Good evening. My name is Helen Anthony. I'm the chair of the finance, and I'm calling to regular order a regular meeting on Monday, 07/21/2025 at five thirty, one hundred PM.
Madam clerk, would you please call us all? Chairwoman Anthony. Present. Vice Chairman Taylor is absent. Councilor Angela.
Present. Councilman Graves? Present. Councilor Sanchez is absent. We have three present and two absent.
Thank you so much. I also would like to recognize that we have here. Thank you very much. We also have here from the office. And we also have our appointment works on.
With that, we have as you know, we've and you've got our CIT discussion. I'm gonna ask for a motion to waive the reading of item one. Right. Motion made by councilor Interloff, seconded by councilor Graves. All in favor?
Aye. All opposed? And the purpose of our meeting tonight is we are focusing primarily on sidewalks and streets, and I really appreciate the DPW's group for coming in again. My intention is to keep this meeting short because we all have things that we have to go to tonight. And so anyway, I will have you all sworn in.
And, also, I'm sorry, superintendent, mean, knows it's also very. We really appreciate it. So now that's fine. Everybody on set? Please read your right things.
You swear on the penalty of perjury that the testimony you're about to give us a truth to vote to do nothing but the truth. And can you state your names for the records, please?
Chris Pointe Babe, Anderson, Craig Hoffman.
Okay. I'll have you come up to the table. We have plenty of seats. And we also have Crystal. So what I thought we could do this evening is have a clear discussion, presentation, brief presentation for you on your methodology used for doing our sidewalks and our streets, How we were what's your methodology?
How we decide which streets are done, sidewalks are done. I know we've had the course from here today. So we now know that you're very involved in some of the processes that we have in place, then I would like to hear from Robert McGregor to speak on some of your new ideas, specifically what you're doing on Saturdays. Know, I think we've talked about eating more coffee. Things like that.
Anything that we're gonna do differently so we can maybe press and articulate sidewalks. On Sure. K. I can imagine that, Craig, so you'd be thinking soft methodology. No.
Restarting streets or sidewalks.
Your preference. Sidewalks. Sidewalks, it is. Alright. So thanks for having us back again.
The the Department of Public Works sidewalks are primarily performed by two divisions, the engineering division and the highway division. The engineering division is typically implementing the capital improvement plan, right, external borrowed funds as well as council, Lyft, and CDBG, and any other kind of external funding which require outside contractors. We may also oversee, write up projects that involve sidewalk improvements, utility projects that also warrant sidewalk improvements, kind of anything done or done without or outside of the purview of category power workforce. So over the past couple of bonds starting in 2017, 2020, as well as the ARPA funding, DPW has used an approach which uses certain established data sets to theorize where the most amount of pedestrians are using sidewalks. We're trying to provide the biggest benefit to the most amount of users in doing so.
We use criteria such as proximity to schools, RIPTA stops, high density housing areas and and developments as well, hospitals, post offices, parks. Right? All features which are either generating trips to or from. And that's how we kind of overlay these features to develop pedestrian hotspots. And that's really driven the bulk of our sidewalk planning areas.
We're also working around known utility projects and also presenting our plan to the utilities to say, you know, this is the areas we wanna work. If you've got a project, now is the time to get in, or we may have to defer our work out a little bit to allow them to complete that work. Our plan is typically presented up for the administration as well as through the council for feedback and an exchange of ideas. So if the administration or the councilors think that maybe there's a better suited place to implement those sidewalk projects, we're open to hearing those as long as it fits within our our methodology. So the real, you know, the real high overview of kinda how we're doing, any specific questions at this point?
Your methodology, I'm just gonna ask. Is there any equity events? It's and, also, I'd like to know, do you try to take into consideration, trying to allocate some layover day 15 doors? So equity events and just dividing children born too.
Yeah. I would say there's equity in funding across all wards. We're not really looking at census data to find economic equity. We are trying to split that out evenly as as much as possible throughout the 15 wards in this latest tranche, the ARPA tranche, we introduced a sixteenth area downtown. It's been neglected over we've had iterations of of investment and neglect over decades.
We've got to the point where we needed to reinvest back in some of the sidewalks downtown. We will continue with that coming up in the next couple of months here before this construction season ends. So, generally, we're distributing that across 16 locations equally.
Sounds good. I'm not. I know I can't speak to my my world that I was able list of streets. I went from phase one to phase four, and we're still in phase one of all the the houses. But some of these houses, again, I
have say, I have very good company to
find books for decades. So so I appreciate the type of. But most of that most of it seems to be done. I keep saying it was none of you guys are tired of singing this song, but I can sing everything that we got singing in this time. But we really need to just stop doing all of the veins and and a lot of those sides really bad.
So how are you justifying some yes for others? As we'll see the the makings getting done in the sides of it. Yeah.
In in some words, we have made the shift from accomplishing most of those primary quarters to getting into those those neighborhoods. Wardine being one of those. To where we finished broad in Ambu, and the need was identified on Sackett Street. There's a park, high rise residential, and a school that ticks three boxes. Right?
So it's still continuing with our methodology. But, yes, it it does start connecting into the into the neighborhood. We're certainly open to suggestions from counselors as to where you think might be of most importance to you. I don't know. Again, as long as we can justify that with our approach, we're happy to entertain that.
And, yeah, we do have that exchange of I'm sorry. We do have that exchange of of plans. So we and we encourage your input.
Counselor question. Yeah.
I was just gonna say, I'm thinking I don't know what's happened on this.
I'm sure you now have better than I do. But if there's I guess
the the big question from us is, like, so what degree can we it has always felt like it was an inefficient use of the funds to kind of send them out to these little packages of neighborhood sidewalks. I had an instance a couple of weeks ago with someone who was weirdly just missing a whole square. It was just dirt. I was creating a trip hazard, and DPW just came in house and and fixed that. That was great.
I think a lot of the unsafe, patchy stuff that's on our streets could fit in that, but certainly not all of it. So, like, just trying to figure out how we prioritize in our neighborhoods and with our neighbors so that when
we send you a list, we can kind of
be like, okay. Here is the we really need someone to come and care for the tree roots and smooth it out, and it's not, like, the whole laying down home squares. And he's like, we we I
think we need some direction in the whole
car, but that's when you're not spending money when everything's like in So I
think your best bet first is always gonna be three one one. I mean, that's that's the main body of where we're gonna get that work from. And the more detail you can put in, the better. So there's a difference between some you know, the things you described, they're they're very different kinds of jobs. So, like, a very discreet panel that isn't even there that needs replacing is different than an uplift that needs to be grinded down or, you know, a hole in the sidewalk that can be filled with asphalt to make safe.
And so it it each one of those is gonna involve a different methodology, different equipment, different substances, different amounts of people to do that work. And so the more detail that can be put into that three one one one, the better for us to figure out, you know, how to get it done. Right? And so the the in house thing that you described, and I'm really I'm really happy about it and excited about it. And I know, you know, Sal has been excited about what they've been able to do with in house, you know, cement finishing.
It still remains a significant challenge for us because it's, we don't have a lot of people trained in how to do that kind of work. It's not as easy as it might seem. Like, I it seemed easy to me, but I don't know how to do it. So we're we've really ramped up efforts in both recruitment and also in training, trying to seek resources to get some sustainability in the department to to have a critical mass of people that know how to do that work.
What is that critical mass? Like, how many people
Right now, I mean, I honestly, how
We have a lot of people with you want that.
How many is my all good portal?
Have created it for four. Yeah. The good one. What do you need?
