May includes National Public Works Week and in this episode we’re shining a spotlight on the often overlooked but crucial work of the Public Works Department. From maintaining roads and sidewalks to managing drainage systems…from big construction projects to traffic signal synchronization, recycling, fleet, and so much more, the Public Works team is the backbone of Elk Grove’s infrastructure. Public Works Director, Jeff Werner, shares the diverse responsibilities and innovative projects his department is tackling to keep Elk Grove running smoothly. Hosts John and Kristyn also share news about a big mixed-use development project, your chance to shape the city’s future, and a call to help stock the local Pet Food Pantry.
Rate, review and subscribe to the Elk Grove Citycast to get more information about the people, programs, and services shaping the City. You can find the Elk Grove Citycast anywhere you get your podcasts or listen online at www.elkgrovecity.org/podcast.
May includes National Public Works Week and in this episode we’re shining a spotlight on the often overlooked but crucial work of the Public Works Department. From maintaining roads and sidewalks to managing drainage systems…from big construction projects to traffic signal synchronization, recycling, fleet, and so much more, the Public Works team is the backbone of Elk Grove’s infrastructure. Public Works Director, Jeff Werner, shares the diverse responsibilities and innovative projects his department is tackling to keep Elk Grove running smoothly. Hosts John and Kristyn also share news about a big mixed-use development project, your chance to shape the city’s future, and a call to help stock the local Pet Food Pantry.
Rate, review and subscribe to the Elk Grove Citycast to get more information about the people, programs, and services shaping the City. You can find the Elk Grove Citycast anywhere you get your podcasts or listen online at www.elkgrovecity.org/podcast.
Announcer: Welcome to Elk Grove CityCast, the podcast about Elk Grove. In each episode, we'll dive into hot topics, share what's happening in the city, and introduce you to some of the people making a difference in this place that we call home.
John Hull: Hi everyone, I'm John Hull. Welcome to the Elk Grove CityCast. Joining me is the City of Elk Grove's Public Affairs Manager, Kristyn Laurence.
And Kristyn, great to be with you once again. As we talk about what is happening here in the city of Elk Grove.
Kristyn Laurence: Hello John and Elk Grove. Always nice to connect with you.
John Hull: Yeah and you know this month we're going to be celebrating National Public Works Week and the city will be hosting Big Truck Day. On May 22nd. We'll be talking on this episode with Jeff Werner, the City of Elk Grove's Public Works Director.
Today's podcast, I promise you, will surprise you at how much Mr. Werner's department does for the City of Elk Grove. He does a lot, doesn't he?
Kristyn Laurence: He does a lot. His team does a lot and they're kind of the, you know, superheroes that don't wear capes and they're kind of unsung heroes behind the scenes. So it's interesting to hear how much they're involved in the inner, you know, day to day operations of making a city run.
John Hull: And, you know, it's always those kinds of guys you're right. They don't get the credit do them for all their work that they do. And we want to thank them for that. But before we get to Mr. Werner the city has been recognized Kristyn with a couple of new accolades just in the past couple of weeks. It's pretty impressive too. So could you shed some light on those starting with livability. com?
Kristyn Laurence: Yeah. You know, I think that we actually touched on this in one of our first episodes together last year, but the city of Elk Grove has once again received a space on the Top 100 best places to live in the U S for the second consecutive year.
And that particular accolade is generated by Livability. com. It is considered for small and mid-sized cities and that's anywhere between 75,000 and 500,000 people, and so Elk Grove is definitely, solidly within that group. And we scored a 799, so they don't actually rank cities by one to a hundred. They give them a score that's based on some different things, but affordability being one and size and amenities and quality of life really. So Elk Grove earned a score of 799 and it is in some really good company with other cities of similar sizes across the U. S. But we are one of only four California cities that made the list and we're the only one in Northern California. I think that next closest would be Clovis but we're pretty proud of that and, and think that our residents should be proud of that too.
John Hull: Yeah, Livability. com. Go, go to that website and take a look at what they have to say about Elk Grove. Here's another online source, Inside Monkey. Now they have dubbed Elk Grove as one of the 15 fastest growing cities in California. We are number eight on that list. Now that's saying something.
Kristyn Laurence: It appears to be the online ranking season, if you will, because we did receive that accolade from Inside Monkey, who I'm not familiar with that organization, but we appreciate the recognition, and certainly I think by being out and about, we all recognize that Elk Grove is a pretty fast growing city, and according to them, we're the eighth fastest growing city in California.So we have some good company there, too. And then there was one more accolade. I don't know if you saw that, but SafeWise has also identified the city of Elk Grove and listed us as the 14th Safest city in California. So kudos to our law enforcement officers and the community for keeping our safety a priority. And we have another online source that recognized the work that's been done there. So I think it, it really supports the high quality of life that Elk Grove has here for its residents. And with more space and development, we're going to continue to attract growth and more people, and accolades like this definitely get people's attention, and so we could expect a few more people, I think, joining our city population here soon.
I did want to mention that we have a survey that we're going to be opening or is currently open until May 20th. It's something that the city does every two years in conjunction with a national polling organization called POLCO. And it is the National Community Survey and we've been doing this since 2009 and it really asks the residents to Help shape the future of the city by sharing their feedback There's a few residents that got a special invitation in the form of a letter that invited them to participate and gave them their very own special online link to the survey. That's intended to try and create a statistically valid sample for POLCO to be able to report from. And I believe the letter was coming from our Mayor with that invitation. So if you receive something in the mail, it is legit and we're asking for your feedback. But besides that, any resident can contribute to the survey. We have an open community survey online now. And if you go to the city's website at elkgrovecity.org you can follow the link to that and help contribute to our survey for this year.
John Hull: Okay, well, we'll have a whole lot more questions for Kristyn later in this episode of the City Cast, and we encourage you, our listeners, to contribute ideas for future Elk Grove City cast topics. Email us at publicaffairs@elkgrovecity.org. Again, publicaffairs@elkgrovecity.org.
When you mention the City of Elk Grove's Public Works Department, we talk about a diverse part of the city administration. This group is diverse and busy with traffic signal synchronization and major capital projects like the Kammerer Road extension to I 5, but they also cover recycling and waste management, roadway maintenance and drainage so that their role here in the city is pretty diverse. Here to tell us all about it. Jeff Werner, Public Works Director. Jeff, welcome to the Elk Grove CityCast. The Public Works Department is responsible for a whole lot here in the city. Can you share a little bit first about yourself and your role in the city? And by the way, I want to be the first to thank you for all the nice smooth roads we drive on here in Elk Grove.
Jeff Werner: Thank you, John. It's wonderful to be here with you on the podcast. Yeah, again, my name is Jeff Werner. I am the Public Works Director here for the City of Elk Grove. I've been with the city since 2005 working in various capacities in the Public Works Department. I've been a project manager junior engineer, all the way on up to a division manager, now director. So I've had a lot of experience here. I live here and raising my family here. So I'm very proud of the city and this department. And again, thanks for the recognition on our roads. We're actually, you know, very proud of our pavement management program and the award we just received. So the award itself was a sustainability award for sustainable pavement management practices. And that involves our fix it first approach to slurry sealing our roads and making sure that we don't let them get in a condition to where they're going to require more extensive or expensive roadway repairs.
John Hull: Random question that just came out of my head and I'm going to ask it. What's the worst weather for roads? Is it several days in a row with rain? Or is it several days in a row of 100-degree heat?
Jeff Werner: That's a good question. I mean, I think that the road will go through various cycles. And so the, the combination of both is probably the right answer. You know, the extreme heat coupled with the cold and wet winters will just continue to erode the materials that make up the road that consists of asphalt and aggregate. And so every single time you get water on a road that's been dried out over the summer some of those aggregates or fine materials or asphalt will start to come out of the road and it'll start to unravel. And, you know, those are the things that we deal with over the life cycle of the road. So we try to rejuvenate roads by putting those slurry seal treatments or you know, some, some additional rejuvenators if you will to try to keep those roads flexible and able to adhere and, and you know, deal with those various weather conditions.
John Hull: Okay, I just learned something. Drainage. Let's talk about drainage engineering. That's quite a responsibility for your team and I was, I would imagine that is not an easy task, especially since the western half of Elk Grove was, way before development happened, a low-lying area that would flood often in the winter. So can you tell us about the role public works plays in drainage and what that looks like?
Jeff Werner: Sure. Yeah, it's drainage engineering and maintenance, right? I mean, it's a combination of both factors that come together to provide a comprehensive system of flood prevention and you know, control of all the storm drain. So we do maintain all public storm drains across the city. This includes all underground pipes as well as our creeks and channels. We have about 530 miles of storm drain pipeline underground that's that amounts to about 2.8 million linear feet. So that's a lot to inspect and a lot to maintain.
We, our goal is really to maintain capacity to avoid flooding during storm events. So when we design subdivisions or new roadway facilities. We make sure that we have appropriate capacity to handle the runoff that's generated during a storm so that we're protecting property and life of people.
We have recently kicked off a new 10-year program that will inspect all of our storm drains over that cycle of 10 years. So we allocate a certain amount of resources each and every year to make sure that we can get to those 530 miles over the 10 year period to make sure that all of our storm drains are still in tact. If you will, we get a lot of root intrusion or other things that can affect the pipe and its capacity to convey the stormwater away from the neighborhoods and into the creeks and channels. So that's just getting started. We've purchased some really nice new equipment including a vac truck and a T.V.I. Van. So that actually sends a little robot down into the storm drainpipe, and we can see what's going on down there. We have operators that control the remote-control robot, if you will. And so that's been a great new program and a really good amenity and service that we're bringing to the community that we're really proud of.
We also just kicked off the process to update our storm drain master plan. The last update for the storm drain master plan was in 2011, and this goes back to that engineering aspect you know, that happens before the maintenance to make sure that we have an appropriately sized system and network of conveyances to get all of the floodwater away from the city and ultimately into the Sacramento River.
John Hull: You know, I read recently a similar or a related question here. I've read that you've added six new creek monitoring stations that would gauge the water levels in the future. So exactly how does that work and where are they located?
Jeff Werner: Yeah, so this is a great new program that we've implemented as well. The monitors themselves are placed within the channel. They're placed at the channel bottom, and they use a variety of technology to detect the level of the creek relative to its baseline position. They also collect other data and it's actually a really robust data set that we're going to be able to use to make some data driven decisions about the design and it will help with our storm drain master plan update as well. But really, their primary role will be to tell us what the water level is during a storm event so that we know when to dispatch a crew or, you know, be prepared to shut down a road or whatever we need to do in an emergency response situation. Historically, we've had to do that manually by sending a team or an individual out there to assess the level of the creek visually. This will allow us to do it from afar. So again, a really great tool that you may see out there at the following locations. So we have them in Laguna Creek in two locations, one at Elk Grove Florin Road and one at Bruceville Road. We also have one in Elk Grove Creek at Emerald Vista Drive. We have one in the Ehrhart Channel at Franklin Boulevard. We have one in Franklin Creek at Willard Parkway and in the Shed C Channel at Bruceville Road.
John Hull: Is that an issue? I mean, do we really have a lot of high water here in Elk Grove? I mean, I don't remember my 25 years here. ever seeing that water coming out of those creeks and really causing an issue?
Jeff Werner: No, you're right.
It gets close, but I've never seen an overtopping event in my experience as well. So, you know, we just want to make sure that we're providing this technology. And again, the data that we're going to get from these sensors is really important as well to help inform and help us understand how the system behaves.
One of the components is a time-based component that will show us how quickly the water level rises, so that we can assess the performance of the system.
John Hull: Okay, good. I'm going to go back to the roads, Jeff. How many miles of roadway is in Elk Grove?
Jeff Werner: We have 564 centerline miles, so that doesn't account for the various multiple lane roadways. When you take into account all the multiple lanes, we have about 1,200 lane miles.
John Hull: Wow, those are big numbers, but now let's ask this. How does your department go through the process of maintaining all these roads on a regular basis?
Jeff Werner: Yeah, thanks for the question, John. I'm going to go ahead and use this as an opportunity to once again highlight how fantastic our pavement management program here in the city of Elk Grove is. Our pavement condition index, which is a measure of the quality of the pavement sits at a whopping 80, which is the highest in the region. When you compare that to the rest of the roads in Sacramento County, the PCI is 52. So we're nearly 30 points higher than the rest of the county here in Elk Grove and that's really the result of the investment that's been made by the city and the city council into maintaining our roadways.
But it really starts with standards and construction of the road. Making sure that we adhere to the standards for the design and construction of our roads is really important to maintaining their quality and making sure that we don't have undue costs when we actually have, when it comes time to maintain those roads. The way we do it here in the city of Elk Grove is a really robust program. I talked about the funding and the prioritization that comes from the city council level on down. But we maintain our 93.8 million square feet of pavement with a variety of treatments. And these are all available on our website, if you wanted to go check out our pavement management program on our website, it talks about all the various treatments that we use and how we go about doing it.
But essentially, we have a residential resurfacing program that really focuses on slurry seal and some other treatments that again rejuvenate the road. We try to fix them before they get too bad and require reconstruction. That's a five-year program, so you can see what we have planned for the next five years available again on our website, as well as in our capital improvement program.
And then for our arterial roads…think Elk Grove Boulevard, Laguna Boulevard, other, other major roadways. That's not really suitable for a slurry seal. So we would look at reconstruction or overlay for those roads. And with the recent passage of Measure E, we have about two million additional dollars available each year that's dedicated to pavement maintenance.
And we're really focusing on reconstructing and or rebuilding our arterial roadway system using that $2 million of, of it's not, it's not extra money, but it's the additional funds that are coming with the prioritization through Measure E.
John Hull: That's a lot of great numbers, and let me tell you, it's money well spent. You guys are definitely taking care of our roadways.
So let's go to your the part of your department, which involves some high tech. Projects that will really help our city and has helped our city. Let's go to traffic here in Elk Grove. A few months back we had James Ashby, the city's traffic engineering division manager, who told us about a traffic signal synchronization program. So help refresh our memory about this program and how it will help with traffic flow.
Jeff Werner: Yeah, so you may remember, John, it referred, we typically refer to this as the Green Wave initiative and it synchronized the signals along Elk Grove Boulevard and Laguna Boulevard. And the goal is to really reduce travel times, improve travel time reliability. But the way I look at it is really, it's about how many red lights am I going to experience along those corridors? You know, when, when drivers are driving down these corridors if, if every other light they're hitting is red. Their driving experience isn't going to be a pleasant one, regardless of how much traffic is on the road. So, what this initiative has resulted in is a 50 percent reduction in the number of red lights motorists experience along these roadways. And a 50 percent reduction in the delay, the amount of time they spend sitting at a traffic light along these roadways. So those are some really great numbers. We're really proud of this project. And in fact we have a goal this year to start to do the coordination of our north south arterials. So think Franklin Boulevard, Bruceville Road and some of those other roads as well as some additional east west corridors throughout the city so that ultimately our network of roads is well coordinated and synchronized.
So that folks are having a better driving experience and being less frustrated out on our roadways.
John Hull: Jeff, your department will be overseeing a pretty big capital project here in Elk Grove. It's the extension of Kammerer Road all the way west to I 5. Now, maybe I was reading somebody's smart aleck social post or social media post, but I read someplace that that stretch of road would actually be a toll road Is that true?
Jeff Werner: Well now that depends John on how much you're willing to pay to drive on the road, but but no, I'm just joking.Actually, well, that's never come up That's that's not something that the city has ever considered or has has been an idea for this road
John Hull: So that was false. That was fake news. Fake news. Okay. Good to know. Yeah. But, but talk about that. How long will that take? And how extensive is that?
Jeff Werner: Yeah, so its a 3.2 mile extension of the existing Kammerer Road, which currently ends at Bruceville Road. We would take the road all the way to I 5. And this is an extremely important project for not only Elk Grove, but for the entire region. It's part of the 34-mile Capital Southeast Connector Project that's been kicking around this area for decades. We'd be, you know, we're really excited to try to bring this project here to the community.
What it will do locally is, is help reduce congestion or relieve congestion on Elk Grove Boulevard and Laguna Boulevard, our two primary east west arterials and the only roads that have a connection to I 5. So, you know, I usually think about this project and I think in terms of if I to drive into a city approaching 200, 000 population, I would expect to see you know, City of Elk Grove next eight exits. On I 5, it says City of Elk Grove next two exits, and so having that third connection into the City of Elk Grove, a city this size with plans for development in the southern part of Elk Grove, you know, this becomes a very important connection, and then regionally, you think about, you know, all of the truck trips that are entering downtown that are just trying to get up to Lake Tahoe or Folsom or El Dorado Hills having this connection and the ability to bypass that downtown corridor will help ease congestion in the downtown region, shorten trips for heavy truck traffic, et cetera, and certainly they're going to put those through Elk Grove, but we have a large industrial development area in the southern parts of the city that, that are going to benefit from this.
Think the Kubota project that just came through that was expecting this connection to ultimately come through to really support their project.
John Hull: Going to say for a business like that, they need that quick access to I 5 if they need to.
Jeff Werner: Yeah, that's that's absolutely right. I mean, I-5 is a major freight corridor for the entire western you know, part of the United States, right?
It runs all the way up through Oregon and Washington, all the way down to San Diego through Los Angeles. So it's a, it's an extremely critical freight corridor. It's, it's among the top three freight corridors in California. It's as identified by I forget the name of the law, but it's a law that was just recently passed here in California. Nevertheless. It's the same thing applies the Highway 99. It's a great stretch and having a connection between those two highways here for the industrial development that's coming to that area, as well as some of the other commercial and residential development is critical. So, you know, as far as the project timeline goes, John. We do anticipate starting construction in 2028 and completing in 2030. However, that's really dependent on funding. I'm pleased to inform you and the rest of the city that we just recently submitted a grant application to a major federal program that's part of the bipartisan infrastructure law or the Investment and Infrastructure Jobs Act that was passed a few years ago. And we're asking for a large commitment for federal dollars to help us close the gap in funding for that project and really try to bring this project to, to conclusion, which would be a great, it's a, it's a major goal of mine personally, but I think it would be a huge win for the city and the region as a whole.
John Hull: Jeff Werner, the Public Works Director here in the City of Elk Grove with us on this edition today. of the Elk Grove CityCast. And you know, we had another episode not long ago we interviewed Kimberly Taylor, your Recycling and Waste Manager. She told us about the waste collection and recycling efforts here in Elk Grove. Now I understand that the Special Waste Collection Center just celebrated its 10th anniversary on Earth Day. So could you explain why the City First of all, created this facility and how it is supported local sustainability efforts since it opened.
Jeff Werner: Sure. Yeah. The city built the Special Waste Collection Center to provide Elk Grove residents with a safe and convenient way to responsibly dispose of their household hazardous waste. This includes, you know, pesticides, batteries, paints things like that. We've now, you know, we take cardboard and appliances and old tires and, you know, we've expanded our operations significantly since it opened. But we really wanted to provide that local convenient way for folks to be environmentally responsible with their hazardous wastes. We also have a reuse room at the facility, which allows you know, reuse of these materials so they're not just being disposed of. There's an opportunity for folks to come in and, you know, use the old Windex or the old paint can that you didn't fully utilize for your project and you may be able to support someone else's project.
Some, some stats here for you because we engineers and folks here in the Public Works Department, we love stats. So since opening in 2014, the Special Waste Collection Center has collected over 594 tons of household hazardous waste 3, 250 tons of e waste. So those are your computers, keyboards, phones, et cetera and almost a thousand tons of paint. That's an incredible amount of materials that are managed safely through our hazardous household hazardous waste facility. And you know, I couldn't be more proud of that facility and really was happy to celebrate the 10 year anniversary and look forward to a long future providing the service to the residents of our city.
John Hull: When we talked about that on our earlier episode, I kind of made a smart alec remark that folks before you go buy new paint, go to the Reuse room. They're on Grant Line, basically it's Grant line and Stockton Boulevard. Go there and look around. You might find your color, you know, it might actually be there.
All right, let's call attention to some of the work you and your staff does and to do that we're going to be honoring not just public works, But all public works departments this month between May 19th through the 25th National Public Works Week. So locally the city is hosting Big Truck Day, May 22nd. So tell us about that one.
Jeff Werner: Absolutely. Yeah. National Public Works Week is a great opportunity to celebrate, you know, all the amazing work that the Public Works professionals throughout the nation and throughout the world, in fact, do you know, selflessly and kind of, you know, a lot of times without, without recognition. So we definitely want to take that opportunity to recognize our staff and all of the amazing people that deliver these amazing services to our community. Big Truck Day is a great event that we put on each and every year. This is actually our 13th annual event. It started from a very small event here in the parking lot at City Hall and has grown now to a large regional event that takes place at District56. It's catered to kids age two to, you know, six ish, but we've seen kids out there as old as 13 plus enjoying the giveaways and hopping up into the big trucks and honking horns and really learning about the public works profession.
This year will be bigger and better than ever with new trucks and equipment expanded games and activities, and lots of hands on fun. We’ll have a bunch of staff out there partnering with other regional agencies like the Sac County Water Agency, Elk Grove Water District our police department will have some exciting vehicles and equipment out there to showcase so, you know, we encourage the entire community to come out there and we'll be ready for you. It's a great time.
John Hull: Jeff. The city has a cute video from last year's event on the city website. It was great to watch the kids climb into the cabs of those city trucks, honk the horn, do all that neat stuff. Our city. But one thing that video showed me and kind of, you know, I think we know this, but this video helped me realize the city has indeed a fleet of vehicles, quite a fleet of vehicles, and it's your department that maintains it. So how extensive is that fleet?
Jeff Werner: Yeah, so the Public Works Department does maintain our entire fleet of vehicles, including the police department's vehicles. All told, we have 254 vehicles and wheel-based equipment. My fleet manager would be mad at me if I didn't highlight the fact that we have more than just vehicles, right? So everything wheel based here is maintained by the Public Works Department. That includes currently only two electric vehicles. But I do want to point out that we're currently in the process of developing our plans for putting in electric vehicle infrastructure throughout our city facilities that will allow us to convert or transition our fleet to electric fleet in accordance with California's advanced clean fleet regulations. And so while our fleet of EVs right now is currently small, we do have plans to transition that our entire fleet to electric in the future. First things first though, we have to have the chargers and the infrastructure in place in order to you know, provide the necessary fuel in this case, you know, battery charging to meet the work demands of our fleet.
John Hull: Well, you know, this has been a great discussion with Jeff Werner of the Public Works Department here in the city of Elk Grove. Jeff, anything that we missed or anything you'd like to share or tell the community about the Public Works Department?
Jeff Werner: Well, John, I think we covered a lot, but, you know, we're really just scratching the surface and if we had more time, I'd love to sit here for hours and brag about our department, which I'm extremely proud of, if you can't tell, but I'll just point out that we have a really great website with lots of information about our services and programs you know, informing the community.
I mentioned our payment management website that can tell you everything about, you know about what we do and when we're going to do it you know, our traffic website, our drainage website, we have everything there is documented and available. And certainly if anyone has any questions you know, the staff is listed there as well to reach out to.
And finally, I'll mention our See Click Fix app, so you know, while we have a great department here we, we can't see everything all the time, and so we rely on the community to give us feedback and report any issues that they have, and they can do that through the See Click Fix application on your Android or iPhone, or you can do it through the city's website as well.
So I just encourage folks in the community, if you care about your community, let us know what's happening out there We'll be out there to fix it. We're extremely responsive department. We pride ourself on being responsive to the community and that's it.
John Hull: Okay, I would encourage everybody to get that See Click Fix app Because it's it's amazing how how you can keep track of things that are going on around town through that little app. But Jeff Werner, it's been a great discussion here on the CityCast and you're talking about all the inner, real inner works of Elk Grove. And I want to thank you and your staff for doing just a great job.
Jeff Werner: Thanks for having me, John.
John Hull: It's time for our rapid-fire segment, where I put Kristyn on the spot with questions about Elk Grove. If you have any questions you want to hear answers for, please email us at publicaffairs@elkgrovescity.org. Again, publicaffairs@elkgrovescity.org. All right, Kristyn, ready for the first one here?
Kristyn Laurence: Let's go!
John Hull: I don't know if this is fake news or not, but okay. It was reported in one local media source that Project Elevate, the mixed-use project at Big Horn and Elk Grove Boulevard, was sold to a developer. So, is that true?
Kristyn Laurence: So there were some really crazy rumors kind of going around about this project that it was done for, right? Like it was, it was dead on arrival and that's simply not the case. There were some setbacks to the project for sure and staff had to step back and reevaluate how to move forward with the project. But we have since partnered with a new company. So at the April 24th meeting, the Elk Grove City Council, they approved a letter of intent with a company called CenterCal Properties, and they're based out of El Segundo, and they will be working with the city to develop Project Elevate, and what that is is an urban mixed use project on city owned 20 acre parcel. It's just north of District 56, off of Elk Grove Boulevard and Civic Center Drive. And this group has a lot of mixed-use properties in other places in the country, including Southern California, and we think that they're going to be a great partner. They submitted a proposal that kind of stood out from all the rest. They're planning to develop 500, 000 square feet, and it's valued at about a $170 million project, but it would be building a combination of about 200 apartments, about 10, 000 square feet of Class A office space, about 80, 000 square feet of high end retail, and a 100 plus room elevated hotel, and this would all be on a half acre.Sorry. It's, it's surrounded by a half acre village park with building heights that are up to four stories. So it's going to feel a bit more urban in our suburban space. That is the vision kind recreating a center of town or a new center. And 15 percent of the apartment units are going to get set aside for affordable housing. But it is a project that is probably lengthy in the development timeline. But they could be starting construction as early as 2026 with the parts of that. You know, the, the market being what it is, I'm sure that, you know, this is one of those that the timing and duration for how long it will take to develop is really dependent on market conditions. But we think that this is a great new partner that will help kind of create the vision that the council and the city had in conjunction with the community when they were envisioning this project. Something that's a bit different than what we have anywhere else in the city. And as our economic development director likes to say, it elevates our living, dining, shopping experiences in Elk Grove. Hence his code Project Elevate name. So we're excited to be working with Centercal and They'll be providing more updates to the council as they continue to progress with the project.
John Hull: Sounds like quite an ambitious project. And one other thing, just attached to that, it's right there by District56. It's right there by some other, is it kind of like the city wants to sort of centralize I think you said it just a moment ago. Try to centralize everything into a, you know, a city center, if you will, that this is the core of Elk Grove.
Kristyn Laurence: I think the intention is trying to create more of those landmark type spaces. So Elk Grove, you know, has a good amount of sprawl to tell you the truth. Like, so we're trying to create these spaces that are gathering places for people that are, are landmark worthy, I guess, and how you would attribute them. It would not be the only space like that. I think that there's been a lot of work and investment put into the old town area or the historic district. So we're just trying to create these spaces where people can consider them being gathering places or landmark spaces within the city.
John Hull: Okay, thank you. Here's my next question. The animal services team recently put out a call for donations. to fill the Pet Food Pantry. So could you tell us A little bit about this program and what the community can do to help.
Kristyn Laurence: Sure. So this is a really terrific program that has been functioning for quite some time. It is not feeding the shelter animals. I want to be clear about the clarification there. The Pet Food Pantry is based at the Elk Grove Animal Shelter, but it's intended to provide assistance and support for low income families, for seniors, for our unhoused population, for those that are may, that may be struggling to feed themselves, let alone their pets. We want to make sure that everyone has nourishing food and the ability to get that food. And so our animal services team has asked for a call for donations for the pet food pantry to restock the shelves. It's looking a little bit like Old Mother Hubbard's cupboard over there. So they are accepting donations at four locations. They did not really establish an end date for this but I think that we're really looking at like during the month of May, we would really love to see as many donations as possible coming in. But you can drop off donations during normal business hours at the Elk Grove Animal Shelter, which is 9150 Union Park Way, here at Elk Grove City Hall on Laguna Palms Way. And then one of our active partners, Pets2Go, is accepting donations at both of their locations. So they're at Laguna Main Street and also at Elk Grove Boulevard and Waterman in one of those shopping centers. So, we would encourage people to support the Pet Food Pantry and really help some of our neediest residents and four legged friends.
John Hull: Okay, thank you. If you have any questions for Kristyn, please email them to us here at publicaffairs@elkgrovecity.org. You know, Kristyn, one thing real quick I know we're putting the CityCast on many different podcast platforms, but how important is it for our, our residents to subscribe to the to the podcast?
Kristyn Laurence: Well, algorithms being what they are, I don't understand all of the technology, but we can reach a broader audience if we have the support of our listeners. And we really do appreciate the people that have adopted listening to our CityCast on a regular basis by adding it to their podcast queue. And I know I have some several podcasts in my Apple podcast queue that I look forward to seeing pop up. And if you subscribe, then it automatically downloads that for you. And we also really need people to rate and review our podcast because we do want to hear from people. and what their thoughts are and how we can do better. So, I know we've been working really hard on trying to share as much information as we can. We would love to get more feedback and suggestions. I know we push out that publicaffairs@elkgrovecity.org. email. I can probably count on one hand how many emails we've gotten so far. So I would really love to hear from more people on what their thoughts are about the podcast. I want to thank the people that have sent us emails. I think for the most part, we've gotten some really complimentary comments back from residents and some suggestions on future episodes that we're certainly taking into advisement, but you know rate review and subscribe is what we're hoping for, please.
John Hull: Okay, excellent. Excellent advice. Kristyn, thanks again. For Kristyn Laurence. I'm John Hull. Thanks for tuning in to the Elk Grove Citycast.
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