Providence North Main Street Task Force-Wednesday, June 25, 2025-5:30 PM
Call to Order, Roll Call, and Chair Updates
Councilman Shimabukuro called the meeting to order, established a quorum through roll call, and provided opening announcements. Updates covered an employee hospital pilot program, a ribbon cutting for Empire Guitar on North Main Street, and a state housing request for information submission.
Item 2: Lighting Projects Presentation
Kyle Delgado presented an update on North Main Street lighting improvements, detailing the installation and electrification of 35 LED streetlights and coordination on tree trimming. He also reviewed progress, engineering considerations, and budget allocations for upcoming decorative lighting near University Marketplace.
Item 3: Intersection Safety Measures for North Main, Benefit, and Olney Streets
Nate Urso presented traffic observation data and proposed roadway restriping, flex post installations, and curb alignment adjustments to eliminate free right turns and enhance pedestrian safety. Dylan Giles followed with an overview of self-watering planter and daylighting barrier options for the intersection.
Item 4: Metro Connector Study Update
Sarah Ingle and Zach Agush presented the Metro Connector transit study exploring Bus Rapid Transit and Light Rail Transit corridor alternatives connecting Central Falls to Providence and Cranston. The discussion detailed Tier 2 screening criteria, the federal Capital Investment Grant process, equity analysis metrics, and upcoming public engagement.
Item 5: STIP Process Update for North Main Street
Jessica Lance and Sean Raymond gave an update on the State Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) agreement with RIDOT regarding $4.5 million in funding for North Main Street design, engineering, and construction. The committee discussed the upcoming council resolution, RFP scoping timeline, and alignment with regional transit planning.
Public Comment and Adjournment
The chair reviewed the public comment sign-in sheet and previewed an upcoming presentation on neighborhood art from the Summit Association. A motion to adjourn was made, seconded, and unanimously approved.
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I am councilman Shimabukuro. It is Wednesday, 02/25 at 05:33 at. I think we're just gonna please take the role. I am here. Vice chair, Drainy Levine.
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Here. Lieutenant William Brown? Here. Larissa Lopes? Absent.
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Rachel Peterson? I'm here. Peter Cameron? Here. Thomas Badway?
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Action. Sarah Eagle? Here. Jessica Lance? Here.
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Nate Urso? Here. Sean Raymond?
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Here.
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And Rosie Jaswal? Here. You have 10 present, two absent. You have a forum. Awesome.
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Thank you so much. I'm excited for us to be back. It's been a couple it's been two months since we've seen each other, so we missed some time. So thank you for your patience. This room has been mainly used for the budget for the last two months, so it's against to the.
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I wanted to give a few quick updates on some of the things that have happened to progress since last meeting before we dive dive in on the official agenda being here is always. Everybody who's here. The other things I always forget to say is that there's a sign in sheet. We used to call it common at the end, but we do ask for you to sign in. The sign in sheet is on that table under the television.
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And so if you would like to make some comment, please sign in to sign in. I would say in the middle of the evening. You don't say anything like that. The three things I was going to share that happened since our last meeting that are exciting, one was and a big high five to Sarah and Zach as follow-up from our conversation with guys at the hospital about the work that they're doing. So thank you, Sarah, and Zach.
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We started the pilot, 200 employees to to go look from there.
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We're getting calls from other than the 200. We're like, we need to sign up. So
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Yeah. Hopefully soon. So it's really exciting. Thank you. And so I think we're at the we had at this meeting, so thank you all so much about that.
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I'm forgetting to get it. We have someone here. The other 200 cookies, one is big and congrats. There is ribbon cutting for the oh my gosh. The guitar what's the name of your guitar business here?
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Empire. Empire Guitar. Something was centered that it was not that. Empire Guitar has opened a beautiful, wonderful new facility on North Main And 10. It's a really great for that part of the neighborhood.
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Please go check it out if you are at all a tart player or keyboard or anything music related. It's awesome. It's great to see that theme to be made investment in their business And the last building update on was since our last meeting, but before I got to our last meeting, the department of housing at the state level had put out a request for information on the idea. There's there was a thought a few years ago around incentivizing housing filmmaking process stating that you can use to call out some specific funding for to, for, like, development of the state itself could be doing. And I put out a request for information on, like, where could we be like, where should we be investing?
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And, obviously, we'd be, like, obviously, more mainstream. So council president Miller and I put in this letter to secretary of housing, Deborah Goddard, in June April asking for just sharing some information So more follow-up to the problem. This is just part of the process. I'm gonna love to share that we redid that, you know, our always trying to muscle today, but just paying attention to the. Request for information, so you're really.
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And also Brandon on our policy team who's not here, but not stopped by a sec. It's. So those were my quick updates since the last meeting, so sounds good progress. And bottom three item two is. Item number two is updates on wedding projects presentation by Kyle Delgado, who led the project.
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Yeah. Thank you, Kyle.
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Hey. Good evening, everybody. It's been a while, so welcome back to. What you have in front of you, if you in front of your bracket is what's said as what new street corner lighting and improvements in general, which I apologize as an error. That's obviously not what we're facing there.
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But I wanted to summarize a lot of the activity that we've done in the last couple of months, and we and we worked with some of these meetings. So with our lighting product, we see for the item one, we have installed 35 new LED for the for the head street lights on the northbound and southbound sides of the middle of Main Street. I've listed all all of it as actually. So if you guys want to go out there and actually, there's a good people who would expect them and see their impact because they have to be back. A majority of them have been electrified, but we are still waiting on a couple of them to get some energy from, you know, around energy.
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So 35 there. The northbound side is largely north of the barrier realm down the north of the target line, but there are some scattered throughout the north of the north. And then southbound is largely on that barrier ground side going down the stretch of the barrier ground, but some scattered. So, again, you know, largely, most of them are energized. They have mask on to put, you know, LED fixtures, and they have been integrated into the city's GIS and SOV systems, and now we can track the assets, effectively once they go along that can be response to any maintenance efforts and get those.
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Again, we're requesting that have those members out there. We even have them at nighttime. This assess, you know, the lights that we have out there, and feel free to give us a feedback. Hopefully, we respond to, like, the areas that the depletion had noted as, you know, impactful intersecting difficulty with RSA. So I both made a few back on those Along with including in install, we've done a little bit of tree trimming efforts along the board with the Athens trees that were a little bit totally grown and covering some lights and getting some illumination.
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So we coordinated with our city, Forrester, and a couple of the areas that are in city jurisdiction, which is the little app south, larger in the median area. We've also initiated a request with Brighton to thank Sean to get some things going for in the Brighton zone as well. So that'll open up in med feeds as well that help kind of with something like that and turn it over. The second more impactful phase I'm not gonna say more impactful, but the second phase of this is the university marketplace area where we are doing the decorative lighting. So our engineering plans are not complete.
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We have kind of the area that we wanna touch over there. Main thing is that RI and ND determined that there are no underground secondary service lines that assist in the area, so we may have to have a new primary service connected via transformer. So there's there's one good evaluation being right now. A survey is gonna be scheduled for Tuesday, July '1. We'll determine the exact spot for your time and location.
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And then from there, we can, you know, take the next steps on doing the estimations and doing what we'd like to make sure that the infrastructure is there to set up the. You know, a lot of materials have been received, including the concrete bases, the poles, or the lighting fixtures. So, really, the main thing in that is the the middle that we're depending on is just the the survey, July 1, and then the announcement of the main. So that'll be happening over the next few weeks. Been a little bit of a lag.
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We're really getting that, you know, when we found out there was no primary service in engineering, so we kinda kinda navigate that. But we're still moving forward, and we still look at the. So the main thing I wanted to, you know, highlight as well is that, you know, we had a $500,000 budget. You can kinda see in the third piece. It's a budget snapshot of approximate notice and invoices that we've already paid for and then some approximate estimates for some of the work, know, thirty, thirty to playing holes, the range of the estimation, and all the light.
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These are approximate numbers, things that might fluctuate. There are a bit more holes on the southbound side of the barrier ground as well. So if the prices are a little bit higher, we can see some of this out of window. The main risk, like, rest of this budget here is that, like, if we are gonna need that transformer in that area, then that's gonna submit again. But if not, it's gonna be 42,000 left there.
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So this is kind of approximate, but for the most part, we've, you know, encumbered and expanded down or, you know, budgeted for most of that 500,000 health care. And then, you know, towards the bottom is in summary, some project wins. There were some internal discussions about some holes that were problematic in the sense that it may happen. Probably one is across the street, and, you know, that would, you know, deeply affected our project as well. So we decided to amend some of those, like, one forty eight, one fifty for the facility to put them in a design with Rideon around energy so that if we were to kind of improve it later on, we saw let's get it to reduce it later.
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You know, a little trenching or outside the wire doesn't to be that moment, so that's that's. And, again, our budget had to be controlled up so far. You know, our biggest risk being in dietary form is needed in the length of this south. Aside that, I mean, across the agency alignment, Rybat has been a great partner. Again, thanks Sean has been very responsive and helpful.
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The energy and the person who had, you know, had a need to go on specific communications as well as, like, state stakeholders, who has helped streamline some permitting processes for us. So it's been fairly smooth getting into moving along here. So I I'm very appreciative of all the stakeholders that I've had to do that made this complex kind of bureaucracy very easy fix. So, yeah, we we are continuing, and I, again, I expect the decorative lighting after the last portion of this significantly to be complete by the end of this summer. And with that, we will have the best use of the decorative lighting that has been a nice
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more for context. One is to try the best person on the planet. So thank you. He's really That's what me. Navigating all this bureaucracy.
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I'm on bread and prism, so Kyle is amazing. And then just as a reminder, since it's been a minute since we had you know, lighting was brought up as one of the main we had a really great reason to be spot lighting, but as one of the factors that is involved in the safety of. So both from, like, a safety perspective, but also just, like, creating a better ambiance and, like, life on work Main Street, particularly in the business district, both by the whole foods in Malta, Newark where, like, soup the sandwich, and others are, making sure that those are well that people can get around. So they would also finally get something that we could immediately do. We would need to wait for the or any just.
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Return proceed. So it's something we want to do as fast as we could. And we were able to shave this that $500,000 that really helped us. Just wanted to provide that reminder of why we're doing this, where it came from, and the gratitude we can file with the team for new business. So, typically, you can't, like, keeping up with all the processes.
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Yeah. Yeah. If I can, I
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just wanna give a final thing to, like, all of our stakeholders here? It's it's really complex dealing with, you know, whole ownership, you know, whole city, know, and so, and get this. So, you know, I I I really didn't wanna thank everybody for being so willing to come to. Yeah.
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And even, like, the city forester, like, it's been just right at the table. You were hearing that some of the lighting was dim because of the trees, and, like, obviously, in the trees, you know, we all want cooler. To But we just jump right in. Were. Really, did you have a question or come again?
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Yeah. I I really appreciate that some new pictures and things are going up. I'm wondering if there's been updates or progress on, like, the existing ones that weren't working. Yeah. I think those have been part of the conversations.
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Right? Like Yeah.
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I haven't been as addictive working those with the
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turn it off. They're like we're definitely not doing that. It's really complicated. It's just. Rosie, were there specific polls that you were thinking of?
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There's there are a couple by the Old Main Street intersection that last I checked weren't on, but if that was a lot
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of those, I'm not sure.
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So Yeah.
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Any other comments or questions for? Awesome. Okay. So moving right along. So much has been going on since we're on bed.
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The number three, we've been having a break for you all week, but no idea. Oh, Okay. Someone please got a motion to submit to you? Item number three, update on safety measures for the intersection of North Main Benefit and Olney Street. Presentation by the Nate or South African email.
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Awesome. Before you start, Nate, and we enter his presentation and. I'll make a motion to enter exhibit three. Okay.
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Yeah. So since our last meeting, there there has been some progress on On the the improvements to basically realign the the benefits we approach to health industry, in essence, we will be in the free right term that leads to a lot of speeding in that right turn and and the the potential that's in the pedestrian safety for pedestrians that are crossing across. We did do a in the end of the end of May, we did do a temporary alignment of that new layout, basically, to see how the traffic operated. But the concern was when you take away that free writing and also but that also does it it also requires benefits fee traffic to stop and actually merge into the Java links about Main Street. So it certainly was
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how would
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that operate? Will there be any backup on Main Street and also on Main Street also? The state of the extension of three right going up onto the industry. So we did we did lay out the the new alignment, basically bringing in Benefit Street, headed to a t into into North Main Street. We're requiring some and put up temporary stop sign and also do signs on the opposite side facing the North Main Street traffic and the stop sign facing facing the street traffic.