District 2 Advisory Board

Page |1 District 2 Advisory Board Minutes February 10, 2019 www.wichita.gov The District 2 Advisory Board meeting was held at 6:30 p.m. at the Rockwell Branch Library, 5939 E 9th St N, Wichita, KS 67208. ATTENDANCE Members Present Staff Present Mike Heldstab Battalion Chief Dave Hersh, Wichita Fire Dept. Nick Howell Officer Ryan Snyder, Wichita Police Department Sam Lindeman Officer Nathan Peterson, Wichita Police Department Nazir Jesri Savannah Ball, Wichita Public Library Keith Lane Mike Tann, Director or Transit Dee Nighswonger Gary Janzen, Public Works & Utilities David Babich Cory Buchta, Community Services Representative Junetta Everett Alicia Sanchez Guests Tracee Adams Tim Cody Council Member Becky Tuttle Chris Broadrick Stacy Shanahan Members Absent Jim Watson Joe Goetz ORDER OF BUSINESS Motion to switch items 8 and 9 on the Agenda made by Alicia Sanchez. Seconded by Junetta Everett. PASSED Call to Order: The meeting was called to order by Becky Tuttle Approval of February 10, 2020 Agenda: Motion PASSED 7-0-0 Approval of Minutes from January 14, 2020: Motion PASSED 7-0-0 PUBLIC AGENDA This portion of the agenda provides an opportunity for citizens to present issues that are not part of the regular agenda for the meeting. There is a five minute time limit for each speaker. 1. Scheduled Items None 2. Off-agenda Items None Recommended Action: Receive and file BOARD AGENDA 3. Updates, Issues and Reports None. 1  Page |2 STAFF REPORTS 4. Fire Department Report Battalion Chief Dave Hersh, Wichita Fire Department reported:  Fires out east – 2 major garage fires in January, one on East Castle, one South Michelle. Both caused over $100k in damages. Both electrical issues.  Textron explosion last month. 25 City units responded. 11 County units. On County property, not City. Q (DAB): What was it that blew up? A: Auto clave blew up. Probably over pressurized by something. Big oven. Didn’t get details of why or how it was over pressurized. Blew front doors off of it. 25 foot doors. Luck it was during the holidays not many people there. Just a few maintenance workers. Really lucky that way. Q (Public): Any fire? A: Just a small fire with debris. Storage area where autoclaves were in. Some nitrogen tanks fell over. 3 inch gas line was involved after the explosion. C (DAB): That’s lucky. Q (DAB): Being in the county surrounded by the city does that mean none of the property tax comes back into the city? A: I couldn’t tell you that. Not sure how that works. Q (DAB): Everybody fine now? A: Some injuries, but nobody significantly hurt overall. One guy lost hearing. 5. Community Police Report Officer Ryan Snyder  No robberies, 2 burglary reports, 11 larcenies, 1 with gun that was taken.  34 non-injury accidents, 4 injury accidents.  2 rapes reported. 2 auto thefts recovered. Biggest thing over here is larcenies.  Officer Peterson, Nathan. Brand new to CP. 33 beat.  Part 1 offenses – all down. From last 3 months of numbers. Compared to last year  Larcenies are up. Increase during holidays. Trend with larceny to autos. Number of hot spots in patrol east. Pretty elaborate special assignment going on right now. Think there is an organized group. Might be some arrests in next week. You can almost guarantee to not get car broken into if you lock your doors and don’t leave valuables. Won’t break window unless there’s a guaranteed pay off. Almost every one of hundreds of cases, valuables are being left in cars. Q (DAB): Guns being stolen out of cars? A: Only 1 gun taken from last month to this month. I think there are more happening. Amazing the amount of people storing their guns in their cars. Probably not what they are, but that’s what the numbers are. C (CM Tuttle): We’ve also been promoting Save-A-Casing. A: Expended casing is exactly like a fingerprint. Unique to that gun. C (DAB): Saturday night across from Towne East. High number of police cars raced into town east parking lot. Early evening. Mall was still open. A: I wasn’t working Saturday but nothing in the briefs. Someone could have called in a disturbance. By the time we get there, mall security could have gotten it handled. Q (DAB): Around tax times, how does that affect crime rates? A: I’ve never noticed anything. Tax fraud is an issue though. 6. Park & Recreation Department Report None 2  Page |3 7. Wichita Public Library Report Savannah Ball reported: Audio books now on e-read. Download Libby by overdrive app. Use library card to access audio books and e-books. Tuesday Feb 18, fun with fossils program. Registration required. Last week offered a class for homeschool students. Letters to Friends class. Intro to Microsoft word. Worked with students who are homeschooled 8-12. Great turnout for that. Action Taken: Motion made by Tracee Adams to receive and file all Staff Reports. Seconded by Nick Howell. Motion PASSED 10-0-0. NEW BUSINESS 8. Downtown Streets Conceptual Plan Update Mike Tann, Director of Transit, and Jim Watson, Nelson\Nygaard, presented an update for the Downtown Streets Conceptual Plan including draft goals and concepts from the civic planning process. Study being done by Transit. Jim Watson giving presentation from Nelson\Nygaard. Holistic plan. You’ve seen small snippets of this plan. But this is a study. Looking at what might be best for downtown. Streets have been designed this way for many many years. So we are just looking at options. Not saying this is what it’s going to be. We just want to update the DABs to what we are working on. Jim – we’ve been working on this for a while. Will walk through some of the concepts we’ve been working on. Murdock north. Washing to east. Kellogg to just across the river. Discovery process. Looking at past plans. Ina feedback loop right now. We learn from the community what you see and how you see things in the future. Proposing designs. Moving forward to spring and summer sum it all up in documentation. Downtown streets have evolved over time. Worked with community and city staff to develop draft goals. Trying to get feedback. Want to look back to these as measuring stick. Public kickoff meeting a year ago. In April we heard there was info on Douglass so we did a deep dive in the spring .June we did open design sessions and invited folks to give feedback, also had a tent at Riverfest. Had a tent at open streets. Throughout whole thing, we’ve been having a variety of stakeholder meetings with employers downtown, community groups like bike walk Wichita, and downtown Wichita. Here trying to get feedback not just from downtown area. Downtown affects all Wichita. Trying to get feedback from throughout city. Open house march 24. Looking to do that at candela at 1st and Market, Look out for times on that. In spring will finalize the report. Then look to formalize everything into summer. Presentation will be on the project website. How downtown street grid works now. Whole network. Noted streets with more and less lanes, bike lanes, parking spots. Showed existing transit and bike networks. Looked at daily traffic volumes downtown. Some of the highest volumes were over on Washington. Also wanted to look and compare back to number of lanes on these streets to get an understanding of capacity as well. A lot of streets downtown have some opportunity for change. Still have peak surges of traffic. Most streets are built larger than what they would typically accommodate. Look at what pros and cons are of 4+ lane sections. Looked at pros and cons of one-way streets vs two-way streets. Looked at what similar sized cities are doing. Chattanooga, TN. Greenville, SC. Discussed tradeoffs. Gains in livability with changes in vehicular service. Comparing that to the goals they set. Showed map of how street grid might look. Plans to upgrade traffic signal synchronization. We know there are some unknowns with riverfront legacy master plan. Waterman, Douglass, Main Street. Needs to be some flexibility with the plan. Lot of development coming as well. Still in draft form. Still working and adjusting. 3  Page |4 Looking to shift transit system to use the grid. Talked about trying to improve bicycle and multimodal downtown. Biggest potential is conversion from one-way to two-way. Identified some potentials. Gave example of Emporia Street. City has some funding to do something. Basically just reversing one of the lanes and looking at parking. For Market and Topeka. Both streets carry between 2500 and 6500 a day. Capacity is 25000 or more per day. Looked to see what could happen if they were 2way streets. Each band represents a block to determine what can fit on which block. Again still working through these. Nothing is final at all. English is a low hanging fruit. Connects arena to riverfront area. A lot potentially happening that could increase vibrancy of the area. A lot of talk on Douglas. Previous plan for east Douglas. For this we wanted to see if you carried that through downtown. What are some main streets? Douglas and also Broadway. Heard some people would avoid Broadway because of turning concerns. Looked at potential for 3 lane section with central turn lane and parking on either side. That’s what we’ve looked at so far. Holistic exercise. How whole network works together. Want feedback on comments sheets. Mark down March 24 for the open house. Website for project Wichita.gov/downtownstreets. Presentation posted and DAB – Is there an estimated cost? A: no not an established cost. Some money available for Emporia. There is some money for changes to Douglas to the east but in early stages. DAB – going to 3 lanes streets, concerned when buses stop. Everything would stop. A: one of the considerations. Could add bus pull ins. For community our size, buses are stopping at too many places. Would like to get pull ins. Big concern when you go down to 2 lanes. DAB – earlier talk about fancy parking meter thing. A: parking study going on right now. We have some of the oldest parking meters in the country. Want to make sure every option is looked at. Concern of making sure parking is turned over. Making sure people aren’t parking for 8 hours. DAB – employees would park there for a long time. Employers are all over that. Not a problem. A: we struggle in old town area. Chalking of tires. Certain areas where employees are parking in front of restaurants DAB – boss would be all over that. A: you would hope so. If you have a lot of parking spaces that means you don’t have a lot of economic development. Trying to link back to a common goal. DAB – 1 way streets north to south used to be the other way. Not a lot of value. A: downtown is sort of a hogpog of all the decades before. You want people to know how to go around. DAB – wanted to know if this will be shared with access advisory board. A: yes, especially after march meeting. Want more public feedback. DAB – often times main street is already a 2way street. We see people going wrong way often. DAB – a couple years ago talking about getting more people to ride the bus. We thought an advantage was how often it stops. A: there’s not set rule on that. If you look at douglas, you don’t want buses stopping every corner. We have to get used to acceptable distance to walk between bus stops is 6 blocks. If we get to 3 I’d be happy. There’s a middle ground to all of that. DAB – what time is the meeting on the 24th? A: we haven’t nailed that down yet. We can get that out in the next couple of weeks. 9. CON2019-00047 Kathy Morgan, Metropolitan Area Planning Commission, presented on an application to build a neighborhood swimming pool. Requires conditional use approval. 37th street south side just east of Greenwich Recommendation is to approve request based on approval of vacation of language in platters text. Can’t adjust administratively platted setbacks, have to be vacated. Covenant will be placed with HOA binding lot 1 and black A where swimming pool will be in Brookfield. Submitted cite plan and development of swimming pool has to be in conformance of cite plan. Have to operate with all federal state and local 4  Page |5 rules. Typical thing neighborhoods do to provide activities. Will be heard at January 23rd planning commission. Q (DAB): Anyone griping about this? A: No. Q (DAB): Will there be parking there? A: There will be some. Some of the parking requirements aren’t as many as you would think. In the neighborhood so it’s walkable. A (Phil Meyer): With Baughman Company, agent for applicant, we are supplying parking stalls on Winston that meet requirements for swimming pool. Action Taken: Motion to APPROVE the application with conditions as presented made by Nick Howell. Seconded by Mike Heldstab. MOTION PASSED 7-0-0 10. ZON2019-00048 CUP-00040 Kathy Morgan, Metropolitan Area Planning Commission, presented on a request to rezone approximately 6.56 acres zoned SF-5 Single-Family Residential located south of East 21st Street North and west of North 127th Street East. The subject property is part of the larger Trinity Academy property at this location, mostly located west and south of the subject property. The application concerns the rezoning of the property from SF-5 Single-Family Residential (SF-5) to LC Limited Commercial (LC) and the establishment of a Community Unit Plan (CUP) DP-352 for the Trinity Academy CUP. Heard by Planning Commission in December. Staff report shows prohibited uses. Application was on consent agenda. No one in the audience to comment on request. Pretty common planning tool in City. Provides specific signage regulations and use types that are allowed. Pretty routine. It has been approved by Planning Commission. Might be seen by City Council next week. Not sure. The protest period has expired and we received nothing. No calls or emails. Q (DAB): This will be commercial property? A: It will be a mix. They are going to have businesses in the first floors of the buildings that will provide opportunity for HS students to learn business practices, but will be used by activities of the school. Q (DAB): How will this work with school being non-profit? Would not like to see businesses sneaking in for tax purposes. A: Not our focus with zoning change. Action Taken: Motion to APPROVE the application with conditions as presented made by Nazir Jesri. Seconded by Nick Howell. MOTION PASSED 7-0-0 Meeting was adjourned at 7:45 p.m. The next DAB 2 meeting will be held at 6:30 p.m., Monday, February 10, 2020, at Rockwell Branch Library, 5939 E 9th St N, Wichita, KS 67208. 5