All

right.

Well, good evening and welcome to the October 12th, 2026 Towalton City Council work session.

I'll go ahead and call that into order.

Our first item on the agenda tonight is an update on the Towalton Sherwood Road rail crossing study.

Mike McCarthy and Abby.

Along

with the team from Kittleson, yeah, with friends.

Yeah.

Well, good evening.

And with us are Amy Griffiths and Mark Bitork from Kittleson and Associates, the consultant we've been working with on this project.

We're really thankful for the job they've been doing.

And no Abby, a project engineer in our engineering division.

And so tonight we wanted to give you an update on

some

of the progress we've made with the project, some more of the technical analysis after we last talked, and then our meetings with our advisory committee and planning commission and our virtual open house and some of the results from

that.

Talk through some answers about travel times and some safety data that we'd heard.

And then we're planning to leave a lot of time for questions and comments at the end.

So with that, I think Mark will be going next.

All right, thanks, Mike.

Good evening.

We'll make this presentation, as Mike said, fairly short.

I'm gonna start and just kind of warm you guys back up on where we ended last.

I know we had a few of you last time when we gave a briefing, and a few of you were uh unable to make it, so we'll get you up to speed, and then as Mike mentioned, we'll um then open it up to questions uh at that point.

So

let's see, there we go.

All right, so we're down at the end of this process.

Uh so just to recall, uh, analyze existing and future conditions.

We look 20 years into the future, try to figure out what are the capacity uh needs of Twalton Sherwood Road, uh developed five major scenarios.

We'll talk about those in uh a second, then work through alternatives, screen those alternatives, got down to most promising, and now we're down to really three uh that we want to talk here tonight with you

all.

Um so developed uh 17 alternatives.

Uh there was uh five scenarios, rail um or roadway over, which is scenario one uh uh roadway under, which was scenario two, uh rail over, rail under, um, and then at grade improvements uh and widening of Twalton Sherwood Road.

There was some other uh potential concepts brought up by the public and the advisory committee that were outside of the scope of this this work, but we did want to uh identify those projects as well.

So zeroing uh quickly after uh six months of work uh down to really three primary uh build alternatives.

We have the uh roadway over um uh in a southerly alignment, and we'll talk a little bit about that here in a second.

Roadway under with a southerly alignment, and then uh the widening uh which is at grade widening, so we don't we still would have the crossing of the track the tracks as we have today, but just a wider road, and then they're potentially a partial widening piece, um, which is a pretty small project, or uh a no-build alternative from that standpoint.

So just to familiarize the group again, um let me just point up here.

So here is the old or the current Twalton Sherwood Road.

I'm pointing at here is Boons Ferry Road.

Um just to familiarize right under here would be like uh where uh Dutch Bros is.

Um we talked last time with the group that was here.

Um the ability to build the bridge over Boone's Ferry Road and have it have traffic on Towalton Sherwood during um construction, necessitated moving south to allow the existing road to carry the traffic for the 12th uh 18 months during construction, and then switch the the traffic on to the new facility, and then the old facility would be an areas would have remnants that would be able to be uh sold off as excess right away by the the city or county, depending on who acquired that originally.

Uh so this one just familiarize yourselves.

We'd have widening of Twalton Sherwood to uh three lanes westbound.

There'd be a right in right out here, comes down to a roundabout.

You come from here, come here, and then go south.

Um, and then if you wanted to go uh you're coming from the south, you'd come up, right, right, and then right to go to Sherwood, and vice versa.

If you're coming from Sherwood, you go over the tracks, come here, take a right, and come down, and then work your way back.

Uh so it's right in right in, right out on both sides, and then the signal uh that goes to the hotel that would be removed under the scenario, and that access would come in uh off the roundabout in the future.

So we eliminate a signal, uh, we eliminate another signal and the grade crossings, improves safety under that scenario.

So those are the key ones under that.

On the under, um, basically everything stays the same except now we drop uh Twalton Sherwood Road down.

We still have that uh the two roundabouts to facilitate this indirect left movement.

It goes under here.

Uh, there would have to be a second bridge to access the old Twalton Sherwood Road businesses, uh, and then it continues from there.

So very everything's similar operationally, except we're lowering it.

I think what we heard through the public was hey, this looks a little better, it doesn't create this barrier.

I probably scared you guys several months ago.