Friday, April 08, 2005

PACOG CAC Transportation — 050407

First impressions of a first meeting.

I had my first meeting as a member-at-large of the Pueblo Area Council Of Governments (PACOG) Civilian Advisory Committee (CAC) for Transportation. What! No acronym for ‘transportation’? Oh well….

Rather interesting group of people, they. 

The meeting was relatively short. I take it that most meetings take up the better part of the morning.

There were several things discussed. The most important, in my opinion, being:

[1] The transportation planners are in a hurt. Seems that one of their own is getting married and moving out of town. Therefore, the remaining members are now in the market for a Senior Transportation Planner to take her place. Considering the long faces and mournful sounds from a number of people there, this person is going to be hard to replace.

While they do the formal search process, they are willing to take on some part-time help. If you think you have some skill with transportation planning with an emphasis in streets, roads, highways and load balancing on such, get in touch with Bill Moore at PACOG.

[2] The City of Pueblo is getting down into planning how to manage traffic and land use issues surrounding the proposed Honor Farm to the west of town. There will be a lot of coordination amongst numerous groups and agencies in order to work out the best possible plan to accomodate need for roads in and around the area, balanced against a desire to maintain/develop hoped for recreational and open space. Lots of easements criss-cross the land involved, including a possible route for Colorado Springs’ proposed Southern [Water] Delivery System (SDS), power lines, Pueblo West sewer, etc., etc., etc. I’m sure the coordination meetings are going to be ‘interesting’.

[3] There is some concern amongst the MPOs that CDOT is not listening to them. Seems that new guidelines on how to prepare plans to be submitted to CDOT did not include many, if any, suggestions from the MPOs on how to improve the process. I’m not certain of the implications here. Or their significance. We’ll see what transpires.

[4] HB 1030, the bill to authorize setting of tolls for use of the proposed Super-Slab, has been shelved ‘indefinitely’ for this legislative session. It passed the house vote and, after considerable public input, the Senate decided they needed more information. Therefore, they will hold off on final passage until they can gather such information over the course of this Summer and Fall.