MINUTES OF THE MEETING OF THE A/GFTC TAC April 24, 2007
Attendees Agency Phone Fax
Members
Brian Boucher Town of Fort Edward 747-5501
Michael Fiorillo Village of Hudson Falls 747-4544 747-5597
Willy Grimmke Washington County DPW 746-2440 746-2441
Dan Hajeck Village of Lake George 668-5771
Wayne LaMothe Warren County Planning 761-6410 761-6411
William Lamy Warren County DPW 761-6556 623-2772
Mayor Bob Phinney South Glens Falls 793-1455 793-3063
David Rettig NYSDOT 388-0456 388-0430
Scott Sopczyk GGFT 792-1086 792-7952
Others
Lisa Penistan Warren County DPW 761-6556 623-2772
Staff
Aaron Frankenfeld A/GFTC 746-2199 746-2441
Kristina Hong A/GFTC 746-2199 746-2441
Monika Bulman A/GFTC 746-2199 746-2441
Minutes of the Meeting
1. Welcome & Introductions –TAC Chair Willy Grimmke called the meeting to
order at 1:37.
2. Visitor Issues – None
3. Administrative Items –A. Approval of last meeting’s minutes
A motion was made to approve the February 28th meeting minutes.
MOVED BY: Mayor Phinney SECONDED BY: Bill Lamy MOTION CARRIED
4. Unified Planning Work Program (UPWP)
A. Transit Report GGFT- Scott Sopczyk: The Glens Falls road closures are being
dealt with better than anticipated; have three new trolleys going into service;
Rte 4 construction may necessitate the use of the Northway for one of the
legs of trips due to resultant congestion at Exit 20; hiring has gone well; FTA
will be coming for review around the middle of May.
B. Consultant Projects, Aaron
1. Access Management Study, Consultants are completing the educational
slide show; working on traffic build outs for the demonstration corridors
assuming that there are access management improvements in place; next
meeting is rescheduled for May 29; RSG has been great to work with.
2. Aviation Road Corridor Study, there was a meeting on March 26 with the
school to discuss their concepts; they are looking at access modifications from
Aviation Road. WSA is modeling the potential impacts of those modifications.
The contract extension to West Mountain Road was approved.
Adirondack / Glens Falls Transportation Council
Washington County Municipal Center
383 Broadway, Room A-231 Fort Edward, New York 12828
phone: (518) 746-2199 fax: (518) 746-2441
www.a
gftc.org info@agftc.org
TAC Minutes
April 24, 2007
Page 2
3. Traffic Count Program, Our first year counts resubmitted (prior formatting
issues) to us from Lochner Engineering; we have given them a schedule for
the second year counts and are seeing if it will be possible to include the
needed counts for Beach Road (Warren County).
C. Staff Activities, Aaron
• Warren County accident analysis draft has been completed and mailed
to DPW. The results were very different than those for Washington
County.
• Coordinated Human Services Transportation Plan is moving along;
Scott Sopczyk and Aaron were invited to speak to Warren County
department heads and told them about the upcoming survey. The
Warren and Washington County administrators distributed the surveys
to their department heads that offer human transportation services
meeting. We have received 15 completed surveys from Warren
County and 8 from Washington County. We will follow up with the
County administrators. Processing of the survey results has begun.
D. Make the Connection Program, Aaron
A draft of the bicycle and pedestrian Make the Connection program was
mailed to committee members. This is modeled very closely to CDTC’c Spot
Improvement Program and was in the 2005-2010 TIP for 2 rounds of STP
funding at $250K a piece. The first round was supposed to be this year.
We need to get a program in place to identify project selection procedure.
Aaron asked for comments. Project candidates were requested to not depend
on actions from other municipalities. This will be forwarded to Region 1 to
determine the mechanism to administer this program.
E. On-call engineering services RFP, Aaron
The RFP went out last week and proposals are due back to us May 7. Not
many incoming calls yet from engineering firms.
Aaron indicated that no comments on the draft TIP have been received which leads
him to believe that the funding assumptions and project costs that we had been
working with were fairly accurate.
Prior to going to the TIP issues Dave Rettig shared some information with the
Committee. All of the Regions handed in their programs. Mr. Rettig felt Region 1
was in pretty good shape, but statewide there are programming issues. When doing
the TIPs we updated the costs and in previous years we were overspent. There were
setasides for armor coating projects, traffic signal improvements but a lot of state
projects had to be pushed out. When doing the TIP at A/GFTC and CDTC no local
projects were pushed but Mr. Rettig now feels that this will have to be done. Two
time frames are being looked at, up to April 2010 and to April 2012. A/GFTC’s TIP is
top heavy, front loaded. The statewide overprogramming amounts to approx. 7-8
billion dollars over a five year program. We are overprogrammed in Federal funds
but underprogrammed in State funds. This gets more confusing when the finance
plan/Governor’s budget is factored in. The Finance Plan is based on $ that DOT
anticipates receiving in Federal dollars. This number is lower that what is authorized
in the Transportation Bill. This is good news because we ended up getting a little
more Federal money. Region 1 is still overprogrammed by about 10%. A decision
has been made to increase the amount of advance construction of Federal dollars
that we use. STP funds will also be used to address a shortfall in SDF. Willy Grimmke
noted that it would appear that at the state level there was a lack of strategic
planning.
TAC Minutes
April 24, 2007
Page 3
Two TIP amendments were brought to the table by Mr. Rettig that convert SDF
projects to STP but yet will not hurt A/GFTC allocations because advance
construction funding will be used. Mr. Rettig acknowledged that this is an awkward
process of deferring locally administered projects while using newly available federal
money for state jobs.
Aaron asked if we would have a better idea of our standing before the final TIP has
to be approved. Mr. Rettig replied that that is largely dependent upon on how the
Main Office reacts to Region 1’s strategy. Short-term, the Policy Committee meeting
on May 9 will need to be postponed in favor of another TAC meeting.
The TIP request from DOT would shift funding for 2 projects (Rt. 22: Rt. 40 to Rt. 4
resurfacing, and Rt. 9: Glens Falls City Line to Round Pound Road) from SDF to
STP Flex.
A motion was made to approve the funding source change
MOVED BY: Mayor Phinney SECONDED BY: Wayne LaMothe MOTION CARRIED
5. TIP
A. 2007-2012 TIP Development, Aaron
1. Draft document comments – adjustments will be made resulting
from the information shared at this meeting.
Administratively an adjustment was made to WAR 127 to add $40K in
construction costs.
2. Self-Certification/SAFETEA compliance, Aaron
Draft self-certification was faxed to committee members. This is a
required annual document to show that we are meeting federal
planning requirements.
A motion was made to refer the Self Certification Draft to the Policy Committee for
approval
MOVED BY: Mayor Phinney SECONDED BY: Wayne LaMothe MOTION CARRIED
The Draft SAFETEA Compliance Plan was distributed at the meeting. FHWA had
asked the MPOs to put together a strategy to address the various requirements in
SAFETEA. Aaron took the final rule section-by-section and addressed the areas that
we were either in compliance with or listed actions necessary to become compliant.
Aaron reviewed the 10 steps to SAFETEA Compliance outlined on page 8 of the draft
document. There was a brief discussion regarding the date the LRP needs to be
submitted.
B. TIP amendments (already covered)
C. Project Updates
1. Warren County, Lisa Penistan
• Grist Mill and Tannery Bridge-Draft design report went to DOT
and APA for approval. Comments were received and sent to the
consultant. Ready to submit final design report
• Woolen Mill Bridge (Milton St.)-Preparing for bid. ROW is being
worked on.
• Corinth Road-ROW for the county is taking place. Utility
easements are still are questionable. Need to get a firm decision
who will be paying for them. Everything else is ready to go.
TAC Minutes
April 24, 2007
Page 4
Bill Lamy added that there are still problems between the Town
and the utility companies. The utilities wish to wait until the
lawsuit is settled before going ahead with the work.
• Beach Road is in the scoping phase. NYSDEC has agreed to
participate in the project.
• Middleton Bridge and Harrington Rd. Bridge are in the scoping
phase.
2. Washington County, Willy Grimmke
• Covered bridges are proceeding with construction and seem to
be ahead of schedule. Should be complete late June or July.
• Whitehall Railroad Bridges-Utility coordination meeting is
Thursday.
• County Route 21-winter shutdown is over and work is
progressing
• County Route 12-draft design report has been sent to DOT for
comment
• County Route 42-bid opening is in two weeks
3. Town of Moreau – no report
4. Glens Falls- Aaron, roundabout is on schedule, we need to identify
TAC representation from the city
5. Queensbury – no report
6. NYSDOT-Dave Rettig
• Before July 4
th work between Exit 26-28 should be completed
• Rte 4 in Fort Edward-working on utilities, water and sewer work
will progress
• Hudson Falls-work on the retaining wall on 254 has begun
• Clay Hill Road work has begun
• Rte 372, Rt. 29, 74A – the costs are getting out of control and
the project may need to be scaled back. Mary Ricard is the new
project manager.
7. Next meeting/adjourn – The next meeting is scheduled for
Thursday, May 24
th at 1:30 pm in the 2nd floor classroom at
Washington County Municipal Center. The meeting adjourned at 3:02.