Santa Barbara County Association of Governments (SBCAG)

All right, welcome and thank you for joining us for today's September 17th SB CAG Board meeting. For the record I am Bob Nelson and Chair of SB CAG Board. Madam Clerk please call the roll.

We have one speaker, Francis Romero and if there are any attendees on Zoom who wish to speak would you please use the raise hand feature and I will call upon you.

Welcome Mr. Romero

Well good morning everyone. Chair Nelson, Directors, staff members of the public my name is Frances Romero I used to be an SBCAG member. I have a couple of comments regarding my community the city of Guadalupe first the traffic between Santa Maria and Guadalupe is absolutely unbearable between now the hours of 2 15 and 5 36 o'clock it has taken me up to 55 minutes to drive 10 miles Think about what would happen if an emergency vehicle is trying to transport someone by ambulance to get someone to Marion Medical in time for the golden hour. They're kind of out of luck.

I know you're aware of this problem it's been a problem for decades, I know it's being studied but it is an emergency Add to that the fact that a fabulous investment is being made on Highway 1 both north and south of us, which causes further bottlenecks and delays for every citizen in Guadalupe trying to get out of town. And then Beterravia it's not much better.

Add to that the condition of Beterravia and the intersection of Highway 1 and 166 at some point I'm going to have to turn a receipt in for alignment for my vehicle. I'm also here today to talk about responsibility and accountability for Measure A and gas tax funds. Some of you may have seen my op-ed in the paper, and I'm sad to say that my community for the last 10 years has failed to again appropriately manage special and restricted funds.

You have some say over Measure A and gas tax funds. Our city has been operating without a audited financials, no audited financials since 2021. Who does that? Who of you sitting here balances your checkbook once every five or six years? I know that you can't fix the problems with Guadalupe. However, we currently do have a competent city administrator and finance director that have drawn a line in the sand about doing things the right way but you do have some peer pressure you can exert and you do have some oversight for measuring gas tax funds. I truly hope you will exercise that because the people of Guadalupe deserve better both in their day-to-day management and in their ability to enter and leave the City of Guadalupe to get to Santa Maria or to get to Arroyo Grande to purchase the goods and services that are not available in our community.

I hope you'll thoughtfully consider the inconvenience that the lack of circulation in and out of Guadeloupe presents to each and every person who lives there. Thank you so much for what you do, have a great day.

All right thank you Ms. Romero Madam Clerk, is that the only general public comment we have today?

That is the only public comment for a general public comment.

Okay that concludes general public comment at this time.

There is a written public comment was received on item 40 transportation network company access for all fiscal year 2026 project selection from Rhonda Cardinal. The comment was distributed to the board and uploaded as part of the agenda packet in addition to that we do have one request to speak from Nancy Crawford on Item 4E.

On 4E, okay. Any Board members have any other items they might want to pull or discuss separate from a motion and the rest of the consent items? Director Parodi, any items that you'd like to pull?

No Chair. Thank you.

Okay so let's go ahead and get a motion on items 4A, B, C, D, F, N, G. Can I get that motion?

So

moved.

Second.

Okay we still have a motion from Director Padino, a second from Director Brown since we're remote here. Let's go ahead and do a roll call vote on those and then we'll hear for you at the conclusion of

with the abstention from 4A please.

And motion passes.

Unanimously with a abstention on 4A. All right, let's go ahead and read item number 4E into the record and then we'll hear from our public commenter.

Transportation Network Company TNC access for all fiscal year 2026 project selection Recommended action approve the project selection for the 2026 TNC Access for All program awarding $183,270 to Care Connections to operate wheelchair accessible on-demand service.

I believe I have Ms. Crawford here available is she online or is she? Welcome.

Good morning Chair, Board of Directors. Thank you for the opportunity to speak this morning on behalf of Care Connection Transport Services I would like to sincerely thank the Santa Barbara County Transit Advisory Committee for voting to recommend Care Connection as the provider for the Santa Barbara County Access For All program. As a current provider, Care Connection is proud to have helped grow awareness and utilization of this very important program. As the only true on-demand provider offering 24 hour service throughout all of Santa Barbara County we stand ready to serve our community expanding access and building upon the significant growth that we have brought to this program.

At its core, the intent of the Access for All program is about independence, freedom and equal access. Individuals who rely on wheelchairs should have the same ability as everyone else to decide where they want to go when they want to go whether that's going shopping attending medical appointments visiting family or even enjoying a couple glasses of wine at one of our local wineries but for most of us opening an app to request Uber and Lyft is something we take for granted Access for All was created to provide the same ride-hailing opportunity to individuals who require wheelchair accessible vehicles. So without them requiring or planning days in advance. So Care Connection remains committed to this mission and the intent of this program, and to continue increasing utilization throughout all of Santa Barbara County so we appreciate the committee's confidence in our team and its recognition of the work that we have done so far.

So respectfully, we'd hope that the board would move to approve this award and again thank you for the opportunity to bring awareness to this program. Thank you.

Well thank you Miss Crawford Madam Clerk, are there any other public speakers on this item? If

there are any other members of the public on Zoom who wish to speak would you please use the raise hand feature and I will call upon you.

Are there any questions from the board on this item? Seeing none can I get a motion approval for you?

So moved. Second.

Okay that's staff recommendation so with that madam clerk can we have a roll call vote?

And the motion passes

Right at this time we'll go ahead and progress to our discussion items and our first of three discussion items today is item 5A. Madam Clerk can you please read item 5 A into the record?

Highway 101 Carpentry to Santa Barbara recommended action. One, receive a presentation on the construction progress and the benefits achieved while implementing the Construction Manager General Contractor Innovative Delivery Method to schedule a project tour of the Highway 101 Carpentry to Santa Barbara project with the Board of Directors.

Great. And a staff presentation will be done by Fred Luna. Welcome, Fred.

Good morning Directors, Chair Nelson and Directors. Yes Fred Luna here giving the presentation we've done a lot of Highway 101 presentations in the past but today we wanted to kind of shed a different light on it and provide kind of a glimpse We're going to talk about where we've been on Highway 101, the successes we've achieved and kind of tell that story. And a central part of that is the use of the Construction Manager General Contractor Method. It's a delivery method to get through pre-construction and into construction and how successful that's been And then I'll give a quick update on the recent construction and then solicit the board members and gauge your interest in a project tour as we're celebrating our 60th anniversary this year.

Highway 101 is the biggest project SBK has ever been involved with, and in our 60 years it's probably been part of our planning and implementation process for over half of that time. And so to get it finished, I imagine that will be a great achievement for this agency. Going forward, I have Joe Irwin here from Caltrans District 5. He will participate in that and as they're the leaders of the CMGC effort and they have the contract with Granite Construction so he'll tell us a little bit about those efforts going on Really Highway 101 is a story of partnering and how we got here. And so we're going to touch on that, how we've worked for over two decades with Caltrans on this beginning early on in the 2000s and even back then if some of you remember the failed attempt to widen one-on-one in the early 90s but that even then that leveraged some funding that we were able to use in some of the operational improvements that have been kind of an integral part of the Highway 101 story And then we'll talk about the delivery story, the kind of the middle years of following Measure A passage which was obviously critical to getting Highway 101 implemented back in 2008 and how you know even though there were struggles at that time.

You know we continue to move forward and talk about those innovations. Then Joe will talk about the CMGC process, the results and the benefits of that And then I'll provide kind of a summary of some of the construction key facts and interesting items that have occurred over time in the several construction contracts that have been implemented. And lastly, just a quick update on the recent progress on the last segment of Santa Barbara North and then again ask the board about interest in our project tour.

So much of the content you'll see today kind of stems from a partnering meeting we had and we call them partnering meetings because we come together and as a broader project team talk about how we can continue to move the project forward. This is A couple of slides from the last partnering meeting that we had and when I say last, we've had those for over several years starting in 2018 through 2025. And really, we culminated in April indicating that we're at the end of pre-construction and we're moving into construction and everything now is construction forward.

At those meetings early on, we look to resolve issues and key development issues, key risk issues But at some point in the process, you know as we're working with facilitators and stuff and efforts to measure how is our team performing. We really have been given kind of the The label of a high-performing team, a high functioning team. A world class team in some cases by those measures and so I think everyone takes pride in that you know we have a broad team that works on that and and that is something that's kind of built the culture to resolve issues develop certain tools to manage the project and then those tools have kind of manifested themselves in other projects that were working on As I mentioned before, the partnering goes back at least a couple decades.

You know we have Highway 101, Carpinteria Santa Barbara and SBK working in tandem with Caltrans but as the project evolved we brought on other partners into I'm going to talk a little bit about that area. So originally in 2014, we brought on Tony Harris as a corridor advisor some of you may remember those that was a difficult time maybe even a dark time and I would want to what where we had a draft environmental document that was out there and it was kind of stalled for awhile and so we're looking for ways to move that forward in and kind of some innovation but it was a good time to pause if implement the project as a team going forward. And then we brought with SBK doing some of the design, we brought a design team on board that would work for us Mark Thomas in companionship with the Caltrans Design folks and then in 2018 Caltrans and we'll get into this in a sec the granite team for pre-construction services and then ultimately that leveraged into them being awarded several contracts to manage and deliver the construction on the project The delivery story for Highway 101 is the next segment that we want to touch on.

It really starts, and you've seen this before, this is kind of the lane concept and it goes back to Highway 101 in motion which was the planning study that in concept started in 2003 and was finished in 2006 with the main emphasis there was a 16 mile gap between Ventura County where it went neck down from three lanes to two lanes and then back to three lanes at Milton Street How do we how do we try to resolve that?

Ultimately if you look at phases one and three, those refer to two specific projects. And so I mentioned previously in Measure D the precursor to Measure A there was a Highway 101 widening project That was the community wasn't ready for, but those monies from Measure D and gas tax moneys were reprogrammed by SBK for those operational improvements that helped pave the way for future widening efforts in that corridor so.

Phase one was the Milpas Hot Springs project that did some partial widening, some operational improvements. And then phase three were the improvements in the city of Carpinteria to replace interchanges, upgrade structures to allow for the future widening that ultimately came to be with phase four. Phase two was a partnership with Ventura County that was primarily funded through Proposition 1B in like 2006 And so that was completed in 2014.

I mentioned previously that pause in the early 2010s time frame caused SBK and Caltrans to really look at like we need, in order to be successful deliver this project we really need to think out of the box. Think some ways to deliver this project that are different. This being a very large project for our agency and also for District 5 and the largest state project that SBK has been involved How do we combine efforts, utilize resources to deliver this project? So we came up with a team and integrated team organization. You can see delivery organization being one of the boxes managing this project delivering it as a team that's combined in developing special task force meetings or things like that would allow us to continue to manage that project.

Also in that time frame we looked at how can we bring more money to the table and still get a better product for the people. And at that time Caltrans had developed a study for And so the project team knew like we can't do consecutive projects and doing. Is there a way we can integrate these 2 And so that was kind of a landmark decision to integrate We also recognize that the whole project is in the coastal zone and so that required working closely with our local agency partners developing a strategy for delivery that kind of resonates with their community values and their process for approval.

So all of that was important parts of how we ended up delivering the project, separating it in various segments This map gives you an indication of what I just spoke about. It shows the kind of the limits and you can see kind of almost similar limits of that, the rehab project, the rehabilitation project and the HOV project. And so it really made sense. Normally you don't try two significant projects combining these but it really made sense to try to make go through those efforts and combine those projects. And at the end of the day as I mentioned before we were also able to address ramp improvements, safety improvements on the freeway like they call profile corrections where you're improving sight distance and curvatures on the freeway. So all of those things were able to be integrated in addition to the congestion relief strategies.

And so I talked a little bit about the whole notion of looking for ways to innovatively deliver this project other than the traditional design bid build where you would go out there. One of the reasons why is that if you were to do this and I have a graphic at towards the end is that You would want to avoid conflicts because there's no assurance you're going to get the same contractor on adjacent segments. And so, there's the likelihood and risk that you would have conflicts with adjacent work segments. So, you'd have to be fairly conservative in how you schedule those out and they could stand over a long period of time.

We were able to manage that through the pre-construction phase, work with the contractor, have them buy in on that adjacent staging and how to coordinate and collaborate that. And then they really own some of that processes on how to manage I also mentioned the coastal zone, making sure that the contractor knows fully that the design elements that are important to the communities and those can be implemented. There's particular aesthetics that were required through the design review processes I'm going to go ahead and open it up for questions.

And then agreed price, you know large project a lot of costs having that price agree to knowing what our funding commitments are early on in the vet and reducing that variability through the construction process. So here's that timeline. If you think of the time between 2012 and 2019, this is kind of the main timeframe for project delivery. But before this, maybe I'll call that the one-on-one origin story where we were I mentioned Highway 101 in motion, kind of coming up with the idea for adding a lane and then Measure A of course implementing many of those ideas that came out of 101 in motion by identifying specific projects to fund including the lane itself as the flagship project in Measure A.

And then work started on developing the environmental document in 2008 and a draft was circulated in 2012. There was a part where it was circulated in 2014. It wasn't until 2014 that the final was certified with there was a number of public comments and it was finally certified in 2014, but then it was challenged so there This board made the decision to continue to advance design work because we wanted to be construction ready while in parallel, the challenge was underway. And so we were in a position to use Measure A money to continue design on segments and Caltrans was already finishing some of their design as well to continue to be ready for construction assuming that we would prevail and we did in 2017 on the final EIR And lo and behold in 2017 Senate Bill 1 passed and we were ready for construction.

And in 2018, we were awarded $183 million from the state and that ended up being matched by another $183 million from the shop Caltrans' bucket for rehab and we were able to deliver the first three segments into construction, get those funded. And that was a key to starting the momentum on construction in the corridor. Now I'll hand it over to Joe. He's going to talk about construction in the CMGC process.

Thank you, Fred. And thank you to the chair of Nelson who just stepped away and to the directors for allowing us to talk about this and discuss some of the benefits in the results of what we've seen through this effort. I'm going to focus on early in the project here when I say the project early in the implementation of CMGC The one on one team came up with these seven different goals and so the team collaborator collaboratively came up with what we would call be hags are big, hairy audacious goals right? And these were supposed to be aspirational high very difficult to achieve. But they revolved around safety, quality, schedule, communication, stakeholders, team dynamics and then our process.

And a lot of these we achieved right? And so with safety it we were able to put those safe decisions up front and achieve those throughout the development and throughout the life of the project. So that resulted in a safe working zone but then a safe highway, a safe freeway for the users In quality, we document the amount of change orders. Our contractor Granite came forward to us and we were only around 0.5% of avoidable change orders things that we all should have caught right there are some things that are going to be change orders once you get to construction that's unavoidable but our goal was less than 1% of avoidable change orders and we were down to about a half a percent In the schedule, our goal was to complete the Cabrillo Boulevard interchange segment and that final piece in Santa Barbara by the end of 2028.

And we are tracking on that. We are pretty close and so I'm confident we're going to make it by that date. And then in communication, we regularly held meetings. We're constantly meeting like Fred was saying we had a format within the CMGC and within the corridor of meeting regularly and so I met with Fred and with Sarkis and Tony on our corridor management team on a regular basis every other week. And then with our CMGC, the broader team, we were meeting As frequently as every week when things were pressing and when there was a need for it.

And then we would taper off as, we don't need to meet as often but we're constantly communicating and this is of all the projects I've been on the most communicative of all those projects engaging in discussing things as they come up. The stakeholder satisfaction, I'll be honest this is one we did not hit. Right? 100% stakeholder satisfaction is a difficult goal and so there's always going to be people that wish you could have done more or wish you did less but that's the reality of government projects like this.

In the team dynamics goal we came up with an idea to achieve this by recognizing and thanking everybody throughout the life of the project. And we do that, and I carry that forward with all my other projects now not just the 101 corridor but every meeting we kick off with recognition and with gratitude to people who have done something in there are times when that goes for 15 minutes in a meeting right? There are other times when it's a little bit lighter but we always dedicate time at the beginning To recognize that and our project. This project is constantly winning awards, right? Either excellence in transportation or their state awards or contracting awards were constantly being recognized as one of the top projects in the state.

And then the final one I'm going to dig into this a little bit more is our CMGC process. We pay Granite to be the CMGC, right? We then also enter into a contract price with them but our goal was those fees that Granite charges us as a project team that we would realize 10 times The savings over the life of the project that it costs to bring granted. So if they charged us $10 million, we better have a hundred million dollars in savings that they brought to the table.

And so that's what I'm going to dig into here on the next several slides. The first one here, this is a lot of information and we won't go line by line but I want to highlight some big savings that Granite helped develop with our team. Avoiding utility relocation throughout the entire corridor saved us around $16 million. Figuring out innovative staging strategies, blending those different projects like Fred was talking about that are over top of each other or right next to each other saved us around $15 million.

Figuring out a pavement strategy and using the right pavement types for the right location that resulted in being able to go with maybe a cheaper pavement where it wasn't needed to be as robust. And that saved us an overall $13 million. There's a whole bunch of other things in here Notice there is escalation, it's the fourth one from the bottom. That's only showing $3 million but we're going to talk about that a little bit later. That is only identifying that there was one project early on in Carpinteria where they came up with an innovative idea with us to take out some of the work and then let the majority of the project go forward. And by taking out that little bit of work It allowed us to enter into a contract price on the majority of the contract and the majority of the freeway work.

And once you lock in that price, you avoid that future escalation. This was for some utility relocation and it was a tough negotiation between some owners but by doing that we were able to save about $3 million on escalation for the entire contract. The next savings I want to talk about, and you see this if you drive down through there. You see Granite's Tower, the batch plant that's there.

The batch plant was an idea that Granite proposed to us. And what it was able to do for us is when we mix concrete for that reinforced concrete pavement that's going to last 40 years We were able to do that on site and that resulted in one, just a cheaper price for the concrete than going to a ready mix supplier in Santa Barbara. And that you can see resulted in about $75 per cubic yard of concrete and there's hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of concrete they go into this.

We got that savings on every cubic yard of concrete that we were able to produce on site. But it comes with more benefits than just the dollars, there's environmental benefits of having mixing onsite too because we're reducing the truck trips. If we had to use mixed concrete in Santa Barbara and then truck that all the way down to Carpinteria, that round trip is up to 16 miles to drop off that concrete and then come back so we're reducing Over 400,000 miles of truck trips to deliver all of that concrete. We were able to reduce water because if you're hauling concrete from farther away you gotta add more water because that evaporates and so we were able to go with less water by mixing it on site It reduces the impact to people in the funk zone near the concrete batch plant in Santa Barbara where we would have gotten it, right?

And so it localizes the impacts to where the construction's happening. Overall, it saved us about $10-15 million in savings by using that mixed site at the Padaro, that North Padaro interchange. This project map is something that you've seen before. You saw Fred kind of show it, but these are the five major segments of the highway and I'm showing this to you because I want to emphasize that these segments of the freeway are right next to each other and they're not very long, right? They're a couple of miles maybe at the biggest. The Padaro one is somewhere in our biggest segments. But they overlap each other, and they're right on top of each other. And this leads into the next slide where I'm going to dive into escalation costs for the entire corridor a little bit more.

You can see Carpinteria and the Carpinteria 4A segment is on the right in the top image and then continuing through Padaro and Summerland and then the Montecito and Santa Barbara segments are the ones highlighted in the bottom left image. But this bar chart here, this is the schedule that we actually have implemented with this corridor, with this project. And you can see the Carpinteria, Padaro and Summerland segments were all into construction at the same time through that first cycle of SB1 funding, that we were ready to go and have that. And then you can see it overlaps with some of the Montecito segments in the southern Santa Barbara segment. And then ultimately, the northern Santa Barbara segment Because of CMGC and having Granite on contract, we are able to basically keep growing the construction project as funding becomes available.

We don't have to wait for one construction project to end and then let out and bid the next construction contract. It's almost as if you could amend into one contract all of this work and keep it progressing so that you have all of the work on top of each other in a schedule sense. If we were going to be going a more traditional route on this project to go out to construction, the bar chart would look something like this. And this is an aggressive schedule. This is assuming that you have all of the money exactly when you need it to go to construction. But we might have been able to build Carpinteria and Summerland around the same time, right? There's about a two-mile gap between it. So you could transition the Carpinteria construction traffic into the normal lanes and then into Summerland so you could have maybe two at the same time and then we would go forward and build the Montecito and the Padaro segments after that and then after that we would go to the Santa Barbara segment and do that.

So this is an aggressive alternative schedule that we might have been able to do if we went traditional bidding Delaying the Carpinteria and Padaro and Montecito and Santa Barbara segments in this scenario would have resulted in $52 million of escalation costs on the construction contract. Now, again I say this is an aggressive one assuming we have all of the money available exactly when we need it.

This scenario here is something that's probably a little bit more realistic, and this is how Caltrans typically builds a corridor. And I know this because I'm working on the 46th Corridor up in Paso Robles that's heading out towards I-5. On that corridor, on the 46th Corridor we started in Paso Robles in the early 2000s We are just now finishing up on the Y project, the 4146 interchange and that's only about 20 miles away from that. But we went sequentially. We built one segment, we finished it, we advertised the next segment and we continued to daisy chain our way along and we've been in construction now for over 25 years.

So that is real escalation that we are paying for now on that Y interchange and we're not even done. We still have more segments to go down 46 so this is an alternative scenario, a more realistic scenario of what we would do without CMGC. And you can see the overall escalation is over $150 million if we were to go with traditional delivery method. So that is real benefit We were not able as Caltrans to tell our legislators this is a savings that they got to realize too, but this is reality. This is what it would have been if we had to go that way.

So total, the total cost savings and this is what I'm getting back to with that big hairy audacious goal for the CMGC process. Did we realize 10 times the contractor's fees? And granted it's charged us just under $9 million in contractor fees over the past roughly decade but just under a decade for doing their pre-construction work. The project specific, that list of savings that they helped us identify through the development of each project. That was at $83 million.

Let's call the batch plant is between 10 and 15 million dollars. We'll call it 12 million dollars of savings, the escalation that I was showing you with those different alternative scenarios that could be anywhere from 50 million dollars of escalation when we went all of a sudden done to 150 million what that results in and we got we on the corridor realized a total savings of somewhere between 150 million dollars to 250 million dollars by utilizing CMGC so that far exceeds the ten times the amount of the $8.9 million for the contractor fees and now I'm going to pass it back to Fred he's going to talk a little bit more about the construction today.

Thanks Joe so as we wind up the presentation here just got a couple additional topics to cover, I mentioned at the beginning we have a few little tidbits about this construction summary and then a brief update on Santa Barbara North One of the things we had the contract to do is kind of compile it kind of a list of fun facts or tail of the tape of how how we performed over that. The roadway segments that have been implemented for the full 10 miles and so this kind of a list of all of the quantities on some key areas and I'll just focus in on a couple recycle materials.

So The batch plant that you mentioned, that Joe mentioned previously. We also had a companion site across the freeway for what's called a crushing yard where we were able to recycle concrete pavement and then use it as aggregate. And so most of that material would have otherwise been needed to be hauled off and paid for or double handled in some way. So that was 370 thousand tons of that.

The other one that on there that may be noteworthy is you know when you drive through the corridor and particularly in those days when we had the divided lanes and you know for a couple years. There was K rail on both sides that white temporary concrete barrier and so With all the staging and stuff, you pay for it as it's placed in every stage. And so 525,000 lineal feet of K-rail was placed over all the different stages. That's about 100 miles of K rail that's if you're looking at it from the projects construction site on Santa Claus Lane that could take you all the way down to Disneyland. So and last one I'll touch on is the craft hours this is really We've had over a million hours of work in the corridor for their staff, their craft employees.

Over a million over that that's equivalent to over 60 people full-time for 8 years of work on that implementation schedule and then if you add their subcontractors that adds another element Joe mentioned this previously, the project has won awards. This is how we one way we can measure quality and that's one of the goals that Joe mentioned that we have. This is the Summerland Interchange at Evans Avenue and it won a excellence in transportation statewide award really Resonating local values into the aesthetics of this working through the design review boards and so that was an important element of the project.

And then total funding secured, so this is as of the cycle four awards. So originally when Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you very much. So as you know, measure a was passed the funding plan for highway one oh one was as 1 3rd local funds from measure and then 2 thirds from out state and federal sources. So this gives you kind of a measure of how we've performed in that's kind of the you know, the tone here that we're trying to say is how have we performed from So 1.1 billion that's about 31% share for Measure A and our local sources so pretty much on par with what we envision Okay, and then the last slide I have at least in this section is kind of how did we perform from the original plan that we had when we developed our original strategic plan in 2010 two years after Measure A was passed.

And we were thinking how can we implement Highway 101? In a in based on what we knew at that time. So this kind of gives you in the hatched areas, we did identify building it in segments so and and this was more driven by our funding parameters that Joe was mentioning And when we could accrue funding for that, we would start in 2017. Now recognize in 2010 we didn't even have an environmental document on the street and so you know we were coming up with a implementation plan to get to construction in seven years.

And then we would stagger it over time ultimately taking about 11 years to complete in 2028. And then the actual performance you saw in one of Joe's slides is we were able to build those first three segments. So started a little bit behind I mentioned earlier, we got challenged on the environmental document with how are we able to make up time? We were able to make up time through that CMGC process through other innovative ways to get that going and of course having the funding available at the time we needed it.

And then the Montecito North was something that we took advantage of. Caltrans had some additional SHOP funding, this wasn't SB1 funded but it was a partnership of SHOP funding and Measure A funding that we said we can do another small segment to move that forward And then in cycle 3 of SB 1 we got 2 additional segments funded and we're getting close. And then cycle 4, we would get the last segment funded so essentially back on track and delivery in 2028 from what we planned 15 years ago or so.

So just a quick update on construction. If you've driven through the area, this is the this is Cabrillo Boulevard. You have on the right there, you have the northbound lanes and on the left, the southbound lanes on the right, the southbound lanes on the left, the northbound lanes and then your In the in the far background there, you're seeing the abutments being constructed for the new bridges that will be built. And that's kind of the major work that's going on over the next year and it'll continue for building those new bridges over Cabrillo Boulevard And then this slide is one of the retaining walls that will support, you know, the bridges in the ramp construction there. So you get a sense of the scale. The vertical steel beams are there for the shoring to support that and then you get a sense of how big they are both in this slide and then this one with the gentleman standing there next to the size of the walls.

And then this is a concrete pump in the there you see next to the truck. You see some steel cages for columns that will help be part of the bridge. And similarly here, and this picture is taken from a project tour we had with State Senator Lamone. That was about a month ago. She was wanting to see that and we were able to share some of the same slides that we presented today to this board of the benefits of CMGC and she was able to take advantage of seeing in the active construction out there with small group.

And then just a field photo of the work So at this time that kind of concludes I think I want to leave with at this point. We feel it's The message is that we're trying to say is this is the biggest project that has been involved in and it's important as we're celebrating our 60th anniversary. We asked the board if there's interest in scheduling a tour out there any excuse to put on a safety vest and hard hat maybe but we will certainly plan it accordingly to the interest or how broad we haven't really gotten any of those details but we certainly want to invite Maybe in the next couple months. Any show of hands of interest?

All right, any questions from the board?

We'll go ahead into questions here. Supervisor Lavignone did you have a question?

Just a question about the batch plant was sure kind of innovative but how innovative was it? I mean is this something now that we're, is being implemented on other large projects. It just seems like a genius idea when I drive by them it's always amazing that it's right there up the freeway

Well, I can start and then Joe probably has something to add. I think it was innovative in the sense that if we were to do this as single contracts, it really wouldn't make sense for the contractor to build those costs to generate a new batch pipe and all the permitting costs. What we didn't touch on is there was a lot of work to get the permit through the Air District and the county to just get that in place. And so but if you spread it out over multiple contracts, it really makes sense and it pencils out

Yeah, Fred's right. We do utilize that on very very large projects up and down the state and so it's not a unique solution just to this location but the economics wouldn't have worked out if it was just the carbon debris segment on its own.

The other question I had and it was on a slide you had Joe just kind of caught my eye that how did the Cormorant, the bird... Okay, so what how did we save nine million dollars on bird mitigation?

So yeah, Granite worked. That was like the first month I was on that project was when the Cormorants and we were taking down the Sheffield interchange so it's a nice welcome to the corridor was dealing with the Cormorants but Our project team with Granite Included worked to figure out what's the best schedule that we can get to accelerate construction through this area. And there was a work window that the Cormorants and then nesting by the old Sheffield interchange, they were protected. And if we could stage construction, and this is where Granite came in and helped us figure this out. Then we could advance certain stages of demolishing and cutting down some trees in the median to rebuild the interchange at a more economic and beneficial way.