Longmont official touts risk collaboration, transit initiatives

LONGMONT — Longmont will be the first city in the nation to join a United Nations program aimed at helping governments collaborate to reduce risks associated with natural disasters, health emergencies and other crises, City Manager Harold Dominguez said Thursday.

During his second annual State of the City address at the Longmont Museum, Dominguez also said the city would launch a “microtransit” program in December to provide services in areas not served by Regional Transportation District buses.

Dominguez said the opportunity to join the program launched by the U.N.’s Office of Disaster Risk Reduction came through a recent visit to the city by Deanne Criswell, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“There is not a city in the United States that has been in this program,” Dominguez said. “FEMA and the state have asked that Longmont go into the process. So we’ll be the first city in the United States to be part of the United Nations’ Making Cities Resilient 2030 program.”

Dominguez said Longmont could become a “hub” of information about successfully coping with disasters.

“We will move through that process in terms of working with other communities when they’re approaching projects when they’re looking at things like flood control and how we’re approaching sustainability,” he said.

“This is a pretty cool deal, as a city manager, to have the director of a federal agency say we want your city, based on the work that all these folks have been doing, to become the only city in the United States working with the United Nations on something like this.

“It’s also a testament to you all as a community, because you supported our work on flood control and all these other issues,” he said. “When you vote on a project to allow us to manage flood control, when you vote on a project to allow us to secure our water resources, that’s giving us the ability to then have this kind of success that people are seeing.

“It is a community connection, it is an organizational connection, and it takes all of us to do this work.”

According to the Making Cities Resilient 2030 website, “cities across the globe are challenged by increasing disaster, climate and other risks such as the COVID-19 pandemic. We can no longer afford a hazard-by-hazard risk-reduction approach. Risk cannot be departmentalized or made the responsibility of just one public service provider or responder. Local planning bodies with multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder representation must be involved. And cities must plan not just to reduce risk, but to invest in resilience building: allowing systems, services and people to respond to crisis, cope with shocks and stresses, and rebound. Resilience building is a long-term progress. Cities should start to invest in resilience now to ensure cities are a safe place for citizens.

“MCR2030 is a place where cities can find guidance and support to enhance understanding of risk reduction and resilience, to improve strategic planning to reduce risk and build resilience, and to take actions and progress along the resilience roadmap,” the website stated.

Describing the new transportation service, Dominguez said, “microtransit will be active in our community” starting Dec. 9.

“You can call and it will pick you up,” he said. “It will be a lower cost than what we’d normally have. This is part of integrating into our transit system.”

The microtransit plan has been described as not only providing service to destinations from areas within Longmont not served by RTD’s fixed routes but also as a first- and last-mile option to connect with existing scheduled RTD and FLEX buses. It’s designed as a hybrid between Flexride, which allows customers to call and request rides, and ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft.

Riders will be able to call or use an app to request a ride and be picked up within 15 to 20 minutes by a six- or eight-passenger vehicle.

The city is funding the program’s startup with $450,000 it received from RTD last fall and $1 million in federal Community Project Funding secured in April by U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Colo., who also spoke at Thursday’s State of the City event.

Dominguez described the system as part of the city’s “holistic” approach to transportation. He described the current construction along Coffman Street as the “foundation of where we’re going in terms of our transportation system. It’s really the first time we’re intentionally designing something that’s looking at all forms of transportation — bus, bike, pedestrian, cars — and you see it throughout the community. This is an integrated model.”

Regarding the proposed Front Range Passenger Rail project, Dominguez said, “we are in the process of acquiring properties so that we can build the First and Main transit station. We’re finishing acquisition, hopefully, in the next couple of months. We’ve had a meeting this week and we’re heading into design, and we’ll have other meetings talking about how to bring organizations together.”

He said the city is contractually obligated with RTD to have the station completed by 2027.

“In talking to the state,” he said, “the reason why they wanted a stop in Longmont is that they wanted a different view of transit-oriented development from what you would typically see in Denver or Aurora or larger cities. They wanted to show what’s happening here and how we’re preparing for it.”

Longmont is a “linchpin” in Front Range passenger rail, he said, because it’s at the end of RTD’s proposed Northwest Rail line and the beginning of the extension of passenger rail service to Loveland, Fort Collins and, eventually, Cheyenne.

“When you look at where we stand in terms of a transit center with access to rail,” Dominguez said, “we’re further along than any of the other northern communities, and time is of the essence.”

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