Good morning, everyone.

The time is now 10.03 a.m.

on Wednesday, March 18th, 2026, and the meeting of the governance committee is now called to order.

Madam Clerk, please call the roll.

Councilmember Via Gran.

Here.

Councilmember Mungia.

Present.

Councilmember Spears.

Mayor Pro Tim McKee Rodriguez.

Present.

Mayor Pro Tem, we have quorum.

Thank you.

The first item on the agenda is approval of the minutes.

I'll entertain a motion for their approval.

I make a motion to approve.

We have a motion and a second.

All in favor.

Aye.

Passes unanimously.

We do not have any members of the public's time to speak, but we do have three CCRs on the agenda for today.

We'll take all the presentations at once, so then we'll have one discussion.

So first up we have Madam Court, can you read the caption?

Item number two is the council consideration request, CCR 2026 0002 by Councilmember McKee Rodriguez, District 2 on the creation of a real-time notification system for the trains approaching our stopped at railroad crossings.

Yes.

Yeah, if you can read all of them.

Then item number three is a council consideration request by Councilmember Gabon, District 6 on the designation of a memorial wave for Joseph Flores III.

And then item number four is a council consideration request by Councilmember Core District 1 for a resolution for large area rezoning of property along Blanco Road.

Floor is yours.

All right, thank you, Chair.

Good morning, Chair and Committee.

Art Reinhart, Public Works Director.

So I'll be here to talk briefly about the council consideration request that was filed to develop and implement a real-time notification system focusing on blocked rail crossings.

So just a brief background on the CCR.

It was filed just a little bit over a month ago by Council District 2.

And again, the focus here is trying to develop and implement some sort of program to identify and publish information on real trying real time train activity and block crossings.

When you boil the request down, there's kind of four key points to think through as we go through this process.

One is uh working with partners to develop strategic partnerships that could be with rail operators such as Union Pacific, also third party navigation applications such as Waze, Google, Apple Maps, and others.

Certainly in universities, uh we do a lot of work with UTSA already and technology firms and others to really help us develop uh a methodology to support data sharing and also foster innovation uh opportunities as we go through this.

Part of the CCR will also look at evaluating different technologies to identify trains and figure out how we can publish real-time information and alerts.

Um, the implementation would focus potentially on piloting on high impact corridors that could be from a traffic volume perspective or other needs, such as proximity to emergency uh service areas.

Um, and we'll measure that through or implement that based on funding that could be allocated and potential uh performance metrics that we develop.

And lastly, we want to make sure as we potentially implement this.

We do it in a manner that's focused on uh high impact areas and in what would promote serving the community best, and that will be through how we implement as well as our outreach process.

Just a little bit of background about our infrastructure.

So throughout the city of San Antonio, we have roughly 500 rail crossings that we call at grade.

That means they're at street surface level.

There's sever several other crossings that have some sort of separation, and certainly we have several projects funded to help remove uh grade crossings by separating them.

One thing we wanted to point out is less than about 10% of those are near a traffic signal and connected to our signal system.

So, you know, roughly 400 plus are our crossings that are not close to a signal.

And why that's important is that almost all of those locations near Signal, we have software called preemption, where we have detection through partnerships with the uh UP and others, uh, where we can detect train activity, and that will speak to our traffic signal system and modify how the signal system operates to potentially give extended green times to clear the the crossing uh to prevent people from being stuck on the crossing, or also prohibit certain uh movements to protect people from entering into the crossing.

So we already have that, and one thought on exploring is using that system to help bring awareness when it's active.

But that would only cover about 10% of the crossings, um, plus maybe one or two upstream and downstream where we can get kind of information from.

But we do have some some data out there.

Another thing to think through as we go through this process is obviously the budget component.

Uh what we've explored already in in the last couple weeks is most of the the cities that we've seen something out there use third-party soft uh software and devices.

So certainly that's something we'll look into.

Uh potentially, you know, that would lead to funding requirements both for developing the concept of what we would do and then obviously purchasing any equipment or or materials to make that happen.

Depending on some vendors, there could be ongoing maintenance requirements as well for software subscriptions, et cetera.

So that's one component we'll look through.