Good evening, everyone, and welcome.

Before I firstly call the meeting in order, I want to remind the public listening at home how they can participate.

If you would like to uh follow along, you can go to the city's web page at Bozeman.net and uh click on the meetings link.

From that page, you can look under upcoming meetings to find our agenda.

And there you'll find instructions to stream the meeting live list on your phone or cable TV channel one ninety.

There will be several opportunities for provide public comment during the evening.

And during these periods, we'll first hear from the people in the room and then we'll take comments online.

Please use the raise your hand feature online, and uh staff will call on your name at the appropriate time.

And you can always submit written comments in advance of a meeting by going to the commission's page on Bozeman.

Or by emailing comments at Bozeman.

Emails noted as being for the Transparent Board are forwarded to us.

Any comments received before noon today were distributed and read by the board.

Are there any disclosures from any members of the board?

See none.

Um, any uh changes to the agenda.

Um I would like to move to excuse uh Bryce Gordon uh from the meeting and Shannon.

Uh Mouni.

Is there uh can I get a motion?

Uh moved to excuse Briggs and Shannon.

In a second.

A second.

So moved.

And um then we'll go to public service announcements, uh, Director Ross.

Thank you, Rio.

I'll be brief tonight since we've got a full agenda.

Um, did want to highlight uh last night at City Commission, our commission approved the public agent plan for our transportation master plan update.

Um thank you for your recommendation last month uh in support.

So we'll have the professional services agreement on their agenda next Tuesday for approval, and that will give us notice to proceed to start the master plan update.

Um also then just wanted to highlight um down in uh construction projects.

We uh ended up getting an extremely competitive bid for our Macquatton Road bike fill access improvements project.

Um so that came in um almost half a million dollars below engineers' estimate.

And so uh that will be revenue that we can bring back into the arterial collector program and fund future projects.

Uh and then one more uh put a good news from uh commission last night, they approved uh a right-of-way agreement for um the right-of-way necessary to complete the first section of the Fowler Avenue connection from Oak down to Durston.

And so I'm going to have uh we will have uh an update to the community coming shortly on the intended bidding schedule for that first phase of the project.

So happy to see that moving forward this summer.

Thank you.

Any questions for the board?

Any questions from anyone?

That was exceptionally brief.

I think I got two.

Um I wanted to ask about the Babcock Babcock curb extensions.

Um I typically ride by EHO park every day now, and I love the little rain gardens that got put in there as a way to treat stormwater.

I think that's fantastic.

I'm curious if there's any move going forward.

I was a little sad to see that that was not incorporated into the Babcock curb curb bulb outs.

Um is there any move going forward to incorporate that into a standard curb bulb-out design?

Yeah, very good question.

I I I unfortunately that usually comes down to funding constraints.

And so the the e-hope project overall, um, and frankly, uh, well, through the strong, it's all through our city commission, but um Commissioner Magic in particular was uh a massive um driver for that project, as well as Ellie Staley that's in the room tonight as well.

And it was very, very expensive.

Uh so um the uh Babcock curve extensions that we're building this year, those alone were about 100,000.

Um, and we would have estimated about 50,000 more or so to do um the the rain garden treatments in our our stormwater division.

Uh just did not have the funding to add those into that project.

Got it.

Okay.

Um and then out of my own curiosity for the 2023 alternatives shared use path project.

I think I saw that there was funding on that to move forward.

Um is there a map of what missing links will be infilled on Valley Center and 19th?

Uh we do have one.

I can bring that next month.

I'll attach that to our staff update.

So um uh west side of North 19th.

Um so there's a pretty big gap right when you get north of Lake uh Home Depot.

Um that will be section that gets built on North 19th.

Um, sort of right on Valley Center approaching 19th.

There's a pretty big gap that will get filled in with this project, and then the last little stick of Flanders uh near Meadowlark will be the other piece there.

Gotcha.

Cool.

Yeah, I was looking at the um pedestrian gap analysis map too, and saw that some of those sections on Valley Center that were identified were uh MDT right away.

So I just wanted to, I was just curious if those were included.

It sounds like they are we're gonna have one um since we're talking about it, sorry, Rio.

Um but um we we um so we're we we have this delicate balance now that we're trying to play um where we we very much value the safety benefits and multimodal benefits that chair use paths break.

Um and we're also being strongly encouraged to protect as much mature vegetation as possible.

Um every project we do is running into conflicts with those two very worthwhile needs.

Um so unfortunately, we are going to have to find an alternative solution for the last piece of that valley center path because it would have required uh removal of more than a half dozen mature trees uh in order to build it.

So we think we could have a lower impact solution with a uh natural surface trail that wouldn't require the digging out to build the asphalt base and pave it.

Um, but the feds won't allow us to use TA funding to do that piece since it won't be ADA compliant.

And so just as a heads up, we'll build a section of that.

There will be a small portion near the hotel, if you're familiar with that up in that area, um, that won't get connected as part of this project, and we'll need to follow up with a future city fund project of some other material in a way that doesn't require the removal of those trees.

Got it.

Cool.

Thank you.

Sorry, now that I was able to adjust it for a little bit.

Uh I do have a question.

Um before that, uh, definitely shout out to our streets teams for um getting those stop signs implemented throughout downtown.

They're working hard.

Definitely notice it.

Um on the Mackelhatton Road project.

Um does it have to be restricted to the RTL improvement fund?

Like that $500,000.

Does that need to be recycled?

Yes.

Okay.

Yep.

Um is there any possibility of earmarking that for nearer term projects as opposed to applying that back into the pot to be um kind of like laundered through our five-year capital improvement plan or projects.

Just curious because I'm sure there are plans for RFBs and other safety implementations, and just because of the uh unfortunate and um uh high profile collisions lately.

Um just curious if we can like kind of expedite some of those projects now that we've found those savings.

Um we use what's called a zero-based budgeting system in with the city.

So any unused funds that have been allocated in say year one of our budget, it automatically become the base of year two.

Um so uh with CIP season coming up in August, um, that would be a good opportunity to begin thinking about some projects that we could do, um, quick build projects, even that don't necessarily have the year plus timeline of going through long design and right-of-way and environmental permitting.

Um, and so I would encourage everybody to start thinking about some recommendations that they could have for staff that we could bring forward as soon as next year.

I may add um our commission had a uh a really compelling work session last night on advisory boards.

Um I don't know if uh commissioner magic would uh like to say anything about that.

Um, but I did feel like uh from my perspective of staff liaison, um, a lot of the recommendations that they have for staff are going to be things that I feel like um we're already implementing with more of a um colloquial conversation format uh on the board.

And if I'm uh not speaking out of place, I'd strongly encourage that uh relationship to continue.

Speaking of which, I don't think you would need a motion to excuse certain members but it was just kind of the the idea of loosening up meetings a little bit to spur good creative dialogue, not having you guys in so much that we make you effective, but also we want to hear good ideas and allow for creativity and all that sort of good stuff.

So that's great.

Uh do we need to wait for something to pass the commission to become less formal?

No.

Great.

I love it.

Thank you, Jen.

How's that?

Okay.

All right.

Um with that, I'm gonna um make a motion to approve the minutes from the June 24th uh 2026 Transportation Board.

Can I get a second?

I'll second.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed nay.

Okay, those are approved.

Um now I'd like to take some time to uh open up the floor to public comment to uh those agenda items that are or those items that are not in our agenda.

Um so anyone who has any general public comment, please yes.

Okay, it's on.

Hi guys.

Um my name's Jarrett, and uh I'm a resident on 611 South 13th uh between Alderson and Dickerson.

And um I just wanted to talk a little bit about the fact that for whatever reason this stretch, like basically my block is the only non-permitted parking.

I can basically throw a rock and hit MSU and uh Highlight Hall, which is a new dorm is about 200 yards from my driveway.

And uh so in the space of a day, about six or seven different cars park in front of my house.

Um there's two spaces, but they're never free for the entire block.

Um each morning students kind of race up and down the street looking for spaces, also faculty members.

I have a nine-year-old son or several small kids in my neighborhood, and they all walk to Irving Elementary School, which is a couple blocks away.

Um in May, somebody ran over my kids' scooter when they were turning around in in my driveway because they didn't get a spot and mangled the thing.

And there's like beer cans after football games.

I'm not a killjoy.

I work, I have a restaurant here.

I work with a lot of students and stuff.

But like this particular parking situation feels punitive because if you go to 11th, 12th, 14th, or 15th, it's all permitted.

So it's just this one stretch, this one little block where in the secrets out and everyone goes there to park.

Um it seems like the parking is free on my street at the expense of all the residents in the neighborhood.

And um, and it's I I realize that there's not a lot of parking available at MSU, and students are frustrated, but that's really shouldn't be my problem.

Um if you if you look at a map and and you'll you'll see it the city has it, they sent it to me.

You'll see this little stretch.

Um it's really, really close to the university.

And uh because of its proximity, it's just it's just constant.

Like, you know, cars are completely just coming and going.

I'm I'm very worried about my child and the other children in the neighborhood.

Um last winter, somebody parked a convertible there in the fall and it filled up with snow and disappeared and then got hit by a snow plow and forced onto my neighbor's yard.

Um people abandoned their cars there.

Last summer, another like an old cam ray was in front of my house for three weeks.

I realized I could call and get it towed, but I went across the street to the college kids' house and I said, Do you know whose car this is?

And they said, Yeah, that that guy went abroad like a couple months ago.

So all I'm asking humbly is that you consider giving the residents of my street the same protections and privacy and safety that like literally every other block in my neighborhood has.

That's all.

Thank you, Jerry.

Can you state your address really quick?

611 South 13th Avenue.

Backwards.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Um Nick, I know that there's not uh you know, we're not supposed to take action on such items, but is what is a path for for someone like this.

I think our parking manager in the room has heard that uh request and um we can talk with Ben and Chuck and see if that's uh an item that we want to bring back to this board for recommendation.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

Is there another comment?

Any other comments?

Excuse me, lack of formality, Chuck Wynn City Manager, just for people uh sorry trying to block that line of uh less and more formality.

Cool.

Thanks.

Uh seeing no one else ready to comment in the room.

Is there anyone online, Leah?

I'm showing no request online.

Malia.

Sorry.

Um, then we will move on to the next item on the agenda.

And that is the I think with Candace Mastel's uh presentation on uh our sorry, there's a lot of documents right now to manage uh our American bicyclist uh evaluation summary.

You're gonna bring it up?

Or do I?

You want me to bring okay.

Oh, okay.

Yes.

I didn't want to mess you up.

Good evening.

Thank you, Malia.

Um my name is Candace Mastell.

I'm the TDM coordinator for the City of Bozeman.

Uh TDM is just a really fancy acronym for transportation demand management.

Um I've met some of you before and um and talked about the League of American Bicyclists report that we get every few years.

Um I'm here to tell you a little bit about the application that we did in 2025.

Um so the League of American Bicyclists is a sort of a national US organization that advocates for bicycle infrastructure programs, education, the five E's, if you've ever heard of the five E's.

Um and I'll talk a little bit about those later.

Um we applied a little bit at the end of last summer.

It took about three or four months for them to get us results.

It usually takes about that time.

And in January, we were able to obtain our results in the report, which I um attached to the staff report that you guys got prior to the meeting.

So this is um sort of a summary of that.

And if you have any questions, you can just throw your hand up.

But this is also information that's uh available on their website for every community in the United States.

So you can find out what's happening in Pittsburgh or Minneapolis, where I was just at in the spring, and any other community that has an actual designation.

So what is the league?

Well, like I was saying before, they run these programs that are very based in advocacy from a national level.

They lobby in DC once a year.

Um you might have heard of bike month, which we do celebrate here in Bozeman, and they celebrate all over the country.

And we do an actual uh spring bike commute week, so that's kind of our part in participating.

And we're also a bicycle-friendly community, and we have a bicycle-friendly university in Bozeman.

So we're sort of all in, and we're actually a league member in addition to all that.

So it's kind of a great organization if you're looking for advice and direction in how to become a more friendly community.

Um, so overall in the entire country, there's 444.

This actually, this number went down, which is not surprising, but a little surprising and disappointing.

Um, but 870 applied, and only 444 got designations, and we were one of them.

So we have maintained our designation as silver since 2012, which is really cool.

Um, I'd love to get to gold, and that's why we reapplied in the fall to see how much further we needed to go to get there.

Um we also have a couple, oh, actually, um, buildings is also a friendly community, and um unfortunately Missoula is no longer a friendly community.

No, I'm just kidding.

Um, but we beat them.

No, um, they they're trying, um, but they were, and I don't think they reapplied, so they're they're standing kind of sunset.

So hopefully they reapply um in a year or two.

Uh, this application takes about 90 pages worth of uh information, including a lot of data from our police department, our GIS department, um, streets, and others who collaborate in the process for us.

Um, and just so you know, even though we have an award for four years, I intend to reapply in 2027 and August or September, um, in order to just again give us more feedback because it is a free process.

I like free things like that.

So we're gonna take advantage of that information gathering.

Like I said, we have two BFUs, that's a university in Montana, including MSU and U of M.

U of M is a gold university, so they've done really well at trying to achieve that next level.

Uh and um MSU does this by promoting Streamline with a financial support and a location for a hub on campus.

Um, they also promote sustainable transportation, they have their TMP.

Uh it's going to be updated soon in-house, so we'll see that process happening, and that that all contributes to that really nice silver standing.

So we're hoping they they maintain that.

Uh in Bozeman, we have a couple uh really really involved businesses, including WGM Group and OnSite Energy.

On-Site Energy is one of our uh best commuters by data and by metrics.

So they definitely uphold the standard being in a silver community.

And um, you know, you see everything from Fortune 500 to small businesses like on-site and WGM and smaller around the country.

So here's our report card.

And um as you know from working with Nick and working with the transportation uh you know and engineering department, is that we follow what we consider the safe plan and the safe systems approach and some of the best practice standards in the industry.

Uh the five E's kind of relate to that, but it's sort of the league's own little scoring system.

So we have to kind of um we have to bring in some of those categories in order to make them fit what we're already doing, and that and that can be kind of hard.

Um, for instance, equity and accessibility is not something that we typically deal with on a day-to-day basis, like the league encourages us to.

So those are things that we can look for to enhance our score in the next application process.

Um, you can see that we we score pretty high in both engineering and encouragement.

Um, and that is really impressive overall, but you can see what the best communities around the country are doing.

So the max score in the US this year was 78.63%.

That's probably a gold or platinum community, and then, or I would say gold.

Um, and then you can see that we scored really high in encouragement, but not as high as the next is the is the best community in in the country.

So we do have a lot of room for improvement, but we're overall not doing super bad.

Um you can see the education number is fairly low, and and we'll we'll get into that a little bit in um two slides from now, and we'll see how we can improve that number.

Um, so this is our the first of the five E's.

This is engineering, this is Nick's specialty, you know, this is the office that I work in, so we focus a lot on built environment.

Um between our last a few years ago uh application and this application, we have improved the bicycle network.

However, uh we have not improved drastically.

So what they're looking for is drastic improvements.

And I think that we'll probably see the next application number improve because of some of our new policies that were not in play in fall of 2025.

So that progress will take time, as you know, built environment takes time.

So hopefully in a year or two or three years, we're gonna see that percentage or that point number of 47.27 go up a little bit.

Um but we have 128 points to work with.

The other thing that we've been called out is with winter maintenance, and we all know that as a if you're a year-round cyclist, it's very hard to get around here in the winter.

Um, it's challenges are beyond.

Um, but they would love us to work on that and focus on that.

Um really it's just the winter piece.

That is our crux.

That is what we have to work on.

Um, the other thing that we do really good in on is we do um have racks on our public buses.

We don't have a bike share and probably won't ever, so you'll see that bike sharing number being really low.

Um we also had a little bit of engineering bonus points for a few of the projects and policies that we've implemented, and we really tried to maximize those because we're we're really proud of them.

So after engineering, they look at things like education.

And we're working really, really hard in our safe routes to school program to advance education for little people, for little kids.

But our adult education piece for bicycles is fairly weak.

So we we know that, and we're gonna be working with that.

Um, one thing that we did not do that you see right under adult education is the motorist education.

We did not have that done before we did the application, but we've since discussed uh the curriculum with the school district, and it's actually really good curriculum.

However, we do recognize that at either end of the spectrum, the most egregious infractions with a motor vehicle are with really young people who are just learning to drive, and older people.

So we know that those are two sectors of society that we can kind of look at in Bozeman and really enhance the education piece for them.

So let's go to the next one.

Encouragement.

So we all know Boat Bozeman is a really amazing bicycle town, more bikes per capita, more bike shops, then we probably need.

Sorry, Ellie, no, we need more bike shops, right?

On Main Street.

Um, we do a really great job with route finding and bicycle culture and all that kind of stuff.

But what we need to do is encouragement programs, and that's where the TDM program comes in.

So I'll be working hard on that one with a workplace uh program coming up in the next year.

And then we do this evaluation planning.

This is where the fun metrics come in.

Um we can do better in this piece because, and I think Nick, we are starting to get better data.

We are starting to get better data with crashes, with um uh tracking our infrastructure, and so all of you know ridership, um, speeds, all the type of stuff that that's Nick's working on with the um the Safe Streets for All, and then of course, with our safe routes to schools, we're gonna be evaluating the work that we do, and that's really important.

So they want to see data from us, and we haven't really been able to give them uh solid numbers in the past.

So this is a huge focus for me in the next year or two as well.

And then we had this last category, which um this replaced what you might remember was called enforcement.

Um, and not that enforcement isn't important, but they replaced it with equity and accessibility.

Um it's a little bit interesting of a conundrum because as we know from a federal level, equity and accessibility might not be fun words to use.

So we have to kind of work with this and and move them into places where this just becomes about streets for everybody or streets are for everyone, sorry, yes.

Um, and so one place that I'd like to get better at here is this data collection and policies and plans that focus on accessibility for everybody.

Um we're gonna be doing that in the next year or two.

So what would we do to get to gold?

So in that, I think this packet that you guys were you received, um, at the very back, there's these big paragraphs, and I kind of summarize those with these these really short bullet points.

So the key takeaway from today, and this is really the key takeaway is the built environment makes people feel safe.

So safe enough anyhow.

So in this category of the network, we need to expand the bicycle network for all ages and abilities.

So that's really key.

The other is to for them, they wanted us to adopt a bicycle master plan.

Now, if we could include a really rich chapter in a TMP or some type of safety plan, that might make them happy for gold.

So we'll see.

So I just wanted to throw that one in there real quick for you.

Yeah, so I I think that's what I had today.

I wanted to keep it quick because I know that the community has a discussion and presentation as well.

But you can always, you know, and ask me questions later if you think of them.

Uh or you can even just look online on the league website, and all of our data should be right there as well.

It's very transparent.

Thank you, Ken.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you very much.

So let's start with some questions from the board.

Grace, if you would like to start us out.

Sure.

Uh yeah, I was really excited to hear about that education piece and working with the school district.

Is that like a driver's ed for bicycle education?

Like, oh, sorry, but the school district?

Sorry, I didn't hear.

Yes, yes, yes, sorry.

Yeah, school district seven.

Okay, gotcha.

And then do you have any plans to address that older demographic that you were talking about?

Right.

So that's the tricky part is where do you get to them, right?

Where do you find them?

Um so with the safe routes to school program, it's typically elementary school level, right?

So that sort of that the child that's really easy to capture and get attention, um, a little bit younger is harder to focus on, and and then the sort of middle school and high school also very hard because their minds are somewhere else.

And then adults are even harder because where do you reach them?

So we recently pitched to um INC Inc.

Um, the neighborhood organizations, we pitched uh, hey, we'll come to your neighborhood.

So if you want to get together and have a block party or a picnic or a barbecue, we'll do a one-hour bike rodeo for adults, kids, anyone in your neighborhood.

Uh and we haven't gotten any requests yet, but we wanted to offer that.

Um the other thing is we're going to where kids are in private schools.

So that's not usually a tenant of the safe routes program, but we're going to headwaters and the YMCA and we're in United Way.

So these nonprofits, the private schools, because we want to reach as many kids as possible.

So adults to be determined, but if anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears.

It's just a really hard demographic to catch.

Gotcha.

That's great to hear.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hayden.

Um, I was curious for the recommendations to get to gold.

Um do all of those need to be hit, like an all-inclusive, we need to hit those nine with a yes or whatever the passing score is to pass that threshold or can we not meet a few or meet them in the future and like overperform on the six or seven other ones and still pass that threshold into gold.

Right, good question.

Um if I had to just wing it, I would say that the two most important would probably be the bicycle network piece, that first bullet point, um, and an education piece.

I think those are the two that they really want us to focus on.

I think they understand the maintenance is a really big challenge.

Um I've already seen what I would consider ridership increase with uh you know e-bikes and things like that.

So again, I I don't know if we have to concentrate on all 10 or 12.

I think concentrating on two, you know, you gotta pick your, you gotta pick your battles, and also you've only so many tokens to like put around.

So if I had to put two tokens down, it would be on good infrastructure that made new riders and new walkers and new rollers feel safe, and the education piece because we always see uh new people doing it and and they're intimidated, but then they do the wrong thing, and that could be an unsafe situation or uncomfortable.

So helping to educate them from a young age or reform them at an older age when they've learned sort of some wrong skills or wrong ideas.

So those two would be my my best my best focus.

Uh we can't do them all at once, right?

Yeah, that's why I was like that's that'd be a very comprehensive.

Yeah.

Um and I guess during this process, were you given an indication of um what kind of quantitative and qualitative uh improvements would need to be made, like X number of bike lanes or um you know this number of or not this mileage of like buffered bike lanes, et cetera.

Um just curious if you have that kind of like path to success uh for us.

Yeah, the league loves numbers.

They love uh high numbers when it comes to separated or protected infrastructure.

Um they go by mile, center mile, or center, whatever, depending on the facility.

Um, and they like paved, you know, they want the best practice facility, right?

So uh it's it's hard to achieve that when you're retrofitting um already existing streets and and infrastructure.

So um they like to see progress though.

So they've given us credit for progress.

We've seen that in the actual verbal or written review.

Um, but we're probably not there, right?

We have a lot of work to do.

But we're small communities.

We're very we're very concentrated, so that's fortunate for us because our boundary is small.

It's like we've got a small boundary, so within that, we can show a lot of progress quickly.

Okay.

Um then I was just curious about the the BFBs, um, like what how what the application process is like for those businesses when you're thinking about like trying to expand the number from two, three, five or more.

Um kind of what resources the city provides in that application.

Um just like what they need to really pass.

The intent is to assist with, I mean, WGM and and you know, on-site have already you know done theirs.

Ours is one of the biggest applications.

The university is also very large because again, they're assuming you have a ton of infrastructure, a ton of lane miles, a ton of parking, a ton of stuff to have data on.

And you're probably keeping track of that from an asset management standpoint.

So with a with a business, they don't have all that all those assets.

They have a building, they have bike parking, they might have showers, it's more consolidated, so it's easier to have data on, and it's just theirs, right?

So it's a much smaller effort, and but we're willing to say, hey, if I'm just gonna make up a business.

No, I won't make up a business, but just say business A wants us to help them, we will gladly help them.

Because we've asked for help too, like with the university, we've asked for their data and information.

It's a it's a community effort.

You have to kind of partner on it.

It's just too much for one entity.

So yeah.

Cool.

Thank you.

I mean, can you think this is great?

It's great to be one of what a hundred and thirteen cities or communities, like that's a that's an admirable goal, and then I think something that we should be proud of.

The only one that I want to really encourage to have to focus on is educating drivers.

Um, the number of times that I approach I'm a bike commuter, I bike everywhere.

Um the number of times I approach an intersection driver clearly does not know what to do with a bike sitting there waiting, or with you know, and it it even when they aren't supposed to stop and they stop, that often creates an unsafe environment for traffic coming in the other direction.

Um and so I really think like a driver focused campaign.

I mean, we all saw the story about the little girl uh North Rouse and it's those things that um regardless of any of the other metrics and anything else in here, like the fatalities one is one that I think our community is a parent in our community as somebody who bikes in our community, that's the one that I care the most about is helping to reduce that.

So whether it's motorist, uh I would argue motorists first and then bikers, because I it's not the cyclists who are running into cars and and causing these accidents.

Um so I think that definitely um that's something for us to just really zero in on um as a goal to get towards that gold.

Thank you, Michael.

Yeah, thank you.

It's great comments.

Simon.

I thought you were gonna go first, and I was gonna have all kinds of stuff to talk about after that.

Um, I a great presentation.

I have, I guess, two quick questions.

One, um, maybe I miss this.

Does the the ranking take into account just the number of bicycle friendly businesses then?

Or is it kind of more, I mean, like if we have if we just go on a campaign to get a bunch of businesses registered as bike friendly businesses, does that increase the rating?

Yeah, yeah.

So it um like I was um was I was telling Hayden, this is a sort of collaborative effort to apply, but it's also a collaborative um or a cumulative uh benefit.

So if you're doing good and and the next guy's doing good, we all do good.

So that all that data feeds into the community uh application.

Uh what MSU does, what the businesses do, uh what we do, um, that all feeds into it.

Uh so and then they interview all the people that we put on the application as references, and they could be five or fifty.

And so they actually make phone calls and then they survey those folks.

So um it's it's that's why it takes so long to get the result.

It takes like four or five months.

So they're actually incorporating all that information from all the partners in the community into our review.

That's what makes it so harsh, right?

So I don't know what they're getting told.

I I'm thinking, hey, me and Nick are like, we're doing super awesome.

And then I have no idea what GBLT tells them.

I have no idea what that information is.

Um all my stuff that comes back to me is anonymous.

So it's really interesting.

They also send us, in addition to this, they send us uh an entire spreadsheet with every single comment and answer to every single question, so I can query that and say, okay, what's the real concerns here?

And it won't surprise you that the real concerns are bicycle facilities or the network and driver yielding or compliance and safety features, so or safety impressions.

So again, yes, it will contribute to it.

And the more bicycle friendly businesses there are, that means there's more awareness about end of trip facilities, um, and there's awareness about the need to spend our money on that type of thing.

Um, or facilities in between, not just bike racks and showers, which is really what businesses are focusing on.

And then maybe things like flex schedules, um, work from home, uh stuff like that.

Yeah.

So gotcha.

Thank you.

And then the second question I had was I noticed um, I don't know if I saw the bullet point in this digital presentation, but in the uh kind of summary write-up that you had included there in the agenda.

I noticed something about neighborhood byways.

Um, maybe this is also a question for Nick, but is there consideration right now with our uh with the installation of stop signs and traffic circles at uncontrolled intersections?

Is there consideration of designated neighborhood byways um with the installation of those stop signs and traffic circles?

I'd say um my interest through the upcoming transportation master plan and CIP capital improvement plan um is to do better um than just signage and um making some formal recommendations to follow up on the success we've had with the Black Avenue bicycle lane to actually schedule some physical projects for improvement at targeted bike uh bikeways that we've identified across the city.

So I'm hoping um within the next CIP and the next TMP uh we get to more of an implementation focus on some of those recommendations that we've had in place for 10 years now.

Got it.

Simon, did you see that under one of the sort of these larger bullet points with the little squares and the paragraphs?

Is that where you saw that statement?

I believe so, yeah.

And I think um we might call them bicycle boulevards, you know, as opposed to byway or uh greenway or something like that.

I mean, there's a bunch of different terminology used.

Um but yeah, that the idea is is that they like where you have low volume, low speed, that you could potentially create more bicycle boulevards or quote unquote byways to share the street.

And a share of was like an older attempt.

I mean, we all remember Sharos and and that's not really the super standard anymore, although they are still being used.

Um really a bicycle boulevard, um, which isn't just for bikes, but it's for everybody.

And so that's sort of the new gold standard for those low volume, low speed streets.

Um, so local streets, basically, like where we do traffic calming.

Gotcha.

Thank you.

Mm-hmm.

Cool.

Thank you, uh Candace for this.

Uh I think it's really great that you, you know, we keep applying for this and we keep having a a record of where we were we were and where we go to.

Um and so keep that up.

That's fantastic.

Um you mentioned really quickly uh that you you said we you don't think we'll have a bike share.

Why why?

Oh, I said that, didn't I?

No, I love bike shares.

And in fact, I was just in Minneapolis for a conference in the spring, and they have a fantastic bike share, uh scooter share as well, which scared me a lot.

Um I won't ever do that again.

So uh bike shares and a thumbs up, but I think it comes down to the demand for that and also the population.

We know we have a fairly small population.

Um Minneapolis has a really large one, um, a dense downtown, and so maybe a bike share works really well.

I think we tried a scooter share, and while it was fun and entertaining, um, I'm not quite sure that we have the density of population for that.

I'm uh I'm not an expert on bike share.

I love using them, but I just don't know if there's one that's gonna come to Bozeman.

Um, and we've talked about it when I was at MSU um for 14 years.

We talked about bringing a bike share in through the outdoor the outdoor rec department.

Um super challenging from a financial funding standpoint to support that type of thing with a type of usership that you would have, and then who's gonna maintain them if it's sort of a self-uh managed program, who's gonna take care of all that?

We talked about that for years.

Um and with the scooter share and Bozeman, you know, the e-scooter share, we we of course didn't have to take care of that, but we had we felt the aftermath of sort of the controls or the management of that.

So it's a tricky, it's a tricky thing.

And I even looked at Minneapolis and how they handle the volume of bikes and the type of parking and the obstruction of sidewalks, and it's a big, it's a big it's a big ask.

So I'd love to see it.

I just don't know if it's gonna happen here because we've talked about it for so many years.

Um I think we've even talked about it.

Yeah, um, you know, I it'd be great.

Uh I think there's a there's other folks doing sort of very grassroots type of stuff with the tourism Bozeman and bike rentals that you can go and rent a bike.

It's just not as easy as like the on-demand stuff you see in bigger cities.

So are are there laws?

One of the recommendations to get to gold status was um repealing laws that mandate bicyclists to use bicycle facilities or something to that effect.

Uh I'm not aware of these.

What are there currently laws that mandate bicyclists have to use bike lanes if they're available?

So sometimes between the state and the city, the language is confusing.

Again, this is all goes back to that predictability piece.

Um when we talked about predictability between motor vehicle users and bicyclists or pedestrians, you know, there's obviously misc misunderstanding.

Um there's also some misunderstanding, even among bicyclists about what kind of laws we need to follow.

And so what we'd like to do is have a running tally of are there conflicting messages in our community that conflict with state law versus city law and even just cultural understanding and find out how we can flush out a more uh predictable environment for bicyclists to react in and to function in.

And so we do have a few things that we're looking at.

We also are looking at things that are really out there, like bicycles on sidewalks, yes or no.

And in some communities, the answer is 100%.

Everyone gets to ride on a sidewalk.

And in other places, absolutely not.

So we do have a lot of conflicting, even just culturally and socially, and and then also legally.

So we want to make it more predictable and easy to bike in Bozeman.

Um that isn't always very straightforward for people.

So, like, you know, if there is no bike lane, do I have to get all the way over?

Yes or no.

Um, even if there is a bike lane, do I and it's not clear, let's say there's snow in it or gravel.

Do I have to use it?

You know, am I forced to use it because someone doesn't want me in the travel lane?

So there's conflicting laws and policies that we just need to kind of flush out.

Riding running on your bike through crosswalks is one that is uh one to me.

Yes, thank you.

And that's another one that we've got on the list to look at from a policy standpoint.

But again, state versus city.

Um and last question I'll ask is uh what are the plans for so uh I'll just say a bit of comment, but I really love the um master plan for bicycles.

Um it's I think it's really hard to get from east to west.

Like downtown is um it's really hard to get to from the west side.

And um, I feel like we do a lot as a city and in our engineering and our policies to like when things are built, they have a bike lane.

But there's no overarching vision for how we make this a better, an amazing bicycle city.

And so are there plans um that you're aware of to do a transportation master plan for just for bicycles or in the update?

What how can we make the update work for this?

I'm gonna defer to Nick on that, if that's okay.

As a formerly high-paid consultant, I despise bike mastery plans.

Um, and only because I've done a lot of them that have just sat on a shelf and haven't gone anywhere.

And so my goal would be in our transportation master plan, which is the holistic transportation plan for the city, including Almoats to strengthen that this time around so that it effectually effectively functions like a bike plan, but with implementing implementation teeth to it.

And so that's one of the components that we really want to build on our bike pit gap analysis as the sort of existing conditions report, and fold that into actionable projects in our upcoming TMP and a way that integrates bike plan within our mastery plan.

That may have been the best answer you've ever given to any question ever.

Thank you.

Um you have a question.

Yeah, not a question, but a follow-up.

Um I also am really excited about this and trying to get gold someday and really appreciate Candace's memorandum.

And I just wanted to point out that similar to all our staff reports and memos, we get kind of a reference to the strategic plan, which is our overarching vision.

And I looked at it this afternoon as I was preparing for the meeting today.

And if you note uh the little comment regarding transportation in our strategic plan, it says improve mobility options that accommodate all travel modes, period.

And if you had listened to last night's commission meeting and talk with commissioners, this does not reflect the enthusiasm we have for active transportation or our vision.

So I talked to a couple of my commissioners this afternoon, and we're um inclined to change this and add a separate line item for transportation that more fully talks about our vision, and then that vision can be plugged into memos like this, but also plugged in to the transportation master plan.

So you have that vision and then plans follow below that.

So we're all really excited about that.

But it's like was really excited because that helped kind of inspire me to think we've got a clearly articulate the direction we want to go when we've got to do that in our top plans.

I struggle a lot when I'm doing staff reports to pick a category.

That's like the hardest part of peak agenda is picking that 4.1 or 5.1.

And this was a hard one because I just wasn't finding the one I wanted.

So I would love it if we just had improved transportation, period bullet point, like easy, okay.

Um, but I like when Nick was talking about, you know, hey, we need to the TMP needs to be including the bike master plan pieces or a section that deals with active transportation.

I appreciate that because it is transportation.

So separating it makes it feel super different, and it's not.

And I already feel super different when I'm on a bike, and you know, when we yeah, we're confused about who waves who through.

I don't want that confusion.

I want I want predictability, like Michael was saying.

So thank you.

Okay.

Thank you.

So um time for public comments.

Do we have anyone in the room who would like to make a comment on this?

See no one.

Is there anyone online, Mike?

Zoom has gone down as a last public comment, so we won't be receiving online comment anytime soon.

I knew there was something good by the way you were looking at me uh that was gonna come from this.

Okay, um, let's um let's make uh a final round of comments from uh the board.

Uh Rio.

Might I suggest we I hate to hate to stop this topic because we all care so much.

We do have a really, really full parking agenda.

Um I'd be happy to welcome Candace back later this fall and pick this conversation back up.

Uh as you feel so strongly about this particular matter.

I'm not going to raise hackles.

Um then let's move on.

Very well.

Um we do have a very full agenda.

So let's let's uh let's move to our next item um, which is presentation uh oh, so many documents, sorry.

Um, about the downtown parking uh and insights on that.

Thank you and welcome.

Thank you.

Good evening, everyone.

My name is McLaren Latta.

I handle strategy and insights for Indigo West.

We are based here in Bozeman.

We handle marketing and creative work.

We were hired by the downtown urban renewal district in partnership with the city of Bozeman to develop a public education campaign and an overall vision for parking in downtown Bozeman.

And as we got into the work, we realized that we really needed to understand the data and the opinions and to better identify the opportunities to have a successful, effective, efficient public education campaign.

So I'm gonna take you through what we have learned.

Hang on, I gotta adjust my microphone here.

Okay, so we're gonna go we're gonna talk about where we've been, what we've learned, what's happening now, and what's to come, where we've been, quick look back, a quick look forward, 2021 to 2023, paid parking and curb management exploration occurred, initiated by the city, paid parking was denied by the commission in 2023.

Following up that was a parking working group that it was established by Mary Mayor Cunningham, collaboration of lots of good people, lots of folks, which identified who identified long-term and short-term priorities.

I'll touch on those briefly.

Data and audience insights, that's where we are now, led by the downtown urban renewal district, working with the city and contracting indigo west.

So as I mentioned, data opinion sentiments opportunities, and then what's happening now and what's to come.

We're working on FAQ's overall vision and that public education campaign, and then also the parking experiences too.

So I'm not gonna go a lot of time into this, just identifying that we didn't want to reinvent the wheel.

We want to understood what had been done.

We understood the parking working group, as I mentioned, had several long-term, short-term recommended actions, key initiatives that they had outlined, as well as evaluation metrics.

So we kept that all in mind as we were digging in.

We also understood what the parking working group priorities were, long-term that public-private partnership utilizing downtown URD funds to build parking infrastructure, and then short-term several opportunities as well.

So all that in mind, we then wanted to dig into the data.

We took a look at the most recent uh supply data that was available, and this was uh done by Walker consultants in August 2023, looking at total on-street capacity as well as total off-street capacity.

So keeping all in mind like what the supply was as of August 2023.

We also took a look at the new data that was available being captured by the city of Bozeman and taking a look at occupancy rates for the variety of the parking zones, including I'm sorry, the different uh lots, the different parking lots and the parking garage, too, as you can see in this map.

So parking garage, parking lots, as well as the off-street parking.

So as you look at this, uh you'll see this is the average occupancy rate per each of those segments.

We've got on street, parking garage, the black lot, the rouse lot, the North Wilson lot, the South Wilson route lot.

And no surprise, you know, in June, just last month, we're seeing the highest occup occupancy rates, both uh average on street, and then also to um in the lots, you're seeing pl black and South Wilson trending the highest.

Okay.

We also want to look at visitation.

So through Placer AI, which is data collected, um, it's a platform if you're not familiar with it, um, that's used by the visit Bozeman and the chamber to understand who's coming and what kind of volume we're looking at for downtown Bozeman.

We have 1.3 million uh visitors came to downtown Bozeman in 2025.

That is only US visitors.

That does not include international visitors.

Uh place area does not have, I think from what I understand, does not have reliable um international visitation data, but um this does give us a good snapshot of looking at you know the US visitors.

But this does give us a good snapshot of looking at you know the US visitors.

So total US visitors over 1.3 million in 2025.

Out of state made up 74%.

Of that total visitation from US visitors, 11% were from the Bozeman area.

And according to Placer AI, about 140,000, 50, 140,000 people from the Bozeman area.

And then we broke that down into two different segments Bozeman residents, those who live in 59715 and 59718, and then the surrounding communities as listed here.

Overall visitation is trending down since 2021.

Certainly that was a height of visitation during COVID, but it is up 8% versus 2019.

So if we take a look at what happened in 2025 versus 2019, it's up.

Two things that really stood out to us here is that the total number of out of state visitors is up 22% since 2019, but the number of Montana visitors is down 20% since 2019.

So overall visitation up, but those numbers of who's actually coming is different.

So taking a closer look at the Bozeman area and who's those visitation numbers, these numbers are steady, right?

You can't, there's really nothing statistically significant in any fluctuations here.

However, though that visitation is not keeping pace with the area population growth.

So if you look at US Census data and you look at what's changed from Bozeman population growth from 2019 to 2024, as well as surrounding communities, up 14%, up 17%, but that visitation level from each of those segments is for the most part, you know, static quo.

Then we took a look at citations.

All right.

So overtime citations, these are, as you can see here, we've got 58% of overtime citations are from Bozeman area residents.

Now, in case you're thinking like, oh, you know what, people with number six are being targeted, that is not the case because this these are overtime violations that are enforced via license plate recognition technology, not by an actual human, right?

So there's no uh there's no biases being entered of oh, I'm gonna really make sure that those folks who've got that Bozeman license plate are you know getting the short end of the stick here.

Um so total overtime citations, uh 15,000 plus.

The other thing I want to call out on this slide is these are not the number of violators, it's the number, excuse me, it's not the number of violations, number of citations, it's the number of those who violate or violators.

Why am I having a trouble time saying this today?

Yeah, so the total, it's the when you look at the um the total for Bozeman, the 44% of overtime citations, that is per person.

So that's not that's including the person.

Dam I making sense there.

So it's not like it 44% isn't like all of the tickets issued, it's all of the tickets issued to an individual.

Um, no, that doesn't even make sense either.

Okay, it's late.

I can tell it's been a long day.

Um Nick, back me up here.

I'm gonna explain that.

Correct.

Yeah.

So that is just how many uh citations we've given to uh an individual one time.

Thank you.

That's what I was trying to say.

All right, moving on.

Next is safety citations.

So we also want to understand where things were with safety citations.

Again, this is not collected, this is collected by you know by humans by uh officer observations and community complaints.

Um, still, we still have 55% of safety citations from Bozeman area residents.

So even though we have a large number of people coming from out of state, it's it's ourselves who are getting the tickets, right?

I haven't gotten a ticket recently, but I will definitely say that I have been a citation receiver in the past.

So what we've learned, we want to dig into the opinions, and one of the questions that we were asking ourselves is okay, is Bozeman the only community, downtown community that has challenges with parking?

And one of the questions that we were asking ourselves is okay, is Bozeman the only community, downtown community that has challenges with parking?

And interestingly enough, just recently, Gensler Research Institute did a city pulse of downtown core business districts.

And not surprising across the world, 76% of people have unfavorable sentiments of cost of parking, and 70% have unfavorable sentiments about the availability of parking.

So we are not alone if that makes you all feel any better.

We also did one-on-one interviews with key stakeholders.

There was 17 people that we interviewed.

And one of the big takeaways here is that downtown Bozeman parking, as you probably all are familiar with, can really often vary by individual.

It cannot vary by whether you are trying to park north of Main Street, south of Main Street, west of black, east of black, et cetera, right?

It's very much an individual experience.

However, what the common themes that we did hear from those 17 key stakeholders was employee parking is definitely top of mind.

Understanding what is perception versus reality, that's one of the reasons why we dug so much into the data, parking opinions and what kind of economic impacts those have, this need for education, a data-driven strategy, and infrastructure and capacity.

So with that, we fielded a what is it called a convenience sample survey, an online survey in March of this year.

It was not a random sampling.

It was not a US census-based, you know, sample to make sure that it was, you know, uh representative sample of the population.

It was really designed to qualitatively capture perceptions and sentiments because we wanted to understand what how people were feeling about parking in downtown Bozeman.

And what was really fun to see is that even though it was not a random, excuse, you know, it was not a random sampling.

Um, we did get some really great responses.

Um we had over a thousand thirteen, excuse me, a thousand three hundred.

And they truly represented who our kind of core downtown Bozeman area people are, right?

So they're frequent Bozeman area residents.

Daily, so there was no like very few uh out of state or even out of the Bozeman area survey respondents, right?

It was really the folks that are using downtown Bozeman day in, day out from the from the local area.

So 74% are either daily or weekly visits, 90% live within 15 miles, 64% live within five miles.

We also saw 26%, 340 respondents of downtown employees.

And the reason why we captured the number here is you like be like, oh, only 26% were downtown employees.

Well, having a having a sample size of 340 is really nice to have when you're trying to understand people's opinions and perspectives.

Same thing with the business and/or property owners.

Again, 11% of the survey respondents were categorizing themselves as that.

However, we had a great sample size of 148.

Again, like really being able to understand those sentiments and opinions.

As you all know, no surprise, this is a complex issue.

You have lots of different user types.

You have some people who are like, it's easy.

Downtown parking is easy.

I never have a problem.

We have other people who are like, oh my gosh, I have so much confusion about it.

There are so many challenges.

We also had lots of comments about people and how they don't like parallel parking in downtown Bozeman, that it's intimidating.

I personally am very proud to have parked in front of a crowd in front of the crystal bar.

It was fun.

I nailed it on the first time doing my parallel parking.

But it is true that you know there are people who definitely have challenges, parallel parking and a variety of different other issues too.

I mean, we just heard about bicyclists and you know that came up too during the survey.

So lots of things, lots of different components to that overall experience.

And one of the things that you'll see in a minute is that it's not just parking, right?

It's also traffic, it's also congestion, which is you know not a surprise for you all either.

Two things we wanted to call out first is this sense of over half, just over half of downtown employees have significant issues finding legal parking spots.

We captured a quote here to give you a sense of the sentiment being shared in the parking survey, and these are their opinions.

This is based on their personal experiences.

This person said, it is incredibly frustrating as a college student who deals with parking on campus to come to my full-time job downtown and stress about parking and pay insane fines.

I do not feel supported as a downtown employee and would love to see more support for those who work downtown and help this area thrive.

We also heard from 77% of survey respondents who said it's important to add more parking spots and downtown Bozeman.

Again, we've included a quote here to capture this example of the sediments.

We need more spots and they need to be bigger.

As much as a perfect world would have no vehicles or need for parking, it is a fantasy and not a reality.

The more you build, the more parking spots you need.

We drive big vehicles and need more spots that can accommodate big four-wheel drive vehicles that tow stuff.

Which is, you know, I think we can all relate to that.

So we offered many different statements and had respondents have chance to note how you know what levels of agreement did they did they have about the statements that we noted.

Availability and proximity, and it's and it's and as you'll see here, it's there's really a lot of mixed feelings, right?

28% never have significant issues, 63% typically park within two to three blocks.

57% find two-hour free parking convenient.

55% say moving their cars to ours is inconvenient, right?

Downtown experiences and timing.

One of the things we wanted to make sure that we understood was was it the downtown experience itself that might be impacting whether or not people were coming downtown.

Um we heard that 77% enjoy the array of experiences offered, and 72 admitted that they will visit downtown when there are fewer people downtown.

So during large events, um, they might choose to come down at other times.

Again, these are Bozeman area residents.

Uh larger vehicles, we heard about that, and then we also talked about preferring not to parallel park.

One thing we talked about was joking is that we could offer a free class to how to parallel park downtown.

Umbe that's not a joke, maybe that should happen.

So parking experiences and avoidance.

25% said positive overall experience, 33% neutral, 41% said they will avoid downtown, in part due to pay parking takes too long.

Uh, traffic and safety challenges, 74% find downtown traffic patterns challenging.

We'll talk about that in a minute.

51% worry about vehicle pedestrian, and then rules and awareness, just some more data here.

Um, and then facility preferences.

One thing we want to call out here is 15% choose bridget garages or first choice.

We see this as an opportunity that I'll talk about in a moment.

And then 31% find it easy to park in public surface lots.

Okay, so lots of responses, more than 1,300 people have a lot to say.

And essentially, at the end of the day, it's not easy for all downtown parking users to find a spot that works for them.

There's lots of different user types.

It's sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's not, depending on the situation.

Their realities and sentiments are affecting their behaviors.

Plus, we have visual cues, existing communications, and current challenges, reinforcing how they feel.

They're definitely based on all the responses that I read in the survey.

There is definitely a lot of misinformation and a lot misunderstood about parking.

So we see here the clear communication can definitely successfully impact sentiments and behavior, and it's one of our one of our best um opportunities.

So, even though how to best solve parking is not black and white, we do feel like there's a great opportunity here to better educate the public on what's what's possible.

So, some of the opportunities, long-term priority, I mentioned that about public-private partnership, employee parking priorities, and informed public education campaign, improvements for existing garage and surface lots, and then some other considerations.

So we're gonna go into these and um just couple top-line things, employee parking, explore top-level parking, and this is specific to the existing parking garage.

Um, there's already conversations happening about that.

Free and affordable options in the future, prioritizing employee parking needs in all management decisions, subsidizing programs, shared use program.

So definitely reiterates what we saw from the parking working group with the sentiments that came out of the survey.

An informed public education campaign.

I think one of the um powerful things that have come out of this is that the city and the downtown urban renewal district are working together to solve this, right?

There's it's it's a combined effort.

We see developing frequently asked questions.

Um there were we actually in in the survey itself, we asked open-ended question.

What questions do you have about downtown parking?

And I think about 300 plus people listed their questions.

So we've got good information to start with.

Umage, develop a district-wide pay wide wayfinding program.

Always remember that surrounding neighbors are important, welcome the Bozeman community back to their downtown, and then educate visitors and tourists, even though they might not be getting the majority of the citations.

Um, there's still an opportunity to um educate them too.

Improvements, um we really want to position the garage as the heart of the parking management and change that 15% as being the first choice to a much greater percent.

Uh we want to celebrate what's available and optimize the user experience, better communicate rules and signage, they're um addressing already app and kios challenges.

Also to clarifying hotel and city usage of the parking garage.

There was lots of questions around that.

And then consider that lack of space for larger vehicles, vehicle safety, etc.

And then uh we're already actively addressing issues, repave two of the four lots and plans for FY27.

Other considerations, this is what I was talking was I was alluding to um about it's more than just parking, right?

Um so many, I shouldn't say so many because I can't exactly quantify it for you all.

However, hot topics in the survey responses were turn signals, pedestrian safety at lights, one ways, a lot of people called out, one way is going the wrong way, uh, alleyways, other drivers, um, semi-trucks, deliveries and ride shares, just stopping in lanes and saying, you know, we're gonna stop here no matter whether there's moving traffic or not.

Uh opportunities to work with the city and the Montana Department of Transportation, and then implementation of some new um and different zones.

So just kind of fire hosed a little bit there, but wanted to get this all out to you concisely as possible in terms of what's happening now, again, long-term priority, public-private partnership, downtown parking FAQs, parking garage experience, employee parking solutions, vision for downtown parking, that public education campaign, um, those are all what's next.

And to give you an example of some of the FAQs, those frequently asked questions, we've included a couple here.

Um, and again, we have lots of content to work with, uh, but these are some of the things, the ones that rose to the top.

As for the parking garage experience, as I mentioned, changing the perception of the garage being the last choice to the first place, making it easier to use the garage, wayfinding opportunities, and enhanced experiences.

So, with that, um questions about this content before I tell you a little bit more about what's coming next.

Anyone uh let's go on to the next question.

We'll save our QA for the end.

Okay.

Did you say that again?

I'm sorry.

We'll save our QA for the end.

Okay.

Perfect.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, so what's to come?

The downtown parking vision plan.

So we're starting to work on this along with uh the public education um campaign as previously mentioned.

And as what the city and the downtown urban renewal district, they see this vision plan as being really uh a true action plan for them to work off of together, right?

So here's you know, we're working together, we're collaborating on downtown parking, here's our action plan, here's what we're doing, here's how we're moving forward, all with a clear vision, taking into consideration the data, the opinions, and the opportunities.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That was uh that was a lot to take in.

Yes.

Um start with uh questions and comments uh from the board with Grace.

Sure.

Thanks for all thanks for the presentation.

Um yeah, one question I had was I think there was a graph and it had uh occupancy rates of different lots.

Yes.

I was just wondering like what is a full lot considered.

What is a full lot considered?

Is the all spots taken?

Yeah, like is that are we shooting for a hundred percent?

Is that a positive?

Like, what do we?

Nick, I'm gonna defer to you for that question.

Yeah, is that yeah?

It's a great question.

Yeah.

Um parking manager.

Or what's the ideal situation, maybe?

Yeah.

Uh I mean, ideal situation is to try to get as many people uh off the public right away as possible.

Try to leave those spaces to get as much movement out of those as possible.

So uh just trying to get those filled uh as much as we can, and then the parking garage and kind of leave on street, uh, not necessarily as a last resort, but to try to use that, um, utilize that for the transient population to try to get in and out of uh businesses downtown as quick as possible.

Okay, gotcha.

Thank you.

And then yeah, the other question I had.

It seemed like there was a focus on employee um parking.

Are you getting the sense that that's gonna be a major part of that plan with the downtown association going forward?

Yeah, it's uh definitely one of the priorities.

Umploy parking priorities and informed public education campaign improvements, and then other considerations.

So that's top of definitely top of mine.

Okay, gotcha.

Yeah, yeah, thank you.

Yeah, I appreciate it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thanks, Chris.

Maybe um the only question that I had um I know in the kind of beginning of the presentation.

Um the state visitation to downtown was looked at, and then like the Bozeman area.

Um then I guess I was just curious on like would that would be like page 34?

Is it page 34?

Just oh, maybe it's different in this for some reason.

Um it just drops to like just Bozeman.

Oh, yes.

And I was curious as to if that was just like shorthand for uh the Bozeman area from the priority right here.

Is this what you're this one?

No, no, no, it's good.

These are good questions because it's a lot of data and it's important to dig into it.

Yeah, yeah.

So I was just curious if the uh drop off total visits from area.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Um that makes more sense.

So I was looking at another one.

Um yeah, that answers my question.

Okay.

Sounds good.

Um I I mean, are we doing questions now or comments now or both and let's do both.

Okay.

Um I don't know how many questions I have.

Um, I have some comments on the data and what we're looking at.

You know, the fact that 75% or 55% of the citations were from Bozeman, but only 24% of the visitors indicates very clearly to me that those are employees getting citations or folks that have to be downtown that are getting citations.

And I mean that just leads to the very first point.

The first parking meters were implemented in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, because business owners were standing on the street watching employees park, walk into their store, sit there, and then retail customers couldn't park, and so they started charging money to get employees off the street.

So it seems that there's an obvious solution to employees parking in spots that are on street that have a two-hour limitation.

And you know, and then in that plan from 2023, there's a proposal to subsidize employee permits to get them into the garage using paid parking revenue.

There were plans to build additional parking supply using paid parking revenue.

That I this I mean I admire the effort.

I think that this takes a lot of work and everything, but I think that there's like there's this avoidance of the main idea that helps solve parking issues.

The reason why people don't want to park in the garage at 15% is that's because it's the only place in downtown where you have to pay to park in a constrained parking environment.

Somebody chooses between three things availability, price, and location.

You have to weigh trade-offs against that.

I'm I have two small children.

So I will take location first and I'll pay $20 an hour to park if I can get right in front of where I want to go.

Where it's a college when I was a college kid and I a dollar beer felt expensive, I would park 10 blocks away and walk to where I was trying to go to make sure that I could do it.

So I mean, I think that you know, changing the incentive, changing the way that we think about parking in this town and thinking about you know that the most valuable asset are on street parking is not priced, but the place where people want to go to the lease is priced heavily.

Um, when you sell tickets at Bobcat Stadium, you don't charge the nosebleeds the most, and then the ones on the 50 yard line, the the the leads.

Like that's it's just it's the opposite.

Um I would really encourage going forward that the parking vision be much broader than parking.

Like it cannot just be parking.

It it can.

There's no solution in which you get everybody downtown who business owners want downtown, who the community wants downtown by only increasing supply.

Then you increase supply that it makes downtown less desirable, less desirable of a place to walk around, less desirable of a place to linger.

People like sitting outside in cafes in Paris, not because there's lots of parking and big roads.

They like sitting outside of cafes in Paris because there's narrow streets with little traffic and plenty of pedestrian infrastructure.

Like if we look at the great cities, it's not because they have better parking or or or more convenient parking.

It's because they design the city around people first and not parking in cars first.

Um I mean, the lesson that I want to point out is just the cost of new supply.

It's $10,000 for a surface parking space, $30,000 to $45,000 for a garage, $75,000 to $100,000 for underground parking per space.

And so that means that these projects are going to cost 20 to 25 million dollars.

There is not a world in which the URD can make up that money.

Um there's no but there's not nearly enough bonding capacity, there's not nearly enough time for them to do that.

And I also think it's a little I I mean calling it a public-private partnership and relying on tax increment financing dollars from the downtown URD, that's tax money the city has chosen to forgo, and that's tax money that taxpayers have paid in.

And so I don't know what the private end of that will be.

I would be very curious to see how that looks, but there's again an obvious solution where the people who park pay money, and part of that money goes towards supporting supporting future supply.

I mean, I think that we keep doing this conversation in this community, goes in back to the 2016 strategic parking management plan where we talk about paid parking and we talk about paid parking, we talk about paid parking, we keep trying every other solution.

And we keep finding surveys like this where people say downtown parking sucks.

I don't come downtown because of the parking.

And we keep avoiding this kind of one thing that's out there that we all talk about and then we all kind of revisit.

So I know that like this isn't a parking conversation.

This is much more the sentiments conversation, but it kind of leads into like what is the thing that fixes it.

Like if I ask my three-year-old, does she want ice cream for dinner or did she want mac and cheese for dinner?

She's gonna say ice cream every single time.

And she's not, but like she's not weighing the consequences.

Building more parking garages downtown is great, but as we see with with highways all the time, you just induce further demand.

Ask the people who take I-70 out to the mountains from Denver every weekend.

It's adding more lanes to I-70 didn't make it better.

It just meant more people came and more people utilize that asset.

Instead of trying to try a strategy that allows us to turn the dials to and and zero it in on things that matter and that work.

So I mean, I think that this like I'm I'm glad to see information and data backing this up.

Um I'm glad to know that this conversation is still ongoing, but I think if paid parking is off the table in this conversation, it's not, or it's not a conversation that leads to long-term solutions.

It's a conversation that leads to things that are gonna work for a few years, and then we're gonna be back at the same spot five years from now, having the same conversation.

So I'll stop.

Thank you, Mike.

Um, I'm gonna I'm gonna usurp my normal order, Simon.

I'm just gonna say that I agree with absolutely everything that you just said.

I think we have we are uh politically too afraid to have this like paid parking discussion in in any meaningful way, and I think it needs to happen.

And I think that I defer to you on all of the financial um like aspects of this situation because of your experience.

Um and and I and I think that the you know, all the economic arguments you make are are great.

I also think um one thing I will add to what you said is that I think downtown just feels messy, and it's not just the parking, it is the unprotected left turns.

It's the um it's you know, pedestrians have the right of way in the crosswalks, and then you have no protected left turns and everywhere's stuck, and then you want to make you want a parallel park, and it it is it is intense when you have 10 cars behind you waiting.

I have no problem getting into a parking spot.

I'm a very good parallel parker.

I've parked in Chicago very many days on very busy situations, but everyone knows that when there's a parking spot open, you're going for it, and everyone just accepts that you you have to wait for them.

And in Bozeman, there's not that shared sort of mentality where um you know, and so you feel like you are hurting everyone, and you kind of are hurting everyone behind you, and and um it's in any case, that's that's all I wanted to add to that.

And um, so I think I think paid parking is good.

I think using uh using some of that money for better uh bicycle facilities to get east and west, like so I didn't have to drive down here tonight, and I would have an easy time to get here and like that one spot freed up anyway.

Simon, thank you.

Great comrade presentation.

Um very juicy topic.

I agree with everything that that uh Rhea and Mike also just said.

Um and without kind of maybe harping on that too much.

Um I think one of the interesting things that I I saw in this presentation, I I feel like I took the survey back when I was um going around as well, was uh I believe you had the diagram in there of like the different colored um blocks depending on how much they were utilized.

And what's interesting was interesting to me is there was a few that streets that were just right in the middle of downtown that are green, right?

And um, so this and this is basically telling us in my eyes here that there's still capacity.

It's just a matter of directing folks to that capacity.

And that's where I think the concept of some FAQs, better parking wayfinding signage, like that's all I think very much needed, because as you mentioned, there's certainly some confusion around just parking availability, where do you go?

Um, so on and so forth.

But it's also a little bit of a behavior and lifestyle thing, like you can walk main street from east to west, one end to the other.

It's not that doesn't take that long, right?

I have some colleagues who live very close to downtown who drive to work, and it's like a it could be a 10 minute walk or a 12 minute walk for them, but they drive every day because parking is so freely available, right?

I mean, even outside of this core zone, you just get into the neighborhood streets of park for as long as you want.

Um, and then you're starting, of course, to get into potential conflicts with with those neighbors.

Um so I don't know how to solve a lifestyle choice thing, right?

Um but discouraging certain modes of transportation by making it a little bit more inconvenient, right?

I mean, automotive travel is so convenient, that's why everybody uses it.

Um but what we have to do, and I've had these conversations with a lot of friends recently, is you can't just make one thing more inconvenient, you have to also make the other options more convenient.

Um I think that kind of ties into everything that that we've been saying here, and um I want to reference briefly the public comment presentation that we got on this and the fact that it referenced uh elements of the downtown improvement plan that have been around since 2019, seven years.

Um a lot of those things are fantastic, right?

And I mean, Nick, I think it was my first transportation advisory board meeting.

I was like, what about angled parking on Main Street with a protected left turn lane?

Like that's in the downtown improvement plan for seven years, and that's just restriping.

Why haven't we done that?

And obviously, Main Street's an MDT street, but I wonder how we can fold a lot of those things into maybe not specifically this presentation, but this overall approach of like something like that would provide protected left turn lanes.

It would provide, I think it was like 140 additional parking spots.

Um it's angled parking, not parallel parking, so you're kind of resolving some of the stress and confusion right there.

Um obviously that's probably a big lift with working with MDT, but I just wonder how we can start to think of some of those things.

And then um the last thing I'll mention, the the quote from the student that was saying, you know, I I park on campus, it's stressful there, I come downtown, it's just as stressful there.

Um relatable.

But the interesting thing to me is that the streamline routes are like 50% of those, I mean, two of the four routes are focused predominantly at serving the college.

I was having a conversation with a friend who works at the college this past weekend.

He was saying that a big operational, a big chunk of their uh the office that he works with their budget goes to funding streamline.

And how can we get college students in an instance like this to use Streamline?

It's free, right?

Like it takes you right downtown.

And then it's just you gotta walk a couple blocks.

Um to me that's if you're coming from campus and you're going downtown or vice versa, that's like one of the easiest ways to get to and from there is using the bus.

And so, how can we encourage that as again kind of building that this whole approach as a multimodal approach of hey, you don't need to drive downtown, like there's a free bus service, and you know, there's a there's a bus uh bunch of bus stops probably on campus and whatnot.

So yeah, that was this is just kind of it's it's an interesting quote because it's talking about I think it's a good encapsulation of the mindset that we have now and then the mindset that we should be shifting towards and how can we encourage that?

So those are some of my sense.

Thank you, Simon.

Yep, agreed with that too.

Um, should we go to public comment?

Uh is there anyone in the room who would like to make public comment?

Yeah, zoom up and running.

And anyone showing comment.

It is not up and running.

Okay.

Um I think we all feel extraordinarily passionate about this issue.

So let's make one last go around and then let's move on to uh our next agenda item.

Um Grace, do you have any anything you would additionally like to add?

I don't have anything I'd like to add.

That was a lot of food for thought, but I appreciate the opportunity.

Yeah.

Um I think just the with the trend lines we're seeing um with you know the nicer months um being the higher occupancy, I think it's definitely leaves fertile ground for that behavioral mode shift, um, which we've seen in study after study about economic development of priced parking um really not taking the the dent or like creating a dent in in local businesses that they might fear um just because of the higher frequency turnover um and people finding uh different ways to get downtown with which I think it was like 40% of people uh currently quote as so I think it's just definitely an opportunity um uh that's before us.

I I mean again there's a lot of work that goes into collecting data like this, and a lot of work that goes into the outreach and everything, and I admire that, and I think that that's an important step in informing the conversation, but I do think the conversation has to have a comprehensive approach, and if the conversation is taking ideas off the table before we even walk in the room or before there is conversation, whether those ideas are improved bike parking, whether it's finding a new place for a garage, whether it's an employee program, whether it's uh paid parking, like it's not going to be a useful exercise if we if if there are non-starter conversations.

Um I think that too.

Um I know in this conversation there are some property owners that own a lot of property downtown or own valuable property and say things like, oh yeah, special improvement district, no problem.

I can I can shoulder that.

But like a hotel that runs high margins, that's not yeah, they might be able to shoulder that.

A retail business or a small business, you know, we saw um Cactus Records leave downtown, like that.

I'm sure that their margin, I don't know what their books are, but I'm sure their margins weren't high.

Like that's an additional tax on top of them for being in a valuable building and on Main Street, like that becomes a question of like, yeah, there are gonna be a lot of voices clamoring for it because that again they own hotels that can charge $600 a night at peak season.

Whereas the t-shirt shop on Main Street selling t-shirts for 25 bucks, like it's are people gonna pay $30, $35 for those t-shirts.

So I I think it think that it becomes a question of like having real conversations and bringing it making sure that the people in the conversation are accurately representing the people who utilize downtown and not just downtown property owners.

It sounds like you were doing that in the survey collection and in some of those interviews.

So again, uh blob that then you know, making sure that all the options are on the table for the vision for the future because I think um there are people in this community who would love to see paid parking downtown and when it wouldn't flinch at it.

May I just can I can I make a comment?

Please, yeah.

So just to be clear, we were not exploring solutions in this survey.

We were just gathering opinions and perspectives, and like you said, I think you do whether or not your kids want to eat ice cream.

Did you say something like that?

Right.

So we tried to really just understand perceptions so that we could address those perceptions and create a uh a public education campaign that will be informative.

And while all the other long-term solutions are worked on of like, okay, here's what we know now, and here's how we can address this now and take action while the other you know solutions are debated, etc.

Because I'm not a parking expert.

I'm a I'm a people expert in terms of understanding people's opinions and perspectives.

And you're absolutely right.

You don't you have you offer a child ice cream for dinner, they're gonna take it every single time.

So our goal is to really just to be able to say, oh wow, gosh, there's a lot of misinformation about parking downtown right now as it stands, and we have great opportunities to make some easy wins and easy improvements.

So thank you.

Twitch.

Yeah, um that all makes a ton of sense.

I'm super stoked to see what you guys come up with in terms of the um public educational campaign of better signage.

I mean, personally, I didn't even know that the lot at um what is that Mendon Hall and Wilson?

Um kind of kitty corner to the armory there, and then I guess there's the one right next to the armory too.

I didn't even know those were city lots for the longest time, right?

Like it's just we just don't the signage just isn't really super great.

Um really stoked to see uh where that goes.

The last thing I think I'll say in terms of like gathering those sentiments and addressing those sentiments.

The uh other quote that you had here in the presentation about we need bigger parking spaces, we drive big vehicles.

Um understandable.

But I'm sure like this could probably could be part of the the public information campaign.

It's just driving a big truck with a raft trailer downtown and wanting to park it, it just might not be the best solution, right?

Like there's there's certain things where if you live in a bigger city and there's a portion of Bozeman that feels like a little bit of a bigger city or a medium city, right?

That downtown core, it's like can't always have that.

But when thinking about those alternate solutions and thinking about this whole thing holistically and talking about the downtown improvement plan from 2019, that circulator bus over to the fairgrounds, if it runs frequently enough, like the fairgrounds could be a great place to park a bigger vehicle and then pop downtown.

I don't have to worry about trying to parallel park a trailer or anything like that.

Um so just thinking about how there are solutions that might not be as obvious as just like bigger parking spots that can still solve the problem in a more holistic way.

Um but yeah, super excited to see what uh how how else this this campaign continues to go forward and what you guys develop.

It's been a hot minute since I've seen a trailer park downtown.

Yeah.

But however, I have to say personally, when I drive downtown, when my husband and I drive down, we always take the smallest vehicle, our smaller vehicle, because we're like, we know that why bring his big truck because it's not gonna fit.

Yeah.

And sometimes maybe that's just what you're in when you're passing through downtown, you gotta find a place to park.

Right.

Um so we do live in Montana.

We that's probably something to be cognizant of, but I don't know that the solution is making every single parking spot bigger.

But anyway, like you mentioned, we're not necessarily looking at solutions just yet.

So yeah, I think you get up the river and you're in Annus, and it's not impossible to find a spot for your boat in your trailer too far from where you want to go eat downtown.

And then you come to Bozeman, and it is a lot more like Chicago when you're downtown than Ennis.

Um so yeah, I think there is some expectations that uh are sometimes unrealistic.

Um anyway, I think um I you know I this is great to start to find solutions of we have an overarching um, you know, like this is a state-controlled highway through and that makes everything so much more difficult.

Um it's just it's going to take some some lobbying and some real effective um uh change of attitudes in our state legislature too to I think change things.

Um I think paying for parking, I mean the worst we can do is try it and everyone could get in an uproar, but at least we have some money to do something with because it's so hard to refund anyway, any other way in the city.

And I think you know, if we need more parking garages, great.

But those also have more bicycle facilities.

Um I think that's it for me.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, let's see if I can find the next item on the agenda.

I believe we are going to have uh staff presentation.

Is that correct?

On the uh Gallatin parking district or yeah, so we're gonna um take a little bit of like a development review approach to this one.

So we'll have uh brief staff presentation, then that'll follow with uh Courtney Johnson, our applicant, who we've seen here before, and then we'll turn it back over to staff.

Um without necessarily delaying us much more.

I just want to make sure everybody's good after an hour 45.

Don't need a quick break before we dive in.

We're probably gonna be at least half an hour and 45 minutes on this section, I bet I hear you, buddy.

Okay, let's continue.

Okay.

All right.

Good to go.

Good to go.

All right.

Thank you guys.

And I first want to say that I love the conversation tonight because we're talking about parking, which is inherently what uh Nick and I live and breathe for the city of Ozeman, and for the record, Ben Bailey, uh neighborhood services and code compliance program manager for the city.

Um so what we're gonna talk about tonight um is something that hasn't been really talked about for quite a few years.

Um it's uh uh contemplation of developing a new parking permit district within the city of Bozeman.

So we're gonna shift our focus from downtown from what you guys just heard and digested.

I'm gonna add a little bit more to that dinner plate because I know you guys are hungry for parking information, and then we're gonna switch it out to the west side of town.

All right.

Um so to be clear for tonight, uh I think I just wanted to set the stage for you all.

Um, and as the Transportation Advisory Board serving as its role as the parking commission, uh the purpose tonight is to share your insights and expertise with us on transportation and parking related matters.

Uh, your feedback and discussion will help inform staff, Nick and I, um, as we develop a recommendation that could ultimately be presented to the city commission.

All right, how we got here.

Um I drove.

Um, I'm sure other people did that same thing and then parked here in the parking lot.

Uh no, that's not what we're talking about.

Um, what have we done to now?

Uh in 2024, we received uh notice from uh a resident who is uh actually in the crowd tonight, um, and our petitioner uh requesting that we consider uh a residential parking permit district um next to Gallatin High School.

And what we're talking about is um uh an RPPD is what I'll refer this to, but residential parking permit district.

Um in September of 2024, um, we came to this board and had our first work session.

Um, and as a result from that initial work session, we received really clear direction from this board on addressing certain concerns that you all heard at that time.

Uh one of those concerns was safety related.

Uh I have to applaud Director Ross and his team for the engineering aspect of that.

Um they've changed traffic patterns, they've added capacity, um, and they've done a lot um in that area to address those concerns that we heard in 2024.

Um the parking side, collecting data for what the supply issues were within that area.

Um, and that's what Nick and I have been doing over the last year and a half was collecting that data and seeing what's actually going on within that neighborhood and within the Gallatin High School area.

Um since then, on-street parking has uh been increased, which has been great.

Um currently the project that's still underway but should be implemented soon is the Bozeman Sports Park, which is gonna add additional capacity as well.

And um additionally increased patrols from the police department to hit on those safety aspects.

Um so during the beginning of the school year and at the end, generally there's a saturation patrol um from the police department as well as from our parking enforcement officers to really hit those areas to make sure that people are adhering to those traffic traffic safety um considerations and parking considerations.

Um where we're at today, discussions with the city commission by the residents regarding the safety and parking supply issues that surround Gallatin High School and our conversation here tonight with you guys at the Transportation Advisory Board.

Um since then as well, um Nick and I have had multiple meetings with the petitioner um regarding um what's going on at Gallatin High School and how we can best assist as liaisons to bring this to you all tonight.

All right, I'm a um image guy when it comes to visual representation for things.

So this is just a representation of those updated traffic patterns.

Originally in 2024, you couldn't make a southbound turn onto Flanders Mill from Oak.

So what happened there was because people couldn't do that, there were students flying through the neighborhood off of Tanzanite Drive and down Ferguson Ave and Ruin Sun, as well as other areas within the Flanders Mill subdivision, which led to students parking on Tanzanite as well as Augur Lane.

And that was really the impetus for the conversation to start.

As you can see, um Flanders Mill is pretty um close to where Gallatin High is, which is where that additional uh parking capacity has been supplied by Director Ross and his team.

Um additionally, this area specifically is where they see the increased patrol presence for parking and law enforcement presence.

All right, the additional supply locations.

Um an image, an aerial image from our community development viewer of Gallatin High School and the surrounding streets, North or North Cottonwood on the left, Flanders Mill on the right, uh, Gallatin High in the middle, and um the neighborhood that we're talking about is just to the east of that.

Um the additional parking supply within this image is roughly a hundred additional on-street parking spaces.

Um, and then uh the Bozeman Sports Park, which um assistant city manager John Henderson uh and Gallatin High School have worked on, as well as Director Ross for the crossing is underway and should be completely finished here pretty soon, um if not done already.

Um and that added a uh safe crossing as well from where the sports park parking lot is to be, which is outlined in the red um square with the green fill so that students and/or staff or staff and/or students um can park there, make their way safely across Oak to Gallatin High for that additional capacity.

And with that, I'm going to introduce our parking manager Nick Foken.

Hello everyone, Nick Folkin, parking manager here at the City of Bozeman.

I'm gonna continue the conversation that Ben started here.

Um the two different tools we have within the Bozeman municipal cool Bozeman municipal code to uh deal and manage with parking is a residential parking permit district, also known as an RPPD or a parking benefit zone.

We're gonna jump into those a little bit deeper here.

Now, a residential parking permit district, uh the implementation for this is at the city commission level.

So they create that boundary for the residents, and all the residents within that boundary can purchase a permit.

The fees for that boundary uh are set by resolution, and that's for the permit costs and the citation price as well.

Uh the cost recovery for this type of management plan uh relies heavily on the residents of that district.

So that's the revenue generated from those permits.

Now, the purpose uh specifically for this type of management plan is to prioritize the on-street parking uh for residential use uh only, uh, not letting non-residents or commuters to purchase any of those permits.

And again, how that works is just letting the the residents uh purchase those permits uh well, not letting the the non-residents uh use or utilize that space.

Now, on the flip side of the plans that we have available to us is a parking benefit zone, a PBZ.

So this one has a couple different uh tasks to it before we can actually implement this.

Uh the first one being it needs to be created by the city commission, and that's a much larger district boundary, and then at that point it's brought back down to the parking commission or uh tab acting as parking commission to create uh smaller zones within that district.

And like the residential parking permit district, the fees are still set by resolution for the permits and citations, but the cost recovery portion of this plan is a little bit different.

It's not necessarily uh just on the residents, but can be spread to commuter uh permits as well.

So the purpose of this type of plan is to again manage that parking demand, manage the curb, but supporting the needs of all of the different uh neighboring communities or businesses, what have you, around that specific zone.

And that's by managing that curb through pricing or occupancy limits set by the neighborhood.

Um this also has a really nice uh caveat to it that any excess revenue generated within that particular zone can be reinvested into that zone, or can be used the the next year to buy down permit costs to make them a little bit cheaper for the residents next year.

So what we have here is the suggested uh boundaries by our petitioner.

This is Augur Lane from Sunstone to Tanzanite, and then uh Sunstone from Flanders to Augur, uh Tanzanite from Flanders to Augur as well, uh that little portion of Annie.

So bringing you back to this area, um just kind of what we're seeing on the citation side of uh parking.

Um August 2025 to August 2025 to July 2026, we had uh a little over 370 citations in that area, and about 23% or 88 of those citations were safety related.

I also wanted to give uh kind of a broader view of all of the neighborhoods that surround Gallaton High School.

Um you'll kind of see there right at Galton High School, uh, there's quite a concentrated amount of violations there.

Um that's well within uh Galton High School's uh private lots that they maintain.

So the parking considerations that we kind of are are seeing from the administrative standpoint that of Ben and I.

To effectively enforce a parking management plan, like I've shown you today, uh, would require additional staff to uh be able to enforce and comply or get compliance out of uh a potential area.

And those permit costs uh to follow our Buzzman municipal code, they the fees need to cover both enforcement and administrative costs.

And then setting up uh a new permit district, what that kind of looks like is using our software and hardware that we currently have for MSU and our BHS districts.

Um just making sure that our staff is uh trained and they know what that new permit looks like and how to uh sell those to the residents within that area.

Benjamin.

All right, thank you, Nick.

Um I think that you learned a little bit more about the two tools that we really have on the parking side to help us manage parking supply, and that is the intended purpose of each one of those unique systems, right?

Um residential parking permit district is designed to help manage parking supply.

Uh parking benefit zone is help a tool to help us manage parking supply and manage the curb.

Um from the data that we collected um over that last year with the minimal citations, it did not show that there was a supply issue on Augur Lane and in that area along Tanzanite.

Um, more of a utilization issue when it comes to students parking um in that area.

Um so our recommendation is to gather data pertaining to occupancy once the school year starts to gain insights as to how the sports park opening up with those additional 119 spaces affects the neighborhood when that uh utilization and supply comes in while also directly uh engaging uh and continuing to engage with the uh residents of that neighborhood.

Um if the parking commission recommends a management tool for parking supply be implemented, uh the most appropriate form for this specific area would be a residential parking permit district based on that data.

And with that, um I'm gonna invite um our petitioner, Courtney Johnson.

Um Courtney is a resident in that area.

I've had multiple conversations with her over the last couple of months, got to meet some of her family members, and is a uh former employee of the city of Bozeman as well.

Um with that, I will invite her up.

Thank you, Benick.

And thank you, Courtney, for staying so making this presentation for us.

Are we okay uh extending for another 15, 30 minutes?

30 more minutes, everyone okay with that.

I'm seeing yay is all around okay.

Thank you.

Thank you guys for taking time from families and being here tonight.

Um, so I'm here to be the applicant.

I don't know if any of you have done the development review process.

I feel bad I forced the parking department into my world.

So as the applicant, we're looking for not only a parking district, but uh parking management plan.

I pull this uh slide up.

This is uh a decade ago where the high school used to sit.

Those power lines is where Oak was.

You can see a bit of Flanders Mill.

There's an old camper stuck in those cottonwoods.

Um we live in a very fast-paced developing city, and so we need to use the tools available to make modifications.

As a design professional, what I put on paper never ends up being what is in reality.

So I'm gonna walk you through what we're looking to do with your help tonight.

Um, as the neighborhood design professional, liaison, doer of all things with the city, um, we've come up with a few requests.

I'm gonna go through those.

Um, I'm a former senior planner.

I was actually the one that did the development review for the annexation, informal review, final review, and the agency exemption hearing for the high school.

So I have a decade of this area.

I live in this area, so I'm happy to answer any questions.

There's a lot of history, I'll try to keep it brief.

Um, but I also am an architect, my work, I go into the complicated and politicized projects and look to find solutions.

So I think we have one here with your help.

When you think of parking districts, everyone thinks of MSU downtown.

I know you guys recently heard from Bozeman High School.

Um, so this goes to the very top right uh portion of Bozeman there.

We're gonna call it the Northwest area.

Uh we submitted a resolution of intent two years ago.

Um, and because this process has not been done in decades, city staff neighbors, we're trying to make sure that we're doing the procedural process correctly.

And what we have found is that we do have the tools and resources available to us.

We do need to look at the 2018 entitlements, what was approved and what is enforced.

That's a really important thing.

We talk about program costs and solvency, but we are spending years of staff time on the front end of a project.

We also need to look at the enforcement of that.

Um, we have grade 2021 consultant parking management recommendations, we have the municipal code.

Um, so we are trying to delineate these land uses.

That is the whole intent of our unified development code.

So improving neighborhood safety and restoring resident access and services.

We have the ability to do that.

Um I get into a new jurisdiction, I always look at the intent of the code.

That's my secret weapon and start to see what is the intent of the code.

Um these two reports that were done give really great guiding principles.

Resident access, ensuring their residents and their guests have adequate parking, safety.

Let's make sure we're making decisions with data, efficient use of parking.

Before we build more infrastructure, let's use what we have.

Multimodal transportation, who can't get behind that in Bozeman?

Um, number six, very interesting.

Uh user parking responsibility.

We need to recognize that employers and major land uses are primarily responsible for their parking demand.

I thought that was uh a great point.

And then the transparent management, the administrative process, the enforcement and program costs, which is what we're outlining here today.

The there are two paths within the existing code.

Um within chapter 36, there's division three or division six.

Staff has recommended uh division three.

That goes through commission with your recommendation.

We meet all the designation criteria.

Is it residential character?

Yes.

Is it congested by non-resident vehicles?

Yeah.

Would the restrictions improve resident access?

Yes.

And then with the district, would this district further one or more of the following objectives?

Promoting tranquility, reducing noise, reducing traffic, and reducing litter.

It's very clear, kind of this is the letter of the law when we get down to it.

So the staff recommended the RPPD process.

Um it was the most practical tool that we have with the code and policies in place.

They align with the guiding principles, and we have the data to support that.

So as the applicants, we're fine with that staff recommendation, but we're also in support of any other process.

We know this is new and it's adapting.

But we are also asking that with the procedural approach, that there's a comprehensive managing framework put in place.

So on the left, I'm looking, hey, code's gonna take a while.

We've got all the steps.

This may take months to implement.

Meanwhile, the 2026-27 school year starts here in a few weeks.

So Nick and Ben have been wonderful.

They've already reached out to the school district to try to work ahead of this upcoming year to see what we can do collaboratively.

So the big question is the infrastructure's built, schools fully capacitated.

What do we have available to us as residents with your help?

We will not go through this.

This is a timeline, it will change, but to give you guys a sense of where we're at, resolution of intent.

We had our first work session two years ago.

We have two years of observation, uh, restriping, infrastructure improvements, the sports park, safety discussions, engagement.

We've done a lot of work, hopefully, to present this to you here today.

Um we're now looking at a management plan with coordination of the school.

We're here today just to ask that you recommend this move forward to commission.

That is simply the request today.

If that was to happen, there's staff work, public hearing, city adoption.

There's a few more steps.

So we'd love to have it happen by fall.

It may take much longer than that, we understand.

But this is you're right in the meat of it.

Why this matters?

Um, this orange rectangle, this is the Flandersville neighborhood.

We're flanked by the Bozeman Sports Park, which is not fully built out and regional park with dog park.

But what people do not realize here in In the Yellow, there are over seven schools within a half mile radius.

So that's approximately 3,400 students.

And we're talking littles down to preschoolers, like the the ankle biters.

Um this number does not include staff, teachers, visitors, so this could be close to 4,000 people coming at drop-off at lunches, 3 p.m.

It is one of the highest concentrations in Bozeman for park, schools, and neighborhood activity.

When we look at the district and how we're trying to delineate this for you, the code says it needs to be predominantly residential.

We did speak with the neighbors to the west of Gallatin High School.

They are separated by Cottonwood going north and south.

Since that is an arterial collector, they're not seeing as much parking.

They're seeing more safety concerns when it comes to speeding, pedestrian routes, and crosswalks.

Um to the north, adjacent on the west side of the sports park, those residents are seeing impacts by parking, but we we anticipate that once the sports park is built out, the additional parking will hopefully solve those concerns.

Um we've done a lot of work.

Um, I'm sure this board more than most knows a lot of the incidents that happened this spring.

Um following Leslie, we had a fourth grader at a crosswalk that had flashers.

Um the student was in the crosswalk, and I witnessed him nearly get sideswiped.

I'm sorry.

Um never, I never want to see that again in my life.

And parents and neighbors responded to that because you guys are hearing what happened, but what is not happening or the near misses that weekly are occurring.

Um it was wonderful the neighbors came together.

We try to make it as positive on what are the solutions, not just the problems.

Um that started with a small group, it's now well over 300.

And I really want to thank um Commissioner Magic and Deputy Mayor Doug Fisher, they helped us organize that.

And they rubbed in poor Nick to coming to the event along with Chief Elkamp, who are wonderful resources.

Um it brought us all together, like what we can do better, and we don't know what, but we need to work together to do that.

Um, state representative Peter Strand also reached out to me after this event trying to bring support and highlight these issues.

Um the area that we're proposing, um, we had neighbors go door to door, and we have the majority of support.

We have signed petitions that we did ourselves.

They're not official, but we wanted to show that there is neighborhood discussion and support behind this.

We have community and business letters of support, and there's been a significant amount of news and media coverage.

So we really hope we're ready for commission, we're ready for the next step.

Um, this is a side note.

Um, Douglas Fisher got very excited during the workshop.

A resident asked, wouldn't it be great if we could use our open space trails?

And you can bike from Chief Joseph all the way to town and country.

How can we make that work?

How would that reduce traffic in the school zones?

And how would that make kids feel safer?

We're talking a lot of little kids.

The high schoolers are mostly driving, but it's that south side that sees a lot of small children.

So another work session.

The history of this, how did we get here?

The entitlement process, if you're not familiar, is the legal approval process to ensure a project aligns with local zoning and long-term plans.

I oversaw that, and the high school submitted to have 613 on-site parking spaces.

They also proposed to have a joint use approach.

So by using the sports park and Meadowlark, they hoped to be able to meet their parking requirements.

They did this because non-residential uses cannot have off-site parking.

If you are a big box store, you have to have your parking on site.

So that's why they proposed this.

In their parking memo, they provided these calculations, and they quote would accommodate all parking for the worst case event without infringing on adjacent neighbors.

Again, our intentions on paper turn out to be different in real life, and that they would exceed the required on-site parking required for a typical day.

So we were like, great, let's sign it.

Let's keep going.

When you are a state school, you are able to exempt yourself from certain zoning.

They had to hold a public hearing.

I presented to the school district and commission.

We went through those.

Most of them were landscaping.

We had this many bond dollars.

We wanted to get that high school built.

But what was important here is that they did request during track meets or large events that they would be able to utilize off-site parking on Andy and Annie in Flanders.

So you can't see behind the flags, but that puts us with those off-site uses at 1,120 spaces.

So it looked great.

So when we look at Gallatin High, I often get the question of well, what's happening at Bozeman High?

So 613 on site.

Bozeman High has 1,040 on site, which looks like a huge discrepancy, well over 400.

When you add the joint use and the off-site, there's 1,020.

So there's only discrepancy of 20 spaces then.

I also oversaw the Van Winkle Stadium and high school project, so that's where these numbers are coming from from their site plan summital.

So what changed?

We're now in 2024, all the students are in the school.

Oh shoot, we don't have a sports park parking lot.

So that joint use supply was not there when the all the students were in school.

Additionally, the high school said, hey, only juniors and seniors can park.

So what has been really devastating, we have the youngest and newest drivers attempting to parallel park, and they are not confident.

They are trying their best, they're rushing to school.

And I've sat on the curb with many of them after a car crash, when they're crying, they're doing their best.

So that's why we came here.

That's why I made the recommendation that we restripe Flanders to give them more parking spaces, try to help them.

So that resulted in that 255.

So in 2024, they had 868 parking spaces.

But then human behavior comes into play.

And when you look at the closest entrance into the school and human nature, I'm rushing to class, I had 20 minutes on my break.

Um, those parking spaces are not being utilized, unfortunately.

And there's no ordinance to enforce student parking.

There's no ordinance to define resident parking.

So only 35% of those spaces are being utilized.

And the impacts are being absorbed into the neighborhood.

On the left, you're gonna see that's the student parking, uh, looking Flanders to the north and Flanders to the south.

You can see that those cars are grouping as close to that entrance.

While looking on the right hand side, Tanzanite, looking east, on the left-hand side of that, the red truck, that is um Diamond Park.

And there is no public use access to that park whatsoever.

That is the only frontage on the park for the playground where ice skating, fishing, the bird nerds love this spot.

The blue heron's a big hit.

Um, and then the bottom, you're gonna see that you're lucky to get your trash can out on Augur Lane there.

This is the first winter I said, thank God there's no snow.

This is 2024.

We have students parking six feet off the curb, which we had emergency service vehicle issues, delivery service, even residents getting to their homes, Bozeman trash uh service.

Um this is the worst case of what we have seen.

So all the impacts, everything that we've talked about, um property damage.

Um the big thing here is we have over 30 young kids that live on the street.

And um, these trail systems, I think are my biggest concern because kids are not going near the high school.

We meet all the designation criteria, so I'd like to see how we evaluate this with commission.

Um this slide, there are some orange circles.

Nick and his team have evaluated those crosswalks, two of which have flashers.

Those yellow ones are the crosswalks.

Maybe in the future we can start to look at and how to fortify those.

Um the safety concerns, um, unsupervised students.

We've had underage drinking and driving, property damage, harassment, and unsafe interactions with young preschoolers and residents.

Um it's well documented, unfortunately.

Um my daughter was nearly clipped by this 18-year-old going well over 20 miles an hour on the sidewalk.

Um she's in first grade.

She was singing, and she's not paying attention.

She's he did not look as he ran through that intersection.

Um it's it's now my kids and every other kid and every kid trying to get home.

Um crime prevention through environmental design is something school resource officers and law enforcement use.

I've also trained alongside them.

The first principle is natural surveillance, direct line of sight.

And we are seeing great kids in the neighborhood, but we are seeing more of the kids that do not want to be in eyesight of Officer Foley.

So this is why we have designated this smaller portion to be our first step of implementation.

Um people, what is the city done?

Where's the city?

We get that.

Well, the city re-styped Flanders.

Nick put signage at the parks at the school districts.

He's got a new pedestrian crossway at Oak.

We've got the new joint use parking, we've got intersection improvements at Oak and Flanders, Oak and Ryan Sun, Oak and Ferguson, and we've evaluated all the kid crossings.

So the infrastructure's been built, but we need to manage it better.

This might be me, this might be Nick, that might be all of us at this point.

I'm sorry, this is a lot of information, but we have all these things we're talking about, and what I'm asking for.

Can we please try to just move this forward?

Um, this is our next option.

And when people say, What have you tried?

We've offered, we have a resident, she did all the streamline parking.

She offered to do great positive messaging.

Let's park here.

We've had neighborhood meetings.

Uh, we've had city leadership come, we've had weekly pickup of trash.

Um, it's been a lot.

Um, we've also really worked closely with the principal and the superintendent.

Their message was that they acknowledge that parking on city streets is outside of their authority and require city action.

So we're all kind of pointing the finger at each other.

What's the next step?

So the proposed area is small, it's limited.

Um, it's based on the data that uh we saw from the city in our meetings this week.

We're looking to keep costs down.

Um, we're happy to repurpose signs.

If Bozeman High is consolidated, let's take those signs and we'll use the same hours.

We'll be thrifty and save however we can to support the city in that way.

Um I've drafted a uh staff memo uh for the commission.

I've done the staff report, I've drafted it, I've drafted an ordinance.

Hopefully, that helps take a little bit of time off of their desk, but there are still other things that the staff would have to take on that will take time and effort.

We recognize that.

So here today, we are just looking for input from this board, and we hope that you support that this moves forward to commission.

Um we have a lot of things we've talked about.

I'd like to defer these other conversations on safe routes to school and crosswalks.

I think we're seeing the city transportation doing a great job of that.

So I know there's a lot to talk about here.

Um, should Diamond Park be signed?

Do we start to take the approach that Cooper Park or Irving or Whittier?

Because the public doesn't have there's a lot of discussions here, so maybe this is something that staff looks into, or there's a different work session.

So we wanted to maybe focus this so everybody can get home on the proposed uh recommendations.

I've put a move a motion here with some language that this would be reviewed by a city commission for their consideration.

Thank you so much.

Um I'm happy to answer any and all questions you may have.

Well thank you.

Um you've definitely done your homework in the work.

Um let's start with Simon questions.

Um let's see.

Um yeah, thanks for doing the legwork there.

A lot of information.

Um I guess one of the one of the big questions.

Well, okay, here's the easy one.

Um forgive my ignorance on this one.

Is the main entrance to the school on that east side?

Or what what's driving students to want to park?

Yeah, that's a great question.

That's not so the main entrance is the south, but you can see where these arrows are that the three arrows pointing out.

That is a corridor that leads out to this side of the building that students have access to.

Um, similar to where the sports park, there's a north entrance and a sidewalk that go there.

So there's three main entrances, south, north, and southeast corners of the building.

Okay, got it.

Um cool.

And then the other two questions that I had might be more for Nick and Ben.

I'm curious.

Um, so we got the sports park parking lot that will be operational this year.

Great.

Long term.

Um, as the rest of the sports park is built out.

Can I make a suggestion?

Yeah.

Just for order of operations.

Can we do questions for court?

Questions for the appearance?

And then we'll do Nick and Better gonna kind of usher us through the recommendation.

Great.

Cool.

Uh I think that was the only question I had for you then.

Perfect.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Uh Hayden.

Um Thank you for doing all the legwork.

It's just seconding that.

That's um uh definitely appreciated.

Umise my my questions are uh kind of operational.

So yeah, thank you so much.

I guess the only question I had for this part was um I know that the proposed district is uh just that auger lane.

Um and I saw uh in the number of citations.

Is the only reason they aren't pro that you aren't proposing one on Tanzanite because of that park access, or is there um I we kind of looked at the city parks department saw that?

I felt like it was a bit of an overstep.

I definitely think that it's the overflow of student parking is impeding the use of the park, but I think staff is probably the better one to answer to that one.

Thank you so much.

Yeah.

I think the only question I had that was burning throughout the first part of your presentation of what is the what are the neighborhood thoughts?

What is their, you know, have you asked the neighbors and with the 85% that that sent CPLike you did?

So um, yes.

Um we have the Western Transportation Institute director thanking me.

I have legal counsel for the school board who's there.

Um there's there's heavy support for this.

Um there's been some really unfortunate and sad incidents, uh, especially in last year.

So we're hoping that this is a way to just um enforce human behavior to use the supply that's available.

Um so there's good support.

Unfortunately, the Zoom is not working.

Um, so we had several people looking to get on and have public comment.

They have a lot of young kids.

So that was one of the comments that we have had is that um being a busy parent, it's been really hard and intimidating to have at I get to be the person that does this.

Uh normal resident would not be able to do this, and that's the the overwhelming comment.

Uh thank you for doing this.

No one knows how to navigate.

The other comment that came back in that workshop is do I call the school?

Do I call 911?

Who do I call when they're speeding when there's a safety issue?

So we got some really great direction from city staff on how we can just be more coordinated.

Um, because there was a lot of pressure for us to document this before bringing it uh forward.

So I think we're pretty well aligned now at this point.

Okay.

Um I think we'll move to I guess questions now from uh operational questions to Nick and Ben.

Um and Simon, sounds like you had one ready to go.

So yeah.

Um yeah, so I was curious with the sports park parking lot being built, but over time, the rest of the sports park itself being built.

Like it seems like, oh great, 119 additional spots now in a couple of years when other sports fields are built out.

Is that gonna be like 45 spots realistically that students could actually use?

What's our thought on that?

Um I'm not knowing if I'm the right person to ask that question to um because I wasn't part of that project with the agreements.

Um from what I understand, um it's primarily for staff, and then they're considering permits for students.

Um if and I'm not sure if that's that's accurate either.

Um that's just what at the conversations I've had with people who worked on that project.

Um I think there has there's some element of events that are going on within the sports park and then some shared use part of it.

Um but as far as numbers go for long-term use, uh, I do not have that information.

Okay, got it.

Um second question I had was why for the sake of it's um well, yeah, why was a uh parking benefit zone kind of ruled out?

It seemed like maybe that would give us the flexibility to be a little bit more agile with changing things, adding streets potentially as things develop, but was it partly because commuters would also be able to purchase those permits?

What how why was that district ruled out?

Yeah, so thanks for that.

Um PBZs are great in high density areas.

Um part of the thing is is that in that area they also have driveways, every single one of those residents for off-street parking.

Um, think of a PBZ in a place that has such high demand that citations contribute to the overall cost of running the PBZ that can be reinvested either by buying permits down for the residents that are seeing such high demand for supply.

Um and since we aren't seeing the demand for supply, it's a utilization issue to limit who can park on those specific streets, the RPPD made the most sense.

Okay, got it.

Cool.

That's all I got.

Thank you.

Cool.

Thank you.

Hayden.

Uh just a follow-up to the PBZ question.

Is the Bozeman High School a PBZ?

It is not.

Okay.

Uh Bozeman High School is an RPD as well.

Okay.

We have that switched.

Um I guess given that the recency of the Bozeman um high school parking district uh conversation last month and the conversation around the fiscal sustainability of the program.

Um just curious kind of what the potential costs of implementing this kind of scaled program would be and kind of what the feasibility would be like from building it out.

Yeah, I appreciate that.

Our initial uh financial models point to roughly 132 dollars per permit um based on size.

So it's really hard to estimate um what people may do when it comes to purchasing permits.

Um so what we did know was we knew the size of the area for MSU.

We knew the size of the area for BHS, and we took those data metrics for how many permits were purchased by the amount of people and linear feet of street within those districts and applied that to the area that was outlined here, um, basically setting up a proportion.

And from that proportion, um we estimated that there was gonna be 57 permits purchased uh within that area, which equates to 132 dollars per permit, roughly.

And sorry, I think I missed it.

Was this uh the enforcement angle was would that require an additional uh enforcement stuff?

Okay, yeah, uh to adequately enforce uh an area whether it's just one street like Augur or uh a more broader area, yeah, uh adding to our supply of uh enforcement capabilities uh is really needed.

Yeah.

Uh bummer, because you seem to have just gotten up to the uh Right, exactly just that.

Just got to that threshold.

Um curious if the uh like vehicles required for enforcement is also is it just the actual employees?

Right, yeah.

So uh I mean finance and budget uh would would most likely be upset with me if I didn't try to include uh the cost of a vehicle and LPR uh to enforce something like this.

So yeah, the adding additional uh officers would also create uh a need for another enforcement vehicle.

Yeah, cool.

Um that's all for me.

Thank you.

Chris uh I was just curious what type of safety measures are planned for that crossing at Oak from the new sports park.

I'm gonna direct that to Mr.

Ross.

Yeah.

Sure.

So last year we installed a pedestrian hybrid beacon.

And so uh there's a new striped marked mid-block crosswalk curb ramps and that pedestrian hybrid beacon.

So um I really avoid calling it a hawk signal at this location.

Uh, but it's the one that um forces the all reds on the uh oak street movements so that uh pedestrians can pass through.

Okay, gotcha.

Thank you.

Um question for Director Ross, do we have an action item on this item?

There were um I believe some recommended uh I won't I don't know if I call it motions, but um you will not be taking formal action necessarily.

You're gonna be recommending the path forward uh to commission.

Okay.

Correct.

Thank you.

Um go.

It is down, but we did have someone reach out via email, so I'd like to make comment about that.

And these are new uh since what was distributed earlier.

Correct, yeah.

So yeah, and for the record, we did receive several comments um via email in support of this district.

So just want to acknowledge that those were received.

So we have uh Brianna Walsh.

She, I'm gonna do an and I quote.

I reside at 820 Augur Lane, and I strongly support the neighborhood proposal, seeing that this topic has been around for years.

It would be wonderful if this could be passed along and reviewed by commission.

That's the one public comment we have.

Okay.

Thank you.

Um then let's go to our thoughts and comments out of the board.

Um yeah, I mean, I think it seems like again, all the legwork has been done.

It looks like this concern was initially raised in 2024.

Um it seems like we've done a lot in the time since, both infrastructurally and maybe with adding some capacity, both along Flanders Mill and now with the forthcoming um sports park parking lot.

Of course, we haven't had a chance to kind of see how that will affect things, but um it seems like, and going off our conversation about Bozeman High School parking district last month.

Um seems like the student behavior is they want to try to use that uh kind of east-southeast entrance.

Um so to me, it probably does make sense to to make a recommendation to um for city commission to consider the establishment of that zone, um, at least in that area to kind of start off with.

So I guess those are just sort of my initial thoughts and comments based on the presentation that I've heard tonight.

Great, thank you.

Hayden.

Um Yeah, likewise, I think safety should always be paramount when we're talking about um uh human interaction and the the public right-of-way and what this uh public sector agencies can can do to support that.

Um so I think it it definitely makes sense, especially given our recommendation last month um to kind of study the Bozeman high school um to kind of take that in conjunction um and kind of study the feasibility um and potential crossover for uh switching that infrastructure uh a little further northwest in the city.

Thanks, Hayden.

Grace, yeah, I'd say I've I voice support for moving that recommendation along.

Um yeah, I think just the intersection of very residential uh family-oriented neighborhoods uh placed so closely to big commuting arteries like oak.

I know just being a uh like pedestrian and bicyclist on oak is very scary in my opinion.

So I think anything we can do to kind of mitigate that risk uh for especially the little kids.

Yeah, that's my opinion.

Thank you, Chris.

Um I I before you wrap um with your uh comments, and we sort of coalesce uh direction from the board.

We do have one member from the public in attendance tonight.

Oh, I I failed in fact.

I'm so sorry.

Please.

Okay, so I yeah, I can say nothing.

I just came to support Courtney, but I do live in the area and I attended her um meeting that she had.

Um I don't remember exactly where it was located, but we did all kind of put in some of our feedback for the area because I have two young boys.

Um actually there was uh a woman at Zumba the other day at the ridge that was hammered, she was drunk at 10 a.m.

And it scared me because her biggest complaint was that there are polls that she may hit on the way out.

But I stopped her, I said my son is out riding his bike, let's make sure that you get a ride home.

She was 72 years old and drunk.

Um, but my idea for this area is because I'm I'm in education is have we talked to the students?

Because I've seen a couple of kids stop by Courtney's house and apologize for some of their behavior.

I don't remember exactly what happened.

I just witnessed them apologizing to her, and I think this is a regular occurrence.

But if we could speak to the high school students and you know, the same talk about pregnancy and abstinence and drugs and all that kind of stuff.

Hey, by the way, you guys have a risk of wrecking your entire future if you do not pay attention to the children.

It is cool to drive the speed limit, it's cool to park in the designated parking places so that you don't accidentally hit a three-year-old who's running across to the preschool that morning.

I mean, I see the you know the flowers in that area all the time, and I keep thinking that could be one of my boys, and I don't want to be a helicopter mom.

I have to let them ride the bark the park by themselves.

But it is terrifying.

And I pay for them to have little watches, and I think if they don't answer me on the watch, they might be dead.

And that's a really uncomfortable place to feel as a mother.

Um but educating the high school students about what they can do to help one another and making it something that they hold each other accountable for and you know, maybe call each other out when they're when they're speeding or not being responsible because I think at the heart for all of the kids in Bozeman, I think we do have good students.

I think we have good people here, and I think that if we just touch at their hearts and say, hey, you know, it's not cool to be driving and doing the things that you're doing because there's kids down the street.

So just a thought.

Thank you very much.

Um we were given this handout um communication engagement for residential parking permit district.

And uh I I don't in any way think we should usurp this process, but it does seem like the neighborhood has done, as everyone has said, done the legwork, and it's hard to for me to imagine um that if this could not be considered by a commission, it's uh and I don't want to get too um too uh aggrandizing, but I mean it it feels like it would be a failure of government to and in its responsiveness to to its president to not consider this seriously.

Um and so I would um I would seriously like I I really recommend that the the commission consider this.

Um and and with that, um I think we could take a small informal vote that we would recommend that this um district be considered by commission to go forward.

All those in favor of that signify by saying aye.

Aye.

All those opposed, nay.

And so we would propose uh such that commission consider this district very seriously.

Thank you so much for all your work on this.

Um let's adjourn.

Let's go home.

Good night.

Thanks, everyone.