I call to order the January 11th, 2024 meeting of the Ashland Parks and Rec Committee. Welcome, everyone, and beginning of an exciting new year. Are there any proposed changes to the agenda? Okay, so we are moving on to the first agenda item, which is election of officers and we'll go to. Does help? Yes, so we are starting some new terms and it's time to elect officers for our committee. We're going to be electing our chair and vice chair. And for each position, I'm going to open our nominations. Once the nominations are made, we'll motion to close nominations and then we'll vote on those nominations. And then we will, somebody will motion to appoint a committee member to the role. We'll have a second for that and then we will close, and then we will vote. So with that being said, are there any nominations for the position of chair? I would like to nominate Chelsea Fricks to the position of chair. Second. Second. Are there any further nominations? Does anybody move to close nominations? Can I move since I moved to close? Second. Okay. Sorry, I'm going to be a little slow because I'm taking notes of who says everything so that's a lot of writing for that. All right. And so now I'm going to ask for a vote. Mr. Malloy? Aye. Ms. Lugo? Aye. Ms. Sean's? Aye. Ms. Freaks? Aye. And Ms. Smith? Aye. Ms. Frakes and Ms. Smith. Aye. All right. So now that we have our nominations, is there a motion to a point. Chelsea has chair of the Parks and Recreation Committee. Second. Okay. Mr. Malloy? Aye. Ms. Loy. Aye. Ms. Lido. Aye. Ms. Chans. Aye. Ms. Freaks. Aye. Ms. Smith. Aye. Congratulations, Chelsea. Thank you. Yay. Did I hit everything I I needed to do it. Okay, good. Making sure with the boss over there. All right. Well, congratulations, Chelsea, we're very excited for you. Thank you. And I hope to follow in. And that's amazing footsteps. So thank you. I appreciate it. And looking forward to next steps. It'll be great. All right. So now we're going to move on to Vice Chair. So for the position of Vice Chair is there a nomination. I would like to nominate in that chance. Is there a second? Second. as there are second second. Do we have any further nominations? Is there a movement to close nominations? I move to close. Second. Mr. Mulolloy. Aye. Ms. Lugo. Aye. Ms. Shons. Aye. Ms. Freaks. Aye. Ms. Smith. Aye. All right. So now that we have our nominations, is there a motion to appoint to the position of Vice Chair? I make a motion to nominate a net as Vice Chair. You make a motion to appoint. A point. A point to appoint. Thank you. Just making sure we have the correct vervege on. Okay. Second. All right. Mr. Molloy. Aye. Miss Lugo. Aye. Miss Sh's. Hi. Miss Frank's. I, and Miss Smith. I, Congratulations, Vice-Chairnett. Thank you. Our new members are getting to do a lot of voting on their first day. We've got fun. Sometimes we go a long time without votes, so get the crash course. So at this time, our new chair may take over, or if you may ask Ms. Shons to finish out the night if you feel more comfortable. You want to try it? Go ahead. Then jump right in. Yes. And following through with agenda, correct? Yes, ma'am. There we are at the moment. OK. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you for the, for the, for the, for the gavill. I appreciate that. OK. Well, let's see moving on we will go for citizen inputs if there is any citizen input here tonight Okay, and at this point do I close it? Okay, we'll close citizen input input section of the meeting and we will move on to the next item Which is Discussion item a introduction of new community members. Ms. Halk. Yes, so I just wanted to make sure we took a moment to welcome our two new committee members. We have Mr. Drew Maloy and Ms. Joyce Smith. They're both very active in our community, and very passionate about aspects of the parks and recreation programs. They have tremendous energy, and I'm very excited for their contributions to our committee. They're coming in at a really pivotal time. We've got a lot of amazing projects on the horizon. And so I wanted to thank them for their interest in serving and for accepting the roles. I know it's a time and energy commitment and we appreciate you giving back and serving the town as a whole. I really, as I've said before, believe that parks are very much a quality of life. Parks and Recreations very much a quality of life and very, you know, very fun, but also very important and integral to a healthy community. And so recognizing that and being willing to promote that in the community and enhance that for our citizens. It's really grateful for your interest in serving and so at this time, not that you have to say anything but if you have any, I prepped you for this. If you have any comments, Mr. Molloy, feel free to share. Well, just real quick, I haven't been cold. Mr. Malloy has been cold this many times. I'm trying to get used to that part. But my wife and I have lived in Nashville for three years now. And we immediately fell in love with the town and everything that goes on here. And while my wife is still working, I'm retired after 42 years in criminal justice work, but almost immediately got involved with activities, the Hannah of the Arts and Activity Center Board for two years and then went through the community leadership program here with the town. And also it's asked to be a national and community ambassador through Martha Miller has that endeavor going on and serve on the Coana sport. So I have a few things going on that keep me busy. But parks and recreation, I walk the trails almost every day and use the parks with my grandchildren. And it's just for a small town, everything that they have going on, it's amazing. So I look forward to being on this committee and hopefully contributing in a very positive way. Thank you. Miss Smith. I too am very happy to serve. I too am very happy to serve. I have been in the town of Ashland for 42 years. I'm real active in the town of Ashland. I am a board member of the Ashland Police Foundation. I'm also an Ashland Ambassador. I'm also a board member on the Hanover King William Habitat for Humanity. And I'm real happy to serve with Parks and Rec. And thank you all for the opportunity. And I look forward to contributing in any way, OK? Well, welcome both of you. And I'm very excited for this new year and this committee as a whole. We've made some great progress and some big picture items and we've got a lot of really exciting things on the horizon. So thank you to our two new members but also want to extend my thanks to our three members who applied for reappointment, went through the whole interview process and for the continued service. So thank you all of you. And just another little welcome to Drew. I enjoy this as well because it's, I mean, I get to see Drew almost daily on walks through town, which is always nice and then it's wonderful to be able to work with you as well too. And I just, Parks and Rec, has, is, to me, such a huge part of Ashland. And so for us to be able to contribute, and I think this is a really exciting time to be able to contribute right now too, because working on this report in particular, our item B that we were getting ready to work on, I just think that this is, we have real impacts with what we're doing here. It's not that you know This isn't just a sitting committee. So it's exciting to move forward with it. So Okay, thank you. So moving on to discussion. Sorry. Do I need to close that out? Okay, so moving on to discussion item B I can pedestrian plan review. That's how? Yes, so For our new members and just kind of recap, we've been working on this plan for about a year and I am very excited to say that I have a finished draft. So draft, let me just make sure we know that word and we hear that draft. Okay, but we've been working on it along and along and making revisions, but finally we've got all of the pieces kind of plugged in. So for today, my goal is to go over a couple of the components that were added since our last meeting and just make sure that you are familiar with those. But I know I heard back from a few of you individually with some feedback. So I know that you have taken a look at it before tonight. And then just ask you for your feedback, any revisions that you have. And then we'll see if we have consensus on whether we're ready to take this for public comment. So starting off, some of the sections that are going to be new to you will be A, a lot of the maps. I have inserted now into the document since I was finished it and was able to work on formatting. That's the other thing too. Don't get too caught up in the format. It's still a word document. What we'll do is we'll actually take this and we'll pretty it up or we'll work with another entity to help us make this a very nice formalized document. So, you know, some of those spacings and picture and stuff, that's all going to be done after I know that we're good on the content. Some of the section or the biggest section that we, that I worked on and we worked on as a staff was the implementation. So the first thing that you'll notice is that we have infrastructure guidelines. Those guidelines are, we're determined by the Virginia Department of Transportation, best practices and our engineering. So that is on page 25, kind of that middle section line, number 477 through 489. So that is shared youth's paths. They're gonna be 10 feet wide. You know, sidewalk should be five feet wide with a four wide grass strip, curbing gutter. And so that is a new section. We finalized what our town standards are going to be based on our state standards and best practices. You'll also see we now have a form for community input that is included in your appendix. This was a direct request of the committee. That is appendix D. Director request of the committee to have a formalized method for people to request. You know, I want to sidewalk on this street or I want to trail so that way we have that documentation. Backtracking just a tiny bit in the project prioritization and that is going to be your appendix C. We have a new prioritization tool. We agreed upon any of the last meeting of the one before, the criteria for that tool being based on the goals and objectives or initiatives that we set for the plan. And the scoring I worked with our engineering team to, because if you were on the project prioritization before, there was some confusion around funding and some of the wording. And so we really cleaned it up and tried to make it more user friendly. And so that is an addition that you'll see here. But that is the main, those are the main changes. And then those sidewalk and trail recommendations and appendix B and those are from the 2040 transportation plan. So those are the tables from the plan. I also cross referenced this with all of the trails and sidewalks that the committee requested when we had all of our work sessions. So I pulled out that all of those documents and cross-referenced with all of these projects. So I've got them all in this table now. There were a few additional ones on the sidewalk side that I had to add to the table as well as some projects that had already been completed that I got to remove from the table, which was the which was really nice. So that being said, I will you know kind of let you guys provide but ever you know feedback that you have Oh, I will say one more thing sorry. I just looked at my notes and realized I missed One more thing I wanted to talk about the measurement tool so that is on page 26 at line 504 It's just a paragraph where we're talking about how we're going to track progress. So I had to sit down meeting with our engineering and public works team and as well as our community engagement manager. And good news. We were already kind of in the works of planning some type of tracking measurement tool that could be public to talk about, you know, so that we could make sure that we're following up on the projects that have been prioritized and making progress on the plan. So when talking, there are so many variables to implementing our project, so we can prioritize them, but cost change, there's differences in, our changes in staff capacity, sometimes other projects are going on at the same time and so contractors may have to change timelines. And so we moved away from getting very specific and setting hard deadlines on when things could be completed because they even opened my eyes to a lot of their challenges for having, you know, we're going to do this by FY this year FY. But what we have kind of come to an agreement on was a tracking document that categorized everything by color. So as you'll see in the paragraph, the table will categorize projects by their status towards completion. And that will, so green will be completed projects, yellows for projects in process, oranges for projects in the queue, and blue is for future projects, but we need to get a little farther down the road before we can kind of talk. We know when and how we're going to be able to accomplish that. And so, you know, for example, we've had a project in place for a while on the engineering side, and we had funding for it, and then that funding source went away. And so that was prioritized, but then we, the pricing changed and we didn't have the, we didn't have the funding source and so that's been pushed back. So keeping it kind of in a more flexible space, but also a way to a make sure we are tracking, but be able to put this on the website and share this with the public so that we're very transparent about what projects and stuff we're working on. Everybody in engineering and our community engagement manager myself felt like that was the best way to move forward with some type of measurement tool. So just know that that's a little bit of the background on that piece. And with that, I'll open it up to feedback revisions, kind of your overall thought. And then after we've kind of gone through that, I'll ask you how you're feeling about taking it to community input. So let's just focus on feedback for now. So let's just focus on feedback for now. I have a question. Yes. During the whole process, there were elements that we identified that we thought needed to be emphasized in the near future, like two to five years out, as opposed to like there were overarching designs and ideas of what we thought the town should be doing or the plan, but then there were specifics that we wanted to identify or we did identify and we talked about maybe putting it in the appendix so that you have the overarching document and then anything that was like more of a short term we were gonna have in the appendix. Are we still doing that? I guess is my question. And the ones that I wrote down from going back from the very beginning, the things that we identified was looking at Gandhi or with a new school name, whatever the new school name is up there. Safe routes to get to there was we thought needed to be emphasized in the near future and preparation for the fall-on trail was another thing we identified since that's going to be coming in strong within the next two years you know as they open up you know hand over completes theirs then Henrico's completing their section that's going to be something that's imminent. Two years is not a lot of time in order to get our ducks in our own. And then the other thing that we had talked about was making sure that we have sidewalks to all park entrances to identify that the parks were the entrances. Because we live here and we know where it is, but when you look at it from a fresh set of eyes, there are parks that we don't have that. Mm-hmm. So that's, so I'm not sure, we talked about those, we identified those as being important, but, and I know that we talked about putting it in appendix. Yeah, my interpretation of putting things in the appendix was the, were the tables that we put in. So my apologies if I misinterpreted because that is very likely. We do have all of those as initiatives under, I believe we have all of those as initiatives under our goals. So the improved safety of active transportation, so we talk about regional cycling routes there. And then we address, right, I mean, I know that they're all addressed but what we're talking about was having a more dynamic area where they could be replaced more frequently than the document. The original document was like 25 years older whatever. But we had talked about an area where we would have more immediate things that needed to be drawn to the attention of everyone that are more imminent. Right. So, you know, I know that we, that they are covered in the document generally. But so I appreciate that. And along with those ones that I was looking for as I read through, was also looking for this goes to the safe routes to school, but also kind of those keywords like bike lanes or, and then as well as the connected loop and so and they all of those items are in here Right, which by the way side note you've been really busy the couple months like this is awesome. It is so great. Thank you so much for bringing us all together. It's amazing And so they're in here, but I almost wonder if there is some reorganization that might help in- To emphasize that. Right, to emphasize, yeah. So, one thing that I've been thinking about is, because right now it kind of goes from, So we have vision goals initiatives and then recommendations. So I almost, and maybe this is more of, maybe this is reorganizing how we do the recommendations, because I think the recommendations could be more clear the way that they are currently. So I, one method that in a previous life doing policy work we used to always do was we either, we number them and we title them. And so that makes it really clear as in recommendation number one, and there's always an actor, and there's always an action. And so looking over, and because also the recommendations then kind of blend into the implementation. And as it's written right now, it feels like it's more the initiatives than it is the recommendations, whereas the initiatives are usually the projects. And I'm wondering if there's a way we could rearrange so that that recommendations are clear, there's an actor, there's an action, and then here's, here's how we're achieving those, and that's through the initiatives. So I almost feel like the organization gets confusing because the initiatives are coming before the recommendations. Okay. So that then it kind of gets muddled down. And so I fit, so in reading this, because then there's implementation. So between initiatives and implementation and then recommendations, you know, I read this as a, so for example, like page 25 lined 478 infrastructure guidelines. The town should construct sidewalks and shared use pass-based on Virginia Department of Transpiration Guidelines. That's a recommendation right there, right? So that to me is the part that should, you know, that's the recommendation that we're making should be more clear. And if the recommendations are coming from each of these, italicized pieces and then follow through with the initiatives, it feels a little bit backwards to me on that part. That's my take. And going on with that, like what I was, some of the things I read fall into what you just read. But I think, you know, looking in the next, you know, two to four, five years, these things are like right in our face. So somehow to be able to emphasize relooking at the new school safe routes, because I don't know when that was done. Yeah. And now the shift is it's going to be, you know, it's really important. And the same with the fall line, just kind of emphasizing that these things are here. Yes, they fall into all these categories, but they need to be in the forefront of what's being prioritized. I don't know how to do that. I'm just saying that I know that we identified these things through the process as something that we thought needed to be looked at. Right. So, and feel free to jump in if I'm off base, but because this is my first time doing this too. But what I see, this is the 2045 plan. So this plan has to have longevity. It's kind of bigger picture. So it doesn't mean we can't focus on those internally as staff and project prioritization. So when we go and do that sidewalk prioritization, we can take into account those factors when selecting what projects go on the list. that we can take into account those factors when, you know, selecting what projects go on the list or when, you know, like we are prioritizing fall line trail internally as a staff and connecting routes. So it's not that we're not, I'm not sure that it, in my opinion, maybe needs to live in this document because we're already, we're already pulling those elements from the document based on the timeliness of those as a staff and, you know, and as a committee, you'll be working on towards that too. It doesn't V.Dot do that where they have the, they have the 2040 plan and then the appendix is where they had specifics. I don't know if that's how it would be. Yeah, but I mean the transportation plan that we look at for the town. I think that's where we came up with the idea of having appendix like they did. I think that's where the idea of taking specifics and throwing it as an appendix item, kind of like what they did with their plan. Their plan says these are the directives and then they had, in the appendix, they had input from everyone and that was, and also then these different goals of getting certain things accomplished and they had it in appendix And so, you know, the document itself, stands at the test of time, but then the appendix is the place where you can, you know, juggle the things as they get accomplished or added and subtracted. I understand you're trying to get the emphasis for those things that are important. Great. The thing I'm struggling to connect and maybe it's more of a logistical part is, you have a prioritization tool, right? And so you go through that, use that to set your priorities, how do you want what your emphasis is to kind of alter or influence that? And I think Emmy's answer is how we've done things in the town for other types of projects, like we do a total capital project planning and I often have to have this very conversation with our council members is not everything can live in there not everything we could ever think of but there is an element of trust and I think we built it with council and I hope you're building it with him where just because it's not said doesn't mean it's not getting on right and council oftentimes has a concern that you know you can prioritize 10 things right well but everything's really important. I want to make sure that you're following that and so we reassure them that things like stormwater Right, even if you don't vote for stormwater, we're gonna be doing store stormwater And so I guess to kind of get to where you're going. I'm trying to figure out how does that alter the priority? Right, there's a tool that you guys are theoretically about to adopt This This says this is how we choose is what's important and what we're going to do. And so how does that influence that? What are you trying to accomplish with that? I guess I wasn't looking at changing the, altering the priority. I mean we have the tools. It's more a matter of reminding ourselves this is where we're looking at as being important in the future. During our discussions we identified these items. Well, and you know that can be that's part of my role is you know when we get to the prioritization going you know saying like okay in previous committee meetings and and reminding saying okay we talked about you know, pulling from the plan the initiative of Safe Routes to Schools. So when we talk about what we're going to prioritize, we're, you know, I'll bring projects that fit those, you know, fit Safe Routes to School or Fall Line or so that's a way too that we can kind of work within, you know, work within what is in more of an immediate or short term need. And I think one thing you were saying that may have kind of triggered for me the where you're trying to go with this is I do remember now the transportation plan. It's not necessarily the recommendations or the offenses. It's kind of a summary of all the things that people thought we were talking about. Yeah. And I think you could do an appendix pretty easy with that. It's not going to be a narrative of, and that said all these things, but a bullet of, the committee was also considering these things important, even though they didn't make it into the plan. Connecting schools, the fall line trial, so you can give a, whatever it is, 10, 15 bullet lists, we can put that in and appendix pretty easily. Right. Yeah, and we, that's what, yes, exactly that. Yeah. That we talked about it and it said we thought these items were important. Yeah. Yeah. And in that too, we can include the public comment, because that's what part, that's what that was. It was all the public comment. Exactly. So we can important that it came up so many times and it was unclear, we kept agreeing on it and kept agreeing on it. It just seemed important enough to capture somewhere. I'm sorry. I didn't know where. Yeah, but I just, like I said, it just was, we just kept coming back to those. So, thank you. I think you're right. And that's going to be made very apparent when we do the public input. Exactly. I'm going to talk about the same stuff you