The Sheldon/Wilton community meeting was held October 6 at C. W. Dillard Elementary School. We had a fantastic turnout, with more than 80 people in attendance. We were also honored to have Elk Grove Mayor Pat Hume and Sacramento County Supervisor Don Nottoli in attendance, as they are the Connector Board members representing the area.

The discussion was spirited and people had many questions about the project and how it will affect their community. Some of those questions and answers will be posted on the Connector web site soon. I encourage anyone with questions about either the general project or specifics about an area to contact us: through the web site, email or calling the office (876-9094).

I was also invited to present information about the Connector at a special meeting of the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors, which focused on transportation issues. Everything from an update on transportation on the west slope to the mining truck study was addressed, with a number of questions specifically about the Connector.

These meetings demonstrate the importance of citizen engagement in this process. Public input and participation is vital for a project of this size and scope. To succeed with this project, whatever form it ultimately takes, we must make sure there are many ways for people to get involved and make people feel comfortable participating.

To that end, we’ll be out in the community more in the coming months. I will continue to repeat an important thought—public involvement is an essential part of this process and I encourage you to get involved. We’ll post upcoming meeting information on the web site and perhaps in future blog entries as well.

It’s no secret that there are homes, stores, offices and educational facilities located along each of the Connector alternatives. One of the challenges we face in planning for the project is to determine how to design and build ways for indirect access to the roadway.

One of the benefits of the Connector is that it is a limited access roadway to provide higher performance and reduced congestion. To accomplish this, many current access options will not be available. People who live, work and visit services located on the alternatives currently turn directly into and out of parking lots or driveways—but that will not be possible along the expressway sections of the Connector route. One indirect access option is that a homeowner would drive a short distance on a frontage-type road to access a Connector interchange instead of making a left turn out of their driveway.

Determining how to facilitate indirect access requires us to look at the various land uses along the alignments and try to determine if that land use will still be there in 2045. As you probably know, a lot of the work we do is based on projections, which makes planning more challenging.

Along with determining the probable land uses, we must determine the most efficient and effective method to allow for that indirect access to the Connector. There’s a lot of design work involved in any circulation system, much less one that will be applied across a lengthy corridor with varied land uses. We will be seeking community input as we work through this planning and design process to ensure that community needs will be met by the proposed solution. The goal is to minimize disruption and maximize benefits for landowners and those who regularly travel the corridor.

We’ll keep working, and applying some of the best brainpower in the business, to find good solutions to these challenges. We’ll keep you posted.

Sometimes bringing the challenges and opportunities together is just a matter of using some imagination. On the Watt Avenue Improvement Project I led for the Sacramento County Department of Transportation, bike paths presented a challenge. Instead of trying to constrain the paths to fit the design, we thought about what the paths could be. Because of that extra effort and imagination, the paths became one of the most prominent and best features of the redesigned bridge.

The Connector presents a unique set of challenges and an exciting set of opportunities. It’s no easy task to bring together five jurisdictions, each with their own vision of the project, and come to a consensus on what’s best for everyone. We may find that there is no solution that meets the specific needs of each of those entities, which means we need to look at the greater good of the community.

The opportunity that comes with this challenge is that we can show how we as a region can join together and make the project, which is a concept at this point, a reality. I am occasionally teased for saying this, but I firmly believe the Connector is more than a transportation project – it can change the face of Sacramento and change the way people view Sacramento. We can make the Connector a signature project for our region. It won’t be as iconic as the Gateway Arch in St. Louis or the Golden Gate Bridge, but we may be able to say we did something that hadn’t been done before: we built a roadway project that is broadly recognized as a milestone, a real asset to mobility of the area, and a demonstration of our regional community’s ability to come together and serve a common purpose.

More to come in future entries.

I’ve been thinking about it, and one thing my years of experience have taught me is that you don’t achieve as much dreaming by yourself as you do when you dream with a group. Whether it’s building the Connector or sending a man to the moon—someone had to start the project, with the energy and enthusiasm to get it going, and then translate that energy and ambition to other people to carry it through. That’s my job as the executive director of the Capital SouthEast Connector: I’m the coach, cheerleader and booster club.

My years of working on public projects, including determining financing and guiding the environmental, design and outreach processes, have taught me when and how to put all the pieces together so those pieces will result in a coherent, well-developed project. And if a project leader can do that, they can translate their energy and excitement to other people and build a critical mass of smarts, momentum and energy around a project. That’s one of my goals with the Connector.

I’ve devoted my professional life to transportation in this region—I think I know the people, the communities and the issues with different projects. Some people would say I’m not a typical engineer, because I’m not the one who does the calculations. Of course I’m interested in the calculations, because a project cannot happen without them, but I primarily focus on the design and communication processes to make a project successful.

I believe that if you can motivate and inspire people, those people will become your most powerful allies—whether they support the issue or oppose it. If a leader can use himself as a catalyst for ideas and then let the process sort out the ideas, the end result will be more collaboration and inspiration than anyone thought possible. And that’s my ultimate goal for the Connector: to plan and build a roadway that was developed with the communities it will serve to best meet the needs of the region.

Keep checking back for new entries…there’s much more to talk about!

You may already know about the Capital SouthEast Connector, which will link the communities of Elk Grove, Rancho Cordova, Folsom and El Dorado Hills. The process is just getting started and I personally am very excited. The Sacramento region has the opportunity to be on the cutting edge of transportation and to create an iconic project that will be the envy of communities across the country. We have the opportunity to be innovative in the development of the Connector and not build “just another roadway.”

This effort requires a vision that sees many years into the future and is not discouraged by current economic woes. One of our goals is to create a new way to develop transportation projects, and to be mindful of benefits beyond mobility – additional open space, preservation of natural resources, continuous multi-modal paths, and new technology/ITS (intelligent transportation system) aspects.

We are working hard to get smarter about today’s key issues – creative financing, environmental stewardship, economic sustainability, greenhouse gas reduction, and more – and we are asking ourselves if there is a way the project can benefit those areas. We’d like the Connector to be a balanced asset to community. We want to be as innovative as we can be with the technology available; be sensitive to the groups involved; address the needs of business; and use our best and smartest team members to generate good ideas to put into the mix. And, of course, we want to gather input from experts and the community to help shape the finished project.

So let’s start the discussion. We’ll be out in the community in the coming months, talking with people about the project and gathering feedback, and this blog will be another forum to share information. Check back for weekly updates, and thanks for reading!