MINUTES OF THE METRO COUNCIL

TRANSPORTATION COMMITTEE MEETING

Thursday, May 16, 2002

Metro Council Chamber

Members Present:  Rex Burkholder (Chair), Bill Atherton (Vice Chair), and Rod Monroe.

Members Absent:  None.

1.    CALL TO ORDER AND ROLL CALL. Chair Burkholder called the meeting to order at 10:05 a.m.

2.  CITIZEN COMMUNICATIONS ON NON-AGENDA ITEMS. Mr. Plinio Crow, 308 E. 12^th Street, #C, Vancouver, WA 98660, who said he did not represent any organization or special interest group, spoke to the committee of his interest in seeing the $1.2 billion dollars of the I-5 Trade Corridor Partnership Task Force of ODOT and WSDOT used for the benefit of the entire community. Mr. Crow presented a document for inclusion in this record, This is not Just a North to South Issue, but an East to West One as well, May 15, 2002. He said he had e-mailed this same report to each of the committee members for their review and would very much appreciate them reading it. The concept in his report would raise eyebrows, he said, but the benefits would be enormous. He expressed his desire to schedule meetings with each of the committee members, saying he had meetings scheduled with people from the Port of Portland, ODOT, City of Vancouver Transportation, WSDOT, etc. Chair Burkholder asked Mr. Crow if he had spoken with the I-5 Trade Corridor Task Force, and Mr. Crow said he had and that his report would be included in the Task Force agenda packet for their next meeting.

3.  RELATED COMMITTEE UPDATES.

•  Bi-State Transportation Committee. The next scheduled meeting was Thursday, May 23^rd, Councilor Monroe reported, and they would be discussing the I-5 Corridor, the experimental HOV lane on I-5 in southwest Washington and what's happened politically in Olympia that affects that, and the ongoing subject of land use and the impacts of the I-5 fix on land use, and vice versa.

•  JPACT. This committee last met May 9^th, and the repercussions from that were ongoing, Councilor Monroe said. There was some discussion taking place with the mayor of Wilsonville, JPACT and the Oregon Transportation Commission (OTC) regarding the Oregon Transportation Investment Act (OTIA) II funds. Councilor Monroe explained that OTIA funds were generated by Representative Bruce Starr’s Bill 2142, and the original amount generated was $400 million; because of lower interest rates another $100 million was forthcoming and authorized by an early and special session. This $100 million was called the OTIA II funds. The Mayor of Wilsonville said she would like Metro to advocate using some of that money to backfill the Boeckman Road project, Councilor Monroe said, so that Wilsonville wouldn’t have to kick in the $2 million they agreed to do, Clackamas County wouldn’t have to kick in their $2 million, and Metro wouldn’t have to kick in the $2 million of MTIP money.

Councilor Atherton said backfill was a word the committee may need to focus on and he told Councilor Monroe he would like to weigh in on it.

Chair Burkholder asked Councilor Atherton if he would like to write a letter reiterating the position that these two projects were the top priority projects, and Councilor Atherton said he would. A good way of phrasing it, Chair Burkholder said, and he quoted Mr. Mike Hoglund, was if there had been $500 million the first time around in OTIA, both projects would have been fully funded before other projects farther down the list. Councilor Atherton said this was very a very serious matter to local jurisdictions and he said he’d like the letter to be from the Metro Council. Mr. Hoglund said the OTC would not make a decision on this until June, and their meeting would probably be held LaGrande. He said it might be appropriate to add to the letter a recognition that there seemed to be a policy discussion still happening by the OTC as to whether or not to fully fund OTIA I projects that weren’t fully funded, or to identify new projects that were further down the list. That policy question didn’t seem to have been decided as of yet, he said. In that regard, he suggested the letter to the OTC reiterate the position of the Metro Council and JPACT that the first priority was to fully fund the Boeckman Road and Sunnyside to 142^nd projects. The reason he thought JPACT should be included in the letter was that part of the process the OTC had outlined was that they specifically wanted comments from the advisory committees and JPACT.

Chair Burkholder said he thought it a good idea to weigh in one more time on this, and asked Mr. Hoglund and Mr. Michael Morrissey, Senior Council Analyst, to assist Councilor Atherton, and that signatures from the whole council would be appropriate. Councilor Atherton said it was important to focus on solving the problem and not have a scattered approach. Mr. Hoglund added that staff was trying to get more information from the OTC which he would bring forward for the letter. On behalf of the OTC, Councilor Monroe said he appreciated the fact that they sought to partner with JPACT in making their decisions. They may not always agree with JPACT’s recommendations, but at least they listen and solicit JPACT’s opinion. He said he didn’t want to damage what appeared to be an improving relationship with this region and the OTC.

•  Southwest Washington RTC Board. The Board met the previous week, Councilor Monroe said. The big issue now was the HOV lane, southbound. It started in November or December 2001, and there was a long-standing plan to widen the freeway southbound. Some Battleground officials were vehemently opposed to all HOV lanes and have done everything they could to eliminate this one. When the Washington legislature put a gas tax increase measure on the ballot for this November, they slipped a rider into it that said unless the HOV lane met all of its objectives by that time, it would be converted to a General Purpose lane and be gone. This was problematic, Councilor Monroe said. The HOV lane had currently met most of those objectives, but the utilization of it was not yet up to the goal standard. He said he hoped that would happen by fall. Some Washington state legislators were putting themselves against a decision made by the entire region and the regional entity that governs transportation in the region. He found this very troublesome and said he didn’t know how it would turn out. If the gas tax measure was defeated, the rider would be as well, but he didn’t like Washington to have to not get the money they need for roads because of this one rider. Chair Burkholder said he thought the Bi-State Transportation Committee would be looking at this issue, as well, and Councilor Monroe agreed.

•  South Corridor Policy Advisory Group. There had been no action performed by this committee and they would be meeting possibly in June, Councilor Monroe reported.

4.  CONSIDERATION OF THE MINUTES OF THE APRIL 18, 2002, TRANSPORTATION COMMITTEE MEETING.

5.  TRANSIT INVESTMENT PLAN. Lynn Petersen, Strategic Planning Manager, Tri-Met, introduced her summer intern, Sean Kennedy of Georgia Tech. Ms. Peterson said that even though she’d spoken to each of the councilors off the record regarding this, she wanted to make sure a good overview of the Transit Investment Plan (TIP) was in the record. (A copy of the slides used in her presentation is included in this record.) Tri-Met’s Transit Investment Plan is a 20-year plan to meet travel demand for all modes to accommodate the increase in population and jobs in the region, she said. Tri-Met implements the adopted Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) by “growing the transit system.” Ms. Peterson spoke of how Tri-Met intends to grow the system in 5-year increments.

The committee had questions and there was discussion on community scale projects, Highway 43, on Tri-Met’s growth south in the region, in their work with Transportation Management Associations (TMAs), and how some communities, Sherwood being specifically mentioned, were looking to provide shuttles for their community for the summer, with Tri-Met’s guidance. Chair Burkholder said his observation, which was not necessarily Tri-Met’s concern but more of a regional concern, was that transit service seemed to follow development rather than lead it. He said he was thinking of the potential upcoming Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) expansion in Damascus and whether or not Tri-Met should be thinking about transit service there. Ms. Peterson replied that that wasn’t included in Tri-Met’s TIP, specifically because 1) it wasn’t included in the RTP yet and they would need to work with Metro on that, 2) Tri-Met has been working with the City of Gresham on adding some service to help build up the grid that could eventually be extended to Pleasant Valley, which could then be extended to Damascus, and 3) Damascus was not within Tri-Met’s service district – they had pulled out of the district soon after Tri-Met was created, and the process of putting them back into it would have to be completed before service could be provided.

Councilor Atherton said this was a key issue in that transit should not be an afterthought but should be designed at the beginning of development and the commitment for it made. He then mentioned a recent conversation he’d had with the Metro attorneys and his subsequent understanding of that conversation that it was permissible for land not contiguous to the UGB to be annexed into it.

Ms. Peterson’s closed by saying JPACT had adopted a resolution with the last MTIP that said the 2004-05 money that would be allocated to Tri-Met for transit, whether it be capital or service, should be related to Tri-Met’s TIP. Also, she said, the resolution said that any further MTIP requests should be related to the TIP. The process of determining projects for the MTIP as well as for the future had begun, and Tri-Met would be working very hard on those over the summer.

Chair Burkholder thanked Ms. Peterson for her presentation and for the discussion.

6.  PUBLIC HEARING. Draft Resolution No. 02-3186 for the Purpose of Amending the Metropolitan Transportation Improvement Program (MTIP) to Include State Bond Funds; Programming Preliminary Engineering Funds for US 26 Widening, and Approving a Conformity Determination for These Actions and Those of Ordinance 02-945 That Amends the Regional Transportation Plan. Mr. Mike Hoglund said he was not looking for approval of the resolution today because this meeting was primarily to have the opportunity to receive comment(s). The related ordinance would be read at the Council meeting at 2 o’clock. Mr. Hoglund spoke to the projects in the air quality maintenance area that would receive more funding under the OTIA II process and that were significant enough that they needed to be run through the models to determine whether or not they would put the region over the air quality budget (as shown in the Tables in the Public Review Draft, Conformity Determination, distributed and included as part of this record). The projects, listed on the first page of the Conformity Determination, were the US 26 and Jackson School Road interchange, the US 26 widening from Murray Boulevard to 185^th Avenue, and other minor system revisions declared to Metro by local governments. Table S-2 in the document listed the Locally Declared Amendments to the RTP Financially Constrained System. He called the committee’s attention to the Public Review Draft and the tables that provided the conformity requirements and findings. He said Metro would be going into their update of the Air Quality Maintenance Plan soon.

There was discussion on the NOx emissions (see Table 3 of the budget vs. the model) on how it showed more traffic each year yet no violations in containment, and whether the assumptions assumed a similar road fleet or significant changes in the types of highway vehicles used in the future. Mr. Hoglund also pointed out that the document reported how Metro met all the rules in achieving conformity and provided the required public notification, plus more.

Chair Burkholder said an MCCI member had brought up the issue of public involvement on this, not on the conformity analysis but on the addition of the new OTIA funded projects, with concern that there were some fairly major projects added in at a late date that didn’t receive the same kind of public scrutiny (specifically Jackson Interchange), and he wondered if there may be more concern on insuring unwanted urban-style development, such as putting a full interchange out in the middle of farm hills, was not created. Chair Burkholder asked if the public notices were informative enough. Mr. Hoglund said the state submitted that project in Washington County and it was their public review process that it had to go through to get approval, but the project had been scrutinized at JPACT. He said this hearing today was to look at air quality conformity rather than project rankings or review. Chair Burkholder asked him if he felt comfortable that the concerns of the MCCI member had been addressed, and Mr. Hoglund replied that the project was in the RTP as an illustrative project because it was not in Metro’s jurisdictional boundary, and that even following Metro’s extensive public process for the RTP would not have told anyone that it was going to be an interchange.

Chair Burkholder had questions regarding Appendix 2, p. 2, on 2. US 26: Murray/185^th project, specifically the Financial Constraint paragraph, last sentence, “Future MSTIP allocations at current funding levels are projected to yield approximately $22 million annually (2002 dollars) through 2020.” He said his understanding was that there was no MSTIP program any more, that this was rolled into the tax base and was General Fund dollars now, which weren’t necessarily dedicated to transportation, that they are General Fund dollars that the current Commission is putting into transportation, but there’s no legal dedication. He said the assumption was that this money for the next 18 years would be spent on transportation and he didn’t think that was quite accurate. Mr. Terry Whisler, MTIP Coordinator, said the purpose of that notation was to indicate that there was a reasonable expectation that funding would be available to support inclusion in a financially constrained document. The issue wasn’t “is money dedicated to this project,” but “are there funds reasonably anticipated over 20 years that could see to its inclusion.”

Another question Chair Burkholder had was on Appendix 2, p. 4, on 3. Sunrise Corridor. He said there were some nuances regarding the EIS process that he thought were not very clear, and asked staff how the federal government could treat this differently than Metro, saying perhaps an explanation at a later time would be more appropriate. Mr. Hoglund said he would provide that when staff comes forward with the full Sunrise Corridor Damascus planning piece. Mr. Whisler said the bottom line was that what was being modeled was no different from what was there before.

Chair Burkholder opened a public hearing. No one appeared to speak. Chair Burkholder closed the public hearing.

There was more discussion of the stand-alone project, the industrial connector off I-205 to 122^nd.

7.  RTP AMENDMENTS. Mr. Hoglund said staff had given a brief overview of the RTP Post-Acknowledgment Amendments to JPACT. He said the committee needed to be aware, however, that the RTP was going to be amended. The summary of those amendments was in the agenda packet for committee review, he said, and the first reading would officially be at Council soon. When Council assigned it back to this committee, then staff would go into more detail. He asked the committee to review the memo prior to that. Mr. Hoglund pointed out the GreenStreets project and said it may have an implication on the Regional Framework Plan and the Metro Code through the Functional Plan, so there may be a policy debate at MPAC, JPACT and perhaps at Council on those recommendations.

8.  OREGON TRANSPORTATION IMPROVEMENT ACT (OTIA) UPDATE. Mr. Hoglund deferred to the earlier discussion in Committee Updates and Councilor Monroe’s JPACT briefing. Mr. Hoglund submitted copies of the letters Councilor Monroe had mentioned, as a paper trail, for the record.

9.  COUNCILOR COMMUNICATIONS.

There being no further business before the committee, the meeting was adjourned at 11:22 a.m.

Respectfully submitted,

Rooney Barker

Council Assistant

ATTACHMENTS TO THE PUBLIC RECORD FOR THE MEETING OF MAY 16, 2002

The following have been included as part of the official public record:

TESTIMONY CARDS. Mr. Plinio Crow, 308 E. 12^th St., C., Vancouver, WA 98660, spoke during Citizen Communications regarding