providing transportation needs. So I'd like to emphasize that from capitol's standpoint. Thank you. Any other commissioners? Seeing none I'll move on to item number 17 which is a director report. Good morning Mr. Dondaro. Morning commissioners. Just a few items this morning to report on. First our rail court or maintenance program which is addressed by in a letter from commissioner friend that's in the consent agenda previously mentioned. In response to that I'd like you to know that RTC staff has been working very diligently to repair and resolve the storm damage on the line to establish a preventative maintenance program and to respond to ongoing issues along the rail line. Staff is putting the tools and protocols in place to manage the corridor through three major areas. Storm damage repair, maintaining the right of way and creation of a web-based issue reporting system. A request for qualifications for on-call civil engineering services will soon be issued and it is broken up into three categories. Civil engineering, structural engineering inspections and construction management and details on the entire program will be provided to you at our March RTC meeting. Secondly our visualizing sustainable transportation project is entering phase two. Staff is partnered with the city of Watsonville to support their downtown complete streets planning efforts and RFP was released last month and we expect to be underway on the project by early March. In this phase we will produce visualizations that will be used during the outreach phase of the planning process for the city's complete streets plan. And finally the Central Coast Coalition Ledge Day is annual event is January 30th. I will join chair Leopold and representatives from the other four Central Coast Coalition counties for a day in Sacramento to visit our delegation and transportation officials from the CPC. That concludes my report. Thank you for the brief report questions, Mr. Bertron. Yeah, one of the things that I pressed for earlier was updates on the Unified Quarters Study and being the capitol of Fils is a particularly important item to be addressed. I'd like more attention to that and I was going to ask the chair if we could have a side committee have some discussion about a side committee to keep individual members of the RTC abreast of all activities that are going on with the Unified Quarters Study. So it's my request to the chair. The other thing is some months ago at the beginning of the spring I think we asked for a study to be done on the capitol of Tressel. Came up in our discussion last Thursday. We're very concerned about the future of the Tressel, its capability of sustaining traffic. That was due in November and I haven't seen it yet. So I was wondering about the status of that report. It's my mic on. Okay. You're correct, Mr. Bertron. You did request an engineering analysis or inspection of the bridge in Capitola. The RTC is working to release a request for proposals for engineering services, as was mentioned by the director, that will include inspections of railroad bridges including the Capitola Bridge. I know one of the concerns from the city of Capitola was that there should be this inspection or analysis before any trains ran over the line again and since there are no trains running over the line we felt it was okay to take a little more time to make sure that we got an engineer on board at the at the RTC who we have now and to make sure that that analysis is done with you know much better oversight from the RTC. So it was brought to my attention when I brought it up earlier in the last year, excuse me, that November represented the timeline at which a report should be due. I think it was two years and also we got some communication to the city of Capitola that the report that was done did not look adequately at the foundation in terms of its actual ability to support sustained transportation and all that that would you know juggle the foundation, liquid factions, since it's a creek, etc. stuff like that. So we're very concerned. The reason why we're concerned actually is because people live, people actually live below that trestle. So it's not an academic issue, it's a real issue for many people. Supervisor Friend. Chair, just for a point of order and the executive director answered some of the questions associated with item 13b, but that's a pulled item. Would you like me to wait to address my questions back to him to when that item is heard? Yeah, that would be great. Are there any other questions for the executive director? Seeing none, we'll move on to item 18 which is our Caltrans report. Good morning, Ms. Lowe. Good morning, Mr. Chair, members of the commission and happy new year. In many ways we're being, I guess the new year is kind of hitting us hard in some ways with in particular guard to storm damage. Storm damage is something that this county is very familiar with after the storms of last year. In this year, as you might know, on January 9th there was an unprecedented storm event following the thomas fire in southern california that brought down a huge amount of debris mud onto highway 101 in Santa Barbara in the city of Santa Barbara and the count in the northern part of the county. Highway 101 is still closed. Certainly if you are, if Santa Barbara is your destination you can get there. You cannot get south of 101 on the freeway at this time.  Marine shuttles have been operating between Ventura and Santa Barbara. They normally are the ones that take people out to the islands to go diving but there's been a number of efforts to come in to play there to allow people to continue to connect to southern california but if southern california is your destination we'd still advise people to use an inland route. Go down Interstate 5. We do have people working around the clock and just want everybody to know that that's taking up a significant amount of resource but we are committed to getting that open as soon as possible. Meanwhile, other business that we continue on with is we've announced our call for projects for transportation planning grants. The 2018-19 cycle is now upon us. You might know we just announced awards last fall from an extra amount that was available to us through Senate Bill 1. This round there are 40.8 million dollars available for transportation planning grants in the in the categories of sustainable communities, strategic partnerships, and adaptation planning and in each of these we're encouraging local and regional agencies to look forward to new endeavors to make transportation a better community amenity and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as become ready for the changes that we face as our as the climate changes around us. You also have an updated project update in your packet and there are a couple other items I just want to highlight that are in your packet. One was the letter responding to questions late in the year. You had a number of questions regarding 152 pedestrian access in the Watsonville area as well as the wildlife connectivity program and how the credit system will work. So hopefully we've answered those questions in the letter to you. If you have need for more information I can provide that to you. Finally I wanted to bring some information about the California Road Charge pilot program. This document this is a highlight document that's also in your packet. It's also available on the website California Road Charge pilot. Senate Bill 1077 called for information to be developed about a potential replacement for the gas tax. This would be a long-term sustainable transportation funding mechanism and I just want to emphasize research. This is a research effort. It was the largest research effort of its kind. There were 5,000 vehicles that participated so drivers with representing 5,000 vehicles and over 37 million miles were reported over the nine-month period. The graphic on the screen there identifies the four phases that were undertaken. There was a one-year phase just to develop the design of the program. Then there was a second phase to set up the program with the with getting the volunteers getting the equipment ready. The third phase was operating it. That was occurred over a nine-month period. Are there folks here who may have anybody here? Just me? All right. Okay, great. Thank you. And then phase four is the report. The phase four report is available now. As you see this is a four-page highlight. There's a summary report and then there is also a full report available. This effort was sponsored by the California State Transportation Agency and it was managed by Caltrans in coordination with the California Transportation Commission. They tested basically they tested three things the functionality, the complexity and the feasibility of a road user charge and the very basis of a road user charge is to have people have users pay according to the miles they drive. And as you know the current method of revenue for transportation is gas tax predominantly. Santa Cruz County are now afforded the luxury of a sales tax initiative tied to another mechanism. The reason that we need to look at other options is because of the the dynamics with fuel efficiency and inflation and our desire to wean ourselves off of fossil fuel vehicles. A gas tax as we've had increased with SB1 was a very critical step in the overall scheme of transportation being able to have a sustainable source of revenue to fix what's broken but looking beyond our kind of current horizon we need to look at something that's longer and even more sustainable. This research validated the feasibility of our user-based mechanism but it has not by any means made any conclusion or recommendation to adopt a user-based recommendation a user-based fee to implement it. Additional investigation is needed and of course there would be legislation and a complexity of other issues that would have to come to pass before a such a charge would be in place. But there more investigation and these mechanics could ensue in time. This report just gives you the overview of what we learned with this research. The graphics on the screen here indicate a breakdown of who the volunteers were, how they were distributed around the state, the types of vehicles that participate in the program and the types of recording mechanisms that were available. So what happens next is really up to the legislature in terms of what direction we want to pursue but this provides the information necessary to take to take it into another avenue than you. Any questions? Other questions for Ms. Lowe? Mr. Schifrin, I have a question about the IWI-17 Wildlife Connectivity Project. The letter says that at this point construction funding has not been identified as part of this agreement. Which agreement are you talking about? Because I thought Measure D did include funding for that project. I know they don't have all the funding as I understand it. Some of it is. Yes, Commissioner Schifrin, this this is specific to the agreement with Cal Fish and Wildlife Service, Cal Fish and Wildlife. The agreement, the credit agreement was established specific to the three million dollar investment from the State Highway Operations Protection Program. And that investment was just funding the support for the development of the project to to basically deliver a set of plans. So then so construction funding itself is not part of the agreement itself. The agreement between Cal Trans and CDF. Correct. GDFW. I call him Cal Wild. Yes. Cal Wild. And then you recommend that the commission may wish to consider engaging in similar negotiations with Cal Wild for local contributions to earn credits. What does that mean? I mean are you suggesting that the commission contact the Cal Wild directly and to try to negotiate an agreement where the local contributions would mean money from the the measure D would be considered part of that. I'm just trying to understand what how this all is could fit together. Yes, Commissioner Schifrin, generally speaking, yes. The the contributions that came from the shop were subject of this negotiation that resulted in this agreement. The the commission's contribution to the construction would be subject to a subsequent agreement. We'd probably work with you on that or get you going because the framework is there but it was just for that amount to to establish that moving forward and subsequent there hasn't been we just haven't had the discussions about the construction funding yet. So. I wonder if there's a question for for a director is does the commission need does the commission need to give staff a direction to follow up on this to work with Caltrans and Cal Wild on the local contribution or is that sort of incorporated in what you're intending to do anyway? It's my understanding we would do that automatically. We certainly want to get the credits the same as Caltrans got them because we could use those on future product projects. So we haven't programmed that money yet. The project's still in the very early stages which is why we haven't gotten there yet but we will definitely that will be included that will be included yes as part of our agreement with with Caltrans. But we appreciate the question coming up so there's not an assumption that it would go to come to pass so. It's just another way in which the Measure D funds help us with with other projects down the line so it's that investment really makes a difference so I'm glad to hear this information and I think we can take advantage of it. Are there other questions from as low Mr. Rios? Yes good morning. I wanted to follow up just on 152. There are areas like Brewington and Eastlake 152 where two schools are there and we wanted to follow up on seeing how we can put lights safety lights so my understanding is that we have to go through you to make that happen. Yes we own the the highway so there's a there's a relationship there where a request would be made. We've we've done a lot of evaluation of the 152 area and we could probably provide you another assessment of another update on our assessments. I'd like to follow up on that because we have two schools traffic is pretty pretty intense there and there's been coming a lot of complaints from the residents so our staff will be following up with you. Thank you. Other questions. That's five minutes of questions because we don't have a 930 item or we could just take a short break. Supervisor Caput. I'll give this to you after you know the meeting but on 152 also a woman with her bicycle was killed at Auto Center Drive and 152 and friends and relatives are requesting that there is no speed limit sign after it's 40 miles an hour at Clifford and Aloni on 152. After that there's no sign until you get to Main Street and Freedom Boulevard where it then reduces to 25. So they're requesting that the speed limit sign be put in that would actually be less than 40 miles an hour between Clifford, Aloni and also Rodriguez. Commissioner Caput we we address that question in our letter as well. There are as you noted there are two speed limits 40 at one point and 25 at the other. There's not an opportunity for us to to impose a step down speed limit but I know that you've asked for advance you know warning signs that let people know that there's a speed reduction ahead and we're looking into that. So it would be something other than the lowering the speed that would be some kind of a warning light or what would be. Our engineers are looking into what that would be but it would not be an intermediate speed limit that would not be enforceable. And it's a little confusing at Freedom Boulevard in Maine that if you're going south southeast then it's 25 going into town but right across the street on going out of town it's 40 miles. That little contradictory there. I don't believe so but I mean there's 25 going in you got 40 across the street going out. Yeah the zones are we do surveys for speed zones every seven years and take that responsibly very seriously. So certainly that area outside of town is a higher speed limit than it is in the downtown area so that would explain why you would have a different sign leaving town. And then later on I'll give you right up on a request to maybe in the future looking at where Anseldo school is. There's a lot of traffic there's a park there there's a school there and when you're crossing 152 at that point it's very it's getting very very dangerous. We're going to put sidewalks on both sides. So some kind of a warning light there too or something people can get in and out of the park on the school without crossing the freeway during high traffic. And this is information that you have for me you said you'd give me after the meeting for it to be more specific. Thank you. Miss Lowe I just had one question about the road charge project. If the state decided to go with some method that was used here would that require a two-thirds vote of the legislature or the voters because it's a new fee or charge? Mr. McPherson I'm sorry I don't know the answer to that question there would have to be it would have to be enacted via through the legislature and that's usually so easy so yeah right yes yes yes okay well we're going to take a a one or two minute break and ask that the whether we need to hear from the public there's an item on the agenda. All right we'll see if there's members of the public who would like to address us about the CalTrans report. Thank you very much my name is Becky Steinbrunner I'm a resident of Aftos I have a question about the road charge how would that be assessed per vehicle per driver for older vehicles that may not have the built-in Bluetooth automatic tracking devices that newer cars have and my second question is I've I've spoken to you before about many neighborhood concerns in the sea cliff area of Aftos at the intersection of State Park and Highway 1 Southbound and off-ramp and northbound and and southbound on ramp it has been made public that by Supervisor Friend that is CalTrans responsibility for that intersection danger nearby at Sea Ridge and State Park. It is a huge concern of safety for those areas and I would really appreciate CalTrans looking into it for improvements thank you. Is there anyone else who would like to address us about the CalTrans report? Good morning. Good morning. My name is Brett Garrett and I just wanted to say something quick about the planning grants that are being offered by CalTrans. This is a tremendous opportunity to expand the unified corridor study to include personal rapid transit. I believe we can have the best transportation system and the best trail and the lowest carbon emissions all at the same time by implementing personal rapid transit on the rail corridor. This planning grant is a huge opportunity to apply to get funds to to to get that studied and I encourage it. Thank you. Thank you. Morning. Good morning. My name is William Minsheen. I'm the time resident of Santa Cruz and I would like to address that same that same planning grant and suggest that the RTC consider seriously about looking at toll road usage of Highway 1 as a way of actually eventually developing into something that would provide for bus rapid transit and high occupancy toll lanes on the freeway. Thank you. Thank you. As long as we're looking at new things it wouldn't hurt to study the small autonomous minibuses that are being tested all around us in northern California. They expected to have them on the road by the end of 2017 in San Francisco. I think that's been extended but they're testing them in San Jose, San Rafael. Software was invented just over the hill. It's a local technology and it's something that would fit very nicely with the scale of Santa Cruz so and it would be affordable. No gas, no operating costs, eco-friendly. I don't understand why it's not part of the Unified Corridor Study. Thank you. Trying to talk about the Caltrans report here. Good morning. One thing that struck to me in that report was the whole SoCal mention of the Highway 101 being shut down in an area and I noticed that there was actually some redundancy that they had going on there. They mentioned that Amtrak was able to save the day and offer a commuters a solution there and the point with that is redundancy is sexy and we need to look at that as an option for ensuring our region has options in times of transportation crisis or any sort of crisis and so as Caltrans works on the 2040 plan state rail plan I think that might be able to tie in as well and provide us some extra options for getting people moving around here. Thank you. Thank you. For anyone else, seeing none we will go to our Item 19 which is a scheduled 930 public hearing on the draft 2040 regional transportation plan. There's a staff report, the executive summary of the draft 2040 regional transportation plan. Morning, Ms. Blakesy. Sorry about that. Good morning, Ms. Daikar. Item today is the public hearing on the draft 2040. Can you speak up please? We start again here. Good morning, commissioners. My item on the agenda is the public hearing for the draft 2040 Santa Cruz County regional transportation plan otherwise known as the RTP. The Santa Cruz County regional transportation plan is a state mandated long-range transportation plan. The RTC is responsible for developing and implementing for Santa Cruz County. This plan is a minor update to the work that was done for the 2014 regional transportation plan. The three main components of the plan. The first is the policy element. This includes the goals, policies, and targets. This was based on the work that was done for the 2014 RTP to rework the policy element based on a triple bottom line analysis. The draft goals, policies, and targets were approved by this commission in March 2016 with a site revision and the policies and targets that were approved in April 2017. Another component of the plan is the financial element. This is an estimate of how much transportation revenue will be available for Santa Cruz County over the next 22-year time period. The total estimate is $3.7 billion over this time period. There's 52 percent estimated to be from local. There's 36 estimated to be from the state and federal is 12 percent. The third element is the action element. This defines the transportation needs in our county that are required to operate, maintain, and improve the transportation system. RTC staff works very closely with the local jurisdictions and other project sponsors to develop this list. This first, the list was divided to was brought together to define all the transportation needs in the county and then this list was divided into the projects that could be funded within the foreseeable revenues. This $3.7 million that was developed in the financial element as well as projects that would need additional funding in order to be implemented. The complete project list was approved by the commission in August 2016 and then the constrained project list or the priority project list based on the financial constraints was approved in April 2017 and this project list is over 500 projects. It can be found in Appendix F of the draft document. These projects include roadway projects, transit, bicycle and pedestrian projects as well as programs. This project list, the total need for the county was is estimated at $7 billion and the available amount of revenue is $3.7 billion. So it's about half of the need is accommodated for under our financial constraints. The RTC is also coordinating with AMBAG on the Metropolitan Transportation Plan. AMBAG, the Association for Monterey Bay Area Governments develops the Metropolitan Transportation Plan which incorporates the regional transportation plans from Santa Cruz, San Benito and Monterey. The information that Santa Cruz County develops for both the financial element and the action element which is the project list feeds into the Metropolitan Transportation Plan that AMBAG is developing. The regional transportation plan is subject to the California Environmental Quality Act requirements otherwise known as CEQA, this environmental impact report for the for the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Plan as well as the regional transportation plans for Monterey and San Benito are all combined together into a combined environmental impact report for the whole region. AMBAG is the lead on this effort but RTC staff has been coordinating very closely with AMBAG. Next steps for this project are the on January 30th AMBAG is the lead in providing an open house and public hearing for the environmental impact report that'll be out at Simkins between six and eight o'clock. On February 5th is the end of the public comment period for the 2040 Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Plan, the draft EIR as well as the 2040 Metropolitan Transportation Plan. On March 1st RTC staff is scheduled to bring back to the commission the final draft regional transportation plan based on the comments that are being received prior to the February 5th deadline in order to submit the project list to AMBAG for their final run of their travel demand model to bring all this information together and then on June 13th AMBAG will be scheduled to adopt their final 2040 Metropolitan Transportation Plan, sustainable community strategy and to certify and consider and certify the final environmental impact report and then RTC staff will be coming back to this commission on June 21st to adopt the final 2040 Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Plan and to receive the final environmental impact report. I'll be happy to take any comments and questions. Thank you. Are there any questions or comments, Mr. Bertrand? You have a question. Can you refer to page 3 dash 13 and while she's looking that up this is I'll repeat the line. The report recommends upgrading the rail on the Santa Cruz branch line to federal rail administration class 2 rails so that we can have speeds up to 25 miles an hour. So just a general question. How would you characterize the current state of the rail that we have in our quarter? Are we class 1? Are we going up to class 2 in certain areas or are we even below class 1? I can try to address that. The operator that's been out there they've been operating the line at accepted track which is the minimum level that you must have to operate the lowest level of freight service and wherever they've run passenger excursion service they've done the work necessary to make sure that the track was at class 1. Now as you know the the rail line did suffer some damages as a report as a result of the storm so obviously in some spots there's some work needed to make sure that the track is usable but that's primarily north of Watsonville and up to about just just past the dump area. Follow-up question? Since we do have commercial operations around Watsonville how would you characterize the rail quality around Watsonville? In terms of class. I ask a point of procedure here. The purpose of this item is to provide input to staff on the regional transportation plan to not to discuss the rail project or rail facilities. It's about do we want changes in the plan do we have particular comments on the plan itself and that's as I understand it maybe staff can correct me as the purpose of this item. Okay I stayed corrected. I do have another question about page 4-3. This is the sustainability policies so I note that on most items the economic benefit or the cost effectiveness is being checked off so would you characterize this as a major component to try to figure out if anything is sustainable for any kind of improvements here in Santa Cruz? I'm sorry are you looking at the cost effectiveness and system? Yeah when I look at all the the the rows uh consistently either cost issues are checked off so it sounds to me like that's a major component for anything that we choose to move forward on. I just want to know yeah that is part of the um policies and goals of our plan. It is part of it but it seems to be a major function a major portion that's what I just want to confirm okay thanks one other question so on page um 72 7-2 I'm trying to understand figures 71 7.1 so it seems like that the long-term trend for the daily total VMT is dropping 15 reduction according to this graph since 2005. Do you feel that this is a fairly good projection? The recent year shows arise so I'm trying to understand that. This data is taken from the highway performance monitoring system that Cal Trans runs so the information is developed by taking traffic counts on the various different roadways in our county and then estimate the vehicle miles traveled related to that based on the traffic counts. They can't take traffic counts everywhere as you can imagine so I think it is a good estimate as you can see there is an anomalous number here for 2010 which I think that the methodology that they were going through at the time in developing the system had changed so there's a little bit of uplift there. I think that we this provides some good information for our county as far as what what the vehicle miles traveled is looking like both as a total and then per capita there's the per capita numbers here are representative of the actual population estimates from the Department of Finance through 2015 but that's also a piece of the 2020 trend line is what the VMT per capita would be so this this data is challenging to get I feel like it is some of the best data that we can have for trying to understand greenhouse gas emissions and vehicle miles travel changes in our county. No I appreciate that seems like going back to 2011 to get our time frame would be more accurate than going back to 2005 in terms of the trend. The reason 2005 is used is because that's what required through Senate Bill 375 and so initially the the baseline through some of the legislation executive orders from in the past was 1990 but that became unrealistic because the data was not available for 1990 so then the baseline that was decided for 3 Senate Bill 375 was 2005 so that's why we're trying to keep some consistency with the way people are viewing these different numbers there's a there's a lot of differences in the way things are viewed vehicle miles traveled are viewed greenhouse gas emission reductions are viewed and as much as we can keep to a standard the more the easier it'll be for an understanding of what's happening. Okay I appreciate that clarification. Our other question Supervisor McPherson. Yeah I think the most telling thing is we have seven billion dollars worth of needs over the next 22 years and we're going to get half the revenue. I think if this change of vehicle miles travel that seven 3.7 change that much I mean if we base some of our funding mechanisms according to that is it going to be stable whether we have just pure sales tax what we're doing now compared to if we get into the vehicle miles traveled or is there a nexus there. Rachel Morricone of our staff is really the expert in the financial estimate for this document given Senate Bill 1 and the changes with the amount of money that's available for transportation I think things are looking a little bit better but Commissioner Low brought up the issues with developing transportation funding based on a gas tax is not a sustainable system and moving towards something where it's based on a vehicle miles traveled in the long run it seems like is the direction that we need to go. Does that answer your question? Other questions. Thank you for the presentation and now I'll open up the public hearing for any comments about the 2040 regional transportation plan. Let's just let's do it at three minutes I'm not sure how many speakers we have how many people would like to speak to this item just a handful if you could keep your comments brief that'd be great morning. Hi so I haven't had a chance to view this current draft but I was informed that it's something we revise every year and I'm here to speak about a particular interest I have in the 17 Express and the Highway 17 Express Amtrak connector shelf service that's let's see it pertains a lot to I mean I guess Cynthia Edd and then I believe the other transit representatives here at the meeting but one thing that I observed when I was riding across I timed myself leaving on the bus there from Scotts Valley to Campbell and it was exactly 30 minutes so that's half as long as it takes for that bus to go on a normal trip now on that bus serves a lot of different interests it serves well namely it serves Amtrak connections and then VTA and SCMTD but it also it also serves you know like a huge number of different demographics I want I made a list so it serves San Jose State University you know just any member of this the Santa Clara Chamber of Commerce the Silicon Valley Organization UCSC vacationing students use it and it's really impacted when they use it on those days those three-day weekends CalTrain connectors anybody going to just light rail anywhere over the entire valley well one thing that I noticed was that it was established around 1990 and at that time the only way to get across to San Jose was the Greyhound and the Greyhound would stop in Los Gatos and at that time you know you know pretty you know it was pretty hard to come up with 650 so getting to Los Gatos was kind of nice for 525 but basically the Valley has developed since we established that route the Valley has developed a light rail line that comes down to Winchester north of Los Gatos and that's been like to me it's it's actually kind of frustrating that every time I take that bus and I go to San Jose I go right by the light rail I go right by the Hamilton light rail stop that you could you could in theory take bypass afternoon brush hour traffic jams on 280 so I'm just suggesting that in a future revision they they kind of addressed the the fact that that route hasn't been really like any kind of route changes haven't been considered probably since it was first established. Do you just want to identify yourself for the record? Bradley Snyder just a member okay thank you I just want to remind people we're talking about the regional transportation plan the 2040 regional transportation plan. Gail McNulty speaking as a mother at this moment and I want to express my concern about the way this plan is being put forward I realized it's a perfunctory document I did write to chairman Leopold saying that I thought this was going to be an overstacked meeting today I think this is an incredibly important document I'm a parent I think probably many of you are parents some of you might even be grandparents this is about how we're going to give Santa Cruz County the opportunity to affect our own future and the fact that we're rushing this through because we've got another important agenda item that people want to talk to is a problem I think honestly if we promoted this to the citizens climate lobby and you know greenway alone we we could fill several hours of public comment on this topic alone but I wasn't able to put this out as something for our community to talk on because we need to talk on the topic that's coming up later in the agenda so I think we're doing our community of disservice by just passing this through and quite honestly in reading it I haven't had a chance to read through it thoroughly but I'm really disappointing I don't think we're aspiring to do nearly enough to if we want to affect greenhouse gases we need a radical shift in thinking and it is not what I see happening here in this county right now so I hope that we can slow down I honestly wish we would maybe redo this public meeting and make it someplace where more people that have the opportunity to comment if we promoted it to the citizens climate lobby we could build a civic auditorium so you know just a thought thank you good morning Michael St from Aptos representing campaign for sensible transportation I'd like to second everything that Gail said she was right on and Mr Bertrand I'm going to make a comment about that graft I agree with Mr Bertrand the scale should be started at 2011 I believe the graph went down in 08 and 9 and 7 because of the financial downturn people stopped driving over the hill basically because they didn't have job so start that graft at 11 I think you'll see something much different basically I didn't want to come up here and spout numbers or give out handouts like I usually do I wanted just to do a general consensus here after reading the 2040 RTP the plan is pretty clear what needs to be done now all we have to do is put aside the politics which is harder for some than others put aside our differences and find a common ground we have a lot of smart compassionate hardworking people on this commission on the staff and in the audience and community I believe we all want the same thing an efficient and affordable transportation system one that affords safety convenience reduces congestion meets the goals set forth to combat climate change and is sustainable I believe this is related to the UCS as well any project that does not meet the goals should be eliminated from the unified quarter study and that money spent on a project that meets the goals of the 2040 RTP you as commissioners have a huge responsibility to move us in a new direction and away from the old way of doing things and give us a different and new way to a sustainable transportation system and for all of us here and it is time to stop talking the talk and walk the walk thank you for your time thank you good morning good morning my name is Barry Scott I live in Aptos and I'll be brief the my friend Josh mentioned redundancy Santa Barbara thank goodness for them that they had a rail line during the mudslides we sent I think seven locomotives and 17 passenger cars so that they could they could manage some of their transportation needs there but for the grace of god go we I think we're more prone to slides and earthquakes than Santa Barbara county we're sitting on a rail line when we look at the long-term needs of this county both for sustainability and for safety and redundancy and reliability I think we I think we're tasked with with meeting our goals by using in part by using our rail line the 2040 plan 10 000 uc students coming by 2040 the rail plan and and Pajaro station and what Monterey is doing how can we not keep our rail line and use that to meet our 2040 goals thank you thank you anyone else about the 2040 RTP regional transportation plan morning good morning and happy new year my name is Becky Steinbrunner I'm resident of Aptos I want to second uh Ms. McNulty's suggestion that you extend the public comment time for this document um I uh I do not think that it has gone before the county's commission on the environment which would make good sense to do especially since the focus is to reduce greenhouse gases so I would like to ask also for an extension of public comment time on this document I would um like to also point out and the report that it ambag is the lead agency I do plan to go to the January 30th hearing in Santa Cruz but I have looked over some of that document and in one of the attachments about growth goals it actually reports that they project a population decrease in this area so I'm I'm kind of curious about all this and wondering where the information is coming from how the modeling is being done and how it will actually affect our county and your commission's decisions in what to do I want to urge you to look at as many different solutions creative solutions as possible and rather than studying them to death actually put some money into doing pilot projects try things see how they work instead of just study them to death and throw money away thank you very much thank you at the 2040 regional transportation plan Robert Stevens from Aptos and I just wanted to echo Bruce's concerns we all have tons of desires on how to solve this through our transportation plan but it's all going to take money and where is the money going to come from hopefully you can choose wisely in your decisions because we can't afford everything thank you very much thank you morning I'm Kerry Pico from Aptos I actually don't have an opinion on this at all however I've heard that people were asking about Cal Trans information and some of you know that I now have an account at Cal Trans I have all the Cal Trans data for as many years as possible I would be glad to give it to you analyze it to you I can tell you every five minutes every lane what the volume is what the traffic is whatever data is available online it's free of charge I don't have an angle on this at all but if anybody's questioning the veracity of the data I'm offering it okay and so many of you know how to reach me and if not you can ask my local representative Zach friend and that's all I'm offering so the data is different than what I hear from the RTC frequently and that's why I dug into it and I'd like to have it just clean and true thank you thank you so I just want to I just if there are any more people it should be about the 2040 regional transportation plan if you want to speak to that please come forward I'm Roxy Hartley I represent agron bio energy where biodiesel produced in the city of Watsonville and we're intending to ramp production and the rail line is absolutely essential to us for moving rail cars we think we'll be moving about 700 rail cars a year at the end of this year some of those rail cars we would like to move north and we end up transloading fuel in the city of Watsonville in Santa Cruz itself thank you very much thank you the 2040 regional transportation plan good morning my name is Peter Stanger in the plan I was formerly a member of people power and then people power changed this name to bike Santa Cruz county when I was a member I asked for the non-profit status and I was told then that they were not a non-profit they're a political advocacy group and that I could not write it off my dues to bike Santa Cruz county because they're not a non-profit I bring this up only because in the 2040 regional plan in chapter 2 page 20 regarding the transportation demand management there's a sentence that says partner agencies include local jurisdictions and non-profits such as ecology action and bike Santa Cruz county and you might want to double check and make sure that they do have a IRS non-profit status otherwise the plan has a factual error thank you is there any more public comment seeing none oh I would definitely like to address what I think is missing from this plan and that's basically vision you know we're looking at a 25-year plan that as far as I can tell does not really provide the kind of vision that is necessary for this county an obvious example is that you know the big debate in our transportation world these days is whether it on it should be a train or no train blah blah blah and it's really a proxy fight over the freeway the issue that I see is that we've got something like a hundred thousand people commuting or using the freeway every day and our 25-year plan doesn't have any way of actually taking the lion's share of those people and allowing them to use alternative transportation on the freeway corridor let's see here basically two-thirds or something like that of you know the traffic coming through the middle of the county is going on to Silicon Valley or going on to Santa Clara County and that there's really no alternative for the masses of people to get to do anything but drive in a single occupancy vehicle so I really think that you know one of the most important things that this plan could do is address a you know truly address bus rapid transit and what it's going to take in the tier one process to make the modification of the freeway work in the future for bus rapid transit so as the highway is widened and there eventually are three lanes and you're coming back to replace all the over crossings those over over crossings should consider what it's going to entail to get direct access ramps to where the majority of the traffic is going now Dominican hospital, Cabrillo College being able to connect the Soquel and freeway corridors being able to get to multimodal transit stations in Scotts Valley so that the highway connects eventually two seventeen highway one connects two seventeen and connects to the valley anyway I really think that this group in terms of vision it's you know the real question is who owns the vision is it this this body is it the RTC staff or is it the public I think that there's a real disconnect between what is necessary in terms of getting on with it and doing something that's really going to move the needle in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and what we see as business as usual which is pushing out these paper processes and going off 10 15 years of planning that doesn't really address the problems I think that you really all can do better than this and I think that you should really think about that there's a process problem and it needs to be corrected thank you thank you last call for the 2040 regional transportation plan seeing nothing I will bring it back here to the commission for questions or action uh supervisor I mean uh commissioner shifrin as I understand the the staff recommendation we were only supposed to hold the public hearing today and then individual commissioners could submit as well as members of the public could submit comments by February 5th on the plan is that correct it's correct the public comment period is open from February 5th and it started on December 8th so I don't know if we need a motion but if we need a motion to move on I would so move uh I don't think we need a motion uh if there's any comments that that people want to share with uh with staff I did have just one question uh it um uh Ms. Dicar could you remind us about the process that went into the creation of the 2014 um uh regional transportation plan which this is built off of so there were the 2014 regional transportation plan for santa cruz county was a major update compared to the previous plans we do go through the regional transportation planning process every four years but in 2014 um we started probably it was 2011 three years ahead of time to rework the plan substantially by really kind of taking a look at the trends for what people are doing and we worked very closely with the sustainable transport with the sustainable transportation council and using the star's sustainable transportation analysis rating system which really the um the meat of that was looking much more closely at our goals policies and targets one of the things that's a real standout in my mind for the 2014 regional transportation plan is that we developed targets for our plan to um forecast if this project was implemented how well would we advance these um goals and policies and when it meet those targets all that information is still incorporated into this plan there's an appendix uh d i believe that incorporates all of the performance measure analysis for how well we met the target for the 2014 regional transportation plan um so it's just a great process to go through to see how we meeting these different goals and um policies that we've developed i think that's the big thing that we worked very closely with the sustainable transportation council um the planning process is um transportation planning process is a typically a three-year process you've uh seen rtc staff come to you even for this plan which is a minor update over the last number of years we've come to you probably at least three or four times a year with the various different milestones of this project to get your input um on each step so that as we bring the document together um you've already had some um decision making about the project list the policy element the financial element so that all of this can come together we have to work very closely with ambag on this that there's a travel demand model that's used in order to run all these projects that are in the project list everything takes time and um we want to make sure that there's a process well in place for um getting your input getting the public input all the advisory committee inputs um to develop this plan okay yeah no i appreciate that the reason i asked about that is because they're also on our star's uh uh rating system which we were one of the first in the country to use we also had an advisory group that was made up of some technical experts in uh transportation policy as well as business uh members on on that group we held uh community meetings around sustainability we really restructured the document to be guided towards sustainability and having some metrics for the first time to look at our plan um and this is a minor update we'll be doing um a major update in the next couple of years but a lot went into this and it did lay the groundwork for us to be able to come up with um something to be able to go out to the voters to look to to uh help fulfill that un met financial need which ended up being measure d which really helps us here in santa cruz county and i encourage people to to be involved but the the the commission's been working on this document for a number of years we actually adopted the star's system in 2009 um and uh and we start you know so we we we've been working on this for a while then we will continue to evolve it over time but i appreciate the work of staff and putting this forward anyone else rios yes following in that um all of this is going to be in our information network for all the people that raised the issue of not informing people enough so i my question is that from now until february 5th right there's going to be all the different networks where people can put their inputs correct there's we have all information on our web page um we put out emails to um oh it's about a four at least 3,500 people that have expressed interest in this study um what other outreach we do we the with ambag they've been providing flyers out as far as the public hearing so this there's a lot of information out there about this process that we've been going through so for those comments that were raised that we need to inform more people the networks are there for people to know about them now and for um at the vision view people also have the networks to put their vision to include in the in the comment period correct we will be looking at all the public comments that we we receive um and that have been received over the past we've look very closely at the public comments to see if there's something missing and if we need to adjust and i just want to mention that this public comment period was open december 8th after the december 7th meeting was when i brought um the this document to the commission to um ask for the ability to release the document on december 8th thank you very much all right thank you for for your work and i look forward to the meeting on january 30th thank you next we'll move on to item 20 which is a santa cruz branch rail line replacement operator there is a number of materials a staff report a notice of default to uh iowa pacific holdings response from iowa pacific uh request for proposals for rail service operator with evaluation criteria proposal from progressive rail um the public comments we received and the other proposals are available online uh good morning mr dondaro good morning mr chairman so um we uh mr mendez and i are going to give a um a little bit of a contextual introduction to this item before we actually get into the details of the staff report okay so louise is going to start to give folks a little bit of history on this rail line because most of the commissioners here today were not on the commission back in 2012 when we took possession of the rail line and so we we we think it would be good to sort of uh revisit where how we got here today so louise okay uh good morning commissioners some of you may know that in the late 80s the this county succeeded in its efforts to make sure it was included in a statewide bond measure to raise funds for rail transportation improvements and development that was proposition 116 which passed in 1990 with 53 percent approval by this uh voters in state of california and 60 percent approval by the voters in santa cruz county and it included 11 million dollars for santa cruz county for passenger rail projects um a couple decades later in february uh 2010 after much work and many public meetings and much public participation the rtc voted unanimously to request over 20 million dollars in proposition 116 and other transit funds from the california transportation commission for purchase of the rail line and for rail improvements to the rail line as well as to institute recreational passenger rail service and in may 2010 after many years of negotiations extensive due diligence and many public meetings including an evening uh public hearing the month before the rtc voted again unanimously to enter into a purchase and sale agreement with india pacific for the rail line and that included commitments to continue freight service and make rail improvements to the line a few months later in august 2010 the rtc voted against unanimously to accept conditions imposed by the california transportation commission uh to be able to consider the rtc's request for funding and those conditions including the continuation of freight rail service as long as it is required by the service transportation board and the institution of recreational passenger rail service then finally in january 2011 after much work by several commissioners here at the rtc to convince the california transportation commission that this was indeed a transit project worthy of funding as requested and assurances that the santa cruz county would not perform a bait and switch the ctc approved funding for the purchase of and improvements to the santa cruz branch rail line with conditions including that the rtc would refund the money if the rtc sees to utilize the project for the intended public passenger rail purpose and also requiring the rtc to add 250 000 dollars in other funds for some acquisition costs two weeks later this commission again voted unanimously to approve the additional funds required by the ctc to be able to accept the funding and the conditions of the ctc then in october of 2012 as many of you know now the rtc um after selecting an operator for the rail line and obtaining approval from the surface transportation board completed the purchase of the of the rail line and that kicked off a extensive public process that lasted over over two years with many public meetings and much fully participation which culminated in 2014 when the rtc approved a master plan an environmental document for the monterey bay century scenic trail network with the main component is a trail next to the rail line and that master plan was also adopted by the county and the three cities through which the rail line travels and as you know in 2016 over two-thirds of santa cruz county voters it's hard to hear you in the back okay sorry about that then in 2016 as you know over two-thirds of santa cruz county voters approved measure d for funding of a variety of transportation projects and that included preservation of the rail corridor infrastructure and analysis of its future potential use to include analysis to answer community questions about possible future transit and other uses and to maintain and repair the santa cruz ranch rail line rtc does have a policy in place regarding use of the rail corridor it is stated clearly in the monterey bay century scenic trail master master plan in policy 1.2.4 which says develop trails in such a way so that future rail transit service along the corridor are not precluded the master plan was adopted unanimously by the rtc and also by the cities of watsonville capitol and santa cruz so it is it is fault and the rtc has been consistent with that policy and its commitments to use the santa cruz branch rail line for multiple transportation purposes including rail service and even in the face of some very vocal active and organized opposition there has been significant community support for the commission's actions including traveling to sacramento to try to make sure that the ctc approved the funding for the project and uh with that i'll hand over to the executive director to provide some additional okay so um coming up to uh the current times um i don't want to repeat anything that louise said it was a very thorough history um but uh more recently the commission did conduct a rail transit feasibility study in 2015 and um there are some uh misconceptions about that there's also some misconceptions about rail banking and what options the rtc is now considering through the unified corridor study first the feasibility study was not a proposal for rail transit the hypothetical estimates in the study are not under consideration by rtc as options for the future the study is not viewed as a blueprint for the future the study was a theoretical look based on types of service for which data were available at the time at what was possible on the rail line also theoretical is the concept called rail banking it sounds enticing pull up the tracks now and then put them back someday in the future reality is is that after thousands of miles of tracks have been torn up over the three decades since the term was coined by congress not a single mile of track is believed to have ever been replaced well it's an attractive idea the truth is that no one has ever seen rail return after it has been designated rail bank so as louise mentioned measure d uh which was approved by two thirds of the voters includes funding for a public transparent study of options for use in the rail corridor and that that study is now underway as called the unified corridors investment study and it will be completed by the end of this year but a couple of myths need to be addressed here um first in the case of the rail with trail scenario the study does not envision that the rtc will run trains immediately it does envision the tracks will be preserved for future use if the community decided to pursue funding for rail service um before drawing any conclusions on the best use of the rail line the unified corridor investment study needs to be completed it will inform commissioners and the public about a recommended use of the corridor based on clear performance metrics so one last point of confusion is that some people have the impression that when the rtc agreed to study a scenario of including a trail without rail service in the study that somehow all use of the rail line would cease or that all prior commitments regarding rail operations would be set aside saying this because based on a lot of the public comments we've received from email um not only on this item but in past months for many reasons that is clearly not the case and hence the item before you today to choose a new operator now that the current one is ready to leave so with that i will now hand it back to louise and he will walk you through quickly through the staff report so we can get on with the discussion thank you as you know commissioners unfortunately the finance situation of the existing operator and the rail line changed significantly and they have not been able to fulfill the terms of the agreement sorry i got to make sure i sit here close to the mic sorry about that so anyway as you know the current operator has not been able to fulfill the terms of the agreement because their financial situation changed significantly and after providing notice of default to the operator they they responded by saying they would agree to cooperate with the rtc and transition to a new operator therefore a request for proposals was released to seek a new operator five proposals were we were received and reviewed and the evaluation of the proposals by the rc staff and a rtc rail consultant um it resulted in the proposal by progressive rail rising to the top as the strongest proposal the proposal from progressive rail demonstrates significant experience managing maintaining and operating rail properties the service plan is reasonable for both freight and passenger operations and shows gradual planned growth in addition of service uh the team also inspected track and structures and so they know what they know what they're getting into and the needs that are that are out there and they provide an outline for how they would they would do things now the rtc staff also checked references for progressive rail and found that they had pretty much the same experience as we have here in san christ county elsewhere in uh in north carolina there was also an operation by opacific where they pretty much the same thing as they did here because of their financial situation racked up a lot of unpaid bills and basically left a lot of bad will towards rail service and the north carolina department of transportation decided to through an r to go through an rfp process and through that process they select progressive rail as well and they've been out there for i believe of over a year now and the reports that we got from that reference check were very very positive and they were very impressed with the activities of progressive rail the work they have done so far to make sure that some of the freight service that was slated to leave as a result actually did not leave and to start creating you know positive and goodwill towards rail service in the community again so they're very pleased with the work of progressive rail therefore staff does recommend that the rtc select progressive rail to operate the san christ branch rail lines and authorize the executive director to negotiate an agreement with progressive rail and return to the rtc for consideration of the negotiated agreement and i just want to highlight that your action today does not you know indicate a pool of any agreement it's the authorization to start negotiate an agreement with this operator if you so you know choose that the staff recommendation and that approved agreement would come back to the rtc also a progressive rail wanted to say a few things and make a short presentation to you if that that's okay morning morning it's a pleasure to be here thank you very much commissioners my name is kreg mckinsey i'm the chairman and ceo progressive rail and it's a pleasure to be here where it's 40 degrees warmer than our headquarters is in minneapolis uh mr chairman thank you for allowing me to make a brief presentation the the goal of the presentation here is to provide a snapshot of progressive rail and to also uh discuss how we're approaching santa cruz from the outside um after the presentation i would be happy to field any questions you may have and in that regard i bring two members of our executive team one is jim Thornton chief of staff and general counsel and the other is jeremy earlacher our managing director of operation services jeremy is a civil engineer by training and has personally inspected all of the branch line all 32 miles of it including the bridges and has also brought in an outside engineering from from our urvine uh to do rail inspections including uh the trussell and capitol um with respect to progressive rail here's a snapshot uh in this photo or excuse me in this illustration you can see that we have 10 railroads in six states one that louis was mentioning a while ago was in is in gastonia uh north carolina gastonia is a suburb of of charlotte and in three of our railroads we are the operator for municipalities and in that case we are actually operator for the north carolina department of transportation in terms of our company how we go about business we go beyond rail and also uh have services that provide warehousing we also um have transloading services and also uh we modify products from in one of our lines of business we actually do processing and packaging of of animal feed union pacific is very familiar with us as the commission is aware uh union pacific interchanges with the branch line and we are union pacific's largest handling carrier by carload volume so they're very familiar with us we are used to working with them should come as no surprise that we are pro rail a green enterprise we don't just talk about it we actually put it into action we have uh modern technology diesel electrics so essentially think of uh locomotives as hybrids one of our railroads is all electric it's the last great railroad run off of electricity in north america that's in northern iowa have a not so secret mission of taking trucks off the off the highways we don't mind last mile trucking because we do um focus on customers who are not directly on the line but uh we do connect them with last mile trucking and uh but every time you see a long hundred car train you can think that it's taking 400 trucks off the highways with respect to being resilient our locomotives don't care about the weather we have redundancy in our systems we are very dependable and and can be counted upon to move freight expeditiously with respect to passengers mass transit favors rail service and we think there's a bright future here in this county for for mass transit for rapid transit with trains but for us we just see ourselves as a bit of a segue a meaningful segue in that regard we do think of ourselves as a as different from the competition in terms of rail service we don't just build and restore rail lines we go beyond that so many times we are faced with railroads that are near abandonment or have been underutilized and so what we do is a first step is restore the integrity of the railroad and then we start addressing customers and welcoming them back to rail service many industrial users of of freight transportation have forgotten how to use railroad it used to be a common place but now trucking is so easy and so we have gone out of our way to make it easy and so what we do is focus on comprehensive solutions to customers from last mile trucking to warehousing to transloading to at points in time investing directly in our customers to to enable them to actually go about their business and and also we connect them with the class one railroads making it easy for them we invest in equipment and real estate and buildings we restore buildings some of the photos in in this slide are examples the top one is what was known as the ampy building is now become red diamond and it was a 100-plus year old warehouse where we hauled out over 40 dumpster loads of refuge and we have turned it into a showcase of of of transloading and processing services the middle photographs is on the left side is a before picture of the wisconsin northern railroad it was near abandonment on the right side is a recent photograph of that railroad and it is i believe it's number six in in in short line carload capacity today number six in the country so it is a it is certainly our crown jewel and in our in our company and it it's a great showcase of what we stand for and the last one is is gastonia the suburb of charlotte there's a before and after and this is why the north carolina department of transportation is very happy with us because we've taken essentially what was a crack house and turned it into a a very reputable transloading center focusing on santa cruz safety rail integrity these these principles are our paramount to what we do and so we don't cut corners we do everything straight down the middle we go beyond the integrity of what's needed commissioner you're asking about um watsonville the integrity of the rail it is fra compliant it is legal and it serves the purpose for the for the freight but i would assert that progressive rail will have an even higher standard for that rail we we go beyond what is needed for fra compliance in terms of how we would approach santa cruz we think we think there's a number of steps and a continuum that are prudent for this county with respect to the rail so first of all we would focus on watsonville where the operations exist but we think they can be so much better and we've we've begun our journey already in terms of identifying new areas of freight both inbound into watsonville and outbound a second step in the continuum would be excursions and i can appreciate uh this commission is more focused on transportation than tourism but i would like to just say that there's a connectivity between the two ideas and what we would like to do is welcome people back to the railroad welcome them back to the branch line and focus on areas that we think are are the easiest um uh first steps uh which are which would be the rail line uh west of santa cruz towards davinport and we believe excursions in that area would certainly be enticing in their in their own regard but also be a meaningful segue because even just to get equipment to that area you're going to have to focus on the railroad integrity of the entire line upstream of that area and then also people in this room or on the commission may you recall the suntan uh specials that connected san jose to the boardwalk we have a goal to reinstate that we've already begun that process uh just through our research and and communications or or meetings with uh with relevant parties and we think it would also be uh a good contribution to reducing uh traffic on highway one and highway 17 during the summer the peak summer months um so obviously in the continuum further down the line is rapid transit uh we leave it uh to the commission to flesh that out and of course you have some studies underway that will come out later in the year we see ourselves as a meaningful transition and segue towards that with respect to rails and trails my simple message to the commission is that progressive rail stands at the ready to help you to facilitate it to play an active role as directed rails and trails can easily coexist there's numerous examples across the country where this is occurring the photographs in this slide are close to our headquarters and this is the line on the shoreline of lake superior where you have rails and trails um uh coexisting for dozens of miles we hope 2018 will be a very busy year for us we would like to hit the ground running in this illustration what we're trying to show is how we would go about taking first steps to focus on the entire line and it would start from the right hand side focusing on warehousing and freight services and Watsonville again there are existing operations you heard the gentleman earlier with biodiesel we have we have service in mind for for that company's growth as well as enticing new customers to the area across the line we're going to be focusing on equipment on on car selection and obviously with with the highways and the pedestrians we would focus on crossings and and signals we have our own internal department who handles this is a very important area with regard to our operations so some things we outsource but in areas like this we have our own standalone teams that that bring it all in house and and focus on the integrity of these areas capitola bridge um that bridge is um is a hundred and fifteen years old uh thereabouts and we have inspected it with uh with american railroad engineers out of irvine california and we have essentially started building up our baseline uh understanding of that bridge along with all the bridges on the line we will work with the boardwalk the suntan special is not just going to fall from the sky it's going to take a lot of work and effort to bring it back and like i said we've begun work efforts on that and then focusing on the western end of the line it's going to take some time to be prepared to put forward high quality pleasurable excursions that and that would be a great experience for everyone this might last two slides uh i think we're going to have a very positive impact not just for this commission but for the county we're going to be a direct investor in the in the county and from that there will be indirect investments knock on or follow on investments follow us we're going to be into a direct employer uh and also a sizable indirect employer with the activities that we have planned so with the maintenance programs with the with any rebuildings or repairs uh and then getting into the warehousing and so forth we think uh that this operation will follow suit just like our other operations we've become a meaningful uh employer and source of economic development uh in the counties and and municipalities where we operate and uh we're going to increase the tax base of this area tourism will benefit we uh we will have a positive impact on all the industries that support tourism and and with respect to your scenic beauty that you have here we think that we could have a positive impact on those areas as well with with regard to security waste management safe passage signage it we're not just a railroad and that's a point i want to keep reinforcing we we try to think of exactly what it all takes and how it needs to come together we don't want to step into the role and usurp government but we stand at the ready to help uh with regard to these two photographs the top one's just a rendering and the bottom one is is a actual photograph in san diego showing the rail line and pedestrians and again i think a solid fringe benefit of everything that we're trying to do is going to be a reduction of of traffic and a reduction of greenhouse gases my last slide i'm just offering a a high-level timeline for our efforts in this first quarter we're going to focus on the negotiations and stb approval and also we'd be meeting with the fr a to establish a baseline and um and obviously both processes are very familiar to us uh it's what we've done many times over we'll focus on watsonville we'll focus on a summer program for the um for the repair programs uh and the maintenance that's needed on the entire railroad 2018 excursions will take quite a bit of effort and we would start immediately in the planning stages we do have a strategic alliance with american heritage railroad who's the largest excursions um railroad company in north america and so with them uh in in tow we would do this in the right way and in the highest quality manner possible and we obviously would uh would support the outcomes of your uh your studies and and lastly uh you know with the suntan special it's going to be a comprehensive undertaking that's going to involve capital corridor tamc um uh caltrans and so forth and so it would be a major undertaking it's going to take some time to put together so in conclusion uh progressive rail is is here to help this commission we would uh it'd be a privilege and honor to be the operator and we would like to deliver upon your priorities we have our own standards that go far beyond um just uh minimum threshold compliance and we would invite uh any of the commissioners to come see us in action you can come to any of our any of our railroads and see us and see how we operate and see how um how we go about our business and also talk to customers and municipalities who have experience with us um with respect to um forward um uh actions uh we will do everything in lock step with the commission and and also not get a not get ahead of any studies but be there to support and and collaborate and uh and be there uh as a responsive corporate citizen in this county thank you very much are there questions that people have for uh um uh progressive rail uh mr johnson thank you chair so um i had a you have forecast here by the way welcome to uh can everybody hear me welcome to um santa cruz county i was looking on the financials in terms of um storage and rental and last night at our city council meeting we had uh we had a presentation from save our shores which they were talking about the real problems of offshore drilling and with the prior carrier there were were issues with some of the oil tankers that were on the line that uh presented uh somewhat of a clear and present danger to places like in wasaville the slew and and so forth take me through um the whole idea of storage and rental and what your vision is i noticed in your forecast from 2018 you're looking at right around 105 000 but ramps up to about a million dollars by uh 2022 um does that represent you know 10 cars on average uh 20 100 and because you brought it up i also want to mention the rail and trail because it was illustrated here um in your vision if there was a rail and trail and with the trail if people wanted to ride their bikes would there be massive numbers of of of just rail cars sitting there for their pleasure um to me that's something of a problem i just kind of want to get what your vision is and and the number of storage cars that one million 16 thousand dollars represents commissioner just to clarify that line item in that projection is not rail car storage rail car storage does not feature in our forward plan as a company we have done rail car storage on occasion during downturns of the economy you know a problem that exists in those periods is rail cars need to be parked somewhere and they can't stay on the main lines and and and block the the passage of freight trains so we have done rail car storage but it is not a feature a main feature of what we stand for or what we try to drive income from so we have no projections of of rail car storage so would you exclude those from your so what what those line items are is pertains to warehouse storage and um and so warehouses are a feature of what we stand for and what we drive income from so the um so the warehouse storage of product we we receive rents basically and as this aspect of our company grows and we anticipate it to do the same as our other railroads we anticipate getting meaningful income from that and it would include the red the red diamond subsidiary that we have where we actually process and package product which we anticipate being a meaningful business here with respect to both feed and and also agricultural users uh commissioner rackin i'm your professor you um brought not only your yourself but your your chief counsel and people at the top of your firm your headquarters are in minnesota um you operate another state state and you said i think six states um what kind of presence from the organization itself would we expect during this sort of planning process and after you're actually running a railroad here of some kind um would you expect to have a headquarters i mean what i've i don't have any sense at all of how you operate a national organization where you had an operation here in the local community i would welcome moving our headquarters here um this week for sure i have to talk to the owners um so um there's going to be continuum with regard to employment and how we go about the business so day one we would need to set up an office and have presence primarily in the operations teams and the maintenance teams we do have centralized functions out of our headquarters and so all of the back office the administration finance legal and so forth are based there and um and we have centralized uh teams that include mechanical and maintenance of way and um and transloading and so forth but as we start building some scope and scale here we would start employing more and so my request would be be patient give us about a year or so to to find our feet and let us start um you know getting some traction with bringing people back to rail typically in the past it's taken about three years for us to really find our stride um but in this area we we think we have it properly assessed in terms of uh not only customers in our network that we think that want to locate here and also uh with regard to how we can basically bring some of the agricultural aspects of the of the industry here back to rail look at where uh the warehousing in in Watsonville and see that essentially almost everyone's gone to trucking and so we have experience in doing the opposite and also working with class ones in a particular union pacific to create sort of bespoke dedicated corridors for expediting freight so in the case of perishable fruits and vegetables there used to be a salad bowl express here and so we would aim to uh reinstate reinstate some of that we've had some introductory conversations on the idea with union pacific they've been receptive they are much more receptive to box car freight now than they've been in a long time and so we think that plays right into this specific this item and then also with regard to um how we would go about supporting agriculture from the inbound fertilizer plastic mulch and so forth Mr. Brown thank you for putting together a really impressive report for us to consider um I just want to ask a quick question or if you could maybe give a little bit of information because I feel like I missed something in terms of your engagement with the communities that are going to be affected by potential especially the excursion services that you're talking about there are some small communities that are going to experience significant impact as a result of that so if you've talked with them if you plan to begin to talk with them just wondering so have we spoken to any of the communities uh to date the answer is no we didn't want to get ahead of the commission but as a matter of practice uh we're open and transparent we would like to take everyone on our journey we would like to engage them to see the merits and deal with any of the issues head on so we're not opaque in any regard we understand the impact of both noise or or with regard to the number of patrons that might be involved hopefully on some of these excursions we'd like to also see you know focus on the flip side of that and engage on the positive aspects as well you know tourism is a natural thing here from the boardwalk to the beaches we would like to just sort of weave our way into that fabric and and be a part of it not intrusive but also after some period of time make it seem as if we're always here the startup is usually a dramatic sometimes overly dramatic at the end of the day we're kind of hearing gone in minutes in terms of the train service and so forth we'd like to go about this the right way we would welcome having collaborative discussions with special interest groups and various municipalities yeah thank you uh you you came out from minnesota yes yes we flew in okay how do you like it here like it very much okay you know we're staying at the dream end so what's there not to like you know it's all about a hundred surfers out there yesterday that um there are no sharks here yeah population control anyway welcome welcome here and i'll make this quick and that'll allow people in the public to speak and i so i'll hold it to a minimum we are not making a decision today uh to make that clear to everybody uh we're not voting on a on a contract today we're looking and just reviewing everything right now right that is correct the decision for you today is not to vote on a contract whether you're actually authorized negotiating a contract and then uh real quick uh suntan special uh i guess you would we all realize that it would have to go through watsonville it can't go over the santa christ not over the past anymore not since 1941 or two or whatever it was that would be too treacherous in particular in the in well first of all the rail's not there but to try and reinstate it it really be subjected to your winter storms the safer faster pathway is actually to go down around the mountains and back up when they changed from through the past to down around watsonville it only added 20 minutes to the historic suntan special and so that's a fast corridor now from san jose going south and we would like to either get trackage rights or coordinate with one of the existing carriers and and use watsonville essentially as the turnaround point to go back up and then quickly excursions uh would be basically from aptos to santa cruz in the beginning because uh we really couldn't get a train all the way from watsonville going all the way to santa cruz right now right there is some damage on the i'm tracked it's that's correct and as was mentioned for what staff is working to to prepare those damages and right now there isn't any equipment they can't that can get beyond you know just a little past watsonville and that would come under set up uh work with uh rtc to restore railroad that that that really should be like phase one or whatever thank you uh uh commissioner rios and amber it's a silly question thank you very much for your presentation why do you want to come here with all these regulations and a lot of opposition and people don't want it some people and you're taking a chance and all this stuff why so first of all it's what we do uh we've made a a a very successful enterprise out of doing exactly this this would not be the first time we've dealt with opposition uh the line that i was describing as our crown jewel uh primarily halls frack sand and it was um town meetings and and forums just like this one uh in which we just put forward the positives and the negatives and hopefully at the end of the day everyone can understand that there's a net positive impact it's hard we don't have any illusion to think that everything's perfect and what we do but on balance we think it's usually the smart thing to do and that's what we stand for so we're not shy about this sort of engagement we'd just like to do it the right way and be transparent about it so we're happy to be here mr burkhun so i'm impressed with your business model in terms of rediscovering railroad so it seems like you are fitting into a niche for the class one carriers in the sense they can't do the last half mile or a mile is is that how you characterize it so there's a couple of different dimensions to answer your question directly um cut and gather um uh customers for the class ones that they essentially don't do anymore they're glad to receive on occasion glad to receive inbound inquiries but they don't uh really go out and seek new customers like they used to used to be a natural part of their business it's not quite the same anymore and so we fulfill that aspect and then the second aspect is more operational operationally we provide service 24 seven on demand as customers needed um one car two cars ten cars a hundred cars we don't really have a limitation and we don't keep track of operating ratios and so forth like the class ones do because they're all public they're all catering to wall street and they're trying to keep all their metrics to look like they're they're very efficient and wise users of of of shareholder capital for us uh we don't have to track that we just we we care about the type of service we care about safety obviously and integrity and and we do that uh as a complement to the class one since they don't have the wherewithal anymore to do that on their own because it's for them this diminishing returns okay some follow up so with this um as you develop more of this particular customer base with this result in more jobs in watsonville on a significant level you're talking about pack and break or repackaging reprocessing i mean can you describe that a little bit more because that could be of great benefit in watsonville it would come in phases so in the beginning we have in mind some restoration to the rail that we would like to undertake and so with that you have crews and so forth when we start getting into warehousing which we think we've identified a warehouse that we'd like to go after and secure then you start getting into more multiples of of of employees start getting into the dozens of employees when you get into excursions then you start really branching out and expanding the employment base because you need support you need the entertainment aspect you need the the ticketing aspect the safety aspect it starts to really start to blossom so uh at some point it starts to feed on itself the the trick is always just to catalyze it in the beginning okay thanks so i notice on one of your um on your org chart uh air lake terminal railroad uh what's the story there i looked it up it's a very short line but it's inactive can you tell us the story of that or would you excuse me so uh air lake is where our headquarters is it is active oh but this particular line at least on the org chart says inactive oh sorry uh that's as a legal entity oh okay sorry because it's up at the parent okay got it okay so it's handed at the okay got it that is our headquarters so some of the photographs in in our submittal show our headquarters that is air lake and i'd just like to mention that when we entered air lake there was nothing there and and through our direct efforts through us being the first movers we not only brought the rail back to service we increased all the warehousing capabilities which fed trucking which then brought in more customers and now if you drive through air lake and again i would invite any of the commissioners to come see this uh it is a it is the busiest industrial area of minneapolis uh today uh in this this is in the southern suburbs of minneapolis and it's a thriving area that people have sort of forgotten that it was us but but but it's all around us now so another one so i'm very impressed that you're able to work with civil organizations such as rgc the state i believe southern carolina what state or north carolina north carolina transportation yes so um that's particularly important to us here do you see particular challenges working with you know a civil entity and all that that may entail with so much participation for the public as opposed to just the business entity well in any business situation you have more parties and and and more stakeholders it becomes more sophisticated and requires more effort we're not shy about that we just need to make sure that everyone's aligned with what we're doing we're very happy working for municipalities or working for government we we provide a service that they don't want to undertake themselves in that regard is complementary in the case of north carolina north carolina uh dot we've we're coming up on a year uh it's a fantastic relationship we're doing things for them that they haven't thought of and uh and and as a result they have opened more doors for us and so they're allowing us to branch out and spread our wings which feeds us more business which allows us to do even more work and then that it even impresses them more and so it starts to build momentum okay thank you very much sir i i just had uh maybe one or two short questions your plan uh looks about creating quiet zones you know we've had other operators where horns have been um uh very impactful um you talked about working with the jurisdictions to help those quiet zones happen um how long does that usually take and what would be the requirements on the other jurisdictions to be able to participate in this and i took a chance in putting this in our submittal because i can appreciate it's it it's it's a hot topic uh typically and in particular in this area uh you know there's um you know a serene aspect to it and uh and an air horn is not necessarily complementary to that um so in the first instance there are different types of horns and so some of them are more obnoxious than not um so uh i just want to say that is a very small step uh with regard to quiet zones you know the we as an operator won't have the capacity to instate that it has to come from the municipalities themselves what we would be happy to do is basically champion it organize it and work with the f r a uh f r a will have to absolutely sign off on how you go about it and so forth but but you know there's nothing stopping from capitol uh through um say swift street um and santa cruz uh to instate a quiet zone there it would it would it would take millions of dollars and so i want to be clear about that but the crossings can be organized and you can uh you can either go fully quiet or you can go down to sort of bell chime like like happens in some uh mass transits and uh and some of the trams so there's different levels of of quiet that you can go about it would usually take a couple of years to put in place and it would be a significant undertaking in its own regard but we can't get in the way of municipalities we can facilitate it and ultimately it comes down to the uh the county or the cities themselves to champion it and we would just like to help make it happen if it's an important objective if it's not then then then it's not thank you very much i i want to um commissioner burtrun i want to make sure to get to the public uh you have a brief question yeah very brief so at the heart of what a lot of people in this community are focused on right now so i noticed from your timeline chart you recognize that the unified quarter study is going to be coming out and that's later in this year so if it went in the way of you know it's just not economically feasible for us to have a rail line on our current quarter from damford to watsonville um i'd like to know your response to that and the second part of that question is do you think a component of your business could exist standalone just out of watsonville providing all the you know the the jobs there the you know packing stuff like that for the class one carriers so that's sort of what i'd like you to address so i can't predict the future but no neither can we but respect the outcome obviously if there's no railroad then there's no need for an operator but you know we're we're taking a calculated risk that the outcome of that study or number of studies if it turns into that will be favorable towards rail because we think the it is a meaningful and obvious in our eyes a solution for going forward on both rate excuse me freight and passengers with regard to if there's no rail then we would be glad to honor the wishes of the RTC in that regard if you're asking me what do we think about narrowing down the operations just to watsonville correct that would be disappointing to us just to be very clear about that we would like to actually have railroads come back to life so again that's sort of what we stand for but you know we need some runtime in watsonville to actually catalyze it and get it going it could be fine okay thanks that's what i was looking for thank you supervisor McPherson yeah i'm just welcome to santa cruz thank you for presentation and thank you for having the guts to come into this subject matter which is probably the most controversial one in the county about the rail line and how it's going to be used you know that when i got on the point yeah well in light of the the two previous operators being primarily freight operators and this is going to be really started or dependent on freight operations have and i understand the the responsibility we have for freight service according to the service transportation board but i have no indication and you you said you're going to be talking with you you want to have these the agricultural community in particular come back to freight service but i have no indication that they really want to go there and um just me makes me uneasy that are we going to just do this all over again for the third time and that's not a direction to attack on yours your your company or anything i'm just very uncertain that this turnaround will take place to give you the foundation for a successful operation i don't know i just haven't heard that from the staff i haven't heard nobody's come to me to say yes this is great let's go i i'm an agricultural operation and i really want to this i'm going to switch i'm going to sell my trucks and go to rail i there's no indication of that at all and i'm uncomfortable without that and your comment is one that we've heard before because as i was mentioning earlier in my remarks people have forgotten how to use rail you can call up a truck and usually get a rate in 30 minutes a lot of times for rail it might take 30 days so the world doesn't work that way easily it takes a lot of planning and preparation and so therefore what we have to do is basically do all the hard work all the leg work bring it all together as a solution and this is what i meant by a comprehensive solution and go to the customer and have the right conversation you are spending this much on trucking getting whatever product inbound or wherever you're taking it outbound here's what we can do for you let's try a let's go through a pilot and do a couple of rail cars and see if it works for you great that worked let's go do some more let's do more hang on this customer here is doing it what am i missing and then it starts to feed on itself so that this is what we've seen time and time again and i would absolutely welcome you to come visit us and see this and i can bring you to different operations on our railroad that started out just like what you're describing i'm not interested in going to minnesota not the junket he's used to all right well thank you very much for the presentation i do want to give a chance for us to hear public comment we may have you come back up for other other questions i'd like to get a show of hands of how many people would like to make comments so we'll we will probably limit comments to two minutes before you get up there mr people they there were two young children who have been very well behaved and i want to honor that and ask them to uh to to come up first because yeah yeah thank you um so my name is ryan hoffman i'm a resident of live oak for the past decade these are my daughter and son and so i'm speaking to you as a resident of santa cruz and also representing the future here so i would urge you to consider your actions the information and not make any long-term commitments until the full scope of the ucis is completed um reason for that we all have the same interests we want to reduce traffic we want to be environmentally friendly we want to accommodate future growth we want options for the future i don't deny the overall utility of rail but i have great concerns about the sacrifices of what could potentially be an amazing trail um so being in live oak i live near to shoreline middle school del mar elementary the boys and girls club the simkin swim center and i have a very hard time imagining a train busting right through there um i do think that a trail would really serve the future and i think would be an amazing thing for our town i also have concerns about the information we have to rely on when the best resource we have the feasibility study the analysis the scenarios it's called theoretical or hypothetical what is the public to believe so the time that's been put into this the effort the cost and here we are i wish we had more information those more objective data driven more evidence to go from and i think that's really spurred a lot of this debate this divisiveness so i urge you to take your time do the ucis give us information that we can use and all get behind a common solution that benefits us all so thank you thank you and thank you for you appreciate your skills as a father and the and the uh the patients of your children so thank you brian people's with trail now i'm here to deliver uh from the office of heron and loyde who represents the farmers um for the rail trail going up from davenport to santa cruz a complaint that uh basically they're against the train going to davenport they realize that it will violate the current eir that is going on and i just want to submit this to the forum to the commission as well as to inform you that that will jeopardize the completion of the eir and it could lose six point five million federal grant i also want to say that i think there was some misconceptions on the submittal we submit it uh be in trail now we submitted a we have submitted a proposal to maintain the rail line um subcontract to a rail operator for watsonville operations which we've already been in discussions with a qualified rail operator um we would work with the community we'd bring two point three million dollars to protect our corridor there are over 20 trestles that is valuable to our community if a tree falls and hits one of those trestles we're going to lose a great asset we need to protect that and that's what our proposal was about it wasn't just to come in and pull up the tracks it was actually to maintain the rail line forever indefinitely we can do that and that's what our proposal was so there was a little misconception and we weren't invited to the table to with staff to have that conversation and i think that's a little bit of short sightedness when they went and the three people who made that selection were rail rail consultants and the the people who have um skin in the game so please reconsider that thank you thank you thank you for lining up uh good morning peter stanger um i live in south county and also i i do like taking trains i take the train to colorado several times um i do want to point out that um the rail proposed rail operator uh in what he put up there was mostly for recreational use i didn't hear any um uh transportation use in fact i was a little surprised that the representative from south county didn't say well you know where do we get in our transportation to get the single cars off the highway one that wasn't proposed um earlier this week i sent over to the um to you all a story that came out of the chronicle about the wine train uh they were saying the usual fare for the wine train was two to three hundred dollars and they um the workers on the wine train uh were taking the bus back from heelsburg uh with um uh on a dollar fifty bus um it gets back down to is this going to be recreational or is this going to be transportation because if it's going to be recreational i really think a trail would be better and a trail also gives us the opportunity to ride our bikes to work which is something i did from la selva to santa cruz for over five years myself thank you thank you morning i'm christine and i've been here along with my family for over 40 years in santa cruz uh i want to thank the commission for taking the time to listen to all the input regarding the selection of an operator for the rail line as is a limited time frame i will touch on key points and questions the two prior operators were freight railroads both promising to fund upgrades to the line neither were able to achieve new freight opportunities on the branch line and both ended their contract with rtc since progressive rail is a freight only railroad and because of the limited freight prospects are you concerned progressive will be a repeat of past operator selections with all the congestion on the railroads we look to passenger rail to provide relief yet progressive is a short line freight operator not a passenger service provider isn't that counterintuitive to the goals of the rtc that in the best interest of the rtc to select a rail service provider and lock into a contract with a provider prior to the completion of the united corridor study shouldn't the report proceed the operator selection so that the goals are in alignment if progressive is so progressive then how come they have no women or minorities on their senior management team i'm a progressive community such as santa cruz i would hope we practice what we preach i for one support using our community businesses who have employed generations of county residents pay local taxes to help many services we benefit from and have been active in contributing to nonprofits in the area i hope the rtc supports our local business too when considering the next operator i appreciate i appreciate the rtc for taking my comments into consideration thank you thank you good morning hey good morning um my name is monique kramer um we like living here too we like it better if we don't have to listen to train horns blowing at a hundred decibels for 15 seconds at every intersection that can be heard for almost two miles um i recognize that there are quiet zones i urge everyone to look into that the smart train actually did a study on it which we should have done um and they say very clearly quiet zones are not quiet uh anyway the uh unified corridor investment study has a certain number of goals they've laid out and in pursuit of these goals they're studying six scenarios using one assumes a comprehensive and exhausting methodology uh exhaustive excuse me fully half of those scenarios do not include a train as a regular use i'm not saying they're necessarily pulling up the tracks but they don't include a train scenarios a c and d uh the ucis is not scheduled to be complete until the winter of this year so i would like it if someone can explain to me why the rtc is even considering entering negotiations with the rail operator why would the rtc commit our limited transportation energy and monies to a rail when study analyzing the best way to apply that energy and those monies has not been completed uh it feels um like there isn't a whole lot of there's a lot of bias here i'm hearing a lot of noise and tonality that says the train is what we're doing the train is what's happening and we haven't finished a study which has purported to be um designed to look at a number of different options uh i don't feel as if there was timely information around this whole subject uh looking back at the december 7th agenda i didn't see anything about this in it and i was at that meeting um aside from the lack of timely information the awarding of a contract progressive rail undermines the promised open transparent public process for determining the best uses of this rail corridor which could result in a trail only scenario or other non-rail decisions um how can we do that if we've entered into a 10 or 20 year contract with all due respect to progressive who has said that they would step away i would be interested to see that happen thank you thank you good morning good morning chair leopold and fellow commissioners my name is mark misciti miller i'm a professional civil engineer with more than three decades of experience designing public works infrastructure and i've lived in this county for almost the same amount of time i'm here today just to remind you that uh we're not entering entering entering into a contract with progressive rail we're simply evaluating the proposals received selecting the most qualified response and then authorizing your executive director to negotiate with that selected proposer to negotiate a contract that we can find acceptable i would encourage you to go ahead and do that primarily we've issued a letter that said gosh iowa pacific we're gonna fire you if you don't come into compliance with the terms of your agreement and iowa pacific wisely said well wait before you fire us resign we resign we need a rail operator you're the owners of a railroad you're obligated by law under the purchase agreement under the service transportation board under who even knows how much you're required to be a responsible operator not having an operator of that rail line exposes the taxpayers of this county to liability and as a taxpayer of this county i'm not okay with that we need an operator progressive rail is obviously a very responsive proposer they have considerable expertise i agree with the staff recommendation that they are by far the most qualified i strongly recommend you award or authorize your executive director to negotiate a contract that you would find acceptable and let's move on thank you thank you good morning hi this is robert stevens uh i wanted to ask you a few questions very quickly commissioners why is metro having a hard time financially and all our roads are in the county are in need of repair this one is easy it's a lack of funding our funds not wisely spent do you think your unified corridor study is fair and will provide clarity do you think this issue has divided our community i don't think so i think your study will not be fair because your staff knows what they want they want to train and that's why we have controversy you must know your staff has bias they say rail banking can't be done proposition 16 funds can't be returned on and on you you and your staff have you established any standard practices to make the study fair is there a peer review are there outside experts brought in from other communities uh are are you uh do you have an oversight committee at all a community committee on this to me the whole study seems like a sham i don't see that you've achieved your job of making this fair now let's just suppose the study came out and said no rail passenger rail is possible for 20 years or never uh and our community would be better off with just a trail why do you want a trail operator in place union pacific sold the line because they could not make it work iowa pacific failed and they owe us $60,000 why do you think a new group of midwesterners operating a tourist train on the north coast will is will work or is anything our community wants how does this solve any of our transportation problems it does not it'll only create more traffic for locals we want immediate and cost effective solutions not a train you might hope for a train someday and i might hope for an international airport at watsonville and trump might hope for a wall but none of these things are going to happen please act like leaders and lead don't hold on to a hope of a someday costly train that won't solve anything we don't have the times or the funds thank you very much for your time good morning my name is anderson shepherd um i'm a homeowner i live in live oak and my house is directly adjacent to the track so i have skin in the game i will admit that but i'm also a proponent of sustainable conservation or sustainable transportation planning and i want to believe in the decisions that are that you that our decision makers are making for the benefit of the community and just given the political contention of this affair and the timeline up on the board there and what's been discussed already i think it's just a little disingenuous to be moving forward with signing or even discussing signing new contracts until after the unified corridor study is finished that study represents public transparency in a public process that i would like to respect and i just think that rushing into um discussion of future train contracts is premature so thank you very much thank you good morning good morning commissioners my name is bud colligan i'm a resident of live oak mr leopold's district i just want to point out uh at a very top level that something is happening here uh greenway has garnered over six thousand petition signers we heard about 3500 and we're on our way to 10 000 people that oppose the direction of this commission many community groups many city endorsements and they're trying to tell you they don't like the current plan period we are organized and we are not going away um the new progressive proposal uh is the third in six years you remember seara northern bruce brought it up um then we had iowa pacific now we have our friends from progressive their proposal is full of unrealistic projections it demonstrates little understanding of our community it requires a three point two million dollar investment certainly an underestimate when we don't know the results of the ucis mr mckinsey didn't say who's paying for that one of my mentors at apple used to call that happy talk and i'm sure you heard the same happy talk from iowa pacific is this a recipe for success mr mckinsey i want you to know that you will have strong opposition to any tourist train north of watsonville commissioners i urge you to focus on freight in watsonville which is our problem today contract for less than one year for freight only and objectively await results of the ucis without tying our hands with a tourist train contract this is the regional transportation commission not the regional tourist commission i thank you gail mcmilti greenway thank god for bud and bryan and all of the other independent citizens that are looking out for our community because we are quite literally getting railroaded the public process is clearly broken i would like to start by asking people who are here representing greenway or trail now to raise your hands okay now keep those hands up and if there's anyone here who's advocating for any solution on the rail corridor that does not include rail add your hands please okay um that's just a show but i also i have a question that i hope you'll bring up with the gentleman from progressive one thing you will see is a small bullet point on page 28 of their proposal um is that they the one the one outside company they are already looking to partner with is a company that's looking to locate to construct a propane distribution terminal in watsonville so commissioner reos and commissioner um kaput please i ask you to protect your citizens i happen to know that the people who advocated in your community just last year to keep oil tankers off of your street are not happy about this because this is not going to take trucks off the road this is going to put trucks on the road and these trucks are going to be full of compressed explosive gas okay it's not a good thing for a community other communities are protesting this ask these gentlemen who's going to profit from that i don't think it's anyone here locally and it's not a major employer so it's just something to be aware of and just in terms of transit we need real transit solutions for our community um while we're saving our options and minimizing our risks kitchen workers across our county are working past midnight because they need to stay there until the dishes are done and there is not a bus that they can catch at that point so these are the people who need transit and we are not currently serving them these are people who need better buses that run later and we need to think about that thank you thank you good morning good morning my name is patrick wiesman i am a resident of ben lomond and a supporter of the friends in rail trail i just wanted to raise a couple concerns regarding the rtc staff selecting progressive rail as their operator of the branch line first of all i'm very impressed of their track record of restoration of rail and business operations as well as their short-term plans for alternative transportation issues particularly the suntan special the three year plan for the suntan special um some of the concerns that i have was the financial magnitude of moving to santa cruz county and retrofitting old equipment to cleaner emissions and modern standards as described in his plan lack of business experience in this area plans for the special excursion market other than the suntan special which needs to be careful carefully marketed for success overall stream of revenue from these points above the immediate necessity of funding and safety of quiet zones trains will only be occasional and during day 10 hours i presume at least in the initial years the request for a 20-year contract that's a little bit anyways we just uh in my opinion excuse me we need to really ask ourselves why we need to make a risky play for a huge new operator when we already have a well-established operator in santa cruz county with assumably enough finances and resource to make it happen easier uh thank you very much thank you a good morning good morning commissioners josh stevens here i'm quite impressed with the turnout here having mentioned earlier the coastal community south of us decided to invest into the rails and going beyond the and decided to go beyond the idea of the arrogant idea of keeping heavy fossil fuel vehicles on a single corridor which is the goal of one of the operator proposals listed today it's almost as if cleaning a small lane of metal and wood tied together is quicker to remove mud from than a two to eight lane highway if it weren't for amtrak availability some coastal residents would be subject to four-hour commutes with these workarounds my point to all this is it's dangerous to think that petty cabs e-bikes or what the trail only groups uh call google pods or people power will save us in a time of need in fact i wouldn't even trust the f4 mentioned operator with the thomas the tank engine train set and finally i would like to ask that the rtc put the next santa cruz branch line rail operator whoever it might be through the ringer the rail the community cannot put faith into a new railroad operator unless they're held accountable commissioners if whoever you choose as the next operator has any hints of delinquency for payments the default process needs to be expedited the process for handling iowa pacific their payroll and lack thereof was epsilon at best and the community definitely expects better as for operator of choice i want to say the progressive rail knows how to put on a presentation um i did have a couple of questions in regards to the trails they met they was shown in their presentation just just curious how as to how wide they are um but they seem to be a solid operator and um as all else fails i'd recommend our local people of roaring camp as everyone takes pride in local business thank you thank you good morning good morning carry pico again i was at a meeting last night at scott's valley of which fort claimed that we could build the commuter train with zero tax dollars new tax dollars it would be free there would be a train to pacharo it's in the capital corridor i can tell you that the capital corridor has dropped the train to selenus which includes pacharo off their agenda it's no longer there for the last few meetings so the point is somehow statements don't get told that's true in the public and now i'm going to get to the rtc which i will not say not true however we all know i shouldn't say we all know their survey was extremely biased in my opinion and i wrote an article on that their numbers in the feasibility study were clearly overestimated on ridership underestimated on price and everything's a little too rosy the traffic is always misstated and everybody that i'm telling about the six out of ten cars going up the night uh highway 17 are always surprised the rtc people are surprised too but that's what the data shows they refuse to enforce the contract with iowa pacific until it made it into the news article newspaper the sentinel and i i want to tell you i'm the one who gave it to them and said keep my name out of it so i don't care i believe in contracts but you got to enforce contracts exactly so now this is what i say the rtc created controversy where none existed before so how much uh who will pay for the repairs of the train tracks now okay how much will you and i actually i'm really seeing the rtc will pay for your job because it's really in your interest to keep it going and so who will pay for the rail upgrades that aren't usable that the class two that they're talking about it's not usable for commuter rails so who's it for it's for supporting the newcomer which i actually think is a really good presentation but that's not our job is to pay for them so the last thing is thank you um i'd like to say lift in wisconsin and i i think you guys give a short shrift to the midwest it's a wonderful place thank you when you're out here thank you good morning good morning i'm ashley when i live in las alva beach um i've got a couple of comments on the request for authorization to negotiate first of all the staff report um at number seven when it requested proposals asked for a proposers most recent financial statements what progressive produced are financial statements based on ed at beta that's not financial statements according to generally accepted accounting principles first require gap compliant financial statements ebita makes companies with heavy asset balance sheets look healthier than they actually are this is from a Forbes magazine article recently abita a beta portrays companies debt service ability but only some types of debts abita ignore ignores working capital requirements and there is more issues with abita so prior to authorizing negotiations let's get real financial statements first second because we're waiting for the corridor study to be completed you should restrict assuming you want to give them the authority to negotiate you need to restrict the rtc negotiators in advance so that there is a clear escape clause from any long-term contract which does not require a payment of rtc funds without that i would like to respond that maybe this is consistent with mr dunderos comment that rail banking has never resulted in a return thank you thank you good morning hello commissioners my um my name is steven slade on the executive director of the land trust we're your partner in building this trail we have six million dollars committed and i have to admit this agenda item seemed not to merit this level of response to me the way i think we look at it is when measure d was passed when the unified corridor study was started we had a rail operator that operator has failed and you're replacing him them it does not seem to me it is clear they're they're not proposing mass commuter transit it's a segue proposition to get us to that point if we ever get to that point so it seems to me and we encourage you to you know adopt the staff recommendation and proceed to do what i think is a relatively routine thing the other thing i also want to say i'm really tired of hearing your trash staff trash your staff trashed by people they're accused of bias they're accused of malfeasance they're accused of all sorts of things we have been working with them for several years closely we've been paying bills and our experiences that the staff is is is experienced one with all the other quote experts you've been hearing from today aren't and secondly they are committed to your goal which is to provide transportation for the many not for the few and i cannot get over thinking that a two-lane super bike highway will serve a few and uh that's why we support you continuing to look at these options and continuing to study and it seems like every meeting face another challenge to something you've been unanimously supporting for years we encourage you to stay the course thank you thank you i appreciate the reminder about the civility of any public discourse i think that's useful and i encourage everyone to remember that as they speak good morning good morning commissioners my name is glenn hannah i live in pleasure point uh i think it's inappropriate and incorrect at the moment to proceed with selecting on a 20-year lease a new rail operator while we haven't completed the unified carter study i would also suggest that there is no penalty for us to wait three or four six months we can find an interim freight operator and i would like to amplify what the previous speaker said about th