Okay. Did allow everyone to unmute. Share your video who would like to
apologies for the child next to me she may make it loud. It's okay.
few more minutes for folks to roll in here.
Most of the same people I see normally
all right
Eric, this is John Waterman. Can you hear me it's my Mike's. John. Great I had to switch out from headset.
Okay. One more minute here and
see if there's any final joiners along go to get started?
Oh right.
Let's go ahead and get started here. We got 19 folks on the call
pretty solid.
Thanks again for joining today. We're gonna do a few few things here sort of administrative stuff and then I'm actually gonna turn it over to John after kind of the first four or five things on the agenda, but call the meeting meeting to order at 504. And I don't believe we have a quorum today but should we get a supermajority of anything that needs to be approved? Gosh, so I sent around the approval and sorry, the agenda and the meeting minutes from last. Our last meeting. I guess is there a motion to approve the agenda for this month?
This is John Waterman. Like to approve the agenda for this one.
Right there a second.
All in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed?
All right. Motion passes. Do the same for the meeting minutes. Sorry. Do you think the meeting minutes from last December 5 meeting? Is there a motion to approve the meeting minutes
motion? Last Great. Say Mitch this
I guess I should say any opposed to their meeting minutes.
All right. Hearing none, we'll move forward. Motion passes. Any members of the public here today who would like to make a statement? Yes. I think I'm seeing mostly folks I know.
All right. Hearing none, we'll continue on. The fastest. First Five things on the agenda ever. It's great. I'm so blessed last meeting we had a discussion. Last couple of years we had a discussion about the next set of executive committee members had a number of folks sort of volunteer and here's where there we would make the those folks available to be on the executive committee. And so there's a slate of members, including John Waterman Parnell, McCarter, Michael Bedard. Also was on there,
Thomas as well.
Thomas and I think there's one more at blanking on the name. I don't see it, but essentially wanted to move forward with those folks. And actually, let me just pull that up right now. Just so everybody knows. I'm getting everything mixed up these days. But wanted to sort of move forward with that, with John being the chair given his extensive career on the CAC I think Scott got most of us out, I'll beat on your time. On the on the CAC so it's really happy to see you step up, John. Give me one second here and I will find the sleeps
good.
John Parnell, Mike Dillard commerce and Robert Palacky. Well, I don't see Robert Thomas here. So I guess I'll turn it over to you, John. And oh, maybe we've sort of formally approved this if you're if everyone's feeling comfortable with that, and I will turn it over to John.
Can I shall I move to approve this slate of executive officers chaired by John? Yes.
Is there a second? Jerry has pressure. Okay. All in favor?
Aye. Any
All right, motion? Motion carries. John, I'm gonna turn it over to you and sort of introduce yourself and give folks a rundown of what you're looking to do over the next release today.
So I do thank you guys for your vote of confidence that I'd also like to thank Eric for what he's done for the CAC and taking off this past year, two years actually running it. So I do appreciate that tons. Great work. With the executive committee, I think the executive committee, I did hear John as up as a chairperson. I did. Not hear at the slate kind of falling in place, who will be taking notes for this meeting.
Normally, I
would be happy to take notes except for I am in a foreign country and that makes it a little bit difficult as I have no notebooks or pencils.
I'm willing to if there's no one else.
Thank you Parnell. If you could make at the minutes for the meeting. And then we can wrap that up afterwards.
I'm sorry. Can you say that again?
Thank you so much for taking care of that. Okay, take it so this year excited. I do believe this is a really transitional year where money is now coming into the region for transportation. And it's really important for us to talk about the needs and some of the frustrations we're feeling as a citizenship, but also looking at making sure that the funding that we see can solve what we're seeing on the ground, and making sure that we have a voice of how the money is going to be spent in our communities. And that we're being great stewards for both the RTA and for the individuals who are using transit. So with sad excitement, I would also like to have the citizens the executive team will look at meeting this week at some stage I'll be sending out a quick little schedule so we can meet together and then plan for next meeting. I think everyone who's stepped forward with that out of the way. I'd like to move on to the RTA overview with Ben Stuka. Ben, are you ready? Yeah,
can you guys hear me?
Yes, I can.
Okay, my power outage situation going on. Like probably some of you so sorry for not being on video and I'm not very good Wi Fi so I don't have all my notes in front of me. So I'm a little Not, not where I usually like to be, but we will proceed. Okay, let's see. RTA. We're gonna start here. I think we'll talk a little bit about this later, but we will be releasing what we call our 5310 call for projects. Hopefully this week, maybe in the next couple of days. Is this another agenda? Step on and if it is, it is okay. All right. So that's that's that's a lot of what we've been working on the last week or so. who continues to move along? Very nicely. We're averaging around 4000 riders a month we hit 5000 in October. It dipped a little bit in November in December, which is expected because of the holidays and other things started to tick back up a little bit in January and we'll usually see the monthly numbers like this, like the second week. So I know that February number is the second week of March but moving along pretty well on DT hu which is great. We actually just completed a survey of DTH riders, we got over 400 responses. We just completed that last week. So we'll be reporting out in a little bit more detail to the board. Kind of some of those responses. But over I think I can safely say and I don't know if Coolio was on or Cory quills on if I need them but safely say overwhelmingly positive response we got it was pretty well split between people from the Ann Arbor Washington County area in the Wayne County Detroit area which is what I was hoping so pretty even split which the ridership also is from the numbers we see is pretty even so that was good. We asked a lot about the purpose of the trip and other things it seems like balance is maybe not the majority but certainly the overall the the largest slice of the pie. So there's just a couple of findings will report out a little bit more when we have a chance to crunch those numbers but really good response rate really happy with that. I think I've mentioned this before but we did receive in the early winter fall. A grant to put a pilot downtown Detroit to airport service together. We are still pulling the funding will take some time to kind of work its way through the system. So we probably won't have any really serious planning conversations about what that service is exactly going to look like and tell. I would say this summer with the goal of having it launched probably this time. Next year. So just just to let people know kind of where we're at with that. It'll take just take some time to get the grants worked through the system. And then we'll do some public hearings and other kind of appropriate engagement around what that service will look like in terms of where the stops are going to be what the fees are going to look like. Other things like that. We may have to go for an RFP for contractor. So there'll be a lot of work on that set in the summer and into the fall with the hope of it starting January February of 24. Kind of the outside hope that it's up and running nicely as we go into the NFL draft in April 2024, which is a big, big item of importance for the region. We received a mobility wallet grant we're one of I believe it'll be three it's not totally officially announced yet, but we'll get the official announcement the next two or three weeks this was a grant from the state to run a pilot program to develop essentially a think of kind of like a bank account for multiple services. So DDOT smart, Mogo at least one scooter service. Will we're working in partnership with all those providers. We're also working with United Way Southeast Michigan, Detroit at work downtown Detroit partnerships
and I'm thinking I'm forgetting somebody dies again and on my notes. B we had Oh officer mobility innovation of the city of Detroit
to really figure out how best to multiple types of mobility but also institutions to subsidize trips. So think of like Wayne State assets or something along those lines. So this is the potential to make that easier, but also we wanted to approach it from an equity perspective. Sorry, there's no kids here. Okay, bye. Thank you. Okay. So we wanted to approach it from an equity perspective, knowing that the majority of the transit ridership well over 70% is cash base. So how do we how do we develop a system that allows for this kind of mode kind of wallet or bank account, if you will, but also allow people with cash to kind of get involved so it'll be interesting. It'll be very complicated to kind of pull it all together, but that should kick off probably in April, and that'll be at least one to two year project. So it'll, it'll get it'll get technical pretty quickly, but very excited to get that going and in a great coalition to move that forward. We did do an administrative update of the regional master transit plan that will be available on the website for people to take a look at no major kind of changes. We really just kind of re looked at what are the major themes in terms of transit and mobility? What it's really more of an update of what happened last year, which is actually a lot of really really good things. So that should be up on the website this week. But we presented that to the board last Thursday, that last Thursday, I believe it was last Thursday. I think that's all I have to report right now I'm sure I feel like I'm definitely forgetting something but we'll leave it there.
And thank you very much. Let us apply and now for the 5310 funding and see the CAC input with you and Cory.
Sure, so I'll leave the general framework out and then we'll just kind of go through a few general ideas. But I think the more probably the next meeting we can get we'll have a little bit more meat to chew on. But so 5310 is it's a federal code. So I apologize for starting out using a technical code number. This is a federal funding program that support services for seniors and people with disabilities. It is a it is money that comes to the RTA every year. We have we're going to do a two year call for projects which means we're going to take the money from this year and next year basically combine it to do one. It's like projects for both years. It just makes it administratively easier. So the total amount of funding we have is $13 million that is just to give you some perspective. We used to get around 3 million well, maybe about $4 million a year actually between Ann Arbor and Detroit. That amount has gone up about 40% Because of the bipartisan infrastructure law so the law goes past fiscal year 2022 did increase that funding along with other transit funding so so we are looking at some more money which is great. Again, to give you some context, we did call for projects 453 10 years ago, the CAC we had CDC representation on that scoring committee, which is what we'll be looking to do again. We funded around 40 projects, and these are generally speaking, local government and nonprofit agencies that are providing these services. So think everything from Woda in western Oakland County to Richmond, Lenox in, in in home county to the wave in western Washtenaw County, to the city of Boston to step in Dearborn. Just kind of this whole universe of mobility providers that provide very specific services for seniors and people with disabilities but kind of fall outside the Americans for Disability Act service and the general what we call fix Rob boss running around so all this kind of world of mobility services out there. That's what this funding is for. Generally, again, it funds vehicle replacements, I'd say that's over 50% of the funding is the small vehicles you
then I think we lost you I lost you know it's not just you, okay. It's worldwide.
Khalil or Cory is able to Oh, there you are, Ben, you disappeared. Oh,
I'm on. Now I'm back on Wi Fi. I'm off. I'm off LTE. So things have gotten one step better.
Excellent. So the last blessing I heard was that 50% are the small vehicles used for service of transporting?
Yep, yeah, yeah. So about 50% of the funding or more or less time was for the replacement of vehicles. Another chunk goes for continuing operations of these services. Another chunk. A smaller chunk goes for generally what we call other capital projects. So think software upgrades for like scheduling software, things like that. And then we provide funding for the my right to system, which is the region's mobility management service. So I don't know if we I think we have talked about that on and off but that that's where the funding for that regional service comes from. We do it every two years. I said that we will do a release this week applications will be due April 7. And what we'll be looking to do is putting together a scoring committee, and we'll look forward I can work back through the chair at least one, if not more than one volunteer. From the CAC to participate in that process. It usually we get I think we funded 40 projects last year we get about 80 applications, give or take. Some of them are really really, really easy to hit. They're just like vehicle replacement. It's pretty straightforward, so don't get too alarmed by like, oh my goodness, I'm gonna have to applications. It's not quite that bad. And what we'll usually do is break them into chunks. So we'll say okay, the vehicle projects are going to go with this group. The operations projects are going to go with this group. Mobility Management is going to go with this group other capital projects that go with this group and if there's any kind of strays out there, so we try and break it down. So it's not terribly overwhelming. So we will do the same thing, the call for projects and if you go on our website, you can see the criteria. There's a memo that lays out the criteria for you know, kind of the scoring criteria, so people can take a look at that. But the way we set the application up is it's completely linked with that scoring criteria. So for looking for example for the overall project readiness is the one that comes to my mind is kind of like how ready are is this applicant to do these projects. So we're we have done a section in the application that says Tell us about your past experience using these funds and tell us about your past experience during this type of project. And do you have a federal partner to be able to pass the funds through like we asked so it's pretty we tried to link it so you can kind of say, Okay, I'm scoring this. These are the answers in the application. We also did an update to the application this year that hopefully will work in that where all the information will come into an Excel file so we can kind of move it around and make it even easier for the scoring committee. So I'll stop there. I will have more information. And but I think for the executive committee or for others to look at maybe one or two volunteers to help us with the scoring, which would take place in middle to late April with the idea that our TA board would make a selection in May. I'm done. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah,
I definitely would request additional people coming on to do the scoring. It's it is interesting, see what these projects are doing and getting a understanding of what is being recommended and it's it's very eye opening of the great things happening in our community. With with that complete as with any questions we have for Ben Hey, Mitch,
yeah, um, if you could then could you just talk a little bit about the mobility wallet, I'm still kind of having a little trouble trying to figure out where it fits in. Versus a, you know, the transit app, or Jart. What is now token transit? Yes.
So, and I wish I had a picture but if you could kind of picture in your head. It's almost like the Apple Wallet. So picture. You would be able to have one bank account one credit card or one kind of pool of money that could pay for your Dart or pay for Mogo or pay for so you're just paying your you have kind of instead of like oh, I have my bank account linked to Dart and I have a bank account linked to Mogo and I have a bank account linked to line and I have a bank account linked to bird or Uber. I have one place where there's a pool of money where I can pay for different mobility services from one place. That's that that's the point. So the what you see in terms of like using your app for customer information or booking trips is I mean, I think we all hope that maybe we move towards where everything is on one app, right? But this is like the back end like the financial back end. Trying to get all that stuff to work together. And as you can imagine, there's kind of technical issues, you know, how do you get all these different things to aid you know, to kind of connect into one thing, and then there's a series of policy issues, right. So how do we do something like what we call fair capping? So the idea of fare capping is we know that in monthly transit passes or 31 Day transit passes, costs, I forget what the running tab is now let's say 70 to 70 to $90. A lot. Yeah, 70 bucks. So a lot of people who ride the bus don't have $70 to get that monthly pass. So they're just paying cash every day getting the day pass every day. And and if they do that, let's say every day or say 20 times a week. They are then paying $100 For what they could have paid $70 For so what fair capping does and what this potentially would allow us to do is say, Okay, you pay you pay, you're paying with your mobility wallet. Once you hit $70 You're free for the rest of the month. Basically, you've you've capped out you've hit the you kind of built up to hit the value. So that's one thing we want to be able to do. Where it gets interesting is like Okay, so what if you use some of that money to do a BOGO and a D that passes What do you pay for Mogo count towards your value for a DDOT pass or for a dark pass or not? So we don't know that's like that. We have to figure that out. There's like a huge policy question there. There's also this allows it to be much easier for institutions to fund passes. So assume think a business that may want to fund transit passes for its employees. Right now. They kind of have to go through a bunch of hoops to figure out how to get that to move to their employees. This would allow them to kind of say, you know, all employees will sign up for this mobility wallet. They'll have a unique ID you as an employer can you know find your specific employees and nice and easy so very easy for them to sign up so Wayne State is another example they they recently were in the last year or so. Did passes for all I think anyone who has a Wayne State ID if I'm not mistaken. But that was a whole workaround to get there. So this would be a much easier way to do that. And you know, the hope being of course, if it's easier than it's, you know, going to institutions and being like hey, would you want to be supportive of a low income? Pass would you want to be supportive of passes for new employees? This as opposed to kind of okay, then you're gonna buy a book of these things handed out this is a much easier way to do it. So that's, that's kind of the hope but it is it does get really complicated because essentially, you're managing a, we're setting up a bank account, which is like you know, I could tell you how to plan a BRT project, but I'm not really. So we're working with people who know how to do the financial, so we're kind of waiting into some territory that's a little bit got some policy implications, some equity implications, technology, financial, so it's, it'll be a tricky one, but sorry, that was played way more than you needed mentioned. I can do that. No, that's that's
about what I was looking for, honestly. Okay. All right. And there's a lot to figure out there.
Yeah, but it's it's interesting. And we're one of, I'd say, four regions, five regions in the United States that are really moving forward with this. And as always, I'm happy to do a presentation with much more detail to kind of go through examples of what other people are doing and all that stuff. So just let me know that that's something that CSC wants to dig into.
Thank you so much. I'm Megan.
Hey, Ben, I don't I don't know if you have had a chance but wanted to see if you've reviewed the governor's proposed budget. We know that there's obviously major federal and surplus funding at the state level. Wanted to see if you had had any had any thoughts on the budget proposal and the what's in it from a transit front front, and whether there are opportunities for more.
Sure. We have reviewed it and we've worked with our consultant in Lansing, Midwest strategies, who also represents the Michigan Public Transit Association. I think the two the two pieces that are interesting, and there's believe it's 15 million more dollars a year for what they call the local bus operating funding. Which is the funding for for folks who don't know that's the funding that the states provide the state provides to support the operations of transit services, and generally that's around 30% of operating budgets for larger services. So it's not it's not insignificant. 15 million more dollars is probably the largest single increase we've seen, at least in some time. So that's great. But we certainly could do with a lot more than that. So the this the legislation that set up this, set this whole thing up through public act 51 and 1951 actually allows for the state to cover up to 50% of urban agency's budget. So right now we're at 30. I don't have again, sorry, all my notes or anything in front of me, but you know, 15 million more dollars isn't getting as close to 50%. Right? So I think there's room to do more. But it is one of those things where it is the largest increase that I I recall seeing. So you won't always be like, This is great, but could we you know, now's the time we could do more. So we're kind of we're working with npta and others to figure out what's the best way to to thread that and is there an opportunity to look at increasing it over time. And then the other interesting thing is that there is a $160 million pot to match capital projects. This is as far as I know, a one time pot that's made up of some general fund money. Which for those who watch things like this general flat, this might be the first time general fund money has really come to the CTF or anything. So that's pretty cool. But it is one time some was some CTE old money that was kind of they've been able to repurpose, so we're trying to get a bead on what is programmed for that funding source. And as you can imagine, there's a lot of debate right now as to what what's going to be coming out of that pie. We've heard that the new center, intermodal station is a big chunk of that. So there's an active project on DOD has on its books to refurbish that Amtrak station in New Center. We've heard that's a part of it. It could stretch up there's a long time need to do some dock improvements up in Sioux Sainte Marie that could be part of it that I've heard Drummond Island Ferry I've heard could be part of it. I've heard potentially funding for BRT projects could be part of it. So it's in a very kind of like this. This is what your legislators are talking about right now if they're talking about transit. So we're trying to we're working to meet with the the appropriations chairs from the you know, both Senate and House, the subcommittee, the transmission subcommittees, the ones who are actively working through these right now to kind of talk to them about what what they want to see out of that funding source. So those I'd say those are the two, the two big ones.
Thank you, Ben Parnell.
Yeah. For the mobility wallet. Is that something that even let's say just a regular individual could set up and use let's say they use multiple transit services in different parts of Southeast Michigan? Is that something just a regular individual would have use for or is it more geared towards particular populations?
That's a really good question. So the way what we're going to do with this pilot is we're going to focus on and I should have said this earlier, and this time, there's a really good question. We are going to focus on job seekers with this pilot. So for the pilot group, that's why we're working with United Way Southeast Michigan and Detroit at work is we're going to focus on people that are using their services for other job seeking or job training and try and kinda see if we can work the wallet and subsidies around their needs as job seekers. But the idea being of course, that if the thing works, that it would be I'll be I'll be done soon, but just give me a couple Okay. When if it works, then we'd be able to expand it to the general public. So that's, that's the idea for the pilot is job seekers first.
Okay. And then for the amounts in terms of the budget that you were just addressing, did you say 15 million for local operations and 16 million for capital. So yeah,
so so it's 15 million in additional funding for local bus operating, which would put it at just over $200 million statewide. So just again, for some context, it was about $160 million, and this is for the entire state. There's 82 transit agencies. In the state of Michigan. So I, it was $160 million for a long time, like a decade. And then in 2015, there was a gas tax increase a road kind of a road, gas, road oriented gas tax increase and it bumped up the LBO. bumped up to like 190. There's a little bit of indexing with inflation now. So it's kind of crept up a little bit every year. So that 15 million takes us basically from 190 million to about 205. I'm sure my numbers are slightly off. And then the other number is a one time 160 million. So 160. That's 61 604 capital. Yep. Gotcha. Thank you. Thank you.
Two real quick questions. One being that transit while it would obviously is done in mind with the changes that we saw over the last week with the with smartened DDOT being more coordinated with their pricing as well and their app structure. So I would assume that would be the case. Just want a clarification to make sure that is the case. And then one thing that we have seen in Lansing from the hearings on the transit subcommittees and the like, one reason why Southeast Michigan has maybe been a little bit behind on funding is we haven't had, one of the things they are looking for is proof of, hey, you can handle and you can run these larger scale projects. And just the point that might be something that we really want to look into is what does that first project look like that unlocks the capability of this organization to go out and get more of the federal funding that is available today? Yeah, and I think that all areas of the region for
that matter. Yeah, absolutely. So to the first point, so the most recent DDOT in the smart news, they that nothing changed with their policy. So they've been linked there there. This is just a new app, basically. So the they are now they moved from. It's still the Dart app. The back end is now powered by a provider called token transit, which I think is better than what they had before is a company called passport just for people who want to know passport is a parking company. Yeah, and they're and they were like a parking company. So you would like see on your sometimes depending on who do you bank with, you'd say in your statement, I just spent $80 on parking like wait, what that was your boss pass. So token transit is a transit transit provider, but they don't. They're How do I put this they don't have a mobility Wallet. So basically, that would the transit payment to send a token transit would be part of the mobility wallet, if that makes sense. So this is like a it's a it's a great time for them to actually upgrade to a more modern and transit day system. So it all kind of fell is falling into place pretty nicely which is not great on your second point. I couldn't agree more. I am having a lot of active conversations with folks in the governor's office and at MDOT about how do we work together to pull one of these projects together. That's at a scale that we think we can deliver. The reason MDOT is so important is that every one of our major transit routes is MDOT road. And we will have to work hand in glove with them to really pull these projects off. Particularly we start thinking of the complexity of you know, road design and construction, right so we're having really good conversations. It's slow, it's slower than probably any of you or I would want but it is we are people are. I will say there's a lot of recognition that you know, the that this is what we need to do and there's and the money is out there for us to be able to secure so we're we're slowly kind of moving in the right direction. Um, Dad's got at least two active Well, kind of three active projects in this space. So they have they're designing a project with a transit only lane on Michigan Avenue connecting Corktown to downtown Detroit that's in design. They're gonna start another planning process on Gratiot in Detroit, and it's just it's basically from downtown to a mile. And then they're about three months into a planning process on Washtenaw Avenue in Ann Arbor. Really looking at that corridor. So it's kind of like now's the time you guys are doing these planning processes. Let's figure out how to pull this all together. So yeah, so I couldn't agree more. And we are we are trying.
Perfect. Thank you. Thank you, Ben. Seeing no more questions. We'll go on to other business. Does anybody have any other business to offer?
You're on mute John.
And I said something very profound in two. So seeing that, so Did you guys hear my statement of hearing now other questions for Ben, then we'll go on to other business. Yeah. Great. Seeing no other other business. We can move on to the next meeting, which will be the 25th of April. At the same time, we will announce if it's going to be virtual or or hybrid or in person. i We're still going to work on that with the executive committee and the people here but I don't think it'll go above hybrid at this stage. And with that, I'd like to ask for someone to make a motion for adjournment.
Sorry, what was the date again for the next meeting? April 2020.
Do you meet Monday, April 24. Are Tuesday April 25.
I mean, Monday, April 24. I'm sorry. I was reading the paper here. I see on my calendar, it is the 24th that is a what I mean. Thank you for clarification.
With that, I'd like to entertain a motion to adjourn this meeting.
I'll move to Azure.
Thank you, Mitch.
seconds.
Second. All in favor.
Aye.
Alright, everyone, have a great weekend. Stay warm and I hope you get your power back soon. Thank you guys.
