Thursday, day two of our budget session.

It is now the nine o'clock hour.

And uh one, two, three, four.

We have a quarrel.

All righty.

We'll call the role at this time.

Good morning, Mayor.

Mayor Pro Tem, City Council members.

Um, Mayor O'Neill.

I am present.

Mayor Pro Tem Middleton.

I'm here.

Councilmember Caballero.

Councilmember Freeman.

Councilmember Holsey Hyman.

Here.

Councilmember Johnson.

Here.

Councilmember Williams.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Welcome to everybody who is joining us live this morning via the internet and those who have joined us in person.

We welcome you all to day two of our City Council budget work session.

And at this time, I will turn it over to Christina Riordan, who is our interim director of budget and management services.

Good morning.

Good morning, Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, members of Council, Christina Reardon, Budget and Management Services.

I will just want to welcome you to our second day of the budget work sessions.

We have a full agenda as you can see in the screen before you.

These are the departments that will be coming before you to give you an update.

We can, as we did yesterday, take a break when you um when you need to, if we need to.

And I will turn it over to our city manager in case she has some announcements that she wants to make before we get started.

Good morning, and thank you.

Thank you, Madam Manager, and uh good morning, Madam Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, and members of the city council.

My name is Sean Egan, and I'm the director of transportation for the city.

I was advised by our budget director, Christina Reardon to focus on three key objectives.

Be brief, be brilliant, and be gone.

And I'm hoping for two out of those three.

But seriously, it is my honor to represent nearly 80 city employees in the department and more than 200 Go Durham and Access Transit workers supported by this budget.

Our mission in transportation is to provide and maintain safe multimodal infrastructure to improve mobility, promote environmental sustainability, and enhance the quality of life for residents and visitors.

Bill Judge, who manages infrastructure development, traffic operations and safety, and Evian Patterson, who manages our parking operations as well as our new mobility division that plans and oversees Go Durham Transit Services.

Our business services division, led by Tom Devlin, is responsible for developing this budget as well as the contracts, agreements, and the many agenda items we bring to City Council.

In previous years, this chart has shown as many as 13 full-time positions for the Durham Chapel Hill Carborough Metropolitan Planning Organization, DCHC MPO, which has been housed within the City Transportation Department for more than 40 years.

In order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of regional planning, the DCHC MPO board voted earlier this year to move to the Triangle J Council of Governments, TJ Cog in FY 2024.

And earlier this month, City Council approved an agreement with TJ Cog to enable that transition.

So those staff positions are not shown here.

Two new positions included in the FY2024 budget are a Vision Zero coordinator to advance the goal of zero fatalities and serious injuries on our transportation network and a new mobility services planner to guide the implementation of new transit routes and improved frequency made possible with support from the Durham County transit plan.

The first chart shows the average number of riders boarding a Go Durham bus each hour.

I like to describe this as a crowding index.

The national average for this measure was 20 in 2022, but our numbers consistently exceed 30, resulting in riders routinely having to stand on our buses as no seats are available.

Additional service frequency and new crosstown routes funded by the Durham County Transit Plan should reduce crowding and improve travel speed, reliability, and the customer experience in the next fiscal year.

The second chart shows the same measure for our GoDurum Access riders whose disability prevents them from riding our fixed route buses.

We work to keep this figure above two to enhance the efficiency of this shared ride service and address growing needs across Durham.

The next two measures show the reliability of our bus and access systems.

For both systems, we continue to perform below our targets, largely due to our ongoing staff shortages.

This reminds me, anyone looking for a new career with great pay and benefits should visit GoDurum Transit.org/slash careers.

That's GoDurum Transit.org slash careers.

On July 1st, thanks to this budget, our starting wage for bus operators increases to $19.65 per hour, while experienced operators can earn nearly $30 per hour plus generous health and retirement benefits.

As we transition to direct contract management for bus and access services, transportation staff will be working closely with the management teams to improve both staffing and on-time performance.

The next measure is the share of intersections with a traffic signal that also have accessible curb ramps for people who walk and roll across our streets.

While we continue to install new curb ramps across the city, many intersections that require a new traffic signal for safety reasons also lack sidewalks for the curb ramps to connect to.