items that aren't on the agenda okay seeing them we'll go right to the presentation all right thank you members of the finance committee my name is brian d'amour i'm the city engineer and i will be presenting today some highlights of the streets capital program and really some of the tougher issues that we're facing today with this program to continue with the delivery and this is along the theme some prior presentations that were brought here by members of public works staff so we just ask that you would take that into consideration with some of that other information that was brought forward so let's see the purpose is to provide an overview of the streets capital program which includes the prioritization you know how we develop the projects how we get them listed and then different funding sources the levels of funding historically in including grants that'll be a good portion of this topic today and then a discussion of some current capital projects i believe your packet has a full listing at the end of every streets capital project that's either in design or construction but in the interest of time there's only a few select projects that i will be highlighting but that information is provided in the back as i believe it is useful and then we will also talk about the fy seventeen capital program budget and how that wraps into  future maintenance needs and the choices that we're making as staff as we go about recommending a budget and when i talk about maintenance today i want you to to be aware that as the city engineer i i oversee the capital part so when i talk about maintenance it's more on the capital side there's the bigger maintenance projects are part of the capital program but then there's also maintenance that happens the routine maintenance which goes on with our streets crews so i'm talking more about capital maintenance but i may not always say capital in front of that thank you rob for pointing out that difference  so the streets capital program projects are first listed in us in the cip members of the committee should be pretty aware of that documents i'm not going to get into too much detail with that but i did want to highlight some of what was presented in the last version of the cip which i think really lays the groundwork for why we're here today and it says basic infrastructure such as streets sidewalks libraries community centers police and fire stations and recreation facilities need to be addressed so that we may keep a viable and functioning city while preserving its legacy and then tough decisions will need to be made in order to maintain santa barbara's high standards in our quality way of life and that the city will continue to look for opportunities to leverage funds wisely and fund capital projects so that's all taken straight out of the cip i think that's good context for this presentation within th cip there's this segment for streets capital is under a heading called streets capital slash alternative transportation and public works staff puts together a list of  projects in that category and they're ranked based on exposure cost of deferral project delivery leverage and city policy and we use that matrix more or less as a tool to help us prioritize projects and  we use that as we put together the budget in a transition into the revenue sources that we have frustrates capital and a lot of this would be somewhat repetitive from what you saw before so i'm not going to dwell on it too much but we do have the ut utility user tax state gas tax measure a and then grants and there's a variety of different grants a lot of them are through the federal highway administration which is administered by caltrans so we would apply to  get some of these different grants including highway safety improvement program active transportation program the highway bridge program and then there is a grant component of measure a so that's also listed there as well as cdbg which stands for community development block grant there's also a couple of other smaller grants that we get as an annual allotment l stp local surface transportation program and tda transportation development act and those are just annual amounts that we get and they're a little bit more restricted in terms of what we can do with that money so when we put together our budget for streets capital the uut gas tax and measure a revenues are typically used to fund the operations first and whatever remaining balance will be used for capital so we'll get into fy seventeen what that looks like later on i'm gonna show a few graphs that basically just show the trend of these different key revenue sources and ask that you just kind of look at him for the trend  these have not been blessed and verified by finance but i did pull these out of munis and it should be good enough for frying just to see where we're at last ten to fifteen years so you can see the ut had some steep decline so that's been hurting measure d which then became measure a in two thousand and nine that went down pretty sharply with the recession but part of that was also there's some money that used to pass through us that would go on to mtd that now just goes straight for those transit activities so it was compounded between the recession and then the switch when we went from measure d to measure a but even if you factored that in  we've probably just about recovered where we would have been prior to the recession so the the growth that we've had has not been outstanding but at least it has been growing as we've climbed out of the  recession so as i said we were gonna look at fy seventeen the budget so if you looked at those key revenue sources and then as i said we fund operations out of that and there's a certain amount that's available then for capital and if you look at as we went from sixteen to seventeen it's a huge drop part of the reason for that is in fy sixteen we did budget  of reserves to help fund the capital program and we had a pretty sizable amount of reserves and it seemed like a safe thing to tap into that and then when some of our revenue sources didn't hit their targets that ended up sending us in to a point where we we may be ending fy sixteen slightly negative on reserves so we're forced as we budget for fy seventeen to be a lot more conservative to make sure that we can build back a reasonable reserve balance right thank you when you say negative are we we below policy or fresh out that's a great question right so there's not a policy for this program but we have an internal goal of maintaining five percent of the operating budget which is a little bit over a half a million dollars so we are actually fresh out though for fy sixteen so not below the five hundred zero but below zero so we're trying to build back up to that five hundred thousand dollars level because different things can happen throughout the year and it's nice to have some small cushion which we have had in the past so it's probably a good point in time to just kind of clarify that this is not this isn't an enterprise fund in this in a typical description of that for budgeting purposes this is an accounting program that has a way of tracking the outside revenue sources that have to be accounted for by the state and regional agencies but it's not an enterprise fund where the revenue stay exclusively in the program and the costs do as well right how would you how would you clarify that for the public's edification yeah i guess  directors so you're right the streets fund is considered a special revenue fund and as such as not subject to the same policy requirements as their general fund or enterprise funds so the the you know staff decide that they want to maintain five percent but it is used to account for restricted monies whether it be ut gas tax measure a or grant funds but again not not subject to our policy requirements for reserves thank you but there are the things like this that are just kind of an anomaly and yeah there is every single fund that is not an enterprise fund or the general fund is not not subject to a policy so we have a number of special revenue funds like our creeks fund our cdbg grant funds those kinds of things we don't have a reserve requirement for those okay thank you sorry for the tangent no problem so this next slide gives a little bit more detail about that reserve balance and it's showing a projection we'll know as we get to the end of the year and run the final numbers but there is a projection that it would dip into negative territory at the end of fy sixteen and then with the the limited capital budget for seventeen we start to build that back up and then we we begin to hit more of a steady state for capital and moving into fy one thousand eight hundred and nineteen but that number for capital of two maybe up to two two million is below what we've  had historically so it's not a great number but it's certainly better than what we're looking at for fy seventeen in the number there the one eight that does include a little bit from lst p and tda so that's a slightly different number than what's on the previous slide so regarding the the reserved here for my general understanding why do we have a kind of a separate reserve from the city's regular reserve so if there was a streets emergency couldn't we pull from the regular reserve yes we could i think a lot of times we like to for public works for engineering transportation i guess there's different categories of emergencies and there there's just some smaller things that come up the unplanned drainage failure and it's nice to be able to have our own reserve and not have to rely on the city's reserve for that yeah to kind of expand on that for certainly we have a major disaster some of the monies that we have in our general fund would go to our repairing streets for example well we look for in some of these funds like the street spec capital fund that have a large operating component is to try to maintain apart from the reserve requirements we talked about for disasters and economic contingencies is some operating reserve so for example we have some of our internal service funds like the facilities fund it's good to have some operating reserves in there it's not subject to our normal policies but you know they think they look at five or ten percent just in case there are some dips and revenues or some emergency comes up when i say emergency not a natural disaster but a an operational emergency they have the money to do so versus just being at zero all the time so it's always just good to have a little bit of cushion in there so is it kind of like a cash flow reserve it's a good way to look at it and is that because you're dealing with a lot of restricted funds no i think just because sometimes you know let's say we had a road repair that needed to be done that wasn't planned not budgeted and if you have no reserves and you know as a cushion you' re always operating at zero level reserves and how are you gonna fund that so it's good to have some level of cushion in case something unexpected comes up to respond to those kinds of things separate from these natural disasters or anything like that so my  only i guess observation there would be to make sure that when we talk about reserves as a city that and i don't know if there's other reserves and other departments we kind of group these together and have an asterisk so we're not over serving or under reserving so that it's kind of understood just in the sense of full transparency for people who are keeping track at home on their spreadsheets they know where all the the cash reserves are yeah and recognize we kind of manage that as well we don't want to see if you know two million dollars or reserves in the streets plan where it could be better used for pavement for example so we work with them as well to make sure that those are appropriate levels thank you okay so moving on as we establish our budget we typically do not budget for grants because the grants are a little bit less predictable and normally we wait until we're more certain of the grant and we'll take that to council as a separate action but there is a lot of grant activity within the streets capital program and i wanted to get into some more detail on that so within public works we have staff that collaborate on the conception of a grant and with the priorities we look at our priorities within the cip unfortunately our top priority projects are not always attractive for the grant agencies so sometimes we have to go down our list and you know at times it's a bit of a  debate over well how far down do you go on the list till it becomes not really worth going after that grant so those are the kind of things that go on internally as we look at that but we do try to leverage the limited city funds that we do have to be able to fund capital projects with from within the cip some of these different grant sources that i mentioned earlier have various reimbursement ratios highway safety improvement ninety two hundred percent and this is the reimbursement ratio is the percentage of eligible costs that can be reimbursed there are some ineligible costs so i just want to make sure that people are aware that there's really no such thing as a one hundred percent reimbursement but we can be pretty close on some of these active transportation program also up to hundred percent and the highway bridge program which has been very successful for us that ranges from eighty eight point five three two hundred percent depending on the road class classification majeure a reimbursement rate varies as well as with cdbg cdbg restricts eligible cost to the construction contract only typically so we have to find ways and lately it's been through the general fund to come up with the funds needed to complete the design and  construction management costs also have to be funded through city funds so overall if you looked at our streets capital program and looked at the expenditures since back to two thousand and four you can see there's been really great growth within the capital program and i've divided this up between the different colors hopefully that shows up well where you can see that the the growth has really been on the grant portion of it whereas the city portion has actually if anything gone down over that time so we've been able to grow our capital program despite having  reduction in the amount of city funds available to deliver capital you know however as i mentioned before we we can't always pick our top priority project when we go after our grant so it's it's generally a good news story but it's not like we're spending twenty to twenty five million dollars on our number one or number two project so right now we have thirty active capital projects there's seven that are in construction and we have twenty three in planning or design it's over a hundred million dollars worth of work the the match if you added that all up together its twenty five percent city funds a lot of this work as you've seen recently with the bridges a lot of this is nearing completion so i think it's right now probably more able to talk about what we have in design so i categorized those twenty three projects and included the grant amount in the city amount so you can see there's still a lot of bridge work that's in design we have a bunch of pedestrian safety projects some sidewalk in access route projects and then unfortunately the pavement maintenance there just isn't any grant money out there for that so that one is taking up the bulk of our city funds but there's no leverage available so of those projects that are in design we believe right now we have sufficient funds that have been appropriated to complete those projects however like i said it's a hundred percent or whatever the percentage is it's of eligible costs and as we develop these projects we uncover what could be ineligible costs or at times estimates can go up so we're tracking these projects closely and trying to keep a close tab on the cost so we can keep that keep the city portion steady if that goes up we're going to be challenged on being able to deliver what we have committed to at this point and that's a problem because there's insufficient funds for capital maintenance it's not like we can have our design project that's already been approved if the cost goes up by two hundred thousand dollars and that's not funded by the grant i don't know where the two hundred thousand dollars comes from because we're already cut to the bare bone on maintenance we as you see from this slide the current annual need is roughly seven and a half million dollars that's just for pavement and we're only budgeting in fy seventeen one and a half so we think the need is in the five to six million dollar range just for pavement which is why if you look if we look back at that budget you'll see that most of the money is going towards maintenance needs primarily pavement but also a little bit for drainage and for street lights and you know we're facing some real dilemmas even here but i know there's a streetlight there's a circuit that's out and we'd like to get that up and running again and we're trying to figure out where those funds are going to come from similarly the drainage maintenance account which was funded at  seventy five zero dollar level which is just not enough to do much of anything we're just in a reactionary mode and that account has gone negative right now and that'll be one of our third quarter adjustments but we haven't figured out where we're going to recommend taking those funds from we as we said we don't have reserves there's unencumbered funds in pavement maintenance but that's a tough sell to try to pull it from pavement maintenance so those are some that was submitted for today it goes over the actual tax revenues and utility tax is seven million gas taxes one eight measure a is three six and then the capital budget shows one four and i know some of the previous sessions they've talked about what percentage of each of these three end up in the one four but where is the the lion's share it looks like it's seven nine about eleven and a half million and then we only end up with ten percent to get that one five million number so where's the other ninety percent going right i think in the previous committee meeting i think that was the one that rob presented that  gave a bigger breakdown on where all of those funds are distributed into public works and i don't have that in front of me but you know the different operating areas which would transportation planning engineering traffic engineering trying to think if i'm forgetting anything we can get you a  greater a more detailed breakdown on that if you're interested i'm actually trying to stay away from the details if i'm going to remember this stuff from meeting to meeting i because it sounds like the one point five here is you talked at the beginning of the meeting about capital maintenance versus capital programs so if you're saying the maintenance budget is only one and a half and i think the last slide showed that the city match is looks like three to four million on the one with the green and the blue colors so that's why i'm just kind of wondering what the general bucket is where that other money is going because it that much money it should be easy to say well a million went to that and a couple million went to salaries or i don't want approximately ten million goes to operations which includes a good deal of maintenance but that's not the large programs that are being managed by engineering which we call our capital maintenance so the difference between what we receive in revenues and what's available for capital maintenance or capital programs or grant match is an operating by and we you know we can pull that out in two big sums we did do that in the first meeting when we showed what the different operating areas are but it's it's basically goes into staff resources both materials and supplies but mostly staff salaries so the numbers we have here are exclusive of salaries like under a project overlays it's a two and a half million dollar budget that's not including salaries that's somebody available for the capital the capital program i believe i'm not sure which one you're looking at but page two  report looking at the fy seventeen budget that would be primarily what goes to the contract that we put out to bid for pavement maintenance again this is all the work that's being offered managed by the engineering department division to do there are larger approach projects which we tend to bid out competitively as opposed to  managing them our weather and how staff resources so that would be our grind and overlay program for the first payment or placement is predominantly what that is okay and i apologize for bringing this up now i didn't get this slide show until today or else i would have gone back and look at my notes so maybe in the future if we can get it a day or two earlier then i can either pre address some questions or go review my notes we'll try and get it out we tried to get it out yesterday with with the frequency of these meetings  so we'll try and get it you know to that point i think it really would be ideal to have it out when the packet comes out for the council and i know that that's extra work but it's really important to have it it doesn't do us any good to get it the day of the meeting at the meeting but we'll take a look at our schedule okay so yeah given these concerns that i highlighted about some of our maintenance accounts for drainage street lights and we all know about pavement i did want to highlight a few of the projects the capital projects that we are working on from the different categories that were listed previously just to give the committee a sense of some of the capital work that we're working on the amount of city funds that are involved in delivering that project and you know what what it would look like if we were to say is better to divert this funds to the routine maintenance operations rather than do this capital project i'm not trying to make a recommendation because these are hard decisions but i think it's good information and staff we've been going over this the last couple of couple of weeks in detail so  just there's a few projects that i wanted to highlight but in your packet i do have the whole list of of those i think it's roughly twenty three projects that are in design and it breaks down the the city portion and the grant portion and gives a very brief status of the project oops so ok here we are so gutirrez street bridge  that project is in design and it's looking like we'll be ready for construction in as early as spring of two thousand and seventeen total project cost is about six million dollars  and with a eighty eight five three match we think the city portion will end up being about eight hundred thousand dollars with a few numbers non participating items so the bulk of that that money has not been budgeted  we're hopeful that the sale of the mason street property that we own right now the blue house on the west side of mission creek will cover most of that but we won't find that out for another few months  yes i think i made skipped a couple sigh apologize difficult choice slide yes how can we never get a slide that's as easy choices so the first choice is forego grants for more capital maintenance sounded like the theme of the first part of the conversations we don't really get a lot of grants for capital maintenance we get grants for capital infrastructure programs but then those two away at our internal budget and we can't use that money on the operations the routine operations maintenance rainy night i think what that's intended to say this is the the choice would what would be a difficult choice would be to say hey we're not going to do we're not going to deliver these capital improvement projects and instead will divert that funding towards capital maintenance but it would only be the city portion of those projects that would be freed up for the capital maintenance leave the city portion because the grant portion isn't eligible for those expenses so the best example the biggest leverage projects are the big bridge projects so you have an eight million dollar bridge you're getting ninety percent of the money from the federal government we're putting in ten percent it's a big number it's eight hundred thousand dollars but if you were to not do that bridge you would leave seven or eight million dollars from the federal government on the table and you wouldn't have that to be able to apply to infrastructure maintenance you'd be able to spend the eight hundred thousand dollars but you wouldn't have the other eight million dollars so i'm aware of a difficult choice which are the grants for capital maintenance that your did you mention some of those really the only thing that we have for maintenance would be the bridge  work and it's pretty large scale maintenance where you're replacing a bridge so that's why we're calling it capital maintenance but there aren't any grants for pavement maintenance a lot of the grants that are out there for redefine that because you said you're the engineer and you run kind of the the big capital improvements and this is saying we have to choose between those programs that you're running and then the stuff like that gyms doing with lights that is that the hard choice i want to make sure i understand the choice yeah councilmember janine guess maybe i think the way that that first bullet is written is a little confusing it makes it sounds as if we're foregoing grants for capital maintenance and as was indicated there are very few grants for capital maintenance what it means is forgo grants and instead directly fund capital maintenance okay would the portion that we would have historically have used to leverage grant so i think the wording is a little misleading chair i mean i've been watching this going now for my years on council where we're going to have these really cool bridges and we've got and we're gonna have crap roads connecting the bridges that's where kind of where we're headed and  o whereas what we could do is have bridges that are falling down and have at least paid roads that are a little better paved which don't still not gonna have enough money to do it right but at least it would be some more money for the paving so that's that's at least and it's it's a terrible choice that we're talking about i'm just not finding that detailed list that you're that you're alluding to i had flagged for hour later on and our consent agenda which maybe you can get prepared for on that because we have a quite a little thing on measure a local program of projects and i'd like to hear i have that described to us in more detail at  add counsel because i think that's there's a lot there and it might help everybody get tuned into that but i'm not i don't know where this it's not in in my i mean we have this thing at the end which describes the list of  o going back to gutierrez i think that illustration was perfect thank you so we'll move on to the next the wording needs to be formalized a little bit more for for hearing purposes but i think people get the idea yeah i think you can ask another question about the grant so do we use a kind of a dedicated grant writer or do you have different staff who are working in different areas who then do the grants for this stuff they're working on we don't have a dedicated grant writer we have various people have collaborated on that people from transportation and from engineering and we've been pretty successful on it despite not having a dedicated grant writer and do we have i know this is i guess probably the the choice we're making but to set a series of goals or kind of i know your you chart went out to just this year and i know in the actually the capital projects report that talks a little more down the line but do we have a sense of where we want to be going with grants for the next or ten years i know there was a big flurry with bridges and i know you guys are basically part of what i'm gathering from today and having seen the workload you're pretty occupied completing the projects the the thirty projects here but is there a sense of h three years from now we want to have twenty eight projects going or thirty two or is that the kind of guidance you're looking for i would say right now we have our work cut out for us to deliver what we have going on and looking at the current budget there just isn't a lot of room because of the capital maintenance needs there isn't a lot of room to continue to go fishing for different grants so  i think it would be it would be helpful to get some direction as far as yes continue to go after those grants or no go after maintenance but i don't think it's that i don't think it's that easy there's certain grant funded pro they're hundred percent eligible and it's a top priority from the community i think we're going to continue to try to go after that but i think on a case by case basis i don't know that we're going to be able to come up with a plan and say bye you know in three years we want to have this many number of projects valued at x number of dollars it's too hard to forecast what grants are coming down the road what the requirements will be and how much money will be available which makes it a challenge to have the appropriate level of staffing based on an unknown future workload and a future budget so here's another example project of what we're working on the upper de la vina street pedestrian improvements so this is some crosswalk enhancements on that stretch of de la vina just below where it meets up with state street it's become a more and more popular area for different businesses restaurants and the like so this is to make it a little bit easier for people to get across that straight and we secured a measure a grant a while back for that and the design is pretty much complete and we're looking to go out to bid here in the next maybe two to three months so this one shows not a not an extremely favorable grant amount but we did get some funding for this but at only forty five percent grant you know this is one that is at least in the discussion about does this make sense or do we divert that money and find a block or two of pavement because that's probably what we'd get i've been told it's right now maybe like eighty thousand dollars for one block of grind and overlay which is not a full reconstruction but it does restore the life of that pavement for what we expect it would be twenty years or more next project here this is there's really two and i've been told there's even a third project that has a small component on this corridor but we had some measure a funding this is the same batch of measure a funding that we got for the upper de la vina project primarily sidewalk infill there are some crosswalk enhancements between these two different projects but again not an extremely favorable grant percentage  this this piece did not complete the corridor so the goal of la cumbre is to have sidewalk from state street all the way up to foothill so this project alone does not accomplish that so we went after another measure a grant just recently we were recently informed that we would be receiving those funds this hasn't gone to council yet for approval that'll be coming up soon and in this case we got a much more favorable grant at nearly a hundred percent so this would be phase two so between the two it looks a little bit more favorable and i think that the two projects need to be looked at together as we decide what to do here and maybe it's a conversation with sp cag but i just wanted to present these two as another project that we're working on and some of the choices that we're looking into due to the maintenance needs last one i wanted to highlight is this green lane intersection markings project which was another measure a grant hasn't gone to council yet it will be going shortly it's a pretty good match from the grant but the city portion is enough that it's in consideration for does this make sense do we go forward with this or do we do more pavement maintenance not an easy choice and with any of these infrastructure improvements there's not just the cost of the city match but then we also have to account for the fact that now there's new infrastructure that we have to take in and continue to maintain and we haven't had a lot of experience with green lanes we have city doesn't have any but there's there will be a cost in the future to continue to maintain that so that's also in our minds as we contemplate how to move forward with our capital projects so i think that's the end of my my list of projects in the handout as i said i do have the list of all of the projects that are in design and i'm happy to share that electronically because those are very small sheets for you to to look at  you know i'm tempted to have you just go through all of these is this a comprehensive list of all the projects that have grant funding i mean i don't know what the other committee members think but part of our charge i think is to really put the light you know transparent light on all of these issues for the public and you know having these ones that you highlighted are is a good start to that but there's another twenty five or so that have that kind of point out this range of grant versus city costs i'm sure there's many people that have different views of all these different projects would spend if they were in charge of the decision would would set fund some and not others but it probably is not a bad use of our time to go through them i don't know what the other committee members think that's memory to me is i'm happy to do that can ask a separate question first so it looks like there's twenty five of them so it's pretty close to the thirty and we've already caught over three so maybe  exhaustive list so it sounds like from a policy point of view there's different decisions we can make that will fund different projects but ultimately one of the takeaways i had from a previous session was that if you d lay costs and certain areas of maintenance it really starts having an exponential cost so if you wait too long it's the old stitch in time nine so what i what i'd like to see at some point from the department is is a a best case scenario  that's price tag neutral in other words if we won the lottery what would make this the most sense where we weren't overspending in other words we're not fixing the same street every year but what's the optimum path to save the most money even if it would cost more money up front in other words to give us the the optimum price tag on a moving forward and then maybe even a variant of that because i know this isn't one hundred percent predictable depending on the grants but maybe one that's more aggressive and one that's less aggressive if if you come back and the price tag is twenty billion dollars let's make one that's a little less aggressive that maybe we will have to push some of the costs into the future knowing that it's going to cost more but given the cheap cost of money these days given that the state has a lot of programs where we can we can borrow money and bonds are relatively low i think it's something that we need to have some concrete numbers of what it would cost to fix the concrete so to speak i'd also appreciate getting i don't i haven't kept the staff reports from our previous sessions have here but to have either a book or a binder or something that just accumulates it all into something as we finish this up then we've got a  comprehensive set of what we've been talking about and obviously this is going to be a continuation and this of course also is a continuation of the discussions that we were having prior to the last election having to do with getting something on the ballot that that at that time it was a half cent sales tax increase which was preceded by a year's effort to ask  community what do we do next so i expect we're headed there with this conversation over the next year and we're looking at a year and a half from now when the next real opportunity for a a ballot measure is there and we're continued and asked the community what what i think we've gotten some good answers obviously we had a difference of opinion on council but that's i would say that's where we're headed is to have something to look at in in that kind of timeframe that's a longer term effort and mister dominguez has comments about bonding and trying to get caught up in some way it was core to that conversation then and obviously the police headquarters building was was a the anchor of that discussion but streets were we're also as part of that conversation as well so it's really a continuation of that conversation and i think i appreciate that we're we're just continuing to to grind on this and try and get get somewhere constructive it's it's not easy and and yet that's our responsibility at this time so i'd like to continue to learn more and and also we'll have more creative ideas about i mean for example what we saw the other day for with planning commission  astounding amount of development that's again that works and i know i hope that mister hart you you got that you got the staff report anyway it's it's it's amazing and so is there and the city is the the lowest cost development opportunity on the south coast in santa barbara county when someone wants to build something here they do it more cheaply than anywhere else and maybe another place to be perhaps securing a little more capital  who is asking i believe what it would look like if we stopped doing alternative transportation or prioritized street repair over alternative transportation and i'm curious what the interplay is in terms of our costs if we were to reprioritize alternative transportation and i'm going to expand his question in both ways if we were able to encourage more alternative transportation i know we have some folks here from easy lifts who do some of that work but if we're to if we were to play with the formula a little bit to increase alternative transportation if there's anything if that would have an impact measurable on the budget or not so that you said to increase alternate alternate alternative transportation going both directions okay the constituent group wanted to i don't know if it was stopped completely all funding for alternative transportation and restore of that funding to basic street maintenance say but i'm curious if we're gonna take up the issue we can kind of look at the whole spectrum of possibilities and see what that might look like actually really happy for that because we put some work into this and make some use of it so euclid avenue sidewalk infill that's a project on the west side it's i think that came out of the neighborhood improvement task force as a recommended project and the design has been funded through some general fund money and it's about sixty percent design complete and there'll be some additional general fund money made available in fy seventeen to complete that design and we would go after cdbg money for construction that's probably the only way this project would come to fruition in construction so we're assuming a grant amount but that depends on c funding so i'm going to go through these kind of quickly unless you guys have any questions so we can hopefully get through them get everybody up to council you know one thing if you can make a point of noting where  the project is only funded through design and doesn't have any construction funding to make a distinction between projects that are fully funded through design and construction versus ones that are just felted through design that'd be helpful too yeah great i think there's only a few that are design only so i can point that out as we go through these section one hundred and thirty kind of a weird name for this one railroad crossing projects this is on state street it has to do with some of the entrada improvements they are funding some of the improvements  caltrans is funding some others so that's why we've got a good grant portion here i think some of this has gone to council recently and there's an exhibit they're showing but this is basically pedestrian safety improvements that are required by the railroad and through the puc so we're working hard to get that lined up so that it'll appear to be seamless with the entrada construction street bridge replacement and pedestrian improvements this was an atp grant that we went after a couple of years ago and we were successful in getting that council did appropriate four hundred and thirty three thousand dollars before that grant program was  even made available and it was going to be just some kind of a interim solution to that difficult crossing and we ended up leveraging that money and applied for the grant which is allowing us now to sixty to sixty percent design we're hoping for construction in two thousand and seventeen one of the issues with this grant source is you're capped so they tell you how much money you're going to get and if you have cost overruns that's on you so we're working hard with our consultant right now to keep those costs as low as we can and it's difficult to because they put together an engineer's estimate but you don't know the final cost really until you put the project out to bed and you could get a great l bid or not so we're faced with that dilemma of how how conservatively do we budget for that construction cost cacique soledad had bike bridges and corridor improvements this is from the same batch of atp grants that we got a couple years back and in theory this one's a hundred percent eligible but like i said on the last one there's capped at that two seven and based on the last cost estimate that we got from our consultant we're gonna have to sit down with them and figure out how to keep this project within the budget but we're still hopeful that we'll be able to do that this is also roughly sixty percent design and possibility of construction in two thousand and seventeen applied for this grant this is designed only and i think there's been a series of public meetings regarding this we've gotten some pretty good feedback from the public and i'd say we're also probably in the sixty percent design range maybe even less on this one but there's the the idea on this would be to complete the design with the grant and then go after probably the same program active transportation program to get a grant for construction but based on what we see with our capital budget we're really only going to go after grants if we apply for a hundred percent so you lose a few points it becomes a little bit less competitive if we don't match it but if we don't have matching funds and we don't really have a choice but hopefully the program will be interested in finding portions of this in construction since they initiated it through design but we'll see when we're ready to apply for those the newspaper article that i read about this project had it integrated with some creeks work as well and the total price tag of being about twenty five million dollars was that accurate  that could be accurate i haven't myself seen the overall project cost estimate but this project goes from cliff drive all the way up lost positas and then we forget about the fact that this is also modok out to the county line so twenty five million seems like it could be high but it's not outside of what's reasonable so yeah but this is probably the best example of a project that's pushing the boundaries on that and the grant strategy in the sense that you get a million dollar grant to do a twenty five million dollar project on the hope that you're going to get twenty five million dollars for the grants to build it and the prospect of getting twenty five million dollars worth of grants from that grant source would be in the wildly optimistic thing maybe a series of five million dollar grants over lots of cycles and whether that that's a realistic strategy for funding is a really interesting question yeah i think that this is probably unique amongst all the projects that you're looking at yes in terms of its size and complexity and viability as a project mm hmm lower milk this pedestrian improvements so this was the fourth of those active transportation projects and this one's in design very good likelihood that this will be in construction hopefully early in two thousand and seventeen a little over a million dollars one hundred percent reimbursable for eligible costs i think we've been keeping those costs within the budget so far so that one's looking pretty good yeah feel free to stop me if you have any questions about the scope of the project i assume people know as much as i do about these projects but then usually isn't the case you pr are bridge at cabrillo boulevard so that will be at council today with the m cag they have some funding through caltrans to deliver design for this construction funding is not  and we're looking at just the it's called the project approval slash environmental document pa needy it's a subset of the design phase caltrans terminology but that's what this phase will cover through the mou with sb cag and we'll be going out with an rfq once that's approved hopefully later this afternoon this also has a twenty two million dollar price tag on it yes this one and only no grant knowing rose beck's it would probably compete well i guess anything could compete for atp we could apply right but that's another question is it even wor applying because that's an effort that we have to put forth and if if we don't get it it may not even be worth that effort so yeah it's a good project but it's very expensive palma street bridge replacement this is on the west side it's over old mission creek right over there by the boys and girls club it is one hundred percent eligible i show ninety seven percent on there because there's typically some  e or non participating costs through the grant it's looking like a possibility that it could be ready for spring of two thousand and seventeen and due to the limited match amount this one actually has a chance to be ready at that point  there's still you know even that one hundred and sixty thousand dollars is right now a hard sell to come up with that money but we're hoping like i said with the the mason project that get a good sale on that property and that will help us to be able to build some of these that are nearing design completion so is the difficulty in coming up with the city grant portion of these bridge projects limiting your seeking grants for bridge replacement yet has it actually resulted in you saying we can't afford to do that yet or are you doing it those projects as fast as you can design and construct them it hasn't yet i think every bridge that's eligible for replacement is either  in construction or in design and they've caltrans has recently changed their criteria and what we've seen is the sufficiency ratings which is the the number that comes out of their inspections have gone up with their new the way they're inspecting these now so there'll be fewer projects that are even eligible for replacement so i think as we get through this batch that we're currently working on we're going to move more towards a preventive maintenance program and i think that's probably a good thing both from a local perspective but also from a statewide perspective so there's a similar through the highway bridge program eighty eight point five three is the typical grant amount and that will fund things like crack repairs fall repairs deck treatment rail repairs so those types of things that will hopefully preserve the life of all of the other bridges that we have within the city so we'll be seeing more of that as we get through this all these replacements so actually here it is bridge that will be in construction later this year and i'm hoping that we'll get a phase three scoped out and have that in the works before the end of the year cabrillo boulevard bridge replacement that's in construction so i'm not going to dwell on that one too much but that that did there was a lot of city money that went in to that project and i think it's a good project and it needed to happen so nobody's questioning that and last night the traffic control changed so we are now people can drive across the new half of the bridge on the we're calling it the mountainside so the pi here that is on there is is old that's the old bridge and that would be demolition will begin on that later in the year and should be completed early two thousand and seventeen bridge replacement we had the ribbon cutting so i guess we don't need to talk about that one too much but there is some punch list items some minor work and then closing it out with caltrans de la guerra street bridge replacement  that's in design i say that construction is pending match funding this one's a little bit further up the creek so i think this one's going to probably sit on the shelf for a bit and maybe it'll wait until  control gets up to that section of lower michigan creek and time it with that but we do have design ongoing and nearing completion mason street bridge replacement largely complete we haven't abandoned the project as some people have suggested but unfortunately we've been waiting on some concrete test results which is why if you've driven by there and paid any attention over the last couple of months and they may look as if nothing's going on but hopefully that'll pick up steam here in the next couple of months and be done in the summer canto street bridge replacement that's on sycamore creek the upper part of sycamore creek this is due to the roadway classification it's one hundred percent eligible for participating costs and we're looking at spring of two thousand and seventeen or eighteen and part of the issue on this one is with the montecito street bridge project also in design and lining up at about the same time frame from a traffic control perspective there's no way we could do both of them at the same time so we're just pushing them both  kind of equally and montecito will have the priority if it's if they're both ready for spring two thousand and seventeen and then this one would wait and go in two thousand and eighteen green a pump station operational improvements so we are winding down on some of the work that was described and we were able to get the five hundred thousand dollars was general fund money so think a couple of years back and we cleared the whole entire channel from the tide gates all the way to the freeway of vegetation so that was that was an effort that happened throughout the winter and happy to see that that's done and we have permits in place now where we can continue to do that on an as needed basis looking at some improvements for the the tide gates but also wanted to mention that we've also taken advantage of active permits that we have to manage the sand out in front of the tide gates and we believe that that may be more effective than relying on the tie gates to be able to open and close so that's been something we haven't done much of in the past but we were able to this winter  working with the resource agencies to manage the sand out in front of the tight gates alright yeah thank you could you describe that a little bit more to manage the sand in front of the tide gates is chris here chris what does all el nino planning mode you know working furiously to how to do this with emergency permits from the resource agencies and in passing we saw other city staff pushing san along the beach we said why don't they get to do it we don't get to do it so we coordinated with waterfront and lo and behold waterfront staff helped us out immensely by sharing with us their active permit for beach sand management that they have at waterfront so we coordinated with the resource agencies found that we could utilize that existing permit and what our staff has done is in advance of every potential storm event gone out and the beach down to the permitted level down through the tight gates so that they would function adequately with the pump discharge from the pump station and obviate the need to somehow lower or rather raise these these old tide gates and get them to function to perform that that that work and so it's very effective and so with that in mind we're working to get to continue coordinating with a waterfront department but figure out design wise if it's more effective to do something else with the pump station rather than spend a lot of money okay and for the infrastructure that we have down there unfortunately over all the years you know we're constantly looking for grants to do improvements and haven't been successful to date on that but we do hope to be able to land some kind of a grant to improve the infrastructure it's just badly needed and a large portion of town depends on that facility to operate own to pavement maintenance so this is substantially complete there was some overlay craig seal and some sort slurry seal which was recently completed so you may have seen that around town just in the last month or so zone three is the next pavement maintenance project that is in design and will be out to bid on that probably in the next month and unfortunately there are grants for this type of work that we've been able to uncover and for zone three we're looking at just purely overlay no slurry this year there weren't enough up with some alternative approaches to some of the work that we used to put out to bid getting streets crews on board to perform some of that work so i'm optimistic that that will help with some of the maintenance needs that we have for pavement aged up highway safety improvement program crosswalk enhancements this is pretty much complete with the exception of the cabrillo anacapa intersection which is somewhat unnoticed because of the bridge project that's happening right adjacent to it and there's quite a bit of city funds that went into that this is one of those where we were capped and the cost estimates went up during  design and then construction costs were higher than we had originally forecasted we still hope to go back to caltrans and see if we can recover that because it is eligible up to ninety percent improvement project at a couple of locations a llamar puesta del sol in la cumbre road at kai sita so when i talked about la cumbre sidewalk infill a while back i mentioned that it was there's really three projects this is the the third component of that work and knowing we were facing issues with matching i think we've been more strategic in how we've gone after grants recently so you see this one was a hundred percent  eligible costs highway safety improvement project traffic signal upgrades this is in construction all throughout town i think there's that says it on there forty intersections  primarily what you'll see what you'll notice when this project is completed is a lot more of the countdown timers and we did get a good match from caltrans and they they adjusted this for us as we developed this project and uncovered that there were a lot more underground conduits that needed to be replaced due to the condition and they came through and continued to fund that at ninety percent las positas cli drive that we have a seven hundred arts yeah seven hundred fifty thousand dollar grant that we've been holding for a good number of years and finally getting to the point now where we're gonna be able to bid this thing in a in a few months and be in construction this fall but only funded because of general fund money that came in to help make this project happen so construction in the fall excited to see this project it's been on the list since i've been here so almost ten years and probably even before that old coast highway pedestrian improvements so si additional sidewalk and access ramps along old coast highway from salinas to another another sidewalk infill project which is funded from cdbg so you can kind of see there's a theme sometimes where we're piecing work together just because the one grant source may not find the whole thing and this one is recently awarded from measure a so it'll be coming to council soon  and it's not a huge city match on this one both coasts highway crossing improvements this is i believe so it's in design i believe this one is cdbg i don't know as much detail on this one but sidewalk infill some curb extensions okay yeah maybe it's not sidewalk infill hits the curb extensions and the flashing beacon so this is i think in conjunction with a parks project within the muni  tennis courts i think they're putting in a park and some ad a access through the park and so this would connect up with that website access ramps phase two so we've typically gone after cdbg funding to construct access ramps we've had a pretty good program for priority prioritizing and completing sidewalk access ramps and  people who allocate the cdp cdbg money have tended to like these ramp projects what we've done recently is take some general fund money to complete the design so when we apply for the cdbg money for construction it's ready to go and they'll know that we can turn it out and their short turnaround timelines so this is phase two we just completed phase one on the west side recently traffic signal upgrades phase two this one is one hundred percent grant and it says requesting authorization from caltrans i think this is highway safety improvement program funding twenty three different intersections and that was the end of the additional project so i don't know how much time we have at this point i don't think we have a lot but i think that was really valuable to go through the whole list like that so i appreciate you taking the time to do that recommendations the next step is really to start looking at the operational issues that we're facing and some of the decisions that we need to make about priority what is going to be funded what's not going to be funded as well as looking at potentially different funding sources within the city which of course we don't have any areas of surplus money but we have some areas that aren't quite in is such dire need so talking about options for possibly moving funding for things from one place to another and coming to you with a list of things that we've identified and potential potential alternatives they're all relatively small quite frankly but we feel at this point as you can see we're wondering whether to add grant money match money to go for grants we really think any money we can divert to improving the sidewalks and roadways is worth it and that's our top priority is to identify those opportunities and then tell you where there are trade offs to be made so that you can make you can make recommendations to counsel on direct us i'm very aware of your time i think you may have thought comment so and on this how many meetings are we talking about then from here well we're thinking at least two more we would you know at least two more we'd like to be able to present it to you have you have some time to think about it so you don't have to go cold on it and then give us recommendations all right thank you and i think fundamentally the problem we're gonna have is that the choices that you described where we're shifting money over to the general fund as a way to boost up the streets fund is gonna cause an impact to the general fund so i don't know that their i don't know that this issue is ti segregated into streets funding in it really is becoming more and more obvious that it blurs together with everything and i'm not exactly sure you know whether since we're not there is no november deadline to what we're doing we might just continue to do this through the course of the year and expand the conversation to include comprehensive discussion of all these components because ultimately they cancel i think is looking for us to give that kind of input about infrastructure in general the initial focus was on streets but it's obvious that's everything so there's a november deadline it's just not november sixty yes november seventeen yes right any other is there any public comment we all look to you bonnie you do actually i do because we're on television is there any way and is it would it be helpful to the public who well i mean as enlightened as this presentation has been i'm still confused and i've been following this a long time i'd liked your questions and while all of you had good questions i i would i know this whole grant process is a mystery still to me it's so generic you know it's like some mythical figure sends out a request for a grant and this mythical grant comes back is i mean is it would be helpful to know what the city's apart from the grants the city's obligation i know that there is a total of what's needed and therefore we may have to have a half sales tax increase but but right now it would be helpful to know that the integration between cal trans sb cag the city of santa barbara i mean all of this together it's so piecemeal i mean to me it is and i i mean i'm not a genius when it comes to figures and so forth i admit that but i do have i have got somewhat of an analytical mind and in order for me to understand or justify going to the public for a tax increase when as we all know you know certainly now the economy i mean i don't i mean if i think if we even talked about it now so anyway is it possible to find out what the city's obligation that how much general fund how much public works money is spent and the grant money because people are going to say well how come we get grant money for alternative transportation and no grant money further our pipes under the ground in our streets and our sidewalks well that that's answerable i'd served me here you know i think the state basically is presuming that we are in a position to handle those things the basic maintenance things on our own and so the state in its judgment has decided that it wants to emphasize the investment in alternative transportation so it's it's taken new funding sources that it's created and allocated for those purposes and that's that's a judgement call it's a political decision and you know i like i've tried to explain i am i think alternative transportation is great but it's taken priority it's taken a priority status over infrastructure basic interest for the state's grant purposes that is true and then the question that we have to ask as well as you saw when we went by project by project lots of the projects that we're doing are grant funded and so when you're getting ninety cents on the dollar to do a grant program project it's kind of hard to turn that down when you're spending only ten cents on the dollar to do something but the biggest number if you but there's a pie chart that showed how those were all broken out those more than a hundred million dollars worth of projects the largest there's the projects are bridges that were funded at a ninety percent rate those are in the five and six and seven million dollar thirty other projects this is really gonna make sense to someone who drowned in one small little bite no but what we're trying to do is we're trying to to transparently show all this information in to public in as detailed a comprehensive way as we possibly can and then i think at the end of the discussion i think there will be clear trends that emerge from that but at this point you're right there's a forest for the trees isn't comprehensible it is it is not logical in all cases it just is what it is this is the system that's evolved and we're trying to explain something very complicated you know in small little bites so people can digest it and that's it's we're not at the point where i would expect you to be able to digest it but we're hopefully gonna get there so would it be helpful to have a sum total of all the grants not clear through to two thousand and eighteen but just current right we could cut these numbers a lot of different ways and i think you know i think or we've asked for different ways of looking at this too and what i think we'll do that as time the city's obligation and the grant up i mean what all these pieces thank you yeah and i think we are out of time so we need to get to the council meeting so the unless there's another what appreciate just being this quick comment i think that is raisins essential comment of having a some time a car the cartoon of our funding sources these are just clouds is saying this is this is this  funding source for folks to start with would help and of course the amounts i just think that would be helpful somewhere along the way and without