Stutsman: Business under the Board of Supervisors, and that’s Item A, discussion/action needed regarding combining the informal and formal meetings on Thursdays. Hopefully we can get this discussion taken care of in 15 minutes or so because we do have quite a few people here for the Road Management discussion. Andy Small is with video productions and is here to talk about the proposed contract. What we’re doing is talking about combining our informal and formal meetings to one morning a week and that would be (inaudible) meetings for, so we need to finish up our discussion on this. If we’re going to go ahead and do this, you know, if we’re recognize the increase in costs of the Board still interested in combining the meetings. I think at one time we talked about doing a pilot project, maybe for 3 months and then to evaluate how it goes, and wondered how that would affect your costs, Andy.

Videographer Andy Small: Just the same.

Stutsman: Alright. You would go back to the original proposal if we decided not to continue that formal…

Small: We would go back, yes. There’s something in there, if the meetings are not combined, then the previous proposal would just be in effect. So it seems like you guys might just, as far as your jobs go, the workload of 2 meetings in one day might get overwhelming.

Stutsman: And we don’t know that. If we can move the agenda along and keep things on track, but there are certain things you can’t move along, that require a thorough… We don’t want to short-change discussion to keep it at just that one meeting a week. The plan was to have the formal meeting at the beginning of the meeting, and that would be voting on items that were discussed the previous Thursday, and then move into the informal meeting at the end of the meeting. Anything else that Board members…

Lehman: That also is considered the second Thursday of the month in the evening would be…

Jordahl: Right. The same.

Lehman: What’s the time table to start?

Small: I don’t know if we could start next week. I’d have to check, but Thursdays, since it is unpredictable. I typically don’t do anything else. I run back to the studio, I put a title on, a closing on, and then I sit around for 3 hours running copies and then I run the copies to the places. So, I typically don’t do anything on Thursday except for the Board of Supervisors.

Lehman: I was thinking if we’d want to wait, start the Thursday after our evening meeting.

Stutsman: Yes. January 20th? Carol you had some comments about agendas and deadlines for agendas.

Peters: Yes. (Inaudible) to do with the policy that we’re operating under right now is to deadlines for agenda items. One of the things that to me, is very important is that staff have an ample time to prepare the agendas for you. So I think we need to look at the deadlines for submitting agendas, also for right now for the formal agenda, if people have the items to us by Tuesday afternoon, meaning we act on them the following Thursday. With this, you will only be acting on those items that had been discussed the previous Thursday. So that’s going to set you back a week there for deadlines. Plus you’ll have the extra 2 days or 3 days, whatever, policy to put in place. So you’re actually setting the deadline for items that are going to be considered for the formal agenda back quite a ways from what you have now.

Stutsman: OK.

Peters: I don’t know how you view that. I don’t know how other department heads are going to view that.

Thompson: Do you have a suggestion for when we would put the deadline? Tuesday afternoon for the Thursday meeting? Is that…

Peters: Well…

Thompson: For the informal and then anything that’s not informal automatically goes on formal the following week.

Stutsman: Basically going to be a 10 day lead time before formal action is taken on something, and we run in…

Peters: Then I’m not sure how you’re going to want to address a situation where a person has a grant. Or not a person, but an agency has a grant, like one of your human services agencies. Now they can present it on Tuesday and have it acted on just several days later.

Stutsman: I think we have in the past kind of flip-flopped the informal and formal so that we can vote on something in a timely manner if there’s a deadline that needs to be met and I think we’ll probably still do that.

Peters: One of the historical things, on your formal agenda, you instituted having an informal portion on that agenda just to allow people to discuss items that department heads can bring up or public or one of the Board members can update the other Board members on a situation.

Stutsman: OK. So you’re suggesting to still have that as part…

Peters: Well no, you probably wouldn’t have that anymore.

Stutsman: OK.

Peters: Because you’ll be having your informal meeting…

Stutsman: Right after the formal meeting. OK.

Jordahl: So basically it will be a week longer to get things acted on but not discussed. I mean, the time period to get something on for informal discussion is the same, or wouldn’t necessarily be affected by this change. We could choose to change the deadline for that, but that’s an independent question. We would just be setting off the formal vote on an item for a week farther than it has been. The question that really needs to be discussed is what kind of an exceptions policy do we want to have for such things as grants, which there may be, for some reason, a last minute need to get done.

Stutsman: Right, and I think if there’s a deadline that needs to be met, then that’s the policy. You know, it will be.

Peters: It will be a big change for a lot of people because right now we’re pretty lenient on people, you know, if an item comes in that absolutely has to get on, you know, Jo waits until Monday morning to post Tuesday’s. We absolutely follow the law, we make sure everything is up 24 hours in advance, or we push it. There are days that Jo does nothing but adjust items on the agenda to fit the requests of other people, and that’s going to come to a halt. That is, unless, of course, the Supervisors direct us to bend the policy that you all set forth.

Duffy: Jo, who just makes one stage, then that could really have an effect on who comes before the meetings and things like that. It’s what we post (inaudible). These meetings are for the public. (Inaudible) done right, and personally, I don’t know how she keeps up with what she’s doing.

Peters: There are a lot of agendas to do.

Jordahl: Well the question before us though is are we going to try this as an experiment. I think the question of what kind of rush deadline things are we going to run into, what kind of pushes for things to be, maybe exceptions for other than grants are there going to be, how hard is it going to be on Jo, those are all part of the experimental period. That’s what the 3 months is about. It’s not to say there will be no problems, it’s we just don’t know what they will be and that’s why it’s experimental.

Stutsman: Well, I would suggest then that we start on the 20th and that will give us some time to do some press releases and send memos to department heads alerting them of the change, and go for 3 months and then we’ll re-evaluate this in March.

Jordahl: I’d like to make one more point about this. There are people who have the impression that this job consists of coming in 2 mornings a week for a couple of hours and then going home and watching television. In fact, the reason that this makes sense to do is that it frees up another morning to schedule other meetings that we have going on all day and, in some cases, all night. So it’s actually, it makes room to do our other work more efficiently, or at least that’s the hope.

Stutsman: The other thing was the opportunity to televise the informal, where most of our discussion happens, rather than just the formal meeting. That would be much more interesting to people than just hearing us vote on what we’ve discussed during our informal meeting on Tuesday.

Thompson: So this means that we wouldn’t have a meeting on Tuesday, on the 18th.

Stutsman: Right.

Thompson: And we wouldn’t have one on the 25th, which solves our problem about the IPERS meeting.

Jordahl: Yes, it does.

Thompson: However, on the 8th of February we had tentatively scheduled the Planning and Zoning progress report. Do we want to move that to the 10th, which is the night meeting, or move it to the 17th?

Stutsman: Well, we can still do that progress report, it just won’t be part of our informal session. You know, just like we’re doing the progress with the Ambulance this afternoon.

Jordahl: But I think doing it on the evening of the 10th would be good too. We’ve got people here interested in zonings and that’s the zoning report. I mean, it would be appropriate.

Thompson: Yes, that’s good.

Planning and Zoning Administrator Rick Dvorak: I think the 10th was the night you had also the road vacation.

Stutsman: Yes.

Dvorak: (Inaudible) at 8:00, and that gives us a 2 hour window, from 6 to 8, to get our plats and zoning done. We don’t know actually how long that would take. (Inaudible).

Stutsman: Well that’s maybe something we can discuss at a later time.

Jordahl: That would be our all night meeting.

Dvorak: We don’t have that many applications for you, if that helps.

Stutsman: This month, but the following, well we can work that out. Are there any other items for discussion about the informal or formal.

Jordahl: I’ve got road vacation on the 13th of this month. Not?

Dvorak: Did I say road vacation? I’m sorry. The vacation of 210th Street.

Jordahl: 200th Street. That’s what I’ve got on the 13th.

Dvorak: I must be wrong then. I thought that was the same meeting that was a public hearing at 8:00.

Jordahl: It is, but the 13th is a public hearing.

Thompson: 13th of January.

Stutsman: OK. So we’re OK with the informal and Andy you’re alerted. OK, and then we’ll work on some press releases and some memos.

Peters: (Inaudible).

Stutsman: Time constraint, as far as moving the agenda along and things? Is that what you’re referring to?

Peters: No, for the amount of time (inaudible).

Stutsman: OK. He had 4 hours set aside for…

Small: There’s a little bit of flexibility. I’m sure if it went 5 hours it would be offset by a 3 hour some other time. They’re not running so much commercial programming where, you know, they had someone who paid for x number of advertisements in a certain time slot. They’ve been really good to you guys and I don’t think that the relationship has changed in any way. They would like 4 hours so there aren’t a bunch of 7 hour meetings, but, you know, if goes to 4 and a half, even if it goes 5. I mean, I don’t exactly know how they operate over there, but they do seem to be just so accommodating that I don’t think it would be, I think it would be OK.

Jordahl: You do the math on that, Andy, I mean 5 hours, you know 5 plus 9 is 14, right, unless my math has slipped a cog, and 14, 12, 2:00, I don’t see Sally running a meeting until 2:00 in the afternoon.

Stutsman: Well, and I guess that’s another issue. I don’t have any intention for these meetings to go much past noon or 12:30, and that’s going to be part of the evaluation. If we’re finding we’re running until one, 2:00 and not getting our business done then we’ll have to look at how we can do it. The other item is do we want to start at 8:30 instead of 9? Any…

Small: I like 9.

Jordahl: You bring the coffee and donuts.

Thompson: You have to get set up before we start.

Stutsman: Alright.

Small: OK.

Stutsman: Thank you, Andy.

Small: Thank you very much.

Jordahl: Thank you.

Stutsman: Let’s move back to Item 5. Business from Jeff Davidson, Transportation Planner for Johnson County Council of Governments and Rick Dvorak, Planning and Zoning Administrator and Mike Gardner, County Engineer. This is a discussion regarding the County road management planning. Jeff I’m going to, or Mike or Rick, turn it over to you for just a brief background on where we’re at with this and what the history has been in this discussion.

Johnson County Council of Governments Transportation Manager Jeff Davidson: Yes, I thought that would be a good idea to do, Sally. This is an issue we’ve been talking about for the better part of a couple of years now. I think many of you can recall the public meetings that we had in Swisher and Solon where we had big turn outs at both places. I think we had 100 people in Swisher and about 60 in Solon, of people that were interested in, and I think on both sides of the issue. Interested in how the County determines whether or not a road is adequate to accommodate future development and the subdivision plats and the rezonings that you consider. We sort of culminated our research almost exactly a year ago, slightly over a year ago, and the Board made a determination at that time that you did not wish to consider having any formal measure by which you would… I guess a way of putting it would be, take some of the subjectivity out and try and put some objectivity in in how you make those determinations of whether or not a road is adequate. You seemed to have a reconsideration of that this year, this past fall, in October, when we discussed it again and you asked that we form a staff committee to actually make you a formal proposal and that’s what we’ve done. The staff committee that we used consisted of myself and Doug Ripley from JCCOG, Rick and R.J. from your Planning and Zoning Department, Al and Mike from Secondary Roads and Pat. We had some good discussions and I circulated a proposal which has then gone through 3 re-drafts and what you are seeing is the third re-draft of that and it is something that all of us are comfortable with being presented to you as a proposal for discussion. That’s what we want to emphasize that this is. This is not something that we’re handing to you and suggesting that you adopt it. We’re simply suggesting that you use it to maybe determine whether or not you’re interested in this sort of thing. We have put a lot of thought into it and we can just kind of real quickly run through it, if you want, prior to the discussion.

Stutsman: That would be great.

Jordahl: Jeff, before you do that, are there copies for members of the public. Do they have them?

Davidson: We have distributed some to members of the public. We’ve been in contact with the I-SOARR Group and they have copies of it. Certainly it is something that any member of the public can contact us if they wish to have, and we can make additional copies right now, if you’d like.

Stutsman: Yes, is there anybody that would like a copy that doesn’t have a copy? Looks like one.

Thompson: 2.

Jordahl: 2, 3.

Davidson: Maybe while Carol’s doing that we can just run through some of the main points of this. As I’ve indicated, this is not intended to really change the way you do your business of considering rezonings and subdivision plats other than adding this additional piece of having some objective criteria to use to determine road adequacy. The other things you consider about, on-site waste processing and water and adequacy of wells and sight distance and that kind of thing, those would remain, you would add this one additional piece to it. There is inevitably going to be discussion of the issue of, well OK, once we determine that a road is not adequate, then what do we do? That’s, I think, putting the cart a little bit ahead of the horse, and we were as guilty as you were in doing that, I think initially. I think the first thing for you to determine is whether or not you are interested in adopting these types of criteria. We can then certainly deal with that issue, of OK, if we’re going to reconstruct a road, to what standards should it be reconstructed. That is something that has received a lot of discussion recently, those issues of design standards. I think that’s something, let’s set that aside for the time being and we can certainly pick that up later. We have looked at the 4 principle classifications of County Secondary Roads, dirt, gravel, oil, chip seal and paved. Clearly your County system is intended to have those different road services reflect the character of that road and the amount of traffic that that road receives. One thing that we certainly have determined in this process is that there is not a single generally accepted standard for determining road adequacy. There is a lot of flexibility. What we’ve given you is what we consider to be reasonable standards, and it is certainly appropriate for you in your role as elected officials to tweak those and modify those to the degree that you think they should be. Put a couple of points on the board over here. One thing that I think is important for you to understand right up front is that inevitably where this leads you to is that your County 5 Year Road Plan will determine where development occurs in the County. This is very similar to a capital improvements programming process that a municipality uses. Where a municipality installs infrastructure, now for a city, it’s not only roads, but it’s sewer and water as well. For the County it’s principally the roads, and where you make improvements in roads will direct where development occurs in the County and that’s something that I think is a very appropriate role for you to have and something that then puts your development community on notice. That 4 years out we are projecting this road to be improved. 2 years out, this road. This particular road we do not have in the 5 Year Plan. What that does is then put a developer in the situation of either waiting for the County to make an improvement or, either through his or her own investment, improving the road ahead of when you intend to do it. In the city, that’s not unheard of for that to happen. For a developer to decide to go ahead and make the investment in improving a road because they’re in more of a hurry, basically, than the municipality is. The same type of thing can occur in the County, or at least some additional revenue from that individual might encourage you to accelerate a particular improvement of a road.

Jordahl: This is how Coralville has been paving Oakdale Boulevard.

Davidson: Yes. But I guess the important point here is that you, as elected officials, will be the ones to direct where improvements are made and subsequently development occurs.

Duffy: Now Jeff, what do you mean development. Do you mean a house, 2 houses, 20 houses?

Davidson: Whatever it might be, Charlie.

Duffy: I see.

Davidson: It could be a house or 2 houses or a whole subdivision or a commercial or industrial development.

Duffy: Then what this really is is a land control plan. Is that what we’re saying?

Davidson: Well certainly, Charlie, through your comprehensive planning and you zoning ordinance you already control where development occurs.

Duffy: Comprehensive plan is a guide, plus the fact that, I think in 2 states now, they say agricultural land, you just can’t say 40 acres. As long as you’ll farm it it’s agricultural land. But this thing here is something else.

Jordahl: I’m sorry I interrupted here. I didn’t let Jeff finish, and maybe we can…

Stutsman: Yes, I’d like Jeff to continue too, and then we can have discussion.

Duffy: Well, I just thought when you brought that up now is the time to do it.

Jordahl: Yes, I’m sorry.

Duffy: If you don’t want me to say anything…

Jordahl: I shouldn’t have said anything. I think we should just let Jeff finish up.

Davidson: Yes, just give me about 5 more minutes and we can finish running through this. One thing we do want you to understand should you decide to adopt some standards for evaluating roads is that there are some limitations in the measurements that we are able to do. I think even in some of the issues you’ve had already, where we’ve sort of been using some of these de facto standards that we’ve kind of come up with such as 300 vehicles per day on a gravel road. You can measure a road for 10 days straight and it will be over 300 vehicles, and then on that 11th day it will be 295. Recognizing the limitations of measuring things like traffic volume and speeds is something that I think we all need to understand right up front, that unless you want us out there taking measurements every day for 6 months straight, you simply need to be willing to accept the traffic counts that we have. We can always take new traffic counts. But, for example, this time of year, if you asked us to take a traffic count we’d be waiting for 4 months because we have to wait until the roads get to be decent enough that we can actually put our traffic counters down again. Just want you, up front, to recognize that there are some limitations in the way that we make these measurements. Oiled, chip sealed roads is something that, what have presented to you in this proposal, is consistent with your current policy, and that is that we are going to try to not create new mileage in oiled, chip sealed roads. Your County Engineer certainly had some concerns about the expense of maintaining those roads. The notion that you take a gravel road and as an interim measure chip seal it before you go in and pave it later is something that we have some concerns about because of the accident records that end up showing up on these chip sealed roads. If you look at, for example, Sugar Bottom Road, both the actual hard accident data that we have and certainly the anecdotal data that we have from the people who live out on the road, is such that having that be a chip sealed surface rather than a gravel surface increases the speeds and then increases the number of accidents that you have. So we are not recommending that chip sealing as an interim measure in the proposal that you have. Doug, would you put up the board that has the 4 different types of roads on it? Basically this board that’s up here now is, kind of gets into what’s on pages 3 and 4 of the proposal. On dirt roads, and I think everybody is in pretty much agreement to this, dirt roads are intended for agricultural use because of the issues with maintenance and the quality of that type of service and I don’t think there’s been anybody who has refuted that. For gravel roads, we start getting into the specifics of our proposal to you. The basic threshold that we are suggesting to you is 300 vehicles per day on a gravel road. There are some examples in the research we did of going up to perhaps as high as 400. We felt that 400 was a little high, and so that’s why we have proposed 300 as the basic threshold. As our policy has proposed, a rezoning where you have much more leverage than you do with a subdivision plat, that there would not be rezonings on property located on a gravel road with more than 300 vehicles a day. Subdivisions would not be approved unless the road was scheduled for improvement within the next 2 years. Now the reason we’ve used 2 years rather than 5 years is that 2 years pretty much locks you into actually doing it. We all know that in the case of something that’s out there in the 5th year of your plan, when you reconsider that the following year you may push that out to the 5th year again. So, that’s the reason that we’ve put 2 years in here rather than 3 or 4. But once again, that’s something that if you felt strongly you could modify. We feel, then, on a gravel road, dust alleviation needs to be addressed and you will note in the proposal we gave you we don’t have that fully worked out yet, and we’ve presented it to you as not being fully worked out. But something along the lines of, if a subdivision was proposed on a road that already had more than 100 vehicles, some type of dust alleviation would be required and hopefully an exaction could be made from a developer to assist with that dust alleviation. Need to work the details of that out, but that’s sort of along the lines of what we’re proposing to you. Once again, if a subdivision was proposed on a road with greater than 200 vehicles, in other words, still under your threshold but starting to get close to that threshold of not being adequate, we would propose that the density of development be reduced to one lot per 20 acres. There are some parallels to this in your existing Zoning Ordinance and that’s why we’ve used the one lot per 20 acres. We thought there should be something addressing excessive speeds or sight distance constraints. Sight distance, of course, pertaining to a vehicle traveling along a road, someone at an intersecting driveway or an intersecting road being able to have good visibility and see. So our proposal was that you would reduce these thresholds that I just laid out for by 50% if we either had proof that speed limit was being exceeded by at least 15 miles per hour or if there were measured significant sight distance constraints. Sight distance is something where we can go out and take a specific measurement and determine the adequacy of it. For chip sealed roads, it follows the same format, OK...

Jordahl: One moment Jeff. A clarification on reduced by 50% there. We mean 150 vehicle trips per day then?

Davidson: Right. You would reduce those volume thresholds by 50%.

Jordahl: Thank you.

Davidson: Oiled, chip sealed roads, similarly, we’ve established a basic threshold of 1,000 vehicles per day, and then similarly to gravel roads you would not permit rezonings on an oiled, chip sealed road that has more than 1,000 vehicles per day, and subdivisions would not be approved unless the road was scheduled for upgrading within the next 2 years. Obviously we don’t need to deal with dust on a chip sealed road, so that’s why that’s removed from this category. Then similarly, subdivisions with greater than 700 vehicles would not be approved at a density greater than one lot per 20 acres, and this is getting at that same thing again of, well we’re getting close to 1,000. We’re not at 1,000 yet but we need to be preparing for it.

Jordahl: It also deals with existing zoned areas.

Davidson: Right. When we’re making a determination, remember this involves not only looking at the existing traffic volume, but with the proposed development, how much do we think traffic volume is going to be, and we would use the 8 vehicles per lot, basically that we’ve been using. Incidentally, we’re in the middle of a study to actually measure locally what out trip generation numbers are. We’ve got the city finished, but we don’t have the County finished yet, and in the city we’ve been right on about the 7 vehicles a day. We did a survey of 100?

Secondary Roads Maintenance Supervisor Kevin Hackathorn: We got about 250 back.

Davidson: 250 people where we actually asked them, over the course of a couple of days, to write down every trip they made and then send it back to us, and it’s been right at 7 or slightly over.

Stutsman: Very good.

Davidson: It will be interesting to see what the County is, but we’re at least a little bit gratified that those numbers seem to be looking pretty good from what we’ve been using. So, at any rate, Jonathan, what I was saying is we would take the existing traffic volume that we currently have in our traffic count numbers and then make an estimation of the additional traffic 10 lot subdivision, 10 times 8, 80 vehicles a day, we’d add that to the existing number.

Duffy: I would suggest that some of the…

Stutsman: Charlie, let’s let Jeff finish, and then we can…

Davidson: I’m almost finished, Charlie, and then we can have the Board’s discussion. We also have a provision on an oiled, chip sealed road for reducing the traffic volumes by 50%. If the 85th percentile speed, that’s the speed that the majority of traffic is going, exceeds the speed limit by 15 miles an hour or if there are significant sight distance constraints. Finally then on paved roads, you know generally a paved road, certainly in the County system, is going to be adequate for… Our highest volume paved road is Hoover Highway coming out of Iowa City. It’s 6,900 vehicles a day, and a 2 lane paved road, you’re pretty good up to 8,000, 10,000 vehicles a day. So traffic volume in itself probably won’t be an issue on paved roads. However, I think you are aware that the 2 things that we do deal with are turning movements and sight distance on paved roads and those would still be criteria that we would measure and use. For example, the Eyman development was one where we required turn lanes in conjunction with that development going in, and we’d continue to make those same kind of measurements. That’s pretty much the essence of the proposal, and now, Charlie, why don’t we open it to the…

Stutsman: Before we get started I would like to thank Jeff and the rest of the staff. Obviously there was a great deal of work that went into this and I appreciate the work and the report that has been submitted.

Davidson: One other thing I neglected to mention, Sally, just before you discussion. In case you’re wondering how the existing County system in the North Corridor, and unfortunately we just have this information for the North Corridor… But in the North Corridor, according to these proposed thresholds, there are currently, out of 84 gravel road segments that we looked at in the North Corridor, there are 5 with greater than 200 vehicles and there are 2 with greater than 300 vehicles. Of the chip sealed roads, there were 36 total segments that we measured, 15 have more than 700 vehicles and 9 have more than 1,000 vehicles. So those would be roads, you know in the case of the 2 gravel roads and the 9 chip sealed roads, those would be roads already where basically, until they were upgraded there would be no additional development approved on it.

Stutsman: Right, and that’s just a very logical way to look at what we’re doing with these roads, you know, we’ve reached the point. Alright, discussion.

Jordahl: Thank you, thank you.

Stutsman: Does anybody else, Pat, would you like to add anything, or R.J., Rick, Mike, Al, Kevin? I don’t want to leave anybody out.

Jordahl: One of the things that has bothered me a little bit about the earlier report that you submitted, which, in most senses was wonderful. I loved the philosophy contained in it, but the one thing that I would object to out of it was the failure to distinguish between existing platted lots in projecting the traffic we’re going to get out of this thing, and what density might occur on existing zoned land. At the very least, as we look at this, I would like to see a distinction made. I would like to see both numbers reported so that we could maybe tinker with the estimate of what’s going to happen on the zoned land because the policy for developing that land may shift and change. We might decide, what would happen if we downzoned that or something, and we need to have a separate number for the already approved plats on that ground. That’s the only comment I would make so far.

Lehman: You refer to it here, but it hasn’t been done. I realize you bit off a lot right here and I appreciate the information you have. But for the projections, it’s part of our planning, we don’t want to wait until after the fact on a road, we want to predict a little bit ahead of time so there aren’t as many people that the construction maybe effects. You know, plan things ahead of time.

Davidson: Yes, one other thing that I neglected to mention that you may have noticed is not in this proposal but was in a previous proposal that we looked at is anything pertaining to crashes, traffic accidents. We decided to take that out because in any individual traffic accident there may have been contributing circumstances that had absolutely nothing to do with the road. An impaired motorist, deer running out, something like that, and so we’ve taken the traffic crashes out of here completely as a way to measure road performance, and we feel that’s appropriate.

Stutsman: I will begin discussion by saying I’m just real impressed by what’s put together here, and as a Board member, to me is just real workable in using this in making decisions regarding zonings and platting. It puts that element of an objective criteria to use in making planning decisions for the County and so that we know what direction we’re going. That if we continue to plat on a road then we know we’re going to have to upgrade it and that’s got to be part of what the County is thinking about and what the plan is. It just seems like a very logical way to approach what we’re doing in the rural areas.

Jordahl: Another couple of points here that you sort of allude to. You talk about the developer paying for dust control and by according to some formula calculated by the engineer, and mentioned the idea of a developer being able to pay for the road to be, whether it’s dust-controlled or upgraded to another type of surface, if they wanted to develop earlier, because of Coralville being an example when I interrupted you the first time. I guess what’s missing for me here, and maybe it doesn’t need to be here because this is mostly talking about the relationship between our approving zonings and the nature of the road. But under what circumstances would a developer be permitted to pay for dust control or some road surfacing and what surface would they be required to pay for. That’s sort of a missing piece here. Because if we are talking about approving development and the developer sits in your chair there and says well, I’ll pay for seal coat, and I think we ought to have a rule that says, no we don’t add any seal coat roads to our system. Either we’re just talking about letting him do dust control or we’re talking about paving it, but we’re not talking about seal coat. I think that should be a piece of this because it’s certainly implied by a lot of the language.

Davidson: It certainly is implied, yes.

Lehman: Not to interrupt, but, if a developer would pay for the maintenance of the chip seal, I don’t know where that enters into your policy. I mean, I don’t know how you put a dollar on it every year, but I think we had the one situation, Buchmayer Bend. They were willing to do that and pay for maintenance, but they weren’t willing to take on the liability. So I don’t know how Mike feels on that. If someone were to come in and say we’ll pay for it, we’ll take care of maintenance on it. Would that be an exception to the rule of adding chip and seal.

Gardner: Basically what you’re talking about there would be, if we were allowed to vacate the road, would be a situation where I could see that taking place because I don’t think you can get rid of all the liability otherwise.

Jordahl: It says here on page 2, chip sealing, at the very bottom, last sentence. It says chip sealing a road, without improving its geometry will increase vehicle speeds and generally cause the accident rate to increase. So, basically it says we don’t want to do that because it makes the road less safe.

Lehman: Well, that gets into that second step which you didn’t want to address. I mean, I had a lot of questions in my mind of there are chip and seal roads out there that have been reverted back to gravel, and that was basically, I don’t think necessarily safety as much as financial reasons. That’s a step, that cart, ahead of the horse you’re talking about. I don’t mean (inaudible).

Davidson: Right. I think though, it’s, inevitably you will be faced with that issue because if I own 160 acres out on a gravel road and I can get it chip sealed, all of a sudden that possibility for me developing on it is bumped way up because instead on 300 vehicles, we’re dealing with 1,000 vehicles a day. So, that is something you’re going to have to deal with eventually.

Lehman: I know I discussed with Mike, and the thing that he pointed out that registered with me is, you put 50 to $55,000 a mile every 3 years in that you might be better off putting your money into paving that road if you can justify it and that’s a criteria. Maybe we’re going to have to live the gravel…

Davidson: It may be, Mike, that a developer is willing to come in when you’re discussing your 5 year plan and say, instead of me paying $50,000 a year for 5 years for chip sealing, I’m willing to write you a check for $250,000 and then incorporate it into the price of my lots and if that’s enough encouragement to you to reconstruct the road in the 5 year plan. That’s the kind of negotiation that can occur when you’re considering that 5 year plan is whether or not any individuals living along a road who want to develop it are willing to help pay for some of that investment.

Stutsman: A couple of comments. I don’t want that to be the only criteria, if somebody is willing to put 250,000 then it’s just automatic that it’s going to be developed, you know, we have to consider other things too that we always do when we consider zonings.

Davidson: It’s certainly not automatic.

Stutsman: The other thing is that the instance in Buchmayer Bend, you know, that developer was willing to pave up to the interest of his development and leaving the rest of the road gravel, and the Board, upon recommendation from the County Engineer, said no, you know, we can’t have just portions of road chip sealed and then the rest left gravel. So, it would be entering in there that you would do from one paved road to another paved road if you want to upgrade and then that…

Davidson: I’m sure you noticed that’s something that Mike and Al made sure was in here, is that we’re not going to pave to the end of a subdivision. If we’re dealing with Seneca Road, we don’t deal with just Seneca. We’re also dealing with Blaine, Cemetery and Green Castle or Amana so we can get to the nearest paved road.

Jordahl: Paved means concrete or asphalt, not seal coat. This is something that’s a little inconsistent in this document. In the second paragraph on page 3, when you’re giving that exact example of entire road segments, this may include more than one project proposed in order to establish a segment with a paved road at either end. Sugar Bottom intersecting Newport, Newport, Newport is not paved.

Davidson: Right. What that was meant to say, Jonathan, was that Sugar Bottom and Newport are one segment that ties in with the paved road Highway One or Mehaffey Bridge at either end.

Jordahl: Right. Which sort of begs the question of Mehaffey Bridge going from pavement from seal coat in the middle of itself.

Davidson: You can go into North Liberty all on a paved road from there.

Stutsman: On Item E under the gravel roads, when it says subdivisions shall not be approved, does this work, or do we need to have an ordinance or something? Because I was always of the understanding, once something’s rezoned, we had to approve the platting.

Assistant Planning and Zoning Administrator R.J. Moore: Not necessarily. If it’s not right for development yet, then you don’t have to plat it. You substantiate that and justify that by using your Land Use Plan and your 5 Year Construction Plan. There’s a sequence for development to occur and you don’t want that to occur out of sequence as you take your resources and allocate those to the highest priorities, that’s what your doing in your 5 Year Construction Plan. So I think that if we were faced with a proposal for development on a gravel road that would exceed the 300 threshold and it wasn’t part of our sequence for development that we could substantiate why it’s not ripe yet. You would then be faced with, as Jeff brought up, the developer might try to negotiate with you that they would pay for those improvements. But I think, and from my point of view, that is the way I understand it and I of course defer again to Pat White as always, that you could deny it, at that point, that it wasn’t right for development yet.

Jordahl: If this were our adopted policy, stating this, I think Pat has, in the past, spoken to the question of being able to do some sort of an overlay, I want to defer to you at this point.

White: You could. It ultimately will be my recommendation though that, depending on what version, if any, of Transportation Management Plan you adopt, but let’s take a question that Sally asked. I would expect that I would recommend that we amend the zoning ordinance to incorporate some of these standards.

Stutsman: OK.

White: To illustrate that historically, I don’t remember how long it’s been. But we actually did, at one point, the Board adopted an objective approach to roads where they backed off what was the implementation stage of adopting an ordinance to amend the ordinance and then they just started ignoring what the plan was and eventually it fell by the wayside.

Jordahl: I think it would be a lot safer too if we had it in the ordinance. Pat would already have approved that, and any dispute about it we could just point to it and say…

Stutsman: Right. Carol, did you have a comment?

Thompson: Yes. I agree with the others, I think you did a great job on this and this isn’t meant as a criticism, but I just want you to talk about it so that I’ll understand it better. On D, under gravel roads and C under chip sealed roads, you say that subdivisions will not be approved unless they have one lot for every 20 acres. Why did you put that in there as opposed to saying those would just have to wait?

Davidson: Well because it’s under the threshold, OK, in the case of a gravel road greater than 200, but less than 300, and with a chip sealed road greater than 700 but less than 1,000, that within that window of starting to approach the threshold, we’re going to allow some development, but at a lower density of development and a lower amount of traffic generated then.

Thompson: But wasn’t one of the philosophies of our Land Use Plan to encourage more dense development?

Davidson: I’ll let Rick and R.J. speak to the philosophy of your Land Use Plan.

Lehman: Clustering is what she’s getting at.

Thompson: Well, I guess this wouldn’t preclude clustering on, you’d have your 20 acre average and still cluster. Houses closer together, but…

Davidson: No. Yes, it’s a one to 20 ratio.

Moore: Well, I think what it does is, one of the issues that arose during the planning and public hearing process for the new Land Use Plan, frequently brought up at the meetings, both informally and formally, was citizens concern about property rights issues. One of the things that we have to address is a person’s permitted right to use property as it’s zoned. In this case we’re thinking more so about the North Corridor where we have a lot of rezoned ground unplatted. Jeff has noted that we’re already at a certain threshold. We still have some room to reach the maximum threshold, but how do we manage that so we can keep that in perspective as, again, we go back to allocating resources for road improvements and yet address the property rights issues. That’s what Jeff’s proposal here is the one in 20 is doing. We don’t want to allow development to overburden the system ahead of our ability to provide infrastructure. So we are going to allow, once it reaches the minimum threshold, a person to develop somewhat there, at a certain density and that should give us some room to then follow through with our plans and our 5 Year Construction Plan. To me it’s a really nice tool to address property rights issues, especially in the North Corridor where, because of what the County did 40 years ago, we have some issues and concerns that need to be addressed.

Jordahl: I have a couple of points that speak to this very issue and might help clarify it. In Items D an E, the term that you refer to is existing traffic volume, when in B you’ve used projected traffic volume and I think that’s probably an editorial error, that the D and E should say projected traffic volume. Because if B holds, then you’re not going to do anything above 300, then you, at 200, you might have a projected traffic volume of 300 and what, you’re going to add houses then? I don’t understand. Why does it make sense to add them at projected, at an existing of 200, because you, under B, may very well have an existing traffic volume of 200 as well. It’s projected that we’re interested in here because we don’t want to overburden the system.

Davidson: Yes. I think D and E would imply that B had already been evaluated and that we were under this because if you evaluate B and you’re over 300 then it stops right there. But if you evaluate B and you’re still under the 300 threshold, then you’d go down to D and E and evaluate those.

Jordahl: No, I disagree. It says, B is referring to rezonings and D and E are referring to subdivisions. This is that property rights question that R.J. is talking about. If it’s already zoned then you go to D and E. B would not be crossed if you already have the zoning. I think that what happened here probably is that in C, when you started talking about the existing traffic volume standard for developer participation in the cost of dust control, that the mind just grabbed that concept and repeated it in D and E, when in fact the concept that should have been grabbed was projected traffic volume from B.

Davidson: Yes. I just noticed that B, on the board here I combined rezoning and subdivision in the same one just for room, but I noticed on this one it is separate, so you are correct, Jonathan.

Jordahl: Thank you.

Thompson: So what should it be?

Jordahl: D and E should say projected instead of existing.

Davidson: Should say projected as well. I mean, once again that’s up to the Board to determine. You can have it either way you’d like. I mean it would be possible, I suppose, for you to condition it, condition approval of a subdivision based just on existing volumes knowing that that subdivision will put it over, but that by the time it, you know, it takes a certain number of years for a subdivision to fully build out, by that time you would have improved the road.

Jordahl: But that makes less sense than B, I mean it makes less sense to add a subdivision on already zoned ground than it does to add a zoning because the subdivision is more apt to get built more quickly than just zoning something. Since there’s another whole step in the process.

Davidson: Yes, the distinction there, of course, is the distinction between a rezoning and a subdivision plat, where, with a subdivision, the zoning is in place which implies that that is the appropriate land use. With a rezoning, the onus is on the person requesting the zoning change to make a case for why the current land use, the current zoning is inappropriate and what is being proposed is appropriate. I think that’s an important distinction for the Board.

Lehman: Would you change it also under oil chips? C and D?

Davidson: Yes, I assume you’d want to do it consistently with both.

Lehman: We used existing there and it should be projected, same as it is in D?

Jordahl: Yes, and the other thing pertinent to Carol’s question is, I’m put in mind of the way Portland requires a degree of density. We’re requiring sprawl in some sense here. You have to have one per 20. Why not require that you have sort of a maximum density in the North Corridor for anything that develops and use clustering? So following along the proposed Conservation Subdivision Design Ordinance that we want to see at least this density or we’re not going to let anything develop. So that we aren’t saying, well OK we’ll have sprawl now, and then once we fix the road you have to have clustering. It doesn’t make sense.

Davidson: Don’t you have a maximum now? Acre lots or something like that?

Lehman: I think what you’re saying is you’re going to have a bunch of 20, you’re encouraging a bunch of 20 acre spots out here instead of putting them together and then shut it off until the road it’s developed. Make the best use of your land rather than have it all 20 acres with one house, 20 acres.

Moore: Well, and I think we have to look at everything here, the big picture of County as a whole. But what we do have, basically we have the North Corridor, and then we have the rural ag area. I think that where we’ve used the one and 20 for development of subdivisions that are already zoned and because of the threshold and our ability to have the infrastructure in place is that we would control the density until the infrastructure met the development projections. Now if we go into that area that we’ve defined as the rural/agricultural area, and we’re on a gravel road that has less than, you know… Is meeting these criteria here or these thresholds, is then what we refer, we don’t have to allow that 20 acre development even though that road is not at the maximum ADT. Our Land Use Plan is the document that now, as Jeff noted earlier, about is the land use proposed appropriate. So, the road is in this minimum threshold, not at the maximum, and it would look as if we could allow a 20 area lot to be developed there. My answer to that is, our Land Use Plan says this the rural/agricultural area we should not be rezoning to an non-ag use. No.

Jordahl: But in the North Corridor, this is the question, that if you have an existing zoned area, let’s say you’ve got 2 of them, OK, one’s over here, zoned, nobody’s proposing anything, and then one’s over here that gets a proposal, we want to plat this thing, well the one that wants to be platted, we can say alright, but we’ve got to have, you can’t do these 20 acre lots. We don’t want those. We want to have things clustered together and preserve open space, preserve forest and all that stuff, minimize the infrastructure impact of your own development here. We want to have centralized wastewater treatment and so forth. We’re going to get all that and we’ll require you to have this maximum density of your development so that where you’re preserving a maximum amount of space on the rest of your land. The one that hasn’t developed yet, they fall prey to the requirement that once we hit projected traffic volume of 300 cars a day, you’ve got to wait.

Davidson: Yes, there is a little bit of a notion of first come, first served here. The scenario that you just gave, Jonathan, that person could build, if he had 200 acres, could build a 10 lot subdivision, either clustered or otherwise, and then if that bumped it up to above 300, the next guy has to wait for you to improve the road.

Stutsman: Yes, and that’s just life. Unfortunately you just can’t, the only way you make it fair for everybody is you throw this all out and say everybody come in and do whatever they want.

Thompson: But you’re still first come, first served.

(Continued in Part 3)