Item B: River Avenue Improvements

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Mr. Howard alleged that a footnote bumped River Avenue into being a major collector and this was a subjective judgment. Ms. Cahill replied that zoning was absolute and not subjective. She reminded the group that the street plan had been through a public process and approved by the Planning Commission and then the City Council. Mr. Spain asked fur definitions of 'financially constrained roadway project' and 'programmed' and 'un- programmed' projects. Ms. Cahill clarified that, in looking at projections of revenues, a financially constrained project was a project that the City thought it could afford within the next 20 years. She said a programmed project was in the six-year window of projects the City thought it could afford and an un- programmed project feU outside of the six-year window and had no funding proposed to be programmed for it at this time. Mr. Spain observed that in considering a decision to do an overlay on the street versus a decision to redesign it, an overlay would not be considered fiscally prudent given the short life span of the repair. He thought it would be fair to assume that the City made this decision with fiscal prudence. Ms. Cahill asked Transportation Planner for the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) Region 2, Tom Boyatt, to speak to the group. Mr. Boyatt explained that he was the south region long-range transportation planner and that he interfaced with the Metropolitan Policy Organization (MPO), Lane County, and the 11 cities in Lane County. He said projects such as the one planned for River A venue were modernization projects. He related that the Beltline Highway currently carried 83,000 vehicles per day, a higher volume than Interstate 5 carried through the metro-area, and because of this high volume and congestion, and exiting safety problems it was an ODOT priority to make improvements. Mr. Boyatt outlined the process by which a project was funded and built, which he observed was lengthy and "tedious." He said the MPO prioritized the local priorities on the State system on a two-year ongoing basis. He stated that this priority list was forwarded to the Lane County Board of Commissioners, which weighed urban priorities and rural priorities and brought those to Region 2. He explained that Region 2 consisted of nine counties and 60 cities. He underscored that requests for projects outdistanced the funding to build them. He noted that the State was in the midst of a major bridge building program. Continuing, Mr. Boyatt said the Board of Commissioners had brought the Beltline Highway to the process the previous year as a priority to begin looking into improving the facility. He stated that the board had been able to secure $1 million in the Statewide Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) as seed money for the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) assessment process. He said this process was used to go through and check the alternatives and, with stakeholders from the different agencies and the public, arrive at a preferred alternative which could then be funded. He related that ODOT had internal guidance and policy guidance from the Oregon Transportation Commission (OTC) as wen as from its administrative rule and had been told to do its planning before the NEPA assessment. He clarified that in order for ODOT to be able to program $1 million to begin the NEPA process on the Beltline project, the region planning group had to commit to do refinement planning 011 Beltline so that ODOT could identify on a higher level what costs and impacts might be and what alternatives would and would not work. He called it a "pre-NEPA stage that culminates in plan amendments." He observed that at this point the segment of Be1tline Highway that was being looked at was 011 the 'futures list' in MPO Regional MfNUTES-River Avenue Stakeholder Group - Public Works Department August 24, 2005 Page 5