Good evening, citizens of Portsmouth, and welcome to our special call meeting.

Umward to the discussion.

Want to welcome all of the citizens that are in the room.

Also wanna acknowledge our city staff that is here with us.

And want to uh acknowledge Mr.

Carter, Stephen Carter, who's our city manager, Mr.

Derek Challenger, our interim city attorney, and Miss Deborah White.

Of course, always want to acknowledge my colleagues here on council.

And with that, I would ask to my colleagues on council, please note your attendance electronically.

Six members of the city council are present.

Thank you, Miss White.

And look, before I turn it over to Mr.

Carter, I want to say I'm really looking forward, and I hope that all my colleagues on council are looking forward to this presentation tonight.

We have a vision for Portsmouth.

And the vision is about being a walkable city where we can enjoy retail, dining, and all the other amenities that are enjoyed by cities.

And so I am excited about the opportunity to be here today and listen to what is going to be presented to us.

With that, sir, I'll turn it over to Mr.

Carter.

Thank you, Mayor.

Good evening, everyone.

Have our city attorney not sorry.

Mr.

James Wright, who's gonna lead this presentation for us.

James.

Um to tie into our existing fiber infrastructure.

Um the primary goal of this workshop tonight is to apply lessons learned from city council's trip to Greenville, South Carolina, um and the tour that they took um while they were down there.

Um this session aimed to translate Greenville's success in multimodal safety and uniform streetscaping into a conceptual vision for corridor spanning from MLK down to Chestnut Street.

With that, I will turn the presentation over to our to our team from VHB, Miss Kirsten Tinch to go over the details for tonight's meeting.

Thank you.

Welcome, Ms.

Tinch.

Thank you, Mayor.

Welcome.

Glad to be here tonight.

We're gonna have a very short presentation before we get to the interactive portion of this evening.

So well, that didn't go well.

Anybody know what happened to the person.

There we go.

All right.

Let's try that way.

All right.

So good evening, and welcome to tonight's uh high street innovation corridor charret.

Um we're grateful to have this opportunity to be here with you tonight to really talk about what um what we're like to accomplish along the high street corridor and get your perspective on on this uh essential process.

So it's about building a shared understanding of the corridor's needs and opportunities.

We'll be exploring design concepts and alternatives together with a focus on identifying strategies that can revitalize the high street corridor in a meaningful and long long lasting way.

We're also here to uh here to hear from you about the guiding principles that should shape this design corridor.

Your input will help us prioritize the improvements that will enhance safety, improve mobility, expand access, and of course support long-term economic growth.

As um Mr.

Wright mentioned, this corridor has uh undergone several preliminary studies, and including the development of the rebuilding America infrastructure with sustainability and equity, or the RAISE grant study.

This effort explored a complete street um opportunity for high street and identified a series of design elements focused on improving safety, mobility, and overall user experience of the corridor, both motorized and non-motorized.

The successful RAISE grant awarded 19.3 million in federal dollars toward the corridor improvements, supporting a project with a preliminary estimated cost of about 24.125 million.

Design development is planned for spring and summer of 26, followed by a public hearing in late summer of 26, and going for advertisement in uh fall of 27 and then construction in 2028 through 30.

The project is estimated to be completed by May of 3030, 2030.

The raise grant included a proposed typical section shown on the screen, and you'll see it on some of the boards as we go around here tonight.

The key features included two-lane roadway with a uh raised median, parallel on street parking, pedestrian combinations that were significantly enhanced, and with wider sidewalks, shared use path, and space for future streetscape amenities.

And as we look at the boards, we'll go into different sections as we go around here tonight.

You'll see some additional details that we can discuss at those at those stations.

So, based on your visit to Greenville and some conversations with the city engineer, we've looked at a couple of other options that we bring in here tonight to present.

So, this first alternative includes angled parking on both sides of the road, that raised median, which increases the total amount of available parking spaces.

However, this configuration does remove the on-street bike accommodations as well as a shared use path.