Item B: River Avenue Improvements

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design of the road when it was going to be rebuilt to urban design standards. He thought Mr. Schoening was interpreting the City Council direction to be in absolute support of these standards. He did not agree that the council directive was clear. Mr. Schoening reiterated the points on which the stakeholder group could make changes to the design. He did not look at the Beltline Road interchange as a part of it because as a city traffic engineer he looked at River Avenue as an unimproved tw<rlane road that needed to be improved. Mr. Howard opined that the road the City designed would not support the sand and gravel truck traffic that traversed River Avenue if the ingress and egress of Beltline at the east end of River Avenue was closed by ODOT. Mr. Schoening disagreed. Mr. Howard questioned the need to move on this project at this point in time. Mr. Schoening reviewed the process by which a road project rose up from the CIP, which typically took five or six years. He said when looking at a modernization project such as upgrading River Avenue to an urban standard, the City looked at the funding stream including the assessments and matched it against the projects to determine what could be done within an annual budget. He stressed that the City used real objective criteria to determine what projects move forward. Mr. C. Austin disagreed with the assertion that the Division Avenue/River Avenue connection would be used very much if the Beltline Road interchange was closed. He also asserted that any widening of the Beltline Road would take out any improvements made to River Avenue. Mr. Schoening responded that it made sense to wait to improve Divison Avenue on the north side ofthe Beltline Road for that reason. Mr. C. Austin likened undertaking the River A venue project before ODOT knew what it was going to do with the Beltline RoadlRiver Road interchange to placing the cart before the horse. Ms. Rojas recalled hearing that one item on the table was the possibility that the scope of the project could become smaller. She wondered if the road could be brought up to urban standards to the point just east of the post office, which she considered to be an area where there really was a concern for pedestrians and bicyclists. Mr. Schoening acknowledged that the linear scope of the project was on the table. Mr. Samer pointed out that Mr. Boyatt indicated that the earliest date that the Beltline Road interchange would be worked on would be 2009. He asked where the conflict lay in building a 20-year road that might be affected by a project tentatively scheduled for 15 years from now. Ms. Damron expressed hope that the preservation of the neighborhood character of the River Road area could be included in the project. She noted that this was the second big improvement project to the neighborhood, with the improvements to Maxwell Road being the first. She shared that many residents had concerns as to how the Maxwell Road project had turned out. She wanted to consider how to preserve the church, for one example, and whether a natural swale drainage system could be used for another. She thought the River Avenue project, if executed well, could be used as a template for future projects. Continuing, Ms. Damron conveyed her concern regarding the process of how things were put on or taken off the table. She wondered ifthe group needed to go back to the council for further direction to determine whether an overlay was a possibility. She did not want to waste stakeholder group time MINUTES-River A venue Stakeholder Group - Public Works Department August 24, 2005 Page 9