Recommendation to approve the designation of one-time infrastructure funds for City Council District infrastructure projects and existing programs; and Approve related budget appropriation adjustments in accordance with existing City Council policy. (Citywide)
Vice Mayor Richardson Motion Carries Item eight. Report from Financial Management Recommendation to approve the designation of one time infrastructure funds for City Council, district infrastructure projects and existing programs and approved related budget and appropriation adjustments citywide. There's a motion and a second. Councilmember Pierce. Thank you. Yeah, I just wanted to say that we'll be removing the funds from Cherry on Broadway and hopefully reallocating that to another corridor for improvements. Possibly Corridor seven. But those funds are already. That street is already covered by measure. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct. And Lee, if you can help us with exactly which item for the record needs to be adjusted. To the chair. So this item does approve the designation of one time infrastructure funds and approves related budget appropriation adjustments in the category of the designation of one time infrastructure funds for public works projects. We'll be removing $34,001 for the Broadway between Cherry Avenue and Temple AV project, and that will then have a revised total of $170,955 of designated projects. Great. Thank you. There's a motion in a second. Any public comment? Please come forward. Good evening, Counsel and Staff Susan Miller. I've lived on East Ocean Boulevard since 1993. I want to respectfully request the Council to remove on item eight all three items related to Ocean Boulevard in District three, totaling $121,000. I have no issues with any of the other projects, and item eight $121,000 is 75% of this item. That is too large of financing. City management agenda at size the item as a financial management matter. It makes no mention of the road diet and diagonal parking in this narrative text simply listing the road diet in I have an attachment. There are currently no public published, publicly accessible graphics or description text on the city's website or on any of its social network pages, or on Councilwoman Price's website or on her social network pages on this. Simply put, there is zero online trans transparency. The proposal is camouflaged within consent calendar and buried among a list of non-controversial items bundled for so-called council district discretionary fillings, which are actually paid by taxpayers citywide. So with no information available anywhere for the average residents to gain information, the three Ocean Boulevard items need to be removed from item eight. This action is not in accordance to support for transparency and desire for public participation. Ocean Boulevard is a major artery for traffic infrastructure in this city currently and for the future. The proposed $100 million plus Belmont Pool is on Ocean Boulevard in city planning. I cannot fathom a major swim sporting event looking at a venue that only has a one lane road being the only access. Please remove the three Ocean Boulevard items from the agenda. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Good evening, Ann Cantrell. And I'd also like to speak on this road diet. I appreciate that. Jack Cunningham from Councilwoman Prices Off Office sent me an email with some of the explanation of why this is being done. It stated that a study had found the volume of traffic that Daily Travels Ocean Boulevard is less than half as much as the road was designed to transport. I have questions about this study. What time of day was it done? What days of the week? What time of year? There are many days in summer, especially on weekends and during special events when the traffic is heavy on ocean and two lanes are needed. Perhaps cutting down to one lane will slow down traffic, but it will also have the effect of bringing it to a standstill when traffic is heavy. And where is the room for cars to pull over to allow fire trucks, ambulances and police cars to access the area? This road diet is supposed to provide 150 new non metered diagonal parking spaces along the south side of ocean. I'm wondering. This sounds wonderful. Why would anyone pay to park in the Granada lot if there's non metered parking on the street? Perhaps a better solution would be to take the meters out of the beach slot. This supposedly this road space will be available. That it creates enough space for a buffer zone between the diagonally parked cars and the bike lane. And I ask you to look at this picture, which I got from L.B. report dot com showing what we were told is perhaps the plan for this. Here's the diagonal parking. Here's the bike lane and here's the one lane. Cars backing out are going to be backing out right over this park bike lane into oncoming traffic. Perhaps the people that are using this bike lane could use the beach park bike bike lane, which is already there just a few feet over on the beach. I think this is a very dangerous proposal. It is suggested that stop signs are illegal to slow down traffic. This makes no sense to me. Thank you, Miss Cantrell. If it's legal to make narrow lanes, then it should be legal to make put in a stop sign. Thank you very much. Next speaker, please. Mayor Council, L.A., Neil. I live in Belmont Heights. First time I'm up here, I'm a little nervous. Agenda item number eight, item number 16, dash 0879. I'm here to urge the Council to not approve $85,000 funding for the ridiculous Ocean Boulevard rodeo between Livingstone Drive and 54th place in Belmont Shore. That's the portion of the $121,000. There are no drawings. There are no diagrams that you are voting on. You don't even probably know what is involved in that. The proposed road diet lane reduction design is severely flawed and will cause an increase in traffic congestion. And unsafe, perhaps hazardous conditions that degrades the quality of life for Belmont Shore and the Peninsula homeowners and residents. It also negatively affects thousands of tourists, visitors and special events on the beachfront. Well, I appreciate the city traffic engineer, Eric Webster, and for trying to come up with parking spaces for Belmont Shore. He does publicly state that he wants to cause congestion because that's what gets people to slow down. Well, as I understand it, the original problem identified by Belmont Shore residents regarding Ocean Boulevard was crossing the street to the beach at a few intersections. As I understand it, residents identified intersections that they wanted marked pedestrian crosswalks or stop signs to help alert drivers to their presence. As they cross. Somehow this request turned into a reason for the most. Undoubtedly lamest road rage inducing emergency vehicle restricting air quality, destroying traffic, congesting bicycle li bicyclist endangering pedestrian ignoring street improvement design. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. My name's Jennifer Cameron. I live on 65, 63rd place on the peninsula, and I've been a resident of Long Beach community for 36 years. I have driven Ocean. Boulevard ever since I've lived there. I've never seen. Speeding is they're talking about, but my concerns are traffic. I'm not sure where this. Idea came from. It was first presented. At the Alameda Space Preservation Committee meeting, came out of the blue. No one at the meeting was expecting this. And when the majority discussed this. Afterwards and they had a vote. No one was interested. In pursuing this for the peninsula. Well, that. Goes as well for the rest of the Belmont Shore area. We at least have a group that met and discussed it for the Belmont. Sure. I don't think people know about this. I don't think there's a group that's discussed it. It just came in. And suddenly here we are with a vote on it. I think the traffic engineer, I don't know when he put out his tabs. And and did the traffic analysis, but he certainly didn't do it during the summer. Because we have so many events. We have the pirate event, of course. We have the pool. We have the volleyball event as well. We've had. The sand the sand event. And that day I was driving, it took me 20 minutes to get from the beginning of Bayshore through Granada, and they brought in police officers to help direct traffic. And that was with two lanes. And now they're talking about one. As you realize, there's only so many quarters. We have Anaheim. We have Seventh Street, and then we have Ocean. People have to get. Through not only locals, but people that come in and work. In Long Beach and leave. And I don't understand. I think if you. Put down one lane. The traffic is going to go somewhere. And where else will it go on crowded days? It's going to go right through that community and people will not like it. As well. There's discussion about safety. If you have, as we know now, lots of SUV and lots of big trucks and they're diagonally parking. Do you know how dangerous it is to back up and try and get out? I have a smaller car. I can't see past those cars. I think they're backing up. You'd be going right into the back lane. You wouldn't see those bikers. Right now, there's parallel parking. You can turn. You can look. You have a rearview mirror. And it's safer. So I think there's a safety issue. I think for traffic reasons, for safety and for alerting the community of this upcoming diet, I think this should be voted against. And taken off. Agenda eight. Thank you. Thank you. It looks like our final speaker. Okay. Anna Kristensen again, this time just representing myself and my street of Termino Avenue. I was driving down Broadway after this issue of the road diet came came up and with the paint and the new lines and the thing and I noticed we now suddenly have a left turn lane painted in on my street, which doesn't even have a stop sign at Broadway. So I'm wondering, is there an excess of paint in the city? I mean, we have like a lot of leftover paint that we have to get rid of because, you know, you know, a good idea is one thing. But taken too far, you know, it gets a little bit crazy. And I think both with this parking thing, it seems like the second and third are kind of mixed up. Maybe the diagonal parking should go along First Street where our congressman lives. That seems to be a kind of off limits area first between Redondo and the park there. There's plenty of that's a very wide street. They need some parking there. I don't think those residents would be very happy about it. But all I can say is, as someone who spends a lot of time going up and down Ocean Boulevard, you know, I just I just don't see anybody speeding. I walk a baby across there in a stroller. And I think you're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist without going to the source of, you know, the people who would be most affected, the community. And I really wish you'd erase that left turn. LANE Everybody's going to start thinking we are a major thoroughfare on terminal, and it's been pretty quiet lately and we like it that way. Thank you. Thank you. See no other public comment. Councilwoman Price. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So a few things. Just to be clear, the item tonight is to set aside money for this project out of our infrastructure funds. So we're setting aside money for the project. We're not approving a project tonight. Having said that, this is a project that is a recommendation by the city's traffic engineer in regards to ways to reduce speed. It's not it's it's it's kind of like when we put additional stop signs in or we put additional lights on or we reconfigure roads, those aren't projects that necessarily come through the council. So I understand the concerns that everyone has, but we just added some lighting, some traffic lights on seventh and Santiago. We just did a Broadway road diet. Those items don't come before council. They come as a result of traffic engineering. So having said that, I know our traffic engineers are here. I'm just going to go through a couple of points and then I'm going to ask if if Eric, if you wouldn't mind, Eric, what's coming up? Just so we can go through a couple of points and then for anyone who's here who feels that they don't have the information or anything like that, please let me know. But I do. I do note that Susan was talking about a lack of transparency. I'll note that on we've been in communication, Susan and I have specifically on this topic. And with this there was a presentation made to the Belmont Shore Residents Association, and then there was a meeting at the field office. And no, the PowerPoint was not functioning. Mr. Van Dike's PowerPoint was not functioning. So Susan did receive, as I said, everybody else who was there, including the neighborhood association, presidents, copies of the PowerPoint. And in fact, in the email that Susan sent on August 12th, she actually attaches a number of slides from the presentation. And I know that she had sent that email, you know, late in the afternoon or like almost 6:00 and and responded within a few minutes saying that she had concerns with the project but hadn't had a chance to see anything so or ask any questions. So, you know, there was obviously some some concerns about it and I get that. But in regards to transparency, at least for the speakers this evening, at least two of those speakers had a copy of the full PowerPoint and the traffic study. The way this came to be is that a traffic study was requested through the Belmont Shore residents. We have repeatedly we get calls every day from residents and businesses on Ocean Boulevard saying that people are taking Ocean Boulevard in in order to avoid other streets. And that's causing a lot of safety issues because pedestrians are almost getting hit crossing the street and that people are driving above the speed limit. So there was a request by the community for traffic engineering to do a study. They did a study. It's actually a very thorough study. I think that's a great suggestion. Susan, we will put this on our website so that everyone has a copy of the study, but they did a study. It's an 11 page study and it goes through many aspects of Ocean Boulevard. So Ocean Boulevard was designed and built for 25,000 vehicles a day of traffic. It currently gets in the peak months, 7000 cars traveling through it a day. So it was built for 25,000. It gets 7000. A lot of the residents suggested that we put in traffic I'm sorry, stop signs as a way to slow traffic down. And this is an area where really we have to defer to our traffic engineers to some extent because this is an actual science. They've they've done a lot of research and study on this. But stop signs aren't designed to slow traffic. They're designed to indicate right of way. It is an in applicable use of stop signs to put them there to try to control traffic speeds. Traffic calming can only be achieved through engineering and design. And so the recommendation based on the size of this road and the number of vehicles that it receives is to do what's called a road diet. Some people have, you know, kind of made fun of the name. That's not really our name. That's a name that's in the traffic industry. I know that Eric came from Seattle. They did a lot of traffic road diets there. He's done one. He's done it in other cities. And again, the the road diet that was done on on Broadway has been extremely successful. We get thank you emails all the time from residents. So that's how the study was conducted and recommendations were made. And it is those recommendations that were acting upon were acting upon Traffic Engineering's recommendation. So I would like Eric to just briefly speak on this, but I do want the public to know, and especially the folks who are here, we are going to have another meeting where we're going to talk about this a little bit more in detail and then also. The timing and the impacts that this is going to have on the community as we implement it. In regards to the peninsula that the woman that was here from the peninsula. I appreciate you coming. Just so you know, the peninsula has the pic and within the pic they have a traffic committee. And the traffic committee originally had wanted to slow traffic by instituting these things called traffic humps, but they only wanted them on one side, one lane. So they wanted a hump on one lane, but no hump on the other lane. Traffic engineering felt like that was not a good solution because cars would be driving around the lanes and also because nowhere else in the country had anyone implemented these traffic humps on only one lane of a two lane road. So what I said to the traffic committee and they were not very happy with me because my predecessor had agreed to implement these traffic humps. But what I said was that I did not feel comfortable implementing the traffic humps because they were not with the standard of traffic design, but that we would do a traffic study for the peninsula. So they said, great. We did a traffic study at their request and all we did was present the findings and the recommendations of the traffic study. And there's going to be a presentation to the Peninsula Group. We haven't had that presentation yet, and I think that's going to happen in October. The money is being set aside, but that project is not going to get implemented for a while. And also the south and north side of ocean are not going to get implemented at the same time because we want to have an opportunity to see how this is working. Because if it's not working or if it's what people think it is, then we we can fix it. But our traffic engineers believe very strongly that this is going to have a positive impact. And I've heard a lot of comments about diagonal parking. You know, this is an unusual diagonal parking scenario because the buffers and I think Erik can speak to it more, are a lot bigger than they would be in any other place. There's there's a whole bike lane and there's a buffer before the bike lane. So it provides ample opportunity for for drivers. The people can say a lot of times that they think that diagonal parking is dangerous. There's really no data to back that up. In fact, parallel parking has proved to be incredibly dangerous because we've had we've seen numerous instances where people are injured as a result of a driver opening their door and a bicyclist driving into the door. There's actually a lot of published data on that. In regards to diagonal parking, there's really very little published data that talks about the dangers of diagonal parking. Finally, you know, this traffic study was done for the purposes of traffic, not for parking. The parking is just an added benefit of this design. It's going to allow for 156 additional parking spots for residents to park overnight free of charge in a parking impacted neighborhood. So that's just an additional added benefit. And although a lot of people don't like the change or the idea, you know, we don't want Ocean Boulevard to be a thoroughfare. We want it to be a safe place where residents and beachgoers can cross the street and not be concerned about travel vehicles traveling at a fast pace, which the data reveals that everybody speeds on Ocean Boulevard. So if you have an experience that I challenge you to stand over by the digital counter and just watch because my staff does it every day, we have one of our staff members who lives right there, and we've been tasked every staff member to drive through there every day at different times in advance of this road diet. So we have staff members driving there in the morning, in the afternoon and at night almost on a daily basis, because we want to make sure that we support a project that we think is going to work. And finally, when we talk about special events, traffic engineering has a whole plan in place for what we do for for special events. So for special events will be working with the Special Events Department in advance of the event to coordinate the traffic plan. And that means that some of these diagonal parking lanes will be opened up for thorough for for through bound traffic so that we do have two lanes on days where we have special events. But as Erik often says, we don't design roadways for special events. We design them for the other 345 days of the year. So I'm going to allow, Erik, if there's anything that you want to add to what I said, just to kind of clarify anything that might be inaccurate. Okay. Thank you, Councilmember Price. I think you've done a great job of getting into the details. So Eric Wood, Strand City Traffic Engineer, we've completed two road diets in Long Beach this past year. Both are working very well. Broadway and Alamitos. The reason for doing the road date on Ocean is to improve safety for pedestrians. Crossing ocean is riding along ocean and drivers traveling along it. As Councilor Price mentioned, this road has an excessive capacity. We feel that the analysis done shows it will still function just fine with one lane each direction we take into consideration emergency vehicle access. We take into consideration the development coming in the corridor with the pool. And with the special events taking place during the summer, the road diet is not designed to increase congestion, but it is designed to get motorists to drive closer to the speed limit that if that results in people going a little slower , that's okay. The slower people go, the safer it is for pedestrians. Reducing the street to one lane in each direction also means that pedestrians only have to cross one lane of traffic each direction, which is inherently safer. You do not have a multiple vehicle threat condition when that happens. As Councilor Price mentioned, we've had several outreach meetings along the corridor. There'll be more outreach that takes place. The diagonal parking will provide a buffer between the parking lane and the bicycle lane, and then the travel in. This setup is also designed to allow emergency vehicle access along the corridor. Traffic data that was collected for the study was taken during the summer months, both on Thursday and Sunday of the summer months and also during the spring. As was mentioned previously, while I was at the city of Seattle, I conducted ten road diets that were successfully implemented. Most of them were controversial, but the results are in going in and working well. I also was a coauthor of the Road Diet Information Guide, published by the Federal Highway Administration. That concludes my comments. Thank you. When I call you Mr. Road Diet. From now on. I'm getting maybe a bad joke right now, so thank you. We've done public comment. We've done the motion in a second on the floor. Seeing no other comments, please cast your votes. Councilmember most motion carries.