2008-03-24 Cities for Climate Protection Minutes

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March 24, 2008 Reading Advisory Committee on Cities for Climate Protection Program Committee Notes for March 24, 2008 (Next Meeting - April 2" d at Town Hall) Committee Meeting 7:00 PM, present were Gina Snyder, Ron D'Addario, Sophie Gellot, Michele Benson, Tracy Sopchak and Stephanie Anderberg. Welcome - Chair Michele Benson opened the meeting, welcoming all present. Minutes - A motion was made and to approve the minutes from the March 12th meeting. Minutes were approved unanimously. MPO Grant - Tracy & Ron provided updates on the process to fill out the grant application for MPO funding of a shuttle service. They met with Carol and then Tracy worked on Market Definition and Market Strategy sections of the grant documents. Tracy also revised the train rider survey to distribute to seniors as they are another key demographic identified in the CTPS analysis of potential shuttle service in Reading. The survey for seniors has also been written to get answers that we can use specific to questions on the grant application. Other target groups identified in the CTPS study were students and train riders. Tracy suggests adding "green residents" to this list. Ron mentioned that we could have a shuttle-riders' pledge form in future years, similar to versions of our 1-2-3 Pledge efforts. Some summary info has been gleaned from the existing train riders survey and middle school families survey. We could consider surveying "green residents" at the Earth Day fair. Ron & Tracy came up with a list of potential stops, and those have been added to the survey to determine the level of interest in using each stop. Part of the grant application is to list each stop and why that stop might be important to each target demographic. The shuttle service would also need a name, logo & tagline. One suggestion is to call it "The Reading Rocket" (Rocketing you across town). And/or the logo/name/tagline development could be a high school project which might help to get the buy-in of teens - a key demographic. The draft cover of the grant application has a photo of the middle school kids who worked on the first round of surveys, and our logo, and maybe we could add the Reading Rockets sports logo. Ron did a trial run of the suggested shuttle route and it could be done in one hour. A possible alternate route route could be run in the morning (and afternoon?) commuter hours for train station connections. The train station parking lot tends to fill by 7:30. We are currently considering one shuttle bus, running on a split shift with a gap in service for the midday. At this time, the meeting broke for the presentation to the RMLD Board. Tracy presented our Action Plan items and overall progress to the Board members, who received the information well. After the presentation, the committee agreed to hold an additional meeting, on April 2, to continue the discussion on the grant application, and to discuss details of the Earth Day event planning. The subcommittee will meet with Peter on Friday and then we'll need to really pull together the application. We can also ask for letters of support from the community/businesses to include as addenda to the application. M. Wilson's Questions - The questions were concerning new lighting slated to be included in downtown roadway reconstruction projects. These questions were referred to Peter. Earth Day - The committee will continue to post flyers throughout town and will discuss more planning details at the extra meeting next week