work is done in accordance with cal transstandards and things like that. some of the firms we've had mou's with in the past have moved on and are doing real well now. >> are they competing against you. >> in some cases. >> i guess that's a determinant that the program's successful. is it very specific that you will take them on projects and... >> it did you want list specific projects, but what it does -- it's an agreement between us and them that first of all, describes what the intent of the program is and that we are going to make an effort and they're going to be receptive and that the idea though is there's in guarantees. they still have to perform and have to meet the scope that's in their contract. this kind of stuff. and... >> how to you identify which

organizations and companies you'll enter an mou with? >> well, cal transoached firms and in other cases they've approached us but >> helping women owned or minority owned businesses. that's just a plus if they are. >> exactly. so on this team here we have four small

businesses and zune is a small business, but not a dbe. >> how do you determine if your program is successful? what are the indicators for success besides some a few of them competing against you? >> to me i think they've all stayed in business. >> okay. >> i think in this economy with the work not being as plentiful as in the past i think that's the best indicator. >> thank you for allowing me the opportunity to go down the pathway. oftentimes there are people watching at home that may have these types of questions. you can continue. thank you. >> almost wrapped up. let's talk about schedule. our intent is to execute the tita moa agreements and the construction management contracts this month and as i indicated before -- that's

contingent on receiving the authorization from the federal and state for the dollars which we anticipate later this month. we will start advertisement of the construction project sometime this year and to start construction in early 2014. we have a dual recommendation here in terms of the items four and five. recommend increasing the authorized amount for the non federal portion not to exceed 11 million 37 thousand and to execute the new moa's for the right away and construction phases and then item five which is to recommend award of a three year services contract to parsons in an /paplt not to exceed 3.6 million. thank you. >> that's a lot of money. is there any member of the public

that'd like to speak on this item? this is for item -- jackie, good. one person. come on up, please. tell me jackie, what did... >> i want to speak on both items -- four and five. >> okay. >> since i was on the [inaudible] subcommittee since 2000 for the [inaudible] was the lead agency at -- i strongly urge you to /su /por them and support both items because i'm familiar with the work that they do and i /sropbgly am in support of this item. this was brought up in front of the cac last month, i spoke in favor of it also. i

favor it now so thank you. >> thank you. public comment is closed. seeing no objection, i pass four and five unanimously. could you please call items number six. >> number six recommend the award of one to [inaudible] combined a total not to exceed 1 million 800 thousand for on cal over[inaudible] consulting services and for authorizing the executive director to terms and conditions. this is an action item. >> thank you. we have a presentation from the transportation authority staff. thank you for being here. >> good morning. [inaudible] and i'd like to draw your attention to page 53 of you

packet. this is the item that i will be discussing this morning. >> 61. >> 61? make sure i don't direct it the wrong way. 61. >> thank you. >> so just briefly as the memo indicated, starting in 2002, the authority has been working with db, a joint venture to provide support to the authority for a variety of program management oversight, as well as engineering services and their contract is about to expire so starting in december we basically sent an out reach to the community of dbe and sbn

local consulting engineering services and let them know the opportunities are coming up. we did that through march of this year and we announced all the opportunities, including the ybi and the pmo and jc services that we were considering. so one of the things i wanted to clarify is that by doing that a lot of people were informed of the opportunity ahead of time and then we had /srertized for the services so everyone was already aware in the community as we could. we did an outreach both at our agency and through professional services and societies that we know in the bay area. with that we basically need support for oversight because there are large project that we are

handling and these projects are included in the general things that you probably hear on a regular basis, but just a list of them for your information is the central subway pro/skwrebgtd. that's one of the projects that we oversee. we also participate in the tjma, the trans/pwa*eu transit center. as you heard about the ybi ramp and the discussions with the implementation of that project. that's one of the projects that we hire to do the work for us on our project so we have large projects that we oversee and implement and we have all the up coming projects that come through or planning department relating to balboa study or the many other projects we support as part of the engineering effort within the authority to our staff and augmentation to the consultant

services so those are the reasons we need the services of a consultant. now, basically we advertise and receive about five proposals on may 29 and out of those five, two were qualified -- met the qualifications. those two firms that were collected [inaudible] are here and they're present if you have any questions for them. they're both bde firms as they lead the leed consultant firm. cd is obviously a team that has been around for a long time and knows authority very well and they have history with a lot of the projects. and vice has done this type of work for the

county [inaudible] we have on the other side of the bay and they'll work with doing program management and engineering services. so those are the two firms that we are recommending and what we are seeking here today is your recommendation to award the one year consultant contract to the two firms with an option to extend to two years for the amount of 1.8 million dollars. you have any questions, i'm here. >> i think i see one question. commissioner wiener. >> thank you and thank you for that presentation. so i just have a question -- it's not really just for this, but it probably goes a little broader and that -- we discussed this before about the use of outside

consultants. backing up in terms of what the ta does, obviously the ta is not the implementing agency. i know sometimes with doyle drive where the ta takes a greater roll than it does otherwise, but in terms of subway or tjta, the ta really provides funding, provides a level of oversight to make sure that the ta funding is being spent properly, but is not the agency delivering the project. i guess i have a -- sometimes when we have consulting projects it's a very specific thing -- construction management on [inaudible] island or awarding an outside -- the next one is /tpaoez

feasibility study. i guess it makes you raise a little bit of an eyebrow of where this is almost 2 million dollars a year for on call consulting services when the ta is not the implementing agency and we have very talented enengineers. that raises question for me. it's a broader issue we've discussed before about outside consulting services when our capable ta staff... >> we basically have myself and we have bob, who's gonna be presenting shortly and we just hired our senior engineer [inaudible]. so we're a small group of people and what we do

is in support of the engineering solution for defining the very group of people, we look at solutions, we evaluate and review and provide opportunity for how best to design something at a planning level that when it gets to be part of the work that needs to get beyond that level for implementation and building coalition and support for the project going forward we actually participate more heavily in the actual planning studies for our roll. the goal of this contract is to have each [inaudible] to be an individual contract so the way it will work is that whenever we find a scope of service, for instance, we need eric for being a project manager for ybi, that's one scope of service. but that work, we will negotiate the cost of

having him on staff to support the ybi ramp implementation. and he will have that task order under this contract. >> all right. >> similarly, when we have other projects like the full ton interchange or anything like that, that will identify and participate in and we need support for those -- tim is another example that we work with whenever we participating in doing analysis for engineering solutions, that's where we get extra help from our consultants. >> right. and i'm not questioning. it just always raises a question for me, but i appreciate that explanation. >> thank you very much. are there any other members that would like to speak? seeing none, thank you for your presentation. like to open now

for public comment. >> yes, good morning again commissioners. i'd like to tell you that i've been familiar with this firm for many, many years, having served on the cac since '97 and every year when this contract comes unfor approval in front of the cac i strongly recommend it and it always gets passed. i strongly suggest that you do the same. hank you very much. a: thank you very much. are there any other members of the public that would like to speak on this item? seeing none, public comment is closed. i would like to entertain a motion. seeing a motion by commissioner tang, seconded by commissioner /khao*u, without any objection this motion passes. thank you very much. madam clerk, could you call the next item. >> item number seven in an

amount not to exceed 250 thousand for [inaudible] feasibility study and authorizing the executive directors and contract terms payment terms and [inaudible] action item. >> thank you very much. >> good morning chair cohen. this item begins on page 73 of your packet. this is the consultant /aeu wart for the county [inaudible] leading. it's a new bus line and it has been envisioned as a new east/west line in the southern part of the city connecting balboa park station, the bay shore station dipping into san mateo. this is to develop some

improvements and outreach to raise awareness in the community. this is a study that's been funded by multiple sources, including prop k as well as grant from the cal-trans with also contributions from our partners, some of them in san mateo county which is the congestion management agency for san mateo. cal train is also contributed some funds to the study. the scope is in your packet. the selection panel for the procurement including zach from the transportation authority as well as the sfmta and from cal

transand ccag. the panel selected three of the teams for interviewing. after the interviews the panel selected the [inaudible] team as the top ranked proposer. based on that teams very strong urban design and complete streets expertise and services. it was the only team that dedicate edd urban designer. the team also demonstrated some strong out reach capabilities and /aeu poach. we think that's important for parts of the community who have not heard of bus rapid transit before and will come in handy as we go through that outreach. all four of the teams that submitted met or exceeded the

dbe requirement of 9 percent. the selected team has a par test /paeugs rate of 9 percent. representative from the team fair and pure is here today, steve, he's in the audience. and we're seeking a recommendation to award this contract to fair and purees in the amount of 250 thousand. i'm happy to take any questions. >> thank you. seeing no questions. let's open up for public comment. are there any members of the public that would like to comment on item number seven. seeing no public comment, it is closed. looks like there's no objection so this motion passes without objection. clerk, could you please call item number 8. >> item 8 recommended [inaudible] by 1.329 million for environmental analysis

services for the geary [inaudible]. >> good morning again. chester, principal planner with the authority. this item begins on page 85. i have a brief presentation that will provide some background on the project, talk about our resent progress and talk about the remaining work to be completed within the proposed contract amendment. just by way of background the the proposed [inaudible] on the geary corridor including a dedicated lane for buses, also including enhancementings for the pedestrian walkway. we've been

revising the project definition and the alternatives. we've got full conceptual designs for the entire corridor now for all of the original alternative for block by block. the new news is a new variant that was developed by the project team in response in part to some of the community outreach we've been doing. what we call alternative three consolidated. the buses run in the center, as with the original alternative three, but we're consolidating the local and vrt service together so there's one service that runs -- runs down the street. this eliminates the need for bus passing lanes, which were featured in alternative three. this allows us to reduce the amount of on street parking that would be removed. by way of talking about the remaining work we'll be taking all these alternatives and will be documenting the results and

environmental impact statements slash report and [inaudible] work ahead a also includes that we're ready to prepare for the /shr*ebgsz of a locally alternative. this lpa will likely be a combination of side and center running bus configurations in the corridor. we expect to update our full cost estimate for the project and our funding strategy and will be working to complete the final eis,ir in relation to comment. just a couple more slides. >> no rush, take your time. >> the remaining work includes work on the community and agency coordination side. then we'll be doing outreach with the release of the drafting

environmental document. the schedules for this remaining work includes the focus on the locally preferred /al tern /w*euf the /o ut /raoeufp in the fall of this year followed by a draft environmental document that will be released in the spring of 2014 and then certification of that document in the winter. coming back to the proposed contract amendment, we are seeking a recommendation to increase the engineering contract by 1.3 million dollars. we will consider a request for 2.7 million dollars in prop /k-bgs fundsment part of that would be for the jacob's contract and

the remainder of it would be >> why are we always -- why are you here today for an increase? a: i can give a little bit of background for this project in particular. when we started the environmental phase of the geary project, the estimate to complete the phase of work was for about 6 million dollars. but we didn't request all that -- those funds at once. we requested installments as we did the work and as it became /khroerer what remaining work needed to be done. so we've cock come back to the plans committee and the full board periodically throughout this phase as we've made more progress and clarified what, again, more work needs to be done. the total phase of this

work where we're estimating now at 6.7 million dollars, which is within -- near 10 percent of the original cost, but again, we are requesting this work in installments. >> requesting it in installments. hello. >> i do want to clarify because this is an authority led contract and geary is one of the bigger ones and cash is pretty tight. we purposely asked for the money in installments to help cash flow it, but i think the positive benefit is the transparency by forcing us to come back to you for approval. we knew that the

likelihood of us discovering more things that needed to be done, more outreach, technical issues we didn't think would come up [inaudible] coming in from one big number up front but in pieces with the sfmta what we needed to do. >> i want to add that as we've gotten into the project we've started to identify some of the issues that in other projects are identified in later phases, in the conceptual engineering report. and in investigating some of these issues where the utilities are located -- some of that work -- we think we're able to remove a lot of the risk from the next phase of the project so we can go faster in that next phase and we can also get some cost savings from that next phase. >> okay, commissioner chew. >> thank you. my questions are really around project management when it comes to

scheduling. this is a project that has been in discussion for years. i know initially there was some targets of trying to complete this in the middle part of the decade. those dates have slipped. now it's looking closer to 2019 or 2020 when we'll finish it. i know there's been a city wide conversation why our transit projects -- why it's difficult to hold them to /skaoed jewels. i know a number of our colleagues recently went on a trip to another city where we saw exactly how quickly other cities can move forward on these projects so my questions are really, you know, what sort of lessons are you taking from how we manage projects or how others manage projects. how the svrt, how that delay could have been short /-pbdz and what sort of lessons are there there. what type of questions

are you having with the sfmta which will have to take over aspects of this to shorten those timeframes and what can we expect to try to speed up the project schedule? >> i think those are really good questions and i think one of the things we've done is we've been watching the van ness pro/skwroebgt closely and try to use them as kind of the trail braise blazer. this is new territory for san francisco. bus rapid transit is not quite a bus on the street and it's not a dedicated light rail line. it's something different from that and i think the agencies have been working together to try to figure out what that is and i think we've taken lessons from v ness in pulling we think we've gotten their eyes on the

project and its details sooner in the process than they have for instance for the van ness project so we think we're saving time there because we're getting them in tune with what the project details are. one thing is with respect to the process with the van ness project, again, i think because of the newness for both the agencies and the community, they did things kinda sequentially. there was a release of a draft environmental document and then said let's focus on what will be the lpa and so sequentially it was a release of a draft document and then another process to figure out what we want to adopt as the a lpa. in the geary process we're looking to do that in concurrence. as we develop the environmental analysis, we want to start the lpa discussion. we know

something about vrt and the different con configurations. hope is we can compress the time it takes to get to the draft environmental document and selection of an lpa and so we can get to the ends of the environmental process sooner so we'll be ready to start design. we've been talking closely with our counter parts at the sfmta about how to speed up the part of the process they'll be taking over -- the final design process. for instance, one of the things we could do is we could start their work after the selection of an lpa before we get to the certification of an environmental document. they could start that process for final de