Good afternoon, everyone.

Thank you for being here.

The time is now 2 11 p.m.

on May 5th, 2026, and the meeting of the Transportation Infrastructure Committee is now called to order.

Madam Clerk, can you please call roll?

Councilmember Core.

Councilmember Mungia.

Councilmember Aldarete Gavito.

Councilmember Spears.

Chair McKee Rodriguez.

Present.

Chair, we have quorum.

Thank you.

We um have a relatively short agenda today.

Because I put it together and I like things to be substantive.

Thank you.

Today we're gonna have two items, three items.

One is minutes, of course.

One is going to be a follow-up briefing on uh council consideration requests by council member Alderez Grito, and then uh we did have a uh an individual dropout of the running for the airport advisory commission, and so we're gonna be reconsidering six applicants for that.

Um I'll start off by entertaining uh approval of the minutes.

Motion to approve.

Second.

All in favor?

Aye.

Aye.

Motion carries.

Madam Clerk, are there any members of public sign up to speak?

No, Chair, we have not.

Oh no.

Item two is a briefing on council consideration request by council member uh Honored De Garita on lowering premo uh prima facie, sashi.

Speed limits in the city and improving safety on neighborhood streets.

All right, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Chair.

So you have asked for a substantive, so here I am.

So anyway, uh Art Reinhart public work.

So uh appreciate the opportunity to provide an update today on where we're at in the process on uh reviewing our next steps on trying to lower speed limits in residential streets.

So just uh a brief reminder as we get started on what the concept of prima fascia is.

So uh by state law, by definition, prima fascia is really a default speed limit based on reason reasonable and prudent speeds for operating on a roadway in Texas.

Uh within state law, there are different uh limits set for different types of roadways.

So the one we're really focused on is what's uh considered a residential street or in our urban district, and that's by state law 30 miles an hour.

If there were no signs posted on a on a street, that's what the default speed limit is.

Uh so that's really the one that uh the CCR was filed about, and we'll be discussing more in depth today.

So I should note um there are, and I'll cover this more in depth in a couple slides, but specific processes for lowering that prima fascia uh speed limit that we'll talk about.

So by brief brief background on the CCR, really the goal was pretty simple.

It's to improve safety on our neighborhood streets.

Um there were several things that were pointed out in the CCR and ideas about how to do that, such as lowering speed limits within a quarter mile of schools or other places of gathering, uh obviously installing the required speed limit signage, heightening enforcement in those areas, and then working as we have uh tried many times over the years to change state code requirements.

Brief history on the CCR was filed just about a year, a little over a year ago by District 7.

Uh the team has gone through the process of briefing the governance committee, uh, and then most recently there was a briefing in December at the Transportation Committee, and then uh since January, we've been kind of working on what uh we're calling our pilot program.

So, why is speed so important?

And um it's I know you all understand this, but for the broader public, it's uh a critical component of both local and national policy on on safety.

Uh locally, you know, vision zero was adopted about a decade ago, and you can see on the right of the screen um the significant increase in likelihood of fatalities as speed increases on our roadways.

Um other effects of of higher speeds is a lowering of our uh field of vision as we're driving, um, as well as reducing the stopping uh reaction times of our drivers.

Nationally, there's a concept called safety systems approach.

There's six different principles of that.

Uh speed is a a uh priority of one of those, uh well of all of them, but it's focused on one of them.

But the principles you can see them here on the screen.

So death and serious injuries are unacceptable.

So part of the the safe systems approach is uh focusing on the limiting eliminating those fatalities and serious injuries on our roadways.

Also, an understanding that humans make the mistakes.

So as we design and operate our roadways, we need to have that understanding that mistakes will happen and try to design and operate our systems accordingly.