--------- Welcome, everyone. I'd like to, greet everybody for the, and or for the meeting of the, Scottsdale budget review commission on April 16. The first thing we will do and by the way, we do have a hard stop at 06:00 today, so we're gonna try and do this efficiently as we can. And, let's start with a roll call. Chair Schweikher? Present. Vice chair Stevens? Commissioner Badenoch? Commissioner Carla? Here. Commissioner Littery? Commissioner Newman? Here. Commissioner Pullen? Here. City Manager Greg Caton?
Here. City Treasurer Sonia Andrews? Here. Assistant city attorney Jennifer Fernandez? Here. And the city budget director is present. Thank you. We believe that commissioner Leterrier is going to be attending the meeting. It's parking's a little bit tough out there, so but we'll go ahead and get started anyway. We start with public comment where citizens may address the members of the budget review commission during public comment regarding nonagendized items and unagendized items when the item is presented. Arizona law prohibits the commission from taking action or discussing on an item that is
not on the prepared agenda. Citizens may submit one request to speak, a public comment card per meeting to the city staff. Public testimony is limited to three minutes per speaker. Written comment cards can be submitted to city staff at any time for agendized or nonagendized items. Cards submitted after public comment has begun for the item will be provided to the commission at the conclusion of the public comment for that item, and I don't see any cards for tonight. Let the record show that, commissioner Littery is now present.
So with that, let's move on to, item number one, the review of the proposed fiscal year 'twenty six, 'twenty seven operating budget by fund. Thank you, mister chairman and members of the commission. We'll be covering a few more funds, in the second part of the review of the operating budget. I did wanna call out that there, has been a change to one of the slides. I believe it's slide 10 in the slide deck. It's been updated online as well. It's, slightly different than when it was originally posted. I just wanted to call that to your attention. We are on the second meeting, of three to cover the operating budget.
Today, we'll be covering the solid waste fund, the health care self insurance fund, the fleet management and fleet replacement fund, and the general fund. Can we go to the next? We'll start with the solid waste fund. This was a fund we were supposed to get to last time before we ran out of time. Solid waste fund is on page b 42 of your budget book. And while you're turning there, solid waste is an enterprise fund, which means that it is 100% funded, self supporting through its customer fees and charges. So looking at page b 42, the solid waste fund five year plan, if you
look at the gray column, which shows the proposed 2627 budget amounts, about one third of the way down, it starts to look at the revenues into the fund. So you'll see that the primary source of revenue are solid waste charges to both the residential and commercial customers, and there's also a little bit of interest fund revenue there as well. The total revenues are $38,900,000 into the fund. That's about a third of the way down. Then if you continue down a little bit farther, you get to the total operating
budget for the solid waste fund of $32,800,000. That's about halfway down the page. And then continuing down just a little bit further, I did want to talk about the transfers out very briefly. There is a $3,500,000 If you move your finger down just a a couple of lines, you'll get to a transfers out other. What that $3,500,000 is is a transfer out to the general fund to repay the general fund for a loan to do the solid waste transfer station upgrades. I believe that's a ten year loan.
It's gonna be paid continue to be paid throughout and beyond this five year planning period. And then just moving down the next couple of lines on the transfers out, there's a couple $100,000 of transfers out to the capital improvement plan. And then just a little bit lower, the total uses for the fund is $36,700,000 Just a couple of highlights that I wanted to cover for the solid waste fund. You'll see that there's a reduction in fleet fuel and maintenance charges. There was a $1,000,000 one time request in the current fiscal year. About halfway down the page under expenditures where it says capital outlays, there's about a
$1,000,000 line item there. That will be to purchase two vehicles in fiscal year twenty six, twenty seven. And then we did talk about the transfers out for repayment of the general fund loan and then the solid waste transfers, to the CIP. Can we go to the next slide? We put together some of the major solid waste fund cost drivers onto this slide. The main ones are personnel, fleet and fuel, and landfill charges. The most significant one is personnel. You'll see the growth over the past five years or so. Fleet and fuel has also been a significant driver of growth, although you do see
a decrease in 2627 as I mentioned earlier. And finally, landfill charges that have been fairly flat, but I'm sure there are some intricacies in those charges that, that could be spoken to, if you wanted some additional detail. If we could go to the next slide. I believe that brings me to the end of the solid waste, fund. I'd be happy to open myself up for questions. I know there are representatives of solid waste here that could answer any specific questions you might have. Does anyone have any questions? Commissioner Littery? The transfer out is a static amount of 3,500? Why would that be a static amount of 3,500?
Mister chairman, commissioner Lateri, may I ask, are you referring to the $3,500,000 transfer out there under other? Right. That that's a transfer out to the general fund to repay the general fund for a loan to upgrade the transfer station, the solid waste transfer station. I believe the loan was, I think, 7,800,000 $17,800,000 originally. Okay. And it's a static amount of 3,500. You're repayment or transfer out. Right? No variation? I'm sorry? There's no variable in there? It's a straight 3,500? It's a straight $3,500,000. Although, you do see in year five, it kind of ramps up a little bit
to $3,700,000. Thank you. Okay. The this fund accounts for the city's self insurance health care program. Under the self insurance arrangement, the city pays pays, the medical and dental claims cost, up to a stop loss limit of 350,000 per claim. The city then charges a premium to the employees and the departments, based on an average 20% cost share and, to cover the expenses of this fund. So the expenses of this fund, if you turn to page b 43, So you
see on b 43, you see the revenues coming in as employee and employer contributions and there's some a little bit of retiree, disabled retiree contributions as well. And then on the expenditure side, you'll see the the largest, cost is the medical claims cost and then there's also an insurance premium, stop loss insurance premium, some employee, programs at the employee clinic cost, dental claims cost, and administrative cost. That's what, the expenditures that make up this fund. Next slide.
So we use a third party benefits consultant to help us manage our insurance program and we rely on our consultants to analyze and project the cost estimates and premiums for us. So for fiscal year twenty six, twenty seven, our budget is 49,900,000, that's a 5,800,000 increase to the existing budget of 44,100,000, mostly because of the increase in claims cost and other costs, and the budget also includes a 1,750,000 for a new employee clinic. Our, human resources director Monica Boyd is here to answer any questions if you have
any questions on this. And then the last slide I have on this fund is just to share with you the, per member per month cost. It has grown by an average of about 10% per year over the last three years. We currently have about 4,900, members enrolled in the plan. And with that, we can answer any questions. Yes. Commissioner Carla. Yes. Could someone please do a quick overview of this new employee clinic, savings versus cost and how in the future does workman's comp fit in this?
And is that even more of a savings or I mean, what what's the just an overview, please. I'll start and, look to have Monica Boyd, our senior director of human resources join me. So, we had this idea a year ago to implement an employee health clinic. And so we put that in the current fiscal year. We put $500,000. You might remember that from last year. And then we also wanted to do a feasibility study. So we put $50,000 for a feasibility study.
That feasibility study by this, consultant Brown and Brown was completed and identified that we have an opportunity to implement this employee health and wellness facility to really manage health care costs. And so to the question, let me back up and describe it a little bit. We're not the first, to do this here in the metro area. We actually our team, visited Mesa that has had a like kind facility for a good number of years and also Phoenix. Those are probably the two primary, examples of this type of facility.
And so it is, for employees and their, dependents or folks on the health care system. Personally, I have implemented this in my two previous organizations and so they're really scalable depending upon the size of workforce that you've had. And so we have nearly 5,000 lives that we cover, through our plan, and so we take that near and dear. I will tell you, so from my perspective, we are proposing this for at least two reasons, in no particular order.
The first of which is this assists us in managing our health care costs. And as referenced, we are self insured. Some call us partially self insured. I call us self insured. It's just we have, layers above, so we don't have full exposure, if you will. But we pay claims. And when you see next year that we're going up approximately 9.7, percent increase, we've earned those, through claims. So, what that means is we write, checks to pay claims, that our employees and,
people that we're covering utilize the health care system. So if we're able to insert ourselves and divert claims, then there's savings. And so that's a part of what the feasibility study assessed. And what it looked at is depending upon your absorption rate or utilization, after about two to three years, you can start to see, the tide turn. I do wanna set expectations. Should this be implemented, we will not start paying less. That's just not unheard of or that's just not heard of.
However, what this will do is soften the increase. It really will take that 9.7. And, And, again, I've seen, implemented in other organizations and really helps you manage the health care costs. Because what we have is in previous years of $45,000,000 spend, and now we have a $50,000,000 spend. And then next year, if we don't do anything to manage it, we're on our way to a 55 and a 60 and so on and so forth. The second benefit, that I reference here a lot is employee retention and attraction.
This, can be seen, as a good benefit for employees. And, again, because we're not the first city, doing this in the valley, we have seen our competitors do this, and it it really does become, a retention tool for employees and an attraction tool. So, again, the long and the short of it is this is, for employees and, their dependents and family members covered on the plan. You have to be on our plan. This is a a near site. It's referred to as a near site facility. I wanna emphasize this.
We don't we're there's no, personnel related to this. It's not like we're hiring a doc or a PA. You usually outsource this, and that's what's anticipated for next year. There are some start up costs, that are included in the initial first year. But really what you do, we will we have planned to issue a request for proposals. And there are firms that are in this business. Sometimes your, hospitals, will also submit a proposal. But it's typically a nurse practitioner model or, a physician's assistant model.
And what happens is this is, kind of the a light clinic, if you will. Specifically, to the workers' compensation, with, miss Boyd and her team and our team, we've been having discussions about the implement potential inclusion of workers' compensation. And that would add additional savings, to I've in full disclosure, I've never had a facility that had workers' comp, so that is a bit, of a nuance in this space, but we believe it's something that we have an opportunity, to pursue.
So let me just, again, highlight, the employee health and wellness facility. This is where you can run your wellness programs through there, your biometrics, really get people, on the path for wellness, which can save us money. Let me let me give you one, also just kinda real time how we save dollars. We have a high utilization when we look at our utilization of, the ED, the emergency department or the emergency emergency room. What we find sometimes, and not just our employees, but just population, you put off
those small things, and then they can become big things. And then when you go to the emergency department, then then we pay in those. So we're utilizing and in some instances, people don't have primary care physicians. I know some that around here, are born here, certainly have those types of relationships. It can be challenging, for people to establish those new relationships with PCP. So what this can fill that void in creating a relationship, that's the other thing
that's important when employees go in to a doctor if you're, like many folks, you're lucky to get, six to seven minutes of their time. This is a different, type of interaction with patients and really, personalized medicine, if you will, personalized wellness, for employees and their entire family. And so then what that does is remove those costs from that emergency room, emergency department, which we pay for because we're self insured.
So we're saving ourself instead of it of going over here and and just spending money, then we're managing. Then we can get into some chronic, cases and chronic situations, and help manage the health care. So that is an overview, and I look to my colleague to add anything to that. Yes. Thank you. I'm sorry. Commissioner Newman had a comment first. To follow-up on that, is there kind in your in your you've done this two other times. Is there kind of a ratio you've got a rule of thumb type of of
thinking in terms of of okay. We typically will if if we if we send everybody out and they do their own primary care versus go to go through this system, what's the ratio of kind of you guys just said there's savings. You think there's savings in that. Is that a 50% or 75? Or what what what do you what do you typically experience? And then my other question is, what's the benchmark of of health care costs going up? So right now, we're going up at nine or 10%. What is the benchmark that we've experienced that others are experiencing out there? Experiencing out there? Maybe I'll look to you to know.
I could speak to that. These are wonderful questions about something that's very important, I think, to us on in our desire to implement. The goal is savings, but also, of course, employee wellness. One of the things that I really like that we do with our feasibility study is our vendor studied our actual claims data from the year prior. So they use real case scenarios to identify, just like city manager said, that we had high utilization in emergency room care. We have a lot of employees with chronic health conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes,
and we believe, as a goal for wellness, we can connect employees to these healthcare, to the health care clinic, build a relationship with the nurse practitioner model, the, the MA model. And so the goal is to have them manage, their care and accessibility to prevent those emergency room visits. We were, I think, surprised to see that there was so much utilization from an emergency room visit. So, again, we really did a really good feasibility study. We did include occupational health, in a very phased model to see that there could
be a 100,000, dollars 85,000, in savings with just implementing certain programs. We have a lot of muscular skeletal issues when it comes to, workers compensation and a potential, again, down the road to add programs like PT, and really drive employee wellness retention, accessibility. If people don't have primary care doctors, you know, our goal is that they'll use our near site clinic. But what we're seeing from a healthcare premium increase, from what we're hearing from our
consultant, is there's double digits. And, you know, our goal is to not be double digits, but there's a lot of reality based on supplies, personnel cost of medical services, equipment, that drives some of those costs. Being self insured, you know, our city manager has said before that it's our employees that drive the claims, claims and the expenditures. If we can drive wellness behaviors, more contact for chronic conditions, we can drive the cost down, but also increase employee health. Yeah. I I completely support it.
I in fact, I would suppose there's a text relationship as well in that for employees and things like that, you know, which there's a lot of things that can be managed. You don't have to come into the office if you've got a relationship with your doctor. Commissioner Pullen. Yes. I'm just looking at the line items. And administrative fees, which seem to be pretty stable, all of a sudden go up substantially this coming year, and continue to be high. What's the change in administrative fees that are going on? So is there a reference page?
Because I Help us understand that one with I'm looking at, a document prepared by our budget team, which is a five year financial forecast. And the administrative fees that were pointed out are forecasted to go from 594,000 to $9.29
as proposed. Is that what you're referring to, Scott? That's a TPA. Well, our administrative fees are fixed with our contract. So I would I didn't prepare this this particular, presentation, so I might defer to, our budget director. Well, he's looking at that. Let me go back to the the broader issue, and I wanna make sure and answer, commissioner, Newman's, my given my experience on that ratio, I might try to answer it and see if I'm getting to your point when it's all about utilization.
The utilization has a significant impact on savings Mhmm. Or reduction in cost. Maybe a reduction in cost or reduction in increase is probably a good way to look at that. Right. So what we're and and, again, maybe just to back up, and I know this group knows this, but maybe for our audience, we talk about self insure insurances is probably one of the, it is one of the more complicated industries. Right? And we're in the business. We're in the business through services we provide or services we take in.
But a fully insured environment, you have no risk. And essentially, the insurance company takes on that risk and gives you a premium if you got a and if the cost patient something like that. Yep. The patient has, a light year on utilization, then the insurance company made money. Right? And so they it was a good bet on risk if you as a patient and you're fully insured, like, even an organization, and you have a high claim year as an organization in a fully insured environment, then you're locked in.
You're locked in in a in a fully insured, and then they lost on you. So what happens with large organizations is you move to, dependent upon your appetite for risk, you move into a self insured environment. And usually, you find that more common in the larger agencies because you spread the risk out over five thousand lives versus five hundred lives. And so and so when Pick it up. I would submit, when you take on that risk and when you move into a
a self insured environment, then you need to really layer in your wellness. You really need to lay in these types, layer in these types of programs because you're in the business then. You're in it and it's self insured, and there's a return on that investment. And that's really what we're look so back to the industry. In a fully insured, I've seen 20% increases year over year over year. So then that's where people are forced. Organizations are are really nudged into taking on more risk, moving up that level of
your deductible, to use that term. It's not quite what you use at at a macro level like this, but that that level of how far you pay. And I've seen it was referenced $3.50. Back in the day, it was $50,000. It was that first layer. So you own the first layer, anything over 50. Now, of course, that is up to, $3.50. The other thing I would submit, in a broader scale, as we look, to move forward with our health insurance as we're self insured, it's a little bundled even though it's self insured. And what we hope to move into in the future is unbundling that and making
it more a la carte and specifically pulling out the Rx. The Rx is where you can spend have a lot of expenditure. We need to to unbundle that. We'll work over the next year with our, consultant to help us. And then what we'll do is start to issue separate RFPs and have separate individual relationship, and that will save us money. Because that's really what we want to maintain the benefit that we provide to our employees while we put downward pressure on cost increases.
This plan with the clinic, in addition to the other path that we're on, will help us do that. So I'll take that 20% on on a fully insured. I've seen even a self insured, depending upon your claims, upwards of, you know, a 13 to a 17%, even as high as that. Then, when you have these types of facilities, I think it, it's mid range, kinda single digits is what our it would be unheard of to have, let's just say a two or 3% increase.
That is kinda unheard of. Yeah. No. I I get it. There there's a I get it. There's a lot of gears in that and it kinda depends on what where your utilizations are. Scottsdale is a lifestyle city, so I would expect that people will be utilizing a lot of those services. Whereas if I were in Chicago, it's chili cheese fries all winter long. You know? So a little different lifestyle there and and a different wellness profile. But I would say if it works anywhere, it works here. Yeah. And I applaud the manager in the town for for looking at all these different approaches. You know, back my old, many years ago, College Econ, I think what they're trying
to do is for health care costs, have us accelerate at a decelerating rate. Mhmm. And I think that, you know, look, you have to look outside the box to do that. Commissioner Carla. I appreciate all the information, and and this does sound reasonable. I would like to make a comment though for the record that relates this to something we've discussed multiple times in previous meetings and that's the proposed Granite Reef Senior Center respite station for seniors. The majority of Scottsdale employees aren't residents and that doesn't mean we don't value them.
Of course we do. But all the seniors who would use the Granite Reef program are residents and we need to value them too because they help build our city. Thank you. Let's see. Do we have an answer for Randy's question yet? Mister chairman and mister Pollan, that number was derived using, figures derived obtained from our actuary. And, what is what I believe happened, and we may have to follow-up on that specific item, but that the admin fees, from what I'm told are the same, but it's the stop loss payments, that has gone up.
Premiums. I I apologize. Stop loss premiums that have gone up, and we'll we'll track down the exact answer for you, but that is my understanding right now. Thank you. Great. Thank you. You can just get back to us on that. Are there any other questions on health care? Otherwise, we will move on to, fleet management and replacement funds. Thank you, mister chair. The city has two fleet funds. They can be found on pages b 22 and b 23 in your proposed budget book. The first fund of the two is the fleet management fund, which is meant to
account for the expenditures that are associated with the operation and the routine maintenance of the city's fleet. And then the second fleet related fund is the fleet replacement fund, which was created to record all fleet acquisition and replacement activity. These funds are both internal service funds, which means that the revenue for these funds primarily comes from charges to, other city departments. For the fleet management fund, the charges to departments are for internal fleet management charges as well as for fuel charges. In the fleet replacement fund, revenues come from charging departments rental rates for their vehicles,
to ensure sufficient funding for when vehicles need to be replaced and acquired. Moving over to the right hand side of this slide, the uses of the fleet management fund are for fleet maintenance, repairs, and operating costs. For the fleet replacement fund, the costs are vehicle purchases, and, I did also miss on the fleet management fund the fuel purchases that need to be made. Could we go to the next slide? So the fleet management fund is on page b 22. So looking again at the gray column about a quarter of the way down the page, we see that the revenues are projected for this fund to be about $16,500,000.
The operating budget expenditures total, which is about halfway down the page, will be about 17,700,000. That's a reduction of about $600,000 or 3.3%. I did wanna mention the transfers outline on the slide as well. There was about $600,000 in transfers out in fiscal year twenty four twenty five. Then you see it go up, to about $12,800,000 in the current year, fiscal year twenty five, twenty six, and then back down to about $75,000 in the proposed budget. The fleet replace the reason for that, big variation is the fleet replacement fund was
created in fiscal year twenty five, twenty six, our current the current budget year that we're operating in right now. And that very large transfer was to provide funding to the new fleet replacement fund in order to kinda separate vehicle acquisitions from vehicle maintenance. Just a couple of highlight. Let's see. I mentioned the decrease in transfers out. I guess we can move to the next slide. Oh, okay. Moving on to the fleet replacement fund, which is on the next page, page b 23. We're projecting about 14,500,000 in revenue. That's, about a third of the way down the page, on page b 23.
The operating expenditures, again, about halfway down the page are projected to be just under $11,000,000 This is a pretty significant reduction from last year, because last year's budget included about a $15,000,000 carry forward due to delays in the delivery of purchased vehicles. The proposed budget does have a transfer out if you keep moving down into the transfers out section of about 6,900,000 to the CIP. And the reason for that is to prepay for certain vehicles that may have an extended lead time, most notably, fire apparatus just to just to pick one where we're
looking at kind of a multiple year lead time. Couple of highlights, talked about the decrease in operating budget, due to the carry forward and then the transfers out to the CIP. I do believe that brings me to the end of the fleet funds. I believe I saw representatives of fleet here tonight that could answer any specific questions you have. With that, I'll open it up for questions. Commissioner Newman. My main question is I I I trust all the numbers are where they need to be, but what is our policy and strategy for capital replacement in this area? Now this is these are this is operational capital, so it gets consumed.
And you could say, well, we got a cars are two years old and we get new ones or new trucks after a couple of years. I know we don't do that. I know we don't do that. But, what is do we do we have a set plan, or do we wait till the usable life is used up? And then you could also then take that thinking and apply that to your hard capital roads, water infrastructure, things like that. Because I worry about how much of how much are we spending on the new incremental growth in people some people want more growth and things, but you're you're spending on new, but you also have to maintain what you have. How much of our overall capital budget is being devoted to say, hey.
Let's make sure the the age of our our average age of our capital is is being taken care of bigger question, probably something to do over the summer since we're mister chairman, I'll But but there's operational capital and then there's hard, big capital projects that that affect it. So I I know I'm getting off the subject there, but I'll just leave it to the operational capital. Yeah. So, mister chairman and, commissioner Newman, I'll look to my director here in a minute to my colleague to assist with this.
But let me explain a little bit how that is in my mind. We do it like most organizations, do this, and it's really a replacement fund. And so, each, vehicle has an expected life, and and it's important to note that the fleet fund owns the vehicle and then essentially has a chargeback, like a rental, if you will, to the departments. And to your point, let's just take a a a certain vehicle. Let's just take a police vehicle for sake of discussion. Has expected life, let's call it six years, says $60,000.
And then in theory, then you collect, for the six years, $10,000 a year. That's like the, I would call that, the pure form. What we do that really allows us to put downward pressure on the cost in this area is have some flexibility. So specifically to that, let's just say we get it's running excellent and, we can maybe get another year out of it. Then that's that's the flexibility in the system, but it's all accumulated. And that's the beauty of breaking out.
I've never seen it quite use the word mixed, not the other the commingled word. But mixed, with the operations piece and the replacement piece. So the beauty of replacing that out is those replacement funds. And then what you look at is in your fleet and you prioritize through all and sometimes you'll get a two or three year, I'll exaggerate a little bit, that's a lemon, and you'll cycle that one out. But you you you have a standard, life cycle based on hours, for some units, hours, miles, etcetera. And then, through and we have one of the best, in the valley, as our
directors working for us. And so really look at that. There's a lot of science to it. The biggest challenge in this area is, particularly through the last four years, I would say. Ordering vehicles is just not what it was like, twenty years ago. Now the build times are longer as was referenced. The larger apparatus, it's three and four years plus. The police vehicles are you have to be on it within a a very short amount of time to put your order in for your your window of orders.
So it's, it's much more challenging than it was years ago and we have, excellent staff that are on that every day. That that that's very helpful. I I was just wanna get it. There's not just a spreadsheet and we're ordering equipment. There's a qualitative, analysis of that and just use judgment once we say these are ones on the radar, but then there's yes of those. And then I would also add as a part of our program, I think this is important. And then anytime there's an addition to because we have a replacement covered, and then that gets when the life cycle is up. But then if there when somebody wants to add a new vehicle, then that comes
through the budgetary process, different as kind of a budget, package as we've referred to several times. So there's that, that's an important component of it. Anything to add that I missed on the overall? Standing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Question. Thank you. Any other questions? Yes. Commissioner Leteri? Sure. I see in the, proposed budget, the gray column, that your, uses are greater than your sources by 3,400,000. And, that's mostly a result of a one time transfer out charge of 6,900,000.
So what prompted that transfer out of 6.9 creating more uses than sources? Mister chairman, commissioner Littery, we, in conjunction with Fleet Management, work together to to determine that about 6.9, almost $7,000,000 should be transferred to the capital improvement plan so that they can purchase vehicles that were planned to be purchased, but that will have a multiple year lead time, and would extend beyond the the planning period of fiscal year m four?
Mister chairman, commissioner Littery, thank you for the the question. So that, is the one year sources overuses. So in that particular year, there will be 3,400,000 in expenditures more than revenues. But what will cover that is the existing beginning balance of the fund for the year of $4,600,000. And so then at the end of fiscal year twenty six twenty seven, despite that 3,400,000 in expenditures in excess of revenues, the ending balance will be 1,200,000. So in short, the the fund balance will cover that.
Okay. Thank you. Are there any other questions? Good conversation. But, let's go on to general fund. Thank you, mister chairman. The next fund we're gonna cover today is the general fund. We have a little bit more, content for this fund that we'll cover with you, and then we'll, of course, open it up for questions. The general fund starts on page b 11, and I'm gonna reference the five year plan throughout throughout my presentation today. So what you're looking at on the screen right now is a, categorization of revenues
into the general fund. We did cover preliminary revenues back in March, but we will spend a bit of time reviewing them today and kind of linking to them on the five year plan. For fiscal year twenty six twenty seven, we are projecting general fund revenues and transfers in to be about $472,800,000 in total. And it's split up into the various categories on this slide. So we'll start with that blue wedge, the biggest one, taxes local, of $215,000,000. So referencing your five year plan, about halfway down, if you if you start looking,
there's a category under revenues called taxes local. And it shows a breakdown of that category. So that category is primarily made up of our 1% sales tax, general use sales tax. That's about a $182,000,000 It also consists of the point 1% public safety sales tax, almost $18,000,000. We have an electric and gas franchise, tax that's charged about 11,000,000. Then we have some smaller amounts for cable TV licensing fees, SRP in lieu and
the stormwater fee. So all of those subcategories together add up to the $215,400,000 wedge of the pie. Moving on, if you keep moving your finger downward, you get to the state shared revenue section, or the orange wedge on the pie chart up there, for a $102,600,000 That consists of three revenue sources: the state shared sales tax, the state shared income tax, and then finally the auto in lieu tax or, charges that are distributed to
cities for vehicle registration. The next wedge is property tax at $41,100,000 Moving my finger down on the five year plan, we get building permit fees of $24,000,000 Then the next section is charges for service of $20,900,000 That's the red chunk of the of the pie chart in front of you. There's four little subcategories. I won't go too in-depth, but that we have Westworld facility fees, some property rental which is primarily TPC, SkySong, cell tower rental charges. Some intergovernmental revenue, mostly fire insurance premium tax, and then miscellaneous revenue, which is primarily
the dispatch contract. And all of those together add up to the $20,900,000 Next, we have interest earnings, 18,600,000. I'm turning the page on the five year plan to page b 12. The next chunk is license permits and fees. That's listed at the top of page b 12. We have three categories, business and liquor licenses, fire charges for service, and then park recreate parks and recreation fees is the the biggest source there of that $10,300,000. The next section, well, we'll skip over the indirect direct cost.
I'll get to that in a minute. But the fines, fees, and forfeitures total about 7,100,000. That's mostly court fines and photo radar, although there are some library fees, fines, and parking fines as well. Then we get down to the other revenues category. That is the on your five year plan, that is the indirect direct cost section as well as the transfers in. And we'll talk about those in a little bit more detail on a a future slide. So altogether, that's the total revenues and transfers in of $472,800,000 Could we go to
the next slide? So since we showed the revenues, the preliminary revenues back in March, there have been a few adjustments to those projections, since we last talked about them. This table shows those, those changes that have been made. There's four columns. The first column is the revenue category that changed. We have the preliminary revenue amount that we showed you back in March. We have the amount in the proposed budget and then the change on the right hand side. That's mainly the column that I will focus on today. So the first category, the first row is state shared sales tax.
We did adjust that downward by about $800,000, after receiving some projections from the, Arizona Department of Revenue. And we saw those and adjusted it downward a little bit. Property tax is next. It was a very slight decrease of about a $100,000. The reason for that change is due to some assumptions that we made about collection of previous year's property taxes. A very small change. The miscellaneous category, reduction of about $400,000. Originally, we had projected receiving reimbursement from a vendor, revenue, but we later learned that
this would be in the form of a credit on the expenditure side, so that reduced our our revenues for the miscellaneous category. Looking at indirect and direct cost, those were both kind of almost placeholders when we showed them to you back in March. And when we updated the calculations, we updated the revenues. So the indirect cost allocation increased by about 1,400,000. And just to remind you, those are fees that are those are, charges that are made to our enterprise funds that they pay the general fund for the cost of citywide services like like, you know, budget, like HR, like IT.
Then the direct cost, that is primarily for, support provided by the fire department at the airport. That increased by about $100,000. The next line is jail dormitory. The jail dormitory program is currently closed, due to a capital project to upgrade the jail. So that means that we anticipate no revenue for this program in fiscal year twenty six twenty seven until the project is completed. We do anticipate that it will come back online in fiscal year twenty seven twenty eight at some point. Transfers in, there was an additional $500,000 in transfers for Southwest Gas Permit reimbursement and
for an operating transfer from the risk management fund to support some handrail replacement at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts. And then other sources just kinda everything else added together that did not change. So on the aggregate, the total source has changed by about $400,000 to the positive from what we showed you back in March. We go to the next slide, please. So this, I'm going to refer back to the five year plan real quick. So on page b 12, about halfway down, you start seeing the expenditures for the various departments. These are the operating budgets that the departments will have under the proposed budget.
So that continues through page b 12 and gets down into page b 13 as well. So if you continue down to the total operating budget number on page b 13, the total is $424,100,000 So I'm gonna keep my finger there and then we'll refer to what's up on the slide there. The total operating budget is 422.1, but then when you add in the additional $2,000,000 PSPRS payment, you get $424,100,000, which
aligns with kind of where where your finger is placed on the five year plan where it says total operating budget. And then just moving down a little bit, I did want to go over the transfers out. There's a transfer out of $4,600,000 to the ambulance fund to support the ambulance fund operations. I believe we talked about that to some extent in the last meeting. There's $10,300,000 transfer out for debt service for, various debt that we have. And then there are three transfers out listed to the CIP for an aggregate total of $33,700,000. So if you keep moving your finger down on the five year plan to total
uses of $472,700,000. That matches what's on the slide there. That's the total general fund budget, which is a reduction of about $48,000,000 or 9.3%. Could we go to the next slide? Could you go back one one slide real quick? I do just wanna emphasize that the reduction is primarily due to the, the $50,000,000 PSPRS payment in 2526 that is no longer occurring in 2627. Now can we go to the next slide? So what you're looking at right now is the general fund expenditures by department.
Transfers out are not counted on this on this slide here. What you see when you look at this, police and fire account for about 55% of all general funds, department spending. We do have some other major departments listed on the slide. Facilities management, parks and recreation planning, enterprise operations, library and human services. Last year's budget, those two were combined as one department. They've since been they're separated into distinct departments for the upcoming budget year. Tourism and events and then other core services just kind of rolled together.
That includes things like IT, human resources, charter officers, city court, just kind of everything else rolled together. Can we go to the next? This shows the total general fund uses by type. This is the total $472,700,000 that we looked at just a second ago. About two thirds of that goes to personnel services, that is to say salaries, fringe benefits, retirement, health care. About 98,000,000 in contractual services, then smaller amounts for commodities, capital outlays. There's a little tiny wedge called contracts payable.
That's, a form of debt service. And then we have our transfers out listed to the to the CIP, transfers out for debt service, and then the operating transfers, which is primarily to the ambulance fund. Could we go to the next? Okay. The chart we're looking at right now shows general fund operating revenues, in blue, and operating expenditures and transfers out in red. This this excludes additional payments to PSPRS beyond what is actuarily required and also transfers to the CIP. So at the risk of being, redundant and covering things we've covered in the past,
I think even going back to last year, you see historically that our ongoing sources of revenue and expenditures track fairly closely until the early twenty twenties when pandemic era revenues went high above expenditures. And then starting in fiscal year 2024 and even through '25, '26, and to the proposed budget, you see revenues kinda slow down and expenditures start to catch back up to revenues. The rate of growth of expenditures continues, up to the proposed budget level, and then you see it kinda break.
It's a little hard to see on the chart, but there is a break in the rate of growth of expenditures. And that break continues through the out years of the general fund. And you see the delta between revenue and expenditures stay roughly the same and even get larger a little bit over the, five year planning period. And the reason for that is the savings from the various exercises that the departments went through, the PSPRS savings, and then some debt maturities that, that will come during the five year planning period. Those are all working to offset the expenditure increases and to keep them below ongoing
revenues. And this is important because we are projecting a slower rate of growth of overall revenues in the out years of about, about 3% on average. Could we go to the next? So just to illustrate the point about the debt service that I was making on the last slide, these are the general fund transfers to debt service. You see, I'll start with 2526 at about $10,000,000. That amounts about the same in 2627 in the proposed budget, and it even climbs a little bit in the next two years, but then you see it fall to about $7,000,000 in fiscal year thirty and thirty one as some debt comes to maturity.
Could you advance the slide? So talking about PSPRS for a moment, this slide gives you a more in-depth look at the PSPRS issue. The blue line is Scottsdale's historic PSPRS employer contribution rate for police for tier one and tier two employees. At its high point of 63.3% in 2223, that represented a 75% increase when compared to the 36.3% in 2017. And at that point, at the highest point, the city began making contributions, extra contributions in excess of what was required to try to arrest that trend.
The impact of the 50,000,000 deposit this year, it's not yet fully known exactly. What we'll see we'll see that in the next actuarial report that will come out in December. But estimates are that the rate will fall to about forty point three percent. On the fire side, the red line is fire for the same cohort over the same period. We see the rate starting at twelve point five percent in 2017. That rate more than doubles. Over the past ten years, it's starting to get above 30%. And, it's it's just been fairly constant over the past ten years or so.
Can we go to the next slide? So p s p r s, this shows the split between p s p r s costs for police in blue and fire in red, going back to fiscal year twenty one. And you see that p d starts at 19 and kind of tops out around 22,000,000 and then hovers around there for a couple of years. And then you start to see it push down a little bit as those extra contributions start to wash into the contribution rates. And like I mentioned earlier, the impact from the 50,000,000 will be seen in fiscal year twenty seven, twenty eight.
That's why you see a projected a fairly big decrease. Fire is kind of following the trend we talked about on the previous slide. It starts at $5,000,000 in fiscal twenty one and then goes up, to the projected just, you know, little by little to the $12,000,000 in the projected budget, 2627 budget. We anticipate that that extra 2,000,000, annually that we have in the fire department budget will slow the rate of growth and possibly stop the growth entirely. Could we go to the next? So on this slide, we have listed a few budget highlights in the general fund.
I want to spend a little bit of time on the first four. On your five year plan, on page b 13 b 13, on the upper third, there's a line called personnel programs for $11,000,000 in fiscal year twenty six twenty seven. This these top four bullets show kind of the itemization of that $11,000,000 and how we get to that total. There's $4,800,000 of sworn, personnel compensation adjustments in that $11,000,000. There's about 1,500,000 in special class and comp study projects.
There's, $600,000 for a one time adjustment for employees that are currently topped out in their range. And then Finally, there's, $4,100,000 for vacation trade and payout for when city employees depart the city. So that's how you that's how that $11,000,000 in the personnel programs line is determined. We have a few other noteworthy adjustments to the budget in fiscal year twenty six twenty seven listed on the slide. There's money to address some specialty skill replacement within the fire department as they kind of face a potential wave of upcoming retirements.
Although as I look at that number, I I think that number is supposed to be slightly higher at, I think $3,300,000. So I ask forgiveness for the typo on this slide. The next one, we did save about $2,600,000 from eliminating about 24 positions through the 2% exercise. We saved about $800,000 from position reallocations where we would change the funding of various positions and maybe push them on to a different fund. There's about $7,000,000 in net base budget savings through the 10% exercise that was discussed in the, in the last meeting that we had.
About $700,000 in Westworld staffing and equipment, a few items working together there, and then some citywide facility maintenance, and their additional city election in 2627 of about $400,000. We go to the next slide. I do believe I think that brings me to the end of the general fund of the content that we wanted to cover before opening it up for questions. There are representatives from the departments here that could answer any specific, department related questions. Thank you. Question. Okay. The last line item under expenditures is vacancy savings.
It went from zero in, 2024, '25 to $11,000,000. What generated that swing, and where does it come from? Mister chairman, commissioner Littery, thank you for that question. Vacancy savings as a concept is just salary savings for positions that are not currently filled at any one given time. When we budget them, we budget them as kind of the entire city, initially, which is why you see that $11,000,000 in adopted. We don't show them in the actual column. Those are kind of baked into reduced expenditure totals in the departments that you would
otherwise see. So that number is kind of sprinkled throughout all the other departments, but we show it in when we budget it as a chunk just to kinda show what we're expecting and anticipating over the course of the year. Mister chair. An unfilled position. You never spent the money to begin with. Right? Okay. Yeah. Let me help, answer, if I may, just to add on, to what my colleague has stated. If you don't have this line item, let's just say if it were zero, then what occurs throughout a general fund with significant thousands of employees is they're not all
filled at any given time, and so you have some vacancy. So you have some savings that is created. If you don't account for that, some would argue that you're actually overbudgeting budgeting because you're not gonna spend it because you're not gonna be a 100% filled. So what was done and in some instances, it's a it's a budget balancing tool. We have not used that here, but it it helps budget it it's like a revenue. You count it actually, you know, even you're not expending. You either look at either side of the balance sheet, if you will.
And so it got as high as 11,000,000. We've had a lot of discussion about this on the team. We had a lot of discussion about this, last year. And the assumption is that at some point, we had a couple 100, you know, 300 or so vacancies, and you're like, well, you're kind of padding your budget, if you will. Was that was the allegation? I'll say it that way. But so, therefore, it's not. We we count that and say, you know, you we know you're not gonna be a 100% filled, so you have to have some vacancy savings. Sounds like it's a more important void and stability. Piece. And so then, what we have had a lot of discussions about, little on comfort,
quite frankly, at 11,000,000 because you're almost having to purposely hold them open a little bit. And now, as we're taking that several hundred, three hundred ish, vacancies down to about two twenty ish is the local, the most recent number, then we're more appropriately accounting for that. Yeah. I would identify it myself more as a cost avoidance than a savings. Absolutely. Okay. Thank you. Commissioner Carla and then commissioner Newman. Yeah. Couple of things. First off, on b thirteen, I just wanna say that I'm really glad to see
that you made the preserve a standalone department again because that makes more sense. I had a couple of questions. On the PSPRS, you say that you're not gonna have the actuarial data in until December. So we really don't know if 2,000,000 is the appropriate number and I just would ask the ERC if we could just make a recommendation to council that when the actuarial data we need to look at it again.
I can elaborate on that and I thank you so much, Commissioner Carla for that question. I actually anticipated that question and I added some additional slides to share some information with all of you. So if you wanna skip to the next slide. So just to, quickly share with you, I know there's a lot of numbers on this page, but this is provided by the, PSPRS actuaries. They provide us every year with the impact of additional contributions. This is for the police plan. As you can see right now, on the very left side with zero additional contributions,
our contribution rate for fiscal year twenty seven is 52.38%. Now we've done 50,000,000 for this fiscal year, and this is the, impact that they have have projected for us. If you look somewhere in the middle of the page with 50,000,000 of additional contributions, we are they are projecting that the police plan will increase to a funded status of 83.6% and the contribution rate will drop to 40.3%.
So that's why if you go back a couple slides, go back several slides, another one. That's why we have projected that for 2728 with the 50,000,000 contribution we're doing this fiscal year, that our contribution rate will drop to 40.3%, which creates the savings to, to provide that capacity for the cost increases. Now, the question is, sorry, if you advance the slide back to the next.
The question is for council, for the budget review commission, for the city is, should we continue making additional contributions? When we get our actuarial report, that 50,000,000 will be factored in. These are just high level estimates and projections. So when we get our next actuarial report in December, we will see the impact of the actual impact calculated into the actuarial calculations, and we will then know how close we are to this estimate and what we should do next.
And the important thing and thank you for that question again. The important thing is if you advance two slides, this is fire. This is the reason, one of the reasons we pay attention to that contribution rate. We are currently at 52.4% as a contribution rate as a percent of salaries compared to our peers, which we, try to be in the top three in terms of salary. So it cost us more to stay in the top three. So for every dollar we spend, we have to pay 52.4%
for PSPRS, whereas Chandler only has to pay 17.4%. So where's fire? Sorry? Fire. Next slide. So fire is the next slide. So, fire right now, we're right in the middle at 30%. And, we're not the highest. We're not the lowest. And if you go back a couple slides so for fire, this is the projection. So if we did 2, million in additional contributions, which is what we proposed in the budget, we will stay above.
We will stay at 81.8% funded status. Right now, we're at 81%, and our contribution rate will stay slightly below 30%. So that's our hope is that these projections are accurate. Now, we all know that the, investment returns, you know, and changes in actuarial assumptions like discount rates or whatnot, can affect, can affect the calculation of our funded status and our contribution rates. But this is the, latest information we have from our actuaries.
So we will wait for the December actuarial report and we will gauge how how far the 50,000,000 contribution got us, where we're at, and, whether the 2,000,000 for fire is sufficient and whether we need to recommend additional contributions or not. I I appreciate that very much. I I still think we should call it out as a group, because it is so important that we stay at 80% funded for both of them. So that's just my thought. Though he's not here, I'm sure that commissioner Stevens would be, very strongly supportive of
of that motion from Carla. So, are you making that as a formal motion? Yes. I make a motion that when the December actuarial report is in and we know the true numbers, not just the hope that we reevaluate if the 2,000,000 is sufficient or if we need to look at anything else for payments into PSPRS. Is there a second for that? Do you want a second? Second. Second. It's been moved and seconded. Is there any further discussion? Otherwise, all those in favor of Carlo's motion, please say aye. Aye.
Aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. I have a final question on the general fund if somebody else doesn't have a question. I have some comments from, a commissioner who's not here, but let's go ahead with yours first. Okay. My question is, if you go to C60, so we eliminated 48 FTEs. Is that what that's saying? So my question is, is, by eliminating those, what is the true savings versus if we have to outsource things versus overtime?
There's no planning for additional outsourcing. None? There's no planned additional outsourcing. Well, that's good. So I just have, like, a 80,000 foot question, which is I noticed that our contract services, that number was, I believe, 98,400,000. Does the city look at that year to year and and decide if there are things there where it would be better to not contract out and do them ourselves? Mister chair, it's been my observation in my short time here that we outsource more than I'm used to for a city.
So we, continue to evaluate that. We've had discussions in at least two areas. One is our parks and recreation. And so some of our median work, our right away work, some mowing, things of that nature. So we are exploring that, and I would say, doing it in a a minor, pilot program that would allow us to test. And the difference also is, particularly in parks and recreation, we have some sports fields that require a higher level of expertise, and we perform that ourselves then because of
the experts of our staff. We have, I would call it, less expert, needs and that has been outsourced. And what happened is there's this assumption that private labor is cheaper. Well, we saw significant increase in these contracts, over the last, I would say, five years because of everybody's challenge in obtaining labor. So it's our, objective to go back and evaluate that.
I will tell you one area that we're introducing next year that you are familiar with or we've subtly mentioned is the liquid, road crew. And this is a good example where we we put a proposal together, sent that as a a memo to city council, implemented that midyear so that we could get some of the the equipment ordered in time, to hit the first part of the fiscal year. And so that is a crew of approximately five folks, five individuals.
And once we acquire the equipment, and then we have product of about a half $1,000,000, staffing of five people. We believe, that if we were to outsource that, it would be approximately 6 to 7,000,000. And we have an example, because we do so much outsourcing of our street, maintenance work that we put that side by side and presented that case and and wanted to move forward with that level. And, as you well know with our roads, there are are a variety of treatments.
And what I have seen in other jurisdictions and I've been a part of is staff doing, various levels of those treatments. You would not do a rebuild or an overlay for sake of discussion, that more in-depth work, but the lighter touch work I have seen where that is handled internally. So those are at least two areas. One, we we continue to evaluate. Another where we are implementing, here in the first part of the fiscal year and look to report back, on the results of that, mister chairman. Great.
Thank you. I just encourage you to keep looking at that because it just struck me as a very large number. Do we have any other questions or discussions here? Commissioner Badenoch, who's not here, sent in some questions. Not all of them agendized for today, so they're not totally appropriate. But, I will ask three of them. The first one is, is the proposed budget structurally balanced and sustainable? City treasurer? Yeah. I would like to go back to that slide. So as we've gone keep going up. Yep. No. Keep going up.
Yep. This slide. So we have gone through every fund with the exception of there's a few funds left for next week. We've gone through most of the funds with all of you. And for most of the funds, you're gonna see a very similar looking graph if we were to graph it out, especially the funds that are supported by sales tax. Because as you can see, since 2021 and the pandemic, there was a surge in revenues with the federal stimulus, supercharging the economy, the pandemic spending, the pandemic travel.
And at the at that time, the inflation was inflation was also bumping up sales tax revenues. And so we built, a lot of fund balance to offset, one time expenses and, help us ride some of the, cost inflation pressures that we're also seeing. So you'll see this chart where as our revenues are slowing down and coming down, expenditures are going up because there's a delay in the inflation, impact on our expenditures.
However, knowing that our revenues are not gonna keep going up like that, that is exactly what we're doing here with our budget, with the two percent exercise, the 10% exercise, the pay down of the PSPRS, and recognizing the, the debt maturities and all the things that we're doing is to make our budget structurally balanced and sustainable. And so that is exactly what we're doing, is looking for these, savings and opportunities
in the budget to create the capacity to absorb the added cost of personnel, overlay, or anything else. And so a lot of our funds this is the chart that you'll see. Some of the funds who are not really dependent on sales tax will have a slightly different picture, but those are the funds that have very restricted revenues, and so we spend what we get. And, water sewer funds, those are slightly different because they have to fund capital, not just operations. So that has to do with the, setting of the rates in the, so overall,
I would say that the, proposed budget is structurally balanced as sustainable. The risks are if we have continued slow growth in our revenues, plus if we have reductions in our revenues, like, if there's legislative changes and reduces our revenues further, or if we have a, you know, recession that cuts into our revenues, and if inflation cost continues to be a pressure on us, then that revenue will start revenue and expenditure line will cross.
And so that's what we will pay close attention to. And I will, have city manager Caden add to that as well. Thank you. I agree wholeheartedly with everything my colleague just said. I would just add to it and also goes back to, commissioner Carla's previous question about the reduction. Just as a reminder, not so much for people in the room, but the viewing audience, the reduction in the positions that were referenced earlier, that was a vacant positions, and so that's important and saved about $2,600,000. And so that creates some capacity for us, and that was needed as we talk
about the 11,000,000 that we're adding with additional compensation. Also, keep in mind too, again, all across the organization and only looked at at vacant positions to come up with that number. And, again, out of my out of city manager's office for sake of discussion, we, provided, two, positions for that exercise. The other thing that's important is we did add. So we added, 33 positions across the organization. So the net, was much, smaller than the loss of the 48. Then I would also add to what, miss Andrews was saying, on the savings of
the 10%, again, exercise of that we went through, extensively last time as, my colleague pointed out earlier in the presentation that created about a $7,000,000 savings. So between the 2,600,000 savings in labor, and then also the 7,000,000 in the operating the line item savings that create pushed up, nearly to $10,000,000 savings because we have costs, that are are not within our control that are increasing and the labor costs. I would as I wrap up my comments, I just wanna point out, a couple
of our expenditures on the departments that are significant that, we are having a lot of discussions about that I'm really mindful of and very supportive of these. So don't take them in a negative light, but just something to be aware of. When you look at b 13 and we take two of our public safety departments, at the fire department at $86,000,000 and then we have our police department at a $150,000,000 So when you total those, we have $235,000,000 going to our public safety departments.
Interestingly enough, when you flip the page just back, I find it on to b 11 at the previous meeting, I I believe, well, it was one of the committee members, might have been the chair, had asked about, the public safety tax. And so not only are we using the public safety tax here that's estimated at $17,000,000, if you keep over here the $235,000,000 of expenditure that we have to get to. We are using utilizing, I would submit, the the $17,000,000 in the public safety tax
just to utilize a line item that's fairly close. We have the sales tax, locally generated, a 102 or excuse me, 182,000,000. So that's $200,000,000 between the taxing of our entire 1% plus the point plus the public safety tax. And, oh, by the way, we're still 35,000,000 short over here just comparing these expenditures. And let's just for sake of discussion go down to property tax. It's about so between those three idle, local sales tax generated, the, public safety tax,
and property tax. We're utilizing all of those to cover the two departments for, police department and fire department. So I just point that out, that we're spending a lot, in those areas. And so, obviously, state shared revenue and the others then are dedicated for other parts of our organization. But being mindful when we have significant wage pressures in our first responders to remain competitive, that that has a growing impact on our budget. Thank you, mister chair. Thank you.
His next question is, are revenue projections reasonable and defensible? Are key revenue assumptions, sales tax, bed tax, state shared revenue grounded in realistic trends? What happens under downside scenarios such as a five or 10% decline in revenue? Yeah. Thank you, mister chair and members of the commission. I would say that with a focusing on the general fund, we have projected in total some of the, revenues are increasing higher than 3% and some lower than 3%. 3% is cautiously optimistic.
We do not have factored into our projections any recession scenario. So the risk would be if there is a recession, we would have to pivot and make some adjustments to expenditures, to to balance, the, you know, reduction in revenues. One of our largest risks is probably the, state shared revenues and as we spoke earlier, there is, definitely if the state conforms to the one big beautiful bill, there will be at least a 3,000,000 a year. Full conformity will be a 3,000,000 a year reduction to our revenues.
The also, if you look at page, b 11, you can see that the state shared income tax number went from 48,000,000 this fiscal year to a projected 51,500,000. That is pretty secure because state shared income tax is paid in arrears, meaning that that is the, the, income tax that the state collected two years ago for 2025
and we will get that. So that is pretty, safe. It's not at risk of, you know, us not receiving that. However, the future years, those are the years that are based on the state's projections and they could be they could be off. So those are the those future years could be a risk of us not maintaining it at that high level. Other than that, the rest of our budget, the tourism fund, again, you know, it's dependent on the tourist industry. If there's a recession, if that impacts the tourism side of it and reduces our
bed tax revenues, that's where we will see the, risk of our revenues. Is there anything you'd like to add? I would just point out on page b 11 that we have developed, prior to me, I inherited, I believe it's through the leadership of the treasurer of the reserve, oh, excuse me, revenue loss, reserve. So that that could certainly be utilized in a a year where we saw some, slower gains than we anticipated. Thank you. You know what? I've taken the city budget and asked many different of the AI models to model
it. And they all say the same thing. You're in good shape, but boy are you tourism dependent. So as long as tourism stays up there I get the same. Yeah. And same answer. Same answer. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Dan, I do have a question. Yes. Commissioner Longman. City manager, Kate and Kate and you you alluded to this, and we kinda talked about it in the last meeting. Carla, made a motion, and I supported it. When we talked about, you know, like, in the in that context, it was the roads. Like, there's point 1% in the sales tax going to roads, and we've got a
gargantuan road budget now. It made me think and I'm not talking about raising or lowering sales taxes, but the proportionality of what those allocations are in the tax. Is that worth an analysis? Maybe not for this budget, but at least over the summer, is is to an go through that analysis and say, do we have the right proportions where the money is allocated? Because once once you collect the sales tax, oftentimes, it goes to sequestered funds, and you may be putting more money in somewhere and not enough in others.
And maybe things have changed enough that we need to kinda reconfigure the sales tax. Maybe this is a question more for, treasurer Andrews, but, but that that that's kinda it it that that what we're bringing in to what we're actually doing, I would like to see that align, you know, because those funds get committed and then it takes voter referendums and things to move them around. I'll start off and certainly look to my colleague to add to it. I would submit that the if we truly did an analysis of where we spend the money and the appropriate, percentage increase, it would take a significant shift and likely
could take an increase, which I don't think there's a pallet for. So let me say it a different way, way, just like I use the public safety. It's first of all, how do we have a tech we have the revenue side, then we have the expenditure side. And from, a revenue standpoint, from a city manager standpoint, we want the broadest flexibility. We want the, which is the point one that we generate, so that general tax. But then what happens is it's not enough. It's it's just and so then when you go to add a tax, then you you make it very narrow so that voters feel comfortable about it.
And then there's also discussion about thresholds of what people and so then when you add to it, it's very narrow and then it's specific to that area. Public safety is the good example, as illustrated with my comments a few minutes ago. I think the transportation is another so what will will end up happening is those special revenue sources, in my humble opinion, are not enough to carry Right. The true expenditure. And so we're already thankfully, we have this, many of the other revenue sources are
fungible and so therefore, can offset. Transportation is a great example where the transportation fund, we need to utilize more than it's generating. So in next fiscal year, which I don't believe has been done to this level ever before, we are taking a $10,000,000 and transferring that to support our roads. And because I think there was a previous assumption that it's like, well, that's all and and again, I'm not casting any dispersions or anything, but this is all we have to use for transportation. So we we utilize it, and that's it.
We have recognized that that has gotten us into a situation where we're not appropriately investing in the streets. And so we take our our flexible revenue source and and add to it. That puts more stress on general funds. There is more stress on the general fund. And so that is our task going forward, and that's where you primarily fund the city operations. I would also add this. There's also extreme pressure on rates. And so we only have the three enterprise, operations, airport, solid waste, and water water
resources. You don't hear a lot about the airport even though those colleagues are here and they because, it's self sufficient. They're doing amazing work. Most of our, discussion about rates and how it impacts, our community members is solid waste and water. Tremendous amount of downward pressure as we've talked about those rate increases and significant needs, and then they pay into the general fund. So, putting a bow on all of that, that, I think you see in our budget how we spend it, quite frankly.
And there is, that's the beauty of the general fund in a broad revenue source is you're able to allocate that, to various funds or functions. Still general fund the various functions, across, the organization. Yeah. Well, I'm just I'm just concerned that there are areas maybe are overfunded versus others that are underfunded as you've stated. And so, you know, things have changed. So maybe there there's a basal level of of of demand for cap for from the sales tax and then then you have to bolus it with other sources.
And it seems like maybe we're bolusing too much in certain areas like roads, and we could probably up that number versus others. Maybe we could could use those funds elsewhere and use them more effectively. And I think, mister chair and mister Nerrington, that that's that's the, thankfully, the ability that we have with the general fund is that reallocation. I will tell you though that for every area that some would submit are overfunded, I'll just use that term, somebody else's term, not not my term, but might be overfunded. Those are the areas, that we would get someone to the podium, to comment on
if we were to shift that. Meaning, someone there's always a stakeholder with every single line item. And what I would also just add to that, I've seen studies on user fees. User fees are of our budget. And when you when you pull when you survey community members, they love user fees until it's the they're the user of that fee. And and then they go to the podium and comment on. So it is clearly a a balance. I'm I'm not saying I'm not saying, hey. I'm seeking to take money away from someone, but I'm certainly still wanna fund things
proportionally and appropriately. And if there are areas where we're just saying, hey. We just don't have expenditures that don't make sense, maybe we could use those funds more effectively. There's others where we do have real needs. I worry a lot about all the capital that's been built. And certainly in the southern part of the city, it's aging and needs to be replaced. So you're going to have more of a proportion of capital and expenditure going to replacement as opposed to building new. And if you're always building new and never fix anything, then you end up with a a city that's falling apart. And we're we're kind of with the roads, we're kind of on the edge of
that. So and and, you know, I I I think it's worthwhile to think have a strategy discussion on the budget and our where our sources are coming from and do we have the right configuration of that. I I and I just would add thank you so much for that question. It is a really fair question because, we are, up until this year, we have not had to I won't use the word subsidized the transportation fund with general fund. But a couple of things happened. We've had to increase the overlay program. And also, you know, a year ago, we lost the residential rental tax, which also
impacted the transportation fund. So the point 2% was voted in by the voters many years ago, and perhaps, to your question, perhaps is not sufficient to maintain the transportation program moving forward, much like the, point one, public safety tax. I mean, you know, clearly, that wasn't meant to cover the the entire public safety program. But whatever portion it was meant to cover, maybe that's not sufficient. And and maybe, you know, we need to look at how we allocate our general
fund revenues to, provide additional funding or how we look at our tax structure. So that is a very fair fair question. Thank you. We shouldn't be afraid of the analysis is my point. And I think that's something we could do between now and the next budget, maybe by making that a reserve as a recommendation that we do this. Yeah. I was gonna say, is that something you wanna make as a motion that the city look at, since we're kind of into that? If we wanna make any motions, kind of now is the time. I'll make a motion that, we before the next budget well, not tomorrow.
Before the next budget, but we review the proportionality of our dedicated sources of funds and compare that to where those funds are being spent. And do we have the right proportionality of our sales, sales tax stack of the various sales taxes relative to the spend and what we would expect that spend to be? That would be the proposal to for the, treasurer and the the city manager to do that, analysis. Second. Okay. Do we have any discussion on that? Other than that, all those in favor, please say aye.
Aye. Opposed? Motion carries. If we have no further discussion or motions on the, our general fund, let's go on to items be be presented. Oh, commissioner Carla. I just have one question. You know, we went through capital and we're going through general fund and all these different funds. And one of the things that had come up at the very beginning of this budget cycle was the whole issue of the aging infrastructure and are we doing enough. And my question is, in this budget, do you feel we're doing enough to keep
up with it? I'll start off and answer from my perspective. I believe we're more cognizant of this than well, we're very cognizant of it, in the next fiscal year. And let me give some specifics. When we think of infrastructure, I'll purposefully narrow it to a few areas. One, roadways. Been a lot of discussion about that over, the last few years, and we're investing it at a level for maintaining. We still are adding new roads, but then we also have more analysis and understanding
the data of what is needed to maintain that infrastructure. And between last year and what is proposed this year, over $80,000,000, nearly $85,000,000, plus we have the new function of some internal staff, the liquid, road that we referenced. So so streets, I believe were in good shape. Also, as a part of that, we say streets, but it's also sidewalks and other things of of that nature. Some concrete work is important. And then parks, I know parks have been a considerable discussion, in 2023, 2024.
And I believe we have more assessment and more analysis of that, going forward for next year. April. Yes. Exact. Thank you. That's what I'm referring to. She's 490. So that's in good shape. The water and wastewater, there's been, I would say some, some some questions about the capital program as it relates to water and wastewater. And I I believe, some criticism that isn't really warranted, quite frankly, because, for next
year, we have 330, million dollars associated, and and we can't produce that much. And so that will still be a a carry forward in the future years. So water and wastewater is infrastructure that will be, critical for us to maintain in some parts of our, community. We have aging assets in other areas where we have greenfield and we're putting in new infrastructure. So, I I think we have, more handle on it, more work to do, in
a sense of under asset replacement, asset inventory understanding. But, those are primarily some of the areas I will tell you. Some city facilities, and we're always cautious to mention what that looks like publicly, because, is it serving staff or serving the community? But we have a lot of, facilities, and they're aging. And so there are some there's probably more analysis we need to do in that area and, and more investment. And I know we have significant investment in that area in the in the coming
years, and that will be important. We we house and we serve, house our employees out of those. Many of them that we serve the community out of, and so that will be important. That's probably the one area in my mind I probably need to get a little bit better handle of. And, there's assessment just much like the roads, you know, where you have a a pavement condition index. I'm familiar with with that type of assessment for every facility that you have, particularly kind of the major infrastructure, of that facility. So we can certainly, reinforce that type of data and understanding that to make those
investments. So, again, parks, I feel good about that, and that and everything that encompasses that area. And then as far as the roads, better now than I think we've been in recent years. In the water and wastewater, there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty, on some new facilities that will know more over the next, twelve to eighteen months. That will help us, in our capital planning moving forward, and then also the continued replacement of aging infrastructure, as it relates to water and wastewater and we continue to
make investments in that regard. Thank you, mister chair. Would it be helpful for us to make a recommendation that in the, over the summer and into the next budget cycle that we take a closer look at aging facilities? Mister chair and, commissioner Carla, I you're certainly welcome to do that. It's something I'm gonna welcome to do that. It's something I'm gonna do whether we have a motion in a direction or not, but thank you. You know, good discussion on that. I mean, I I think we all know those especially were involved in four ninety
that, you know, one of the reasons that some of that was really needed was that deferred maintenance and and things that weren't taken care of. So it sounds like you have a pretty good handle on that and and look forward to more discussions of that. So I don't Carla, I don't know if we need a motion on that. I Well But but however A recommendation. Yeah. Just I think we make a recommendation that, we'll take a closer look at aging facilities over the summer and in the next budget just so that it's on the
record and the council knows that we're looking at it, you're looking at it. Do we have a second for that recommendation? Second. Do we have any discussion on that? Otherwise, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. So let's go on to items that'd be presented at the next meeting. Next slide. So for the next meeting, we will finish out our fund by fund and, review with any continuation.
We set out some time for any continuation discussions of the general fund. We will have commissioner Stevens and commissioner Badenoch, at this meeting. So I wanted to provide some time to give them opportunity if they had questions, if they, reviewed the general fund and had questions. We will then look at the preservation fund, that is our, remaining point one five preserve tax that the voters approved back in twenty two thousand and four and, we will then look at the new point one five Prop four ninety Park and Preserve
tax funds as a series of funds. We will go over and share with you how the city is proposing to spend the, point one five Park and Preserve tax that we're collecting. And the other funds listed on here, the aviation stadium risk management, with the exception of risk management, the other funds are relatively small and debt service, that's not small. But we set that aside as if time permits, we will have slides and we will be ready to discuss those. But if we run out of time, we could you could skip those if you
chose or if you could if you wanted to, dive into those, we can as well. And then the, upcoming meeting, we will devote time for the, commission to, discuss and deliberate on observations and recommendations. We will bring all the recommendations that have been voted on back for discussion. You can, make amendments to add to or change the recommendations and add new recommendations. We will also discuss the form or method of report or presentation to counsel. In the ordinance that we amended, last time, we gave the commission an option to
either, produce a written report or a slide presentation. So it doesn't have to be a written report, you could just have bullet points on a slide and that could be your recommendations to be presented agendized items that the commission voted on over the last few meetings that we will bring up for discussion as to, how the commission would like us to move forward on those future agendized items. Thank you. I don't think we need any discussion on any of that.
I just have one quick question. Yeah. So the future agendized items, because we're scheduled So let's move on to Oh, since I got this assignment wrong last year, I'd like to just clarify and make sure I get it right. Do we do we need to do anything right now on this? Like, I just wanna be here because I've I've I've been jotting down some recommendations
and things, but we're not collecting that yet. So, correct? So I just wanted to clarify. Last year, the budget review commission was asked by the chair to submit individual recommendations, And, we compiled those recommendations into a report. We're not proposing that for this year. We realized that doing so created recommendations that were not discussed in open meeting and gave the appearance that they may have been, you know The door. Yeah. So so this year, all recommendations will be discussed in open meetings and voted on
in open meetings, and we will just compile all of them, and we will not seek individual recommendations from individual, commissioners. I think I can get that one right. Thank you. So identification and approval of possible future agenda items. Does anybody have any future agenda items they would like to add? Alright. I don't hear any. With that, the chair would entertain a motion to adjourn. Motion to adjourn. Is there a second? All those in favor, aye. Brad, you know what you were describing when you said we should do analysis?
I've been doing budgeting for a long time. We always look at what will build shareholder value when we're in the budgeting process. So when I was listening to you talk, I said, Brad is actually describing the budget process. That's what they're supposed to do during the budget process. Well And so need a motion for them to do Part: 2
Can you all hear me? How about now? Okay. Can everyone hear me now? How about this one? Test test. Is this one working? How about now? It didn't seem like it. Yeah. It's more Well, good evening, everyone.
Sorry for that short delay. This is chair Wilcoxon, and I would like to formally call the meeting to order. Welcome to the city staff, transportation commissioners, and public to the 04/16/2026 Transportation Commission meeting. Meetings are being held in person, televised on Cox cable channel eleven, and streamed online on scottsdaleaz.gov for the public to listen and view the meetings in progress. I'd like to ask for a roll call to begin the evening's meeting.
Nathan, can you do the roll call? Yes. Thank you. Chair Wilcoxon? Here. Vice Chair Cardella? Here. Commissioner Marmon? Here. Commissioner Binkowitz? Here. Commissioner Koftau? Here. Commissioner Davis? Here. And commissioner Baker. Here. All are accounted for. Thank you, Nathan. Spoken comment is being accepted for agendized and non agendized items. The request to speak forms must be submitted no later than ninety minutes before the start of the meeting. Nathan, do we have any submissions? I see one at least. I would love that record too.
I if we have one spoken comment, then I'll take your word for it. Okay. We'll go ahead with that. That's agendized though. That is agendized. We'll wait till the agenda. We'll wait till the agenda for that. Okay. All right. So we have no items for non agenda. No request to speak for non agendized items. No request to speak for non agenda items. Thank you, Spurt. Written comments are being accepted for agendized and non agendized items and should be submitted electronically at least ninety minutes before the start of this meeting. These comments are also emailed to the Transportation Commission and posted online.
And Nathan, I know we received a number of comments, written comments, this afternoon Yep. For the agenda item number three, I believe. We have seven written comments for agenda item three. We you have a packet up there for each of you as well as we will post those online for the public to see. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Nathan. So with that, we'll jump into the agenda. First item is the approval of the minutes from the 02/19/2026 Transportation Commission meetings. I assume everyone has had a chance to read it.
Are there any comments? Hearing and seeing none, I'll take a motion, to approve the minutes as presented. I move. We approve the minute excuse me. The minutes from February 17 meeting. Thank you, commissioner Baker. I second. Thank you, commissioner. All those in favor do we need a roll call vote for this, Nathan? I believe we let's just go and see if you guys all are There's any controversy. Yeah. I'll mark them all down. And then All those in favor, say aye. Aye.
Any opposed, say nay. I will abstain as was not present. Okay. We have, what, seven ayes and one abstention. Okay. Ayes have it then. All right. Moving on to the item number two, appointment of a new commissioner to the paths and trails subcommittee. We had, this is an item from last meeting, and we had no, new nominees. However, it is my understanding that we may be able to, keep the, commissioner koftaile
on the commission, or on the on the subcommittee, as a pro tem member until we find, someone to take his place. Is that correct? From my understanding, he can be voted in for another year of of, service on that sub committee. Okay. So we can have open nominations for anybody who's up there right now. Nobody I I I guess, except for, commissioner Davis, who's served full terms on the subcommittee. Otherwise, everybody is eligible for a nomination to the subcommittee.
Okay. Alright. Thank you. Thank you, Nathan. Do we have any nominations for that position? I nominate Commissioner Koftaile. Do we have a second? I second that. Okay. Commissioner Koftaile, if you get elected, will you accept? Yes. Okay. In that case, we have another vote. All those in favor of commissioner Koftaill serving on the term on the Parks, Paths, and Trails Subcommittee, Notify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed, say nay. Alright. Well, congratulations and welcome back to the Piles and Trails Subcommittee.
Thank you. Okay. That brings us to item number three, neighborhood traffic management program exemptions for two locations, information discussion and possible action. Hello, chair Wilcoxon and members of the Transportation Commission. My name is Colleen Dominguez, senior traffic engineer. And today, I'm bringing you the item, NTNP variance requests for two separate locations. So the first is 77th Street from McDowell Road to Murray Lane. The second is Palm Lane from 68th Street to 70th Street.
So I just want to go over the agenda really fast. The first portion, I'll talk about the role that the commission plays, in the neighborhood traffic management program and the reason that this item has been brought to your attention today. And we'll go over a summary of the warranty criteria of the NTNP, of which we are requiring variances or requesting variances. So, from there, I'll discuss each location separately. So these are almost two completely separate items that aren't really related, and they will
have two separate associated actions with them. So I'll just discuss each one separately. And then at the end, go over the recommended actions for both locations. So going over the commission's role in the process, for both of these locations were in between step four and five. So, residents have contacted the department to discuss their concerns. We've submitted a letter of interest form, and we've collected data. After reviewing the collected data, we've determined that, for both of these cases, they don't
meet the warranty criteria of the NTNP. And so, the purpose of this item is to request approval from you for a variance from this warranty criteria. From here, we'll move on to the next step, which is the neighborhood petition, and then from there, constriction. So just to remind you of the criteria, as outlined in the NTNP, the first is length criteria, so it needs to be at least 660 feet in length and up to a mile long. The street needs to be paved and also planned for only one through vehicle lane
in each direction. The volume criteria is it needs to be between 503,000 vehicles per day. For the speed criteria, at least 40% of traffic needs to be traveling at speeds of five miles per hour or more, and at least 20% of traffic needs to be traveling at speeds of 10 miles per hour or more above the posted speed limit. The last one is the driveway frontage criteria. So taking both sides into consideration, the street needs to have, 50% or more direct residential driveway access. It also notes that exceptions may be given to streets adjacent to a school or
park. So I'm I'll go ahead and get started with the first one. So, this is 77th Street, from McDowell Road in the South up to Murray Lane. This originated, from a citizen request to city council regarding speeding near El Dorado Park. So, on the West side of 77th Street, as I mentioned, is El Dorado Park. On the east side, there's a commercial development down by McDowell Road, and then north of that, it becomes residential, both multifamily and single family homes.
So this segment is about 3,000 feet in length. It is a local residential roadway that's paved with two lanes or two lanes in each direction. Post speed is 25 miles per hour and want to note that there is no direct residential driveway access on this segment. So, on the screen are the data results. So data was collected collected at three separate locations, between December 8 and December 10. So as you can see, all three locations met the volume criteria. It was divide, I'll go up a slide.
It was divided by between McDowell to Granada, Granada to Oak, and Oak to Murray. So, all three locations met the volume criteria, but only the first two came close to meeting the speed criteria. Between McDowell and Granada and between Granada and Oak, over 40% of traffic was traveling 30 miles per hour or more. But less than 20 Murray, the, speed the measured speeds are not as close to
the thresholds as the other two locations. We also performed a collision, history review that found there was two collisions in the most recent three years. A bicycle collision up by Cypress Street where a bicycle riding in the bike lane was sideswiped by a vehicle turning right into a driveway, and then a left turn accident, which occurred closer to McDowell Road for a vehicle turning left into a private driveway into the commercial the commercial area.
So for this segment, traffic engineering staff recommends that the variance to the NTNP be approved for, 77th Street from McDowell to Oak. So only the first two segments, that I had noted previously. The justification being that the volume criterion was met for, both locations. More than 40% of traffic is traveling at five miles per hour or more above the posted speed. And then in reference to the lack of direct residential driveway access, this segment is
adjacent to a park, which the policy does provide exceptions to. I also, be related to this, there is a caveat to what the NTMP defines as the affected area for for this street segment. So because there is no direct residential access, as the NTMP defines the affected area, the number of residents would be very large. So as part of this request, staff is recommending that we limit the petition area
to just the areas that are shown highlighted in yellow, which is the, multifamily townhome community on the Southeast Corner Of 77th Street and Granada, and then all of the single family homes, that are accessed through the cul de sacs, coming off of 77th Street between Granada and Oak. Okay. I'll move on to the next segment, and then, we can discuss in total. I'll take any questions then. So the next segment is Palm Lane from 68th Street to 70th Street.
Palm is located halfway between McDowell Road and Oak Street, and this segment is located just west of Scottsdale Road. So the study segment is a quarter mile in length, local residential roadway with, two lanes in each direction, and it does have direct residential driveway access along the majority of its length. The unique thing about this street segment is that there's already traffic calming existing on the street. So, there are intersection corner bull bouts at both 68th Street and at 70th Street.
69th Street kind of bisects the segment. To the west of 69th Street, there's some flesh, choker islands, and to the east of 69th Street is a center median island. So we collected data at two separate locations from March 2 to March 4 year. Basically, the two halves, east and west of 69th Street. So for both locations, the volume criterion was met. And for neither location, the speed criterion was met. But the reason I'm bringing this to you guys today is I want to point
out the speeds that were measured for eastbound traffic, particularly between 68th Street and 69th Street. Almost 60% of traffic is traveling over 30 miles per hour, and about a quarter of vehicles are traveling more than 10 miles per hour above the posted speed. This is pretty unusual for a street like Palm Lane. And it's also unusual that the measured speed for the opposite direction in the westbound was considerably lower. So a huge differential, in measure speeds between the directions.
And, taking into consideration both travel directions, the segment didn't meet the speed criterion. But, just taking a look at the one travel direction, it was quite a bit higher than the minimum threshold. There was also a a collision that occurred on the segment, last year involving a single vehicle, that lost control and collided one of the center median islands approaching 70th Street. So for this location, traffic engineering staff recommends that a variance to the MTMP be
approved, for the following reasons being the volume criterion was met. And as I mentioned, the amount of speeding in just one direction is, atypical for a street like like Palm Lane. So I've, written here the recommended action for you all. I'll read both, and then we can go over questions. But, for each location, the first would be that the transportation commission moves to approve the variance to the NTMP for 77th Street to proceed with the initiation of the
neighborhood petition for the proposed affected area. And then the second one would also be to approve the variance to the NTNP warranty criteria for Palm Lane to proceed with the initiation of the neighborhood petition. So that's my presentation. I'll take any questions from the commission. Chair Wilcoxon, sorry. First, can we have the public comment? This would be the time for that. And then Yes. I was gonna suggest that we do that first. So we have one, card to speak. Ryan Henry, are you here? Mister Henry, if you could go to the podium, or that podium, I guess.
Yes. And, tell us where you live, your name, where where you live, and, you have three minutes to speak. Okay. I'm Ryan Henry. I live at 6833 East Palm Lane, so right in between, the 68th And 70th Street. This is Colin. That the some of the results that you had mentioned, a few comments. The one near 70th Street, you set it up right near the stop sign. So it, like, it was, like, slow. People I I watch it. People, like, starting to slow. So but, regularly, we see people going 35, 40 miles an hour because it's a
kind of a people go from 68th Street all the way to Scottsdale. So they're just zoom in especially around, around, like, the end of work. So around 5PM. Specifically, it's a residential area. We had a really bad scare with him. When he learned to walk, one of his first things he loved to do is run-in the road, you know, around, like, fourteen, fifteen months. So, we had a pretty bad scare where someone was going, like, extremely fast, and I had to run out, and he almost got hit. So, if you guys got a ternially worded email from me, I apologize.
I was hot at the time. But, anyways, I I I think anyone who would spend thirty minutes out there around 5PM would realize just how unsafe it is and how people go extremely fast. So I'm very excited for this. And you could put, you know, the not in my backyard that is around our area sometimes. I was talking to one of our neighbors. It was like, well, it better not be in my front yard. You can put it in my front yard, the speed bump. I'll I'll allow it. So, yes, in my backyard. So that's all I'd say. Thank you, mister Henry and Colin for your moral support.
Commissioners, questions? Commissioner Baker. I'm new to the commission. So when you say that we would grant a variance, tell me what that means. Commissioner Baker, members of the transportation commission. Yes. Of course. So, as I mentioned, we have warranting criteria that's outlined in the policy. Mhmm. And we also have in the policy that if we want to move forward with the study segment that does not meet the warranty criteria, we need to request an exemption from transportation commission for that criteria.
So in both of these cases, they did not meet the speed criteria. And in the 77 Street case, it did not meet the direct residential driveway access criteria. So, for those reasons is why we're requesting the exemption. Okay. So the the variance would be because we didn't meet the criteria, we grant the variance, and then we put in speed bumps or whatever we decide. Yes. Well, I will say the next step is still the petition process. So we're not jumping over the petition process, but we're just trying to move to
that step. Okay. Mhmm. Thank you. Mhmm. I had two questions. The first is, is there a hypothesis as to why the speeding was so predominant on one direction of Palm Lane versus the other? Commissioner Davis, members of the Transportation Commission. I believe it has to do with the travel patterns of the area that there is a significant amount of cut through traffic in that segment because Palm Lane is a quarter mile street. It would just have more more volumes, but also, people who aren't living directly on
those street would would be utilizing this the street to travel to where they're going. I'm assuming they turn right or turn left to go eastbound, on Palm Lane. And as soon as they make their movement, they must just gun it and try to try to get make their way towards Scottsdale Road, which is probably their destination. And then provided we get past the petition and we do decide to install some infrastructure, do does that affect the way that we design any traffic calming measures, or would anything be applied to both directions?
Commissioner Davis, the residential transportation commission. I'm not sure if it would have a large effect in terms of the design of the device or of the type of device. Particularly because there's already traffic calming on the street that, has shown to be ineffective, we likely would, consider vertical reflection like speed cushions to either supplement or replace the existing traffic calming devices. And I I I can't recall when those traffic calming measures were installed.
But was there any impact from I guess, I'm assuming we collect the data before those initial traffic calming measures were installed. Did we see any reduction between the data from, I don't know, year years and years ago to now? Commissioner Davis, members of Transportation Commission, I didn't take a look directly at the before and after data. In my research, I saw that these these traffic calming devices were installed back in 2003. Through my involvement in as the NTMP coordinator for approximately the past two years, I
will say that this particular street segment, has come to us previously for a traffic study to be completed. A little over a year ago, we collected data that showed that there wasn't a significant amount of speeding. They resubmitted almost exactly a year on the dot, which is pretty impressive since we require a year in between traffic data collections. And this time when we collected data, it just showed vehicles are traveling at really high speeds. Very good. Thank you. Mhmm. Mhmm. Commissioner Penquets.
Thank you for your presentation, and thank you to the resident that came to speak on this item. My question is about your definition of direct residential driveway access. Because it seems that if you have a multifamily, location, they directly access their residences through that driveway. So does your manual define what that is? Because if it seems like people that request this in a multifamily development would not
get it, as opposed to somewhat if if that street would have been built on a single family form. Can can you explain a little bit of that? Commissioner Pankiewicz and members of transportation commission. Yes. Of course. So, I wouldn't say that there's a definition that's provided in the NTNP policy, but what it's referring to is, primarily single family homes where, residents are accessing their home directly from the street. So if it was a multifamily community, that would not be direct residential access because
residents would enter through the driveway and either park in a parking spot or somewhere within the site. This refers directly to the the driveway is up against the street. It's not it's not a side street. It's not like, you know, fronting the corner street. It just means directly on the street. And as you mentioned, it is primarily intended for single family home land uses. So a question and a comment. So maybe, like, the only thing I can think of this was written this way
is because those residents would tend to back out of their homes and maybe a speeder, would be harder to see, versus someone exiting from, like, a multifamily driveway where you're already facing the road and looking at the the direction of the traveling traffic. But, my comment is if it comes to 77th Street, then even though that's not direct residential access, you have a condition where a lot of those residents are probably
crossing the street to go to the park. So, from a vehicular perspective, they may have more visibility and you're avoiding that collision, but you could have more of, like, the pedestrian or bicycle collision that was shown to have happened in the past five years. So those were my my comments. Thank you. Okay. Commissioner Finklesh, just wanna add one more comment to that. I think, my interpretation of the policy is that the reason it has that requirement is to, to make sure that only streets that have more of a, what I'll
call, local residential classification rather than a local collector classification. A street that doesn't have direct driveway frontage and just has, size streets feeding off of it, functions more as a collector. And so, that's the purpose for that requirement, not necessarily, I guess, for the the land use. I hope that makes sense. Commissioner Koftow. I just wanna there's a I had a few questions. I guess the first one just to stay with, commissioner Pan Pankowin's, comments.
Like, I I live near this area. I'm I use this street, almost every, you know, almost daily or every every other day. And, those those homes do seem like they're all facing it's like one driveway that leads into the home. So, it does seem like I mean, I guess, since it's at a park, it it can have the variance. But I think the definition I mean, even as you're describing it, it does seem to me like the idea behind the definition is met by by this because all
those homes there, the people walk out of there, they cross the street, they walk you know, you can walk down the street to the local shopping center there. So I I do think it's it should be able to meet meet that criteria as well, just based on the way it's it's configured, and I've seen the way it's been used. So, the, some of the emails we had, I guess, mentioned that there was traffic calming and then it was removed at some point. Is that and so is that on this part here we're talking about the 77th
Street? There was traffic calming there. So I believe that all the comments you received were for Palm Lane. Those were all for Palm Lane? Okay. And so, I don't wanna speak incorrectly. I haven't done a site visit myself. Maybe the residents know more than me. My understanding is that there was a choker choker islands, just west of 69th Street, which had, curb and were raised. Those were removed and replaced with flush side islands that are flushed with the pavement. So, has a visual narrowing effect, more than maybe a physical narrowing effect.
Okay. And I believe that's what that comment was referring to when it says that the islands were removed. Okay. Alright. Yeah. I was looking at it on Google Maps, and it seems like there's still something there on that one. So I assumed it was on the seventy seventh because that's pretty much just open. And then, I just wanted to correct because I I'm sure, Coftel, I think we we can have a a resident make a a comment to that question as well. Is this on? Can you hear me? We can. If you could, just state your name and address and, keep keep it under three minutes.
I'm Lisa Akey. I live at 6924 East Palm Lane, the submitter of both traffic studies. The car traffic calming you're referring to was removed by resident request because of flooding concerns, but it really because their house was right in front of the Choker Island on my side of the street. I don't even know. The north side of the street. But our whole north side just floods. So they had this petition to remove this because their house was flooding. They've told this to me personally, but they've removed the island and everyone's house still
floods including theirs. So the Choker Island that was removed didn't have any effect on the flooding. We all still flood. It just increased the traffic flow on that side of the street. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Alright. And then the other thing I, I don't I think maybe when you in your initial thing, I think you said or maybe I misheard you. I heard you say 77th was two lanes in each direction. I'm I'm sorry. It's a it's a two lane roadway with one lane in each direction. Okay. Yeah. I I okay. Yeah. I just wanna be clear on that because I was like, that doesn't yeah.
Okay. I think that was it. The other thing is I guess the the only other question I have is, since that since that there is that shopping center there and it does people do walk and, ride their bikes and cross over there. There wouldn't be any traffic calming done in that area, though, even though there might still be pedestrian traffic trying to access that area. It is is what you're recommending tonight. Is that correct? Commissioner Koftai, and members of the Transportation Commission, that is correct. We would limit the location of the speed cushions for that segment to be, north
of the last driveway into the commercial shopping plaza. And this is, to maintain that the speed cushions, exist within residential where residential land uses. So, as you approach Granada with that first townhome community, that's most likely where this first cushion would go. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Commissioner Koftau. Commissioner Marmon. Thank you. Good presentation. Thank you. On 77th Street, it looked it looked to me it's like it's a park problem,
not the residential problem. The, it's very poorly marked. The people are backing in and out of the road. And it's it's, it's really wide, so it's like the New Jersey Turnpike in there. And it's also a symptom of other things we've seen with these long, wide local roads with traffic problem. But can we get petitions from the park rep, the park patrons also? It seems to me that's what's really affecting. Commissioner Marmon and members of the Transportation Commission, the neighborhood traffic management program is primarily
a resident led program. So, we typically only collect data once we receive a request directly from a resident. Also, we only allow requests from residents that are directly living off the street that they're requesting traffic coming on. Moreover, this is, the street within the public right of way, we we we maintain whatever devices go on there. So, I'm not sure if you're if you're referring to receiving funding from the park
or support from the park. But as far as I know, we kinda have Okay. Total purview over this. Alright. On, Palm Lane. It seems to be a symptom of a bigger problem that no matter what we put in there, short of islands that make them really weave, there's gonna be a problem. Perhaps when you enter into the study phase, you can look a little more regionally in there, and maybe we can find an alternative to divert traffic away from there.
Commissioner Marmon and members of the Transportation Commission, typically, we, study segments on a case by case basis depending on, the request that we receive from residents. So, the scope of this study currently is just limited to that quarter mile segment of Palm Lane. It does like I mentioned, it's a quarter mile street, so it does provide a certain amount of connectivity within the area. It seems though that the problem isn't the residents. The problem is people around them or wherever they're coming from.
And in this particular case, perhaps we could look a little more at the area to see if we there's another solution here, short of another structural construction in there. Commissioner Marmon and members of the Transportation Commission, thank you for the suggestion. We we haven't moved to the phase yet of design. That's something that we we work with the with the neighborhood as well. So, that's something that we will consider in our evaluation, when redesigning the street. So thank you for bringing that up.
K. Thank you. Vice chair Cordello. Thank you. How do you click the speed data? I'm just wondering if there's something about it that makes people change their patterns of driving and maybe you're not capturing what's actually happening in normal circumstances. Commissioner Cardella and members of the Transportation Commission. We collect speed data with pneumatic tubes. So there is these tubes that are stretched across the width of the roadway. For speed data, we require two tubes at each location. That measures, when the tube was run over and, you know, calculating between the distance
between the tubes is how you get the speed of vehicles. Based on my experience, I I have not noticed people slowing down for the tubes because they don't necessarily know what they are. Or, again, that's that's from what I've seen in this whole data collection process from the NTNP. I don't think that I think it makes sense maybe why somebody would think that. But, it's our most effective tool that we have in collecting and collecting data.
Thank you, vice chair Cordell. I have a couple of questions. So, again, just to be clear, what we're voting on tonight is just to move forward with a petition process. The petition may fail. If we approve, the petition still may fail, and we may find out from both streets that they don't want traffic hauling. Chair Wilcoxon, that is correct. So we have not done the petition process yet, and that is certainly an outcome that could happen. The 77th Street 1, came, I will say, from a singular citizen request.
Whereas the Palm Lane 1, we've had several residents approach us, about their support for continued speed mitigation on this street. And so, I believe that there's overwhelming support on that street as we move forward. Thank you. And then the, you talked about the petition boundary on 77th, but what would the petition boundary look like about how many homes would be affected on Palm? Chair Wilcoxson, unfortunately, I don't have the number of homes, but it's essentially every home that the driveway is connecting to Palm Lane within within that street segment.
So if their house is oriented towards the side street, we wouldn't require their signature on on the form. If I had to guess, it's maybe 20 houses. Okay. Alright. Thank you. And then if these petitions are successful, would the final design come back to this committee for, consideration? Chair Wilcoxon, that is correct. In the NTNP policy, it outlines that prior to construction, we bring the, design to commission for final approval.
So, once design is complete and we're ready for that step, we'll we'll come back here and and present the design to to you all for your approval. Thank you. And then, following up on a comment that commissioner Davis made, about the source of the traffic. I I think you're probably correct. I think it's probably cut through traffic, but that's just a theory right now. Is there any, would there be any follow-up studies to determine through a license plate study maybe who or where the residents who are in those cars live? Chair Wilcoxon, I do not believe that we have the ability, or the technology to
do that at that moment. As far as I know, we don't necessarily have origin destination data like that. I'm not sure, John, if you wanna speak to that. Chair Wilcoxson, commissioners, we haven't done that here in the city of Scottsdale, but I've done it in the city of Tempe. Typically, that is just a very small data sample. I'm I'm not sure if that's kinda determined the outcome of, the the, you know,
origin and destination, but we can certainly do that if that's needed by the transportation commission. I understand. Thank you. And then the final question, and I'm a little bit concerned about the fact that we've put, traffic calming in on Palm and then had it taken out, and now we're petitioning again to put it back in. And that just gives me pause to the amount of money that we're spending, on this regardless of the reasons why it was put in or taken out, that could
happen again in the future. Is that correct? Chair Wilcoxson and members of the Transportation Commission, that that is something that can happen again. So, as I mentioned, this the NTMP is very resident led. If the residents are in support and the data goes along with it, then we will construct it. If the residents are not in support, regardless of the data, we we take it out. If the residents aren't happy with the side islands, because of flooding to their front yard.
We try to only have devices out that are a benefit to the community. We didn't take out the chokers in terms of completely eliminate them. We came up with a solution to mitigate the drainage issues while still keeping the essence of the traffic combing effort. So that that's kinda specific to the to the choker situation. But, as I mentioned, we haven't determined yet whether the devices will be supplemental or replacing the current devices currently in place.
But, I believe that the the speed cushions or whatever traffic calming devices we decide to go with will be a benefit to the community that, they are in support of. Thank you. And thank you for your presentation. Any other comments or questions? K. So, again, the if you could put up the recommendations. Yes. We have two recommendations. Do we need to vote on those separately, or can we just package them all at once? Or That is a great question. I would prefer them separately Okay. Since they are pretty distinct and isolated areas.
But, not to simplify oversimplify, but both of these are requesting that we just proceed with the petition process. So with that, I will, I will, look for a motion for, the first item. Point point of order? Yes. We are we are voting to grant a variance. That's correct. Okay. And that variance is for petitioning. Right. Okay. So I'm looking for a motion for the first. I I move that we approve item one of the recommending recommended actions proposed by
staff. Thank you, commissioner Marmon. We have a we have a, a nomination. We have a second. Second. Thank you, commissioner Koftaile. We have a, first and a second. We do we need a roll call vote for this or just, I think I'll do a roll call for Okay. Things. That's fun. So chair Wilcoxon? Approved. Vice chair Cardella? Yes. Commissioner Marmon? Yes. Commissioner Pinkowitz? Yes. Commissioner Koftow? Approved. Commissioner Davis. Approved. And commissioner Baker. Yes. All approved. Great. Thank you. Now we're also now looking for the same, variance to proceed with petitioning on Palm
Lane between 68th And 70th Street. Do I have a motion for that item? Commissioner Baker. I move we grant a variance to the NTMP warranty criteria for Palm have Palm Lane from 68th Street to 70th Street. Thank you. We have a first, we have a second. Second. Thank you, mister Davis. Alright. Chair Wilcox? Yes. Vice chair Cardella? Yes. Commissioner Marmon? Yes. Commissioner Pinkowitz? Yes. Commissioner Koftau? Yes. Commissioner Davis? Yes. And commissioner Baker?
Yes. All in favor? Great. Thank you. Motion carries and thank you for the, both the city staff and the residents who came in to, make their opinions known. We appreciate your time and your, your effort. Thank you. Alright. So we are now moving on to item number four, bike month update. I see Susan is not here, but, Nathan, you will be presenting for us. Susan has had a family emergency, and so I will be substituting in for Susan. So I'll give an update on we are at the middle of bike month.
We've got two major events coming up that the city puts on yearly, and I'll give a update and a brief explanation as to why we do this and what benefits we see from it. So as an overview, April is the Valley's bike month. It began in the nineteen eighties as a bike to work day. And in 2025 2005, it grew to a full month. Valley Metro partners with the cities in Maricopa County to put on promotional events as in Share the Ride where they print materials, give out challenges as well as free
T shirts stickers designed by artists. They've tried and promote and encourage biking as well as using transit throughout this month. And then for the city, we have two events that we've put on regularly for a good while now. I'm assuming the slide is going to say it, but Scottsdale Of The Arts is on its twentieth year anniversary and Bike to Work Day is approaching around that same around time frame where we do this yearly to encourage this. It is promoted on the Web page, press releases, social media, Scottsdale updates and e bus. We're We're trying to get the word out and get people to do both the
Valley Metro events as well as our own internal events. Cycle of the Arts began in 2006, doing quick math that is twenty years and partnered with Public Art staff, board members and artists to encourage a family friendly activity to go around certain areas of the city, try and keep the distance at a reasonable length to go and both get out, ride your bikes, but also see some of the good public artwork collections that we have throughout the city. So, pre ride safety talk is done, then we promote helmet use, small groups with
ride leaders. I think for a couple of years at the beginning, we did one large group, found that ineffective for both the ride experience as well as the listening to the artist or the discuss the art staff talk about the art. There's a strong push to have the artists themselves come out and present their artwork, which is always a great scene to see somebody who is passionate about the thing that is out there really talk about it. Scottsdale Public Art is also passionate about when they go and talk to it.
So they give really great presentations at each one of the little stations and you can really get a good perspective as to these pieces that we see every day and get a really close-up look. Highlight new and notable projects. So recent art program and extensive public art collection as well as our capital improvement program. We try and also, since we have you there, try and show a little bit more of the other features that the city is doing as well as discuss that all art is on with. And then in 2020 and 2022, 2020 and 2021, we had in the middle of
COVID, we had to cancel the in person events but then started to offer in 2021 the self guided option where over 90 people downloaded the route map. And we still do upload the route on the website. So if somebody doesn't want to or the attendance is full for the event, they can go and do the ride themselves and see the art through the same similar ride for a different weekend. Bike to Work Day history, 2018 and 2019 expanded the event, to the shops at Vista Del Camino, Regroup Coffee, One Civic, Mountain View Park.
We give out T shirts, drinks, breakfast snacks. There are sponsors. We get staff can't host all these booths, so we ask and encourage some community businesses will host stations for us. So we have about five stations strategically placed throughout the city to collect as many commuters as possible as they're going to work on the days. And 2020 was canceled for a similar for the similar reason. 2023, the bike to work or whatever day was encouraged with the shops at Vista
Del Camino, ASU Sky Song one Civic. Crosscut Canal Path at Oak Street. And those are the similar locations that we have now. The, Crosscut Canal, The Vista Del Camino Park one is relocating because of the construction that's happening right now at the park. So it's going to either Miller or down a little further south, and that should be out on the map.
Tour to Scottsdale is also an event. It's already happened, but it is an event that has come back to Scottsdale through bike month. It was on March 28, 3,000 riders in support of the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy. It had a 62 mile metric century and a 32 mile 0.5 metric century route. So significantly longer routes than we have for our Cycle of the Arts, which will be a 10 mile route. Cycle of the Arts will be Sunday, April 19.
So this Sunday, it will be up in North Scottsdale and will go start at the Arabian Library and go around North Scottsdale to some of the art that we do that we have up there. We don't do North Scottsdale very often. We have much more concentrated effort or concentrated amount of public art in the Old Town as well as the Southern Part of Scottsdale. So that's usually where it is, but we try to make a conservative effort to
get up there every five or six years to show that art as well. Then Scottsdale Bike to Work Day is Wednesday, April 22. And then for more information, you can always go to www.scottsdaleaz.gov and search biking and find these events. I don't know if Cycle of the Arts is full yet, but Susan put this image in at the last second to humble me, that we did a promotion of
the event on twelve News this Tuesday because we still had spots still available. So hopefully, they got the word out and the spots have been filled up. But we did expand, so we haven't lost, people who come to this event. We still have the frequent flyers and the new people. So we've increased the amount of people we wanted to attend this year. We usually do about 100. We went to about 150 this year because it is the twentieth anniversary and we wanted to get a little extra on Finn this year's one.
So we still had spots available on Tuesday. Maybe we have a couple more, or hopefully, we got the message out and filled all the spots. So it will be Sunday, April 19, from seven a. M. To about eleven a. M, depending on how fast we ride. Nine art installations with seven stops. It'll be a 10 mile route in North Scottsdale from the Arabian Library. It will highlight, we will be highlighting Citi partners. The artwork that you see on the screen is designed by a local artist. We do this every year where a local artist will compete and then we'll get
awarded the chance to do the sticker and the T shirt. So that is what is on the stick on the T shirt and the stickers. And then we will also have the interactive self guiding tour, like I said, online for anybody who is not available to attend. Bike to Work week will be a Bike to Work Day or wherever day will be April 22 from seven a. M. To 08:30 a. M. There will be the similar five bike stops, with T shirts, stickers, breakfast snacks and new Discovery Scottsdale urban oasis maps.
We have been printing these out for a couple of years now. They're very well received. They fold in and out very easily. We've purchased a new batch of them, so we'll be happy to hand them out to everybody who is interested in knowing where all of our active transportation infrastructure is and how they can get around the city easily using a bike. So the locations are going to be Indian Bendwash Path at Vista Del Camino Park, South Of Roosevelt. It's going to be probably a little bit more further south because of the construction.
Like I said, ASU Sky Song, the Civic Center along 75th Street, cross the Canal Path at Oak. And then if you haven't gotten tired of listening to me, I will most likely be at Mountain View Park along Indemn Wash as well for this event. Next steps, present to the Hazen Trail Subcommittee, April 2. That was completed. So we did give all this information to the subcommittee, celebrate by month with all of our riders. We'll have a debrief meeting as soon as this month is over and then start
planning for 2077. We'll begin we'll give ourselves a couple of months and then get ready for the next April that will come up next year and the twenty first anniversary for of Saigo of the Arts. Opportunity to for an art ride along Canal Convergence in November, We've been talking about this for a while. Maybe we'll have the energy and the enthusiasm to do a art ride in November as well as April, but we shall see. So I'll open up for discussion and questions. Thank you, Nathan. You you've done Susan proud.
I hope so. Commissioners, do we have any questions? Alright. Thank you very much. Alright. Moving on to, projects and programs update also by Nathan. This time playing Nathan. That's why I officially by me. So going into our progress and programs update, some highlights of projects that are starting, the planning stages, some that are in design and then some that we've just recently completed to give you a full picture of what capital improvements we have been accomplishing. So starting with, we're about to start kicking off the Old Town Streetscape projects.
These are all bond projects that are phased to start some level of design and how we can incorporate some streetscape improvements throughout these quarters. You can see a map of where they are. I've put their corresponding bond number there. So 18 is 2nd Street from Drinkwater to Goldwater, 19 is Marshall Way, 20th is Main Street and the forty third is 5th Avenue.
2nd Street is in design. It's preliminary designed to 15% moving forward to 100% in the next coming months, about six or eight months, looking for bike and pedestrian advancements along 2nd Street, widening or repair sidewalks in places where needed, lighting analysis. And the goal is to create a better bicycle and pedestrian experience through this area of the Old Town. You can see some of the design being trying to improve the connection through the
parking lot next to the library and through the 2nd Street Drink Water intersection. So that is part of the preliminary design to improve that connection. This connection being a key, bike route from the Indian washed paths all the way to the canal paths. So this is one of the limiting spaces along the corridor for bikes to get
through. So any way we can make this flow a little bit easier, gets bikes in and out through this corridor as best as possible as well as then any other spot improvements we can make along the corridor. Marshall Way, this would be kicking off in the planning stages, but to create a consistent and enhanced pedestrian streetscape with similar things as 2nd Street to widen sidewalks, possibly new landscaping or pedestrian lighting through the area. Main Street, very similar as well, improving sidewalks, lighting, landscaping to enhance the pedestrian experience. And then 5th Avenue to enhance the streetscape, widening sidewalks, improve landscaping and improve pedestrian
lighting. That all sounds similar. That's because that's the bond language. That is what it is entailed to try and incorporate in all three of those. And so we will kick those off and start looking to go into the design phases and incorporate improvements to those four quarters, one being already in design, the rest being in the planning stages and moving those forward. We'll keep bringing updates to this commission as we move forward in that process. Cactus Trail enhancement project, this is moving on to the construction phase.
There will be a public meeting, shortly in the remaining part of the spring. There will be a Phase I and Phase II. Based on budgetary options now, we might merge those two options to get those two phases together and complete it all in one phase, install a two tier unfinished steel fence on the South side of Cactus Road as in identified locations. This was a citizen, petition and request that we put some safety features for horses.
This trail is used by horse riders throughout this corridor and to limit people parking on the trail. So a twofold thing. The original request was for a wooden fence, but for maintenance issues, we went for a aesthetic looking fence that would look like a wooden fence but still have the long term maintenance effects of a steel fence. Construction should start '6. So in the upcoming months, we should start construction. 68th Street sidewalk, we finished our last round of individual meetings with the homeowners along
68th Street. We're nearing completion of the design. This will add a new sidewalk connection from 68 from Indian School all the way up to Camelback, to tie into the sidewalk right next to, the Optima, development right there. This is probably one of the last gaps of sidewalks that are in the Old Town area. This entire community lacks the sidewalk infrastructure. There's also some improvements that we've been able to make while adding the sidewalk.
If you can see, the image I showed was from Lafayette and 68th. And we've been able to bring the curbs in, straighten out the road a little bit and align the car a little bit more to the 90 degree angle. So when they're that turn on the 68th, they're aligned in the right location to not kind of edge out into 68th as it was when the curb was that wide and rounded. It also is going along with a storm drain pipe that's going down the middle and then some pavement improvements.
So a pretty holistic change to 68th Street should start '6 and get that sidewalk in to finish that gap and improve that pedestrian connection. In Midland Wash Path renovations, we recently completed the section of north and south of Osborne, widening that path from the eight foot 30 year old path to now a brand new 10 foot path. The next segments are along the McCormick Ranch sections, so north and south of the Via Linda and north and south of Via De Ventura.
And construction should start '6 as well, widening that from the eight foot to the 10 foot and 12 foot in certain locations to our current standards. So very excited for that one to get going and finish that off. This is a very high volume for pedestrian and bikes area for our multiuse pass and widening that out will make a significant difference for that traffic. Pima Villalinda to McDowell Roadway widening will be completed by the '6. SRPMIC is leading this.
It'll get us to four lanes, medians, bike lanes along the quarter as well as landscaping. This has been a long time coming, but now we will have that ultimate configuration of four lanes all the way up to Via Linda. And then the dirt road paving, this project was completed this spring, constructing three inches asphalt paving to match the existing grade and alignment of three miles of unpaved roads up in North Scottsdale, Via Donna, Black Cross, Granite Reef, Peakview and Smokehouse Trail to we had a federal grant for this for dust mitigation, but also the community was
looking to have paved roads through their communities. And now that has been completed. As I mentioned during Susan's presentation that I gave, the Discover Scottsdale Urban Oasis map was recently updated, and we're printing for this these upcoming two events that will be in the April. So we'll be handing those out. The map is also online for if you search bikes and includes the active transportation network as well as the regional park system.
So a comprehensive look at where people can hike, bike, walk and even ride horses throughout our community. So we have the unpaved trails there, we have the multiuse paths, the bike lanes and anywhere that you would like to go throughout the community with our active transportation infrastructure. And I wanted to talk a little bit about the repaving, restriping program for the spring season. This is a collaboration effort between Street Ops, Traffic Engineering and Transportation Planning.
Is in order to win Street Ops goes out and repaves any of the roads, they will ablate clear out all of the striping. This is our opportunity to bring it up to current standards, modify the lines where possible, add buffered bike lanes where bike lanes were possible as well. These are two examples from the fall season where we had Hunter Street, Cactus Road, Sweetwater added buffer bike lanes and 68th Place North Of Shea added one bike lane on the east side of the road.
Elaine has left, but she is I want to give her credit that she has done a phenomenal job taking this on and leading this effort. And so for the spring season, these are the notable changes to the striping that has been made. So the completed projects so far in the spring season have been the, Pariso Drive, 91st Street from Pima Road to Pinnacle Peak Road, added buffered bike lanes to the existing bike lanes. 91st And 94th Street between Bell And Legacy added buffered bike lanes to those that
striping as well. Happy Valley Road from Homa School to 112th Place, added bicycle lanes. So it was a very tight squeeze to get the bike lanes in there, and we were able to get at least that connection through there. Cholla Street 108th To Via Linda added bicycle buffered bicycle lanes as well. So some pretty good improvements and connections that were made. The remaining restriping plans that have been made but are going to be done through the spring season, 94th And Dowling Olsen Drive, Union Hills to Pima Road is adding
buffered bicycle lanes as well. Miller Williams Drive to Pinnacle Peak Road is adding a buffered bicycle lane. And then Thompson Peak, Hayden To Pima Road is widening the existing bicycle lane. So all modifications to the striping. And once again, now she's here, kudos to Helane for, taking this on and finishing all of this for us. So with that, any questions or comments about these projects? Any questions? Commissioner Koftau? So for when you went down some of the changes that you were making, the
2nd Street updates on there, that goes around the library, kind of around the parking garage, there's a sign when you come off of 2nd Street that says no bicycle or roller blades or whatever, just as you're coming up, is that going to be removed? Because that's a little confusing, I guess, if we want people to cycle in that area around the library and the parking garage. It's a sign that says it right in we had this existing ramp up this
way. It says no biking or roller blades up. On the other side. On the other side, this right over here? Yeah. Yeah. I think so. Is that the parking garage right? It's like that the the thing that the green line's going around. What This is the parking garage right here. So it's to the to the right. So as you're coming in off the 2nd Street the other way. This way. Yeah. So when you're coming when when you're heading west around there, there's a sign that says no no bikes or, you have to dismount your bike, no roller blades, skates
or skateboards allowed as you come up on the sidewalk there. If these changes are incorporated, we would look to see if we can change that sign because this would be looking to make this a bikeable Okay. Connection. Alright. Yeah. Okay. For the Marshall Way, I just wanted to give you kudos, for the including there was a, there was a cyclist in in your photo there, which I I appreciated. I could see him right there. Thanks. So thank thank you for that. On the Google Street View can be Google Street View can be thanked.
I didn't wait out there to find if there was a bicyclist. Okay. They were right there at the car. Perfect timing. For the you know, I'm, as somebody who uses, the Pima Road cycleway a lot, and the, the the gap in the I, at the path and trails, I mentioned that the, it's a couple more up, I think. Or next one. Wherever the Pima Road one was. That one. So they had, like, cut out a piece of the sidewalk at one point, and
it was, like, impossible to get around. You had to either walk the road or walk through some very thick bushes. That's been taken care of. I appreciate that. My next complaint is at, Indian Bend. There's a sidewalk, but as you are heading southbound, there it's all blocked off. So as a cyclist, you can't get to the sidewalk, and so you have to go into the road and it's a single lane. I rode on it this weekend. There's a, like, inch and a half lip, and so even though there's cutouts that
you can use to get to the cycle way, because of that one and a half inch lip, it you can't really ride onto it because you'll just you'll you'll crash if you take your and so, had a very angry drivers behind me. They were really upset about those twenty seconds of their lives that they're never gonna get back. And so I just wanted to mention that if they are going to block the ability to get to the sidewalk, to the cycle way, if they could, make sure
there is a way for people on bicycles to be able to get there because I I do appreciate the cutouts, but, since there's a giant lip, it just it is impossible. You have to dismount and then and then get up on it. And when there are drivers behind you angrily honking, it's it's a little it's not a little, it is very intimidating. So I just wanted to mention that, for the Pima. So and that's but other than that, I'm I I'm I'm excited for all these
updates and I look forward to the future updates on that. But that those are the things I saw when I was going down. Thank you. Thank you. Commissioner Koftaill? Commissioner Pangwitz. I wanted to echo your kudos to Helene. And it's not related to this, presentation, but she did a great job presenting the item, she did and answering all of our questions. Thank you. Commissioner Davis. I also had one comment to make on the, 2nd Street improvements, if you could flip to that slide. So also very excited about this. You know, it's a tricky situation, right, where you're transferring people off the multi use
pass system onto the roadway. It would be ideal, given the constraints of right of way and and and budget, if bicyclists who were going west didn't have to do a double cross there, I'm sure that has come up, but it would be great if they could only have to cross one time to continue proceeding, if possible. We have alternatives. As we go to a public meeting, we can still have those alternatives and show them. But it's challenging, but not yeah.
It's challenging, but I agree. It'd be it'd be better. Very good. Thank you. I just had a couple of couple of comments. First of all, I'm really excited about 68th Street Sidewalk. I remember as a commissioner that coming through, the neighborhood will be very happy about that. And I assume that the curb radiuses that we're talking about are as small as we can make them without deviating from standard. Yeah. I would say with standard. Yeah. Okay. And then the other question I had, and maybe this is, none of these locations are, appropriate, but I know that we talked a lot about ebikes and trying to
figure out a way to kind of get them out of the traffic out of the, pedestrian and other bicycle traffic. I'm wondering if one of these projects, and I'm primarily thinking about the 2nd Street project, would be a good place to, maybe attempt some creative new and creative signing to try and see if it works. Just to see if we can start separating the, e bike traffic. Just a thought.
I know you have to go through FHWA for any kind of sign changes, but it's just a thought. And since we have these projects, it might be a good opportunity. So you would, just to follow-up, you would think of a separate look area for them or or No. Not necessarily changing the plans here. Just maybe a new way to communicate with e bike riders to stay to stay one side of the, the path versus the other or just to start trying to differentiate, between the traffic.
I understand. Thank you. Thank you, chair Wilcoxson. Otherwise, thank you for the presentation. A lot of exciting work coming up, and I really appreciate it. Alright. So moving on to item number six, upcoming projects, project public meeting. And to present on that tonight, we have a mister Nathan Dome. Nathan, are you still here? I am still here. And maybe, the upcoming present commissions, we can have a more diverse group of present centers. I don't initially have a slide for this.
I know we have two public meetings coming up. They haven't been scheduled yet, so we can get the word out for the commission. We have the one for Cactus Trails. Like I mentioned, that we'll have a public meeting for the community out in the next coming month. And then also, we have one for the Thompson Peak Bridge project to add an additional bridge over, by D. C. Ranch. That public meeting should be coming up in the next couple of months as well. So those are our two biggest public meetings coming up. We'll keep the Commission informed as those come up.
So this is a new effort that we're trying to make to inform the Commission of any public meetings that are coming up related to transportation projects, and we'll get a slide and keep the commission informed of when we're having project public meetings. Thank you, Nathan. I appreciate that. Any comments from, commissioner Koftau? So we're on the tentative future items or is that no? We're still on the public meetings. Any comments about that?
Oh, no. No. Sorry. Okay. Now, we're moving on to item number seven. Potential transportation commission identification of future agenda items. Any suggestions? Commissioner Koftile. So I'm I was looking over the information, in past years. There's been a presentation about the trolley use, during spring training. I didn't see it on on here, so I just, I'm always curious how how the trolley if that's if that was used. I, from our from our third item, with the definition of, like, homes that that,
abut the street, I was wondering if we could get a more detailed information about how that's determined. Because when I was looking at the Palm Lane houses versus the 77th, houses, like, the parking for Palm Lane is all it's not like all all the houses face Palm Lane, but there's no, like, parking there for them. Their their parking is all behind the house on, like, side streets or things like that, which is looks to me like the same situation that the homes on 77th
have where, like, you know, there's they're they're face they're just facing each other instead of facing the road, but there's still everybody has to get to their driveway. They all have to go through 77th or go on Palm Lane. And so I think, you know, maybe I I don't know if there's a way to update that definition or make it clearer or see what the spirit of it is because I I I I think the people whose homes, you know, sit next to the road even if their driveways don't point there, I think, you know, they they I I think there's room for a update to that.
So I don't know if that's something that can be here. Chair chair chair Wilcoxon's comments about ebikes or eMotos. I I would be really interested to know. I don't know if it's possible, but if there's a way to track them. Because just from my, just from my own anecdotal view of things, I've noticed writing now that they're I guess since the new, the new Scottsdale law got passed, I've
seen a lot I'm seeing less people I'm seeing less kids riding their e motorcycles on the multi use path, and I'm seeing them in the road. And it's a little weird to see, like, a 13 year old on a e motorcycle, even though it's got pedals, riding in the road. But, it I am seeing that there is a change, and I'm just wondering if there's anything the city can do to look at the effects of the usage of the you know, I know we there was gonna be that plan to track how many people were going under, Indian school and in that kinda area.
And I'm just, for a potential speed limit. I'm just wondering if there's anything the city can do to check, how how eMotos are being used these days, since that. And then, and then, my first year on the commission, we went to, we went to the traffic control headquarters, you know, the place up there with the lot. And I'm just, we didn't do it last year, and I'm just wondering if, if that might be something that could be added because that was that was a lot
of fun, and I really enjoyed going there. So, those those are my potential ones. And then I guess also, you know, just if since we're talking about speed bumps, like, you know, you you've heard me talk about before on Oak when the speed bump went into the bike lane. So if we do put in speed cushions or, or any kind of, you know, things like that, if they can maybe not go in the bike lanes because it makes riding in those uncomfortable for for a bicyclist, you know, and we're only going
like 15 you know, 10 to 20 miles an hour. So thank you. Mhmm. Thank you, commissioner Koftow. Commissioner Marmon. Thank you. I'd like to suggest, the city's experience with, Waymo. I mean, are there problems? How was it approved? I'd like, suggest also that this neighborhood traffic management plan, we've this has come up a lot, but I don't think we've had a discussion of the plan itself.
And I think that would be good for understanding the plan and also understanding current maintenance of traffic excuse me, wrong, Traffic calming techniques that are used. This just seems to be a recurring item that we have. And I had a third one, but I don't see it. So I'll go with those two. Thank you, commissioner Marmon. Commissioner Penkowitz. To echo Commissioner Koftel's, concern regarding this direct residential access, because that stayed in my
head too, and I'm wondering if you may have an equity, issue if you're only allowing single family homes to petition and not multifamilies. And I if the intent is for the device to go on the right road classification, then it should be a road classification, issue, with residential being single family and multifamily. And to commissioner Marmon's points, something that I've been thinking about because as he said,
it keeps coming up. I'm wondering if once we have the, safety plan completed, If there is a way to rank these, cut through streets in terms of serious and fatal collisions, and even, like, minor collisions if we have enough, as a way to develop a CIP for these, roadways where people continue to where where we continue to see issues.
Those were my two items. Thank you. Commissioner Banquets. Yes. Commissioner Davis. I was reading a, a press bulletin the city put out about some of the upcoming, spring, preservation, work that was gonna be done on our roadways, and it was talking about all the different types of treatments we apply. I might be interested in a presentation about, you know, melanovolay versus this liquid road versus other treatments and, how that ties into measuring our PCI and, you know, what kind of benefits we can expect from that and perhaps some of the costs. Thank you.
Thank you, commissioner Davis. Any other suggestions? Okay. And certainly, if you see any or think of any later, you can always, email myself or the, city staff. With that, that brings us to the end of our agenda. Our next meeting is scheduled for May 21. I will not be here for that meeting, in all likelihood, so it'll be chaired by vice chair Cardella. So thank you for doing that in advance. For this meeting, I'm looking for a motion to adjourn.
So moved. Do we have a second? Second. Okay. We have a motion and a second. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed say nay. Alright. The ayes have it. Thanks, everyone. Have a great evening. Drive safe on your way.