Nope. Welcome to our February 10, '20 '20 '5 Rochester City Council study session. We have, three items on our agenda tonight. One is lead, and then, we'll turn it over to the mayor on, a, presentation on our Rochester Vision 2050 update. And then I think it's back to Cindy on, the heart of the city Peace Plaza improvement. I just wanna also add that, immediately after our study session today,
we will take a break, and then we will convene in Room 104, a special session of the city council. We will then immediately go into closed session. So, and I will repeat that at the end of our, study session here. Administrators, do you have any anything else to add before I turn it over to Cindy? Is that right? Cindy, take it away. Thank you. Council President Schubert, Mayor Norton, members of the City Council, Cindy Steinhauser, Deputy City Administrator. Excited to be here with you this evening, or this afternoon,
to provide, an update on supporting transformation. Also with me are two members of our key partner organizations, Erin Sexton from Mayo Clinic and Jamie Rothe from Destination Medical Center, who is talking to media right now, but will be in, shortly to, also be available to answer questions at the end of my my presentation. So, just want to do some context setting as we talk about, coming with you before you with an update on supporting transformation and to remind you and those watching at home that what we're talking about is unprecedented level of investment
in Rochester over the next five to seven years. When we realize not only what's happening in the public sector with the work that we're doing with a lot of projects I'm going to mention in a few minutes, but also what's happening in the private sector. And so, these are just some of the things that are informing the things that have passed here recently or announcements that have passed in the last year or so that are informing this transformation, transformational investment in Rochester and in the State of Minnesota. Obviously, the biggest of that is Mayo, Bold Forward, Unbound, their $5,000,000,000
investment. But it doesn't just stop there, right? We continue to break records in the last number of years over commercial investment in Rochester. And so, what's roughly Mayo both were inbound, obviously, dollars 5,000,000,000 project in a roughly 35 square block area, so adjacent and in the heart of downtown. So, very tight geographic area where a lot of this work is happening. But, there's also a lot happening throughout the rest of downtown in our community, not only with Link BRT, with the West Transit Village redevelopment, with Sixth Street,
Riverfront Bridge, and neighborhood safety and connectivity, some work at Silver Lake, work that we're doing on South Broadway. There's a lot of infrastructure and public projects happening that are also part of that transformation story. And again, just a reminder, when we think about Mayo's investment in this community, it is truly the largest project the state of Minnesota has seen. It's almost double what was the largest project the state of Minnesota had seen about a year ago with the improvements at the airport. And so, thinking about that, as partners, we came together
to develop what we're calling guiding principles. They're in your packet. These are draft guiding principles. And we did this because we said there's a lot of work happening, not only by us, not only by our partners, but the rest of the private sector. And so, understanding and developing a set of guiding principles to align our efforts and to think about what is our North Star and what we want to achieve as we work together with these improvements. And so, they're in these five different buckets that we want to talk about or that we want to show. But today, I want to talk about and emphasize the work that we're doing in three of
these guiding principle areas, what we're doing around, the principle that we call providing the best experience possible through construction. And really key for you to understand, some of the things that are informing this principle are things like optimizing and aligning schedules across our projects to minimize disruption to the community. Right? We're not going to get it right every single time. But if we have this goal of trying to minimize disruption, as are at the forefront of our work, it's really, really important. Thinking about intuitive and creative approaches to wayfinding and movement around these construction areas,
thinking about our business forward model, and having that solutions oriented approach, thinking about immediate needs but always with that eye towards the future. What is it that we want to deliver at the end of all of this work? Connectivity is another guiding principle we'll talk about today. And again, this is thinking about connections to the neighborhoods through downtown, thinking about connectivity not only at grade systems, but we have a subway and we have Skyway and how does wayfinding and signage come into play, how do we think about technology informing that. You're going to hear me talk about high-tech and high touch.
There's a people component and there's a technology component that we can use to our advantage in guiding this work. And then, communications and engagement. I actually was thinking afterwards I should have inserted the IAP to spectrum of engagement because engagement goes from everything from informed to fully engaged. There's five layers to engagement. And all are appropriate at different points of time in this work. Some it is literally just to inform. Some is help walk alongside us in design. But what we also want to talk about with communication as engagement is that it's
timely, it's actionable, and it's coordinated across, not only our organizations, but across the audiences that we need to deliver the information to. That it's ongoing, that it's meaningful, it's meeting people where they're at. So they you and, your constituents have the information they need to understand what's going on in Rochester during this time. So let's first talk about providing the best experience possible through construction. And, you know, we're not in this journey alone. Like, we have five major partners helping us, walking with us in this journey, whether not only Mayo Clinic and DMC,
but also Downtown Rochester, Inc, RDA, the Chamber of Commerce, Experience Rochester and Ready. These are the organizations that also make up the Downtown Task Force and we are at the table in regular conversations and action about making sure that we provide the best experience possible through construction. When we talk about construction coordination, right, that's at a very basic level we're talking about here is how we're coordinating, all of this work happening in this tight geographic area. It's really about how do we deliver solutions. And for us, some of the tools are things like business forward,
it's a good communications and engagement strategy, it's thinking about creative solutions, it's about process improvement. And when you think about the impact of innovating in construction, it is delivering on the commitments that we say. It's not just, hey, at the end of this cycle, we're going to have this building. It's about at the end of this, we're going to have this this process improvement. Right? We're gonna have a great building. We're gonna have a system where we work better together, where we iterate, where we're more responsive sooner, where we're doing great performance measurement, what do we say we're going to do? How do we deliver on that?
And most of all, a really robust partnership and sense of collaboration that lives beyond these projects because there will be something else that we'll need to collaborate on in 02/1930 and 02/1935. And so, these are the kinds of things that we're talking about in innovating and delivering impact. Again, I talk about high touch, high-tech. It is people centered, and it is also about using resources, technological resources, to advance, coming together. And so, just as an example on the people piece, how we come together as teams, here's a number of meetings that we have on a weekly,
sometimes daily basis, whether it's our development review committee, whether it's infrastructure meetings, there's multiple onbound infrastructure meetings that happen each week. A downtown impact review is a new group we started, a couple of weeks ago really to help because we saw some shortcomings in information flowing across our teams in the right of way and street closure process, and that is not a reflection at all on the public works team at all. They do a great job. It's just about a statement in saying, we know that there's more information to be the
link BRT meetings, detour route meetings that we have, all of it really, really important where we are talking about what's the latest information we have to push out to the public. And then we talk about high-tech. We've got partners investing in technology and willing to share the data that they're pulling using that technology to help us manage disruption. So here's an internal tool that Mayo uses. It's not a tool that we have available to us, but that's okay because Mayo then exports the data from this tool. So they're building they're using Centimeters Builder.
They export the data from this tool and they provide it to us. I want to just show a couple of tight screenshots to help you understand what Centimeters Builder does. They're able to input their construction schedule on a week by week basis, and it tells us what road is gonna be closed, where you might, suggest pedestrians walk. There's a number of other things in the, legend that I I'm are escaping me at this moment. But the the important message here for you to understand is that we can get very granular, block by block, import that data into our GIS system, and we add in other data layers.
We add in layers around what are the bus routes for that week, what might be special events that are happening that week, what are other road closures because of other construction happening that week. And we have a construction impact map then that we can deliver. But we can do better than that. Right? This is a great one stop, a map that tells you in short order, everything all at once. But we can layer it. So here's where we're showing sorry. I know it's hard to read. I apologize. But we can show you the blue is where there is a road detour. The, dotted dash dot line is where there's pedestrian detour.
So again, you can we can zoom in at, we can zoom out at a higher level, and we can zoom in and help give people the information they need week by week on construction impacts. We then use that to develop an even, what we hope is an even easier to read map in terms of a pedestrian public map. Green indicates this is an open sidewalk around the construction area. Yellow means this is a partially closed sidewalk. Red means this is a closed sidewalk for this week. Right? So plan your plan your route. Then let's talk about communication strategies.
So, you know, at the forefront of our conversation around how do we communicate and engage is recognizing that we have many different audiences. Here's just six audiences, for example, that we know we are communicating to. Our audiences need to receive information. They have different things that are are of interest to them. For example, downtown businesses are interested in different information than a commuter might be interested in or someone that's coming to visit or a conference attendee, whatnot. So, understanding who the audience is, what information it is that is most beneficial to them,
and the method in which we deliver to them. And so, we have, we are continuing to build, but we have built out a layered communication strategy. And again, our goal is to provide clear, timely communication. So, here's just an example of the current strategy and the number of ways in which we're pushing information out to the public. We just had a media briefing last week. We have our monthly downtown task force meetings. We have weekly construction coordination meetings. We have unified communication meetings.
We have email updates. We're going to be implementing community cafes. So again, the idea is to push information out in as many, venues as possible so that people can touch it in the way that they're most comfortable with. And obviously, I would be remiss if I didn't put a plug in for 311. 3 1 1 is a great tool for residents to use, during this time. Right? There's, we we continue to populate it through a three one one team with information around what's going on related to construction. But, we also want to make sure that you have information that you need to share
as you receive constituent questions. And so, we're going to be pushing out weekly updates. This is a newsletter, I guess, for lack of a better word, that our communications team has developed. And the intent of this regular update is to give you the weekly highlights. What are project milestones that happened that week? What are construction updates? What are upcoming meetings? Whether they're meetings around construction activity or where we're going to be out in neighborhoods, where are there road closures. That's just the starting point. Some weeks, there will be more information in this update than other weeks. But really,
what's most important is for you to have consistent, concise communication mechanism for you to be able to answer questions and for us to be able to answer residents' questions. The other thing that the communications team working with the rest of the city team involved in this work is to launch the downtownrochesterconstruction.org website. Again, this will be a one stop shop resource. It's a website. It will also tie to our partners' websites, but here's and it's launching at the February but here's where, again,
you'll be able to find those maps, you'll be able to find updates, you'll be able to find information on road closures, you'll be able to find information on construction progress, upcoming meetings, when to pop into a community cafe and let us hear your questions or your suggestions of how we could do something better or an audience that we might not have reached that we need to reach. It's really an opportunity for us to push information to make the public aware of opportunities to give us information. I want to talk about connectivity, right? Again, really, really important when we think about connectivity and having an integrated and inclusive approach to
our work. We have engaged some resources with RAP Strategies, which is a public relations communications firm who has been helping us with developing our communication repository for BRT. We're enlisting their expertise as it relates to the bigger messaging around what's happening around construction communication. Zan is another firm that we have under contract that is very specific to BRT, helping us with that technical information to share with the public,
specifically to the BRT project. Storefront Mastery is a business focused consultant who is now under contract with us to help, again, primarily focused with businesses that are impacted by BRT construction. But certainly what we learn and glean from Storefront Mastery in assisting with businesses, we can take and apply across the entire work that we're doing here. When we talk about connectivity, we want to be very specific about what does it mean to think about connectivity
in a construction zone. And so, again, for us, it's first and foremost about being pedestrian focused, but acknowledging it's multimodal, right? Our active transportation master plan talks about walkable, rollable. So, walkable first, whether you're, a completely independent walker or you're able to walk with some kind of rollable assisted device, if you're in, other rollable means, whether it's a bike, a scooter, a wheelchair, all the way up to, you know, vehicles, right? It's a multimodal approach. Again, thinking about that we have three levels to connectivity.
We have to think about subway, at grade street level, and, Skyway. And then thinking about connectivity, not only in downtown, but the greater downtown area. What is the experience like to come into these corridors that get you into downtown, that get you into services, institutions, businesses, recreational opportunities, thinking about that greater impact and having a seamless connected experience or as seamless as one can be when you're thinking about connectivity in a construction zone. Really another important layer when we think about connectivity is wayfinding and placemaking.
And I'm gonna ask Jamie Rote from DMC to come up and just talk a little bit about what, this means and co joining these two kinds of initiatives because as you'll see in the upper right hand corner of the image, that is heart of the city under construction, with snow on the ground and a successful strategy to ensure that people were staying connected in downtown. And Jamie was part of the team that led those efforts. So Jamie? Good afternoon. It's good to see you all. Jamie with you at DMC. So wayfinding placemaking and doing this well will help us achieve our goals of making
sure that our downtown is active and we see support for all of our businesses. And so we wanted to share just a bit about what we learned with Heart of the City during that time because it was a time where we have a lot of people entering into construction sites and we wanted to be really clear about how do people get through that area. But we also wanted to bring attention and continue to bring people back. A lot of times as humans we see construction and we don't want to enter in. We see orange cones we're like I don't want to go there. What we wanted to do was be really intentional about what was happening in this space, to invite people back.
So the example that you're seeing up at the right hand side is really the intersection of Peace Plaza and First. And what we did is, often, Plaza and First. And what we did is, often, we in the wintertime, we wanna back up. So often we would make sure that all of our walkways were secure and intentional. You never saw temporary walkways. It was always us laying down concrete and sometimes we'd pull it out and put it back in to make sure that everybody could walk, and roll clearly through it and not have any navigational problems. When it started getting darker sooner we added lighting to the area wand to make sure that each walkway was really clearly lit. And we added light to it to make sure that was fun and interesting.
The other thing that we added was a number of placemaking and you saw those a bit on some of the other slides as well is that anytime that you came in or close to the construction site we provided messaging that created some self site open for business, head this way. And as you got closer we were really intentional about the signage that you saw that said Mayo Clinic this way or Chateau this way. And because we saw a lot of changes within this site with movable, signage that helped build confidence along the way. So you knew that you could get to a store. But it wasn't just that. We also, partnered with organizations to have like a human centered approach to it. So we worked with the RDA and had the ambassadors in place during busy times.
So, morning time when people are going to appointments or getting to the office, lunch time and dinner time. So, again, we could build self confidence that yes, you're walking the white rain and here's these people to help. We also engaged our construction team as well for this project. We said if you see someone lost not knowing where they're going we'd like you to stop and help them understand which is different than a normal construction team might work. We wanted them and we knew that all of these things needed to work together in order to build confidence to move this, through this construction site. So, all of those types of principles we'll be looking and applying to a larger perspective
of our downtown and making sure that these all work together and again that we're collaborating with our different, organizations in our downtown to make sure that, people can move around confidently as we move forward. Thanks, Jamie. I would also say, if if you were able to listen in at all on the media briefing from last week, Mayo Clinic also announced a $500,000 donation to RDA, and RDA's intent to use those dollars to, again, support marketing and promotion of downtown and helping the public at large understand downtown is still
very much open for business. There's a lot to offer to choose from in Downtown. It is a foodie destination. It is a destination for a lot of really great retail and entertainment. And so, as RDA as a partner, we'll be rolling out a strategy related to that investment from Mayo. So, again, all of these things that layers into connectivity, that layers into communication. I would also say that we are working with a company, Gale. DMC is working to bring them on. It's where science and art of human centered design and place making and navigation really
converge. It is an international firm that has done work here before, really understands Rochester, really understands how people move through spaces, whether it's under construction or not, and understands, almost more importantly, how you measure the success of the use of space and how you help people move through those spaces. And so we're really hoping that Gail will help inform what is inevitably going to be temporary connection points throughout downtown for a period of time. So, again, when we think about the tools that we have and we think about connectivity,
again, we're going to be able to deliver maps. And here's just some be able to deliver maps. And here's just some additional versions of maps that we can pull off of our GIS system with that imported data from Mayo. Here's one that shows you green is what's open for a bike lane. Red is what's currently a bike lane that's closed. This is just a snapshot in time, I think, taken I don't remember what week it was. But that's a snapshot in time that we can say, this week, here's what's open, here's what's not available. Again, getting very granular, here's for a pedestrian orientation,
here's where you can understand what sidewalks you can navigate, what ones are partially closed, what ones are fully closed, so that, again, it can help you inform your route, getting in and around downtown. Lastly, I wanna not lastly, but I wanna also talk about how we, how we staff up for transformation. Right? So when we brought this to you, just a year ago, actually, now, thinking about how do we support transformation, not only teammates and resources needed for existing projects, right, just because we have some of these major announcements. The everyday work doesn't stop, right? And so how do we make sure the everyday work still gets done while still
making sure that these new developments can can be successful and can deliver on time. And so how do we staff up for that? And our staffing plan was really tied to forward thinking about succession planning and doing some analytics around where are we likely to see retirements. We have a lot of retirements happening over the next or potential, I should say over the next ten years, and a lot of that is in the development services arena. And so really thinking about supporting this work now, but thinking about how those become positions that can help with future succession planning as
retirements and natural attrition happen post, post, I'll just say, 02/1930. So here is the staffing chart that was provided to you. Not all positions have been hired. We brought on some in 'twenty four, and a few more in 'twenty five. What is not yet hired is the admin two position, although that process is underway. The senior finance analyst position is not yet hired, but that process will likely begin this first quarter. The plan examiner position is underway,
but the inspectors have not been hired because we're not fully ramped up into that inspection work yet. Because this is a, you know, I don't want to say quarterly, but like a six month check-in, we want to just share with you what we know are some upcoming impacts, some milestones between now and mostly April, but some into June. Again, we will be reporting out on these to you in that weekly update that I showed earlier. But as you can see, we've got a lot of big stuff coming up with some closures,
business forward strategy, demolitions happening, bus stop relocation to accommodate our transit riders despite, while some roads are closed, and then working towards some bike lane solutions based on the vacation of Third And Fourth Avenue. When we talk about this work, right, when we talk about construction, we really, really hope, and what we usually want is what's on the left hand side: smooth, linear, uncomplicated, things happen naturally, progressively, but the reality is, of the investment that's happening, both at the public and private sector.
And so our reality is really what you see on the right hand side of this slide. And so it requires us to think about high touch, that human centered focus. It requires us to think about high centered focus. It requires us to think about high-tech, where can we take advantage of technology and our partners' technology to help inform this work. It requires us to be very collaborative, come to the table with good intention. It requires really clear policy direction, so we know we have our marching orders in terms of what you'd like to see in a deliverable. And really, all of that is why we came to we need some guiding principles for our
teams. We need some guiding principles for our organizations and to share with our teams to say, this is how we need to center our work. We need to center it around creating the best experience possible. We need to think about it from connectivity. We need to think about it from communications and engagement. We need to think about an elevated experience. How we maximize opportunities. And I know it's really, really hard when you're in the thick of it to think, I just got to solve through this next day. But we need to think about how this presents an opportunity, not only for us collectively across our organizations, but across the community, because we and and and I think we have a really great,
a great group of teammates coming to the table with that with that spirit. So with that, I will just stop and say thank you for the opportunity to provide this update, and I'm happy to take questions and, you know, might also rely on some teammates and partners to help with those questions as well. Thank you, miss, Steinhauser. I'll start and, you gave a preview of this presentation at the DMC meeting last Thursday. And, what I was struck by was really the level of partnership that we're seeing between
the city and Mayo Clinic and DMC. I was really struck by hearing the, the, chair of facilities at Mayo saying in his thirty plus years that the relationship between the city and the the and, Mayo Clinic is at its best. So I really think that, the partnership is in a good place to see what we're going to see, which is a major major disruption and concern. So getting to a question,
so I really appreciate all of the connections that are happening in all those meetings. And, maybe at a future meeting, you'll show us exactly what residents are going to see as far as updates on, on closures and and, detours and whatnot, because it's hard for me to see what that's gonna look like, and we're gonna have residents that are going to want just a quick snapshot. And then there are those that are maybe gonna want a little more detail and,
you know, what's the time frame. And so, I don't know if at a future date you will be providing kind of a look at, you know, what what is this downtownrochesterconstruction.com? What are our our constituents gonna see? Yeah. Dotorg. Just to make sure Dotorg. Yep. Yep. Dotorg. Right? Although .com doesn't pull up, someone might not go to .org. So, yeah, we can do that. Obviously, we tried to demonstrate a few of the things like the maps, but what does the road closure information look like? And,
yeah, all of that will be populated on that website. They're building out those pages right now. So and and listen, we know that, it's more important that we roll it out and get it active as soon as possible, and it it will definitely, iterate, I would imagine. Like, we'll probably hear from from residents that say, this map wasn't helpful, a map like this would be helpful. And we want to be able to be responsive and be able to do that. So, I would look towards, what we're doing with that that website. But absolutely, we can provide additional information as that gets really built out. Thank you.
Council member Wall. Thank you. I I believe that in, your presentation you, answered the question that was most on my mind and that is the maps that are provided to the public will be updated weekly? That is correct. So will it say this map is good May or something like that? Yeah. I'll have a date on the top like Feb what's today? February 10? February tenth, ninth through the fifteenth. Okay. And so if there's no change on the February 15, it'll still be changed to say February, so people could be,
certain that, they are going to encounter the right information? Yes. That's right. And will there be any analysis of the number of hits on a particular web page to see if the public is actually using this and if we are being effective in driving them to information that will be helpful? That's a great point. I know we can draw down analytics and I know that's actually something that rep strategies has helped us monitor in the past. So I'll just make note of it. Great. Thank you. Councilmember Keane. Yeah. Again, I appreciate staff being here today with the partners.
But there are some things that I just want to make sure. I mean, the real focus of today in my view isn't like what we're building, but it's how do we get from here to there with the least amount of disruption. And I think this is what again, I've heard some things that it's a Mayo's meeting when they talked about, you know, this is we're building for this new patient experience in twenty twenty nine, two thousand and thirty, but we can't let our patient experience suffer during those four years. And I think it's similar to what we're trying to say at the city level. What I I do we we're throwing around some words here and some of them have, I think good definitions, but one of them is business forward.
And I know we did this with some projects in the past. I think there's a cost to that. And I think of it as we can run projects as optimized for construction or using business forward, policies that aren't optimized for construction that really do say we can't do that right now or until something else happens. So one of my questions is, how much does that cost? How much does a business forward strategy cost? Compared to cost? How much does a business forward strategy cost? Compared to an optimized construction plan. Compared to I want Jamie to come up and talk about business forward toolkit. So, I don't unfortunately, I don't have an an answer for you specifically. I What we have said, we know I can tell you how much,
not off the top of my head right now, but the Storefront Mastery, for example, and what that contract is. And what Storefront Mastery might do, for example, is to say, okay, you're a retail establishment, you're a restaurant establishment and you're impacted from a road closure. What's your DoorDash business look like or meal delivery business look like? I don't want to promote a particular product. Okay. It's only 10% of your business. What can we do to drive it to 30% during this during this time where
maybe getting to your front door isn't as easy? Right? How can we how can we help you implement some strategies to shift your your business plan to pick up more of that market? And we saw really good examples of that during COVID. Right? Yep. And so alongside that is saying, okay. It might be a construction zone, but we gotta be able to have food pickup driver parking spots, like, right here so it's someone can come in and get takeout really quickly or, whether or if it's a delivery. So that would be an example of a business forward strategy that,
you know, is really more just doing some analytics, providing some guidance and helping them maybe redirect some marketing dollars towards a meal delivery strategy as opposed to, you know, a general kind of redownload. And just to clarify, I'd love to have Jamie come up, but I'm not really looking for a dollar amount or anything like that. Okay. I'm just trying to establish that we are spending money to do this. Mhmm. And and again, I don't think it's wasted. I think it's but I I also want people to understand. I I'm worried that a business forward strategy means we're not gonna get any complaints.
And and that's just nonsense. Oh, no. That's no. And that is correct. And like we know, we're it's how we manage those complaints and how responsive we are. Right? We need to be very responsive in when acknowledging the complaint. Some we're gonna be able to solve, some might be really challenging to solve, but, you know, part of that guiding principle around, you know, how do we how do we maximize opportunities? Like, what might else we do to, try and respond to this issue? Or at least know that they're heard and and it could inform a solution for a completely different challenge that,
someone's faced. But I know you said you don't need Jamie to come up, but I do think it would be valuable to talk about the Business Board toolkit that just came out because it's a really great product that we can, share with the community. Hello, good to see you again. So, some of you may have seen that we just got done, printing something called the business forward playbook. This is work over the last, three, four years that we've been working on together with the city and the community on how can we do construction better, how can we improve it and how can we make sure that it's community centered? Really I think what gets to your answer, Mr.
Keane is, it's really thinking about things ahead of timing and ahead of time and being really intentional. There's three buckets. There is, microphasing. How can we do construction in a site that takes, the people at the center of it and so that the construction being the center of it. So that means that we're working with our businesses and the stakeholders in that area asking questions ahead of time to better understand what type of phasing might be beneficial for that area. The second bucket is around communication which we beneficial for that area. The second bucket is around communication which we touched on today. Again, better understanding what the stakeholders need from a communication plan and how do they receive
information. So, whether it's newsletters and you saw some of them on your screen already built into the plan, face to face. How are we doing that in a way that our stakeholders want to be communicated with? And how are we making sure that they work? Which I think was another question that you had asked. And then the third bucket is wayfinding and activation. We want to really make sure that we understand the site really well. How does it work with the other construction sites that are going on? And how do we create wayfinding and activation in that? In this playbook, it's geared towards really two groups. It's geared towards internally our own city partners and everybody in each department better understanding
how to be mindful in planning. And then it's also geared to our construction partners as well. We want them coming in, to these projects and better understanding how to be mindful about their planning these projects. And then how do we all work together with the other organizations like the RDA and then our stakeholders should be good to copy of this and be fun some future discussion as well. That's helpful. It kinda leads to my next thing is sort of like, you know, in a way, what you're talking about is the two main drivers of projects are the Mayo Clinic and the city. Those are the two, but then they disaggregate down to we hire people to do things.
And the question is then, are they part of this business forward or is it the the general contractors, the city and Mayo? And it seems to be mostly focused on access to the access to the right of way or is there much more than just access to the right of way? I would say there's much more to the access to the right of way. So for example, some things that we're trying to do because this it's come up multiple times. This is the largest project with all of the projects, not just Mayo Clinic, but we have not seen this much change going on. And so we know that we need to take an elevated approach or a more,
strategic approach than even what we did for Heartless City. And so wayfinding isn't just a map and saying here you go. It's really looking and understanding how are people moving to today through our city and then how do we put in the tactics to make sure that they continue to move throughout our city in that way. And how are we measuring and focusing on those pieces? So for example, one of the we're looking at a variety of different tactics and one of those might be while a corridor is closed, we now have opportunities to say people can no longer move through these corridors, because, the underground work is deep and it's not safe to bring people across.
So are there opportunities for parklets or pop up concerts? Are there other things that we can be doing to drive people to that area to continue to have foot traffic, happen in those areas? And we're evaluating that from the whole and then how does this work together as a system. Is that helpful? It is. I mean, mainly what I'm I'm using the old experience of the heart of the city work and doing the business forward and the positive feedback we got from some of that. But I also heard that it did drive cost and it did drive timelines. So I'm just trying to make sure I understand that. And I am viewing it compared to an optimized,
like have a bidder, have a contractor saying whatever it takes. And I find those in conflict and maybe Jamie's trying to guide me towards maybe not. It's just better planning upfront. Maybe well, it's it's that, but it but it is also more than road closures. Let me let me just go back to, a more downtown wide experience, and that was during COVID. During COVID, we were, we were putting in Jersey barriers, right, to create more outdoor space because it limited how much space you can be inside. We didn't just put in Jersey barriers. We hired artists, and they painted. So we employed artists who lost who lost employment opportunities because they were no longer,
everything was shut down, right? But we we're able to reengage them to make a better streetscape and we reuse those Jersey beers today, right? And so that's that's one method. We we brought people down during we worked with RDA and we did, a couple of days a week, lunchtime jams. Right? You couldn't really be inside a building or a limited number of people could be inside a building, but you could come together out in the open. And so it was promotion and event. So, there's event money, there's infrastructure money, there's signage money,
there's other just more marketing kind of dollars. So, it isn't literally just construction dollars. It's what, as Jamie said, what needs to happen for that area as compared to the greater area. And we can go from micro to macro. And I don't know, do you want to add on to that? Yeah, I think I would also ask that or add to it for example in Heart of the City, when we did the pre interviews with the businesses that were in that corridor, we asked a lot of questions about, have they been through construction before and what did they learn? What went well and what didn't go well? Or have they been a part of a construction project that's similar?
That helped them to inform. We brought that back to our construction team and design team and our internal teams to kind of begin to evaluate what really became priorities for that area. In that area we heard things like dust mitigation and sound mitigation. So when we talked with our general contractor, general construction manager, we said what can we do in our general conditions to limit dust and limit sound? So then they came back with let's make sure that we're planning for extra water trucks on windy days and then let's make sure when we're cutting pavers that we're creating some sound barriers. So I think maybe that's an of like a an example of on the construction
site with that information how it informs some general conditions that shows up in the planning and in the budget. It is. Yeah. And I guess my my comment is I I like the chart where it said this is how it should go, but experience tells us it's a lot more complicated than that. I I I hope that when we get into those complexities that we're optimizing for schedule along with, like, the the sort of I still maybe I'm still reading business forward is a little bit of like a defer to having less impact. And I don't want these things to drag out, you know,
to miss schedules because this miss. So I still want that idea of like we we have schedules to keep and we we need to make sure that's one of our guiding principles too and not just lack of disruption or impacts because construction on main right of ways is disruptive. It's just the nature of the work. Yeah. So if I could maybe rephrase, don't let the business boards delay the construction schedule. Right? And I think, great clarification, it is really within we're always thinking about within that schedule.
Right? Like that's a data set that comes into what does our business forward strategy look like. This is the schedule, Brian. Good. Thank you. Councilmember Palmer? Thank you. We did business forward when we did North Broadway, and that was the largest project for public work since, flood control. And one of the things that we learned was when you did the bid, bid came back because we're going to keep the road open, so it was too expensive. So then we closed the road, to save money. So that was frustrating. And what happened with 110 businesses there, it was very difficult. What we learned was that the contractor in charge of business forward is not really
the person that should be doing it. Are we having the contractor be the business forward person or do we have an outside agency doing that for us? We have our team. It's our internal team leading it, right? And the contractor is a resource for us who is front lines helping to deliver business forward. So I would say from business forward as I mentioned with BRT we brought on Storefront Mastery they're part of it. Our communications team, our teammates at DMC I would say it is a group working on business forward it's not an individual. Well, that means no one is in charge of it and that's what's frustrating.
And so the way I look at this is in your contract for the contractor, are they being paid more to be business forward or do we have an outside agency saying this is the person that's in charge of business forward? The contractor is not paid more to be business forward. Perfect. Yeah, okay. Okay. Go to St. Mary's, business forward, are we doing that in front of all St. Mary's that we're for all those businesses on Second Street? As part of the BRT project, we have yes, along the BRT corridor, we that Storefront Mastery is the firm that we have hired to assist businesses along
the BRT corridor, including those in front of St. Mary's. So for definitions, the BRT in front of that corridor, does that include the sewer and water or is the BRT separate from the sewer and water projects that we're doing on the new road improvements? The I think you're referring to the street closure that happens down there that's That's correct. During including the sewer and water installation, the infrastructure, underground infrastructure, yes. So are we doing business for it for that? For that four that up to four months where that section of second will be closed, yes. Because that includes the sewer and and,
water infrastructure work, stormwater infrastructure work, and then, the BRT construction work. So we have the downtown business associations has money to help out them. Do we have money that's helping out the businesses on Second Street? So right now the, it's within our project budget for the link BRT to take actions related to business forward, if I understood your question correctly. Okay. So so at BRT, we just got word that the bids are over over budget. Is that correct? We're still evaluating the bids. Yes. So when is that going to come back to us or or what is what
is the completion date on the BRT? Completion date of the BRT is currently scheduled to end of twenty twenty six. We intend to bring something to you on March 3. Okay. So when you come back to us, you're going to have I guess what's frustrating about it is that we just did the sports facility and that came in over budget and now we're making compromises. Are we looking at compromising on the BRT? We're evaluating the bids right now. Okay. You talked about inspectors. I know last week we were one week out for electrical inspectors. I mean, how are we going to ensure that we're not going to be delaying all the
work for all of Rochester, not just downtown? That was I'll I'll let, assistant to Ryan Yetzer, respond. But I would say that was part when we put together that staffing model, it was done in collaboration with Ryan's team to help us under and and the goal there was, what do we think we need to staff up that lets us continue the work as well as support this new book of business. We haven't we haven't even started the work and we're already a week out on inspections. Council member Palmer, the delay in inspections, I think I think this is known as due to an unanticipated staff shortage in
that field specifically and, it doesn't account for the staffing that we're adding. So, we're working on filling those gaps as quickly as possible but when you lose two thirds of the team at one time that has an impact on your wait time. But that doesn't mean we're not going to lose it in the next five years. I mean Right. These things happen and we work through them and we've brought on part time folks to help fill that gap and we are actively hiring to fill those, vacancies and and the team is working as as diligently as possible to bring that time down.
Okay. The last time that we talked, we talked about the contract. The contract for reimbursement from the Mayo Clinic, have we got that signed and worked out yet? For reimbursement for For our fees, our costs that this is going to take place? You mentioned we have a contract that you're working on with Mayo. We don't have a con we have an operating agreement contract as it relates to BRT and their compensation their their payment to the city for operations for BRT. There's not an special agreement with Mayo. The the revenue comes in these filing of permits.
It's permit revenue. I'm not understanding the question. Maybe, administrative zones has some added detail here. Council president, council member, Palmer, I maybe I'm also also missing the question, but I think maybe you're referencing there's a map here that shows some sewer and that's really a conversation with the destination medical center and Mayo Clinic about who's responsible for what infrastructure. Is that what you're referencing? Well, no. The last meeting we had, we were talking about a contract to to get reimbursement for the for the upfront work that we're doing already.
No. A lot of staff No. All of that has always been permit revenue that we know will come in based on all of the different projects that we are aware of and their valuation. A number of different permits came in last week totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. I apologize if I I misstated. Any more questions, Council Member? Mayor Norton? Just a quick one as and it kind of falls in line with the beginning part of the discussion we were just having which is you're focusing primarily right here on Bulle Ford Unbound and the work that we're doing that dovetails with their work.
But there's a lot more work that the city will be doing this year and sometimes in the same area and sometimes in areas a little further out. And so I'm wondering, are we going to have are you going to include that in this type of is this specific to Bulleford and Bound or are you going to have something similar for other projects, where these strategies might also intersect or RDA might also be involved? Yes, it applies across all of the construction activity that we're seeing we're going to be seeing in what I'll say the greater downtown area. As I said in the beginning, both forward and bound is the $5,000,000,000 investment.
But last year, we had $800,000,000 of commercial development in this community. The year before, it was over almost $650,000,000 I think or even higher. So, there's a lot of private investment happening. And there's our projects are as well, right, Sixth Street, more Broadway work, BRT, West Transit Village, any bonding work that we have happen, the street the the funding through the local sales tax renewal. So, we wanna apply this across, you know, because the the general public doesn't know, oh, that was just that project and it only they just know stuff is happening in
downtown and we need to we need to be responsive to that. Thank you. Other questions from council members? Council member Doring. Yeah. I appreciate the update today. Thank you so much for that. Just a quick question. It seems like all the maps, that will be provided are in a digital format format. Are there any analog versions of those going to be produced for those for whom the digital, realm is challenging? You know, we have not talked about that, so that's a great, that's a great suggestion. I will take that back to our comms team, and maybe there's an opportunity to, like, partner with key,
you know, like experience Rochester, the library to have them placed, and make them available to neighborhood. So I will I'll make note of that. Thank you. I appreciate that. Other questions? Just to wrap up. So and and this is kind of a question that I'm gonna start asking at the end of any of our study session presentations. Are there future council actions that we should be aware of that relate to this? And I know that there is the, the Mayo Clinic, DMC, Citi, I don't know what the term is,
contract that we're waiting on. Oh, yeah. The, the cost share agreement. Maybe I'm trying to then what you were Is that where you're talking about? So future yeah. Future actions that are coming to you, obviously, actions related to link BRT, we'll be bringing forward to you in one of the next upcoming council meetings I don't recall which one action related to bringing on a national transportation consultant who specializes in bike and pedestrian connectivity to help do the next level of intense engagement around
where should alternative bike lanes go to replace what we're losing on Third And Fourth Avenue. We have what we call UPUI agreement. You approved a UPUI agreement in December related to gosh, I can't remember the area. But we have another one coming to you in March. Do you remember? In March. We have a development agreement coming to you by June. We have a construction coordination agreement coming to you by June. Those are specific agreements with Mayo.
We are in conversations about what does the cost share look like around other improvements that go beyond what needs to be done versus need versus want, like how do we think about taking advantage of that dig once mentality and thinking about taking advantage of making improvements in the area since it's already going to be ripped up. So, just off the top of my head, those are the those are a couple of the big ones. I don't know. Ryan, maybe, is there anything related to street vacate not street vacation. No. I think that's it. Those are the big things. Well, I really appreciate your very,
very astute impromptu list of that. And I think, I think going forward and I, administrator Zones and I did have a discussion about this that will put a little more formality to that so that the future council actions will be listed in our, packets moving forward. So thank you. Thank you, miss Steinhauser. Thank you. Oh, was there another question? I'm sorry. Thank you. Council member Miller, go ahead. Just a quick question to excuse me. To clarify, on the connecting on communication side,
there are a variety of forums and newsletters and other things. Things. I'm assuming all of those aren't open to the public, like, unified construction meet or communication meetings, some of those Yeah. That's correct. Some of them, there's a lot that are internal. Sure. And then there are things like the, you can't take as a closed caption, but like community cafes, media briefings, those are tend to be more public facing. We could have put neighborhood meetings on here as well. Those are more forward facing. So that was exact My point. I just wanted to clarify that there's robust opportunity for the public because I I have received questions about this.
Where can I get involved? Where can I share my input? And this is a great list, but it clearly isn't open only to the public. So just thinking about that too, inviting people into specific areas. And, I I think it's wonderful too with the construction updated maps. I would hope maybe we could even just buy some of the other domains so that if somebody mistakenly puts in downtown construction rochester.com or .net or they they just get redirected. I know those are really low cost. And to the mayor's point, I appreciate that, you know, downtown is not just an arbitrary barrier and we do access communication downtown,
but we have the whole Second Street corridor, for example. I would just hope some of these, pilots and communications construction impacts could extend to other things. Just thinking about our our permitting map or construction impacts map, those are publicly available but I I've often heard that they're very hard to navigate and use and so as we think about improvements to our other communication, I I hope this is a real learning opportunity where we're improving the experience for all residents. Thank you. So that'd be great. Thank you. Thank you. Any last questions? Thank you, miss Steinhauser. Thank you. Moving on,
I'm gonna turn it over to the mayor to introduce, the Rochester Vision twenty fifty initiative. Thank you. Yeah. Roger Mater, our consultant, is going to come up and hook up his, equipment, I think. We had thought we were going to have a live presentation for you so you could actually get into the documentation, but found out that you can't do closed captioning with that. So that's why you don't have anything in your packet, because we thought it would be live. It is not. It's going to be a PowerPoint, which we will get to you after the fact. You've also been given a handout, and the handout is actually the work of our steering committee.
It's not 100% complete yet, but it will give you an idea about the steering committee's perception of certain areas, as they review the information. But Roger, Amherst Inc. Thank you very much, Mayor and Council. I'm here to talk to you about Vision 02/1950 for the city. I'm a spokesperson for the mayor who chaired of course that initiative as well as a community group steering committee and what we called Vision action team. We had to expand to a slightly larger group because of the action taken. Some of you have met me in the original interviews,
Allison and our established legacy council members. Those of you who are new, congratulations on your investiture here, and I look forward to your questions momentarily. May I ask, council president, may I understand from you what my time frame is to make sure I address you properly? Are we to end about 05:30? Is that when we're supposed to end? This is my first formal study session. So council president, typically, we would end by six or 06:30. You do also have a closed session to
consider following the three topics. I'd say forty five minutes. Is that Okay. With questions or With questions. Okay. Mister chair, just we did fly him in from Canada, so I do hope we give him enough time. Is forty five minutes a good healthy amount of time for you. It is. I wanna give you time for questions, you know, and I could My colleagues know I can be pretty flexible. We do have another topic after this, as well. So Understood. I'm gonna try and be concise. Recognize that the report I'm gonna share with you is available through the mayor's office and will soon,
pending your review, be available to the public. So, there's nothing I'm I'm suggesting to you here that won't be available on an ongoing basis after today. The, Rochester Vision 02/1950 was commissioned by the mayor as an initiative to communicate with our constituents and residents in order to get their views of what Rochester should aspire to achieve by 02/1950. We consciously looked out a generation, if you will, in order to try and get beyond the regular inputs that city council will regularly
hear from your citizens about the trials and tribulations of day to day living in the city and force their thinking farther out into the future so that we could be talking about what the next generation and our children should aspire to achieve in the city. The presentation I'm giving you today, as the mayor mentioned his PowerPoint, the online version is interactive. I'm going to mimic that a little bit with the PowerPoint to show you how you can interrogate it, but I won't have the full versatility to interrogate it with you today, which is fine because in forty five minutes we wouldn't have time anyway.
The platform that we're using is something called Group Solver. When we started the initiative, we thought we were going to be doing surveys and interviews and one on one focus meetings in the city with residents. What we found was with the rapid escalation of artificial intelligence, there was a platform available to us that basically allows you to conduct a survey. I'd like you to think of it as a chat interaction on your phone, where you could construct a survey and you could literally use this yourselves and construct a survey and send it out to a group.
They would respond by getting a question, it's like a text message, and answer in free form. Based on their response, it might ask the next question that you've programmed in. Or after two or more people have responded, it might actually interact with other respondents' answers. So to be simplistic, if you said that your favorite color was blue, it might say 37% of the citizens of Rochester have also said blue, which shade of blue do you prefer? It allows the outputs to function kind of like a focus group,
where traditionally you'd have multiple people in a room commenting on a topic, but it does it in a much more efficient and streamlined fashion. The purpose of this initiative was to move far enough out in the future in order to offer limitless possibilities, but close enough that it was tangible and within kind of the forecastable period of the folks that we talked to. And we commissioned a steering committee of volunteers, leaders across the city, and recognizing that we were going to have to put boots on the street in
order to go interact with community, in order to gather this information. We did things like show up on the Thursdays. Thursdays downtown, thank you. And both city and county events, there was a lot of interaction with the community. So, in addition to the steering committee, we commissioned another nearly 30, what we call vision and action team members, which really helped to give us a little bit more labor and focus on building out this survey. I'm not going to take you through the details of the executive summary because I'm going to show you the comments. Just to help you understand how it occurred,
individuals would have seen the question that you see at left. What's needed to create the best Rochester by 02/1950? You'd be astounded how long it took us to pin down that specific question to make sure that we were getting the answers that we were looking for. And they were able to answer through the means most useful to them. They could, go online and they could, send an email response. They could do a phone response as well. And, they could also there was a QR code that they could use with their phone in order to open the survey that way. We also initially framed it based on research that shows that any effectively functioning city
should be able to address the categories that you see around the edge of this wheel. When we moved to group solver, what we found was we could do an open ended question like this and allow AI to tell us what the categories of information were. So rather than us rigidly saying, what are your thoughts about economic vitality or nutrition or housing, etcetera, we could say, what do you care about most? And let the correlation of language cluster those into themes that would tell us what was most important to our residents. We should let you know also that we didn't limit this to
citizens or voting records or driver's license holders. We specifically sought out residents of the city and visitors, employers, whether they were residents or not, employees, whether they were residents or not. So it was broadly about the stakeholders, by the way, including students, the stakeholders who have a vested interest in the future of the city, whether or not they happen to have a City Of Rochester driver's license. Were you to go to the survey today, you'd see a screen kind of like this followed by a summary of results.
Forgive me for looking up but that's how I'm gonna direct my attention. And this is a summary of the answer to that primary question, difficult to read here but it shows that the number one concern could be categorized as youth and childcare followed by community events and funding education. And the wheel on the right is a visual, what we call a holograph, of those answers. What I can do for you today is show you how you might interrogate that
information to see what's really behind it. If I were to click on the youth and childcare section which was a little orange sliver at the top of this chart, it would show me that I've got 11 responses on this and 82% support for this theme. What that means is, I may have had 11 very specific ideas that were put out by different people, but others may have commented on rating those ideas that raised it to the top. So you don't necessarily have an idea from everyone in order for them to suggest
that it was important. I dig down a little further and you'll see that this explodes into the orange color that was represented here by youth and childcare into two major categories. On the left is affordable childcare, on the right is more kids activities and there's a subset of activities, sorry, suggestions in each of those. And if I click on affordable childcare, it shows me the six underlying statements. And if I click on any one of those, it spells it out for me,
shows how many respondents gave that answer. And at this level, I'm basically at the bottom of the detail because I'm getting a very specific response from someone answering the question, what's important to the future of Rochester in this case ensuring access to affordable childcare. We also asked them to make sure we had all the terrain covered. We also asked them to comment on the framework of the 12 that I mentioned previously that the wheel that shows 12 categories that are vital to effective civic discourse.
And in those ratings, they chose housing as number one and if you delve into it, it's mostly about access to affordable housing, but it's much broader than that. Education, infrastructure, economic vitality, a lot of this was you'll find about both respect for the economic vitality that Mayo brings to the city, but a lack of diversity in the employment and the opportunities that that represents. So there's a desire for greater economic vitality through diversity. Natural resources, culture and arts, health care sustainability, justice, and nutrition. I'm going fast because I have a lot of detail on these.
If you went into affordable housing, you'd see that low income and unsheltered individuals gathered the most support. You'll see it on the right in blue here. Now, the colors, once we go into a section, it color codes again. So, don't think the color codings relate from slide to slide. This slide is just about affordable housing. Sorry, just about housing and the number one issue being affordable housing, which is the blue half of the circle and then lots of individual categories underneath.
At this point, I don't have in PowerPoint all the details built out for each one of these sections. So, I'm just giving you an overview of the sections to show you that within housing, affordable housing is the most important. Accessible public Excuse me. We're not taking public comment at this time. Yeah. I just I just I just It's hard to read. You can speak to, to him after the presentation. Yeah. Thank you, mister president. So this, as a breakdown, shows affordable housing followed by housing for low income, housing for growing families,
housing homelessness solutions, family housing. It truncates some of the statements, housing that needs to be available and accessible, and property taxes that are too high was the way that that was phrased. And as you can see those are subcategory headings and then there's more detail under each one. I encourage you when the mayor provides you or has me provide you with the link to the survey to go in and interrogate this to your satisfaction. The next area is education and there was a big focus on the quality of
education and education funding and number one priority was increasing teachers pay. It doesn't always come out as kind of a directive like that increased pay, but in this case, it was quite explicit. So there was clearly a concern that teachers were being underpaid. There were several themes about diversifying the economy beyond Mayo. I want to be clear to those of us with a vested interest in the Mayo Clinic and all that it does for the city that there was great respect for that. It was simply a concern that that created a concentration that might be limiting for
the city. And so the goal here is vibrant neighborhoods, which meant economic opportunity broadly distributed across the city, economic diversification, which meant more than the medical center and medical sector itself, lower prices, broader economic base, financial confidence, etcetera, etcetera. Next was improving accessibility and affordability of healthcare. So this is a healthcare writ large but the themes literally come down to access and affordability. And then we used the AI to give us the top 20 recommendations for each of these
categories that took comment. These are not the exact quotes of individuals necessarily because there may have been three or four statements made that artificial intelligence combined into a single statement just so that we could show which were the most common. There is not scale meant to be meaningful in this, if a bubble was bigger because they have more words in it, that didn't make it more important, just more verbose. So there you can think of these as equivalent top 20 of the statements. And for those of you, I recognize most of you who can't read this microfiche,
it says things like housing here is really expensive for people's wages and housing needs to be affordable for both low and middle income classes more affordable, make housing cheaper, etcetera. You'll see the theme here. This, by the way, you should know for those of you who are, tracking this on a nationwide basis, this is has been true for the entire country or most urban centers post COVID. So it comes as no surprise that it's a big deal for Rochester as well. And there's top 20 recommendations in education, infrastructure, etcetera. I it would take us far too long to go through these things and have
a debate about them in detail. But what I did wanna do was take you to the next level where we got recommendations from our steering committee because the goal is for us to ultimately be able to take action on these recommendations. Just by way of logistics and demographics, the majority of the respondents were residents as you can see, 92% in the blue ring on the left Our residents of Rochester, a smaller much smaller number are visitors and others who just didn't identify. Most everyone was either employed or full time, part time, self employed,
or retired. There was small, yellow in the central ring. The yellow frame represents those who are student respondents, and then the, small segments represent those who prefer not to answer or were unemployed. And, for those who were students in Rochester, so we blew out the yellow section in the middle and asked students whether they intended to live in Rochester when they graduated. And as you can see here, the definite yes is the 18% blue on the left. It's a slightly different blue at the top.
Those subtleties are hard to see on a projector. But for the most part, you'll see that more than 50% of the folks expect that they would aspire to reside here post graduation, which is interesting since not all of the students are residents of or come from Rochester. So, it's an appealing place. Roger, can I ask you to address something? Of course. Would you address the number on the front of the page that says like 600 completed surveys. Could you address the difference between completed and the number of ideas and people that actually participated because we switched modalities?
Yes, we switched modalities, meaning we started out by talking to human beings and giving them pieces of paper or collecting surveys by phone etcetera to allowing them to enter information directly into this technology. We did port any recommendations we got from paper into the system, so they're all resident here, But not all of them, not everyone will have answered a full survey, which would take after your initial question, it would ask you a lot of other ones. You will see a number of six fifty four responses.
Those are the originators of those who answered in the survey and completed more than the first question so that their answers did things like judge and rate and rank some of the other categories. There were 1,004 respondents overall and those 1,004 respondents will have made both the initial recommendation as well as maybe additional recommendations based on the questions that they were asked, so 1,004. Given that that was preponderantly residents of Rochester,
what that translates into is 99% fidelity, meaning 99% confidence interval that that is an accurate interpretation of the population at large and something like a plus or minus 4% error rate. So, it's a lot better than guessing and much better than a poll, but still has some error rate in it obviously because it's a small sample of a larger population. Did that answer your question, Mary? Yes, it does. And those 1,004 that we had, there are also some that we entered,
from those paper. I would go in and enter word for word, but I would put maybe five or up to 10 people's comments under one And each of the people that responded often had more than one idea, surprise, surprise, right? So the ideas we got from this, you will also be able to access, on the spreadsheet at the back of the document, which lists every single response that we got. So it's all there for you to look at. Yes. And I commend you if you're willing to go through the tedium of reading a spreadsheet of that length.
Thank you, Mayor. That is very clarifying. So we did do this pivot from paper to digital and it created a little bit of a difficulty in trying to calculate the averages. But basically what that means is we have underestimated in the calculation the number of responses. Even if we had twice as many responses, it would have changed the error rate by about a percentage point. So it kind of statistically doesn't make that significant difference. Our goal is always to get over 1,000 for audience of roughly this size because then you get into statistical validity. Okay.
Now this is my guidance to our steering committee that says, in order for recommendations or ideas that are submitted by our residents and citizens to be useful, they need to be translated like any initiative, like DMC, like Cindy's presentation earlier this evening. What you need are six things. Let me do it visually. Oh, not much better. Okay, I'll go back. You need a mandate. A mandate simply means that you've got some vested interest, some guidance, some think of it as supply and demand are being met here. There's sufficient demand for it to matter and sufficient supply meaning impetus of others to
deliver on that. You need a leader, at least one, ideally many, but you need leadership for an initiative in order for it to be focused and take action. And that leader would then be responsible for ensuring that there was a plan so that it is not just fumbling about indefinitely. To act on that plan, you need resources which can be summarized as you need humans and you need cash, you need money and you need labor. So, there's a leaders remit is largely in order to recruit the resources necessary to be
able to deliver on this. And then those are the requisite, elements needed to be able to take action. To be able to take action well, you also need governance. You there should be some third party oversight, for example, a city council or some other body who's responsible for ensuring that we're meeting goals and doing on the appropriate time frame and no subset of the group's interests are being served disproportionately. And then sustainability, a little bit like the US Constitution. You need something that allows it to morph over time because they're going to be changing conditions on the ground,
changing assumptions, changing owners and leaders, etcetera. And so you need to make sure that you're not so static that you can't morph over time as changes require. I said this to our steering committee just today in reviewing their work, which I'm going to share with you, which was to take the findings in each of the major categories and begin to map out for us the specific actions that needed to be taken for it to move forward. Under infrastructure, really, really concisely, the main focus was around
roads, bikes, sidewalks, and in particular, a public transit system, something that's available, twenty four hours for the critical portions at low or no cost to user transit. Now that could take many forms. It was not dictated what that might mean, but simply that we have many residents who have a difficult time transporting themselves around the city and being able to take advantage of fully and being able to realize all the economic potential that it represents as well as social. There was a summary of a lot of input that said that what we really need is to be thinking not just of roads,
but of bicycle routes and sidewalks, all of the mechanisms by which humans travel around the travel around the city and then to maintain those after they are built. So it's not just about, hey, we need to create these things and then send them into disuse, but build a budget on our system in order to maintain them. Very simple as you can see here. Some of them not quite as simple. So, I'm glad we got to start with an easy one. Justice, let me just say that these are not an order of priority, they're in this logical sequence that they were presented. Justice wasn't a high ranking category. There's an assumption in the interpretation from our steering committee members,
sorry, that that, that this is a focus on first responders primarily, and that for the most part, there's much good work that has taken place here. And so, they're mostly talking about crime prevention, remediation, and mechanisms for, for allowing anyone who's been who's transgressed the law, for example, to be able to remediate and kind of correct themselves as both particularly youth. So that when we've got instances of young people getting in trouble that we have
a way for them to be remediated and return to kind of living as productive citizens. Education, remember each steering committee member did this independently and just presented it today, so you'll see different formats here. Education, this was a very high priority as you saw to begin with particularly youth education and funding for education ranked third only behind youth and childcare 80% in community events. The focus was much on early childhood education and there was a lot on childcare if you will for some of the earliest years.
The key actions for the city on the bottom left here are to prioritize focus on education, build strong partnerships between city leaders and community education leaders, proactively assist those leaders in producing strong education and prioritize early childhood needs and investments. You will find that if this was produced as a Venn diagram, there's lots of overlaps. So there were issues with childcare that were separate from youth education, but you could see in the commentary the overlap between them. So we've segregated them for purposes of creating clarity here.
You'd find in the actual data that there are topics that crossover categories. And among the key themes at the top right was the need for increased investment in education. We saw in the very first slide that I provide you there was a real concern about paying teachers more that came out in this action as well. Culture and arts involved sort of two forms here, there's performing arts and there's the visual arts, if you will. This was also the category in which sports and other physical activity fell that wasn't
directly in the parks and nature section. And the five top themes for this area were more arts for youth, more in public spaces, more for funding including this concept of a performing arts center. We had a conversation about that particular issue today and there was concern that the options for public performing arts were basically too small format, the ones that exist today. And so the notion was that we needed something that could accommodate an audience that was the appropriate scale for the size of the city.
Community engagement through the arts, celebrating cultural diversity, or basically having arts opportunities for every one of the diverse communities within the city, and supporting local artists. There are key recommendations about what those things might entail. There was a bit of a debate today about museums and which museums and particularly a medical science museum that would be important. And again, the notion here is that this isn't the highest priority that came up among citizens but every one of these topics was addressed.
Sorry, more on culture and arts, so we go to economic vitality. This was an important point. This was the one about diversifying beyond just medical sciences. Housing becomes an important part of this. One of the limiters that was noted is that you can't really attract greater employment if employees can't afford to live here and then the commute becomes difficult, then the transportation, the local transport becomes a challenge. So there's a lot of interworking parts here. But the notion is that we want to encourage economic development more diversely in more
areas of the city, in more domains of the city, meaning more industrial domains. There was also conversation about the fact that we are not a city that has inordinate individual or private wealth, which produces donors that you see in a lot of other cities and goes all the way back to the original railroad barons and Carnegie Hall etcetera. There are cities, San Francisco being a good example of this, that have great individual wealth that can be the funding source.
In Rochester, we rely on public sources and sort of commercial enterprise to be those funding sources, which means that we have to operate a little bit differently and a little bit more creatively in order to gather funding for any philanthropic causes if we had broader economic vitality that was creating more of an entrepreneurial opportunity for individual private wealth to be accrued, there would presumably be subsequent benefit both employment and in philanthropy. I want to note the last bullet point on the left that creating new tools in the toolbox was this notion that came through that said,
we need other ways to encourage, support and develop new areas of the economy. One that was brought up was biotech, which was a logical kind of extension of the work in medical sciences, one that has received a lot of conversation over the years, but the toolset doesn't seem to be in place for us to encourage that. Natural resources, sorry, this is an awful waterfall of information for you guys to endure. Thank you very much for your patience. Natural resources, the last concern here was about the development and pressure of removing green spaces which
many cities face, and that there needs to be a real emphasis on maintaining the importance of these spaces and both protecting them and then promoting their use and doing that through more experiential activities that encourage people to take advantage of the nature and the beauty and the surroundings. In our city, it wasn't just about parks. There were, for example, you see this comment about that came up a couple of times about cleaning up Silver Lake and safe and clean. But for the most part, the comments were about being able to use outdoor space in a way that was
accessible, safe and encouraging for all ages. In health care, surveys mostly identified this was the top identified when we asked them to rank categories. And, again, it was about affordability and access. And the suggestions here on the right of the bullet points you see, the circular open bullet points, I'd work with Mayo to broaden access to primary care, strengthen the focus on equity in healthcare, establish more free clinics and we had a bit of conversation about the distributed healthcare
sources that are available to the city that often go unaddressed and to establish pop up clinics. But for example, we talked about Salvation Army and we talked about Planned Parenthood and the diversity of healthcare resources that are available that often aren't included in the conversation. Can I summarize this for you? Again, with pop up clinics, I think we've got it covered there. And affordability was kind of a critical theme here. Now this is a nagging theme across The United States and around the world.
So I don't suspect it's unique to Rochester, but I do think that there is an expectation that Mayo would somehow help with creating greater affordability and that's and maybe they do, I'm not sure. But there's a sense that affordability is the biggest challenge or hurdle or impediment to receiving timely health care. Sorry. In housing, homelessness came up, but not as much as simply the affordability of housing. What we've I don't know if this is the driver in Rochester,
but what we found in many other parts of the country is that affordability has been affected by COVID primarily in many parts of The U. S. Immigration coupled with the funding that came through during COVID and then was removed over time has created this disproportionate challenge for health for housing to be affordable, particularly for people at low and middle income. In some places, there's also a tax divide that keeps housing from being affordable or passing it on
between generations. So some of the comments that came out were the idea for PR campaigns and grants and construction programs, in large part about building more low income and middle income affordable housing that was consistent with population growth. And vision for event, diverting attention, okay. There's a lot of detail done on housing and there are some supply side recommendations which is about building the housing, zoning, maybe more thoughtfully in order to encourage such builds. And on the demand side,
strengthening economic pathways for people to be able to afford housing, that might be grants for low income folks, that might be subsidies for builders, but the notion is that you'd create an easier pathway for people to be able to fund access to housing. That's overlap with health and well-being and strengthening the vision of housing. I believe that's it. I should also mention to you that there are two sections. The steering committee just met today to go over these recommendations. So two of them, nutrition and sustainability that input hasn't come in yet.
So don't think that by their absence that they are neglected or not important. My apologies that those haven't come in yet. All right. There's more detail here but it's extraneous. I would like to open the questions if I may. Thank you Mr. Mater. And question for you and I guess for the mayor is what is the next steps for the steering committee? When will we or other parts of the community see this? We haven't discussed it yet since steering committee meeting just happened today, but here's what I recommend to you and then America can correct me.
What we discussed as a steering committee is that for this to take action, there are constituent groups who already exist, who own many of the responsibilities that this represents. There's a parks department for example, there's a housing and there's education etcetera. So, the notion would be that we would consolidate a report and solicit the leaders, if you will, when I talked about we need a mandate and a leader etcetera. We don't need to create that if we can find those who are already charged with these missions in the city and basically give them this information and ask them
to consider it in their planning. Many of them we know are working on data sources that are over ten years old now, just because that's the time lag that the initiatives like this cause. And so, what we're really doing is giving them the opportunity to update that and we're doing a forecasted the best you can do with contemporary data to try and anticipate the future. So this might not only be more timely data, but data that's trying to look forward to the future a bit more than in the past. We knew, for example, that in some of the school data that we'd received, the the programs are based on input that was gathered by childlike
childhood students who are now parents with students themselves. Right? So it's just a timing thing. So identify the the credible already designated leadership that might be across different groups, both public and private. Give them this information and ideally, we would coordinate a gathering of a group that might not otherwise really talk to each other and give them that briefing together and ask them to take action together or divide and conquer, however they choose to do that for each of these categories. President? Administrator Zelens?
Council President, Council Members, I think for just clarity of what was referenced, you're also going through your strategic planning process and this body for any of the direct work that would be a city department is the leadership of that. So it would be important for you to look at this information and understand whether or not it the detailed actions align with your priorities considering, especially, the resources section that you mentioned and then also whether or not you talked a little bit about during your strategic planning process,
the initial kickoff about where do we lead, where do we support, and where do we influence, as not leaders of some of these different institutions. I think it's really also very important to recognize that it may or may not align with what they're able to do based on their regulatory environment, etcetera. So just putting that caveat out there. I think that's a bit of what, mister Mater was saying when he's talking about sharing that information together. But I would just note that, you know, having a conversation with the department head and asking them to lead something without,
having that be something that the council's strategic planning initiative and budget yeah. I'll I'll Mayor. Will answer as well. So today, when the steering committee met, one of the things we did was go through each of these areas of course, report out and then talk about what are the organizations in the community who are already taking a lead or who should see this information. So that was one of the things we spent an hour and a half this afternoon going over because this information is now public. We're going to publicize it. Anyone in the community is welcome to dig around and look.
You know, comment was made about is accessibility mentioned. Yes. When you go in there, you can see that someone mentioned accessibility in the form and how many people agreed with it. So, it will be out there for folks to look at. The reason this was important to do when we did to share now is because this information, which I hope you spend some time looking at, can help inform the strategic priorities of the city. What does our constituency want? What are they telling us? Clearly, they've said some things are very, very important to them. Is that part of what we're focusing on as a city?
Are we heading in the right direction or do we need to make some adjustments? And this is the community's say in where we're heading as a council. So my hope is that it informs this council and myself and the staff and again, it will go to organizations, the information will be specifically sent to the organizations that were identified by the steering committee today by staff, our staff departments. I mean, surely public works will have an interest in some of the information that comes forward and hopefully it will inform the thinking.
Our boards and commissions as well can take this information and look at it. So, it's not just we're going to solve every problem, right, but this thinking should help inform us about the direction that we're going. And then the steering committee members, there definitely are some who have already emailed since the meeting with ideas about who they could work with that on things that aren't the city's purview that are in the in a different department or a different, division like the schools for instance or social workers or, you know,
the homeless population, the county, sharing it with them and working with them. Other comments, questions? I have one Mayor, if I may, I just on behalf of the council members, I'm curious. Have they been given yet the link to the survey data themselves? I believe it was sent out right before the meeting. Okay. Okay. We do have, Council Member Keane, go ahead and then we have Council Member Kalmar. Yeah. Thank you. Again, I'm trying to think of this in this light. I'm remembering back a year ago when we voted to add some sort of contingency money to do this thing.
But I'm thinking of it very much in that twenty fifty view and not so much as just, okay, what are the issues today and what should we be doing about them? I'm not approaching our discussion that way, so right or wrong. I'm also seeking it as a loose definition of the city. When people say where do they want to live in 02/1950, I don't think they're thinking of this park and rec department or this. I think they're thinking of what are the kind of things that make it like enjoyable or important or like an area that they'd want to be in. That idea of like if the education system is not part of the city,
that's fine. It's not that we're not thinking of it that way. And again, that's why I'm taking the data. I'm always suspicious when we have low data like when you try to have a city of 120,000 and try to get these things, you'll get certain things that come out and I want to make sure we have that and I'm not sure if it's scientific, but I'll call it objective way of making sure we're not aligning it to our preconceived notions, that we're not saying like, ah, housing has been a big issue. Yep, housing came out. I mean, I'm not surprised that housing would come out as a big deal because I think it's a major impact on how people look at what their quality of life is
going to be in now and especially younger people looking for into the future. Most of the areas that I saw come out are fairly consistent like when you start talking about justice and education, justice and education and culture things that there's none of those jumped off the page, but I did hear one and maybe I heard it wrong, but I'll run it back to you. I heard something about transportation and I saw something about, you know, kind of a major change that right now transportation is an individual's responsibility and a city the size of Rochester tries to contribute to have a public transportation system, but but it's for fee and it's,
fairly limited and it seems to be transport to work, more that, like, our major routes. Did did did you get the impression that there were people saying, like, I would like to live in a city where I don't have to worry about that, that transportation is provided through a municipality? Because I thought I heard free and frequent and things like that. And You did. Is that, like, an isolated opinion or is there some sort of because just to me, that's a bigger idea to say that's something we don't do now and you start talking about twenty five years in the future could people think about that as something
their municipality does for them, even if you're not a city of a million people where most cities our size can't do that sort of thing especially when you have a 55 square mile footprint. So, free is isolated. Accessible public transportation is general. It is not uncommon when you ask people to think big about the future that they think in idealized terms. So we all want free everything, but we don't expect it. So I think the challenge becomes how do we make easy,
accessible transport with coverage that meets all of the needs of our people now and in the future as readily available as we can. And the way to make it most readily available is to take away all barriers and the biggest barrier for many people is economic. So that would be an idea. I don't think it's an expectation. So good on you if you wanna take that one on. But I don't think it's an expectation in New York City either. So I, but, you know, it is in some places highly socialized environments say there are we we don't charge
individuals a toll on every one of our roads and we don't necessarily have to charge them every time they get on a bus if that's what we choose is important as a society. So I leave it to you to determine its priority and therefore the budget associated with it. I think accessible transportation at low cost as a minimum would be the most common response you got. Yeah. Thank you. But Jen, just to clarify too, I don't want to take this as like you'd say, I let's talk talk to the staff about getting, I'm not thinking of these things that way. This is a twenty five year horizon,
but I think I'm trying to look at things that says, what do we do today that's changing dramatically? And one of them is transportation. And are there things we could be looking at or at least have in the repertoire, having the idea of like these are things we could consider. We're doing things right now with bus rapid transit and transit oriented development and trying to, in my view, lean into this idea that the way to make this stuff work is by is, is through zoning. It's not just by making as many bus routes as possible and things like that.
So I think there are some things there that I was sort of pulling out and just in my way of thinking of this, this isn't a way of saying like, oh, good. Let's take this to the strategic planning meeting in two weeks and start talking about how we're going to I'm not looking at these things that way, but I am looking for that sort of like, you know, those sort of kernels where you'd say, things aren't going to be the same twenty years down the path and what are things that could make that could have an impact on the economic viability, and housing and you know access to other you know lifestyle things that,
and transportation could be a major one. That's something that's been, you know, usually one of those building blocks of any sort of congregate living. And Patrick, I would just add that I think it's a yes and I think we can think about transport, not necessarily a specific idea, but how are we going to handle transportation in the future. And we've already taken the steps that community may not even realize we've taken to provide later bus routes on our bus rapid transit and free fare for bus rapid transit that they may not even be aware of.
So the future action is already in the works to address some of the needs of the community and we can just, you know, put the rest of it on the table as are there other changes we need to make for the future. Yeah. And that's probably one of the reasons that one jumped out at me is because the idea of like we're in a pretty good foundation for something like that. But again, I I I'm also trying to communicate that I'm not looking at these as things that we need to assign staff to and start doing. These are ideas for as we look into the future, what are the next steps with bus rapid transit and what are the things that
distinguish our community from others, not just like how does other people do it, what can we do to, have Rochester standing? Patrick, I just want to second the way, that Councilman Keane is thinking of this or Councilmember. I agree with the way you framed it. At least that's the way that a future forward survey like this is intended to be interpreted. You also have to remember just in human psychology and behavior that individuals are going to answer about individual things without weighing them against all the other trade offs which is why we asked them to do rankings in the end and why free transportation
didn't come up as the number one thing for good reason. However, I would suggest to you that the right way for any organization to take a future forecast like this forward is to kind of lay a put a stake in the ground twenty five years out and say, what do we want it to look like? What do we believe in all the trade offs that are represented here we should try and achieve by 2025 recognizing there'll be lots of changes in technology and demographics and everything else along the way. And then back into what are the things that we would need to be doing
now or in the time of any administration to be moving in that direction and feel like we were achieving the leading indicators for that future. And you'll find you're doing many of them. We saw that over and over again. But you're probably not doing some of the things that you would want to be doing ten years, fifteen years yet and having a map to those can be really helpful. So, I think there's maybe an exercise for city council that would just be a useful conversation that says, what do we really want the stake in the ground for twenty five years from now and what are the key metrics that would show us that we're on track.
Thank you. On to Council Member Palmer. It's difficult for me to sit here and listen because we didn't have this information ahead of time and I like to read it. And part of the things that I picked up on here is that in 02/1950, some of you talking about ruts on the trail at Silver Lake. That's not 02/1950 and that's disappointing. It's disappointing to me that you're talking about 1,000 people or 600 people who have come here with these questions or the answers or what they think is important.
But here you got affordable housing, what's the definition and that's been an item that we've talked about a lot. When you're talking about healthcare, childcare, and then you talk about schools and I find it really hard to believe that 95% of people think the school district needs to pay their staff more. I've never heard somebody when I've been out in the community say, oh, geez, the number one problem with schools is that we're not paying our teachers enough. So that would tell me that you have a biased, survey and and it doesn't help me much. Now, today, the county announced that they're doing their, interviews and they're gonna do their survey to see what the county residents want.
Hopefully, that has more information that's not use the word bias. But to me what I've been presented today seems to be very biased and very one-sided and less than a thousand people less than 1% surely can't be Rochester. It is. It's 99%. And every one of us up here have been elected and every one of us who will knock on doors and listen to people and lower taxes isn't the bottom of the item that I've heard and no one's talking about healthcare or childcare. Those are not issues for for for this this city council. And so it's hard for us to spend our limited time and our limited materials
and staff time on stuff that we don't really have any control over. Can you speak to council member Palmers, on kinda how did you, prevent for bias? Did you take demographic information on the respondents? Will that be available and transparent as well so that we can kinda get a sense of the scope of the community that's responded? Let me say a couple of things. First of all, you're confusing two things. You're talking about the people you're talking to today about the stuff they're caring about today and we ask people to project to the future and talk about what their
children needed. So there might be a time interval difference between the two things that you're talking about. And secondly, we know statistically that if you get a thousand responses out of a population that you can count on it being 99% valid with 4% error rate. That's the statistics you apply there. Now that might differ from your personal experience, which is the most biased thing, one person's view versus the view of a thousand. So I'd again ask you to reinterpret the way you're thinking of that. We did offer them the option to provide a lot of demographic data that would
take them a while to complete, but it was age rank and serial network kind of thing. Those who did the survey on paper beforehand didn't do that, we didn't make that part of the survey. Those who did it online, a significant portion that did answer the whole thing answered all of that. And so we do have some demographic for a subset of that answers. I'm not sure you'd be able to tie them. I know you wouldn't be able to tie them to the specific answers. You might be able to in the detailed spreadsheet in order to say, oh,
people over the age of 60 tended to answer that question this way and people under the age of 12 do it that way. It's important to you. Council Member Palmer. Any any more questions? Mine was answered. Other Thank you. Any other comments, folks? Thank you very much. A lot of information, a lot of valuable information and valuable information that, can help us as administrator Zelens and mayor norman Norton suggested to, to inform our work on the strategic planning process that we're going through.
But to, council member, Keane's point that really looking at this as long term 02/1950, information. But I'm really anxious to delve into it and thank you very much. Thank you. It's a real pleasure. Thank you. To you as representatives of the city. And we are going to take a five minute break, and then, come back into this room for our final agenda item during the study session. Thanks. Okay. Thank you. So our next agenda item is an update on the Peace Plaza improvements and assessments,
and I'm gonna turn it back over to, recording and progress. City administrator Cindy Steinhauser. Cindy? Great. Thank you, council president Schubert, mayor Norton, members of the council. I think we're just waiting for the presentation to pop up. Are you okay? Or do you need me to get my computer? Oh, I I need to do it. Okay. Apologies. Oh, there we go. Okay. Great. Again, thank you. Here with me this evening, I'll be presenting, but also here with me, is Steve Sampson Brown, our Director of Construction, Jamie Rote from Destination Medical Center, and I believe we have Ryan Petersen online from RDG,
who is available to all of us are available for questions afterwards. So what is before you is, some apologies. Over there. It's fantastic. Thank you. Thank you, miss Reeves Holmes. While this side says slide says discussion and action. It's really just discussion. You cannot take action at a study session. This will be coming forward to you at the next city council meeting. But, what we want to talk about is an action we'd like to be able to take to, one, immediately expand the smooth paver pathways on the plaza. We want to do that incrementally and allocate some dollars for some additional engineering serving
and cost estimating. We're estimating the ask, which was approved last week at the DMC Board of 175,000 of DMC funding. Okay, great. So just a little bit of context, when we, embarked on the update to Peace Plaza, we set out to invest in Peace Plaza. There were seven key goals. You can see the goals that are identified there in terms of what we were thinking about in terms of design of the space and engaging the community in helping to design this space. Overall, we think it's been a very successful public realm project in creating a safe,
flexible public space for people to gather. But we recognize that, not everybody experiences it in the same way, and that's what we're here to talk about. I want to talk a little bit about the engagement that got us to this design. So, community engagement was central to this project from the very beginning. Right? We had, during the initial design phase, we did extensive research around what the community wanted in this space. It included also prototyping, different treatments of the space, including pavers that are there. We conducted feedback sessions, and all of that data was incorporated and aligned to develop the final design that's
out there today to really meet what the community was looking for in terms of a project that delivered on those seven goals. That said, once the project was done, we did begin receiving feedback about the raised lettering and that experience, and we shifted our engagement to a more targeted audience, right, to better understand what were some of the core accessibility concerns that were being raised by certain members of our community, populations of our community. It is a space that does meet ADA standards, but really we wanted to engage in direct conversation with individuals who experience mobility,
vision, or neurological challenges who might navigate the space differently than, someone who, like myself, navigates it very differently. So we also wanted to engage with key stakeholders from these groups who navigated the space on a regular basis. And again, their insights were really invaluable in helping us refine solutions that both balance the design and usability of the space with enhanced accessibility considerations. Some of the I'm not sure why I'm challenging it this time. Okay.
Here's some of the feedback that we got from the interviews. Right? Inspiring space. The messaging is inspiring, but it does present a challenge for, some users. Right? The raised lettering affects mobility and comfort. Navigating the accessible routes is, often unclear in terms of understanding which space I should walk in and traversing it during special events, and the communication around that is some of the most immediate feedback that we received from these intense
community conversations with members from mobility, vision, and neurological impairment communities. So, that informed our goal, right? We updated our goal and it really was so that we could achieve a space that is creates a more wider uniform surface, for concentrated pedestrian movement. That's really what we're talking about here in terms of better accessibility for all users. So some immediate actions that we took, we immediately added signage to highlight some of the potential areas. We moved some of the planters to,
make sure, started to try guide people into to a certain direction towards the smooth portion of the plaza experience. We did do some resetting of pavers. As I mentioned at the last up or I think I answered a question at a meeting in December. In your first year of a construction project, that's when you see some of the greatest settling happening and so we went in and did some resetting to improve some of the safety. We enhanced our daily maintenance protocols, right, we are on there, we partner with RDA and DMC to have presence in the space every single day,
but we really enhanced and evaluated some of those protocols. We did some additional engineering evaluation. And as I indicated, we did additional stakeholder engagement to get input. These photos really capture some of the observations that we heard during those so with that, we engaged RDG, who is a design, architecture, and engineering firm that is an expert in creating really fantastic, accessible, public realm spaces, and we employed them to do a number of things. One, do some additional engagement with key stakeholders, and that was the kinds of questions that they asked were getting a general understanding
and experience of these user groups' use of the space, questions and comments they had and observations around accessibility and safety of the space from their lenses, the interactive and usability from, again, from their perspective, emotional and social considerations, right? If you feel like you can't navigate in a space, a space that was set up for people to gather, then that has an impact on your ability to socialize and make that human connection in that space. And then just generally suggestions that they had for improvements.
And so, I wanted this image here just really shows you what the current conditions are, right? And so just for, people looking at the slide, the blue area is the water feature. The darker gray area is where we have the artwork. Those are the raised letters, pavers. And then the lighter gray is where the smooth pavers are. And that is intended to be the walking path. But clearly, not everybody is understanding that because we are here today talking about some additional, enhancements to the space for usability.
And we want to take a page from another really successful project that we designed and based the design on what we learned from Peace Plaza. And by that, I mean, you can see in this picture where we have both pavers, so we have that artistic element, but we have a very smooth surface that is your clearly articulated smooth walkway. And so now we want to take lessons that we've learned from Discovery Walk and bring it back to updated work on Peace Plaza. So, here's an image and it's highlighted on the right hand side.
You can see that right now we have a 10 to 12 foot smooth walkway that is intended to be the main walkway. And in the background, you can see where there are tables and chairs, and that is because table and chairs are intended to be set up on the artwork. But based on, again, these intercept conversations that we have with stakeholders, we might consider expanding that smooth walkway 14 to 16 feet. That's an observation that has we're talking about. But before we do that, there might be other efforts that we want to try first.
We believe we want to try first. But I do want to show you, here's an example of what it potentially could look like to expand even more smooth pavers into the Peace Plaza. This would be the maximum amount of additional smooth pavers that we would even want to attempt to do. And we're not suggesting that we do all of this and certainly not suggesting that we do it all right away because we want to do these improvements incrementally. So, again, just so you can see them side by side, on the left hand side is what the current conditions are,
on the right hand side is a reflection of what we might consider at the most in terms of smooth paver incremental improvements. And I want to talk a little bit about well, let me just step back. And so, when we say incrementally, we would likely first start with the east side, right, so on the bottom half of that that imagery. So the bottom half is east, the top half is west. To the right, my right is north, and to the left is south. And so thinking about how do we widen,
the, eastern portion of the plaza because we do have a sidewalk cafe, out from Galleria that takes up a larger portion of the smoother walkway, and so we want to make some accommodation there be for that cross traffic. So that would be our first step and then test it and and, see if we were successful in adding that. But we also want to do some additional near term tactics that, again, guide people towards the smooth pavers that are the navigable portions of the walkway.
So, we want to create signage for walk zones, and again, being cognizant of we don't want to put a lot of verticality onto this Peace Plaza because that is something that people would have to navigate around. So, the signage could be, on the ground, right, but clearly articulate this is, this is the walk zone, this is the walk area. We want to continue to do some resetting and adjusting of, the pavers, right, we're constantly monitoring to make sure if there's any movement we're in there and we're settling those pavers. As I said, the greatest amount of settlement happens in that first year after construction,
but that doesn't necessarily mean it's complete, so we're monitoring that. Also doing daily monitoring of maintenance. So, again, thinking about that smooth walkway and making sure that there's not obstructions in there, right, that the tables and chairs are set on the artwork, not on the smooth pavers, that we don't have sandwich board signs and benches and other things that are blocking that 10 to 12 foot smooth, walkway. And so, we feel like those are some of the first things we need to do. Is it just really a matter of it's not clearly marked and not clearly indicated?
So we clearly mark it, navigate people towards that space. Did it work? Great. Do we need to do more? Maybe. Do we need to add some more smooth pavers? That's the kinds of like every time we do one thing, we're going to come back, test it and then go back and make some additional improvements. To help you understand what this looks like, starting in March and we want to just just in communication with RDA, for example, today they asked when would this work happen, they said we're already booking stuff on the plaza, we said we want to work with your schedule, like so we're going to sit down and understand what do they already have,
but they book this space for us, We want to be the least intrusive if possible to the businesses around there and to users that have already made commitments to this space. So, to the extent that we can work with them and make a schedule work to both interest that is our goal. But those intensive measures in terms of additional signage, monitoring, modifications to pavers would happen between March and August. At that same time, we're documenting how the space is being used, how are people experiencing it, and and again saying what measure was the most successful,
have we landed or is further work needed. At the same time is conducting some additional engineering surveying and cost estimating. Because if at the end of this in August and we say, you know, it's just not enough, we're not happy with it, we're not happy with how the space is being used, are additional measures taken, That additional analysis by RDG will help us identify more intensive, intrusive modifications to this space and help us understand what a price tag would look
like associated with those additional modifications. So, again, what we're suggesting and what we took to the DMC Board last week was requesting authorization of $175,000 to do some of this incremental work. If you are in agreement with that, we're going to be bringing this recommendation to the next city council meeting for action on the part of the city council. And, I think that I'm happy to answer any questions and maybe Jamie and Steve could come up and, help with questions that I might not be able to answer. Thank you,
Cindy. So just so I'm clear, if you can go back to the slide with the smooth the proposed smooth pavers. Yes. That one. Mhmm. So I'm unclear. So what I'm hearing you say is that you're going to start with the East side, which is kinda where the where we go into the Galleria. Correct? Right there. Galleria. So so then with with the, the hundred and 75 k, is the is the potential of doing the smooth pavers in all of the yellow
yellow designated space, is that a part of this 70, I think. Yeah. March to to August Yes. August timeline. So what I'm So, oh, so so you so what you're saying is you're going to do it incrementally, but it is part of the plan? So let me just be clear. We're gonna start here and, hopefully, people at home can see the red dot. If not, I'm pointing to the bottom half of the screen. Yeah. As you indicated, Galleria is here, and so we're gonna first start with adding some smooth pavers here.
And we're going to start by adding clear signage in, I wish in my laptop I could do the arrow, in along the existing, thank you, along the existing travel walkways. So some additional smooth pavers here and signage along the existing smooth pathways. And then we're gonna bring back our stakeholders who have been helping inform this process, who are visually, mobility, and neurologically challenged and say, how is this? How are how is it working?
How are you navigating this? Is this okay? Does more need to be done? Have we clearly articulated the walkways and and are we maintaining it at the level in which you can experience this space in a way to your satisfaction, right, and to to your expectations? And if the answer is yes, then we're done. Right? We're done. We're gonna continue to monitor movement, but we're done. We've set in good protocols, and we've said no more work needs to be done. If they say, you know what? We really need a thin band here to cross north, south,
south. Right? Maybe we need a thin band here. Okay. Let's understand what that means. How many feet? And let's do that. And then come back and say, did that work? And if they say, yeah, that worked, we can be done. Got it. So that's the plan. So so that initial feedback after the smooth pavers go in on the East side, that will happen roughly when? So, it'll be our first thing that we do. But again, I wanna understand what RDA's schedule is with booking. Like, if we can get it, you know,
also free process to come out of the ground. Right? So if for us is out of the ground and say we're in there maybe in April, as long as we're not intruding on something that's already, scheduled. So let's just say, hey, April's free and we can do something in April. That's when we would look to do it. But I wanna I wanna make sure, we're not interfering with RDA's programming. Got it. Council member Wall. Why and I couldn't read the option page other than the headlines, they were so fuzzy and when you expand it it gets even fuzzier
but just the titles it would appear to me that none of the options includes the removal of the paver, the raised pavers altogether. Those option, So let me just say those options are just an example of some initial analysis that RDG provided. We are not ready to say that these five options are options, and we I don't I don't believe we did say remove all of the, consider removing everything because what we heard in,
you know, all of the community engagement that informs the design of this space, that that artwork was integral to that sense of experience. And it wasn't and even in these more recent rounds of interviews, they're saying the art is inspiring, it's great. We didn't hear remove it, we just said make it easier for us to get through the space. So, that is why at this this juncture, we think it it don't take a sledgehammer to, a solution that you might be able to handle with the tweezers,
right? That's our approach right now. So, I would say and of course, people don't generally come to us us and congratulate us for the great things we're doing, but I 100 of the feedback that I've gotten is that the raised lettering is just a hazard and, just doesn't belong on a flat surface for any number of reasons. I have some more questions about that. How do you how do you remove if you took all of, the gold area, how do you remove those raised pavers,
raised letter pavers without destroying the integrity of the poem? Exactly. Yeah. That is that is why we're suggesting we don't do all of them at this point. We just just do the East side and we need to engage the artist also in understanding the impact of further removal of raised lettering and what it does to the artwork. So So by doing the east side alone, it looks to me like you're gonna gain about
four feet. Mhmm. Is all. Yeah. And that might be all we need. Right? That might because right now it's narrower because of the outdoor cafes, outdoor seating that's there. We might just need a little bit more on that you said, but not all the way. And down there is where the artwork repeats for about five or 10 rows, I believe. Yeah. And I could speak to a little bit Yeah. To the artwork, from working with the artist in the beginning. So, in the beginning when we Jamie, can you go to the mic? Excuse me. In the beginning when we started to design this work,
there was, as Cindy mentioned, extensive amount of prototyping and, the main artist in Hamilton with this work, her original work is in the spine in the poem. So, it talks about in the beginning and then it has some pieces and as Cindy mentioned there's some repetitive words. So, can we shorten up those repetitiveness words down the middle of the spine and not lose that poem down the middle. The rest of the work itself, as she explains it in her description it's not meant to be read line by line. It's meant to be every time that you walk through the space you're picking up
a different word as you go. And as a reminder it's also integrated with, Gwen Westerman's A Song from Mississippi. So, those pieces kind of inter walk with each other. So we think this could be a good solution in the sense of someone could still come to the space, pick up those different words, and still read the spine. So, we feel like we're in the area of keeping the integrity of the art by still shrinking it so that we have more clear walkway. That's a good explanation, as I have tried to read the poem, not in the past week but, many months warmer weather. I would I would call it more stream of consciousness poetry than I would say
telling a story. Going back to that gold figure, why why would we leave raised letter pavers in the street where people, could stumble on them as they use rolling ore, people don't lift their feet quite as much as they used to when they were 25? Sure and just I want to be clear this street is here. We can't see it. Sorry. Pardon me. Oh, okay. I took the I did too. I did too. I thought that was the street. Wait. Pardon me.
Is this the street? That is. That's the street. I I'm sorry. Yeah. So we're leaving pavers in the street. Yes. Or raised letter pavers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Again, we, we wanted to have a differential as you leave the plaza completely west of, you know, west of that gray area and completely removing artwork. So, and and I would say we are not suggesting to do all of this. It is it is the, I don't wanna say the nuclear but it is the nuclear north south,
walkway solution. It could be something much narrower and so you continue to have, artwork across the street and to the other plaza. So this problem has been evident for a long while and we've gotten feedback for a long while. I'm not really terribly supportive of doing additional engineering, additional surveying, additional cost estimating, in I'll be a really hard sell for this. Council Member Miller. Yeah, just a couple of questions. I know we're prioritizing the East portion. I'm assuming that's an easier part to redo quickly.
Do we have any sense of incident, like, locations along the plaza where people specifically have had the most difficulty over time, maybe where trips are most likely to happen? Any sort of sense of, like, what we would do in street crash reporting, pedestrians, or other Sure. Yeah. We don't have it, pinpointed to certain, you know, corners, I can tell you that the trip and fall data is virtually no different from the design now versus pre Peace Plaza. Now, that is that is subject people reporting it to us,
right, even before. But the trip and fall data is is relatively Okay. The same. So we're seeing it just where people are walking. People are It's just where people are walking. Yeah. My other question, do we have parents involved in the stakeholder, group because Not in the second round. Our first round or the sec excuse me, not in the second round. So in the second round of, interviews, we focused on people with different abilities and then we also met with UMR students as well. Okay. Thanks. The reason I ask is because I hadn't really thought about this either. I always think, you know, the fountain's a great place for kids.
I actually was asking my daughter as we were traveling this week when the agenda was published and she said, yeah, I don't really like to go to the fountain. It's it's really uncomfortable on bare feet. And I only ask because we we think about activating the space, making sure we're asking beyond, yes, absolutely accessibility first and foremost, but are there other impediments to people using the space, that we should be thinking about. So that Mhmm. I really appreciate that. From the sort of interpretive stance of the poem, obviously, people can look down. Is there an opportunity with the signage that brings some vertical aspect to it to
ads? Like, if we lose part of the poem, could we actually increase the legibility of it by providing a bit more context for what it is? So that's, I'll just go to this image. It's a great question about how do we bring to life even more the poem. And so, what you see here are wraps on poles. We do think that the catenary light system that's there presents a really great canvas for us to add some additional signage. And does that signage, not only provide storytelling and interpretation of the poem but also be those prompts, those visual cues that people use to say like come here and experience the space
over here, you know, as well as something that's on the surface of the pavers as as well. But that's exactly what we're thinking about. And that's what I was thinking too when I saw that. I I because personally, I mean, it's really easy to just be in a hurry, walk by. And I appreciated seeing the top down image because I think it gives a different context to what it is than you get at the ground level skim pond. Is that no longer in service period? Will that be coming back? That's another element that I felt like lacked lacked interpretation. You were just either surprised because it was on or it was off. So that is another opportunity,
in the interpret as you said, in Right. Signage interpretation that we, we want to consider or we want to include. That it shut down for the winter, obviously, and it's intended to come back. It's Right. It works it's technology based, software based. I didn't remember seeing it last summer, but okay. But it it is Yeah. There were yeah. There were some there were some, not mechanical and software things Okay. That had to get fixed. Okay. Yeah. So that's also part of the improvement. Okay. That that sounds great because I think that that would really help. I even think about people have mentioned, you know, it'd be great to have a scavenger hunt downtown,
like, those are great options. Can you find these words? Like Mhmm. How do you bring younger audiences into that too? So thank you for thinking about that and I appreciate you considering the parents as the stakeholder. My last question was, I saw one of the comments on the community group was vehicular areas often unclear. How are you thinking about that as it does intersect with the street? Is there any sort of work in that area to because it does feel like a continuous plaza. Right? But it is also an active street. Are you oops, let me go back here. Are you talking about the transition from the I think if you go back a
few more slides, there was a Feedback slide. Oh. Oh. One more. This one. Back to There. Sorry. So navigating accessible routes at the particular areas is often unclear. Yeah. So I think, if I if I remember correctly and Steve can also jump in, that is that, when you have you go from late raised lettering to the truncated domes that know that you've transitioned from I'm gonna go to this. You've you've transitioned from this is raised lettering. This red area is the truncated domes,
which are the normal Mhmm. Visual cue and change in pavement surface experience to help someone know that they're leaving a curb and walking into a street. And so I believe that that feedback relates specifically to there's really not much of a difference experience these raised letters to these truncated domes and so is there an opportunity to put a smooth, a band of smooth pavers along there so you have go from raised letters to smooth back to truncated domes.
So, you know that there's an there's a visual queue and an acknowledgment of a change in text. So it's not about people commenting on entering on active street first. It's it's the differentiation service. What we heard with the focus groups is that, people with site impairments as they're using a cane to try and tack tack using the tactile surface to determine when I'm leaving the letters, I'm hitting the truncated domes, there's just not enough difference. So they ask for maybe a three, four, five foot band of smooth area between the plaza before the road starts as a
queue to them. So that's what comment's about. Okay. Makes sense. Thank you. Council member Doring. Yeah. Thank you so much. I have a lot of the same concerns that my my colleagues have have raised so far, and and kind of find myself in the same boat as council member Wahl. But I have a couple of additional questions. So I appreciate you talking about those who are visually impaired making a delineation from the plaza to the road. But I've also heard in this presentation that part of the signage, the visual cue of where places were smooth and where places were raised.
So how do you intend to share with our visually impaired community if we go forward with the expansion of the smooth area where that smooth area starts and stops around the plaza? Yeah. Thank you. That's a great question. And I should have added some of the other things that we're talking about is this more than just signage. Do we, do we do maybe, some additional planters at corners, again, to start to channel people to the smoother area? Like, what what will work? And so that's in addition to to signage is are there very intentional and discreet
because again, you know, it's yet another thing that someone would have to work around, but, placement of planters as a strategy to help move people in to those smoother spaces. Okay. Second question. In that $175,000 ask, is this purely the Peace Plaza, or are we also talking about the pedestrian areas to the north and south of the Peace Plaza where there are some paver issues. This is purely Peace Plaza. So what is the plan to address those other issues?
So part of that will come through that further analysis of what's happening. So I should say the the Hundred And 75 includes the brickwork here at Peace Plaza, but additional exploration of what might be causing, settlement in those spaces is is part of that analysis that's in the 175. Okay. But not paper fixing. Yeah. So again, I have, some of the same issues as as council member Wahl.
When we're putting orange cones above pavers that are syncing, I don't know how much more analysis we need to do to understand that it's not working. Right? So, I am concerned about, those differently abled members of our community waiting another six to eight months for a space that we are trying to activate in Downtown Rochester for that community simply not feeling safe to participate in that activated area. So I will also be a hard sell of of doing what I believe is
the minimum to improve, the space, but I look forward, to additional information when it comes before the council again. Sure. And if I could just speak to that, I I absolutely appreciate well, there it is. It's there's shifting there. The is understanding what is the underlying cause? Is it runoff from from the roof lines? Right? And is it hitting? And that's just causing, you know, that constant drip of water. Is that creating? Is it undermined by, something else that's happening underneath that we're not aware of?
That's that invest that exploratory. And I appreciate the concern about spending additional dollars for, you know, designing a bigger, more nuclear, I'll just say, more nuclear fix. But, right in we current it will cost additional design dollars if you are not satisfied with this solution, if the community is not satisfied with this solution. That is just going to be our reality. And I hate to be the one to deliver that, but that is our reality. And I ended preemptively. I have one more question. So I had the privilege of attending Latino Fest,
last fall, and our mayor saved me from falling into a cavernous hole around one of the trees in the Peace Plaza. Yes. So is there a solution for that? I'm pretty physically able, but I could have definitely broken an ankle or a leg simply because I was talking with the mayor. Yes. We actually have we the tree grate design do you have an update on that? Yeah. We have a tree grate design like we're doing in Discovery Walk, but go ahead. Yep. So, Jessica Frang, project manager on your team, has ordered the tree grates.
They are being fabricated and they'll be ready to go in the spring. So each one's custom sized because the trees aren't perfectly spaced in the middle since they've been there for a few years. So and they'll look like the ones on Discovery Walk. Thank you. Council member Fredericks. Thank you. Sounds like the same people who have gotten in all of our ears up here. So, I do have some of my own thoughts. I just wanted to address. Every person needs to be able to comfortably navigate a the city. I think we can all agree on that. And safety being our number one concern. That's something we don't sacrifice on.
I I wouldn't think we can all agree upon that. Stopping and starting projects is expensive. Every time you roll on the equipment, you get ready, you tear some up. Okay. That didn't work. Okay. We're going back in. Let's do it again. Back to the drawing board. It's it's just not a good way to do business. It's not a good way for the contractor. It's not a good way for us. It's not a good look for us. It's a bad look for us when we're stopping and starting all the time. Interruptions are annoying. We you guys get to hear about it more than probably we do. I pity the person that has to answer the three eleven calls. So,
exactly what does the 70 70 5 cover? Sure. Thank you for that question. So, I want to just talk about your comment about stopping and starting work. Absolutely, like there's a lot to mobilizing equipment. Yes. The for this particular space and this solution, it is very much handwork. So we're not bringing in rigs and mobilizing, it is mobilizing people to come in, pop the paper, you know, pop the paver, you know, resettle the underlying, soil and reinstalling the paver. So, it's a lot of handwork. So, the largest portion of the $1.75
is looking at if we had to do all of this space here, that's probably two thirds of the cost. That's like a hundred and 20,000. K. Is if we were to do all of this. The other the other, amount is the additional signage, and additional engineering and surveying of the area to see if if you're not happy and you say, rip it all out and pour concrete which that's not what I'm suggesting at all.
But here's what that would cost you in design, engineering, and likely construction to do, and that will be a big number. So we think an incremental approach results that we are hoping they have with those particularly in visually and mobility and neurologically challenged communities. K. Two part two part question here. How high is the lettering? It varies steeps, sir. Yeah. It varies. There's actually, on the western edge of the, scrim pool area, it's a little bit shallower. The average is about an eighth of an inch.
Again, they're each one each stone is fabricated, so there's a little bit of variance amongst stones, but the average is about a eighth of an inch in height, the raised letter itself. Okay. So common sense would tell me we're embedded in probably wash sand on those. Right? You said runoffs causing this and that. So it permeates, causes so it's probably bedded in sand. Correct? Polymetric sand. Yes. Alright. So can they just be turned over and plate compacted? Yes. That's our with the, budget that Cindy's describing, we would turn the paver over. The pavers that are out there have a certain sheen to them.
Those were heat treated. So there is a heat treatment process if we want it to all match. So we would turn it over, heat treat it, and set it back in. And, yeah, that's our that's our plan. That's a year and ten. Short term plan. Okay. And then the next two things, if we need more pavers, I I I would propose to just do the whole thing smooth. So it's you're done with the issue. You're done with the issue, and do it properly. The other thing is any new additional pavers such labor, are we sourcing locally for those? I'm sorry, new pavers would, we try and so the stone,
but first of all we're not anticipating in this short term phase to need any additional pavers. But, we would go back to the same quarry which was core stone, just to get the match and the color of the stone. And then, yeah, we'd be taking bids. Our contractor that did some work this past fall for some resets on the biggest trip hazards, they're local. So Perfect. I just wanna make sure when we're sourcing materials and stuff, anything we can get locally, we're doing that as, you know, we wanna support our own community that supports us. So, I'm sure I have a hundred more questions, but I'm gonna step out of the way for now.
Council member Palmer. Thank you. If I remember correctly, when this idea came up to do this, you went to the art center and you had a a mock up of this. Is that correct? That is correct. And and and so we had groups come and look at that, the different groups could come and make suggestions. Do we not listen? Did we I think less than Yeah. I figured that out. Yes. Maybe you we did less than. We monitored, we took photography, we took videography, we had a number of different groups come through, people that advocate for different abilities, people that have different abilities. We built probably it was like let's say eight feet by 16 feet long so
So it was enough to wheel wheelchairs for different people with different abilities to move throughout it. And the feedback was supportive of that model. We looked at different heights, we looked at different flashing products, for differentiation between the letters and the other papers. They went through an extensive review process. And in that size of a model the nod was yes this works. Now we put it throughout the whole entire plaza and that's where we're seeing it not not working. So about two years ago we had this discussion and and the question I had was do we meet a standard,
the ADA standard? And and I think you I think somebody told me we had. We do. Okay. All the let raised letters are meeting the standard or exceeding the standard. Okay. I I I agree with mister Wall that that that, you know, my phrase is we've been digging a hole, let's stop digging and let's let's let's flip them over and make it flat. One of the things that bothers me is is we have one of the things is accessible walking area. And I want people to be able to walk to the water. I want them to go and see their kids. And and the complaints I'm getting from a lot of different people in the last
year has been from wheelchairs, electric wheelchairs, walkers and stuff that they can't get electric wheelchairs, walkers and stuff that they can't get to the pool and and they don't like that. And and so my understanding of this poem, and I've not really read the poem, I mean, if we took it up and moved it somewhere else would be nice. But the other one is if we can just turn them over, flatten them out. I think that would be the solution that that would be I'd be most comfortable with. Sure. I might respond also. You bet. I think one of the things, that is that is great about our community and the worry that we do our work is we do look for a lot of input.
Yeah. Before, during, after. You know, we got made fun of in the beginning for prototyping the word if people remember. But we prototyped a lot in this area. We prototyped the benches, we prototyped the pavers, we prototyped BRT, like we continue to test because we want feedback. And with that feedback we're not always going to get it right. And to each person individually it's going to have a different experience and what we're trying to do is great for everyone. You know, right before the summer ended I observed an older gentleman, with a walker in the water. And that was the first time he was able to enter into something like that. And so his experience might be different than somebody else with a walker.
But it doesn't mean it's right or wrong it just is and we still need to address them all. So, I think with the solution and what Cindy is offering is that let's do it incrementally and see if we can provide, a better experience for all and let's keep walking that together. And if it's still not meeting that then let's together come back and say let's make a bigger decision and make more changes. And again, I'm going to go, I believe what Mr. Wall said is, you know, let's take care of it now and get it over with. So Yeah. And if I could just, I meant to say this before, I like, I totally appreciate that.
I really do. I mean, I'm the one like just go in, do the fix for the long term. I I think this is a space where it calls for and it's okay to do it incrementally, one, because we don't have to bring in big rigs. We can do it literally paver by paver. Right? We can do it, we can turn it around faster. It is literally like, hey, how about we take out those two rows and flip them and make it smoother. We don't have to wait two weeks for a rig to come, and we don't have to get it scheduled.
We can bring the person that that can do the pavers, and they can come, and they can flip them, and we can try. Right? So we can we can react quicker that way. I also think that, what this does is not introduce disruption to a business community in an area that experienced two years of disruption while this project was developed and constructed. And you saw in my previous presentation that image of the elevated walkways in winter
with lighting, like, to to do a rip it out or something much more dramatic would have a very significant disruption to the area. And we also wanna be cognizant of that. Right? So I know it's maybe not what you were looking to hear, but I feel like it is a solution that lets us respond a little bit more quickly and see if it's successful, while at the same time recognizing if it doesn't at least we're still continuing to get do some analysis and get you some numbers on what a more intensive intrusive
experience. Okay. I wanna get a council member, council member Keane in here and then, Mayor Norton and then I I'll have something to say as well. Okay. Yeah. Again, I, I saw this on Thursday when you presented the DMC, and I did interpret it differently. I really did think the yellow space was changing. So this is a nuance here that we're changing some of it. And then that sort of generally speaking in my counsel role, I do not like to weigh in to say this is how it should be or that's how it should be. I like the prototyping. I like the idea.
There's a professional group doing this, but it is a fascinating conflict here because it does seem like a very, vocal part of the community really dislikes this. And somehow the staff is really protecting it, and I'm not sure exactly what's happening. I'm pretty good with the idea of the way the yellow is drawn here that there is wide walking spaces and it's only if you're going into this space that you would be going into this place where it's eighth of an inch it matches ADA criteria. I was good with that.
The problem I'm having more is the idea of like, I don't know what's going to happen when I leave here because it's gonna be incremental and it may just stop right away and it may go on. I won't know And I'll get comfortable with that, but I'm still my observation is there is a there's a gap here between what staff perceives the problem to be and what the public and what this council has heard it, heard it as. But I'll say it again. I do not like to come here and say, like, the way you should have done this or the way I would do it, that's irrelevant to me. The fact that we prototyped and tried to follow rules and did it and then
got negative feedback to me is important. And important and I think you're here trying to say we're hearing that but now we're still having this conflict that we're trying to protect the design versus saying, yep, we're going to change it. And I'm and that's just an observation if you want to respond to it. Yeah, sure. No, I appreciate that and there there is absolutely not my intent to to come across that way. I I use data, right? And I take data from the genesis of the project to the now. So when you think about the timeline of this project and you think in the
beginning and all of the public and all of the effort that informed it, that's data. When you think about, technology and how it's able to tell us how people are tracking and using this space and this the staying time, the stickiness of it, Thursdays downtown aside, during during our outdoor weather, it's 6,000 people a day. That's a dataset. When I take the dataset of how many trips and falls reported before and after, it's generally the same. But I don't want to minimize the vocal
the voices of people who have legitimate concerns about experiencing this space. And I try and segment that from the people who are challenged with letting go of a design that they of an old Peace Plaza that they wish still existed versus a new Peace Plaza. So I'm trying to bifurcate those opinions and really just get to how can we respond to people who are visually, mobile and neurologically challenged and make this a better space for them. And so I really do not,
I don't mean to come across as trying to defend this design. I think the citizens designed a really great space, but it's not a great space. Everybody can experience the same way and we got to get to a fix. Yes, just quickly, Cindy said a lot, Ms. Steinhauser just said a lot of what I would have said. I appreciate the incremental steps that we're taking. This is a space that is used every day in good weather by people who love it. It is one of my joys to walk down there during the day and watch the activity that goes on.
Can it be better? Yes. And I think this incremental approach is one way to see if we don't have to, I don't know, want to say ruin, but modify the artwork that we worked a long time with many artists to put, I think there's three or four, I think ultimately four pieces when the last one was added of artwork that we paid for and we had people curate for us. And I don't wanna toss that aside needlessly. So if there's a way to modify it, make it safe for everyone who wants to use it and and remain and keep
that artwork intact, that would be optimal in my mind. If we can't do it, if it if the modifications don't work, then we'll go to the next step. And So I appreciate the incremental approach. I appreciate Cindy's explanation of it just a moment ago because it really resonates with me, that we want this a space for everyone and these incremental steps will, I think, move us in that direction to make sure we can do that. So thank you. Thank you, Mayor. So just to kind of get my arms around this and hopefully this will help my colleagues, I think you're hearing a sentiment that I can't disagree with.
I I think, if the incremental approach is March through August, which actually could include the entire, gold area, which would be, us completing what is within this a hundred and $75,000 budget. I think I would be good with it that. But where I'm at with this issue is and what really brings me hesitation with the incremental approach is that it feels like a drip,
drip, drip to me. It feels like we you're really not giving us a solid plan. You're saying it could be this, but it could be more. I think I've gotten a little more clarity, and I think I'm kind of in the camp with, the council members that are closest to me right here on the dais on that. If we need to turn all over all of those pavers in the gold area, let's do it. But I kinda don't want the community to see us continue to assess this.
I am, fully in the camp of council member Wall that I don't believe we need to do additional engineering surveying and cost estimating on on this. I think we need to get to the artist. It sounds like there's some room to, to collapse some of those phrases and still have the integrity of the poem, the initial poem, and the the other piece that's kinda interwoven in there. So but I I think I think you're hearing your the council has some concerns
and really wanna see this issue handled pretty directly. And I totally I see I don't know if Jamie is still here. I don't see her. But, what comes to mind to me and when you when you open a a public space artwork, you know, you're you are taking a risk and and it's very visible in the community. And when it's a success, it has a thousand mothers. When it's a failure, it's an orphan. And, and so we really wanna have this issue,
handled in a way that can be expedited and, Taken care of for our community. Any other comments? If not, thank you, team. Thank you. And we will now, this concludes our study session for the day. As I mentioned at the outset, we will have a special meeting, immediately after this, in Conference Room 104. We will convene in about, ten minutes and this the purpose is to conducting a closed executive session pursuant to Minnesota statute 13 d.
Five subdivision three c three to discuss possible purchase of two property parcels as identified in the posted agenda. So we will move into that, in the next ten minutes and take I don't wanna interrupt you, but I think that the city attorney had some different process in mind for opening this. Typically, he would City attorney Spindler Craig is we are moving there to open the open the, regular city council meeting? That is true, council president.
You are adjourning the study session. We will open the special meeting in 01:04 and then take the the logistics from there. That is what I was on the road to doing. Apologies. We had a different conversation last week. Okay. So we will move into 01:04. We will, it will be very briefly a public meeting and take role, and then we will close the meeting as we described. And then, after the closed session, we will then reopen in 01:04.
Is that correct, attorney Spindler Craig? Sure. We will reopen in 01:04 and, and report any action that the council, recommends in, the closed session. So with that, we are adjourned here. In ten minutes, we will,