MINUTES OF THE METRO COUNCIL

TRANSPORTATION PLANNING COMMITTEE MEETING

TUESDAY, JANUARY 18, 2000

COUNCIL CHAMBER

CALL TO ORDER AND ROLL CALL

Chair Monroe called the meeting to order at 1:32 p.m.

1.  CONSIDERATION OF THE MINUTES OF THE DECEMBER 14, 1999, TRANSPORTATION PLANNING COMMITTEE MEETING

2.  RESOLUTION NO. 00-2888, FOR THE PURPOSE OF APPROVING SUPPLEMENTAL AMENDMENTS TO THE 1999 UPDATE OF THE REGIONAL TRANSPORTATION PLAN

Andy Cotugno, Transportation Planning Department Director, said that at the council meeting on December 16, 1999, the resolution on the RTP (Regional Transportation Plan) was adopted. A section, which dealt with all the comments submitted since the last JPACT (Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation) meeting, was detached from the resolution and was referred back to JPACT for recommendation. Therefore, Resolution No. 00-2888 includes all of the additional/remaining comments from the JPACT meeting through the council meeting on December 16, when the last resolution was heard and adopted.

Resolution No. 00-2888 also proposes an action on each comment. In some cases the department agreed and recommended a change for specific parts of the language, in others they decided to leave the language unchanged. The department recommended that a whole package of the responses be adopted by consent. Mr. Cotugno also highlighted three comments that the department thought needed additional attention and discussion concerning the resolution.

Chair Monroe said the committee needed to hear about all three items that were not on the consent list. He asked Presiding Officer Bragdon if there were any items on the consent list that he wanted to hear additional details about as well.

Presiding Officer Bragdon said no. He asked, for the record and to refresh his memory, if the committee was referring to the same consent list that was adopted by JPACT last week.

Mr. Cotugno said yes. The resolution the department distributed to the committee today included an additional comment that the department responded to that was included in the JPACT packets. However, the comment was not included in the committee packets, because they were mailed about a day earlier than the JPACT packets. The item was recommended by JPACT at their meeting on Thursday, January 13, 2000. Otherwise, the rest of the comments were recommended by JPACT.

Chair Monroe asked Mr. Cotugno to review the items that were not on the consent agenda.

Mr. Cotugno commented on Exhibit “A” to Resolution No. 00-2888, 1999 Regional Transportation Plan, Part 1, Summary of Additional RTP Comments and TPAC (Transportation Policy Alternatives Committee) Recommendations for Approval by Discussion. A copy of this document can be found in the permanent record.

Mr. Cotugno said his remarks and this resolution, and the earlier resolution adopted in December, addressed all the input the department received during the RTP public comment period, which lasted from October 1, 1999, to December 16, 1999. In light of that, he suggested there was no need for the department to schedule another public hearing regarding the RTP. The two resolutions included all the comments they received during the RTP public comment period.

3.  REGIONAL TRANSPORTATION PLAN SIX-MONTH WORK PROGRAM

Mr. Cotugno commented on the 1999 Regional Transportation Plan, Post-Resolution Activities (Spring 2000) handout. A copy of this document can be found in the permanent record. The transportation department created the work-plan, based on the last resolution that identified several outstanding issues. The plan provided a sequence for addressing all of the necessary job tasks that had to be completed during the next six-month period. The policy track (the bottom half of the work plan handout), in particular, would be used to measure and document the department and JPACT’s progress every month during the process. This was preferable to waiting until the end of the six-month period and asking council to adopt the plan. There were too many components of the plan that required input from the council to hold them to the end of the process. The department would request input on a variety of issues as they completed the process.

The main point was that the process had to be broken into components, with financing the central piece. Therefore, the department would answer the questions related to a fiscally constrained system, first. They needed to model whatever scenario and define a set of transportation improvements the department thinks they could afford.

Therefore, they would be spending the first few months focusing on constraints. They planned to spend approximately six weeks modeling to test for air quality emissions and to verify whether those emissions would be within budget. They would complete the revenue estimates and policy direction up front as well, to determine what they should fund with the estimated revenue.

The department would be spending an additional two months focusing on financing the strategic RTP. The department planned to address questions such as: What scale should the RTP be? What could Metro afford? How much money would that represent? What does that mean you would be building? Then, they planned on addressing the following question: What were the department’s good ideas concerning getting to the system Metro wanted to get to? That would be a second two-month set of activities.

Other activities were interspersed throughout the work-plan. The top row of the document, for example, showed that the department planned to do a first cut at findings for state and federal purposes, and meet with state and federal agencies to determine whether they would be satisfied with those findings. The department also planned to identify results from the findings that may result in further amendments to the document so that they would comply with all the requirements. He described the process as a parallel track that would help guarantee that the department covered all the bases with all the relevant agencies.

The work-plan also mentioned the special needs transit issue (Comment 1) he referred to earlier in the committee meeting. The department would use a March/April 2000 timeframe to produce a system design component and that would need to be incorporated into the process before the department could come back before the council for adoption.

Those were the big items covered in the work plan. The fiscal constraints, financing for the strategic RTP, the Transit Service for Special Needs Populations issue and the agency findings all appear in the work plan.

Councilor Kvistad said it looked like Mr. Cotugno’s department would be operating according to a very tight schedule. He asked Mr. Cotugno if he thought his department could process all of the modeling and compliance issues by early May.

Mr. Cotugno agreed that the schedule for completion would be a challenge. But his staff was going to try hard and should be able to meet the deadline. Now that the winter holidays were over, the department was going to try to complete the six-month project before operations (council and committee meetings, etc.) begin their August recess.

Councilor Kvistad said it was a lot of work to jam into a six-month time period. He noticed that the boxes on the work-plan were very small and represented a lot of work that would need to be done if the transportation department planned on completing the project on time.

Tom Kloster, Senior Program Supervisor, noted that the major tasks listed within each box actually represented several smaller tasks. For example, the resolution led to a question concerning the number of corridor studies that the plan would generate. There were also questions about specific corridors like TV Highway. The department planned to organize a more topical set of issues that would be reviewed by both TPAC and JPACT for discussion of the questions people have asked about in the resolution. The information would address questions people wanted answered before the council adopts an ordinance. The department designed the boxes to help organize related questions into groups. Later, transportation staff would produce a more specific work program list or schedule of items that would be making their way through the system.

COUNCILOR COMMUNICATIONS

Presiding Officer Bragdon said he was curious about the summit on transportation funding issues that Chair Monroe and Councilor Kvistad attended. He requested, at some appropriate point, that they brief the rest of the councilors who did not attend the summit on what they learned. He heard very positive things about the meeting.

Councilor Kvistad summed up the summit. There was no money and everybody was worried about it.

Presiding Officer Bragdon said at least they were talking about those issues.

Chair Monroe said that almost everybody agreed that was true. It was an excellent meeting and a great speech by Governor Kitzhaber. He commended the efforts and credibility of Dick Righton and Tom Brian, the co-chairs of the meeting. The co-chairs planned on organizing a similar meeting after the May elections.

Chair Monroe said there was a request that all government agencies in the Portland region consider a formal resolution of endorsement concerning Measure 82. The resolution was being prepared. The draft they handed out he thought could be improved upon, so he asked Mr. Cotugno and his staff to make improvements. The committee wanted to talk about the best timing, when it would have the most impact on the election and when it would be best for Metro to publicize its endorsement. The issue would come before the council sometime between January 18, 2000 and May 1, 2000.

Mr. Cotugno said on Thursday, January 13, 2000, the Transportation Commission also approved the final list of projects that moved forward as part of ballot Measure 82. That included improving what his department submitted to the commission. There was discussion about how far they were willing to depart from the original list that the legislature had seen. The commission approved significant changes that the department suggested to the original list. He said that what the department submitted is now what is moving forward.

Councilor Kvistad asked if the commission accepted the cuts Metro made. (Muffled recording/malfunction: Some of Councilor Kvistad’s brief comments were not recoverable.)

Mr. Cotugno said he would check, but he didn’t think so. They had adopted, very much with the Governor Kitzhaber’s direction, conditions on some of the projects. Some of the issues that were raised by 1000 Friends of Oregon, in terms of whether they wanted to support the measure, were based on some of their concerns about the projects that Measure 82 was funding like the Sunrise Corridor, for example. Was it encouraging desirable or undesirable growth patterns? Therefore, ODOT imposed conditions that the projects will be built subject to answering those kinds of questions. He said tolling was a similar question that needed to be considered further before a final decision could be made to build those projects. He would research the specifics concerning all the conditions ODOT imposed, but it was a significant part of the commission’s discussion about the project list.

Chair Monroe told Presiding Officer Bragdon that when Metro had their resolution of support, it would be a good time to have a review of that list in the Portland region before the full council, so that the other councilors would know what they would be voting on. They were projects that were important to everyone.

Presiding Officer Bragdon agreed.

Chair Monroe said there had been a lot of discussion of that. The amount that was being bonded for the specific up-front projects was only two cents, and there was an additional three cents that would be available to local governments for all kinds of other projects that wouldn’t have necessarily been bonded. Although, he said there would be an option.

ADJOURN

There being no further business before the committee, Chair Monroe adjourned the meeting at 1:53 p.m.

Respectfully submitted,

Andy Flinn

Council Assistant

Attachments to the Record

Metro Transportation Committee meeting of January 18, 2000

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