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HomeMy WebLinkAbout02/23/2012 HOUSING/TRANSPORTATION/ENERGY CONSERVATION & EFFICIENCY COMMITTEEMINUTES HOUSING / TRANSPORTATION / ENERGY CONSERVATION & EFFICIENCY COMMITTEE WORKSHOP February 23, 2012 A workshop of the Housing / Transportation / Energy Conservation & Efficiency Committee of the Council of the County of Kaua`i, State of Hawai`i, was called to order by JoAnn A. Yukimura, Chair, at the Council Chambers, 4396 Rice Street, Suite 201, Lihu`e, Kaua`i, on Wednesday, February 23, 2012, at 8:49 a.m., after which the following members answered the call of the roll: Honorable Dickie Chang Honorable Nadine K. Nakamura Honorable JoAnn A. Yukimura (excused at 9:46 a.m.) Honorable Tim Bynum, Ex- Officio Member Honorable Jay Furfaro, Ex- Officio Member Excused: Honorable KipuKai Kuali`i Honorable Mel Rapozo The Housing / Transportation / Energy Conservation & Efficiency Committee of the County of Kauai will be holding a non - decision making informal workshop regarding the progress of the Kaua`i Multimodal Land Transportation Plan in conjunction with the County of Kaua`i Transportation Agency, and their consultant, Charlier Associates. Committee Chair Yukimura: Let the record reflect that all members are present with the exception of our Vice Chair KipuKai Kuali`i, who really regretted not being here, and also Mel Rapozo, who are...both of them are excused. Welcome, Celia, Jim, we are really glad to have you and eager to learn about the progress on the plan and if you would state your names for the record and start. CELIA MAHIKOA: Good morning, my name is Celia Mahikoa; I am the Executive on Transportation. JIM CHARLIER: My name is Jim Charlier. I am with Charlier Associates, Boulder, Colorado, and we are the contractor on the plan. Ms. Mahikoa: I just wanted to start off by thanking you so much for giving us this opportunity to be here this morning to provide an update. Recalling back to October when we provided the initial update for Council being requested that we come and provide an update as we made more progress on the plan. We are currently in our second round of community meetings getting feedback from the public on the elements that are to be included in the plan, and we wanted to provide you with the current status, and at the same time laying the groundwork for us wrapping it up and asking to have it completed and adopted in April or May, so within the next couple of months. Thank you. Mr. Charlier: Thank you very much for making time for us this week. This is our second briefing, and the subjects that we will go over HTE Informational Workshop 2 February 23, 2012 are...primarily just bring you up to date on the project, but also, we are at a point where we can sort of see some of the choices we think the County has, and we want to focus on those a little bit, so I will move to the technical detail pretty quickly to give you time to give us direction on some of these more what we are calling choices. Just to review, we held our first round of workshops in August. We reported to you on those in October. We did a travel demand survey both online and on paper that we had a good response to. We did an onboard bus survey since we have talked to you. We have been meeting with local groups, and... Let me tell you about each one of these. I am really glad we have done our workshops the way that we have been doing them. Instead of doing a single workshop somewhere in Lihu`e or whatever, we have been doing five each round, and I think that is great because it gives us a smaller group, and it is a lot more intimate, and we can talk story back and forth and sit and listen to each other, and that has really been useful. We have also found that even though there are a lot of similarities across the island in what people are concerned about, there are differences from district to district, and we are able to pull those out by doing the smaller meetings. Our travel patterns survey, you will start to see some of the data. The entire report is up online and on our website, and so you can download that and read it if you would like. It has been up for a while. A number of citizens coming to our meetings have indicated that they have read through it. I do not want to present the data. We talked a little bit about it in October, and there is not time to do that, but a couple of key things that we learned: 1) the island today is more than I would have guessed, not being from here, can be characterized as people commuting in and out of Lihu`e to work. That is 65% of the people who live on the island are working in Lihu`e. I would not have guessed that, but now that I have looked at the data, it makes sense. So we have a commute pattern that is very directional. If you where in flat lands somewhere, it would be a hub and spoke system, but it is an island, so it is more of a ring road system. We also... this is something that we have spent some time; we went out and did some more research on once we saw the trend. The islandwide average is a little misleading. You have people on the Westside and on the North Shore who are commuting or traveling about 50 miles per day per household. It is an issue because the average islandwide transportation expenditure per year at the household level is 15 thousand dollars, and it is higher than that on the Westside and North Shore. For modest income families, that combined with their rent or their mortgage is...I am sure a high percentage of those families are spending more than 50 percent of the family income on housing plus transportation, and the research done nationally indicates that households that are spending more than 50 percent on those two items are households that are being stressed by those costs. We will talk a little more about that in a second. The onboard bus survey is a different look. It is where we talk to people who actually ride the bus, and we get advice from them. We had volunteers who did our survey work for us. We actually interviewed people on the busses and at the bus stops. Again, the Kaua`i Bus today is moving people in and out of Lihu`e. To a large degree, that is how the system is functioning; you probably all knew that from riding it yourselves. When we asked people what is most important (this is pretty much what we would expect): service frequency, fares (because a lot of the people ride the bus, the cost of the fare is significant), and the stop locations, and so forth. When we asked what would you like us to do? Interesting there is ratification of the administration's ongoing effort to put shelters at bus stops, but again, more frequent service on the weekend shows up, and interestingly notice that third item HTE Informational Workshop 3 February 23, 2012 safer sidewalks and crosswalks; this is something we noticed when we came on island. The citizens are saying it back to us. They are concerned about it too. Many of your bus stops, even some of the better bus stops, are hard for people to actually get to; they have to cross the highway and so forth. So all of those things have solutions. When I started working on this project I said I would meet with anybody who would meet with me, and so a lot of people have taken us up on that. I need to add the school district to this because we met with administration yesterday. We have had a lot of meetings. We were at the Farm Bureau County Fair; we probably saw some of you people there. We had a presence at HCPO last fall, and we have been on the radio, and the folks at KONG were really nice to us. We were on there Saturday morning and they have been plugging our public workshops ever since. It has been great. We have done a couple of special things for the transit agency as part of the project that were not originally scoped. One is, I have advised County Transit Agency and I will advise you that I think it is fairly urgent that the Kauai Bus get off of diesel as quickly as possible. I initially said...told Celia, I think you need to be off of diesel by next year, but of course that is not possible, and so we have written a report for her and I think that either is or will be available online that goes through all the potential alternative fuel sources, discusses what is feasible and what is not. You have done a lot of work on- island already; we used all that information as well. The bottom line seems to me to be this, I think that the Kaua`i Bus could get off diesel in about 10 years. Now that seems like forever, I realize, but it is actually extremely ambitious. The most viable thing for them to consider doing on- island would be biodiesel, but there are issues with biodiesel. There are issues with any of these fuel sources. Battery buses would not work. The characteristics of your service here is that you are running commuter service over the highways. Batteries work well in local circulation, so you could use a battery bus for your Lihu`e circulator maybe or something like that, but it is not the ultimate answer. I guess this is not a criticism, it is more an observation, but Kaua`i and the State of Hawaii to some degree were all over the place on what are alternative fuels ... there is hydrogen things going on, there is compressed natural gas, you guys all know this I am sure. What we have said is the Kauai Bus cannot scale up on its own. You cannot run the Kaua`i Bus on French fry grease. You have got to have a supplier, hopefully more than one supplier, so there is competition on the supply side, so that we can get prices down, but it is only 60 to 70 busses and it is not enough scale to become "the market." So you need the 1.4 million people of Hawaii to scale whatever you are going to do up, and if we are trying to do everything at once, I am not sure how quickly that is going to work. Hydrogen is the direction the Big Island is going, but frankly, I am skeptical that hydrogen can be cost feasible. The bottom bullet on this screen says, "transit is highly cost - sensitive," I will come back to that point in a minute, but something that doubles the fuel price for Kaua`i Bus is not solving the problem. Right now hydrogen is at about a 100 times the fuel cost of diesel, so it is a challenge. We have offered recommendations. We are not just giving you a problem. We are trying to give you a pathway to a solution as well. We have described the idea that the transit agency could go through a two -step process, an interim solution, and a long -term solution, because your average bus life right now is about five years, and so that would give you two sort of generalized purchasing sequences that you could sort of go through. All of this makes the Administration nervous, because it is daunting to know how to make that work, but we can come back to that if you have questions or comments. HTE Informational Workshop 4 February 23, 2012 I showed you these in October, so I do not want to dwell on them again, but we have had a good planning process. We started with goals and objectives, worked our way through measurements...how we are going to measure outcomes. Ultimately, there will be performance measures in the transportation plan, and the goals are what you would expect them to be. They are all the things we would expect. What we did, and this is new information, the people who came to our workshops, and in our discussion with you we learned the same thing, said we do not really want the character of Kaua`i to change a lot. We think that it is one of the most wonderful things about Kaua`i is that it is still rural, and it is two -lane roads, the scenery dominates, and it is not like the Kona Coast with the six -lane highways and just the industrial feel that that creates. People felt that that was valuable that we should retain that. That is pretty much how your current General Plan reads. Planning staff has confirmed that they think in the General Plan Update cycle that that general sense of vision and mission that the island has, the County has, it's probably not going to change that much. The numbers and the details change, but you have sort of arrived at your view of what you want the island to be. But then people also said, however, we are really frustrated about the traffic congestion; we would like you to do something about the traffic congestion. You all realize the dilemma that presents, and so we sort of accepted the challenge, and we said alright how do you do that, and the idea that we are putting forward for discussion is that admittedly the level of traffic congestion out there today is for many people probably unacceptable, but what if there were no further increase in traffic? Would that be possible? How would you do that? How would you accomplish that? Technically, it is feasible, and we will talk a little about it. So the measure we use to describe that is "Vehicle Miles Traveled ". We can estimate that on a daily basis, on an annual basis, for statewide, and for the County. I am sure you have this background, but historically since World War II VMT ( "Vehicle Miles Traveled ") has grown in nationwide and in Hawai`i until 2006. Starting in about 2006, nationally VMT leveled off; we had a couple years of decline, and we have not seen it begin to resurge yet. The "Vehicle Miles Traveled" on the mainland is still at about 2006 levels. Hawai`i's VMT has continued to grow through that time period, but not at the rate that it historically had, and on Kaua`i your vehicles miles of travel per capita has actually begun to drop. So we said, what if you had no further growth in "Vehicle Miles Traveled ", what would it take to get there? The way we are structuring these scenarios is to keep it simple and to allow you to deal with a fairly complex set of data, but make choices, is we are presenting a baseline scenario which is just the trend, what has been the trajectory that you have been on, and what if that continued to 2035, and we are showing an interim year of 2020, and then a preferred scenario which we are driving entirely off of this premise of what if there were no further growth in traffic? Obviously your per capita "Vehicle Miles Traveled" would go down...of vehicular travel would go down. The per capita personal travel would stay on the trend or be somewhat below trend. The objective is not to have people unable to gain access to the goods and services, and activities, and opportunities that they need. We want people to have all of that and even more, but to be able to drive less to achieve that. The variable that comes in to play is this variable that we call mode share, which is what percentage of daily trips are made by each mode? This shows a preferred scenario; if I showed you the baseline scenario, all three pie charts would be the same. The preferred scenario would say that the mode share in 2020 and 2035 would be the same as it is today, so we do not need to show you that graphic, we will just show you the preferred, which starts with the mode shares today based on our research. It shows what it would HTE Informational Workshop 5 February 23, 2012 need to be in 2020 and in 2035 to achieve that objective of no net growth in VMT over the time period. Now this is a little bit of a quantitative exercise, but it validates a lot of things that people are saying. (1) There is a lot of demand locally to be able to walk and bike within communities for the shorter trips, children and adults, and this would lead us in that direction, and to some degree we would be responding to that existing demand. We would not be trying to push demand in a certain direction; we would be responding to it —a demand that already exists. Same for transit, the ridership on the Kaua`i Bus has been growing very rapidly, exceeding the rate of growth you have been able to achieve with the service itself. They are trying to keep up, but it is not going to be easy, and so there again, I like the feel of this plan compared to some of the ones that we worked on over the years, because we can be responding to demand pretty much throughout this 25 -year cycle. We are not trying to drive demand, we are not trying to push people in the direction that they do not want to go. We are just trying to keep up with the demand that is out there, and if we do that, in our opinion you will be able to achieve this idea of no net increase in long -term traffic. The punch line of course is that it requires a very significant ramp up in transit service to about ten times what it is today. Now that is over twenty -five years, so even with a flat percentage increase, it is two to three percent per year. Does not sound like that much, but it is extremely ambitious and challenging, and it is especially challenging financially, and I will come back to that in a second. What do we think about a 19,000 daily transit rides on an island that has maybe a hundred thousand people in 2035? That is not a surprising number. It is a robust number, but it is not out of character with other transit - oriented cities around the country. Committee Chair Yukimura: Can you repeat what you just said? Mr. Charlier: I was just trying to give you a sense of the scale. If you had 18,000 rides per day, does that seem reasonable given a population of what you will have in 2035, and I think the answer is yes. It would be 3.6 percent mode share, which is below what we have in Boulder today. It would be high relative to most of the metropolitan areas of the country, but it would be low relative to the most urban parts of those metropolitan areas. Just to give you a sense of the feasibility overall. Is this crazy? Is it reasonable? It is entirely reasonable. It is expensive, but it is reasonable. All sorts of benefits accrue from that. The benefit part of this plan will be great to write, because for one thing, the motor fuel consumption goes down both gross and per capita. We think that is one of the most urgent policy issues for Kaua`i is imported petroleum. You are at the end of a very long supply chain, and you are already paying a dollar a gallon more than we are in the Mainland. Diesel prices will go up faster than gas prices. Fuel is 15 percent of the Kaua`i Bus's budget. If fuel doubles, they have got to cut services 15 percent, which will be pretty dramatic, so it is an issue. Driving the per capita dependence on imported petroleum down is obviously a good thing. We think Hawai`i is not the cause of the world's greenhouse gas problem, but you have a role in solving that problem, and you are actually more the victims of it than anything else, but still we do want a report on that. We do want to show how that performance would look. We also have, in our look at the accident data from the island, in our conversations with people around the island, and with your really, really, excellent Public Works staff that is very focused on these issues now, we think that you should articulate some safety objectives and actually work to achieve them. We think rather than just sort of fretting about safety, let us actually set some targets and try to achieve them. So we have proposed an improvement, HTE Informational Workshop 6 February 23, 2012 obviously by not having "Vehicle Miles Traveled" increase, theoretically your overall accident performance would stay somewhat the same as it is today, but we do not think that is good enough. We think you should actually try to decrease it. And as you will see when we get to the programs, we are actually proposing that you target some spot safety improvements based on what your accident data is telling you, and that is good design. I think it is good engineering, and Public Works staff is very interested in making that work. Another side benefit, this is an interesting thing I think for you, we did some research to sort of make sure that this was right. People of Hawai`i today are more active than their counterparts on the Mainland. As adults, the children are less active than their counterparts on the Mainland, and Hawai`i's trends have all been very negative. The increase in obesity and the occurrence of obesity, childhood diabetes, all those things that you are very familiar with are accelerated on Hawaii. A couple of years ago the Americans Public Transit Association and some other organizations published studies that a lot of us chuckled about, because they showed that people who ride transit are healthier than people who do not, and that is because they seemed humorous because, it is like oh sure you ride a bus, you are healthier; what sense does that make? Well it turns out it makes a lot of sense, because if you look at the CDC (Center for Disease Control) guidelines for the level of adult activity that is required for people to stay healthy, you pretty much are going to get that level of activity if you ride the bus, because you will be walking to and from the bus, and that is why that data turns out the way it is. And so we worked with that a little bit and we are positive that you might be able to have a fairly...by providing those local walking and biking environments and increasing transit ridership, you could push the health of the Kaua`i population up, as a side effect of those general trends, and that would have benefits that we do not probably even need to talk about. They go from personal benefits, family level benefits, cultural benefits, and government benefits, and so forth. All of that is predicated on this underlying idea of VMT not increasing. Now a number of people at our workshops, Planning staff, others have said to us, but can we really...what is the implication of that in terms of roads? Does that mean that we would not widen anymore roads because the congestion is already controversial, and is that going to be acceptable to those people who are driving, who are caught in that cue that backs up from Lihu`e all the way to Maluhia Road. Is that going to be acceptable, because that cue is not going away when the construction is done, those traffic signals are still going to be there, and the timing will still be the same. The cue might get a little shorter in the early going, but within a year or two it will be back to where it was. Is that going to be okay? That is the question that we are going to come back to in a minute. We have developed six programs that we are proposing that we will write up in the plan. They are programs that would be implemented over that entire period (2012 to 2035), and the question is what should our priorities be over the long term, but also what should our short -term priorities be, and so we have been having that conversation with everybody who will talk to us about it, and now we are going to have it with you. The six programs are transit, pedestrian, bicycle, county roads and streets, land use, and agriculture. Now land use should be part of any transportation plan; the two are integrated and it is a system; we cannot look at one part of the system without looking at the other part. We have spent some time working on agriculture as part of this plan because when I was first working on the plan, everyone said to me, Jim, we want this plan to address the needs of agriculture, because we want sustainable, locally grown food on Kauai. We import 95 percent of our food; that does not make sense, we should not be doing HTE Informational Workshop 7 February 23, 2012 . that. You drop a seed on the ground on Kaua`i, it grows. Why can we not provide more of our food? So I asked the question, I said what do you need from transportation to make locally grown sustainable agriculture work? And the answer I got was, I do not know. So we spent the last several months trying to define that, and so we have these six programs. These are the boards we are using this week, but when I put them on a PowerPoint slide the words end up being kind of small, but I wanted you to see what we are actually taking out to the public. (See February 23, 2012 Housing /Transportation /Energy Conservation & Efficiency Committee Workshop file for printed copy of PowerPoint presentation) In the transit program, that program will be the one that we develop most fully in the plan and will actually have a cost profile out to 2035, because as I said a moment ago, and I will come back to it in a moment, that is going to be one of your key issues. We think that the transit agency ... so I am going to talk about those where you see the checks and the dark headers, and I will go through them quickly. We think the transit agency should move into a more... should modernize and expand and have a more assertive marketing and information program than they have today. They have done what they need to do and they have done it well, but we would like them to jump ahead a little bit on how they do that, obviously using internet, and maps, and so forth, and we have generated this part of the project that set up full color maps that they can use, so wherever we can, we are trying to help them launch that journey. You have grown...when I was working on the island in 2006, the transit agency was about a third of the size that it is today. I do not know if you realize how quickly it has grown, I am sure you do, but they have done all of that through just incremental paying a lot of attention to daily needs, and so they have never actually had a transit plan. So we are spending quite a bit of time and effort on developing a transit plan for the Transit Agency. Local circulators, that second box improve local circulators, we think you should start in Lihu`e with the circulators you are running now. There is some need for some route refinements and some improvements in that. Circulators will never be full like your commuter busses are. They should not be. Just like local streets are never as full as major highways right. They are collector distributors for your major routes. Your major routes will always be more full. Local circulators will always seem less full, but we think the performance of those could improve. I have already talked about the need to convert away from diesel, so that we think is a very important priority. One of the days when I was working here in the fall, I came from Kapa`a down to Lihu`e early in the morning, and I saw 4 busses going northbound on the highway, and do you know what they said on the marquee at the top? "Not in service." While I am talking you will be thinking about that and you will go oh I know why that is. Then I came and met with Celia and we walked around the transit yard, and I looked around and I said where do you park all your busses, and she said we park them in here, and I was like no, and she said yeah this is where we park them. So that yard is full of busses at night right? So I said wait, I have seen two problems today and it was the same problem. So what happens in the morning, I will give you like an anecdote, somebody gets in their car in Waimea and they drive to Lihu`e, and they park, and they get in a bus, and they drive the bus back to Waimea with the sign that says "not in service," and then they turn around and start picking up passengers to come back into Lihu`e, right? And you have got a yard, you have grown to the point where you are at capacity even though it is fairly new, even if it had not been there very long. And the building is too short for longer busses, so if you were to have longer busses, you would not be able to do the HTE Informational Workshop 8 February 23, 2012 maintenance on them, and you cannot expand the building, because you need the whole yard to park the vehicles in at night. It is all one problem, and what we are suggesting is what if you had a parking and wash facility on the Westside, and a parking and wash facility on the North Shore. Now that is not easy, I realize that is not easy to do. It is probably easier to do on the Westside than it is on the North Shore, but still if you did that you would be converting, you would be making a capital investment that reduced your O &M cost, and we think it would pay off in about four or five years. It is an idea. We think that you have to do a lot of that kind of decision making to make your Transit Agency stay solvent in the face of all of this demand and pressure. So that is an idea. It is not an easy one. Celia, when we first talked about it, she is trying to figure out how she is going to make that happen and it is not simple. But step one is to know you want to do it, and then you go from there. You are already beginning to focus on bus stops. We think that is very important. Citizens think it is important, but we have done some technical work for Celia where we identified what other kinds of improvements should be made at bus stops in addition to just the shelters. The shelters are certainly highly visible and very important. Citizens care a lot about the shelters. I think it is great that it is part of the Holo Holo program, but you also need to be doing crosswalks, and sidewalks, and some associated improvements. On your asphalt roads, if you could do a concrete pad where the bus stops at the bus stop, it will save you a lot of money in maintenance over the years and so forth. We have outlined some of that. Ultimately, we think you could be doing some new local circulators. The two that come up most often, and one came up in our citizen's meeting in Hanalei last night, was the idea of a Ke`e shuttle of some sort, and we had a very robust conversation last night. I am sure as you realize, not everybody on the North Shore agrees with everybody else on everything, but it was actually great. We talked through some of the choices that would be associated with that. Is it mandatory? Is the road close to visitor cars or is it voluntary? Is it all year? Is it seasonal? Is it pay or is it free? Is it run by the Kaua`i Bus or is it run by a contractor? All of these issues that people had not thought about; they were just like you need to run a shuttle, and we said let us peel back the layers and think about that. But what we are hearing is that people are really ready to have something like that happen, and so we are bringing that to you as something that will probably be part of our recommendations. Also, Koloa- Po`ipu, that was a recommendation we offered in our Koloa- Po`ipu plan in 2006, and I want to mention, and give credit. One of the groups that we met with three times now is the Po`ipu Beach Resort Association. They have reached out to us, and said we want to talk to you about this plan. We are still paying attention and we still care a lot, and they actually wrote us a letter that we will post on our website so you can see what they said, and they feel pretty strongly. There are a couple of things that they are talking about, and I will just take a moment to relay them. It is sort of related to transit, but not entirely. They feel that a walk by corridor from Koloa to Po`ipu in the Po`ipu Road corridor would really accomplish a lot that would be beneficial down there. Your Public Works Department is working on that already. It is obviously not simple; there are right -of -way challenges and many other things, but they also feel a local circulator that would move both employees and guests around in the area. When you think about you have this wonderful Koloa Town that is like world caliber, local, authentic place that is just a short hop, skip, and a jump from all these coast resorts, and yet everybody drives into Koloa. It seems like an obvious opportunity, and so they are very interested in seeing that happen. They mentioned other things like Hapa Road and some other priorities. So we have that on the list. You have had your KCC students come in and talk to you here a week ago or so, and you HTE Informational Workshop 9 February 23, 2012 know about the KCC experiment. We think the transit agency needs to have a long -term plan and a sort of a systemic approach to pass pricing. Today you only charge $25 for a monthly pass, and yet you charge $2 for a cash fair. That is not the relationship we ordinarily would expect to see between those prices, and we know that you will be under pressure to offer passes, and to have the passes discounted. Hardly a day goes by that somebody does not come in and says we would like to have discount passes for our people and so forth. So we are recommending that the Kaua`i Bus develop an across - the -board pass policy that includes deeply discounted passes for bulk purchases like employers and so forth, like KCC perhaps, and also perhaps a little more rationalized structure for the pass pricing of people who just buy monthly pass, and so you need that information, and we will be providing that as part of the plan and those recommendations. Digital services, depending on the audience, people get excited about this or they do not care about it. All of you probably carry smart phones, and so you understand the opportunities, and you have been to cities where you pull out your iPhone, and you go to the maps function, and you get a transit map, and you find a stop, and it tells you what routes serve that stop, and when the next bus is coming. All of that can happen, and what we have suggested for Kaua`i Bus is let us just skip some generations here. Let us go straight to GPS and GIS connections. Now it is easy to describe. There is a lot of work required to make it happen, but the technology is actually pretty accessible, and pretty far along. It is not like you have to invent anything, and so that is a priority. We also think things like Wi -Fi on the busses and at bus stops would open your... Today you primarily serve...I mean your largest market are people who have to have the bus to get to work, but there is a briefcase crowd, there is the new millennials, there are a lot a people who have smart phones in their pockets or would buy a smart card, and that kind of thing, and you could move into that environment. The reason I bring it up is not just so that you would be cool and current, it is because it will save you money. It is a way to save money and it is a way to increase the ridership that you achieve per hour of service you provide. The most important demand on the part of everybody we have ever talked to on the island is continuing to improve your commuter routes, level of service and your commuter routes. The three big things people mention are more frequent service, longer hours of service, and more weekend service. When you think about your resort employees, the resorts run 7 days a week. Sunday is not that much different than Tuesday, right? And yet our services are oriented largely to the five primary workdays of the week, so that is something you will need to do, and we are looking at park and ride facilities. I honestly do not know what we are going to say yet. We originally started out saying that we felt you should expand the park and ride system, but we are going to look more at it, and think more about it strategically. The problem we have of course is that you do have somewhat of a dispersed development pattern, and it is hard for people to walk to the bus, and you cannot afford to run the bus up into some of these spread out areas, and so how do you make that work? We can talk more about that if you would like. I will not go into detail on these others. So safe routes to school. We think implementing the Lihu`e Town Core Plan is critical. It shows up in all of these programs, because it is a way to sort of put a... stake your flag in the dirt, say we are going do this, this is something we are going to do, and we can be doing this in all of our towns. Having a walkable, bikeable, accessible place where we have mixed use development patterns is a great thing, and we are going to show in Lihu`e, your biggest town, what that could look like. HTE Informational Workshop 10 February 23, 2012 Something that has been getting the most green dots at our public workshops is a social trail idea, and this is one we just came to recently, and it was sort of an observation. I had some conversations with people who were talking about their kids walking to school, and the paths they used to get there, and how those are across private land, and some day those will go away. So we are recommending that as you do your area development plans, and I think you have three of those kind of in the works, you got Koloa- Po`ipu- Kalaheo, and Kapa`a, and Lihu`e, the three that are on their way or are about to be on their way. That as part of those, you actually have the public talk to you about where the use paths and social trails are. You can almost see them on Google Earth, on Google maps; if you look at an aerial, sometimes you can see them. Just map them and ask yourselves, are some of those important enough that you would want to preserve them somehow? Obviously pedestrian safety improvements. Again, spot improvements, you know, where do you have a problem. A lot of those are going to be crosswalks. Access to transit. I drive frequently through Hanama`ulu and there is that bus stop on the North side of the road there, right after you turn, and there is always 3 or 4 people sort of standing there, and I am like how did they get there, and so that issue of access to transit, and getting across a highway, and that kind of thing. And then future town core plans, which we think are important, and we are endorsing the idea that you would do those as part of your area development plans. A bike program, I will come back to this in a moment, but we think...you know I realize that this particular place does not have a really rich bicycling heritage. It is not like the little town where I grew up where all kids rode bikes all the time. It is because of your geography, and the history of the way the roads were developed, and so forth that you do not have that much of a history of biking, but everyone of our workshops people come in and will talk to us about their kids want to ride bikes, or their kids do ride bikes, but they do not think it is safe, and so forth, and so on. So we have articulated, we think you need some structure to that. It is not enough just to say we are going to make biking better. So there is the idea of town connector trails. I will show you a map on that in a second. We do not think rural bike lanes would be the first place to go. I do not think that is the most important thing. Not that many people are going to ride a bicycle from Koloa to Lihu`e for practical purposes; they might do it for recreational purposes. What is the role of other multi -use trails, and the coastal trails, you know you have been working on the eastside trails. What role do those have? Are those transportation facilities or are they visitor and tourist recreational facilities? And then what is the role of bike lanes within the towns, and where do you do them, and where do you not? We would argue you do them on collector roads, but not on local streets that have low traffic, and so forth. County roads and streets. The State looks at the collector roads as part of its long -range land transportation plan. We want to offer advice to that process, and then there is all those other miles of local street the county maintains and is responsible for, and so we have identified some priorities that we think should be part of that. These are coordinated with Public Works. Then then land use program, and this has been...the interesting thing is most of this is already on underway, we are recommending things, but you are already sort of working on them. The Ag program —I would love to talk for several hours on this, but I think... all I can say is there are things you could do to make sustainable, locally HTE Informational Workshop 11 February 23, 2012 grown ag feasible. They are complicated, they are controversial, but they probably are important. You know every day people all over the island go out and open their trunks and put a cooler (like you, and I would take camping) in the trunk of the car with some ice, and put some local products, whether it is goat cheese or taro or poi or fruit or something in the trunk of the car, and drive all the way across the island to a farmers market or to some other destination and they are all passing each other, and they are all going each way, and they are all driving 120 miles a day, and they are all spending a lot of money doing it. Farming, I grew up on a farm, and I worked my first ten years in Ag policy at the Iowa DOT, and farming relies on cooperative effort among farmers, and cost savings, and sharing of facilities and services. If you want small plot agriculture to work on Kaua`i, you are going to have to help get in that business, and there is nobody really doing that today, and I am not hearing anybody say that is a bad idea. They are just saying no, we are not doing that yet, and so we think that is important. We think an intermodal facility near the port where things can be stored and processed...we talked to the beef industry, the grass fed sustainable organic beef, and that is something Kaua`i could be doing, but there is no slaughter, there is no processing, there is no cold storage, there is no intermodal, and so they have to kind of make that work, and so forth and so on. We think all of that is possible, and it would be interesting stuff to work on, and we will be giving you some specific recommendations on it. I am about to get to the end of this. So in terms of choices, out of all of that, we think there are three primary issues that we kind of wanted you guys the Council to give us some advice on, and you are obviously welcome to give us advice on any of this, but these are the things that we think are most challenging. The first is do you agree? How do you feel about the short -term priorities within those programs? I will give you an example. The second is how should we be thinking about this issue of budget and money? We know Chairman Furfaro has talked to us I think at our first workshop up in Kilauea about how important this issue is, and we need to pay attention to it, and then an issue about the State highways and major roads. So for example, within the bike program, we think that one of the biggest opportunities, and maybe something that should be a priority for you is this idea of the town connectors. Two of these have been studied in draft plans, or are actually coming out right now. One is Kekaha- Waimea and the other is the North Shore. They all have challenges and issues; I would say North Shore probably more challenges than Kekaha- Waimea. But the idea is that this island, you have these towns and villages that are close enough together that they would be an easy bicycle trip if there were bicycling facilities, and what a cool thing to do both in terms of your local population, and your kids, and people moving around, and sort of reinforcing the local shopping, and the local...people like to do things within their own community, they do not particularly want to drive all the way across the island, and the kids just being able to get around. And then in places like the North Shore and Koloa- Po`ipu, would it not be nice if you had something other than golf to do when you got here, you know, as a visitor; not to put golf down, but I am just saying that today's visitor markets are very demanding, and if you come to Steam Boat Springs in Colorado, we have got more than golf to offer. And so I think for those reasons we are sort of highlighting this as a potential priority, and as you look through those other programs, when we come back to you we would be interested in whether you think we have got it right. You will notice at the bottom of all of those program graphics there is what we think your short -term priorities should be. That is one question that we are sort of laying out there that we want to have a continuing conversation with you about. The second one is this question of money. I think in most cases you can do what you HTE Informational Workshop 12 February 23, 2012 need to do within the resources that are likely to be available to you. We think in the bike and ped programs, and the county road program, working with the State and continuing to compete for discretionary grants, not through the pork barrel process, but through the new administrative merit -based discretionary grants programs, we think that you can probably do a lot of what you need to do. You will have to be smart at it, you will have to be good at it, having this plan will help a lot, and you are in this Camelot period really where you have got a Council that sort of knows where it wants to go, and a Mayor that is trying to make these things happen, and a really confident staff, and I think that a lot of this stuff you could do. I think the level of competence I see on Kaua`i is above what we see in many of our client groups and client destinations, and so I think that is all possible, but I think the transit thing is harder. Just so you know, today the money for transit comes...for capital, from the federal government comes through a formula allocated distribution of money, and that money is divided up based on some criteria that Congress decides, and is distributed out, and it comes to the properties like Kaua`i Bus on a formula basis. It is supposed to be for capital. That is what the money supposed to be for. Federal Government has on and off over the years also had an operating assistance program, but it has never been very successful, and it led to some terrible outcomes. In the 1980s the operating systems program went away entirely. Went from a very significantly large program to nothing in one year, and you had service cutbacks and shutdowns all over the country. You do not want to be dependent on the Federal Government for operating funds, except that small transit agencies across the country are allowed to transfer their capital allocations and use them for operations and maintenance. That is what you have been doing with your formula allocated funds. That is not a criticism; many small agencies do that, but we are at a point in time where that situation is for two reasons going to be untenable for you. One reason is that the Federal Government... How you have been able to continue to make capital investments given that you are using your capital funds for operations and maintenance is you have been successful at doing discretionary grant applications through the congressionally prioritized grant process. You have had two senior Senators who have enormous seniority, and you have been pretty much at the top of the list and have been able to do that, and you all know that very shortly you will be at the bottom of the list. Also, that there is a mood in Congress away from the discretionary congressionally earmarked appropriations, that they appear to be serious about them. We will see how serious they are about it, but they have been serious about it this year, and so that means that you are in a situation where you do not really have a way that I can see to really grow the transit agency the way that we are talking about you need to grow it. Now there are options, and we can talk about what those are. I mean among them are the half cent excise tax for transit that was authorized by the Hawai`i Legislature in 2004 primarily to get Honolulu built, but it applies to the other islands, and there are other things that we can talk about. This is the first time I have laid this out in such stark terms for anybody, and I would only do it here first, but I have discussed it with the Mayor...we have discussed it with the Mayor, but I am sort of just putting it out there so you can tell me what you think. It is our job to give you alternatives, and options, and to give you the technical evaluation, but it is to some degree a political question, and so we need guidance. If you thought that one was challenging, the third one is this question about highways. Your General Plan that you wrote in 1999 has a 2000 date on it. It says, "Kaua`i is a rural place with beautiful landscapes, and that is what we value, and that is what we want to keep, and we do not want to degrade that with multilane HTE Informational Workshop 13 February 23, 2012 highways." That is the short version of what the text says, but the project list in the plan which was developed by the State Department of Transportation includes multilane all over the island, you know six lanes here, four lanes there, and to be fair, they are just looking at the data, forecasting the congestion, and saying here is how you would build your way out of congestion. We all know that you cannot build your way out of congestion, that the investment brings more traffic, and that fills up the road, and then you get in this cycle. We see it on the Kona Coast on the Big Island, and we see it on O`ahu, and to some degree in parts of Maui where that leads, and it is a dilemma. You know, if you said, okay we will just go with it— inextricable widening, it is State and Federal money, let them widen the roads at least, and there are people who get in their pickup trucks and drive from Waimea into Lihu`e every morning, and that is their choice, that is the one they would pick, they would check that box right there, and that is part of your voting population, and those people feel strongly about that. Then there is sort of the opposite, which you say, no, Kaua`i is going to be Kaua`i, let us keep Kaua`i Kaua`i, let us not widen our roads, let us have two lane roads, one of the last places in the world where you can go, and it is a slow pace place with two lane roads. Let us put our stake in the sand, and draw a line in the sand that is it, and under the no VMT growth scenario you wonder well is that feasible? Maybe that might be feasible, but then people say the congestion today is already unbearable. You know the cue into Lihu`e from the North goes all the way back into Kapa'a in the morning, and that three lane thing you are doing with the contra flow lane is very well done. Those guys are really good at that, and it works really well, but it is at capacity. It has not got much more. And yet even if your goal is no- growth in VMT and you went out and "fixed the worst congested points," would that not actually generate traffic and work against your goal of no- growth in VMT? And then you look at it just at a more visceral level. When I drive around the island, you come down this hill on the left and you are headed up to the pass, headed towards Maluhia Road, and I remember the first time I drove that road I looked out the window and I thought, wow, this is a really beautiful place. The vistas and the land, it is just special. There is no place like it, but you look at the traffic out there, and then you take, and I am sorry to do this, the poster child of, you know, where is the one picture that everybody brings home from their trip to Kaua`i? This issue is not just the State highways; it is also your county collectors. The next steps are we will write up and post to our website our public workshops where we need to get into a more concerted coordination with DOT. They are at the point where they have done their traffic forecast now, and they are starting to propose their project list, and then we need to actually write the draft document, and major parts have been written already, and bring that forward for you to look at, and bring it to you for consideration and adoption. Down the road as the staff develops the update for the development plan, our intent has been that that and the long range land transportation plan that the State DOT is developing get incorporated into a really robust transportation chapter in your General Plan, and so that is where we are headed. With that, I will let you kind of take on those challenges that we laid out. Committee Chair Yukimura: Thank you Jim, that was a very good presentation. I jotted down "happiness is working with a great consultant and a great County agency." Really helpful to have both this data and some sorting of what our choices are. I would like to open it up for questions. Actually, I have a real urgent question. You mentioned the half percent transit excise tax. Is that still available? HTE Informational Workshop 14 February 23, 2012 Mr. Charlier: All I know is just from the code research, but there may be things I do not know about. Has something happened that makes that not available for you? Committee Chair Yukimura: I am just recalling that in 1990, it was available, but we had to act on it by October of `92. Mr. Charlier: This is a change in statute that was made in 2004. Committee Chair Yukimura: And it applies to the other counties as well as Honolulu? Mr. Charlier: Let me do more research on that. I thought it did. Perhaps you would have to do legislation too. I do not know. Committee Chair Yukimura: Yes. I mean at the hearing of Ways and Means and House Finance a couple months ago, and the Chair was there, I think it was Senator Donna Kim who asked our Mayor whether we would ... if the Legislature saw fit, we would want an excise tax power. Mr. Charlier: So maybe it is not active. Committee Chair Yukimura: I do not know. She was thinking in general terms, so I do not know if there is a particular transit. When I was Mayor and that opportunity came up, I proposed a half cents for open space acquisition and transit, but that failed, so, and you know it was a very different time. At that point the bus was not so beloved. So we can find out. I would like to open it up now for Councilmembers. Questions? Councilmember Bynum, and then Councilmember Chang. Mr. Bynum: Thank you very much for the presentation. I am going to keep my questions to a minimum, because I could go on. There is so much you have shared that we need to address, but I want to start with the local shuttles issue, and you have identified the areas that I think are important— Po`ipu and the North Shore. So some specific questions about that though, for a Koloa- Po`ipu shuttle to be effective, do we not also need airport shuttles, so visitors have the option of staying several days in Koloa, and also car rental out there so they can spend their pleasure time in the Po`ipu area, and then one or two days do the travel which... I have talked to the visitor industry about this for a long time, since I used to do conferences out there, and I would get calls from people saying I do not drive, I cannot drive, I want to come, what are my options, and they were pretty limited. So I think they are losing a market share by not having that kind of traveler choose here, because of those obstacles, so that is a boatload of questions. Mr. Charlier: Well it is an important one, and here is what I would say. It is an opportunity, but it is not the first thing I would do. For one thing, it is very expensive, and it is really hard to do. You have to basically meet the planes. The conference need can be met by asking your conferences to provide shuttle services; that is how that should be done, and that is how it is done in every other State in the country. I do not know if New Partners had shuttles running or not, but where you have... In big cities sometimes it does not happen, but usually that is just built into the conference cost, and conferences I have worked on putting together over the years that was one of the costs that we had to put on the balance sheet, and that should be part of what a conference does. But the visitors, the HTE Informational Workshop 15 February 23, 2012 tourists... I will give you an example. We did a transportation plan for Breckenridge, Colorado, which they implemented. They were asking, should we connect the airport, and the airport is farther away, granted it is a hundred miles, but what we said is the problem is you have the parking at the condo. The problem is that you have that, and you have to provide four additional spaces for it, right. Every car on the island has four parking spaces, which means you have four times more parking spaces as you have cars. Of all the traffic that goes on, the trip between the airport and the condo, or hotel room, is not that large a percentage of the travel. It is all the other travel that goes on while they are here. Often what we recommend, and this is what we recommended on West Maui too, is first create the circulation system, so the car stays at the condo and is not parked in Koloa Town. That is easier, it is less expensive, and those buses will be full early on. We helped Starwood start a shuttle between its four properties on West Maui in Lahaina, and that has been full since day one, and it is one of the most popular services; when they surveyed their guests, it was one of the most popular services they offered. We calculated that we were reducing the peak period parking demand in downtown Lahaina on a Saturday evening by four hundred cars. That is a dramatic impact, but yes, eventually you do want airport service, but it is really expensive. We did a study for Jackson, Wyoming, about should the start bus, which is a local transit service, serve the airport, and we said, no, it is just too expensive. You have to meet the busses, you have to have schedules to accommodate that. If the busses are not at the curb when people come out... You do have rental car in Po`ipu to some degree. I think the 'Sheraton maybe, and maybe the Grand Hyatt too, and you do want to encourage that, but I would not go to airport service first because it is expensive. Mr. Bynum: Following up on that, and I have discussed this with Po`ipu Beach Resort Association, one of the options is to have all the visitor accommodations contribute to that resort shuttle, and in the past and past opportunities on the Eastside, the bigger hotels got involved, put resources into it, but felt being used by the smaller group properties who were onboard for the ride, but not on board for the resources. Is it appropriate for the County to have some kind of funding mechanism that is required for each accommodation unit if we are establishing that service? Mr. Charlier: I think there are a couple of options that you could pursue, and that could be one. You could also do a more of an incentive -based approach where you would match money brought forward voluntarily. What PVRA has that perhaps I do not know if you have on the eastside or not, is a pretty strong organization that has an ongoing relationship with its properties. It is a functioning entity, and they are capable of coming forward and saying here is what we want, and so forth. I think that if there were, where you would say the County would be willing to fund x- percent of the cost of a shuttle system in a resort destination area, and you have got maybe arguably three of those, certainly North Shore and certainly Koloa- Po`ipu, and perhaps the Eastside as well, and under these terms you would need to put together a fee -based system, and you would need a multi -year deal, because you cannot afford to ramp up for a service that is only going to last a year. That is a model that is used a lot. A lot of the ski resorts communities do that, and it is the hotels primarily and the resorts who will come to the table. The retail will not, even though they should. Retail is challenging to deal with. They are on very narrow margins. They work very hard, and they are hard to even get to come to meetings, and usually we have not had success with retail, but I think your resorts and hotels would consider and would react to that. You may get a reaction from the more exclusive properties that we will just do our own, we will run our own shuttles, and there is some of that HTE Informational Workshop 16 February 23, 2012 happening already today. I think it would be worth trying. The reaction that we have been getting in our meetings with the Po`ipu Beach Resort Association is I think they would be interested in working with you on that. You could also try to do something that is mandatory, where you actually had some sort of a fee or assessment attached, but I guess my experience has been that it is always easier to get to agreements than it is to impose, you know get a vote to impose something, although you may have a different perspective on it. Mr. Bynum: I watched the Eastside put together a shuttle, and unfortunately it was kind of in an economic downturn period, but what killed it in the end was these large hotels, yes we are in, we are helping fund it, but the smaller properties were no, like we want you to stop here and pick up our guests, but we do not want to pay. Mr. Charlier: Well that is a deal breaker. I think you stop at the resorts that are participating in the program. Mr. Bynum: The same thing for the North Shore, and I know you said you just discussed this in Hanalei, but I think the concept I heard in the past is, because our roads are beyond carrying capacity on the North Shore, and we want to keep them that way. We do not want to make these big four lane highways, and so that is an inherent dilemma. Our recreational opportunities there are over...now we are, as a County, trying to address those issues in our properties by acquiring more land, and trying to deal with it, but the concept was if you are a visitor, you do not drive past Princeville, but then you have to deal with all of those cars. Mr. Charlier: Where you park them. Mr. Bynum: Yeah, where you park them, and what incentive would a landowner have to house all of these cars. Mr. Charlier: Money I think would be required. We worked on a number of those kinds of systems, and we should not probably try to answer the details today. I think it is the right question. What I would say is that I think what we heard is that the stage is set for this to be a priority for the County to move forward, and I think it would require some study, some evaluation. We all know the destination and it is the origin end that we need to do some work on. What percentage of the trips destined for Ke`e Beach originate outside the North Shore. There are a lot of questions that I would want to know more about before I necessary thought I knew the answer to your questions. But I think what we are going to do is bring to you a policy basis so you can work from this as in a planning basis that says this is an important thing to do, and by virtue of you having it in your transportation plan, it becomes an important thing for the State to do. I think it has been one of these things everyone talks about, but nobody does anything about it. We need to get it to the point where you are actually moving forward, and I do not know the answers to all of those questions yet. Committee Chair Yukimura: Just a follow up, it sounds like you put it in this plan, and then we do some follow up focus studies to do what you call travel demand, and help us design the system better. Well let me just say, I will have to leave at least about five to ten, because I have a board meeting that was scheduled, a Water Board meeting prior to this meeting. Hopefully I will come back, and you will still be going, because I think this discussion is going to be a while, but I have HTE Informational Workshop 17 February 23, 2012 asked Councilmember Nakamura to be the Pro Tem while I am gone. I will hand that over to you now. Ms. Nakamura: Councilmember Bynum would you mind if Councilmember Yukimura ask a question first? Committee Chair Yukimura: No, I am good, but I just wanted to let people know I have to leave. Sorry, thank you. (Committee Chair Yukimura was excused from the workshop at 9:46 a.m.) Mr. Bynum: The other thing I take away from this is, in terms of land use, that a strong incentive for us to develop more housing in Lihu`e as opposed to the outlying areas, because the vehicle miles traveled go down dramatically, and land use, is that not the focus we should have? Mr. Charlier: Yes, I think so, and your staff thinks so, and the public thinks so. I would say there is two parts. That is true, having more housing opportunities especially for wage earning families in Lihu`e. Now a lot of people grew up on the Westside, and want to live on the Westside, and so forth, and it is all percentages. Some percentage of people could live in Lihu`e. That is an improvement. The other part I think is commercial. You know the commercial core of Waimea was probably more robust 20 years ago or 30 or 40 years ago than it is today, and so to the extent that... That almost should go the other way, and one of the things we learned in our survey was that people are driving a lot of miles to groceries, but in some places they are not. The people in Waimea actually do buy groceries there in Waimea, and the people in K61oa buy groceries in K61oa, and so we know that that can work, and so forth. I think it is both of those things, but the planning staff is very oriented towards mixed use, compact transit - served walkable development, and that is what you should have in all of your towns and villages, your major towns and villages, in our opinion. It is hard in a really small village to get a resurgence of retail; it is very difficult to do, but over time the arithmetic of that will change. We are already seeing those changes. Smaller footprint stores are becoming viable again. A lot of the major retailers are looking at the opportunities in smaller footprint stores and so forth, so yes I agree, and we have... The text in the plan will make some of those points. Mr. Bynum: I do want to focus on Lihu`e just for a minute, because I think we have some decisions that we are going to make in the short term that could impact Lihu`e. One of those is that our retail anchor in this town was right across the street in a County -owned building —Big Save Market was shut down. I am of the personal opinion that the County should reserve six or eight thousand square feet for neighborhood retail to keep this a walkable community. We are expanding our walkable residential within blocks of here. We are improving the Hardy Street here and its walkability, and we are looking at Rice Street, and rethinking that, but I am concerned about losing that retail anchor right here in the heart of town. Frankly, people in the County are like well that is our building, let us make it office space, and I am saying okay maybe we do not need sixteen thousand square feet, but maybe five or six for neighborhood retail, so we have that anchor, so the people who live here can, and the people who work here, many that used to go there and get eight or ten items to go home. Mr. Charlier: I do not know the details and should not wade into the details of a particular building, but what I would say is that a strategy that small communities and large communities across the country use is the idea of HTE Informational Workshop 18 February 23, 2012 small footprint retail, because there are so few opportunities for that, and it is hard for small retailers to find a place where they can go where they got market and they can afford the rent. One of the interesting things that happens is that serves as a retail incubator that those small retailers become more viable, they get good at what they are doing, and they go into a larger store somewhere. So I know that the idea of a retail incubator for a smaller footprint space is one that many communities pursue. The other thing I would say is that the idea of a walkable mixed used transit - served town core in Lihu`e that has residential, office, retail, and restaurant, and all of that...the hardest thing to bring to that mix will be small footprint retail. If you have an opportunity to do that, you will make that concept to the Lihu`e town core more viable, and more real. So I think yes. I do not know about the specific building or what issues might be hiding there, but the concept is definitely an important concept. Mr. Bynum: Then you focused on this town core which deals with two blocks right here, Elua and Akahi. Mr. Charlier: I am thinking a little more broadly. I realize you are right, the town core plan is just that area. I would say there is a pretty large area in the core part of what I think the core part of Lihu`e that should be walkable, mixed use and has a lot of opportunity. There is a lot of employment here, and the Hardy Street corridor, and Rice Street corridor, beyond just that core area seem to me should be priority. Mr. Bynum: I kind of heard in this presentation that the County should move to implement some of the infrastructure, the walkability infrastructure, in the short term, and not just wait for somebody to redevelop it, and say, oh okay you redeveloped your part, you put the sidewalk in front, so it takes years to connect all of them. Mr. Charlier: I was not aware of that issue. There are things that... You could do a sinking fund where you made the improvement, and got paid back when the property redeveloped. I would think about if that is an issue that is holding you back, I would solve that issue; I would try to solve it, because I think there are solutions. Mr. Bynum: You mentioned impact fees, and Councilmember Furfaro helped put an impact fee study on our CIP plan in 2009. We just got an update yesterday that basically that is not going to happen until 2014, you know, unless that was the prediction here. In 2009 it was like it is going to happen next year in 2010. Now it has been pushed back to 2014, but you feel that that is an important potential. Mr. Charlier: I do not know about the thing you are talking about, but we, in our Koloa- Po`ipu circulation plan, developed a proposed impact fee system for that area, which the market crashed, and so forth. Interestingly, Po`ipu Beach Resort Association in their letter to the County, to us, actually raised that issue again and indicated an interest in seeing that pursued. Now I am sure there is a lot more to the story that we would have to flush out with them, but yes, I do think that impact fees should be part of the equation on Kaua`i. I do not know about the scheduling issue, but I will say that it has been universally difficult in the islands for counties to implement impact fee systems. Maui County's first transportation impact fee study I believe was completed in 2002. I think it has been updated three times. They have never been able to adopt it. So I know it must be very difficult to do, and I do not want to underestimate how hard it is, but should it HTE Informational Workshop 19 February 23, 2012 be part of the equation? Yes, I think it should. I will mention, Councilman Bynum, that it is probably not the first place to go for transit, because the impact fee revenues are more appropriate for capital use than they are for operations and maintenance use. It is not impossible to do things with transit, but it is probably not the best fit for your transit needs. Mr. Bynum: I have more but I do not want... Ms. Nakamura: Why do we not ask others to ask their questions, then we can come back to you. Thank you. Council Chair Furfaro. Council Chair Furfaro: Again, thank you for being here today. I am glad we were able to work this out. Let me ask you, you said the particular data sheet that you worked out in your original plan, and really measuring work miles, and transportation area, and so forth to get to us to some type of impact assessment for that area in Po`ipu. Were you talking with the Po`ipu Visitor's Association, the Po`ipu Hotel Association, who was in that meeting that has raised that as a potential opportunity again? Mr. Charlier: The Po`ipu Beach Resort Association in their written communication to us. Now I think it would be, I am sure, a more detailed and nuance conversation, they are not just blanket off sure do it. I think they would want to talk about how does it get structured and all of that, but yes, and we would have recommended it anyway, but it has come from that organization. Council Chair Furfaro: Well then they obviously, wanting to discuss it, have seen the value in it. Will that new position you are taking in the presentation today about rethinking park and rides, that was a big part of that Po`ipti piece, if I remember as well. It was really presented as a very important component about the interior circulation within the Po`ipu Resort area. Is that something still in their plan for that area? Mr. Charlier: I am trying to remember, Mr. Chairman, whether... I do not recall that being that being a major focus of the Koloa- Po`ipu area circulation plan. There would be two groups of passengers using a shuttle like that. One would be the guests at the Resorts, and their cars are parked at the hotel, so that is sort of a de facto park and ride, and the other would be employees, and they are parked out at the other end, and again, the use by employees would be sort of secondary. The systems we worked with around the country that were most successful were the systems that had a mix of employees and guests using them. The greatest need for the employees is the commuter service from across the island, and especially the weekend service. Council Chair Furfaro: I guess I was referencing the discussion that I once had with the Hotel Association, because they were modeling a plan like they had at Wailea when they used multiple hotels in that destination area, they reallocated employee parking during the period of peak convention areas, and it really became a park and ride to your assigned hotel. Mr. Charlier: Oh, okay I am caught up with you now. Yeah there is a parking problem. It might not be the right thing to go into a lot of the details right here right now, but there are a couple resorts there that their employees do not park on the resort, and that is a problem, and now where you would put satellite parking I do not know, but that would be another function. I see now exactly what you mean, and that would be another potential function of a shuttle HTE Informational Workshop 20 February 23, 2012 and a circulator system. Interesting. I do not know where the site would be for satellite parking. Council Chair Furfaro: I just got one more piece here if I can. Some of the items in the presentation that we are working for, for example, tying some of this transportation scope to like economic benefits that would be available, is there some kind of a measurement like how much more influence financially we might put into maybe a plan that has agricultural access for employees? I mean is there some kind of a formula saying if you want to grow agriculture then we need to have this offspring even if it is just getting people who work in the agriculture business at a early morning rise to an area that is earmarked for prime agricultural development, because we are going through that right now with our important agriculture lands, and I think we are farther ahead than any of the other counties by identifying these areas, but to provide transportation for the growth of agriculture activities, I would think a certain amount of that needs to be understood. It is the cost of growing our economy. Is there some kind of a formula in rural communities for something like that? Mr. Charlier: I do not think there is a formula. I worked on that issue for years at Iowa DOT. Here is what I would say. I think that we have already, in our talking to people, in our draft recommendations, we are saying that you should follow up the important agriculture lands study in the prioritization of those lands with a transportation program designed to specifically support that. Now I will say that a number of people have said to me as we have said things like that, yeah but do you know that numbers wise, and traffic reduction wise, the resort employees market is bigger and more desperately in need of service, and so why would you prioritize ag over resorts? I think the answer has to come back to how important do we think it is that we develop locally grown agriculture on Kaua`i, and based on that where is the greatest need? The good news is I do not think it is highly technical issue. The Kaua`i Bus today has worked with the taro farmers at Hanalei to make sure that they have access to bus service. There is some special issues there in terms of there is no place for a bus stop and things like that, but I think it could be fairly straight forward, and I also think it does not have to be transit. I think that a lot of the people that we have talked to over the months have said, if I could just ride a bike, that would work for me. A young woman I talked to at the goat dairy said I would ride a bike up here if I could. She does not own a car. A lot of those people make low wages, as you know. I may not be answering your question, but we will try to address it in the plan. I think you are looking for some sort of criteria about what is most important. Council Chair Furfaro: Thank you Jim. Ms. Nakamura: Councilmember Chang. DICKIE CHANG: Mr. Charlier, welcome back, and thank you for taking the opportunity to address us, and Celia, thank you very much, Kaleo. I have a couple of pretty much quick questions. Number one, on page number 48, household transportation cost details, there is an average fleet miles per gallon. Are we talking about the average car, or the average bus at twenty -six. Mr. Charlier: Well it is the total vehicle fleet. Mr. Chang: Okay. So jumping to page number 8, I want to thank you for showing us an illustration of what it costs for the people on the Westside, and the people on North Shore almost 50 miles roundtrip commute, as HTE Informational Workshop 21 February 23, 2012 well as the Eastside, and Koloa, Po`ipu, Kalaheo. So in my calculations, given the fact that we are paying about four fifty a gallon of regular gasoline, and the Chair brought up the fact that by August it will go up about eleven percent or what have you by the end of the summer as projected. Somebody could conceivably be paying upwards to two hundred dollars a week, is that correct? Mr. Charlier: I think that is about right. We think there are probably some families, households on the Westside that are spending about thirty thousand dollars a year on travel. Mr. Chang: And we are going stop and go, so you not getting the 26 miles to the gallon, and especially if you are within the business district, you stop, you go, you stop, you go, it is not like you are cruising on the freeway at 55 miles an hour. So that to me is a really great indication that as the value of whether you are paying twenty -five or forty dollars for a bus pass, that is what I would hope that is being conveyed out to the community. I notice also that you have two radio stations. Are those paid spots, or are those public information? Mr. Charlier: No, they just allowed me to come on. Mr. Chang: Public information? Mr. Charlier: Yeah. Mr. Chang: Because I would recommend that if that is the case, I do not want to speak on behalf of the radio stations, but it would be nice continuity to be able to use everyone if they are doing it as a public service announcement to just make a comparison as to how you say upwards to maybe thirty thousand. We do not think about these kinds of stuff, but rents, or mortgage, and transportation is the... Mr. Charlier: That is a great idea. One thing we could do is we could put a calculator on the website, and that would enable people to enter how far they drive, because you are right, people are not aware, I mean they sort of are, but they do not know the details of how much they are spending. If they were aware, then the choice of how much is a bus pass, they might be able to make better choices. I think that is kind of your point. Mr. Chang: Yes, because like yesterday we had this housing committee talk about how much people are actually saving on their mortgage through education so they can apply for a lower rate or what have you. That was number one. Number two, do we have a, I think Celia might have asked you this before, but do we have a microphone or a sound system in the bus? CELIA MAHIKOA: Yes. Mr. Chang: And what does the driver say? Ms. Mahikoa: You mean...? Mr. Chang: Like next stop, Kapa`a. Ms. Mahikoa: Drivers are to be announcing each stop that they are at when they are stopping at their stops. HTE Informational Workshop 22 February 23, 2012 Mr. Chang: I think to enhance, and this is me, to enhance the program, it might be nice if we had like a pre- recorded tape, like "we are entering the town of Kapa`a," and like a historical, you know, this is the town of Kapa`a, which could be updated maybe every week or every other week, like this week we have the Veterans Day Parade, or we have the Pow Wow, the Native American Pow Wow. Anahola, there is going to be something going on at the North Shore, because historically speaking, even for the local residents, many of whom are recent transients, it is nice to have that educational base, but we can also let the ridership know what is happening within that community, so they can get on the bus, and help participate within the events that will be happening. I think it would be an enhancement for the bus riders. It would be kind of fun to hear. Maybe it might be an incentive for the drivers to educate themselves to talk a little about... I also want to say that I am happy to say, that you had mentioned, Jim, that the bus ridership people tend to be a lot more healthier, because they have to walk to the bus stop, because when you get off at the bus stop, it is not normally the case that you get off the bus stop and you are right there. You probably have to walk maybe a convenient quarter of a mile if you are lucky, or what have you. Mr. Charlier: I think our average walk is a half mile. PATRICK BUCARD: Average walk is about a quarter mile. There were some people that somewhere... Mr. Charlier: By the way, that was Patrick Bucard who is on the staff at Charlier Associates, and I think that is a valid point, your average walk distance is more like a quarter mile, so there are public health benefits associated. Mr. Chang: It is too bad that the employers will not allow their employees to come in with tennis shoes; you have to be professional. I guess you can put them in a backpack, and you know because it is very comfortable when you, you know. Anyway, the last point I wanted to make, and I did this again, and again, and again, and my math is probably way off, but on page number 48 you have driving cost per mile sixty -two cents. Mr. Charlier: That is in the additional slides at the end. Okay. Mr. Chang: It says driving cost sixty -two cents per mile, but if I do the math, at 26 miles it will come out to about fifteen dollars or so based on the 50 miles or so. But if you look at the cost per gallon, if I average 26 miles and my drive is 50 miles, then with the average gallon would come out to about Seven dollars, but now of course it is more. But when you do sixty -two cents a mile, I think that figure might be a little bit more, but would it not be less, because if I am doing 26 miles I would be paying fifteen bucks at sixty -two cents, whereas if I am getting 26 miles to the gallon it would be costing me seven dollars. Mr. Charlier: I am not fast enough to do this in my head, but what is included in the...it may be misleading where it says driving cost per mile, it looks like we are only talking about fuel, but we are also talking about all the marginal costs associated with driving, so there is more than fuel in that calculation. Mr. Chang: Okay. Thank you. Ms. Nakamura: Thank you very much for your presentation. It is really great ideas, and very keen observations about what is happening with respect HTE Informational Workshop 23 February 23, 2012 to transportation on this island. I had some questions. I am referring to slide number 8 that shows the average daily miles traveled by home district, and there is a concern... What I have been hearing is that we should be doing more things, centralize Lihu`e, but what you also mentioned is that this tells us that it might be a good idea, as a land use policy and a economic development policy, to try to look at jobs on the outskirts, so that not everyone has to drive into Lihu`e every day and drive home. If we had jobs in someplace on the East, North Shore, and jobs on the Westside, that people who live on the Westside would have fewer vehicle miles traveled. Is that a policy that... Mr. Charlier: Well I think the concept is a good one and an important one. A couple of challenges that you would face is what sort of policy would the County be able to enact that would encourage that. What you actually have at your disposal, in your toolbox, that you could actually use to make that happen: zoning, mixed use comes to mind, I guess. In our profession, I would say that the current opinion, sort of the state of the art, is that in terms of mixed -use development and trip reduction benefits, and that kind of thing that commuting is not the easiest place or the first place to go. Studies have shown over the years that your big opportunity is in a mixed -use development pattern. Eighty percent of daily travel, actually on Kauai it is only seventy percent, seventy percent of daily travel on Kaua`i is other than commuting. So your mommy and daddy —five hundred that goes on in the mornings and the evenings, the discretionary travel by high school kids, all the visitors, all that stuff that goes on in the island makes up a significant percentage of the travel. And because your commute trips are the trips that are easiest to serve with transit, and where you have the best highest ratio of benefit to cost, what I would say is that, if I were working on this with you, I would be working harder on the schools, and the civic, and the retail, and perhaps... It is very difficult as a private sector person who once had two offices, one in Orlando, and one in Boulder, you know two offices is, guess what, more expensive than one office. So to have companies... in Honolulu, they have tried the idea in Ewa of moving some of the agency functions to the second city, and it is tough, and employment wants to concentrate, and the efficiencies are in concentrations, and you need it to be efficient, and you need employment to grow. So I would say yes having a policy that made it possible for people who want to locate jobs in those other places to do so, and so that you are not a barrier to that, but I do not think that is where you are going to see your big reduction in travel. I think it is going to be in the discretionary trips, and so having neighborhood schools, having neighborhood retail and shopping, and then making it possible for people to walk and bike in neighborhoods. I think those offer really significant benefits. Ms. Nakamura: The other thing is that government is a huge employer in Lihu`e, both State and County governments. It is one of the largest employers on this island. We have talked about... have you looked at again the dispersal of jobs? Do they have to be concentrated? Does your study get into any of that? Mr. Charlier: I know this is not intuitive, and I know you do not... As I told the folks in Hanalei last night, you do not have to agree with me, but concentration of jobs is actually one of your assets. It is one of the things that works for you, and I think it is not something that dispersal of jobs would make your transit less feasible. I realize there are certain examples where having a significant contra flow movement of commuters might help balance the demands on the transit system, and so forth. But around the country, the thing that has been most damaging to places like Lihu`e has been government moving employees out of those places. We had a major issue in Boulder where the county wanted to move HTE Informational Workshop 24 February 23, 2012 part of its offices out of the downtown, and they ultimately did. It is a very healthy downtown, so we survived it, but I would say that one of the things that government can do to make this work on Kaua`i would be to keep your concentration in Lihu`e, and to use that to make Lihu`e more of a...I will use the term urban, but I mean urban in an island way, I do not mean sixty story, or forty story towers, but more of a mixed use moderate density exciting vibrant place. Those employees are your biggest asset, and that is what will make the retail that you were asking about viable. I realize there are other ways to look at it. Ms. Nakamura: No. I appreciate your perspective on this. Also vanpooling and car - pooling, does that play into this at all? Mr. Charlier: I have been doing this 40 years now, and the whole time we have talked about ride sharing as the obvious most efficient way to lower vehicle miles of travel and increase, and throughout that 40 years, our percentage of car - pooling has gone down steadily over time. So in the visitor population you already have high levels of ride sharing by definition. In your hotel workers you have high levels of ride sharing already today, especially the housekeepers, but others as well, and variations on that. What we call kiss and ride, the shared ride, drop off, and so forth. The people who can do that and for whom it is beneficial to do that are doing it, and it is a very hard thing to incent, to make, to encourage, and increase in. We have done many projects in many places over the years with increased parking, special, favorable parking for carpools, subsidies for carpools. Probably the one thing that becomes most influential, I will mention this once, and then I will not mention it again, in encouraging carpooling is to have pricing on the parking, and to have paid parking. I think you are a ways from the point where that would be the right thing to put up in front of people right now; it is one of the most controversial things you can get into, and it can be very detrimental to everything else you are trying to do. Ms. Nakamura: The recommendation about getting off of diesel for our transit is I think something we really need to explore further, and I am not sure if you folks are aware of the algae to biodiesel project with the Department Of Defense working with the Hawai`i Bio Energy. It seems like it is moving from... It is still in experimental phase, but they are looking at once they get up to the product levels that they need that they will be shipping this fuel to Honolulu and to HECO, so I think it would be good to explore that further, because they have made progress. Mr. Charlier: We are aware of the specific (inaudible). Just to reiterate, and I think you are making the point that I think is really critical, is that the scale problem is the big problem, because what you need is you need enough demand that you have competition on the supply side. It is not going to help the Kaua`i Bus or the other entities we need to help if the biodiesel price is higher than diesel price. You can argue that we have accomplished something, but we maybe did not accomplish the most important thing we set out to accomplish. Ms. Nakamura: Also, you made a comment about not having a transit plan, and I was wondering if you could just explore and describe that a little more? Mr. Charlier: What we think that what is most important for an agency like the Kaua`i Bus, and what we are doing is writing the transit plan; this is what we are proposing to deliver as part of our plan okay? It is not a need that would go on, you should update it, but we will write the first one, and it should be a HTE Informational Workshop 25 February 23, 2012 strategic plan to show how the system will grow over time so that you have a sense of how many buses would you need in 2020, and how many buses would you need in 2025, and so forth. How much fuel would you be consuming? So if the Kaua`i Bus sits down at the table with somebody who is developing a biodiesel source, the first question they are going to ask is how many gallons will you buy in 2020, and how many gallons will you buy in 2025? Where is that data? You need that data. The other thing that a strategic plan would do, and this is... some of what I have described for you, is identify those opportunities that are most important in terms of cost reduction and market development. So we have said well one of those is a pass program, one of those are the digital services in the geo locator system, so we are doing that as well. I think that should be updated about every five years. Ms. Nakamura: I did not realize that you are getting to that level of detail, and that is great. Mr. Charlier: Only in transit. Ms. Nakamura: Okay. The suggestion about the bus parking wash facility in some of the outlying areas I think is a good one, and you know, not sure if that would also be a part of a park and ride system or a standalone facility? Mr. Charlier: I do not know, I have not thought about that. I will think about that. You always look for synergies that would share cost, and maybe that would be a possibility. The transit operator in me wants to keep it simple and have a facility where you park buses at, and the liability is straightforward, and the fencing or whatever security is straightforward. I do not know. I will think about it. It is an interesting idea. I guess it would depend a little bit on the location. Ms. Nakamura: The discussion about the internal circulation for... I think it is referring to like bike paths where you are connecting within the towns themselves, and will this plan... I think you have identified several potential areas around the island where it makes sense to do the town connecters. Who will then prioritize where the best opportunities are? Will you have some priorities? Mr. Charlier: Yes. What we are showing you are where we think the distance between the towns, the size of the towns, and the landscape would be most conducive to that. For example, you could also look at Hanapepe, `Ele`ele, and Waimea, but the landscape challenges become... or like Lawa`i and Koloa, but again the landscape. So this is sort of a starting point, but what our recommendation would be is that you work with the system you have, which is that you do these area development plans, and within the area development plans you identify the specific infrastructure priorities. That is how I would do this. Now the two projects that have been done already, we will be posting the results up on our website. We did not do the work, others did. Through the State Health Department, somebody may know the name of this program, but that funded the look at the Kekaha- Waimea corridor, and funded a look at the Kilauea- Hanalei corridor. That is part of the outreach from the Department Of Health. Those are good examples of how you would start, because they identify alternative corridors, and they have done some public processes and had some public meetings, and I think those could be good prototypes for how you would go about it. Ms. Nakamura: Good, thank you very much. HTE Informational Workshop 26 February 23, 2012 Mr. Bynum: That is "Communities Putting Prevention To Work," and you know, Nadine has asked most of the questions I was interested in, and so I just want to thank you for being here, and just maybe...I really like this focus on digital services. I am really pleased to see that as part of it. I was just in San Diego, I could go on my iPhone and say the bus is an alternative. I am in a strange town, but it is like walk here, get on the bus, go here, you know I would not be a bus rider if I did not have the ready access to information. Mr. Charlier: And I failed to mention something, Councilman, and I will mention it now. We also think that the idea of skipping generations, jumping to the leading edge, which I think a small agency can ironically do actually before the big agencies can. I think you should also go as quickly as you can to a smart card system for fares, because I think what you do today costs money. Collecting quarters and hauling them down to the bank is expensive, and accounting for them, and every afternoon Celia walks to the bank with these buckets of quarters, and it slows down boarding time, and it is sort of inherently inefficient, and there is no tie in, you cannot tie in to anything else, but with a smart card you can. We can talk more about that if you would like. We are actually suggesting that they leap some generations there and go straight to that, and then if you had the right kind of reader you actually could use your iPhone as your smart cards, or your other device, not to market Apple necessarily, but so I do think there are some opportunities there and your visitor population, and your millennials will gravitate to that very quickly, and so I think that would give a good direction. Mr. Bynum: That is it, thank you. Ms. Nakamura: Council Chair Furfaro Council Chair Furfaro: When you come back to us, are you going to show us some comparisons on...this Council added $575,000 for the expanded service that we have now recently. During that period we expanded the service, it was an increase by 11% of the budget, but we increased ridership by 33 %. We also know that our fuel increased 16.3 %, but it looks, quite frankly, that we were very successful in that margin. We filled empty seats. You and I had this conversation in Kilauea. I do not want to over - promise and under - deliver. Mr. Charlier: I understand. Council Chair Furfaro: I want to measure the effects that this has had, and you know me looking through some old reports and calculating, I can see we are going in the right direction. Mr. Charlier: We will work both on elasticity of ridership to service, and on the relationship between your fare price and your fuel price; we will do some of the arithmetic so you do not have to go back to old files to come up with that. Council Chair Furfaro: When we saw the villages that you referred to up here, you know the village of Hanalei and the internal system that we need, on your map shows Kilauea to Hanalei, basically. But am I hearing that there is going to be an opportunity after comments from the North Shore that this could include some expansion into Kepuhi. Kepuhi is by the Colony Resort, it is not quite the end of the road, but is that going to expand getting people opportunity from Hanalei? HTE Informational Workshop 27 February 23, 2012 Mr. Charlier: I need to look at the report. No one has asked that question before. I do not know how far they went. My guess is they probably did. I will look at that; that is a good question. You are right. That is part of the market. That is right. Council Chair Furfaro: We might have certain kind of vehicle specifics for the small bridges, and so forth. I would like to know if that is going to be expanded. The last piece is, currently under State and Federal grants, how many people do we actually cover with these grants? It looks like we could have as many as twenty people covered by current grants, is that about right? Ms. Mahikoa: Yes, we cover about five or six full -time positions with that, and then our entire pool of on -call drivers is covered by it. Council Chair Furfaro: So the pool is covered in there. Jim, did I hear you saying that just like HUD, we know there are certain cuts coming from our housing grants, are we going to get some exposure from the Federal Government as a rural community on some of the recovery funds we get for staffing issues. What do you anticipate? Mr. Charlier: You mean risk? Council Chair Furfaro: Yes, risk. Mr. Charlier: Yes, I think so. If we had the House version of the bill, your transit program is basically not funded, so I do not think the House version of the bill will prevail, but I think there are significant risk, and the lesson we have learned, I have been doing this since the early 1970s, and one of the two or three things I think I have learned is that you do not want to run transit off of federal funds for O &M. It exposes you to enormous risk, and we have seen and been through cycles of that, and I think we are potentially looking at another one. But the more positive message might be that I think that you, because of the quality of the planning process you have put together on this island, and the kinds of issues you are facing and the way that way you are going about them, positions you extremely well for the sustainable partnership program and the new grants that are based on merits. That is going to be I think for another four or five years going to be a major part of the Federal program, and that will... I think that is an opportunity that if I were you I would pay really close attention to, and I would be in that competition every round. It is too late for TIGER IV; TIGER IV is due at the end of March, or the 20th of March, but there will be continued cycles of discretionary grant opportunities that are merit - based, and you have laid the groundwork here for very compelling applications, I think. It is not simple, it is not easy. Our firm has been in a cottage... we have had a business over the past year of helping people do those grant applications, which are hard to do. I do not imply that it is simple, but the rewards are significant... the potential awards are significant. Council Chair Furfaro: Last question for our Transportation Director. Who in our organization is focused on your grant writing? Ms. Mahikoa: I do it. Council Chair Furfaro: You do? Okay. One of the concerns I have with the County is we move some of our grant writers to other positions, and I think HTE Informational Workshop 28 February 23, 2012 members of the Council are very concerned about that. But currently you are not using the Civil Defense grant writer, you are doing them? Ms. Mahikoa: No. I think what would be difficult is in our situation, and maybe in most, is that you need to know your operations pretty much inside and out in order to be able to be effective in assembling a grant. At least that is what I have experienced so far. That would be the challenge —is having someone knowing the operation well enough to be able to request... Council Chair Furfaro: Understood, because you are writing narrative that you can answer the questions about when the busses will stop riding from Hanalei back to town empty. You know that operation better than anybody else. I want to sincerely thank you for all of that effort. Jim, I have no more questions, and this has been very good for me. Thank you. Ms. Nakamura: Just to follow -up on Council Chair Furfaro's point, Celia, is that you have got a lot on your plate as well, just managing the system, the study... So if you need the resources to seek these grants and assistance, myself, I think that is something that is worth investing in resources to do that, because we know it is probably going to take a group effort to make it happen, and I am willing to entertain your suggestions. I also wanted to just follow -up on the other transit circulation studies that were mentioned earlier within Po`ipu and Ke`e areas. For me, that is a big priority, because I noticed that when there was a drop in tourism, my travel times decreased, and if we can get visitors on to shuttle systems to see the island in a different way, and particularly the Ke`e Beach shuttle project was something that has been talked about for a long time, and at one point when I was on the Hawai`i Tourism Authority board we were talking about trying to get a specific study done to look at how it could be, what type of circulation, where you would do the park and ride, where you might do a visitor center that is tied into that, how it could be managed, is it a County, is it private, where the stops might be. There needs to be a very detailed analysis of each circulation system. But the rewards is not just getting people...having fewer cars on the road, but it preserves the rural character, our one -way bridges, it could provide economic boost to specific areas where we want visitors to go, and it is also an opportunity to educate visitors, and make it a culturally rich experience, and fix the problem with parking at our parks. I think it is much more than just transportation —it is economic development, it is lifestyle. So to me, this is a huge...we would like to see this be something that happens sooner than later, and for me it is a big priority to see these shuttle systems. So first to figure out how to make this work on this island. Thank you for outlining those possibilities. Is there any public testimony? Council Chair Furfaro: We are going to share the mic with other speakers. BARBARA ROBESON: Good morning everyone. Barbara Robeson for the record. Hanalei Roads Committee, I am here representing them. Several of us went to the meeting last night. It was really informative, and I am sorry that more of us could not be here today, because it was even more informational, and lot of impressive information. I just have a couple of comments and some thoughts to keep in mind, and they are very selfish, because they relate to the North Shore, specifically Hanalei, and they focus on historic preservation, and Council Chair Furfaro of course mentioned that, and they are also the comments are related to the HTE Informational Workshop 29 February 23, 2012 goals for 2020 -2035, number 8, which relates to the cultural values, and the rural character. I just want to remind everyone that of course the North Shore is a special planning area, and it has been identified nationally as a cultural landscape although it is not designated as one, so it would...the national guidelines for cultural landscapes could be relevant. The road from Princeville to Ke`e when it changes to route 560 is on the State and National Register Of Historic Places, and the roads committee had worked with the DOT in developing this corridor plan for that area. When I talked to Jim, he is going to post some of this stuff on his website. There is also these fairly new, it is called the "Preservation Office Guide To Historic Roads," and it is clarifying preservation goals for State Historic Preservation Offices and establishing preservation expectations for State transportation departments. There is a lot of very informative and relevant information in this report or guide document. We are hoping that, and after talking to Jim at the meeting last night, that some of this information will be incorporated into the plan that will be identified should transportation planning that comes up in this particular project relate to the North Shore. So thank you very much. Ms. Nakamura: Thank you for sharing that information. Any questions for Barbara? Would anyone else want to speak? If not then... Mr. Bynum: Move to receive. Mr. Chang: Seconded. Ms. Nakamura: Any further discussion? Mr. Chang: I have very quickly. Barbara, thank you for your testimony, and we appreciate your manao and wisdom within the community, and if I am not mistaken this might be the first time that you have testified in our newly renovated building, so we wanted to say welcome. Pat Griffin, welcome to you too. I just wanted to say a few comments. I guess all of us love the fact that if we can get busses stationed on the North and on the Westside, especially if we have employees on those sides of the island, I mean how refreshing is it that you can just jump in a bus from where you are at, and start your route, and come back. I think it is great for morale. I like the walking aspect, because I think when people are healthier, because they catch the bus. When you walk in the morning, and then you have to walk to work, it kind of energizes you, gives you an opportunity to think without the stress to be able to start your day, I think that is a lot more productive. I would also love to, on my visitor industry hat, love to see some sort of a narration, you know like a historical narration, and perhaps talking about activities or events that are going to be happening this week in Anahola, or in Waimea, or what have you. I think there are benefits of having the vehicle staged for cultural events, and bus shuttles, and something available, for example Waimea Town Celebration people park by the Russian Fort, you could get them in. People from Kekaha you can get them in. I mean I like that opportunity, but maybe one day down the line like in Honolulu they have the advertisements on the side of the bus, maybe that could be a revenue making option on the bus, but I am happy with the direction. Mr. Charlier, thank you as always for your wisdom and your manao, and understanding, and knowing for many years this island of Kaua`i, and being really true and helpful to our culture and to the people. I want to thank Council Vice Chair JoAnn Yukimura for putting this on the agenda, so we can better keep our residents abreast. Thank you Celia, Kaleo, and Mr. Charlier. Thank you very much. HTE Informational Workshop 30 February 23, 2012 Mr. Bynum: I want to thank Jim for being here. I met you I think five or six years ago, and I am very pleased you are back on Kaua`i helping us work these things out. You have been here a few times now so you have really gotten a sense of this, and just how pleased I am with the synergy that is happening in our County with support from the Mayor, with the Transportation Agency, Planning, you know getting out of the silos and talking to each other, and working, Get Fit Kaua`i Built Environment Task Force. I mean these were things I had hoped would happen in the future, and they are happening here, and it is very, very positive. There is no secret that I am a big fan of shared use paths, and I just want to mention, on the Eastside we have met critical mass. We have gotten there that it is really having an impact today on transportation issues on the Eastside, particularly because visitors are spending some of their time recreating on the path as opposed to getting In their cars. We just went out...we are fairly close — within a year or two—of connecting Lydgate Park all the way to Kuna Bay in a continuous thing, and when it comes in front of the Coconut Market Place and our visitor industry there, we are going to see those benefits to all of us get better as visitors spend more of their time getting to their restaurants and to their shopping on a path instead of getting in their cars. We all know right now people stay in Coconut Market Place, they get in their car, on to the highway just to get to Safeway, because there is not a safe way to get there, and there will be in the next couple of years. These things are starting to hit critical mass, and to see the energy that is coming from the North Shore and the Westside on these walkability and pedestrian, because they have seen the benefits, is a great thing. So this was a good day. Thank you very much. Ms. Nakamura: Okay, thank you very much again. This meeting is adjourned. There being no further business, the workshop was adjourned at 10:41 a.m. ubmitted, /ao APPROVED at the May 16, 2012 HTE Committee Meeting: JO ►I N A. YUKI H ing /Transport And Efficiency Co A, Chair on /Energy Conservation mittee K. Na as ima Cler Typist