The Bend City Council met on August 20, 2025, beginning with a work session at 5:30 p.m. and convening for the regular session at 7:00 p.m. The work session covered two major topics: the Reed Market/Bond roundabout congestion and an update on electrification policy development. The regular session included public hearings on a supplemental sewer system development charge (SDC) and the OSU-Cascades overlay zone amendments, along with consent agenda items and reports. All votes were unanimous, with two councilors recusing themselves for conflicts of interest on specific items.
So I think we're gonna go ahead and get started with our work session for the Benn City Council today. So we are starting with a work session on the Reed Market Bond Roundabout Construction discussion, and I will turn it over to you. Ryan. Perfect. Thank you very much. So Ryan Oester, director of our engineering department, and I'll let Scott introduce himself here. I'm Scott Baird with Kittles and Associates, and we've uh been helping the city with analyzing this intersection for a few years. Okay. I'll wait for this to catch. Okay, so we've got about a half an hour set aside uh for this this evening. And so probably gonna get through a good other bit of the background in the you know, maybe five, ten minutes tops, and then really kind of dive into uh you know what direction council, and I I don't need a decision tonight, just want to clarify that up front. We don't need a like yes, do that. But we are gonna be coming back uh on September 24th talking about midtown, kind of as its own independent thing, and then on October 8th, we'll be back for a much larger, more comprehensive work session that's gonna probably be the full two hours all about transportation prioritization and how we might want to move stuff on our capital program. So, again, this evening is just to address some of the comments we've been hearing from the public and give some background and throw out a concept or two on how we could potentially meet the intent of adjusting the schedule. So uh bond and read market. I think everybody's familiar with where it is, it's right up above the old mill there. It's it's one of the more beautifully landscaped roundabouts in the city. The old mill has always kind of taken ownership of that, it always looks great. Uh, this is one of the primary east-west corridors across the city. I think we all understand that. Uh, east-west travel time reliability was one of the key goals out of the transportation uh master plan, and this is one of the only eight river crossings in the whole city at the Bill Healy Bridge there. Uh and as a reminder, this is the southernmost river crossing in the city. There's no bridge south of this. Uh, we do have uh a study planned in the TSP for another southern river crossing. We haven't initiated that. That'll be part of the discussion we can have in October of when we want to initiate that. But this is what we have today. This is looking east, kind of where where you'd be in front of the park right there, looking up towards the roundabout. This is a good example of why there's a lot of cut through traffic in in Wood River Village right there. Is a lot of people don't want to wait through this line, so they they take the ride and they kind of speed through the neighborhoods up there. Uh so we fully recognize there's a backup here and it's uh reaching its life expectancy in terms of when this was built. So, what have we done to date here? Back in 2020, uh, we did an initial study. We even spent a couple days out there uh counting cars, counting the cues or the backup with a metering program, which was uh uh an unorthodox idea for us here in the city. Um they do have have these in other places around the country, but we uh investigated the idea of metering the roundabout, which basically means at peak hours you would give priority to one of the legs that has a longer cue compared to another leg that has a short queue and let that cue kind of empty out, um, and then you can trigger the lights again. So uh results of that were a bit mixed. We didn't get a ton of like, yes, this is gonna work really well, uh, but that is still something that is on the table that we could explore a little further. And then, of course, uh a lot of concern lately, especially with what happened in California about wildfire evacuations given the the limited crossings we have in the river here in the city. So uh what else have we done to date? A little more background information. We did a pretty intensive study of the corridor as a whole with ODOT. They have a lot of improvements they would like to make at the 97 Reed Market interchange. If anybody's uh taken that that northbound off ramp and tried to make a left, you know it's very scary. Uh there's multiple on-ramps to go north off of Reed Market. It's just a a bit a bit of a jumble and kind of confusing. So we studied the bond and reed intersection, we studied both ramps, we study the division intersection, the third street intersection, and the Brosterhouse intersection. And what came out of this study is the project landing where it is today on our CIP, which was much more optimistic in terms of ODOT wanting to do something at the Reed Market interchange. I think we all understand that's pretty unrealistic. ODOT doesn't isn't gonna be able to bring anything to the table. Um so it is a good question for us to ask is do we separate our work from whatever work ODOT might want to do at the interchange in the future?