Tag: city

Posted on

Asheville City Council approves purchase of new ART buses with combination of federal, local funding

 

Three new buses will be added to the Asheville Rides Transit (ART) fleet, under action taken by Asheville City Council. At their December 14 meeting, Council approved a resolution to purchase three 30-foot Gillig diesel buses to replace buses in the fleet as they near their useful service life.

During the last five years, the City of Asheville has purchased 16 transit buses to replace vehicles in the fleet that have met its useful service life. The buses purchased include five electric buses, seven hybrid-diesel buses, and four diesel buses. The three buses being purchased will also use diesel fuel. Included in this bus purchase are transit accessories and features such as bike racks, fareboxes, and transit security cameras.

This $1.6 million purchase is part of the annual bus purchases undertaken by the City to replace existing buses that have met their useful service life per the Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA) service-life policy and guidelines for transit buses and vans. This FTA policy establishes the minimum number of years (or miles) that transit vehicles purchased with federal funds must be in service before they can be retired without financial penalty. The minimum useful life for ART’s buses is 350,000 and/or 10 years.

The City uses a combination of funding sources to fund its bus purchases, which includes federal transit capital assistance, funds awarded by the French Broad River Metropolitan Organization (MPO), and the City’s General Funds. In addition to the annual transit federal formula funds allocated to the City, staff also applies for and uses competitive federal funds if awarded. For instance, in 2018, the City applied for and was awarded funding from the FTA’s Low No Emission grant funds that was used along with local funds to buy the five electric buses purchased in 2018. Additionally, federal flex funds received from the MPO were used to pay for the eleven buses that have been purchased to date. Some of the remaining MPO funds will be used for the buses being purchased in this fiscal year.

Upon receiving the buses, the Transit Planning staff will work with the City’s Contractor to complete required federal inspections before placing them in service. As recommended in the Transit Master Plan (TMP), staff plans to use the new buses to improve frequency on bus routes in the transit system. Specifically, this will help with plans to increase the frequency on the S3 and S6 Routes which serves residents in south Asheville. Planning efforts are currently underway to improve and increase the bus frequency on both routes from 90 minutes to 45 minutes. As such, the additional buses will assist with ongoing plans to improve and increase service reliability for ART riders.

The City believes that frequency and speed of service are the keys for current ART riders to continue using the transit service for their mobility needs, as well as attract new riders to use ART.  We also believe this investment will help make ART convenient and more attractive as much as possible. 

To read the staff report to Council, visit this link.

 

About ART bus service

Asheville Rides Transit provides bus service throughout Asheville and to Black Mountain from 5:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays/holidays. 

The ART Station is at 49 Coxe Ave. ART serves 19 routes with an annual ridership of 2.3 million, per pre-Covid data.

  • It costs $1 to ride the bus.  A ticket booklet (11 rides) costs $9 and a monthly pass costs $20. Both are available for purchase at the ART Transit Center, 49 Coxe Ave.
  • The ART Transit Station, 49 Coxe Ave., has been completely renovated, including improvements to the interior of the station/lobby, additional outdoor seating, and upgraded lighting, as well as new lighted digital displays boards and public wi-fi.

If you haven’t already, we invite you to download the Transit app to your smart device, to help plan your trip for better efficiency. Visit the City of Asheville Transit webpage for more information or stop by the ART Transit Center.

 

 

Posted on

Watercrest Myrtle Beach Assisted Living and Memory Care Honored for Outstanding Creative Landscape Design by the City of Myrtle Beach

The exterior landscaping of Watercrest Myrtle Beach boasts a PGA-worthy putting green with purposeful awnings for shade, and individual gardening stations to appeal to horticulturists and nature lovers alike. The illuminated walking paths are surrounded by lush lawns and interwoven amongst rock-scaped ponds and gorgeous arbors to create destinations and relaxing gathering spaces.

“It’s a great honor to be recognized by the City of Myrtle Beach for the exceptional landscape design and aesthetics at our newly-constructed Watercrest Myrtle Beach community,” says Jeremy Cairns, Vice President of Construction Management for Watercrest Senior Living Group. “We are grateful to all of our partners for their hard work, particularly to Gregory Duckworth with Environmental Concepts for our award-winning landscape design.”

Ideally located at 6151 Colline Verdi Way, Watercrest Myrtle Beach is a 98-unit, luxury senior living campus comprised of 76 assisted living and 22 memory care residences with resort-style amenities and exceptional care.  The comfortably, classy design includes a stunning promenade, fireplace, signature water wall, cigar and scotch lounge, multiple dining venues, Southern style outdoor living spaces, Art Studio and Gallery, and the coveted Spa W. The community offers residents world-class wellness amenities including a resort-style pool, light and salt therapy, state-of-the-art fitness and physical therapy center, beautifully landscaped walking paths, therapeutic live moss walls and a putting green.

Watercrest Myrtle Beach will be open for tours and holiday festivities as the team prepares for the arrival of future residents. The community is hosting a Christmas Jubilee on December 16th with lunch served at 12pm. Reservations are requested, please contact the community at 843.936.4020.

With multiple senior living projects in development throughout the southeast, Watercrest Senior Living Group is setting new standards of quality for seniors and their families in the development of upscale senior living communities.  Watercrest Myrtle Beach is one of two senior living development projects partnered between Watercrest, Corecam Capital Partners, and Peninsula Alternative Real Estate.

About Watercrest Senior Living Group
Watercrest Senior Living Group was founded to honor our mothers and fathers, aspiring to become a beacon for quality in senior living by surpassing standards of care, service and associate training. Watercrest communities are recognized for their luxury aesthetic, exceptional amenities, world-class care, and innovative memory care programming offering unparalleled service to seniors living with Alzheimer’s and dementia. A certified Great Place to Work, Watercrest specializes in the development and operations of assisted living and memory care communities and the growth of servant leaders.  For information, visit www.watercrestseniorliving.com.

About Corecam Capital Partners
Corecam Capital Partners is a Direct Investments Platform focused on Private Equity, Real Estate and Venture Capital. Corecam Capital Partners targets private investment opportunities alongside its investors and provides access to its proprietary deal sourcing. All investments are structured in-house by a team of investment professionals located in Zurich, Vienna, Singapore and Ho Chi Minh City.

About Peninsula Alternative Real Estate
Peninsula Alternative Real Estate (“PARE”) is a leading private equity firm in the Student & Senior housing space and a vertical within Peninsula Investments Group. PARE provides equity and mezzanine financing to leading developer-operators in the student housing, senior housing, and multifamily space following institutional quality processes developed over the last decade.

SOURCE Watercrest Senior Living Group

Posted on

Fremont Brewing Is Still Using Concrete Blocks to Prevent RV Parking. So Are the City of Seattle and the US Postal Service.

Ecology blocks outside Seattle City Light's substation in Ballard
Ecology blocks outside Seattle City Light’s substation in Ballard

By Erica C. Barnett

After at least one formal complaint, the Seattle Department of Transportation has issued a warning—but no penalty—to Fremont Brewing, the company co-owned by city council member-elect Sara Nelson, for obstructing the public right-of-way around its Ballard brewing facility with massive concrete “ecology blocks.”

As PubliCola reported last summer, eco blocks—so called because they are a byproduct of concrete production that uses waste that would otherwise occupy landfills—are an inexpensive way for business owners to prevent people living in their vehicles from parking on the street next to their properties.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, when the city stopped enforcing a law requiring people to move their vehicles every three days, the blocks have proliferated throughout Seattle’s industrial areas, which are the only places where people living in oversized vehicles can legally park. Business owners say that the presence of RVs and other types of large vehicles, such as box trucks, discourages patrons, and that large concentrations of RVs can lead to health and safety problems that impact their customers and employees.

Obstructing public streets is illegal, but SDOT has treated eco-blocks differently than other street obstructions; instead of penalizing business owners for taking over public space that belongs to everyone, as they might if a random person set up a tire fort or craft fair in the middle of the street, the department has responded to the proliferation of eco-blocks by essentially throwing up its hands.

Eco-blocks line the street next to Fremont Brewing's production facility in Ballard.
Eco-blocks line the street next to Fremont Brewing’s production facility in Ballard.

This is true not just of Fremont Brewing, which received a written warning, but of many other businesses around the city’s industrial areas as well as the US Postal Service, which surrounded its Ballard sorting facility with eco blocks way back in August 2020.

At the time, USPS spokesman Ernie Swanson told PubliCola that “USPS got the OK from the city to put in the concrete barriers” in response to a proliferation of RVs in the area. The Seattle Department of Transportation disputed this, calling the road-blocking barricades “unpermitted,” but took no action. They’re still there today, graffiti-covered and looking dingy compared to their more recently installed counterparts in front of a Bevmo!-anchored strip mall across the street. 

Contacted for information about why the blocks are still in place more than a year later, Swanson said, “The concrete blocks were placed in front of the Ballard PO as well as other neighboring businesses as a response to a proliferation of needles, human waste and other hazardous materials being discarded on the property. As of this date, the blocks remain not only in front of the PO but also other businesses in the area. We have no knowledge that a permit was ever required.”

"Eco-blox matta": Graffiti on an ecology block in Ballard.

The city’s process for dealing with Fremont Brewing’s ecology blocks was typical. After someone filed an anonymous complaint about the blocks in September, SDOT performed an inspection “and observed ecology blocks” in the street around Fremont Brewing, according to a notice SDOT sent to the company September 17. “We do not allow this type of use in public right-of-way due to traffic safety concerns as well as transportation and utility access needs. Please remove these unpermitted encroachments from public right-of-way by the compliance date indicated below”—November 10.

November 10 came and went; the blocks remained. About a week later, the case was closed.

SDOT spokesman Ethan Bergerson told PubliCola the department followed “standard procedure” in responding to the complaint. “The first step in the enforcement process is to mail a letter to the adjacent businesses or property owners notifying them of their responsibilities to remove the concrete blocks,” Bergerson said. “The purpose of this letter is to initiate a conversation with the responsible party so that we can find a path forward leading to their removal of the unpermitted concrete blocks. To date, we have sent letters of this nature to property owners and businesses adjacent to concrete blocks left in about a dozen locations around Ballard, SoDo, and Georgetown. … Our approach [with Fremont Brewing] has been consistent with the other locations.”

A reminder for dog walkers is visible behind a fence that blocks sidewalk access next to City Light's Canal substation.
A reminder for dog walkers is visible behind a fence that blocks sidewalk access next to City Light’s Canal substation.

Fremont Brewing owner (and Nelson’s husband) Matt Lincecum, who runs the company day to day, declined to comment for this story, as did Nelson.

SDOT has the authority to take enforcement action against any business (or government entity) that obstructs the public street with eco blocks or other objects that make it impossible for the public to access streets, sidewalks, or parking strips. To date, it has not done so, beyond warnings like the one it issued to Fremont Brewing.

As if to emphasize the city’s lackadaisical approach to enforcement, Seattle City Light has installed its own anti-RV fortifications at its Canal Substation, located two blocks away from Fremont Brewing and the rest of the eco-block-littered Ballard brewery district. In addition to eco-blocks in the street, the north side of the substation is walled off by two layers of fencing that completely obstruct the public sidewalk. A review of historical Google Maps reveals that the eco-blocks were installed sometime after this past August, when several RVs were parked along the south side of the substation. The fence, too, is new; as of June 2021, per Google Maps, several RVs were parked on that side of the substation, too. Since then, the RVs appear to have moved around the corner, to a narrower residential street on the east side of the building.

We’ve reached out to City Light as well as SDOT about the obstructions around the Canal Substation and will update this post when we hear back.

Old and new ecology blocks next to the Ballard postal sorting facility, which installed blocks on parking strips and (around the corner) on the street itself last year.
Old and newer ecology blocks next to the Ballard postal sorting facility, which installed blocks on parking strips and (around the corner) on the street itself last year.

From the point of view of a property owner, ecology blocks solve an immediate problem—people living in RVs or parking large vehicles indefinitely in front of their business—that the city has failed to address. But the fact remains that even if the city continues to turn a blind eye to vigilante street obstructions, nothing will really change until the region stops ignoring the needs of people living in vehicles, who make up as much as half of King County’s homeless population. In the absence of “safe lots,” social services, and affordable, permanent housing, people sleeping in their vehicles will continue to take up space in public,

But no amount of semi-sanctioned street and sidewalk obstruction will fix the underlying problem: The city and county have dedicated virtually no resources to people living in vehicles, who make up as much as half of the region’s unsheltered homeless population.

 

Posted on

Good Day: New art exhibit opens in Meridian City Hall | Good-day

Posted on

Siloam Springs city board to hear budget amendment for pond guardrail and landscaping

Town directors will hear a spending budget amendment in the course of Tuesday’s assembly regarding the set up of a guardrail and landscaping together the Highway 412 gateway pond.

Throughout the Sept. 7 board assembly, city staff members gave an update with regards to the addition of a guardrail all over the gateway pond intersection of Hwy 412 and East Principal Avenue as properly as installing landscaping (Spicata Liriope), in accordance to a employees report geared up by Metropolis Engineer Justin Bland on Oct. 8.

If authorised, the guardrail will be put in by Time Striping Inc., Bland claimed in a comply with-up email. Installation would take place 4-8 weeks next acceptance of the budget amendment.

An raise of expenditure for the money outlay in the Basic Fund will arise if authorised in the total of $24,431, the report states.

The board reviewed the solutions personnel offered and made a decision on putting in 275 feet of Cor-ten guardrail on the Hwy 412 aspect of the pond, the report states.

This would get started about midway around the curve in the pond wall on the south side and increase to the northeast to a stage powering the shadow of the welcome signal, the report states. Landscaping would be set up among the guardrail and the major of the pond wall, the report states.

A resolution was accepted in April of this year by the city board to check with the Arkansas Division of Transportation (ArDOT) to location a guardrail at the retention pond in close proximity to the “Welcome to Siloam Springs” sign on U.S. Freeway 412.

The resolution is owing to two separate car or truck mishaps that resulted in cars crashing into the pond, as well as a mower crashing into the pond in Might, producing the injury of a town worker.

A vehicle crashed into the pond on Jan. 1, 2019, and was flipped upside down, main to the loss of life of 11-year-old Tyner Levi Hammett.

On March 18 of this 12 months a 2nd auto crashed into the retention pond and the driver was arrested in connection with driving while intoxicated and was not transported to the medical center, in accordance to the Siloam Springs Police Division.

A metropolis employee was wounded although mowing at the pond when their mower overturned into the pond on Might 3. The worker was critically injured and transported via ambulance to Northwest Regional Medical Çenter in Springdale.

The bid for the guardrail does not involve the auguring of the holes for the guardrail posts, the report states. This function will be carried out by the electric department with digger trucks, the report states.

Additionally staff is nevertheless performing on ideas for the bushes in entrance of the guardrail so that cost is not involved, the report states.

In the fascination of timing workers would like to convey that notion to the town board in the in close proximity to potential with an supplemental budget amendment as wanted, the report states.

Town administrators will also focus on and vote on the subsequent objects:

Consent agenda

• Workshop minutes for the Oct. 5 workshop.

• Frequent meeting minutes for the Oct. 5 conference.

• Resolution 53-21 about the participation in the settlement of an opioid circumstance with the Arkansas Municipal League’s Municipal Lawful Defense Software.

Ordinances

• Inserting Ordinance 21-20 regarding the holiday of an unnamed right-of-way for 613 East University Road on its second looking at.

• Positioning Ordinance 21-21 concerning rezoning 613 E. University St. from I-1 (Industrial) to R-3 (Household Two-Spouse and children) on its next studying.

Staff experiences

• Board 2021-2022 board objectives update.

• Chamber of Commerce 3rd quarter report.

• Main Street Siloam Springs third quarter report.

• Siloam Springs Heritage Museum 3rd quarter report.

• Administrator’s report.

• Government session/town administrator employment.

Posted on

Mason City artist turning buildings into beautiful canvases

MASON City, Iowa – Driving by Downtown, you may perhaps observe some buildings are having an elaborate fresh coat of paint. Just one area artist influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright is portray murals on some obvious properties in the River Town.

Zoie Papouchis is a scholar of art.

“Considering that I was younger, I’ve often admired large artwork on buildings.”

Already an avid painter, she was driving past a mural 1 time, when she observed a person portray a mural and was instantly hooked. She contacted the Mason Town Chamber of Commerce, who runs the ‘Building Our Brand’ program of murals. However painting a huge wall was different than the smaller sized canvases she was more familiar with, Papouchis had teaching with two other artists, area Keely Hertzel and College of Iowa student Ali Hval.

“She actually confirmed me a entire new point of view, and I was ready to pull a whole lot from it. Now here I am!”

So considerably, she’s left her mark on four properties close to town, and not long ago finished a mural on the south side of the Current market 124 setting up on North Delaware.

“We want to test to make it a location wherever men and women really feel at household and they like what they see.”

The mixture of the prairie faculty fashion that Mason Town is identified for, and Papaouchis’ incorporation of all things audio like a soundboard and the ‘pause-play’ buttons, tie in nicely with the strategies that developing owner Lucas Frein has for the inside the previous Affordables on Initial area, which tenatively includes conference rooms and workplaces.

“The conceptual plan is a location wherever people can get the job done together, work on their very own, and have a great successful do the job area.”
Frein is now impressed with Papouchis’ do the job, and is hopeful to see extra murals pop up in parts of town that could have been neglected or forgotten.

“It’s been a person of my favourite parts by turning the corner in the early morning and looking at this what applied to be a bleak landscape some thing vibrant and a thing wonderful to appear at that beautifies the community and retains acquiring this part of downtown.’

Papouchis is currently listening to lots of optimistic suggestions on her art.

“It truly is been a large ‘Wow!’ to see how much persons really treatment and appreciate this type of things.”

Whilst she will be taking a break by way of the colder months, Papouchis states there are plans for an additional mural this coming spring, and hopes to achieve painting about two to even 4 each and every year.

She’s hoping to full the mural by Monday, but is seeking for volunteers to enable in the approach.

Those people fascinated in discovering more about the ‘Building Our Brand’ software can speak to Robin Anderson at the Mason City Chamber of Commerce at 641-423-5724.