Interchange Book 3 ((EXCLUSIVE)) Free Download Audio

The exercises in the 16 teaching units are grouped into two topical and/or functional cycles. Progress checks after every two units allow students to assess and monitor their own learning. New to this edition is aSelf-study section with a free audio CD.

Jordan Wainer: Thank you, Paula. On behalf of the Federal Highway Administration's Center for Innovative Finance Support I would like welcome to today's joint DOT FHWA major project webinar. My name is Jordan Wainer. I'm with the U.S. DOT's Volpe Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts and today I will be facilitating our question-and-answer period and providing technical assistance. I will introduce Jim Sinnette, the project delivery team leader momentarily. But before he begins I would like to point out a few key features of our webinar room. On the top left side of your screen you will find the audio call in information. If you are disconnected from our webinar at any time, please use that call in information to reconnect to our audio. Below the audio information is a list of attendees. Below the list of attendees is a box titled material for download where you may access a copy of today's presentation. Simply select the file, click download file and follow the prompts on your screen. In the lower left corner is a chat box where you can submit questions to our presenters throughout the webinar. We will pause for questions at the end of each presentation if time allows and we may take questions over the phone later on. Further instruction will be given at that time. If you experience any technical difficulties, please use the chat box to send a private message to Michael Kay. Our webinar is scheduled to run until 3:30 P.M. Eastern today and we are recording today's webinar so that anyone unable to join us may review the material at a later time. Finally, before we get started there are two quick poll questions I would like to introduce to help better understand where our audience is. The first question is how many people are participating with you today. The second question is what is your affiliation? So I'll give you all a couple of seconds to respond to those polls. And thank you for your responses. I'll close out the polls now and turn over the webinar to Jim Sinnette. Jim...

Allan Kosup: Good morning and welcome. Let me just kind of step through a little bit of what the corridor is. We call it the I-5 north coast, not the north coat but coast corridor in San Diego County and it's a 27-mile long corridor. One of the things that's unique about San Diego County, obviously, the coastal boundaries. This project is entirely within the coastal zone. And we have very limited north/south facilities, in fact, we really only have two in our county. One the I-5 corridor combination freeway and rail and then the I-15 corridor. And because of that our facilities are much more than just commuter facilities. In fact, sometimes we have higher volumes on Saturdays and Sundays as people go to the recreational areas as people are moving to and from Mexico. We've got a lot of goods movement. And so they're very high demand corridors. On the freeway we're running probably close to 250,000 folks a day. In the corridor at any one point in time we run about 700,000 people per day are touching the corridor so a lot of demand. In California, our coastal zone has a higher regulatory bar so to speak and that was a major constraint as we looked at the project. Also, a number of endangered species. So it was a very complex project to begin with. We go over through six coastal cities and through six coastal lagoons. And at the end of the day what we have is a $6 billion 30 year program of projects that really has four major components, express lanes which are essentially managed lanes that we're going to use first and foremost for carpools bus rapid transit and then any additional capacity will be priced. It's very similar to a model we have on the I-15. Also our existing rail line about half of it is single track. And so we're going to be finishing. We want to add more frequency, reduce headways in the rail line and so we need to finish double tracking the corridor. And then two other components that are probably unique to the program is improved coastal access. I mentioned that coastal commission bar. One of the things there from their business processes is improving capacity on a transportation facility isn't really one of their goals but improving coastal access is. And so that was something that was something that we needed to look at on our project. And then coastal habitat improvements it mentioned the endangered species and the lagoons. We'll talk a little bit more about those in the future. Just kind of high level of what's the corridor look like? It hasn't really been touched since the early sixties when we built it. True to Southern California standards, low density, widely spread job centers, does not really make it a transit friendly corridor. But you can see how much population has boomed over the last 30 or 40 years. And we see another million people coming to this 27-mile long corridor in the next 30 plus years. And as I said, we're already experiencing congestion pretty much throughout the day and on weekends. Slide eight is just sort of an example of the challenge we're up against but it also highlights maybe an opportunity that we didn't see when we started the entitlement process and the environmental process. At the lower end of the slide is I-5 crossing one of the coastal lagoons. And in the middle of a lagoon you can kind of see an old wooden trestle. And then at the oceanside you side a city street called Coast Highway. But you can see how when the facilities were built, these transportation facilities were built we weren't too sensitive to the health of these lagoons. And so we tended to fill into the lagoons and shorten the bridges in order to reduce the cost. And so I think sort of a lesson is-- and then one additional constraint or challenge you can see that we really blocked east/west bike and ped traffic as well as north/south. The bike and peds had very few places to go. If you want to cross the lagoon you pretty much go a mile to the west and then use Coast Highway and then come back. If you go to the east then it's about another mile to the east to the first major regional arterial. And so these transportation facilities really did act as a barrier for the communities to move around. And then you can also see how development was starting to encroach into these lagoon areas and kind of soak up the last remaining open space in the coastal zone. So I think one of the lessons learned is our need and purpose for the highway job started out as a freeway job. It was a Caltrans lead agency project with FHWA. It started in 2004. The need and purpose was kind of an old fashioned congestion relief at capacity. But over time it became clear that the need and purpose needed to include enhancing and not just mitigating but enhancing some of the coastal resources. And that really became the bar to get the project approved with the California Coastal Commission as well as the regulatory agencies. And this slide kind of shows that sort of joint effort among all of the different agencies. It was identified back in the bush administration under presidential order as a project of high nationwide significance and a challenging corridor that was going to require the agencies to work differently together in sort of a different conflict resolution approach, if you would. And then the whole I-5 corridor is a corridor on the west coast. Locally, just kind of point out sort of other lessons learned or something that really helps us is that our NPO and our state DOT in San Diego County is very close. Our teams are joint agency teams. We try not to pursue projects individually. We try to merge them at the end but instead we actually merged the teams. And so we'll have corridor directors who kind of represent both agencies and staffs will work sort of interchangeably under this corridor director. When we stared out in 2004 the coastal communities were very concerned about widening the freeway and adding traffic so much so that a state legislation was introduced SB-468 which originally tried to kill the highway expansion and prioritize the transit first. But at the end of the day it was actually a very helpful bill that really just requested a balanced approach and they were very concerned that we were going to do the freeway improvements of the $6 billion program first, never get to the rail, never get to the lagoon. And so one of the asks was it needs to be balanced. It needed to have those bike and ped facilities that we talked about. And in the lagoons they didn't want to see an incremental approach. They didn't want to see the rail people come in the first five years and then the highway people come in the second five years. They wanted this get in and get out idea. And that lead us to, and we'll talk a little bit later, us pursuing a CMGC pilot because we just felt that was a good way to construct these improvements in the lagoon and further blur the lines between being a highway and a rail project. One of the things we talk about in terms of lessons learned is although we had individual environmental documents both for the rail and for the highway we rolled them up under an umbrella document for the California Coastal Commission which we call the public works plan and recognize that most projects don't need this. But we actually found it as an asset because it allowed us to address the mitigations and the impacts of the highway and the rail more holistically. So that was a huge advantage and a huge improvement in terms of dealing with the regulatory agencies. It also allowed us to try to find synergy opportunities in working the projects together since we were going to try rebuilding them at the same time. Perhaps there was ways to reduce costs and reduce throwaway and just be more innovative. This is an example of how we're dealing with some of the active transportation. At the bottom of this slide, you see a large monolithic-- it was originally a monolithic wall that the engineers ended up splitting the wall and putting a new north/south bike facility in it. And interestingly enough as we talk about the need and purpose evolving and including coastal access this carpool lane/express lane now has a brand new 27-mile long north/south bike ped facility that's attached to it. So that was part of the positive enhancements of the project to actually get the communities and the region to yes. One of the regulatory goals of the California Coastal Commission is the project can only be approved if there's a net enhancement to coastal resources, not mitigation. So it's a net enhancement so you can see the bar is a little bit higher. Interestingly enough, this project is also partially funded with the region sales tax. So we have a half-cent sales tax in San Diego County that goes to transportation and this one of the larger projects in that program. And that's important because one of the things that it allowed us to do is the region looked at building a comprehensive restoration package for both the rail and the highway across the entire thirty years and allowed us to try to front load that mitigation package to the first five or ten years and we used the region's money to do that. And that really was attractive to the resource agencies. It wasn't this mitigation as it occurs. They get this all in the first 5 years of this 30-year program. And in exchange what we got from the regulatory agencies was flexibility and how we're going to mitigate and enhance these impacts because we didn't have enough habitat to create. We could create new habitat at one to one. But in terms of going above and beyond the one to one we were challenged. It just wasn't enough space. And so the resource agencies allowed this multifaceted holistic program of mitigation and it totals close $200 million of restoration. And so there was some property that we were able to buy that was going to be developed and so we were able to reserve that in perpetuity. There was other property that had been filled in over time and reduced the wetlands and so we were able to convert that back to wetlands. We were also able to fund two large restoration lagoon restoration projects that are in the corridor. And we're actually adding those large lagoon restoration projects to our freeway and rail projects which is very interesting, again, broadening the definition of a transportation project. We talked about those narrow lagoons. One of the things that the regulatory agencies asked for, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. We were going to have to remove and replace those bridges anyway. And they asked that we study what it would take to lengthen the bridges to restore title flushing. It turned out that it was about double the size of those bridges. And the region stepped up and funded those longer bridges and that became part of our enhancement program, not our mitigation but our enhancement program. Also we're funding some long term endowments. The lagoons fill up with sediment and they periodically annually or every other year need to be dredged. The foundations who manage these lagoons did not have any funds to dredge them. And so part of our mitigation package is actually funding those long term dredging programs. And here's just an example. You can see what the existing bridge looks like at one of the lagoons and then you can see in the bottom how we're lengthening that bridge. And then lengthening this allowed us to put in a new bike and ped facility. So the idea of synergy, a transportation, carpooling, job turned into a lagoon health job, turned into a coastal access job. This slide-- just the net benefit slide talks about, you know, we ended up being able to convince the regulatory agencies in the communities that the build project resulted in a net benefit, again, not mitigation but above and beyond the existing baseline condition. And that was really helpful in moving people to yes. So where are we today? The region surprisingly didn't have $6 billion to frontload the entire program in year 5, in the first 5 years. What they do have is about $600 or $700 million of different colors of funds, federal funds, state funds and then local funds that we talked about. And so Caltrans is the lead agency in building this suite pack of improvements, this $600 million portfolio. You can see here basically removing and replacing two rail bridges living up to that get in and get out once, building the carpool lane, thirteen miles of carpool lane, one lane in each direction. We don't have enough to build two lanes so we're not going to build the express lanes in phase one. Those are probably in year ten fifteen, something like that. But we will be in the lagoons removing and replacing those freeway and rail bridges. And it also includes the restoration of San Elijo Lagoon. So we're putting that all under one construction contract with CMGC and a joint venture. Just kind of segueing to why we chose CMGC in terms of another sort of lessons learned for us. One of our big concerns was communicating to the contractor accurately what our expectations were in building those projects in the lagoons be it normal traditional specs and plans. We felt there was a lot of opportunity for arguing and construction claims and arguing with the regulatory agencies in construction. Water quality is paramount, environmental health paramount. And we did not want to risk that conversation with a contractor. And so the CMGC allowed us to work collaboratively with them so that they understand what the expectations are. The flip side of that is the contractor has brought a lot of innovations that maybe we wouldn't have felt comfortable in putting out in a design-bid-build-package because we weren't exactly sure how they would be administered. They've been able to give it assurances to the regulatory agencies that these alternatives are better for the environment. And so we've actually found some opportunities, constructability opportunities to reduce the cost reduce the potential impact. As an example we thought we were going to have to work in the lagoons in the wet and not be able to build a work berm in the lagoons. And the resource agencies once they talked to the contractor and gotten comfortable with the idea of building a work berm it's both cheaper and probably safer for the environment. So the idea of improving our constructability, making sure that we're all in the same page and what's in the bid. And then the project we weren't really sure, some of the costs were very soft because we just didn't have a lot of experience as engineers doing the lagoon restoration job and building these bridges in the lagoon. So working with the contractor to price it has allowed us to design the budget. We only have a set budget. And so we're able to move scope and then move scope in and out of this phase one. It's ultimately going to get built in the finished product, the 30-year product but what can we afford in phase one? We're able to work collaboratively with the contractor and build the highest priority elements. So far CMGC we've been under pre construction contract with the joint venture. It's a joint venture of Flatiron, Skanska, and Stacy Witbeck. We've had them under contract for about ten months of pre-construction and it's been very helpful. So just to kind of wrap up. In terms of the entitlement best practices of the holistic systems approach to mitigation was huge for us. The holistic systems approach to transportation was huge to us. And I think Caltrans has always been criticized for sort of building projects two or three miles at a time. In this case we planned a 27-mile long corridor both rail and highway together. And so I think we had a good handle on what needed to be built first and when we made those changes, where the congestion was going to go. And so I think it's a more cost effective project looking at it holistically. And I think it met the expectations given in California focused on VMT, greenhouse gas, having a rail component was very important. You know, the idea of sort of bringing new mobile choices to the corridor was very important. And so the holistic systems approach from both environmental and transportation was important. And I can't emphasize enough that the idea that the need and purpose actually includes a need and purpose element related to improving the environmental in the corridor. So I think that, at least, from a Caltrans perspective that was very unique. Shared agency objective, you know, once we moved it from just being a transportation project to trying to understand what the regulatory agencies wanted to accomplish in the corridor that was very-- that brought everyone under one tent so to speak. And it became-- changed it from a more developer regulatory agency paradigm to more of a team approach. I think that was very helpful. And then this idea of integration brought opportunity. And the fact that the region was part of the funding, you know, major funding player, again, the projects became more of a regional enhancement project not a carpooling project. And we were only able to do that with the region's support. Best practices so far, it's only ten months. We were very concerned probably early on that the design teams were not going to be listening to the ideas that the contractor brought forward. That has not been a problem. It's been a very good relationship, lots of free flow flowing of ideas. So I think the project design is much better for this collaboration with the contractor. Cost negotiations that's kind of a new skill for the DOT. I mean we're used to negotiating change orders but in this case it's a $600 million contract. So it's a work in progress with probably both the contractor and us. It's probably taking a little bit longer than we thought needing a little more patience on our part but I think we'll get there. And in terms of an additional business practice we talk about integration and the systems approach is what we need to do which is true. Sort of the downside of integration is that it's mushing a lot of business practices of different companies together like an MPO and a state DOT. We do things differently. And so when we want to integrate and we want to build it under one flag that's the right thing to do but it takes a lot of work and collaboration so that both companies, both businesses are fairly represented in the risks and the cost estimating and just general business practice. Where do we go from here? We're going to do our GMP, our guaranteed maximize price, process with the CMGC contractor. It starts in January. We have one last coastal commission hearing in March and we hope to begin construction in late spring. It's about a five year construction period for that $600-$700 million project. One of the biggest challenges is removing and replacing those bridges across the lagoon. As I say, we have about 250,000 people a day over each lagoon. So traffic management in the corridor will be challenging. That's it. Questions? 2b1af7f3a8