Okay. Commission's Court for the evening of February 16th is now session this evening is a 5 p.m. Public meeting for the review of the draft to death and kind of thoroughfare plan. And first we're going to call on John poster. And for the public that's here, we're going to have John say a few words. They're going to go through what about a 10 minute presentation and then if people would like to ask questions at that point that's fine but we can take a little break with the knowledge of the presentation. You're welcome to go look at maps, ask questions and then we can open it back up if you want to ask questions at the podium. Give you the opportunity to do that. So John, if you'll start us off please. Yes, ma'am. Thank you Judge Commissioner. My name is John Holster with innovative transportation solutions and tonight we are here to have a public meeting on the proposed draft in County Thurfer Plant. What we'd like to do is have Kevin St. Jocks from freezing nickels kind of go over how the development of the Thurfer Plant occurred. What steps we took to get to this point in the process then maybe take some time to either hear comments from some of the folks that are ready if their folks it so want to just look at the maps or whatnot. Go ahead and do that. But then we do the whole thing over again around six o'clock for people who may come in after that. This presentation time frame. Does that work for you? Kevin? Okay, go ahead. All right, my name is Kevin St. Jake, so as a project manager for Freezin' Nickels on the program, we'll walk you through briefly, make sure I have this, there we go. How the plan came about, things we took into account as we developed the plan and where we are at this stage in the process. First why do we do a plan? We've been marching along for a long time and just kind of taking things as they go, but it's good to kind of have a plan that incorporates all the other plans of the cities together and starts looking for the gaps and advance elements of where the cities are going as they proceed into the county and make sure the county can plan to accommodate that growth. And so there's a lot of reasons to have a plan. There is also a need for this county to communicate its interests to techs.com about where the growth is planning. Their cog is always reaching out, techs.com is always reaching out what's your plans, what are you thinking, so if they can understand how to do their business, and so it's good to have a coherent plan that presents the collective thought processes of what's going on in this county. And then to reach out to the Jason Calais and to say, well, here's how we're extending out. And here's how our role in networks so we can make sure they don't plug in in the future as things evolve. To begin, what we did is we reached out to every city in the county because the city is actually have their own thoroughfare plans and within their city limits they control their thoroughfare plan. They have been planning for years about how they're growing, they've collaborated with their citizens and their developers and so they have the plan in place for where they're growing, they've collaborated with their citizens and their developers, and so they have the plan in place for where they are growing. And they can actually control that. The county, in our overall plan, just incorporates their plans. The county does not control what the city does in its thoroughfare plan. And so it's important that as we look at this whole thing, if there's something about something in the city that we've represented, it's not really the county that you need to go to. It's the city that you need to go to. The city gave us the representation of what the thing is. So as things evolve and as the city updates its thoroughfare plan, in fact, they've done that, like, umpteen zillion times through this whole process that we went through, We incorporated their plan to the most current. And even to the point that we've had some draft versions of plans that still need to be updated a bit as we move forward. But even if you adopt the plan, there will always be updates. Cities will need to kind of send you a memo saying, hey, we will put it in a plan, can you represent that in your plan? But the fact that the county may not represent what the city is doing in their plan, will not control, will not limit what the city can do. So it's just really just looking at the big picture and helping the county the plan to receive the city's growth, essentially, is what's going on. And to interface with all the other agencies. going on, and to interface with all the other agencies. So the input, again, city, city, thoroughfare plans was the big part. In fact, there's some portions of this calendar are told and covered by city limits. And so there's parts of this that really they control probably a good half of this county is all within a city limit of stuff. And so it's really the extent between some of the smaller communities of how they see each other growing. And maybe we had to kind of do something to kind of coordinate between the two and that there's a foreland coming from here and a two-length coming from here. We had to kind of get them to come together. There's some areas actually that were kind of in ETJs of other communities and none of them really had a plan for what was going on there. So actually during the whole process, some of those discussions happened and things kind of materialized and some communities actually benefited from the process of talking about this things that are outside their cell labs. So all these things came to play during the whole input of the program. We're actually doing the third-fair plan in Cook County and so we've been collaborating very closely with how that county's drawing and raising county others. Especially Colin County with their big plans for growth over there. Just to take all that into account and see how it all comes into Denton County and make sure that how Denton County is growing and evolving is taken into consideration in all of their plans. And then what this whole thing will eventually allow the county to do is do its capital planning that it needs to do for enhancement roads. There may be a growth corridor that has a deficient bridge that these be brought to standards to allow growth to occur, so to help program all these things that will take a place in the future. We did some assessment of how NCD Kong represents Denton County in its program of roadway, of evolution in the 2035 plane that they had done. They're now in the 2040, but that kind of, we can't catch up to them. So we did actually some forecasting beyond what was in 2035 considering what was evolving beyond what was in their model and have them do some adjustments, especially just for this county plan. So we've added some things that were really focused high intensity developments, some roadway elements that were evolving that we want to just kind of test and see what kind of volumes that they would bring and take care of. So we've done some enhancements to the regional modeling to test out some of the network to prove up whether it should be a Tulane or a four lane. But the thing we have to recognize is that it's only a 20-year plan that the con has. So they'll do a 20-year fork to ask and say, well, you need a four lane, or you don't need a four lane boat. It's up to us to look at that corridor and house positioned in relation to all the other quarters and see what these are the foreland boat are or what it needs to be for the larger picture and the longer horizon planning. And we also did some scenario planning in the east-west quarter, north of 380. There's the old out-releaped corridor that had a vision a long time and in calling counties kind of taking that and and advancing it and so the question put forth on this plan was Is that reasonable thing to extend into that account and tied over to 35 what would that do so we actually worked with ncd calm to do three scenarios One was looking at scenarios. One was looking at some of the North South connectivity and some of the East West connectivity. We did some testing in there. Looking at some of the limitations on how folks can get east to west across the area. And so we did a screenline testing of the level service in the quarters and how things are evolving, how with 380 in that 235 horizon is programmed to be at level service at and beyond and just really a quarter that needs some relief. And so we looked at that and some of the other quarters in the southeastern quadrant of the county that's mostly built out area. It's level service at and allow the roads and that's just the way it's going to be. There's not a whole lot of room before doing anything. But up in that northeastern quadrant we've got some room to plan for the future. What should that future be and how should we take care of what's going to be happening and make sure we can accommodate things. So we did a little East West connector study to look at that area north of 380. And if we did a no-build scenario, if you just have like 428 is the FM road that kind of passes through north of 380 and this got a level service F scenario in that future condition. We also looked at parallel rows, up at 455, the roadway that goes across the dam, what's it doing, and what's that traffic in the future. And actually saw that there actually is some relief by two other alternatives. One next step step up was doing color, what we call enhanced arterial scenario. What if we connected a bunch of the FM roads that are kind of up east west across that corridor and made them a little bit bigger and enhanced the connections between them and that would be a reliever for 455 especially it goes from 30,000 down to 20, traffic. And then some of the relief up off of 380. Interesting thing about 380 is that the more traffic we relieved off the, we can see we've added 50,000 cars a day into this east-west quarter north of 380. But it didn't reduce 380 a whole lot because as we tested the latency of the demand, the more you take out of 380, the more room there is to put more into 380. So it tends to, it tends to free up its operation just to receive more traffic. And so it's going to be at capacity no matter what happens, but it's just going to be, and not as bad level service after when you add these parallel routes. And then we tested the east west quarter as a bit more of a freeway, a bit more continuous flow across the quarter and those volumes jumped up from about 50,000 up into the 70,000s. Relieved the 380 quarter a bit more, relieved the 455 quarter tremendously, even relieved some of the some of the traffic off of the tollway across the bridge. So there's a lot of east-west conveyance that right now is just putting up with 380 conditions that will be tremendously relieved and will get out of jamming up the arterial network if something is added. And so's the the kind of justification for Seriously considering the east west connector that goes between 35 and ties into that east west connector that is going into Colin County east of the tollway And so with all those elements put together We mapped out the draft thoroughfare plan for the county. In some areas we had undefined elements of what roadways would be between cities. And so we just looked at how they were growing and what logical connections would be made. So, example, we put a roadway going from Denton to Sanger where the two of them hadn't thought about trying to make the connection, but something parallel toways that would fill into the emerging developed areas and allow better structure to receive the development. In a northeast quadrant, compared to what's out there now, there's kind of a small web of FM roads that kind of work their way through the Northeast quadrant, but we see that Salina and Prosper and everything are growing and they're growing into this northeastern sector of the county. And so we want to have a framework for something that will evolve as developers come in and they want to plant property and want to do things in the sector. We have a framework now to receive them that will have logical connections and logical circulation for the traffic that they will generate. And they will generate traffic. There's no kind of way around it. Now the DNT will be extended up through the area in the county line up in the Gracie County. And the structure for the network was built with that anticipated to be in place. Parallel back-end roads for the DNT to receive the backside of the intense development and a more logically spaced parallel roadway after that and crossing east-west roadways to feed everything. And logical I was circulated rather than having everything have to come down to 380 and go across to have this network of underlying minor material and major or two network that will fear everything together and really relieve the pressure event that's often built on the highways. And so that, we highlight a few areas. We've mapped out what is different between this program of development of Robo Network for the county was different from what's in the COG plan as far as it's where we network and so we have feedback back into NCD COG. We actually have them taken to consideration some of those roads we already when they test out our network so the network has some of this robustness in it already in the specialized network they generate for us. It's an informal network. It's only applies to this study. But at some point, Kahn will then take the county's input and you have to tell him what you're going to build in 20 years and then they'll put that into the network and represent the county in that fashion. We also, at the very end of the plan, developed a set of roadway standards as far as right away requirements, elements that would go into the corridor. For a rural environment, having the shoulder and having the space for the side ditches in an urban environment environment having a center median for a divided four-lay major arterial. Looking also at the minor arterials and allowing multiple kinds of cross sections available to put in the bike lanes and other things that happen on minor arterial network for four cities and developing communities. To allow that, that, kind of what they call complete streets. But in that lower intensity traffic area to allow the the Iceland connectivity and the heavy pedestrian activities that happen in those smaller areas. And so the steps that we'll follow next, we're, you know, we're 99% done. We've been constantly bringing changes from city's to our plans. We'll continue to make a couple of mile patient of bedrock to our attention. And then if there are things that are evolving at the city level, they can still evolve. If they don't evolve in time when we're accepted, then what happens is that the city again will just say, hey, please update this in the third-fair plan for the county. There's no rush for cities to hurry up and finish the third-fair plan to get in time. There's no constraints on the county plan on their plan, but it's just something that will be constantly updated over the future. So that's something that now was a briefing. We'll kind of be available for folks to look at the boards and ask us lots of questions. And we'll be coming again at a future date for official adoption by the official court, but we'll finish the course. Once we get all the fine tuning and everything, take a place and we think it's ready ready to go. And then we'll adopt it officially. But again, it's a living document. It will be constantly growing and adapting to the future. So it's really up to the pleasure of the court. And folks here, what they want to do. We're open to have comments now or if they want to try to get some of the questions asked individually we can do that but we'll do all of it however you want to do. I just want to make one other point before we move on. On the adoption and amendment process, when it's receiving what the city asks us to just reflect on our map, generally speaking, we'll simply incorporate that because they have the authority inside their sick elements. But there'll be a formal process by which the county if requested to change your amend your thoroughfare plan and the unacquaprated area that will follow the normal administrative code that requires that to be done with public notice and all that other stuff. That's to you to put normal the normally a process for us fields would amend the thoroughfare plan. So I think what it's not going to be an agreement. It's going to be an item that changes as we move through. Right. So in the other areas, locations that we've amended mean change that date of thoroughfare plans. Essentially what we do is as you adopt it, part of your adoption is the amendment process will be spelled out that you've got to be compliant with the appropriate statutes. And you'll spell out what those are. I'd rather have it go through our planning department and the engineering department and then eventually come to the commission's board. So it's up to the pleasure or whatever. Any move to the public that has a question at this point or would you like to take some time and look at the maps and you know we've got several people here you can ask specific questions and members of court you have any questions at this point. Okay. Let's take a little break here and invite you to come up and get closer to the maps and take a look and maybe you'll think of something that you'd like to ask particularly these two gentlemen. So let's take a little recess. Come on in.