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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2021-03-16 TranscriptionPage 1 Council Present: Bergus, Mims, Salih, Teague, Taylor, Thomas, Weiner Staff Present: Fruin, Monroe, Kilburg, Dilkes, Fruehling, Seydell Johnson, Reichart, Bockenstedt, Havel, Hightshoe Others Present: Longenecker, Van Heukelom (UISG) Review of Pavement Management Program (03): Teague/ Well welcome, we are at our work session for March 16, 2021. We just finished an ... an executive session, and so now I'm going to call this meeting, um ... to order, and we're going to have and start with our review of pavement management program, which is IP3. Reichart: Thank you, Mayor Teague. My name is Jason Reichart. I'm the Senior Civil Engineer at the City that's overseeing the pavement management program. We hired a consultant, HR Green, uh, based on their qualifications and experience on similar projects, and tonight I have Jeremy Kaemmer from HR Green, to kind of walk through the technical aspects of the report and our findings. So with that, I'll tum it over to Jeremy. Kaemmer: Good evening, Council. Mind if I share my screen? All right. (mumbled) start at the beginning. Can everybody see my screen? I just need one yes. Reichart: Yep. Kaemmer: All right, so ... my name is Jeremy Kaemmer. I work for HR Green out of the Cedar Rapids office. I've been doing pavement management for quite a while and we've done it for cities all over the state of Iowa. I'm very happy to have been able to complete this project in my own backyard, so thank you. City contracted HR Green to complete the pavement management plan in order to develop an objective data -driven and sustainable approach to managing its roadway assets, as well as the budget for the future needs. That was taken directly out of like the first page of the report, um, and it's a lot of words, but we'll go through what that all means. So the goals of this program were to look at the City standards for street construction and the maintenance practices that they have been performing over time and find any ways that we could make it a little bit better or improve pavement designs in a way that extends the life and saves you money. As well as we're going to look at an inventory of the City street system, look at every road in the city that it maintains and its condition, and how we afford to pay for it in the future. Then we're going to look at ways that we can address those needs, as well as plan for future needs moving down the road. And then we did all of that work using a pavement management software called dTIMS Business Analytics or (mumbled) or just BA in the future. And then the end goal is to develop a sustainable replacement schedule for all of the needs within the City. So these are, you know, this is your actual capital improvement program, you know, with lists of potential street projects that could be done in the next five years and looking This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council work session of March 16, 2021. Page 2 at our future needs beyond that. So what is pavement management? Pavement management isn't repaving streets. It's not fixing the broken road necessarily. It's not a silver bullet either that solves everything. It's a process. It's a methodology. It's like being organized in order to get your job done better. And it comes with a little bit of a mantra that we like to say at HR Green, `It's the right treatment for the right road at the right time.' And that means that you're finding the most cost-effective options. It's not rebuilding all of the roads that are completely deteriorated, and it's not just focusing on the brand new roads. It's finding that balance that saves you the most money and provides the most benefit to the citizenry. And so a lot of that is involved in preventative action, such as the graph on the right showing that we would much rather be up in that top half of the graph and spend a little bit of money to expen... to extend pavement life longer, rather than spend a lot of money to fix the completely broken roads that are down at the bottom. And the way to do that is making well-informed decisions that maximize the impact of your funds, such as by using pavement management. So when I talk about pavement management, it has a lot of different moving parts, and they all are important to this. It's not just conditions. It's not just projects. It's all of this system working together. So a pavement management program starts with inventory and assessment. That's looking at the conditions of the roads and the assets that you are in charge of. Next is coming up with the options that are available to us in dealing with those. Then we're going to find our constraints — what are our budgets, what are our goals in doing this program? Then we have to figure out how we're going to make those hard decisions, comparing this road versus that road, then reconstruction over here or a, uh, rehabilitation someplace else, and then we're going to come up with a plan. We're going to take all that decision-making framework, we're going to run our software and come up with a list of potential projects, and even then it doesn't stop, because we've got to go all the way back to the beginning. This is an ongoing, living, breathing process... where you have to check to see if you are meeting those goals, monitor the conditions as time goes on, and reassess to see if you are meeting those needs that we planned for at the beginning of the program. So let's talk about how we did the inventory and assessment in the City of Iowa City. We first ... HR Green took City available data, data from the County, as well as the State GIS data sources. We amalgamated all those together, and we took all the useful data, and anywhere that they disagreed with each other, we made sure to double check that those weren't, you know, which one was more correct, which one we would rather move through into the final program, and the other part is assessment. So the Iowa Pavement Management Program, or IPMP, is run out of Iowa State University and is partnered with Iowa DOT, and since 2013 they have been driving all of the publicly -owned roads in the entire state, in order to collect pavement condition data. The van on your right is from Pathways. That van is used by the current data consultant that the Iowa DOT has contracted with, and that van has fancy laser beams that shoot down onto the ground to measure the cracking and the rutting. There's additional lasers and sensors in the van. There's cameras mounted on the top, as well as another lidar array on there. And in the end, what we get is data. So we get these imageries of the pavement, as well as a process result. So there's kind of...on the right hand is a relief map using lidar data that shows the elevation of the roadway, as well as the raw imagery, which is on the left. And on the far left shows a little bit of how the program that Pathways uses to process this data, where it looks at the types of distresses that it sees with its sensors and cameras and then classifies it by type, severity, and then counts up how much of it there is. So if we're This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council work session of March 16, 2021. Page 3 looking in the middle photo, it would look at this area and call this alligator cracking of severe distress and then count up how many square feet of that there is. On the right hand it would probably see this area and call it a failed patch or a bad patch of asphalt, and it would count up how wide that is, and in the end all of that data is publicly available from the IPMP website, as well as PathWeb, which is owned by the Iowa DOT. You can look at all of this imagery there, as well as they have street -level view, just like Google has for most cities, but it's for every single road in the state of Iowa at the time that they collected the data, and that is done on a two-year basis. So Iowa City has had data collected in 2013, 15, 17, and 19. So we have a very good handle on how things have been changing over time. Moving forward, uh, the DOT is changing (mumbled) to a four-year cycle, with the option to take two, and I believe the Iowa ... Iowa City MPO has taken the opportunity to buy the off year. So, when we talk about the data, I'm often going to use a term called PCI or pavement condition index, and that is a way of grading a roadway on a scale of 0 to 100. And this is not the same grade like kids get in school, so a 60 is not a failing grade. It's not an F. A 60 is fair, a 60 is nice and in the middle where we want it to be. You're not getting into a failing grade until we're down in the 20s, because we have it broken up into even quintiles. So 0 to 20, 20 to 40, 40 to 60 (mumbled) I'm sure you understand. So, I want to show Council a few examples, just so that we have a frame of reference to what we mean when we're talking numbers, or if I use a term like `very good.' On screen right now we have Benton Street on the left and Ball Street. So these sections as shown, I'm not saying all of Benton Street or all of Ball Street are very good. I'm saying the section specifically shown right here is very good. And these are very good because there are no visible distresses. There's nothing wrong with them. There's no cracks. Uh, the ride, if you drive on it, is going to be very smooth. You will barely notice and that's the way we like it. Then we get into `good streets.' This is the 60 to 80 range. This section of Sycamore Street and this section of Friendship Street were given scores in that range. And the reason that they're good and not very good and they're not below that is because they have a little bit of distress, just a little bit, not enough to bother you while you're driving. You'll hardly notice it ... because, you know, most of the distresses outside the wheel path. There's no big potholes. There's no large alligator cracking to cause you to vibrate up and down, so it's going to be a relatively smooth ride. And we can address these with very simple crack sealing and patching routines, so that's good pavement. Next I want to talk about `fair,' and fair is kind of one of our target categories because this is a great time to start doing work like rehabilitations to get really good return out of our money without breaking the bank like with reconstruction. We can do things like overlays or milling overlays or do slurry sealing. So it will be a little bit more than the routine maintenance, but it'll be much more cost-effective than reconstruction. So this section of Muscatine Ave right here is fair because while there is quite a lot of cracking, it's all sealed up. And ... that you can see a little bit of wave to it, so it will be slightly bumpy. It's, uh, fair is when you start noticing that something's wrong, but it's not like really bad. Same thing with Hollywood Boulevard over here. We've got a few cracks, the edges of the pavement are starting to be worn. You can tell it's old but for the most part the drive is going to be okay. Then we're going to get down into poor, 20 to 40. This section of Rundell Street has a lot of asphalt patching sitting in the gutter line. It's probably a drainage issue going on here. You will probably feel that. However, there's not that distress the entire road. You look at the middle of the road and it's kind of okay. Uh, Wayne Street, a little bit different. We have fewer cracks, This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council work session of March 16, 2021. Page 4 but if you look at them, they're really worn down. You can see the edges of the cracks breaking and falling in deeper into the cracks. That's when you start hitting those bumps and joints that really like are noticeable in your car, and that's when you'll start getting a lot of citizen complaints. Lastly, is `very poor.' Very poor is when we have major distresses. We got big jumps in elevation. We've tried fixing it with some patching or some sealing, and it's just not taking and it is ... these are your teeth rattlers. Um, like East Davenport Street has some old overlays on there and they are just falling apart, and those ones are where we're going to hang our hat and say, `That is the worst and the only option is to reconstruct those pavements." So talking about the options that are available to us and how we make those decisions, we helped Iowa City put together a ... what we like to call the toolbox. These are our treatment alternatives, broken down roughly into four categories or the three Rs of reconstruction, rehabilitation, and restoration. These are the types of treatments that we think are viable in the city and then we looked at bid tabs, bid tabulations of projects that have been done in Iowa City, as well as in communities like Cedar Rapids and, you know, that are comparable. So, looking at those we put together costs and then a trigger, the situations in which it would be appropriate. I'm not going to go through those really in depth tonight, but I want you to know that those things are what goes into our decision-making process. And that decision-making process is what feeds into the pavement management software. So after we've developed our, um, toolbox, as well as looked at all the data that's currently available to us, we've loaded all that into dTIMS and then we've processed it using a variety of algorithms. Uh, dTIMS is a great software for this, because you get it at a discount. IPMP and Iowa DOT have selected this as a preferred partner, and Iowa City has bought it effectively from Iowa State University at a very deep discount. And what makes it really good for this type of analysis is its use of something called incremental benefit cost analysis. This looks at each individual option available to us, every step of the way and compares them against each other. So one option, um, shown in the top right, is a pavement over a very long period of time, where you might do some crack sealing at, you know, years 5, 10, 15, and then eventually we'll get to a .... a minor rehabilitation, and then we crack seal it one more time, and then we do a major rehabilitation, and then we reconstruct it way down the line 50 years from now. And then maybe we do another minor rehabilitation down the road. This is one scenario for one road segment. The software then looks at every other scenario. What if we reconstructed it here, instead of doing the minor rehabilitation. What if we did two majors instead of the reconstruction, and it does that for every year, every road, every option. And then it weighs each of those for the entire system, so hundreds of thousands of permutations compared against each other, in order to find the most cost-effective one. So it looks at, okay, this one we got so much benefit over doing nothing and then if I did a different one the area underneath the curve would be slightly different. And then the program picks the one, whichever did better, and then if we have two roads of equal value, it'll pick the one that provides the most benefits. One other way that we helped make these objective decision-making frameworks serve the public is we also weighted it by traffic volume. So we took available traffic data and we loaded that in as part of our benefits calculation. So it's not just how much better is the road, but how many people get to drive on roads that are that much better. So the high volume, high importance roads are the ones that are going to get the focus when everything else is considered. That doesn't mean that we're going to ignore local streets, because those are also important for a variety of reasons, and we have made sure that there are This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council work session of March 16, 2021. Page 5 locally available streets in the program as well (mumbled) One other thing that it lets us do is scenario -based planning. It lets us compare budgets and options available to us. So what if, you know, we find a way to make one rehabilitation cheaper, what if the City budget drops or it goes up, and we're allowed to explore those options in a very rigorous manner. So I want to talk about how Iowa City is doing conditions wise and then we'll get back to the results of our modeling system. Iowa City's doing great. Right now, the citywide network average is 66 out of 100, which qualifies as good. Also, if we're looking at all of the large cities in the state of Iowa, is the third highest. So this is very commendable; however, it doesn't mean you get to stop here. So, one thing that we noticed when looking at the available data is that one category of pavements was doing worse, and one type of pavement has been a little bit neglected. So COM refers to composite pavements. Uh, those are roads that were once regular (mumbled) cement concrete, so that regular gray kind of road, and then it was blacktopped. It has asphalt overlay on top of it. So it is built with regular concrete and asphalt on top. And those ones appear to be having some issues. They are doing worse than the rest of the roads in the city, and this could be due to the age of those roadways. It could be, um, because there's bus routes that go on those overlays and kind of rut them down. Maybe its environmental factors, because there's no drainage available and it's causing those overlays to wear out sooner. Also we noticed that some of the local streets, notably the ones with asphalt surfaces, were also suffering. The graph on the right shows, again, that distribution of roads and the various categories. So it has slightly more `very poor,' has a lot more `poor,' and almost a third as much `good' and `very good.' So it is quite a significant difference from the other roads in town. I'm going to show a quick map here to show where we can see the different types of pavements. There's not a lot of asphalt. They're usually on the major roadways, on the outskirts of town. Similar seal coat is the more rural areas, and then PCC makes up the majority of the network, but there's a lot of composite pavement in the old core of downtown and just to the east, as well as on either side of Highway 6. So it's those older neighborhoods that have gotten overlays to preserve them, but those preservations are now growing older and need work. So here's a condition map that shows how ... I just want to flip back and forth to show that the areas that are nice and blue and are concrete end up being purple here. And dark blues, which means that they're doing good and very good, whereas we see a lot of those composite pavements are in the fair, poor, and very poor in that same zone in the older part of town and just to the east of there, and then on either side of Highway 6. One other trend that we found when analyzing the data since 2013, although I forgot that they didn't collect it in 13. You were delayed until 2014. But is that the pavement condition has declined slightly over this time. So we started up here, ended down here. It's not a lot different, but it is notable in that it has been a consistent trend, and it's something that we're seeing all over the state. So it's ... it's not unique to Iowa City, but that has more to do with, uh, funding availability and the environmental conditions in the state. So, I want to talk about the modeling results. After we've run the dTIMS analysis and it spits out a bunch of data that we've processed and... adapted for you. So the first thing we want to point out is that there is an outstanding need. There are roads that are in poor, very poor, and fair condition that don't need to be, but it is a very expensive, uh, pro ... process to get to fixing all of those. If you were to fix all of the roads that need it tomorrow, it would cost about $189 million... and cost is going up as time goes on. So by 2035, 15 years from now, it'll have more than doubled to 472 million, because the deterioration is accelerating. This gets back to the This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council work session March 16, 2021. Page 6 scenario -based planning that we did. So we ran through a number of budgets, looking at various increments, starting from if you did nothing, and then we looked at where your current budget is. The current City budget is right around $2 million, around 2, 2.5 million dollars, and then we tried to find where it breaks even, where we start seeing that over the next 15 years of projections, it stops going down. And what we found was that even at $8 million a year, it's still declined to being barely in the good category. So if you want to continue to have the quality of pavements that Iowa City has today to maintain that good that puts you third in the state, that would mean a $10 million budget thereabouts, which is an $8 million increase over the current budget. So, again, this is what it looks like in ... 15 years from now, we would be expecting to see that, well, almost half of the roads are in poor, very poor condition, as opposed to if you raised it by 8 million, to that 10 million target goal, it remains relatively steady from where we're at now, with only a slight increase in poor, but a very large proportion, over 50% in that very good category. One of the other things we looked at was how do we distribute the types of treatments that are available to us. And the computer found a very nice balance of about 70% of that budget should be going to reconstructing those deteriorated local composite streets; 20% going to major rehabs of our fair pavements; and then we're going to focus about 10% of the budget on maintaining those good and very good pavements in the state that they are in. One of the other goals that kind of came out of that is that in order to keep ahead of things, you want to be re ... rehabilitating, so overlaying or milling overlaying (mumbled) crack and (mumbled) type of treatment for about two miles of roads each year, and some of those needs are very overwhelming. As I said, it's an $8 million increase over the current budget, so additional funding options should likely be explored to ... in the near future. There's a slight downturn expected around... 2023 is when it starts to take off in the need department, as well as if we look here. Um, it's at this scale. It's a little hard to tell but at the current budget, you see it moves from just being a little bit over the line and it starts to curve downwards. And we want to get ahead of that rapid deterioration. So ideally a funding strategy will be in place by 2023, ahead of that acceleration. One other thing that might be a reasonable target that the City can pursue is splitting up the goals by functional classification. The arterial roadways are the heaviest trafficked ones in town. These are the very important ones that everybody drives on to get to their destinations, so we want to keep those at very high conditions, so usually around a 70, because people are driving faster and more people around those, whereas it might be okay to allow local streets, the minor ones that only serve people's houses. The dead end streets, the residential neighborhoods, to allow those to have an average of around 60. It's still good. But putting so much money after local streets provides much less of a return, because people aren't going to be driving at high speeds. They shouldn't be driving at high speeds on these roads, so they won't feel those minor bumps as much. And they don't have truck traffic to make things worse. So, the results of going through all of this data and the recommendations was we understand that there are current limitations to the funding. So we took the available funding and we ran the program to make the best of it and found a five-year program that used that as wisely as possible and provided a list of recommended projects to, uh, Jason, which the City can now work with and identify where we can leverage the available funding. So, we want to point out that the funding problem is not a uniquely Iowa City thing. The Highway Trust Fund is losing $1.6 billion a year. Inflation alone has doubled construction costs in the past 20 years. We're already seeing a decrease in road use tax revenue in the state of Iowa. But COVID has This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council work session of March 16, 2021. Page 7 tanked that. Uh, estimates right now that I've seen of about 15% of gas tax revenue has been lost. And then we also have to deal with the fact that electric and hybrid vehicles are becoming very common in places like Iowa City, and that means they're not generating road use tax money the way that everybody else's cars are, and that means that they are driving on your roads, using them, but not paying into the system that pays for them. So finding alternative funding measures is very important because we are not getting support at the state and federal level, and at the local level we're seeing a change in our traffic mix that is, you know, throwing up some red flags. So that's all I wanted to present on the pavement management at this point, and I want to know if Council has any questions for myself ..(mumbled) also through Aaron who is our Project Manager on this. Teague: Thank you for that wealth of information. And I'll open it up to Councilors. Thomas: Well I'll offer a few comments, and I might have a question or two. First of all, thanks to every... everyone on staff and the consulting team for working on this. It is something I've been interested in for some time and, you know, seeing the condition of the streets in the district of Iowa City where I live sort of explains, I think, why I have been concerned about this for a while, because the conditions in the center of town are significantly in a more deteriorated condition than they are in other parts of Iowa City, which is one of my comments that ,you know, Iowa City as a whole has a very high grade, relative to other Iowa cities but if you break down Iowa City into smaller sub areas, you would find that the condition would vary from sub area to sub area. I do like the idea of developing different standards for local streets. I think that given our, you know, the ... the challenges we face financially, it certainly seems like a reasonable strategy, and I would also say I think when ... when you have, uh, as long as the streets are at that kind of good condition, there may actually be a traffic calming effect that the streets aren't in perfect condition because of, you know, that minor deterioration. Um, the ... let's see ... some of the other issues that came to my mind would be, you know, this is really.. it seems the analysis is focused on what ... what the road experience is like for drivers, and I would just want to add that, you know, bicycling, you know, is using these roadways as well, and I suspect that the standard for bicycling would need to be a little bit higher, because the ... that good condition, which is perfectly acceptable in a, you know, an automobile may not be as safe for a bicyclist who's on two wheels rather than four. So that's something I think we need to be thinking about is ... is, you know, how ... how this program, if we run it through an equity and climate analysis, you know, that... that's yet another layer that we could be considering in terms of trying to prioritize these projects. Another thing I would just add that ... is that I think this is really about pavement condition, um, but, you know, as we do these streets, uh, assuming we can identify funding sources, I am kind of excited about the opportunity that they provide to try to address some of the, you know, the situations and issues that we have on these streets that are ... have been identified as being unsafe, and one of them that comes to my mind, because I've seen it noted on Facebook recently, is say the intersection of Court and Muscatine and, you know, if we're doing these projects, I think we ... we could take the opportunity to try to identify, uh, those...those conditions and incorporate them into these projects so that we, you know, as we've been talking about the federal level, we build back better so we're not just simply repaving to the existing condition, but identifying when something could be dramatically This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council work session of March 16, 2021. Page 8 improved through the... through the street project. So yeah, we have these with what I would call dangerous by design conditions that ... that could be addressed. Certainly LOST seems like a very, you know, an obvious and appealing way to try to address the, you know, that ... the issue we have with needing additional funding, and as was noted in the report, it has sort of a built-in, um, increase because as the city grows, one can assume that the ... the income from LOST would increase as well. But of course we do have the, um, the issue of equity and how we ... what ... what ways can we ... ensure that if we can the... any equity issues that ... that come up with increasing the sales tax (mumbled) how that would impact lower-income households. So those are some of my thoughts. As I said I'm really excited in a sense to see how, you know, if we can identify the funding, it may help us, um, in a number of ways in terms of making our streets safer and better. I think we do have because of the disproportionate concentration of the fair and poor streets, an opportunity to raise the bar in those areas. We have a better understanding of where their distribution is. And so there are two -maybe my last thought would be, we're talking in the ... in the report about pavement conditions. If you do have a preponderance of streets that are in poor and fair condition, it reflects badly on those areas. You know, they -you start having an image question, um, that, you know, in terms of the image of that area where you have the ... that concentration of streets in poor condition. So again, this I think identifies those areas and gives us an opportunity to ... to look at that issue as well. Mims: I would just thank staff and the team consultants in the work that they've done. I think it's always really helpful to have the data, and I think for a lot of people the graphics are really helpful in kind of getting our head around what's... what's really a complicated situation when you talk about the different neighborhoods, the different kinds of roads. I think, John, you made a good point about, you know, it's not just ... mostly it's for the vehicles, but also looking at safety for bicyclists. And certainly when we look at those, we can look at, you know, where do we have dedicated bike lane or don't we, where do we have the wide sidewalks, you know, that would allow us to maybe not worry quite as much about the (mumbled) for bicyclists, etc., but I think it, you know, as we start to look at how do we put together a plan so that in 20 or 25 years we don't see that significant deterioration. Um, having this kind of data and having the graphs, having the maps, the graphical data comparisons, is really helpful for us as a Council, um, as we try to determine how we're going to come up with additional funding, and also for our staff as they try to determine what should be on the CIP each year, depending upon how much money we tell them they can use, so before we did more discussion. Taylor: I'd also like to thank the staff and the consultant, and one item that jumped out at me was when you'd mentioned the ... the drainage systems on some of the streets and how they contribute perhaps to some of this deterioration, and particularly, uh, I'm on that east side a lot, the Longfellow neighborhood. Those older neighborhoods, those streets, Rundell in particular. They flood all the time, and so I think that's something we as the City would need to keep in mind also, along with the funding for actually repaving the streets, but also look at the drainage systems and redo those when we can. Bergus: I just had a question that maybe staff can help kind of close the loop based on John's comments of how the, uh, I guess traffic engineering plays into the recommendations for the actual This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council work session of March 16, 2021. Page 9 pavement condition improvements. I mean are we now, you know, with having this data, are we putting those things together so that we can take advantage of those opportunities for ...like if there needs to be a reconstruction we're obviously redoing the engineering at the same time or can somebody just speak to that a little bit? Reichart: Yeah, I'll speak to that. So as Jeremy said, you know, based on the results of the ... the analysis, we came up with a report, kind of a five-year plan if you will, of proposed improvements and what we can do with that is share that with other Public Works departments or kind of compare that to our existing CIP program and see kind of like as John said, you know, to include other improvements or projects nearby, whether that be intersection improvements or bicycle master plan improvements, um, storm water, you know, anything. You know that way we can at least use this list and, you know, our knowledge, uh, interdepartmentally to kind of pick and choose at this point, you know, since we're early on, we're in the infancy, and we're kind of getting this started, um, you know, what what projects make the most sense, you know, where ... where are we going to get the biggest bang for our buck, and you know, if we're ... if we're doing say intersection improvements, is it worth maybe pushing a street to a different year or include a portion of that in the CIP, or the existing program CIP project. So, um, there's still variables we're looking at, but yeah, I think, you know, like I said with ... with the information we have now, we're definitely approaching this more methodically than we have in the past and we're definitely able to kind of address some of these concerns you guys have been talking about. So that's the long term goal. Bergus: Well that's great, thank you, and then just a quick follow up. So just the timing wise of getting this program report, like our current... the CIP that we're looking at right now, do you think it's fair that we would expect maybe some adjustments or differences sort of next year and going forward because of the ability to do that more comprehensive look? Reichart: That would be, yeah, that would be the goal. Um, when we put together this year's asphalt resurfacing project, we did look at a list, kind of a backlog list, of streets that we've had and compared it to the ... the program. Um, and we've kind of, again, made some adjustments. We've included some of those streets that were already, you know, spit out in the -the PMP report. We're still kind of using some of the ... the streets just based on, um, a lot of this is just, you know, knowledge, you know, of being in the field, of driving those streets, knowing what streets are bad, and you know, that's kind of how it's been, you know, pretty reactionary in the past and now as we move on into more of a data- driven analysis, we're able to look at this list and say, well, you know, should we overlay this one or does it make more sense to overlay this one, you know, at least now where we have more options and more data to back up our decisions so... Bergus: Excellent! Thank you. Fruin: One thing I ... I'd like to offer, just as we conclude this. You know, the $2 million budget that's referenced is that annual resurfacing program, along with our annual pavement patching program. You have some of that on your agenda tonight. It's not all ... not all 2 million on your This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council work session of March 16, 2021. Page 10 agenda tonight, but that's roughly what ... what is being spoken about. Um, as you... as you know, going through the CIP and particularly those that have been on Council a longer period of time, you're seeing more projects outside of that. So, you know, looking ahead you've got the Benton Street rehabilitation. You've got Rochester. You have Court Street. These are all 4, 5, 6, $7 million projects that we're ... we're bonding for. So that $2 million budget is our standard program, but increasingly what we're seeing is that we just ... we just have to bond for more road projects and that's kind of our ...our projection going forward. It's not to say we're going to be doing $8 million of projects per year with the current funding, but what's going to happen if we don't identify that funding source in the next couple of years is you're going to see more pressure on property taxes to pay for roads. And that's going to squeeze all those other projects that we'd like to fund with property taxes, whether that's Rec Center improvements or park improvements, all those are going to start to compete against roads, which historically they haven't had to because we've... we've just relied on that ... on that road use tax. So keep in mind, we are investing more than $2 million per year on average, but it's not necessarily a good path that we want to continue to go down if we can avoid it. Weiner: One of the sort of unusual things about Iowa City is that we have a number of the state highways and national highways that run through here and therefore end up with DOT funds and so forth. Do you have ... when one of those comes up for a project, as Burlington Street did, what ... how much of the tab in essence is the City pickup versus the state? Frain: Jason can correct me, uh, you want to handle that, Jason Havel? I see you jumped on. Havel: Yeah, I can jump in on that. So it's going to depend on the roadway. Um, typically roughly what the breakdown ends up being is the DOT will handle sort of the pavement portion of that. Any repairs for storm sewer, sanitary sewer, water main would be City responsibility, but a lot of times the DOT will pick up the ... the lion's share of the actual pavement repairs for those corridors, but again, it's somewhat dependent on the project. Weiner: Thanks very much. Ad Hoc Truth and Reconciliation Commission (04): Teague: Great. Any other comments? All right, we will move on. That was very helpful to go through there. We'll move on to the Ad Hoc Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This is IP4 in our infer... information packet, but I also wanted to just mention to Council that this is an item on our formal agenda. It is Item #26, and this isn't ... well there's an item on our formal agenda tonight. This is the item that I requested to have put on the agenda, and this is a temporary suspending of the operation of the Ad Hoc (mumbled) Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Um, I think because this is going to be an item that we're going to have on the agenda, I might suggest that we hold our comments until we hear from the public, and then we'll be able to talk about it at our formal agenda, if that is acceptable to people. All right, then we'll move on to discussion on the utility account collection protocols. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council work session of March 16, 2021. Page 1 I Discussion on utility account collection protocols: Fruin: Well, in the interest of time and in allowing you discussion, I don't think I'll recap my memo, unless you've got questions, but I tried to give a ... give the Council an update from our last check-in with you, which was back in November I believe. So ... so the current memo that's in the packet just kind of gives you an update. Unfortunately we still don't have the ... the rules for the State program. We thought we would by now. It does look like we should see those by the end of March. So we are in a kind of a holding pattern right now at the staff level, but hopefully the update was what you were looking for and will just allow you to have a discussion and ... and follow your lead on any direction you want to issue at this time. Salih: I really just believe that we should just wait on ... don't do any shut-off or anything, or collections, until the end of the month to see what the ... going to happen with the State programs. A lot people, you know, are a lot of (mumbled) I mean not only people is even organization they ...they came together so they can help the people apply for this. There is, uh, they offered by Affordable Housing Coalition with like Johnson County, Shelter House, like (mumbled) everywhere, you know. They ...all of them they came together so they can help people. It doesn't make any sense for us to (mumbled) shut off the water for the people or sending this money to collection, just ... hold on, it's coming soon, and hopefully everybody will be able to apply, and we will see, you know, people are paying it through this State programs. Taylor: I agree with (garbled) about (garbled) until we find out about the federal and state programs, but I did have a question for you, Geoff. Uh, thank you for your report, and in that report you mentioned those accounts where, uh, there ... it sounds like there's just nobody at that address any longer. They've just sort of picked up and left, and those (garbled) recommending perhaps sending to the collections. Would... would that... collection agency then be responsible for trying to find those individuals, finding where they are now and collecting from them. How would that work? Fruin: Yeah and I'll have Dennis join me on the call. Um, he's ... he's much more familiar with that process, but these are cases in which typically rentals in, you know, where a renter was responsible for paying water and they left. Their lease expired, or they left for some other reason, and they're not receiving City service. So they ...they in a lot of cases probably aren't even living in Iowa City anymore, but Dennis, do you want explain the ... the collections process. Bockenstedt: Yeah, and I don't necessarily know all of how they do what they do, but they do just to make an effort to reach out to those individuals and to locate them if they can, and ... and then they make arrangements for them to make payments, if possible. You know, they don't do any sort of the heavy- handed collection effort or...or liens or court actions. So they just really attempt to locate those individuals and then set payment plans to get them to pay what they can. Fruin: And we just ... so Council understands, we use those third parties simply because we don't have, you know, we're not staffed to do collections. You know we're really staff to run current operations, but we've always relied on those third parties to help establish... establish that, This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council work session of March 16, 2021. Page 12 even ... even the financial system that we have isn't ... isn't really designed for payment plans and things like that. So this is a trusted partner of ours that we've used for, you know, a considerable amount of time, and it's not ... it's not like we're going out and seeking special collection services for these cases. Salih: Dennis, how many (mumbled) like those people who no longer live there, how many of them? Bockenstedt: Uh, currently at the last count there was over 500, and a lot of them date back to maybe a year ago, that maybe they left (both talking, garbled) Salih: 500 people left? Bockenstedt: Well they may have moved out of their apartments and not returned back to town. It's hard to say what they all are, but there's currently over 500 accounts that are (mumbled) no longer live at those residences. Salih: And this is just for the ... all this happen in the 2020? Bockenstedt: Correct. Fruin: Yeah, so it's, um, it's ... as of the date of the memo it was 521 accounts, accounting for about $82,000 and so those are folks that don't have a shut-off risk, right? They're not receiving that service anymore. And that's... that's the one I think as staff we feel comfortable moving forward to try to identify them, get them ... get them on payment plans. Again, it's not a harsh collections, but ... but they're at no risk of shut-off because they ...they're not the account holder at any other Iowa City address. Salih: Okay, if they are not really receiving services right now, and they no longer even live there and we try just to locate them so they can make a payment, that makes sense to me. Fruin: Yeah, and then I think for everybody else our recommendation in the memo was that, you know, if you're an active account holder, then we should stay the course and wait for that State program, because we share that goal of maximizing participation in that program. You know it's going to be a lot easier for us to collect those funds through that State program than to go through collections, so we just want to make sure that we're not, you know, we're not going to jeopardize anybody's status in terms of being eligible for those funds. Once those State program's information's released we may want to come back to you and say, okay, now we know the rules and we have another couple of sub ... subsets of account holders and work through those issues with you, but as for now we kind of see those two groups potentially eligible, and then the no longer receiving service. We also have the renter versus homeowner distinction, and that State program is ... is going to be just the, uh, just for renters. It does look like they're going to launch a ... a homeowner relief program, but at least as of last time I checked the State website, that was really going to be a foreclosure assistance program and not a utility assistance program. So we'll have to ... we'll have to verify that. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council work session of March 16, 2021. Page 13 Salih: I guess right now they changing it every day. I ... I just believe for everyone we have to wait until we figure out. As soon as they release for the renter by the end of the month, uh, we will figure out also for homeowner. I guess if we can just be patient for both homeowner and renter, as long as they are active. Teague: I'm personally comfortable with the 521 accounts, going ahead and moving out and doing some movement there. Um, I would agree that we should wait until we learn more about these programs. I think it's good that we're hearing about these programs and they're... they're right there. We don't know all the final rules. It makes sense to wait. The one thing that I would want to maybe not wait on is for Council to start thinking about, um, so what happens to the ones that don't have assistance. Is there an application that they can have at our ...at the City, if they need some type of a waiver or some type of a consideration. So something in-house that we can provide. That's... because there will be some people that may fall through the cracks. And that's where I think that we would be better off having some conversations there. It sounds like the majority of Council is good on waiting until we hear more answers, you know, for the ... for the tenants and some homeowners, um, that are in foreclosures, but there will be other people that have needs, and seem to me that we would want to establish something that people can apply to have COVID relief. I know that we do have a program at ready, but it seems that that may not be sufficient. Salih: Good point, yeah. (several talking) I'm sorry, but there is a lot people are not going to be eligible for the State programs. I think that's a very good point, Mayor, to bring it up. Thank you. Mims: I think staff also has in there at least an attempt to work on a payment plan. I think we can also talk about if that doesn't work, but I think trying to start with a payment plan if people can afford that is a good place to start. Weiner: I just wanted to find out if...Geoff, are we ... is on the website or through other ways also going to let people know sort of in general that we're waiting for this State program, in case they're concerned, have another... got... got one of the early... earlier letters, um, just want to know what the status is. Bockenstedt: (mumbled) they've been reaching out to ... to individuals through letters, but then the last time the State program came out, they actually phone called every individual, every account. They called every... everyone and told them about the programs. So I don't know if they'll have ... there's like quite a few more than there was (laughs) the last time they did that, but ... but they certainly have been making every... every effort to reach out to individuals and let them know about the programs that are available and sending letters. So ... so we've done a lot of time and effort in communicating with people about what is going on. Weiner: Thanks. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council work session of March 16, 2021. Page 14 Teague: So there does seem to be at least a consensus that we're going to be waiting for more information from the State, and I anticipate we'll have more conversations. Frain: Did I hear consensus on the non-active accounts, where there is no shut-off risk, to go ahead and move towards establishing payment plans (mumbled). Okay, thank you. Teague: Okay. Any other... anything else related to that? All right, moving on to clarification of agenda items. Anything on the formal agenda? Clarification of Agenda Items: Frain: Mayor, maybe I'll make mention of this. The Melrose Court sewer improvement projects, there was a, um, the Press -Citizen had an error in ... in the publication of the ... of the public hearing in that that they notified us of. So we cannot hold that hearing tonight, and there'll be a request to add that agenda item to your March 23rd meeting. If you remember we have a special work session scheduled at 4:00. So we'll have a one item Council meeting to consider that project, and that'll allow us to get the publication reposted in accordance with State law, so you'll... you'll hear that change tonight. Information Packet Discussion (March 4, March 11): Teague: Okay. Info packet, March 4th. Mims: Just say thanks for the report on the deer management plan. Obviously we didn't have very many people taking advantage of that yet this year. Some of that might have been timing, but obviously if that doesn't pick up we are going to need to go back to the DNR and see if there's somehow some way we can get the sharpshooting done again. Teague: Anything else from March 4a`? March 11th. We really have the two major item for March 11th presented today. All right, Council updates on assign boards, commissions, and committees. Council updates on assigned boards, commissions, and committees: Weiner: I don't ... I don't really have an update on that, but I did take advantage of the opportunity to go see the electric bus that came through, and take a ride on it, and it's really impressive. Um, you know, when we're talking about changing our streetscape and what ... what it looks and sounds and smells like. It's quiet, you can talk on the inside, you can talk on the outside, no diesel fumes and in terms of fuel save, the ... what stuck in my mind was what takes a current bus 100 gallons of diesel fuel, would take one of these buses the equivalent of 18. Teague: Any other reports that ... we can probably do reports now if Council is open to that. Just general reports. There was the Night of 1000 Dinners and some great people honored during that. That This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council work session of March 16, 2021. Page 15 was fantastic. That was with the United Nations Association of Johnson County. So ... any ...any other reports people want to give? Are... Weiner: With respect ... with respect to COVID, I don't have a specific report, but I really liked ... there was a great article in the Gazette about Brian Finley, who's a resident of Iowa City and a programmer and has done basically the entire state a huge service by creating a Twitter account that ... that automatically aggregates available vaccine appointments and... and spits them out as it finds them, and it's really improved life for ...for so many people who have been searching for vaccine appointments. He's done a huge public service, where just as a essentially a private citizen his goal ... he's got thousands and thousands of followers now. His goal is to be able to get rid of the account... Teague: Wow! Weiner: ... when it's no longer needed. Teague: That's impressive. (laughs) Great, anything else? Hearing none, we will be adjourned until 7:00 P.M., and we will sign out of this Zoom meeting and sign it to our next one. Ob, one last thing, our next meeting in April will start at 4:00 P.M. So, starting in April, our work sessions are at 4:00 and then our formal meeting will be at 6:00 P.M. So, all right! See you soon! This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council work session of March 16, 2021.