Safe Routes to School Advisory Committee (SRAC) Documents... · 1/21/2020  · • ALTA Planning...

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Draft SRTS Advisory Committee Meeting Notes January 21, 2020 1 Safe Routes to School Advisory Committee (SRAC) DRAFT Meeting Summary January 21, 2020 10am-4pm Oregon Department of Transportation CCBI, Room 115 Member Attendees: Kari Schlosshauer; Dana Nichols; J.D. Tovey; Kim Crabtree; Steve Dickey; John Vial; Brian Potwin; Mavis Hartz; Mychal Tetteh; Sonny Chickering; Rob Inerfeld; Scott Bohl; Laughton Elliot- Deangelis; Anthony Buczek; Lisa Mielke On the Phone: Luis Ornelas; Brian Potwin Audience: Sally Cook, Marion County Health Not in Attendance: JD Tovey ODOT Staff: Amanda Pietz; Susan Peithman, LeeAnne Fergason, Heidi Manlove, Traci Pearl, Alan Thompson Facilitator: Chris Watchie; Cogito Note-taker: Traci Pearl Welcome: Chair Mavis Hartz welcomed everyone and asked them to introduce selves and the two new members, Carolina Iraheta-Gonzales and Trevor Arnold. Meeting Overview and SRAC Business: Chris Watchie welcomed group to 1 st SRAC meeting of the decade. Decision: Unanimous agreement on approval of the notes from the October 2019 meeting. Public Comment: None Department Updates: Amanda Pietz presented an overview of the Oregon Transportation Commission’s (OTC) approved ODOT re-organization/structure in December 2019 (see below). Key changes under the new ODOT Director, Kris Strickland: 1) Four new ‘bureaus’ each with an assistant director: Finance & Compliance, Government & External Relations, Operations, and Social Equity. 2) The Operations bureau will include Policy, Data and Analysis Division (formerly Transportation Development Division (TDD)) 3) Both infrastructure and non-infrastructure Safe Routes to School programs will be housed in the Operations bureau but still in different divisions (Infrastructure: Public Transportation Division, Non- infrastructure: Transportation Safety Division (TSD)).

Transcript of Safe Routes to School Advisory Committee (SRAC) Documents... · 1/21/2020  · • ALTA Planning...

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Safe Routes to School Advisory Committee (SRAC) DRAFT Meeting Summary

January 21, 2020 10am-4pm Oregon Department of Transportation

CCBI, Room 115

Member Attendees: Kari Schlosshauer; Dana Nichols; J.D. Tovey; Kim Crabtree; Steve Dickey; John Vial; Brian Potwin; Mavis Hartz; Mychal Tetteh; Sonny Chickering; Rob Inerfeld; Scott Bohl; Laughton Elliot-Deangelis; Anthony Buczek; Lisa Mielke On the Phone: Luis Ornelas; Brian Potwin Audience: Sally Cook, Marion County Health Not in Attendance: JD Tovey ODOT Staff: Amanda Pietz; Susan Peithman, LeeAnne Fergason, Heidi Manlove, Traci Pearl, Alan Thompson Facilitator: Chris Watchie; Cogito Note-taker: Traci Pearl Welcome: Chair Mavis Hartz welcomed everyone and asked them to introduce selves and the two new members, Carolina Iraheta-Gonzales and Trevor Arnold.

Meeting Overview and SRAC Business: Chris Watchie welcomed group to 1st SRAC meeting of the decade. Decision: Unanimous agreement on approval of the notes from the October 2019 meeting. Public Comment: None Department Updates: Amanda Pietz presented an overview of the Oregon Transportation Commission’s (OTC) approved ODOT re-organization/structure in December 2019 (see below). Key changes under the new ODOT Director, Kris Strickland:

1) Four new ‘bureaus’ each with an assistant director: Finance & Compliance, Government & External Relations, Operations, and Social Equity.

2) The Operations bureau will include Policy, Data and Analysis Division (formerly Transportation Development Division (TDD))

3) Both infrastructure and non-infrastructure Safe Routes to School programs will be housed in the Operations bureau but still in different divisions (Infrastructure: Public Transportation Division, Non-infrastructure: Transportation Safety Division (TSD)).

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SRAC Comments/Question: Comment: It was intentional to take Highway out of ODOT’s name. The focus is maintaining Right of Way (ROW). Q: Does this reorganization affect ODOT’s region structure?

Staff Response: Not at this time. Q: A lot of the local programs were funded in the 2024-2027 Statewide Transportation Improvement Plan (STIP ). Which parts of the agency will be leading that?

Staff Response: Travis Brower is in charge of communications with the OTC. With regard to the STIP, there are hearings this month on the Fix-It Program, ODOT’s maintenance practices, and where are the agency is falling behind. Beginning next month, discussions are planned on the multi-modal aspects. Amanda Pietz will present on this and the Strategic Investment Strategy to the OTC. ODOT is conducting surveys with the Area Commissions on Transportation (ACTs) to figure out local communities’ engagement.

Q: To confirm, will TDD and TSD will still operate out of separate divisions? Staff Response: Yes. Transportation Safety Division and now the new Public Transportation Division.

Program Updates: Heidi Manlove presented a map of the funded education projects for the next 3 years (2020-2022) noting that new grantees are just getting off the ground and preparing for spring activities. She reviewed key 2019 Statewide Services (technical assistance) Program activities:

• ODOT’s Technical Assistant Provider spent time on developing resources • Re-vamped action template • Created a resource clearinghouse on ODOT SRTS web site available to both new grantees and

the public

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• Filled a new SRTS Network Administrator position for the Leadership Team to help support the SRTS Network to help organize trainings, meetings, etc.

2020:

• Working on training for SRTS Practitioners • Continuing development of outreach program • Working on a P.E. curriculum • Creating a Walk n’ Roll recognition program • Expanding the Jump Start Program with three new bike fleets

o Currently have one very old fleet, so only goes to one school/year (currently in Roseburg). Applications for next school year to receive the JumpStart program bikes and training are open right now, contact Heidi or Lindsay Huber ([email protected]) for more information.

SRAC Comments/Questions: Q: Do you intend to have these fleets available for the next cycle of funding? Can only a school district apply or can a county apply?

Staff Response: We are going to make them available once they are purchased and ready. The Jump Start Program is open to counties. Heidi will provide an update at the next meeting.

LeeAnne Fergason provided an update on SRTS construction projects:

• Two projects completed (Deschutes Co; La Grande) • One Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) not yet signed • 22 active projects (25 total) • Specific outreach to Gresham and Corvallis about the Rapid Response Program sadly because of

pedestrian fatalities last month. No applications have not been received. • ALTA Planning and Design has been to 11 Oregon communities to assist with draft SRTS plans for

infrastructure recommendations o One complete, 10 in draft phase. The final three are scheduled for spring 2020.

Agenda item: Activity 1 – Small Group Discussions about Safety, Equity, and Readiness/Coordination with Education LeeAnne presented an overview of the activity. She started with a reminder that during the 2018 round of funding, SRAC members spent their long 6-hour meeting on making the recommendation list. For this year, the SRAC is using their 6-hour meeting to dig into the priorities which directly affects how projects are scored and ranked. She highlighted the priorities should reflect the existing Guiding Principles: social equity, geographic balance, safety, health, communication, coordination, and collaboration and maximize resources.

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Safety Debrief:

SRAC Members were asked: How do you want this topic to be evaluated? How much should it be weighed?

Information given to SRAC members during discussion: The applicant could receive up to 90 points out of 500 for this category. Safety questions scored from the previous application: Is there a history of school-related crashes at this location that this project would address?

• If yes, describe and include number of crashes and if crashes were non-serious, serious injury, or fatal. • Posted travel speed (mph)?

Optional: Operating speed (85th percentile) (mph)? What are the number of travel lanes and the crossing width of the road? At the project location(s) what is the average annual daily traffic (AADT)? Does your project qualify as a Priority Safety Corridor? If you have multiple projects, does at least one of your projects qualify as a Priority Safety Corridor? Safety Key Discussion Points:

• Important to look beyond being reactionary about risks. • Focus on if there are ped/bike facilities currently there. • Consider the visibility, lighting illumination at existing location. • Perhaps this could be done by a staff checklist. • If changes happen to the existing safety criteria, need to

consider the equity impact (i.e., does X impact only urban areas, etc.?).

• Perhaps do not give as much weight to serious and fatalities versus all crashes (serious/fatal for pedestrians tend to be random).

• Move away from school-related crashes to bike/ped crashes. • One comment was that applicants interpreted questions

differently, so how can we make that more clear, tighten up definitions.

• Could ODOT help provide some resources on the crash analysis piece such as an online map? Need to discuss the current Safety Corridor definition. Currently need two of three to qualify (lane speed, traffic, history of crashes).

• All discussion groups recommended Safety be ‘higher’ than what it is (18%).

• Bonus points for finding extra points for safety. • Consider how readiness could be included in the screening criteria, plug safety in, etc. • One group noted it was high priority and should be increased to 25%. • Safety is in the title of the program and the application weight for it should be higher. • The perception of safety in the community is missing as an evaluation criteria.

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• Use ODOT crash maps and make available to applicants.

Social Equity Debrief: SRAC Members were asked: How do you want this topic to be evaluated? How much should it be weighed? Information given to SRAC members during discussion: The applicant could receive up to 200 points out of 500 for this category. Equity questions scored from the previous application: What percentage of children who attend the primarily affected school are eligible to receive free and reduced price meals? Social Equity Key Discussion Points:

• It’s complicated to view in terms of the priorities and determine how much social equity plays a role in safety. Difficult to separate that out since it’s related.

• Groups had consistent agreement on reduced lunch/Title I as easiest way to measure social equity but also agreed there may be more to look at to get at the finer grains of social inequity (public health data; racial data/populations; crash data; enforcement data).

• Need to consider how hard it would be for applicants to get this information?

• Weighting becomes complex. If the SRAC says just uses Title I and the percentage of Title I to get a higher weight, does that actually get to what we’re looking for?

• Are schools more unsafe because a higher percentage of kids are free and reduced lunch or should we look at something else?

• Groups agreed the weighting of this was high with not a lot of variance because all schools with 40% or more free and reduced lunch received 140 points, then the higher rates of free and reduced lunch above 40% received an additional set up points up to 200. The committee would like more nuance in the scoring, i.e. not giving all 140 points as a baseline, and spreading out the weight of the 200 points more.

• One group suggested lowering social equity to 30% to increase points for safety.

Staff Response: Staff thought Title I was going to be a criteria but found out during process that we couldn’t use that as a criteria so all applicants started out with the 140 points if they were Title I schools.

____________________________________________________________________

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Readiness Debrief: SRAC Members were asked: How do you want this topic to be evaluated? How much should it be weighed? Information given to SRAC members during discussion: The applicant could receive up to 80 points out of 500 for this category. Readiness questions scored from the previous application: • Does the applicant own sufficient right of way (ROW)? • Does the ROW need to be acquired? • Who owns the right of way? • Does the ROW owner concur with your project request? • Will any utilities need to be relocated? • If yes, please list and explain how you plan to mitigate: • Describe how your project impacts storm water drainage. • Are there any environmental resources within or adjacent to the project area? • Are there any environmental hazards within or adjacent to the project area? • If yes, please list and explain how you plan to mitigate: • Briefly describe public outreach process around this project to date. • Describe any design work started or completed on the project Key Discussion Points:

• In general, most wanted it to be weighed higher – currently weighed at 16% .

• One group said it worked well the way it is. • One group wanted it raised to 25%. • One group discussed the environmental questions as well as

public outreach and ROW need to be more important than some of the other readiness questions.

• Some projects were really low on readiness, so maybe they’re not eligible, screen this ahead of time.

• It is nice to know that the public process has started and that there is support for a project ahead of time, but it is hard to guarantee that in an application. Also ROW is important but does not need to be acquired before the grant, the project could be ready with the ROW acquired within a certain time frame of receiving the funds.

• Consider adding a question: o Is there power to the site, or if a flashing beacon,

how are you getting power to that site? o Staff response: If an applicant only had a couple of

the readiness pieces, they received fewer points and then scored higher if more pieces were met.

o The application asked for eight things about readiness, so each of those questions get 10 points for a total of 80 in the end.

• In terms of weight, general consensus was to rate higher than it is now. • Isn’t readiness just an eligibility requirement, that is, red light/green light?

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• If this is kept in application, does it conflict with social equity? Does it have a higher or lower score? • If it’s not ready to go, then it isn’t evaluated, so frees up 80 points for other items.

Staff Response: Problem with pass/fail is that it is not always black n white, so don’t want readiness to be zero; I’d like to see a compromise of both. Taking it down to zero we lose some of the complexity issues that the Legislature and OTC will need.

___________________________________________________________________

Coordination with Education/Encouragement Programs Debrief

SRAC Members were asked: How do you want this topic to be evaluated? How much should it be weighed? Information given to SRAC members during discussion: The applicant could receive up to 10 points out of 500 for this category. Questions scored from the previous application: • Describe past, present, or upcoming Safe Routes to School non-infrastructure programs at the school or school

district. Safe Routes to School programs includes education, encouragement, and evaluation activities that reduce barriers to children walking and bicycling to school.

Key Discussion Points: • Many felt this should have more points or even be a screening

criteria for eligibility because applicants need to do this around their IN project.

• Discussed how that might disadvantage a small community. • One group came up ideas: provide more resources to the

grantees awarded an IN grant. • Camera-ready artwork/flyers/brochures that the school agrees to

pass out, watch an orientation video, offer an assembly for the schools.

• Felt like 10 points was too low and didn’t allow for prioritization. • Consider 12% for education.

______________________________________________________________ Agenda item: Activity 2 – Small Group Discussions about second three topics (Cost Benefit, Solution Match the Problem, and Geographic Balance Cost Benefit Debrief: SRAC Members were asked: How do you want this topic to be evaluated? How much should it be weighed? Information given to SRAC members during discussion: Cost Effectiveness questions scored from the previous application: None- this aspect of the project was not scored but reviewed for any major red flags by staff. Staff asked for a problem description, a solution description, a project description, and a budget.

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Key Discussion Points: • Applicants asked if they can only get one project or up to X

amount because they would do the application differently. • Liked the red flag approach we did and liked the technical

assistance provided to applicants. • Would like to revisit this after the next round when the SRAC

has two more years under their belt. • Could cost-effectiveness be scored and, if so, how? • This was not scored in the first round. • In the final evaluation, the SRAC could have a range of

projects around the cut line with similar scores then do a tie-breaker. Using a 2nd level lens, such as a simple 1-2-3- scale on cost effectiveness or percentage of students being reached.

• Think the SRAC has a good check and balance in the program due to the match requirement; for example an entity would be more likely to underestimate the project than over estimate because their required match would increase with an over estimate. If we prioritize lower cost projects though scoring it would dis-incentivize entities building safer projects (like projects in the urban design manual- separated bike facilities instead of just a bike lane for example).

Geographic Balance Debrief SRAC Members were asked: How do you want this topic to be evaluated? How much should it be weighed? Information given to SRAC members during discussion: Geographic Balance questions scored from the previous application: None- the SRAC decided to use an additional lens on the recommendation process to award only one project per entity. The result funded more communities and dispersed more projects around the state. Key Discussion Points:

• Consensus that it is important to think about in terms of legislature, etc. but not so much to assign points.

• Consider giving applicants bonus points for geographic balance if they have not been funded before.

• Don’t spend a lot of energy on the geographic balance funding decision.

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Solution Match the Problem Debrief Summary SRAC Members were asked: How do you want this topic to be evaluated? How much should it be weighed? Information given to SRAC members during discussion: None- this aspect of the project was not scored but reviewed for any major red flags by staff. Staff asked for a problem description, a solution description, a project description, and a budget. Key Discussion Points:

• The question was for the solution and not the problem. • Two separate ways to identify: red flag structure and a scoring

structure. • All groups supported continuing the red flag structure and in

terms of consistency. • Can we integrate more questions or clarity out of the Letter of

Intent (LOI). • Utilize the LOI. • Work off of system design guidance; how we can address this in

a workshop and provide best practices for education? • We could ask in the LOI a question about interest in technical

assistance, i.e., transfer some of the consultant’s time w/ the PIP program to do some of that w/applicants?

• However, if we are trying to capture all this info in LOI, the LOI may not get it all, so we still need to do a flag review of the full application.

• Honor the applicants’ knowledge. • Recognizing that we’re doing flags on different types of issues,

roadways, and solutions. Can we incentivize certain things?

• ‘Weight?’ No one wanted to assign points to this. • Like the two-step process of reviewing applications. • Trust staff to make decision based on eligibility and red flags. • Answer the question: does the money solve the problem (simple yes or no)?

______________________________________________________________________ Group Discussion and Decision

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Chris asked the SRAC to consider their conversations and suggest how would they split up the pie in regard to priorities/percentages in 2020 to begin the conversation? She asked for the SRAC to do this individually and then use their ideas as a basis for a group discussion.

LeeAnne reviewed the SRAC’s Guiding Principles and the previous applications (see below).

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SRAC Discussion: LeeAnne noted that the following were part of the eligibility requirement:

• Readiness at 16% or higher • School Type (elementary and middle schools) at 18% or higher

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The remaining topics will be discussed as part of the “pie” (Meaning which topics get scored in the application and what percentage of points would that topic get. See picture of notes above.). Geographic Balance SRAC Comment: I put a weight on this on my pie for solution matching problem and geographic balance: SRAC Comment: Folks on the phone would like to see geographic balance be combined with equity.

Staff Response: Do people want to combine geographic balance and equity together? Phone folks, you may need to make a case for it. We separated it out initially because social equity (income & racial) is different from geographic location in the state such as is the applicant inside or outside of an MPO to capture rural and urban. Geographic balance is about making sure rural communities are able to compete for the funds. In some cases this would be low-income communities but that does not apply to all. Weighing them both is important, but you’re weighing two different things/topics. Recommended to keep it separate.

Safety & Social Equity Safety had a 30-45% range from the SRAC. Social Equity had a range from 15-40%. Education/Collaboration had a range from 0-20%. There was support to move this into the eligibility category. Comment: In regards to education, we could include it as a component of the application, applicants would have opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of what SRTS is all about beyond just this branded program/dollars. That could be a requirement. For instance, via a letter from school district to commit to distributing information we offer to provide, like a template on what the project is, how it was funded, and on the back SRTS information and to contact your local coordinator. Comment: It should not be an option but a standard.

Staff Response: We can probably do this. At the very least if we moved this to an eligibility criteria, we’d have to make entry level really low such as the school commits to a small educational piece. We also have the planning assistance that we can provide for applicants who don’t currently do education. If there is a very small community that lacks resources, we could make them an automatic recipient of the PIP that could help them work with others to come up with the SRTS Plan with an education component.

Chris asked the question if it is an eligibility requirement or if awarded a requirement to provide education at some level? The SRAC indicated no points for education but make it an eligibility requirement with resources provided. Readiness:

Staff Response: Readiness and K-8 must remain high priority but how it is evaluated can be updated. Readiness is added as a 16-30% range on the pie chart based on how individuals want to weigh readiness. In the first round for Readiness, we looked at ROW, utilities, environmental issues, public outreach, and stage of design phase. If an applicant had three of those, they received about 20 points. If

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they had five of six, it was 70 pts. If they had eight or more, then a big jump to 80 pts. Important criteria included ROW acquisition, environmental issues, and public process.

Comment: We could also have threshold for readiness, red light/green light. Staff Response: It would be hard to just be green/red on this issue or not at all. Lots of things depend on other things. We could say ‘if you have three or fewer of these six things, it will be scored as ‘zero.’

Comment: Sounds like all or nothing. Staff Response: Some applicants received zero points and some half-credit for starting the process, etc.

Chris asked the SRAC about readiness and its six factors. Is the SRAC willing to keep it at the 16% of points? For some people they want it higher, why? Comment: Because we want projects that will be good and meet the legislative intent. We don’t know yet how successful we are yet because most of our funded projects are currently in progress. Comment: My thought is that I’d like to see this cycle as a litmus test for how well the score we did measured readiness. I don’t feel comfortable giving up points to other projects because of the importance of Readiness. I would rather see points go to the other categories. Comment: Carve out 20% for readiness. I would put Safety and Equity above Readiness. Comment: In all ODOT programs readiness has been a continuous problem for local projects. ODOT has struggled with this for a long time. Comment: Problem is that readiness of the project relies on a key person driving the project, so to me, readiness is fine but we also need someone committed for the next 3-years. Comment: There’s a bottleneck of contractors who can do the job. It’s so backlogged with lack of internal engineering staff, etc. Construction piece is consistent problem and every year drives prices way up. Chris focused the SRAC on equity noting the last round it was at 40% now the span is 15-40%. She asked why do people want to lower it? Comment: Because safety is the most important and can’t take points away from there.

Staff Response: Safety was 18% last year. Last round Title 1 schools with 40% or more Free Lunch received 140 points. The available final 60 pts were given based on percentage of Free and Reduced lunch. All applicants received a base 140 points because all of them were Title I Schools. In this way non-low income schools were less competitive.

Comment: I’d like to add 5% to scoring how close a project is to a school (proximity) and add 5% to jurisdictions that have not received grant before. Chris continued the conversation and asked about safety and equity as they had the highest percentages. She asked to begin the conversation what was an acceptable for a low range for both Equity and Safety. Comment: Equity should not be more than safety? Chris asked the SRAC to show hands for the question of safety being higher than equity. The SRAC had a 50/50 split of hands shown.

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Comment: What problem are we trying to solve/fix? Would be good to understand from local and statewide advocate perspective. Comment: I would keep equity higher.

Staff Response: Statute also mentions safety and equity. Title I is also low-income is also a proxy for health, lack of bike-ped infrastructure, being a low income school is usually in an underserved community which is why we focused first round on low income schools.

Comment: Equity should have larger weight. Sometimes we equate equity to something like income/race component and it becomes divisive. There are a lot of communities that have not been served. A lot of Title I schools face a lot of barriers in providing resources to communities, challenges for resources, etc. Equity makes it accessible to all communities in Oregon. Comment: Walking to school is a basic human right. Lower income communities have not had historically the [infrastructure] investment. We should be prioritizing those communities. Comment: I’d like to propose something that’s missing in the pie Health. From the OBPAC standpoint, we’re trying to tease this out with the equity and safety component.

Staff Response: Equity is a good proxy for health. Comment: Agree but I think people need to see the word health. Comment: I would echo that. Equity, at this point, is way too general and everyone has a pre-conceived notion of what that means. Comment: Having health as a criteria is not necessarily a good scoring criteria, but it is a good goal of the program. Comment: The proxy that was used at the Portland Bureau of Transportation was census track data on limited English proficiency, income. How do we put people in a position to access that data? ODOT could provide that information to the applicant to adequately score their project. Comment: The sentiment I’m hearing is the way we’re measuring equity is a really dull tool. We have used Title I but is that the only thing to determine ‘equity?’ Every school in state has an ODE report card regarding: English as a Second Language (ESL), students of color, disabilities, and income levels.

Staff Response: Why don’t we just make safety and equity the same as a way to start to the conversation?

Chris suggested that for discussion, the SRAC could try 25% and 25% for each equity and safety in the pie chart. Comment: Anything we build has to have an equal amount of benefit (cost benefit analysis), or determine X improvement to this location is likely to prevent X # of crashes. Is that too much analysis for the applicants, or for staff? Maybe.

Staff Response: That was the recommendation to have a few years pass and then determine the cost and benefit analysis. This will include the Before and After Studies on how many kids are being reached and what changed after the project was built. We might have a better idea in two years but we don’t have the data right now.

Comment: We’re struggling with this small # of cost effectiveness; How about 25% Readiness; 18% school type; 25% Safety; 25% equity; 7% left: Could go to Cost Effectiveness. I think we should reserve scoring of cost effectiveness as a tie-breaker that will be applied to 150% list projects really close to the 100% funding line.

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Staff Response: How would we measure that? The two ideas for cost effectiveness is how many kids we are reaching and score it based on if you’re only asking for X amount of money then you get extra points. Smaller cost projects get higher points. Staff Response: In competitive grant programs applicants tend to underestimate dollars needed regarding construction costs, etc. Would be concerned with underbidding if we score smaller projects higher. I support using this as an eligibility criteria.

Comment: What if we try to avoid the real expensive projects eating up most of the money. If we don’t fund the big project, we can fund five small ones, etc. What is that break point? Chris highlighted the discussion point to move cost effectiveness over to projects near the cut line of 100-150% and look at new jurisdictions with a lens as well

Staff Response: A second level of cost effectiveness could be used as a tie-breaker for those who are really close.

Comment: I agree. Comment: I still vote that we should increase equity. Comment: I have a comment on process. We’re looking at this visually but it doesn’t necessarily reflect the average score of the group. For instance someone said low on equity at 15%, everyone else at 40%, so now it’s averaged to 25%. Are we oversimplifying this? Is this process reliable? Comment: I agree, I think there was a misunderstanding on how weight was allocated to each topic. Comment: We’re using this as a discussion platform. The 50/50 split reflects how we raised our hands on equity and safety. Chris noted it was for discussion. Given the limited time, it was unlikely to for the SRAC to reach a decision. Staff will take this back and look at what we’ve discussed and bring some recommendations for the February meeting. Comment: I think doing this discussion right after lunch or at the end of the day when folks are tired is hard. Chris asked about new jurisdictions that have not previously applied being a lens for the SRAC. Comment: If it is scored at 5%, would have been 25 points and is actually a lot. Comment: Is project proximity to school on there? Yes at 3.5%

Staff Response: We will need to have the February 11th meeting. There’s never enough time for full discussion. That’s why we needed the SRAC to do their homework to have more input prior to the discussion. We have agreement by the end of meeting in order to communicate priorities with the community and stay on schedule.

Comment: Can we do a simple exercise of people submitting their pie charts then we average it, see if average is similar to what we came up with

Staff Response: It feels that we’re getting the categories nailed down and are at the point of massaging safety, equity, and readiness. If there is additional things needed after this meeting, a simple prioritization of those three might help LeeAnne come up with a draft framework.

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Comment: It would be interesting to run the projects we DID approve through our new priorities process, because it would be different, or maybe not at all. Chris highlighted that this meeting was for the SRAC to set the priorities within the application for a deeper involvement in the application and subsequent scoring process. Comment: Averaging people’s pie charts will not work either because the outliers will skew results/ this exercise/discussion is one of compromise not of averages. Comment: Our compromise did skew a lot because of high and low outliers. Comment: If we’re talking about safety and equity, it’s almost 50/50. Comment: I think having the February meeting is fine. Staff can come up with something to test the waters, and then you’ll propose something more concrete for an actual vote. It would be helpful to have two models with one with a heavier weight on equity. Comment: What about 20/20/35, still a 75% for the three.

Staff Response: The result will be that we look at fewer Title I schools if we do a side-by-side comparison of what got funded before.

Comment: I’d like to see a February meeting. I’d like to see a safety/equity thing, two scenarios with different weighing, and compare with what we came up with the last time. Is there anything really wrong with the last criteria/scoring used? What are we trying to ‘fix?’ Chris noted that this SRAC inherited the Rule Making Advisory Committee’s direction who created the trajectory. Their direction was based on the statutory law.

Staff Response: For the last round, this committee set high, medium, and low priorities. Then internal ODOT folks looked at those priorities and created a scoring matrix. The SRAC wanted a focus on low income schools. Whole idea is to limit what we’re focusing on so we can better evaluate it.

Comment: For the February meeting, can we hear more about those other ODE criteria. What are some other criteria that we could use in addition to Title I + percentage on Free and Reduced Lunch thresholds, for instance? Break out equity into different categories? Comment: The office staff should contact is the Office of Financial Administration. They have different qualifiers that determine how much is reimbursed to school districts. This ties into what we are discussing.

Staff Response: I think we do have the ability to compromise but March is the time when we are going to agree on criteria. I will come up with a couple of scenarios, and couple ways to score equity. This is why we give you homework before this meeting was to get at some of this information. We will allow opportunity for SRAC members to add more ideas to the homework they already completed since it sounds like people have more ideas/comments now. The LOI opens on April 1 thru mid-June and we open the application on June 1 – Aug 31. We want them to know the scoring criteria so our March meeting is our final deadline to reach a compromise.

Chris noted that the February meeting goal is for the SRAC to agree upon the priorities so staff can build the application and begin the solicitation. Today was the springboard of discussion. Please review your guiding principles, which is driving your priorities here. At the October meeting, the SRAC provided input on what Guiding Principles to discuss today. The meeting today was to have the SRAC gain more ownership of the application and the process.

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Comment: I think we can more effectively do the homework now after this discussion and everything we’ve learned. Upcoming Important Dates: --Feb 11 --March 17 --Sept 8: Optional: online meeting for analysis of all apps. --October 20: Recommendation for Infrastructure funds. Next OTC. Adjourn: 4:00 pm

Next Meeting Date: February 11

Time of day: Noon-3pm CCBI, 626 High St NE, Salem, OR 97301