Well, welcome everyone.

It's time to get started here for Mesa City Council study session for April 6th, 2026.

Councilmember Goforth is absent, unable to attend as excused, and Councilmember Heredia is on, he said.

So other than that, all their council members are present.

Council, you know the drill.

Item wants to review the agenda for tonight's council meeting.

I know we went over it recently, so are there any additional questions for tonight's agenda?

Councilmember Heredia.

Okay, hearing none from council.

We'll move forward to item two A is a presentation of Private Direct provide direction on the transportation budget.

Thank you.

Eric, who's this other person next to you?

I haven't seen him for a while.

Different role, no agendas, huh?

There you go, Edgar.

Time's yours.

Good evening.

Uh thanks for having us.

Um my name is Eric Kadarian.

I'm the transportation director.

I have Andrew Calhoun with us, the who is a deputy director here in transportation and oversees our support services group.

Um so we're here to talk about transportation.

I know everybody's favorite subjects, so um we'll we'll try to and yes, and uh we'll we'll try to keep everybody interested tonight.

So um first we just want to start off with our our public purpose that we've worked with, uh, the Office of Innovation and Efficiency here over the past few months.

Um it's really to plan, operate, and maintain Mesa's transportation network to enhance our efficiency, to reduce our safety risk, and to promote uh the longevity of our assets and our system.

Um I do want to note that this is although this is a brand new public person purpose statement, uh it almost mirrors what our mission statement was before.

Um, and and we did this independently.

So I hope we're on the right track.

Um as far as new outcome areas that that we're gonna start reporting.

Uh, we're really gonna focus on reducing safety risk.

Um in 2022, there was a proclamation by the mayor uh with city council to reduce the number of fatal fatal and serious crash um or serious injury crashes by 30 percent by 2030.

Um that that still is our goal.

Uh it's amazing to think that we're halfway through that that time time span.

Um we finished our comprehensive comprehensive safety action plan.

Uh we've started implementing projects that to help with that and doing public outreach.

Uh, if you see if you see our department at uh Mesa activities, you we will have a photo safety uh or sorry, not a photo safety, a safety booth uh that you can take photos and take and take a driver pledge to to drive more safely.

Um, and then also our other outcome areas to promote longevity and enhance the efficiency uh of our uh network.

So before we jump into the budget, I just do want to highlight some of the the great work that that our department is doing.

Uh a couple weeks ago we spoke of about our pavement management system, and so I won't go into detail, but I just do want to highlight that our our pavement condition index is uh well above our our target area, um, and that's due to the amount of investment that um that council and management has given to us to be able to preserve our our asphalt.

And I I we we think we have a great program.

Um, and so we'll continue to to do that.

Um, I also want to highlight, I think both the mayor and council member duff have seen a slide like this for the past seven budget cycles at least, as far as our conversion to LED street lights.

Um we and do you want to highlight that in June of this year uh we will have completely uh changed out our street light system to two LEDs, and we did this all in with in-house staff.

Uh when we looked at it seven years ago, we we decided that that we could take this this project on just to save the city money.

Um we have about 400 fixtures left, and they're all in the downtown area, so they're they're coming in uh a few different shipments, but we expect to be finished in June.

Also, we want to highlight uh three years ago we we were approved to uh bring an in-house concrete crew back into the to the city.

Um we were noticing that our concrete contractor um just just with uh materials and the number of workers they had weren't getting to to things quite as quickly as we were looking, especially buckled sidewalks.

I was taking uh uh in excess of 30 days to repair buckled sidewalks.

Uh we stood up an in-house concrete crew this past year.

We got all their equipment also with them.

Um and we've got our response time for for these in-house, you know, for buckled sidewalks to be 10 days.

Um, and we're also doing a lot of smaller projects that typically we would have paid the contractor that our crews are getting the experience and being able to handle more and more uh as as the years go on.

And mayor, can I just say to that point, I I appreciate Eric and and his staff continuing to evaluate that.

And it goes to the question that um council member Taylor had raised about street sweeping and evaluating uh when we use in-house and external, and and those are the types of things that Eric and his staff are are looking at constantly to see can it be more timely, can it be more cost effective for in-house versus contracted services on that?

So just wanted to appreciate them for continuing to keep an eye on which way is better way to do it.

And that could change over time, right?

Sometimes depending on economic conditions and other things, um we might get better bang for the buck going external, and then other times it it may be more efficient to be and cheaper to be internal as well.

So I think about 20 years ago we we went to a lot of contracted work, and just over the past five years where our contracts are going.

Um I think you know, now we're looking at can we be more efficient in-house again?

So another thing we we do want to highlight is uh we only have a few locations left uh in the city right-of-way or street right-of-ways that that we have turf.