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diamond for communicating with parents regarding our exciting opportunity to have our new teacher West Marchena who is part time at Central now moved to a full-time music position here in the district and we're really excited about that he's transitioning over to huckleberry and still working with some of his assignments over the center school and a whole plan in place the principals and it work with the parents on this and as I understand it we will still have a kindergarten performance and we prior to the April break so Wes is working with the kids on that so it seems like we've had some of the transition and I think the principles for their work on that and very happy to see Wes with us a little time now the only one was carolyn dr Angela will be taking over as the full-time principal secretary at the high school and while we're excited for the high school with Carolyn going over there mark will be in very good hands she will be leaving her her post under mr.
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post in the finance department in the great work she's done there so we certainly will miss her at TSO I do have to give a big thank you to Lisa Genovese the former principal secretary at the high school she's been doing double duty she is not transitioning to the Dale Ren's job they'll recently retired and while she's been doing Dale Ren's job for the two assistant principals she's also been the secretary for the principal for the last six weeks she's done both without complaint a heckuva job and we're really proud of her thank her for all her service and continued service going forward so you just wanna comment on Oh sick so is there plans for replacement or miss Virgie that's the plans that are going on right now right now we're transitioning and we're also working with we we did yeah we did post a part-time job but we don't have anybody at this point we have some before but the concern for that is finding a certified music teacher for a part-time position for the end of the school year a lot of the cases would take those kind of jobs coming out of college are a little mr.
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Southern College lightweight certified so we do have subbed in there and we're working on it and again the thank you for reminding me morning the substitute at center school was the same substitute that was at public when this is like this without so no no that wasn't it it's not same so I thought it was okay we have something we have a substitute will be on to new business to see my trip recommend motion that the board approve a trip for the Odyssey of the mind team to travel to Michigan State University in East Lansing Michigan from Tuesday May 21st two of nineteen through Sunday May 26 2009 teenth participate in the world finals competition as requested by IOC the mine advisor Sarah Amaya hi I'm yes Oh second all right hi oh so I'm super grateful to be back here again we had a wonderfully successful year with how to save in mind ten teams consisting of 62 students competed this year action last Saturday and seven of the time one in first place so I'm here once again asking for permission to allow these students to travel to East Lansing to fundraise their hearts out for the next eight weeks and to go out of the time their life that's congratulations thank you else amazing this does it tie or doesn't surpass it Hill's record so I think we're filled the most myrtles ever sent is six teams at one time and two years ago when we sent six it was six out of 12 teams that qualified it was the largest representation for the state of Connecticut I think the team closest to us this year is 14 so I so like we're 20% of every of the state of Connecticut which is which ability one is very small community that's a tremendous shout out to all of our students and all of the corners yes isn't it six months worth of hard work but it is it's just it's a major testament so that the kids the parents the parents the coaches they the support of the school district they it's it is not it doesn't operate on its own so we're very very fortunate and very very excited any other questions okay all right well thank you congratulations again good luck and I expect to see some chickens in my yard yeah well yes yes you were checking us on our way yes thank you guys thanks for hard work we appreciate it all right next we have the next-gen accountability report 1718 oh that's just an action so that repeat you are up good evening you have a packet which has the PowerPoint slices up there's a lot of numbers and one of the first things that I'm going to show you is a very brief video that really succinctly explains several of the slides but I included because I know that some of this stuff is like foreign language to folks I included all the slides with the description so you would have it and be able to contact me if you had any questions [Music] it is a picture of this condition we're gonna kill a lotta Considine weeds in this purse and it didn't use this waters [Music] therefore when it comes to a nine-week schools and districts Connecticut uses eat water and moralistic approach called the next generation basis poor grace of the 12 key leaders these indicators focus not just on academic achievement contest they also build this dynamic growth chronic absenteeism college and career readiness graduation will secondary interest physical fitness and participation some thoughts even when it comes to test scores the next generation of ability system looks at things for students in grades 4 rewards and Harry Cornish this means the schools with historically lower achene students system if they help their students grow we're students in grades 11 and 12 because different students show their abilities in different ways the system reward schools will soon speed benchmark scores on any exam not just the SAT but else will be a CT Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate dis or some schools are using this system to identify areas that media through the state uses the system to identify the certain schools that are doing well and those that may need resources and support for additional information on the next generation accountability system please visit the ED site data so the next slide I'm going to show you are basically restating what Ajith had said in that video and I will be happy to take questions on any of these but if there aren't any questions I'm going to keep going so ok great so SD state of the accountability system has several purposes help us track progress help schools make improvements show the state where towns and school districts might need some help and we've received that help in the past of their high school recognize the schools that are having successes and so that we can recognize our own successes as a district and it's it's a system that's trying to be more transparent than our previous system was and it's also designed and at be approved by the federal Department of Education because it's designed to meet all the federal and state guidelines and these are some of the things that as these the 12 indicators that he identified are ones that we look at we recently have a meeting with all principals and little tech all the scores or those indicators is if you look at our Brookfield report right now you will notice that one of the areas that we have concerns with is physical education it was it was a number that you know caused our total number to be lower although our 82 27 is a very respectable number and when I saw it if you look down at number 11 we have seven even though we're above the state 70 point eight percent of the points that were available were their place that we learned and we pride ourselves in having very excellent athletic programs and our sports teams are very good so I was like what the heck is this all about and so Steve did some work in looking at some of the assessments and what I want to tell you is that we've already taken corrective action we understand why we had such a low score when we think that as as a district that's an area that we shouldn't be low we should be well above the state so the first thing that I can tell you is that the tests of the students take for this particular indicator has four parts and we generally do very very well on three of them and can you guess what the one is that we don't do well on upper body strength and so the the phys ed department in our curriculum revision has already taken that into consideration to improve opportunities for students to build upper body strength the second area of concern for this year in looking at our performance was the way the test was the test window existed so participation is critical and I'm going to talk about that in a minute with regards to the rest of the test but participation is actually figured in to the calculation of the percentage points that you earn so when we have students who are enrolled in school who are exempt from phys ed for time period for a concussion protocol for a broken leg for whatever that goes against us which doesn't make much sense so they are not there the window for next year the the directors for physical physical education athletics for the area had a meeting and what's going to happen next year is that window for students is going to be the entire year so if you look at the high school we have this children don't take this at at the middle school as well all year long and so when they have is that they have a broken leg or a broken arm or whatever is precluding them from participating in gym we will have our our teachers of visible education and under our directors watchful eye watching those students so that we can have them take the assessment even if they're not enrolled in visit when they become eligible to be assessed so that that score in itself really hurt us in the our total score but we did look into it immediately because it really should be a no brainer basically if you look at these scores you see that you see what in the far right column the state average percentage points earned that's in blue and then the column right before that is the percentage of the points that we earned so you can see how well we did benchmark with the state average points earned a thing that's really important because we're talking about growth the different and graduation rate gaps you will recall some of you as parents some of those board members that several years ago we had a very large gap at the high school which caused ice in ela each main high-risk students and non-irish students and that caused the high school to be identified as a focus school so that was a gap I'm happy to tell you that we have no gaps in achievement this year and in fact I'm gonna be talking a little bit later about how how much high school has improved because there are there are five total categories that schools can be put into categories one two and three are the main categories that schools will fall into based on how many points they score and then there's categories four and five which are special categories that the state assigns you to and the high school was assigned to category four because of the gap that we have so hold on to that information if you this is the the report that shows you that we have in the final column is there a gap or an outlier we have across the district we have no gaps or outliers in ela math or graduation rate you will notice that there is an absence of data in the row for science performance that's because the science test is not does not cap did not count last year because it was the implementation of NGSS we were going to pile it before but last year everybody in the state took that test and since it was the first implementation no scores that reported the data were used by the state to analyze where a cut scores should be etcetera one of the reasons that I'm really been a proponent of providing our teachers with the professional development and the materials that they need with the Smithsonian science is because we need those to be in alignment with the standards for the science for the state and also those numbers are going to be filled in in in that room next year and we don't have the we don't have the opportunity to professionally develop our teachers and provide them with a curriculum and curriculum tools that align with the standards it will make it very difficult for our students to perform well at the bottom of this slide this is something that is very important for folks to understand this expectation is that 95% of students purchase at least participate in the assessment if you have less than 90 percent participation rate that does not affect your total score that 82.7 nothing was detracted because we don't have participation but here's what we have to help everybody understand that affects the category that your school is put into so while our high school was didn't make level one two or three several years ago that got put into a special category for for having a huge gap it was I think I think it was I can't remember the number one hundred thirty fourth from the bottom in the state in terms of the gap so there were only 133 schools that had a larger gap in in in ela so our stands for for the high school places Brookfield High School in category one the highest category that you can be in however because I sound like usual however because we have not achieved the correct participation percentage we get dinged and they get downgraded to level two that's what people look at that's what real estate agents show people what they don't show them all those numbers on that other page because nobody's going to look at those but they tell them what category your school is in so the same thing happened for our middle school our middle school is in the lowest of the three categories that you can get put in with unless you're put in four or five for other problems because of participation they were level two so this participation piece is really critical and I would love to if people are listening or people talk to each other people who typically opt their their students out we would love to meet with those those parents and learn more about why they are compelled to opt their children out it's their right obviously to do what they see fit but we would like to help them understand more about us back and more about common core and why it's so important to us as a district to to have all children participate so we get a really honest picture of how our whole district is performing that informs the work that we do with teachers that informs curriculum that informs the resources that we provide for teachers and unfortunately if we don't have participation our schools will get downgraded and people looking at our data who are interested in purchasing a home in Brookfield will will not know the true story because they'll only be looking at a number that doesn't really represent what we have in Brookfield right um you know that didn't participate what percentage of those were students that had opted out I'm sorry so so let all the students that didn't participate do you know how clique is that whole you know those are opt outs those are opt outs some of the student is absent those that yeah those numbers are on this chart reflect pop house you're not believing the point the principal's do their best to work with the families and try to assuage them of any concerns and this kind of thing the parents to what mornings Thomas are different reasons decided about again we would relish an opportunity to have further conversation about that and explain as that gurus is playing tonight the importance of the assessment on this slide you can see the accountability index at the bottom for the district which is what that big report card showed but this is breaking giving you breaking out for the individual schools I also tell you that for a center school the only they they don't take any of the tests they're not graduating they're not doing any of those other things there so they're basically looking at attendance chronic absenteeism and they don't get categorized because if you are only scored on a hundred points or less of the total points that are available in the system you don't get categorized and that's typical for lower elementary schools you see huckleberry musketeer or fill high school the accountability index indices for those schools the participation huckleberry did not have a gap with participation just the middle school in high school but there was no achievement gap in any of the schools between the high knees and the non-id students which is a first for us which we're very proud of and those are categories I already explained this slide just shows the last of the current year when I say current year I'm talking about last year's data and the two previous years and if you look at under achievement gap you see there we had yes yes no and we've never had a graduation right gap you know that we do well with our students graduating on time and you can see that participation has been a problem for the past three years so this is something that if anybody has any ideas to help us with I'm all ears but we would love to be able to explain to parents about common core about us back and about the relationship of s back to the SAT so if you want if you would like to know about how we compare to the other schools in our dearth this is this chart gives you that information statistically speaking a point above a plus or minus one is considered by the state to be no change so those are the 21 21 schools in our district and we if you look at the mean median and mode and you consider the plus or minus one we're smack in the middle and we do believe that we're going to see some nice increases over the next couple years with all of the curriculum work there doing because we are becoming more and more aligned to the standards with both our instruction and our assessment so when we looked we sat and we looked at all of the principles met with us we met in central office and we talked about you know what are our strengths and opportunities based on these data and other data that we have and in terms of academics we our strengths our curriculum revision the what we've invested in curricular tools early literacy skills in our students the professional learning and the fact that we have stayed the course of the strategic appearance plan the opportunities that we have based on the data and looking at last year's data as well as - the first one is to improve our science instruction and be in line with NGSS as I referenced before we we have definitely some growing room in mathematics and one of the one of the things that we felt would be important would be to have st map brought in to provide students with that some temporal spatial learning opportunity to increase their understanding of mathematics and the opportunity that we have to increase our early literacy skills all the way through grade five so the foundational skills that are in a common core that's with the word analysis curriculum tools for fourth and fifth grade which we have in the budget with regard to talent we've been doing a lot of professional learning we've worked with collegial calibrations through region learning with our administrators for the past three years we have a walkthrough plan that you'll be later we have elevated the human resources department and have a director we are continuing to improve our onboarding process as you know we did some rework last year with the administrators and we had Special Education reorganization while there are always bumps in the road when you change things we really believe that these are an asset to our talent Department and what we have opportunities we have discussed our our vision for having a visual and performing arts person district person and a civic and community partnership leadership person as we endeavor to improve our social studies program and have more civic engagement opportunities for students and we with regard to the challenges that we feel in the growth that we can do in mathematics we believe that one of the things that we should be looking at in the future our tutors to support the filling the gaps for students in that area with regard to culture and climate we're very proud of the work that we've been doing with social emotional learning and ruler we are going to have a three-day conference in the beginning of April here with our our faculty and folks from surrounding schools that were invited and creating trauma sensitive schools will be doing training in that we're collaborating with the book field early learning professionals with regard social-emotional learning a high school degree shalls' challenge and we have kindness initiatives at both the high school and the middle school and our elementary children are always kind are they and unified sports what you heard about the opportunities we wanted to start with a parent University this year dr.
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pearl brought that forward in last year's budget talks and we probably didn't do it where we still have that on the burner and then we really would like to see more participation in the assessment with regard to operations the folks under Ken's watchful eye have been doing great job with munis you heard about time and attendance you know about the new school project in the new school configuration and we are continuing our work on the employee self-serve portal our opportunities which we've been looking into when you've heard about our breakfast program and what dr.
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Brule refers to as small our regionalization but I like Jeff's regionalism terms for efficiencies and purchasing transportation and you know that's you know that we're not just saying that I mean Jeff came tonight and talked about it it's a reality so that's questions I'm happy to take them and if you you know when you go home and you look at these numbers if you have any questions I can try and answer them I know Rose and I have communicated and there's a really nice easy to read I think manual that explains in more depth than you've ever wanted to know about about this test but thank you for your attention Thanks progress tickets right so the students at the high school opting out if I actually had a one particular success or multiple tests I'm gonna turn that over to mr. moment the scope of the issue yeah the some of these high school really look at participation numbers you lookin got one grade level of class are you talking about we were I believe our individual participation numbers for the SAT or somewhere in the 90s I want to say 91 92 so like 3 or 4 percentage points short what ends up becoming 8 kits or nine kids who didn't take the test and they're talking about si si that could be for anybody for different reasons kids that were out sick we have kids that are just not there we have kids that you know we have some students who are technically enrolled as 11th graders right because they didn't have enough credits earned to actually take also the last year they were loved craters there's still 11 craters this year because they have enough credits there maybe a quarter crash or the state can so does some 11th graders to get those kids to sit and take the SAT again is a real challenge you know and then you balance that do we hit the participation of numbers hit that up and then run the risk of the possibility that I'm taking the SAT and not doing well so it's a real delicate balance Act we're working really hard on Jewish IDs working with Maine in particular is the new principal here at the high school to figure out some strategies to make sure we get to that 95 percent room easily seems to have an NGSS though I'm not sure how that's going to factor in with a whole new test I don't know that those numbers that you saw really are SAT yeah and while this celebratory night we don't like the self-aggrandizing really important to talk about that Jeevan cabinets it's closing the incredible work that's going on in all the schools especially the high school in labels the focus school four years ago and the work that's been done with the the the Sea Grant if we can't hit the big state grant that my mark put together and all the PD this one is that and all the effort you can't make teachers enough and the administration enough we're working on that do a great job yeah we have two more years of that grants how incredible we have the a walkthrough protocol project thank you so first I have to say that is a Brookfield resident and as an educator here in the district about well here's there's a lot to be proud of this has really been a celebratory night so to speak so a lot to be proud of in any event I'm excited to have the opportunity to present on the walk through process the administrative team and I have been in working on this since the spring of last year I entitled this presentation the power of the walkthrough process because indeed the northen process does have the potential to be very powerful in impacting teaching and learning especially when it's done in the context of the continuous improvement planning process which is exactly how we're doing it here in Brookfield all right so what is a walk through a walk through is really just brief classroom visitations it has a specific focus and a definite set of look force unlike a classroom observation in which you're really getting a single classroom snapshot the district walkthroughs really present an opportunity for us to get a district-wide snapshot which is a bigger picture of of many small spec loss snapshots so it's really a strategy for providing the school or district in this case not an individual teacher with non-evaluative feedback so with that you'll notice this slide has a huge exclamation point so the old walkthroughs are but what our walk there is not they are absolutely not a teacher evaluation tool so I'm going to be really clear about that the focus of these data walks is really in the understanding of the supporting the improvement of teaching for learning and again not evaluation of the performance of individual teachers so the big why right you talked about what they are well they're not but why are we embarking on this so again we began our district walkers in the spring of last year and one of the reasons that we began this was because in our district implementation plan we specified that the gradual release of responsibility model is the adopted framework here in Brookfield so we really started this burrow through process was born out of the adult action to be able to measure the efficacy of a professional learning relative to the gradual release of responsibility additionally we wanted to measure the efficacy of a collegial calibration work that we've been doing with were actually our third year I believe with revision training with the administrative team in order to build in excuse me administrator capacity as instructional leaders that has changed agents in the advancement negative teaching and learning so in order to make sure that we're actually seen changes in student learning outcomes and engagement and instructional practice we need to get into classrooms to see what was actually happening in the classrooms were the professional learning initiatives actually going to classroom for the student learning outcomes additionally we wanted to make sure that we were also seeing the quality of the feedback and the supports that the administrators were providing for teachers relative to the observation performance observations of teachers so what is the process first what we did is we identified our focus so our focus was with the gradual release a responsibility model and the active active learning environment as well we then how to identify the participants and what were the team's look like so the participants were the administrators and we had six teams three administrators from each team except pointing at four people on I'm we then identified of the data collection tool so the data collection tool I'll show you in a moment was really just taking the components of the gradual release model and the components of the active learning environment which really comes from the Connecticut court teaching the Common Core teaching and that is also the instrument that we use for the performance of practice observation of teachers and it made sense to use those components since we were using those components for a collegial calibration work with revision learning to really unpack that rubric as administrators to calibrate with one another on what is effective teaching look like and how can we prepare effective and quality feedback offer teachers so then we created a schedule the schedule is really a two week window three days in each week so about 60 s in observation in our offers and the schedule is such that we do be in classrooms for about five minute clips at peace we have again three three three administrators on each team so you had AM schedule and p.m.
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schedule we had three teams going out morning 13cm afternoon in about ten classrooms per team so we were doing about thirty thirty walk throughs per team per day communication of the plan this was pretty critical adopted Burrell with email D of the staff on Tuesday prior to our two-week window commencing communicating that you know this is the window of time attach the checklist so that everybody could see exactly what the tool was the investors were using in the walkthroughs and also putting in bold the way that this is absolutely not something that would be part of evaluation in any way shape or form that it was really about the administrators the building capacity of administrators to really impact you know teaching and learning collecting the data so then the walkthroughs commenced and we went into classrooms and collected data using the warfare tool so what the tool is on a Google Form again I'll show you that moment and we basically just went in with iPads the checklist was right iPad in our teens after doing a walkthrough looking to see whether or not certain components again of the gradual release and happy learning environment or observed we just you know check them off if we observe them the groupings that we observed and then he also asks student engagement questions and again I'll share the checklist with you and on it so after of the tuak window ended we got together as a diminisher council team where we analyzed reflected on the data and discussed you know any kind of trends or patterns that were emerging from the data we shared the aggregate data and discussed data and trends with staff so that the principals basically the building principals on a Wednesday afternoon after the Administrative Council team met would share the aggregate data with the with the staff so in terms of an action plan the next steps at the Administrative Council meeting when we would analyze and reflect on the data we also discuss and possible adult actions that could occur within buildings these walkthroughs are really kind of like benchmark assessments if you will where you're kind of just really taking the temperature and seeing if there are any red flags relative to you know any of the components of gradual release or the active learning environment in terms of components of the learning that we had on the checklist again I'll show you Don it and then we decided whether or not there were reasons to do some additional Diagnostics what we see in certain you know trends in certain areas and then building principles which share that with their of their teams back at the ranch so to speak whether it was through data themed process or climate learning teams whatever teams at the different schools to discuss whether or not there were some additional things that needed to happen at the building level and I'll share with you some of the things that did happen a little bit at the building with a little a later slide and then obviously after the plan so let me show you what they look through to look like let's see if this works all right so he's nice some technology works Thank You Erica so this is the walkthrough tool that we used and again dr.
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Brown shared the world through tool with the staff you know as I said at least a week before the window open it starts out as you can see I'm not going to read it to you but with a brief purpose right we always want to start with why are we doing things and then there's some demographic information here time to day grade level subject area number of adults in the classroom excluding the teacher you'll notice teacher name is not on the checklist we're not getting any data at all that could bring us back to an any individual teachers classroom hour we had about three hundred five data points last spring close to 306 I believe the minute that the beginning of the year and unfortunately due to the snow we had 185 data points in the middle of the year so as you could see there were no teacher names it would be really difficult for us to try to figure out which teacher which you know was in what class or when you have 300 data points so that was not our goal it wasn't the purpose of this so you can see the following elements of instruction for active learning were observed and again these are really components or attributes if you will that were coming really from the Common Core teaching record for effective instruction because it made sense that it was an alignment with oral-b they're doing with the Collegium calibration work as well and the room beans again was a whole group small group teacher led students because that gave us information about the gradual release of responsibility model and then we have some student engagement questions we really tried to get to at least three students but in the five minutes sometimes it wasn't possible and if the teacher was doing direct instruction or modeling sometimes we didn't want to interrupt that instruction we added these student engagement questions because certainly we have understood and have been working with teachers as well as students to help really understand that students really need to be active participants in their learning and the work that we're doing with Murray Alcock you know curriculum development work is really helping us to to really get that message out and also to again help students understand their role in that prop in their own learning so this is just the checklist and that's pretty much it on that let's see if I can get back into the slides so last but not least I wanted to share this slide with you because it kind of goes with the rest of the celebrations if you will for the evening one of the areas that we have identified in the spring of last year as well as in the beginning of the year this year as an area that was least observed in a classroom so it was more of a trend that we had noticed was the setting of the lesson purpose it was one of the areas of components on our checklist that we noticed was least observed as a pattern across across schools in the district so in terms of the action plan if you recall this library talked about the different steps that we took after analyzing and you know reviewing and discussing the data one of the action steps that was taken at the buildings was to do a little bit more PD on learning targets and success criteria with teachers and then teachers certainly working with students to really kind of help them understand their role as to why are we setting why am I talking about learning target why is it important to have one why is it important to understand the broader context of learning and why is it important to understand whether you have learned what you're supposed to learn in terms of the success criteria and it was really nice to go back into the schools in the middle of there and really hear the the setting of the lesson purpose really clearly articulated and also to be able to see it increases you can see here of 16 percentage points of students being able to clearly their response clearly reflected the learning target and then the the why are you learning was an increase of 15 percentage points and how do you know if you know is an increase of 12 percentage points so that was really a nice celebration and again kind of goes to why I indicated the beginning that I entitled this the power of the walkthrough process because this really showed how powerful it can be when you work within a continuous improvement process to really impact teaching and learning so this was really I think a cause for celebration because I know that the building principals have worked hard with their staff and the teachers as well to really understand learning targets and to help students understand their role as what we're working on with our curriculum development work to create self-regulating right self navigating and self monitoring students I don't think I thought there's something right but we're gonna get so that's so that's it I thank you of your time if you do have any questions or comments butwhat's I'm happy to hear them if you can't think of any questions now because I know this bit on a long evening for Souls and we'll day from so you can certainly call me or email me and I'd be happy to talk to you more about the process me personally or the oh yeah so we were in the classroom for five minutes Pervis Pervis right that's why it's a walk through is it is great but I have to tell you ju really do get some good information you're not going to see a lot in terms of length lesson progression necessarily in the five minutes but you do get to see depending on what given time that lesson that you come in you might be able to see where the lesson purpose I was either clearly articulated but even if you don't see it necessarily expressed you know you know you know I couldn't eat the beginning when it's a lesson a lesson purpose the setting the lesson purpose is something that really can be articulated and will add multiple times you know in the session and when you speak to the students you can clearly see whether or not they are reflecting the learning purpose which is the whole reason that we talk to the kids right because you can't really you can't really go to a feel for student learning outcomes unless you talk to the learners right because I could be teaching and if you're just in that will be compliant stage you might not be learning how many classrooms so um yeah so in the in the spring of last year we had 300 I think about 306 classrooms that we were in and in the beginning here we also went to about 300 and unfortunately snow was on a friendís winter and we had 185 yeah and I have to say also that we really as the administrative team we've had conversations about this it's really really foster a collaborative you know calibration if you will around you know the the again the CCT rubric to really help us work with one another to really understand what effective you know instruction looks like and the relationship between teaching and learning that cause-and-effect relationship so so we've kind of bonded around the waters so deep like administrators from the high school might go to the elementary Thank You Jenna exactly right and that was that's been awesome as well I know that you know Marple and I really enjoyed going to see the kindergarten classroom yeah and I gotta say yeah - two big guys on our administrative team I I was on the team last spring within Eric and Dave Petoskey and they enjoyed sitting in preschool chairs - having a great time you know in kindergarten and everything else it was like any card table it was hysterical and and notice they both are in different spots this year so they really got excited getting out of their comfort zone individuals and so it's been great for the administration's and get to know each other as well and mom you know work together a lot of camaraderie and actually if I can just add one more thing that they just load up now in terms of you know what's happening back at the ranch so to speak and response to this work that we've been doing together I know that speaking of dr.
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pate mr. rosovsky a doctor - saucy he actually the last professional development you know opportunity conducted a PD opportunity for teachers called the CCT and named so really are working with teachers to look at again the Common Core of teaching for effective effective teaching at rubric to really look at the different attributes the indicators and look for key letters you know in terms of language you know what does it mean to you know to be developing versus fish oil into the exemplary level so looking at that together and then talking about the possibility of getting teachers is really worrying about teachers in this process right to get them on board to do some walkthroughs as well so we're really looking forward at the building level to begin that hopefully if not by you know this year certainly by next year so when you bring the data back to the buildings to you the teachers look at the raw data and sort of talk about it analyze it what does that look like yes so we share with them it's not just a raw data but it is the aggregate data in terms of you know what percentage of let's say you know the lesson purpose was clearly communicated what was the percentage of the observed opportunities for that one of the things that were that we saw a change in was from last year this year was the groupings and yes so when we shared aggregate we're seeing a lot of direct instruction this is important not all the time we've seen slowly but surely more collaborative blue book so when you think about the gradual release responsibility we've seen you know people really embracing that and we want kids to be working together on challenging problems and hearing perspective and you know speaking and listening which are standards which we didn't have before and all of those really important things to become in and the learners so we saw a big change over when we started through the beginning of the year and the middle there so they get that information and I think it's when you're working when your teacher and you're in the classroom with all these children a working hard to do it it's nice to know sometimes you feel like I'm the only one that's doing it to see that you know people across all four schools are in the same you know the same framework and working together then one last piece wanted ad that will be coming out just a little piece in the newsletter I'll send out next week is the three questions we've talked about when we ask the children what do you learn why are you learning and how we know when you've learned whatever that lesson target is I'm actually seeing you know getting a give it a try to the parents give this a try you're the quietest talk a little bit about walkthroughs and give this a try instead of just what did you do at school today and the answer which I get my kids all the times not that we all know that is really ask points question and really I say it's not per tuning for connection conversation or obviously learning what what's going on in school but it really it moves the conversation deeper between your kids as well so it's just another thank you thank you thank you very much moving on we have a district technology update good evening I'm gonna give you a quick little update about some exciting things in the term of good news and things to celebrate the exciting things happening in technology but you also want to remind us some of the things we've done this year how we got some right now and what we're gonna do looking flow going forward so what have we done this year you know you'll notice some of this the same as what we did in the fall but we did put 22 network switches in it with skinnier and Center improve their bandwidth connectivity reliability and and in turn Wireless which organism or Wireless later on and with that also upgrading the entire district to be capable of doing 10 gigabits per second internet connectivity speed that were utilizing now and preparing us for the future as as more and more technologies used big copier project 270 copiers and Printers that were installed and configured using what's called Canon Uniflow solution so you have the copiers the printers that you know are obviously more efficient or part of a contract for supplies and anything like that but on top of that it's the software solution that brings in badge printing jobs get held until the person actually walks up with their badge which not only reduces jams but also eliminates a pile of paper sitting at the machine when somebody goes to pick it up this software solution also enables us to get more granular reporting and actually kind of real time to see our cost savings one of the exciting things is we recently had a business review and it was reported that with these new machines we've seen 99 percent uptime which means 99 percent of the time every machine is up and running in elastics today 9 9 months now it's been it's been very exciting to see um I did want to I hope inter previous because I didn't want to get the previous but when you don't have a new solution like this Uniflow solution of the equivalents that are out there getting uptime reports just just as it is easy so I looked and I looked but I couldn't find anything on on uptime for for the older devices which of course there's also a lot more of them we also put it in an interview the principals can tell you about downtime because they complain we put in interactive displays at Burke Phil High School a dozen of them in math and science departments um they've been heavily utilized throughout the year and I'm hearing positive things about and it came in a great price so we'll continue with that in the next school year um also the big news at huckleberry where we're trying to start looking towards eliminating big physical labs and doing mobile apps and we did have the Chromebook cart coming in huckleberry and the old 400 computer lab was turned into a classroom um the district did receive 530 new Chromebooks which we're all using today in the elementary schools and as part of the one to one program on what studying about these Chromebooks is not only the number of them that we have and the usage that they had um but as defent mentioned when he was there earlier on these Chromebooks were actually purchased with the region's regional efficiencies group that he mentioned you know that came from attending meetings for and through them Brookfield and many other districts work together to really drive down and get some great pricing on on Chromebooks and we're excited at the opportunity again for the coming school year the BHS 101 program was expended expanded to the 8th grade at whisking here so now it's a district one-to-one program I've heard some great things over with skinnier mr.
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Randy can agree that they're using them and the teachers have been excited the students have been excited and and they really hit the ground running with it and the staff here took off and and we're supporting them as well and the tackle over there has been great Barbara McCarthy had some and adapting to changing and doing more of that work now that that's been going on in high school for years so they're gonna really nice so what we're doing now back in October we didn't finally get our next generation district firewall in salt which brings improved connectivity security and safety to everybody district-wide oh it was actually installed in 2000 in October of 2018 on I did want to put that it's still a work in progress um you know when you put something in like this you still want to monitor you know update what's protected what's blocked and monitor usage to make sure that it's accurately protecting blocking and actually securing our network so that is and will continue to be a work in progress and what's nice about it the fact that is the next generation is as new technologies come out and new concerns come out the firewall automatically updates those for us so they're kind of like one step ahead of the game which is great some work I've been doing with the security task force was reviewing some of the various applications regarding student safety and protection they include a Chromebook web filtering when students are at home anonymous reporting of issues and situations and a lot of it some collab had mentioned at the last meeting during the security task force report and we had proposed looking into the goguardian platform which encompasses a lot of separate features but one of the most important being the ability to filter and control on not control but actually control the students access on Chromebooks when they're at home the idea being that when they're here they're protected by our network when they take their devices home they're not um which then leads to potential security flaws that can then be brought back into the district the next day goguardian helps take care of that and working with facilities department it's called well we we got some principals as well and student resource officers who had a lot of input putting new cameras in at the high school and whiskey near we finally officially formed the Technology Committee had our first meeting in January of 2019 where we discussed a lot of topics such as student name privacy and talking about going forward district needs for technology and professional development and how we have in the community can help look to how we support staff support students and get training in there as we require more and more use of technology we always need more training to go with that and and who better than the teachers that are expected to use it a staff that's expected to use it to provide input on that with the increased number of chromosome you know they need to keep getting more power to our wireless network so during the year we've added a total of 22 access points spread out between the high school skier and huckleberry on to to help both provide more coverage space but also allow more devices to connect at once one of the cool ideas and I barber McCarthy over it was here of mentioned this to me last week I thought this was kinda nice what she did is we have Chromebook carts in that school as well they attached a wireless access points directly to the chrome ball carts and they go around with them so whenever they play your Chromebook card in a wireless access point comes online and they'll connect to that so it's wireless wherever that Chromebook car goes as long as power and and we have the two access points for the athletic fields that were are going along with the pressbox project that are going to be installed a lot of work with the the student data privacy law we're still working on identifying software and products that contain student data that we then need to get assigned contracts or addendums with those vendors based on what the state wants say about data retention and destruction of data and who owns the data we also have to publicly share that list of software and those contracts and privacy policies on the district website which leads me to my third tab on here is that um when mr.
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Bowman's here a couple more beans go get introduced in Brookfield Athletics on a website um which had left an empty space on the district website so we had to turn that into a technology corner and I was going to click that quick and take you here so we've expanded our technology services offering and there's a lot to do here but we wanted to get this out and released and share it with everybody um that it covers all the information related to data privacy the Google products that we use and district resources and access to the help desk and you know a one-stop shop for anything technology related whether it be looking at a policy looking for a resource that we use in the district we're just getting ahold of somebody so we're excited about building that cat ecology there's a lot of work with that with the website company and I thank her for that let's ask what's coming up but we have looking into the next year and a half the Technology Committee will continue to build we are going to look the district reading plan and use that to help create a technology strategic plan looking out in in the next five years on the technology technology committee can also work to help us evaluate on the district's website and how we communicate using that tool feedback from them as to what they like to see what if they'd like to see changed and we actually have our next meeting scheduled for this upcoming Tuesday at 3:30 p.m.
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where we're gonna move forward and and of course what else we can do as a committee with support from the security task force we are going to look in towards a phased in approach or a implementing goguardian on all the Chromebooks for the one to one program at once it all depends on and how it works out with budgeting on a number of Chromebooks we'll be installing network switches at huckleberry over the summer is the last school that needs those switches open all the schools on the same infrastructure equipment all of the same level and it prepares the district for more access points more bandwidth and a potential foam project sometime in the future that would be an internet-based foam project will be like oil we'll be putting more interactive technology and classrooms more boards on continuing insulation at the high school hopefully getting a whisk in Harris quickly as we can more Chromebooks will be brought for the one to one program which will then make either those Chromebooks or other Chromebooks available for the lower schools and next year will be the first year that the one-to-one program is fully Chromebooks our senior class currently is the last class that has my pass so when that class goes next year all five one-to-one grades will have Chromebooks and so that transition will be complete if you will and data foxy will always be an ongoing item nu nu and knowing contracts will happen to be signed at the time of renewal so working closely with vendors on that and a new law that we have to deal with reporting a special education software if used by less than 50 students and it is actually exempt from the law because of the needs of special education students so it's now an added layer to the data privacy law that we have to address and that's a small part of everything that's going on but over here everybody joined I have any questions there's a question as far as the Technology Committee is there any discussion or work towards technology benchmarks or standards that's why I kind of want to see the strategic plan part of that come into place utilizing that too you know we do have morning and Ed both on that committee and and you know utilizing their important and some of the things they spoken about tonight um towards that thank you very much thank you very much thank you next we got the letter to Minnesota building committee recommend a motion that the board authorize the board chairman to send a letter to the Municipal Building Committee regarding technical assistance okay so um I attended the NBC meeting last night focus was on the missile project and they will be initiating the process of a architect projects it actually has to be done as part of the application to the to the state grant it's detect on isn't working with us firms and I wasn't here about how sorry I was for me yes and so then we'll attack time you all know how valuable they are been with us since that really I joke about it they have and have passed with flying colors actually so it was our intention to send a letter to the MBC just um indicating our desire to continue the relationship that I've done I kept okay I guess I don't know I say I don't give a that's right so you all have it for you this was my communication of what I wanted to sign but since this coming from the orchard a second option tiny as I can second okay sorry jumping over guys pushes Dewey's does the Municipal Building Committee still have to interview others and put out an RFP for other's work does this letter suffice to say that we no no we need a little more transparency that's out there right now trying to figure out whether they have to do the full RFP or and to continue as a face to they're bringing that to the First Selectman National Council direction just absolutely or do the correct steps in this it's called our request for qualifications and since the interview processes she talks about Colette was done a year and a half ago descended it from notice the MDC is that they've already gone through the RFQ process and so this would be kind of a second phase of the work they've already done so that's where they want to check councilman that kind of a thing oh there I thank you and next we have the education specification Smith school project threat and that's just action wash and that should be a motion because I have to approve this um I had slated for approval on the third I wanted to get the board to draft tonight so there's time okay they just say a little bit about it that I want about the coming six a we do that to you guys um so just so you know which would you have for any this is the ED specifications this is a very detailed outline of an oxymoron a fella it really goes through classroom by classroom area by area I hesitate but from technologies is a 40 page single-spaced very dense document that is a requirement of the grant process of the state remember we're fogging grant and a range of fifty million dollars or so she's very serious we need to make sure we do everything in our power to submit that grant properly I'll talk about that a little bit next agenda item but this is a wonderful yes fax I really asked the board I really need you to go through this if you have any feedback questions thoughts ideas Johnny might have left something out can you check on this or thumbs up things look good to me if you could get this to me maybe by the middle of next week because I want to have any feedback that needs to be incorporated or ideas that need to be added ready to go for the April 3rd meeting which is only two weeks away so we can approve it the reason we need to approve April 3rd is we really need to get this uploaded to the state grant website remember there's the June 30th deadline we don't like to get to the deadline when we need to get our materials in we want to have the majority of this done but and so we can have a meeting with the state to ensure that we have every piece of documentation in so if there are any changes from the state that they attend that we take care of plenty of time to get that done so it's all a lot of timing on us the aspects I had drafted he's done prior to the referendum I don't know if it was an omen or not I kept it quiet I was doing that but we need to turn this stuff around so I couldn't wait do you want us to get comments directly to you or should we follow them through Colette and do one document on everything or like I said let's just separately yes it suddenly just send it to me that we don't need that sure and hey if I'm gonna shoot for Tuesday night next week the data's f26 and it's a bit of a short turnaround but thank you this thanks in advance for taking with this an ocelot I thought it was just so exciting fly right on it as always it right all right that moves us to our business and first is just a discussion of the Board of Education of pleasure estimate as I had mentioned to you all late last night quite late that [Music] the Board of Finance is talking about a reduction total from our budget of 384,000 $432 I say discussing that right now because they're meeting probably as we speak I asked I asked them to give me a shoot a message if they made decisions prior to best missions beautiful amount but it seems likely that that will be the reductions that we will be looking at later because it's not definite I really don't think we can talk about specifics now so I asked dr.
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Brill and ministration to come back with a list of suggested reductions that we can be taking that that explores all options preferably you know non-instructional that might be tough given what we have to ask last year so we'll probably be making having those tough discussions and making those hard decisions next week as far as capital projects go that seems to be all our projects seem to be over here with the exception perhaps of center school paving which may even be modified or reduced I'm not sure which one day they've been discussing those options there there was a discussion because they did have some money that they were going to do to like not recurring capital or cash capital of using some of that for the whisk in your mobile or language lab yes I should know I thought that would be decided upon by the other two ages so that may advance even though it won't be part of our budget any questions with them and so there's nothing definite the minute I do find out I'll shoot any mail to you all that you know and then we'll just roll up our sleeves and already they have that discussion on April 13 is that it definitely so the world language lab it's not that so could that sheet as far as what they want to use that money for or to get input on that no that's their decision to be made they want to keep that within capital and not put into operating because they want to maintain the three-person operating budget model and that is the one item in our recommendations that could technically versus the other person's equipment yes it really is some software software but the category that they were using they written capitalized for that club thanks for all the work you're doing the engagement of the fortifying us on all of this with a budget can you share a little bit about what we talked to talk about just prior to the meeting regarding our next meeting April 3rd and with an iteration task to come back with you know ideas for the Farrington $84,000 introductions just the timing of the meetings and some decision points as the board yes um last year because we had so many service and I think we missed two meetings literally with snow days we weren't able to discuss the reductions prior to the referendum as a referendum even our second thought upon them and I really think that that may have an adventure because I think it's really important to communicate to everyone what these reductions look like before they go to referendum so it would be very in our April 3rd meeting we'll probably it'll actually be a day after the Board of Finance public hearing so we won't have that decision for them but it will be our last meeting prior to the town meeting which is may to say may seven so it will be very good to communicate those reductions so from the Board of Finance decision tonight there will be a public hearing by the board of Finance on April 2nd that's seven o'clock I'm not quite sure actually the location it's been listed both Orion and media center but it's traditionally been about 33 so I need to thank you 133 this isn't a little bit up right now though I'm a second it's a day prior to actually our board about need so we won't have those decisions for that the tell me to determine a referendum date will be to will be on May 7th in addition to determining the referendum date there will be a presentation with by both town and school a budget proposal and the proposed referendum day as of now is May 21st okay I stress booth because that doesn't become official until the time meeting is over dinner D April 2nd meeting for the court finest is here okay all right [Music] ladies oh yes if you look on a couple of different sites and solicited different places okay this is here great okay so let's just for my memory anybody yes approximately how much did we have to reduce our budget last year proposed okay and there was a lot there there's a slide in my original PowerPoint from December 5th really what's out of all the things we had to reduce custodial position secretarial position administrative position there was a number of things that we had introduced and it's been very difficult the clerical positions in special education so we really dr.
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Ruby said this the other day while we don't complain about it we live with it and we feel these these reductions every day next we have the new school building project just an update on that and as I had mentioned well we have put forth the next steps I think that has been since our last meeting but which I will anything for everyone any recommendation Debbie I did it on the NBC meeting last night and they will be going forth and meeting every month now and the right now the NBC is really reviewing and actually had some someone come in to discuss the different models would look like as far as construction management whether they go with a general contractor with a go with a construction management advisor or whether they go with a construction management at risk and they had every one of describing this and then there is a presentation with a owners project manager as well so they're deliberating or another model that they want to use I think they feel pretty strongly about the ochio model as well and that was included in the sulfur baths and that's just someone that's that's representing the town with no financial benefit to doing anything else besides trying to look for the town's best interest if I may just so in the newsletter next week I'm going to in a little bit of a different format repost the the next steps and that's important and the timeline we talked about that communication committee prior to the board meeting tonight in addition to that and working on the grant I want to thank Andrea the staff in our town clerk she's working with Lisa they're locating a lot of different authorizations and historic documents to prove that this project and the municipal building committee are actually established and the minutes from meetings of approvals and all kinds of things that have to be uploaded for the grant we found the you have to have a document that shows the establishment of the municipal building committee we found it from 1982 so we were able to get that one we'll upload that soon so I want to thank obviously Lisa and Eric helping move that as well as Andrea the other part is a few staff members that I responded to back and forth as well as many members asking about opportunities for input on the project there's going to be plenty of opportunity number one I want to remind everybody that at the very beginning of this three years ago the billion project we did internal focus groups and so we from every bargaining unit here in the district dangerous audience me and secretaries nurses everybody paraprofessionals we had it in and we've got a lot of our administrative team of course many divisions that actually soliciting input from the community it really doesn't make sense yet to do that until we have an architect formally hired for this next phase of work so once we have that we want the architect there to listen to the ampulla because they're the the folks are going to be actually designing the project so that is on the way Oh we'll get there soon enough but I just want to put that out there publicly for everybody to know three main points it's taking that next generation kind of bet early report I asked you tonight that's pretty yeah me that's that's a young I don't know there's there's a there was a lot of information gave her the same he wasn't there are the love for her process was Irish unified sports there's a lot so what have you had for one of the bullets you had reports and then you could have just a brief you know bullet on each of the reports that we game yeah no I mean yeah I mean if you if you want to talk about the reports around that that you know on the sports fest one and the moment obviously the mind I'll be too and then the reports under reports you have the three reports there's so much stuff that would equal a size four way to have it we do you take the news report sir good know whatever lockers you can see all those reports and everything we talked about that I was an extension of mine and your goals updates that we had last last me so does that work well yeah it's good stuff I'd like to see like we do have a management letter so you know link it or something you wanted to do like celebration so there's a category or we can call it category or any it's the number of stuff along yeah I'm gonna put it all in there that she was yeah there's the celebrations are Kachinas yeah it is nice to see sort of yeah oh yeah yeah so we're in admissions so just to clarify so what are the actual breeding thing you know Vice worse that's not I see the minds on something okay and we have the documentation there that Sara provided of all the different teams that break down and then reports right okay so the celebration reports thank you for doing this thank everybody that's it's a lot of work after the medians it's so helpful right now for me that's okay at center elementary school those early dismissal at 12:15 for spring conferences tomorrow March 21st and Friday March 22nd there's no afternoon preschool the smart Fair is next Tuesday March 26 from 5:30 to 7:00 at huckleberry there's an early dismissal for spring conferences tomorrow at 12:15 and also on Friday March 20 the same a Thursday may March 21st per second that was fin year there's a mathlete competition at Newton middle school tomorrow March 21st from three to five thirty and the 8th grade field trip to Washington DC is on Wednesday March 27th through Friday March 29th at the high school coffee oval and is tomorrow March 21st from 7:30 thirty in the staff lounge and the spring musical the wedding singer will be on Thursday March 21st Friday March 22nd and Saturday March 23rd at 7:00 p.m.
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and Sunday March 24th at 2:00 o'clock all another forum thank you all right you have an executive session recommend motion that the board enter into executive session for the purpose of discussing a confidential student matter second me thanks everyone for joining us evening [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]
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welcome back to welcome back to cuddle today is April 1st 2019 it is a hundred and thirtieth day of school the WPA 2 news I am Amanda I'm Kerry today for lunch there will be cheeseburger onion rings baked beans mandarin orange and milk come on tomorrow but they'll over you lovin you're good right cherry apple juice and milk we have some friends celebrating birthdays just a Jake's summer birthdays ever see Jacob K Anthony please come to the office to pick out a birthday book yesterday running past question 1 which do painter cut off by project here Vincent van Gogh the winner is chorus c3 Keenan come to the office to pick out your prize today since my question is which is heavier silver or gold we want your white to answer it and include the name and class we have a special announcement we will be drawing for special seating at lunch once once a week with a friend at the picnic table remember if you don't put your last name or class we can't use your use your name remember there are many students with the first name is you and now we'll get a clue we will pull the names three of them that's okay [Music] wait [Music] Jerry I'm from 2d pull another one your article juice no that's where you go just an overly anything no and okay Elijah r3k tying artery tape manual 3j you're all thinking Eli for more people thanks Alex h4 be cool be cool Eli again another one deeply then put it away if you said it twice Cassidy for and taxes even or perfect rope okay and I will obey the Queen but simply assign it to a vet on a dizzily a action of the day we stand for the pledge I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all having waffle it's one day and remember pausing on every a time Hitler thanks thanks for watching bye so what about to put these dollar
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it's Drennen could you please call the roll sure Commissioner Graham Commissioner Skinner chair needham here councilmember Smith Commissioner Slavic Commissioner Appel commissioner gay Brandel councilmember banister Commissioner callewaert Commissioner Brown here in Commissioner Mirsky here you have a corn terrific first item on the agenda is approval of the agenda does anyone have any additions or changes to the agenda Sara motion to approve second all in favor aye great next we have the minutes from our February meeting any changes to those is there a motion to approve yeah second thank you all in favor aye great and next we have public commentary is anyone from the public here who would like to make a statement to the Commission nobody all right you will have another opportunity toward the end of the meeting if you so choose we don't have any unfinished business tonight and our first item of new business is a presentation on stormwater from the city's Jena awesome hello thank you for the hello I was asked to come speak with you all about stormwater in the city of Ann Arbor and after a little bit of soul-searching it's a big big ask so I decided to focus a little bit on telling the story of how we manage stormwater some of the tools that we use and some of the projects that we've done over the past ten years for both quality and quantity management and then open it up to some questions and pardon my technological prowess here we're having some issues okay I'm gonna talk a little bit about the background what is stormwater in Ann Arbor where is it how do you see it what how do we kind of manage it I'm gonna take a few slides to talk about the stormwater utility that we have here in Ann Arbor which is a very unique item that I want to make sure I touch on that's how we finance more most of our projects I'm gonna hone in on a few of the creeks shed projects some of the citywide programs that aren't necessarily specific to any geographic area how we use data and science to manage stormwater and then I can open up for questions so this is the city of Ann Arbor north is up this is how most people see the city but this is how I see the city all of the water this is all of the open water in the city of Ann Arbor the Huron River goes right through the center from north west to southeast and this is breaking it down even further into creeks sheds so we have several creeks in the city of Ann Arbor that all flow into the Huron River we have Allen Creek Mallett's Creek swift Run Creek we have drainage that goes directly into the Huron that doesn't touch any additional creeks a little bit of Honey Creek is in the city Traver Creek to the north Miller's Creek and a little bit of Fleming Creek on the far east so of all of that drainage in the city we don't actually own and operate all of it there's a big swath through the middle in blue the University of Michigan owns and operates that portion of the stormwater system everything in the bright green is owned and operated by the city the red lines are owned and operated by the county of important note though the city pays for the maintenance of county drains they just send us a bill once a year the purple lines are privately owned and then there's a few yellow lines in there that are what are considered waters of the state under jurisdiction directly of the state of Michigan so just thinking about the stormwater pipes in the city of Ann Arbor we have 231 miles of pipe if you got in your kayak in Ann Arbor you could almost get to Chicago you'd have to stop and take it up the L thinking not just though of the pipes but if we add all of the open creeks and ditches it's five hundred and forty miles of conveyance of stormwater that gets you to from Ann Arbor to just about st.
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Louis ultimately we have a lot of stormwater system that we have to operate and maintain Public Works has six staff there are six wonderful gentlemen that drive around the city and fix the drainage do improvements for us and maintain our system so thinking back to the pipes again the 231 miles of pipe almost twenty percent of our system was installed prior to 1940 we do have some that are nineteen hundreds decade ish we a large portion of the city was developed in the 50 60 70 s over half of our storm water pipe was installed then and the last quarter was installed in the city basically since the 1980s one thing to keep note though just because a pipe is old doesn't mean that it's bad pipes were built much longer and thicker pre-war and so you do have a lot of older pipe in the system that still has a lot of life left in it so talk a little bit about managing the stormwater system what we do to manage it so when I say stormwater management I think a lot of you probably have a preconceived notion I know I did when I started doing stormwater management 20 years ago but it really encompasses a lot of different things here at the city we have an asset management program that covers operations maintenance work orders work scheduling as well as inventory and figuring out how we maintain our system it covers capital improvement projects it covers a lot of our regulatory programming as well as enforcement of those regulations both state regulations federal regulations as well as local regulations it includes flood plain programming and implementation of floodplain projects here in the city somewhat unique to the city of Ann Arbor our stormwater management system also includes the street trees so our urban street trees forestry is out of their stormwater program we also have a wonderful Green Streets policy that many of you may remember because it actually came out of the environmental Commission and that looks at city-owned projects including road projects making sure that the city walks the walk just like we hold our developers and we have to make sure that any road project that is done a reconstruction of a road also addresses stormwater for infiltration and water quality improvements so I mentioned a stormwater utility there are nine stormwater utilities in the state of Michigan and this is a funding source that essentially creates the revenue for this management of our stormwater system based on a fee assessed to every parcel in town including the university including churches everybody pays because everybody creates runoff so we look at the square footage of every single parcel of impervious area so that's area that doesn't infiltrate water and everyone gets a quarterly bill so one of my favorite examples this is a neighborhood in Ann Arbor that does illustrate that everybody pays but not everybody pays the same because not everyone's house is the same size and not everybody has the same size driveway or the same size garage and so you can see there's three houses here right at the corner that are different colors each of these different colors represent a different tier for our stormwater utility and so those three neighbors the house on the far left that's 23:55 it's the largest bill I would think they're probably in Tier three 25:11 is tier 2 and 25 17 is Tier one my favorite picture anyone know where this is yeah they pay to you can see how much impervious area there is this is the diag at the University of Michigan they are our largest rate payer for stormwater but we do work hand in hand with them making sure that projects that they do implement are reducing impervious area they have some of the same regulations that we do it is so gravel driveways are a perfect example it's gravel so you'd think that water wouldn't would percolate through it we actually have a wonderful tool that we will come out and test your driveway dry that gravel gets so compacted with cars driving over it for the past however many years will come out and test to see if it is actually pervious I think nine times out of ten we found that it's it's still impervious but if anyone has a question about a gravel driveway we're more than welcome willing to come out and check so thinking about all three of our water utilities here at the city stormwater still is kind of the little brother we have roughly nine point 1 million dollars of revenue it's about 16% of the revenue coming into our system as compared to Water and Sewer bigger systems different types of operations and maintenance what does the stormwater system look like it looks like pipes it looks like out false this is an outfall of stormwater dumping into the Huron River some of the things that we do internally our inspection of the system so how many of you remember how many miles of pipes there are 231 Thank You Shannon we inspect those miles of pipe not all 231 in one year we don't have enough staff to do that but what we do have is a wonderful technology it's a it's a robot camera that our staff drive up the system and televise and rate the condition of the pipes things that we see in the pipes it's a fairly decent pipe nothing special tree roots blockages broken pipes critters more critters one thing to note the city's stormwater system is entirely separate from our wastewater system we have what's called a municipal separate storm sewer system city of Detroit has a combined system a lot of your first ring communities in the Detroit area have a combined system that means that both rainwater and sewage are in the same pipe ours are separate and that's very fortunate for us but it also does mean that those 231 miles of pipe most of them go directly to the river without treatment because we don't treat our stormwater so one of the things that we're doing internally now is looking for opportunities to treat that stormwater before it gets to the river both improving the quality of the stormwater as well as reducing the quantity and that quantity reduction is really important because if you think about all of the rain that falls in the city if we just push all of that water out to the river it's going to cause floods it's going to cause erosion as opposed to pre-settlement mother nature had all of that rain water soaking into the ground so we look at how we can mimic nature for both the quantity management as well as the quality management so we use what's been termed green infrastructure and green really means that it doesn't have to be the color green but it is something that was mother nature intended or mimicking nature so if we do some back of the envelope calculations here in the city we are and I'm not saying this being self boastful but we are the leader in the state for green infrastructure we have more green infrastructure than any other community in the entire state we have 124 city-owned rain gardens bioswales large detention facilities and we have 277 residential reading gardens which in itself those numbers are amazing but the better numbers are what we actually do with that pieces of green infrastructure so annually that's per year we infiltrate or treat 403 million gallons of stormwater just in the city owned that's a great number that number will increase as we continue to increase through our Green Streets policy through an implementation of green infrastructure this isn't even including stuff on private property though this isn't including what we require developers to do there is another number on there that I want to say a personal thank you to all of our residents who have rain gardens that they have let us know about and they're infiltrating and treating 3 million gallons of stormwater which is nothing to sniff you know that that's still a quite a wonderful number to see question not online but we do have this information on an internal dashboard we can certainly share it when we look at external dashboarding sure so I do want to take a minute to talk kind of honing in on a few creek shed projects a couple months ago I think there was a handout that you received regarding Allen Creek it was just kind of a little bit of a teaser to say hey we do some really cool things in fact we've spent over 10 million dollars in Allen Creek in the past ten years so after I presented that to you guys a couple months ago I did some more homework and I crunched a whole lot more numbers and I I have to admit part of me has an engineering brain so I'm always looking for that data numbers to justify some of the science behind everything so by the numbers and I know this is a really number heavy table but what this is telling you is that we have a lot of creek sheds in the city that we're doing a lot in so at the bottom you see we've spent three points - I'm sorry 31 point six million dollars just in stormwater improvements that's both capital as well as reports on the studies over the past 10 years what's not included in this number is the operations and maintenance that's an even different number and I could give an hour talk about what we've done there but I'm focusing mostly tonight on in the ground boots on the ground improvements to water quality and water quantity management something to note those all kind of read through this table in Allen Creek for example but we've actually spent 11.5 million dollars over the past ten years and that's 36 percent of what we spent but adilyn Creek actually only covers 17 percent of the city so we're spending a lot of money in Allen Creek Allen Creek is 49 percent impervious so almost half impervious and that watershed health indicator index score is on a scale from one to a hundred with a hundred being the best Allen Creek as you all know it's entirely underground it's scored a five and anecdotally I was told it scored a five because its underground and it's cold citywide that's where you see our urban forestry program so we've been planting a thousand trees a year for the past ten years we have been doing model calibration rate study so a lot of our larger studies that's where that 7.7 million number comes from Traver Creek that 3% is mostly attributed to the Traver Creek Golf Course project that was completed direct drainage is everything again immediately adjacent to the Huron River that would be projects within the ARB area projects that are kind of old Northside area there is a zero percent on here that I do want to explain in Swift run we've spent about 125 thousand dollars we had one project that we did in Swift run last year and it does see zero percent because of decimals so I just want to make sure that my man I me that's correct just wanted to point that out but looking at each individual area so citywide projects we've done some sewer lining we've done tree plant tree inventories are hydraulic model and calibration street resurfacing a lot of our capital road projects do take budget from stormwater because as they're fixing a road there are storm water inlets and storm water pipe connections that you also need to be included and so many of our road projects do pull capital from stormwater in Miller's Creek we've done three projects some of these projects may look familiar to some of you in mallets we've done a lot of really good stuff a lot of above-ground projects a lot of streaming stabilization projects some rain garden projects in there mallets also is fortunate to have some of our poorest road surface projects Traver we have some not so exciting projects storm sewer crossings underneath the railroad a road project on Pontiac trail culvert replacement I do varn and the Leslie Park Golf Course project that I mentioned we haven't done any projects on Fleming Fleming's only 4-percent and it's actually really on the far east side of harbor but we haven't done any stormwater based projects in the Fleming Creek Swift run I mentioned we had one project and those are rain gardens the residential rain gardens in the public right-of-way that we worked with some residents on directly to the Huron River we have a lot of road projects a lot of really not exciting projects but again it's a lot of that quantity management that we've had to work on in Honey Creek we just finished the sister lakes stormwater retrofit project where we captured all of the stormwater from one neighborhood before it got into first sister Lake and infiltrated it treated it and we're actually still kind of under warranty for those plantings for this year and in Allen I apologize the the list got really small I had to fit everything on the screen but we've done a lot of wonderful projects you will also see projects regarding the Allen Creek berm is on here some demolitions that we've done in floodplain so we have a lot of wonderful things in Allen Creek we've done just for reference I'm not sure how many of you have seen this picture this is what Allen Creek used to look like this picture was taken in 1918 I think is what was written on the back and this is actually over off of Washington in the Old West Side neighborhood I'm not sure if they're deciding what they're gonna do or if they're just hanging out but um that is what Allen Creek used to look like this is what Allen Creek does now because we've decided to put it all in a pipe we've put it all in a pipe and continued to build continue to create impervious area and there's so much water that comes we're getting manholes that pop off what we have done recently instead of this because I wonderful as our residents are we've had a few good Samaritans that have seen manhole lids that have popped off like this and tried to put them back on and from a liability standpoint I don't want anyone's toes missing so we have now graded bolted down manhole lids but this was a common occurrence that we would see in large events probably about eight or nine years ago so a few of the citywide projects and programs that I want to delve into this picture is actually a great picture what's underneath 4th Ave right now between Huron and Liberty this is a project on about six or seven years ago the storm drains on this road go into a large stone vault that's all that stone you see there that infiltrates the 100-year event which is unheard of for projects what's that it is a wonderful downtown was built on sand which is great sort of because the more we infiltrate the more concern we have but yeah downtown has a great great sand ribbon right through it so I mentioned we have a lot of those projects and programs that we do floodplain programming regulatory permitting asset management this picture is from 2013 I believe 2012 2013 over in the campus area hill some of the individual projects that we've done across the city that calibrated hydraulic model I'm going to talk about in a few slides but that is one of the most important tools we have to manage our stormwater system our engineers adore this program as a matter of fact it's a great decision maker and scenario builder for us as we look at improving our stormwater system we also have projects proposed for detention pond upgrades detention ponds that were built 30-some odd years ago were built for a different kind of storm and a different kind of development and they really weren't built for water quality improvements they were just built to hold all the storm water and let it go later we've actually started inventory and assessing our city-owned detention ponds and looking at opportunities that we can improve them now so not just for quality I'm sorry quantity management but for quantity management as well we also have a wonderful and I will say unique relationship with the Washtenaw County Water Resources Commissioner's Office we pay for a staff person essentially to assist us with financing projects assist us with project implementation so sometimes you see the county at the city offices and in fact sometimes it's great we're not really sure who works for who sometimes but we do work hand-in-hand with the water resource Commissioner's Office to implement large-scale projects we also work with them I'm going to put on my maintenance hat really quick we actually contract with the county to do maintenance on all of the green infrastructure that we have in the city because we don't have the staff and we don't have the staff expertise to implement all of that maintenance and it's about two hundred thousand dollars a year that we're spending on maintenance of that green infrastructure okay so I mentioned a little bit that we use data and science we measure everything that we do and we don't make decisions without running the models without having the science and data to back up those decisions we have available also online for the public stream gauges that are we actually pay the USGS for we have several stream gauges around town we also have rain gauges there are five rain gauges in the city that our tipping buckets every 15 minutes and so we know exactly how much rain falls we have flow meters for specific projects that we put in the systems we have radar rainfall I can show you one of those maps and we also have an extremely complete GIS program or system and that GIS stands for geographic information systems it's a geospatial tool to connect geologic space spatial data with non spatial data no it does not we have a one stream gauge that we've worked with the USGS at wall street that does some of the water quality monitoring but we found that it's more efficient for us to do our own water quality monitoring because there's so many different parameters and then we also contract with hearing over watershed Council and they do a lot of the stream modeling or stream monitoring for us so this is our stormwater management model again it's a lot of Engineer speak but in a simple form it is a network of our pipes and channels and structures that we can run simulations through with different storm events different durations different frequency different volumes of water and we can see how our system would react where we may have surcharges where we if we put a blockage in the system what might happen if we have future development what might happen and what some of those needs are a little plug we also have models for our drinking water system and our sanitary system so this is what the printout of a stormwater model would look like you can kind of see the stadium in the bottom Center in a I think we did this as a larger 10 year event the red pipes would be running full the black pipes would be to the top of the structure but none of these would be coming out of the structure in this scenario this is a screenshot of what the stream gauge data looks like at the USGS website you go on the city's website we actually have links to all of this but we can see exactly the flow and depth of several point locations both in here on River as well as some of our creeks sheds we don't have the water quality but we do have how much water is passing at that moment and we can start seeing how the creeks are reacting to different rain events this information is I'll call it relatively real-time usually it's about an hour lag and then these are this is a screenshot of what our rain gauges look like the blue dots are the five locations out at first sister Lake we have one at Barton Dam we have one up on North Campus but I'm sorry down at 2000 South industrial and then here on the top of City Hall you can look at these as either daily points or 15-minute points of rainfall for each of those locations and this usually is updated takes a couple hours it's not instant this is an example of some of our project specific flow monitoring this is hydrographs looking at how we actually did a project in mallets Creek what happened during specific rain events and where our peak flows were this is an example of the rainfall data I love this slide because it tells a really wonderful graphic story in June of 2010 there was a really really big rain event and we had a lot of people complaining about the amount of rain that they received but then as you can kind of look red is the most rain red I think is three 3.17 inches at the most and yellow is not a lot of rain and what this tells us is that when you listen to Channel seven and they say up you got three inches of rain not everybody receives that same amount of rain because rain falls different we're in a valley here in Ann Arbor and depending on the weather pattern sometimes those storms move and they split so we do look for some of our larger rain events to pull this data to actually look at how the rain fell in the city and I talked about data I talked about projects I talked about how much we spent on things and I'd like to open it up with one quick question for you guys and then you can ask me questions this is a storm drain here in the city of Ann Arbor how many storm drains do you think we have in the city of Ann Arbor 231 miles of pipe it's more than how many way more way more we have over 15,000 inlets in the city if we count inlets and structures so solid manholes we have 23,000 just in the storm water system thank you I have several questions related to I'll say the cost structure to make sure I understood first of all at I guess 30,000 foot level does the utility and its revenue cover our costs adequately in other words are we in a situation where we're looking at our storm water activities broadly and we're falling behind X dollars per year and we have some mounting amount of work that's that's gathering where we're gonna say 5 years from now 20 years from now oh we've got this 50 million dollar bill coming yes but only because a couple years ago we did a rate study and we worked with a financial model to plug in our capital improvements plan our operations and maintenance for the next 20 years and so all of our rate increases over the next several years are based on those future needs and at this time we are on track for current spending it's a good question thank you I have a couple if I may um I want to also make sure I understood the budget is roughly nine million dollars a year and if I take the 31 million dollars in improvements and divide that by 10 roughly because it was over 10 years that means that we're spending roughly three million dollars a year in improvements out of this out of the nine million the math isn't that easy because I don't have the operations and maintenance numbers in here and I don't have the administration numbers in here if you are interested in those numbers for the stormwater revenue as a whole so what's the nine million then the nine million is a revenue revenue okay the nine million is the revenue that is created by the utility right for us to do operations and maintenance capital improvements and administration of the program so but that's covering the roughly three million dollars a year in the kind of projects that you showed in each one of the creeks sheds moving forward yes previous to this we only had six million or five million or four million so it hasn't been a static number okay and it won't be a static number as we progressively improve components of our system okay then I guess my my major question is goes to some discussions that you're probably aware of related to the city budget and the County millage rebate so there are as you know a resolution sponsored by the mayor co-sponsored by councilmember Griswold that would basically take the money that comes from the rebate and without tying it to the rebate in the millage would allocate a certain amount of money to climate action to affordable housing and to pedestrian safety there's likely going to be another resolution that's going to say residents fed back that we have certain issues and priorities and we think we should spend fifteen percent here ten percent there eight percent there the the percentage that came from that survey would if it's allocated that way would increase the spending on water and sewer and structure by 250,000 dollars so that's roughly 2.7 percent of the total amount that's just the 9 million I don't know what the water portion is of that I don't know if that's one of the other figures that you showed on your circular chart what I'm wondering is does $250,000 change anything in terms of how the sewer system is run and how it's fine and how improvements are financed because that's going to take a significant amount of money way from affordable housing and from climate action it will more than double climate action funding it will have a big impact in terms of leverage on the affordable housing side and so on what I'm wondering is if we take that money in that allocation and shift it to a different allocation where it's spread out over six or seven different issue areas what does 250,000 dollars do for the sewer system something to keep I know that I'm putting you in a spot you're all right putting me on the spot something to keep in mind stormwater revenue can only be spent on stormwater so when we think about where we need to be with our rate structure for stormwater we've been very very diligent to make sure that we're covering our costs and one thing that I didn't really Express I kind of sort of tried to is that the way we manage our system does include climate adaptation and climate change the way that we are designing our stormwater system the way that we are requiring developers to mitigate stormwater it does address climate adaptation strategies if if someone came to me and said I have 250,000 dollars for you to find and spend on stormwater I'm sure I could find somewhere we have a lot of projects in our capital improvement plan that do get poisoned we have a lot of programs that I would love to see implemented that again we only in the city of in the stormwater program we have roughly 19 full-time equivalent staff people I mentioned the six wonderful gentlemen in public works that are the boots on the ground fixing things but those 19 full-time equivalents a lot of it is programmatic engineering staffing regulatory enforcement there are always programs that we would love to be able to implement some of them on the public education side some of them on the outreach side really to build awareness in our community about stormwater about stormwater management I I'm not really answering your question but of what I'm saying is there are certainly going to there could be opportunities for that 250 would it assist us any new capital project probably not would it assist us in some sort of program probably did that answer your question yes okay I have one last question MA and that is what would you say our key takeaways for residents what should residents be doing or based on everything you presented and we what can we do to help improve storm water quality stormwater runoff etc I mean I we just heard taking an asphalt or concrete driveway and making it a gravel driveways really not a significant strategy so what are the kinds of things that we should be doing in our everyday lives and the people that we interface with and encouraging them to do to improve stormwater issues in general that is a really big question to answer one of the things that I that I have dealt with my entire career focused around stormwater is stormwater awareness if I went into a school tomorrow morning and asked the third graders if they knew first of all where the Huron River was I think in Ann Arbor they might know but where the catch basin at the end of their Road actually went to I don't know how many of them would actually know that we just recently about 12 or 13 years ago got the word watershed into the states benchmarks and standards for education and that's at a fourth-grade level is when they learn about watershed but stormwater is not there so when I think about what the ultimate thing is it's really awareness it's the fact that your actions on your property business property home property the roads all do impact stormwater from a quality standpoint from a quantity standpoint that and my wonderful example that I always use that cold cup of coffee that you dumped out if you don't dump it on the grass it's gonna end up in the storm drain it's gonna end up in the river everything that ends up on our roads the cigarette butts that are flicked out of the windows the leaves that people blow into the road because they don't want it on their lawn our pets our pets that was my next one patch that we don't pick up after all of these have what you think minor but they start adding up there are so many ways that everybody affects storm water quality and storm water quantity but I my favorite example is my in-laws if I ask them about that they first of all they're not really sure what River is even close what watershed they live in it's not the world that they grew up in and it's not something that they worry about every day I think about it daily so of course I know but I don't think a lot of people actually fully comprehend how their lives touch stormwater and it's actually a good segue into some of the things that I put in front of you guys so one of the other programs that I didn't I could talk for an hour about is some of our education and outreach for water awareness in the city you have a sticker that is a - h2o I'd love to see those stickers all over town I put mine on my laptop I actually did have a guy say what's that chemistry to explain him it wasn't you have a chip clip that is one of the strongest magnets I've ever seen use it for chips put it on your fridge that'd be great but again a little bit of that awareness that stormwater is around and the last two pieces kind of go hand in hand the little button if you look closely is actually a teenage raindrop we have a program with a local artist we're actually morphing it into a different local artist where we built a comic around the life of a teenage raindrop teaching the water cycle teaching stormwater management we have three issues that we're working on so this first issue I think is the my life as a teenage raindrop and you kind of go through the water cycle and maybe he's going into the ground the second issue we have or the second article is teenage raindrop visiting City Hall so a couple of years ago we did a lot of stormwater improvements here at City Hall in fact we are zero runoff here we use infiltrates and up take all of the stormwater that falls on a City Hall but we told the story of that through a teenage raindrop who was visiting and the third one coming out hopefully in the next couple of months is teenage raindrops cousin who's going to visit the skate park because our skate park was built around a lot of really cool rain gardens and infiltration beds and when she goes skateboarding we want to be able to talk about how different places around town improve water quality and address stormwater management so those are given out at most of the schools elementary school some high schools all of our public events and we partnered with the county as well to do some of that outreach so those are just little teasers of some of the fun educational outreach things that we have we do partner with the Ann Arbor Schools for an urban hydrology curriculum from second through sixth grade so a lot of the students in the Ann Arbor program do kind of learn about the water system here in the city of Ann Arbor so thank you for that segue other questions for Miss Rose I guess I first just like to say that somebody who works in this and somebody who questioned have a question for you Jen around this - because of sitting on Planning Commission as well there were some developments in the kind of in the Glendale neighborhood where it became clear that some of those streets actually don't have stormwater infrastructure on them and so a development was you know going to be doing their own stormwater management but it became very clear that the neighborhood was suffering in other ways that may or may not have been affected by the development but as part of the public input process many people showed up and said you know our streets are flooding during rain events and things like that so so there are parts of the city that don't even have storm system at all so in which would eat up $250,000 like that but I'm just wondering so my first question is are there plans for some of these areas in terms of the long term capital improvements plan to be able to address some of these issues it's hard I mean it's difficult toils you know it's all kinds of things that are challenges there and I'm just wondering how the city sees they're they're 9 million dollar budget in relation to some of these areas that just you know kind of missed the boat so to speak in terms of when some of those things are being constructed in big strong ways in the 50s and so it's a little bit of a slippery slope that you're asking so just because a road is in the city of Ann Arbor that was not built with stormwater doesn't mean that we can just put stormwater in our stormwater utility is set up so that first time in provements must be assessed to that property owner I can't take money from the utility for first-time improvements this actually happened over on Gettys a couple years ago we were doing the big Gettys road improvement and we had a lot of areas on that road that never had stormwater and we did have to assess for what we would have paid for the typical stormwater design no we did green infrastructure design over there with infiltration beds and we also found wonderful sandy soil over there but we didn't assess them for all of that we just assess them for what it would have cost us to put in a pipe so in a lot of those areas that you're referencing Shannan it really would be on a case-by-case basis to determine if it's a first-time improvement or if it is and a like an upgrade or an existing system improvement to understand yes another question I have and this has to do with my own neighborhood so you're gonna bear with me on this one I completely believe in the power of trees to be able to citrus trees especially to be able to intercept stormwater there was some extremely severe tree pruning that came through our neighborhood and took off a whole bunch of lower branches which seems to be you know you don't just want to leave this stuff on top you want there to be layers and it was way above any kind of you know garbage truck kind of clearance issue and boy it was just it felt very harsh in in light of just what the road looks like but also you know its impact on stormwater management too it was not Deadwood it was it seemed like it was kind of like we're going up this high and I'm just curious if you know sort of what the what the intent was behind behind that kind of I do feel like I have all the answers this evening so a couple of years ago well I really started about eight or nine years ago the city realized that we were way behind on three maintenance we did not have a regular pruning cycle because our forestry crews had been pulled off of regular tree pruning maintenance to address the emerald ash borer all of the trees that died from that emerald ash borer was so widespread our forestry crews didn't do any preventative maintenance because they were dealing with dead trees they had to remove so when we completed our urban community forestry management plan a couple of years ago one of the recommendations in that plan was to evaluate and implement a proactive street tree pruning program which in theory sounds great but we had to play catch-up and so over the past several years what you've seen is catch up on tree pruning some of these trees that we had planted years and years ago had never been pruned and so there were certain areas and again depending on the species they did look really harsh because they had to really look at the overall health of those trees I don't necessarily know which trees you're talking about but when you have a tree that has never been pruned coming in from an urban forestry standpoint the trees aren't necessarily grown for their their habitat and ecological like we're used to seeing there a street tree they do have clearance issues they have to deal with even the species and types of trees that are planted they do look at the underground utilities that are in that area I do know that at the time that the program started with this ketchup of the routine street tree pruning our Forester was getting daily calls just because it was very shocking for so many people to see trees that had never been pruned now we're getting pruned um if you are still concerned I can certainly send our Forester out they we have sort of frayed arborists looking at this it's not just you know someone going out and cutting trees willy-nilly but I first personal level I want to come and see which trees are talking about because I'm concerned my last question that has to do with the stroma stormwater utility and some of the lawsuits that have been happening around stormwater in especially the greater Detroit area where some of the programs have basically been going through the wringer in terms of the court system and that they're saying it's a tax instead of a fee and things like that I'm just wondering how you feel about the program the way that ours is set up and how robust it is in terms of anybody trying to go at it and in the courts I love that you use the word robust I probably get a phone call once a week from Detroit area Michigan community asking how in the world we have a successful utility some of the lawsuits that have occurred over the past several years have been based on communities that are implementing utilities unfairly there was a decision made back in the 1990's called the bolt versus Lansing decision and at that time that really set the precedent on how a stormwater utility function how it was implemented and the city of Lansing didn't implement a utility based on the amount of rainfall that fell they made some pretty broad strokes and said anybody under an acre you're gonna pay hundred dollars or whatever the number was back then which as we all know isn't fair that's not equitable so the city of Ann Arbor does fly over the city every three years with color infrared photography to evaluate and assess the square footage of impervious area per parcel and we updated every three years so just with that alone we're charging what that parcel creates so that's one the second aspect of bolt is that it has to allow the parcel owner to control their use you can make an analogy to a drinking water utility if you don't use the water you're not really gonna get billed because if there's a meter on there so we have a credits program with the stormwater utility if people put in rain gardens on their parcel if they reduce the impervious surface if they put rain barrels or bioswales or cisterns and reduce that amount of runoff they can get credits on their bill so we feel very strongly that our program as implemented is very very we call bolt proof based on that lawsuit from the 1990s but you know we're always watching we're always certainly paying attention but because we use again that data and science making sure that we are assessing exactly what the property owner produces and that's a really strong piece which a lot of these other municipalities in Michigan don't do they do that broad brushstroke another analogy the city of Jackson just about a year or two ago they tried implementing a utility and it fell through because anything under two got two acres they just did a broad brushstroke that they paid a the same fee which really is not fair so does that answer your question and make you feel a little better yet definitely it's good I know that our attorneys also are very much watching it and we watch all the briefs that kanata Lansing regarding the stormwater utilities councilmember Romney has introduced a resolution to ban blowing of like cigarette butts from city streets into the storm drain and ban that kind of equipment because of the noise and the pollution that the two-stroke mowers so we've been breaking it down and it would take a whole bunch of battery he's you know to do this but from an environmental standpoint do we have any information on how much cigarette butts and junk and dirt street dirt is going into the downtown storm drains that this would help by banning this and making people go back to brooms I don't immediately have it but I do have the tonnage from our Vactor truck we vacuumed out catch basins and so I do have the tonnage that would be that we would have brought back to our decant facility that I can pull so historical data maybe maybe it might be helpful as we as we break it down and see all the different ways thank you and it wouldn't I mean we don't separate it by cigarette butts and that kind of thing it's just tonnage of what we vacuumed out which could be any number of things that get washed into the catch basins yeah can I come in and that is I encourage you to look at the resolution we looked at it in a draft form and I don't think it says anything about preventing things going into the storm sewer it only addresses the way the unit is driven and it outlaws two-stroke engines it doesn't say that even if you use a broom you can still broom it into the storm sewer or if you use the battery driven one that you could put it in the storm sewer so I don't think that the resolution really has any impact as it's drafted on storm water and the quality of storm water or anything else thank you for adding that I am just saying that as council members were talking about it and saying that well what was the real goal that they were trying to do here and part of it was protect the storm drain and so that it's evolving and amending is what's is this is it so it's part of the creation of this that's where it came in I two other quick questions yet another one um when you showed that one about the modeling of a flood and it looked like maybe that was the fourth war we had the U of M Stadium in it and all that area is that did you use that picture because that is the most flood risk no I used it because the U of M Stadium is recognizable okay well that was sort of my question is that are there certain Ward's or neighborhoods or creeks beside L and creeks that are for its dirtiness so in our in our calibration model report we identified 13 I think 16 areas that are when we run the model there they're problem areas and each of those problem areas have been addressed in our capital improvements plan and we have recommended improvements in our CIP to address all of those areas okay but your to your question of is there a certain area Allen Creek is is very hard hit but it's not where all of our flooding areas are they are interspersed around town and that model report is actually available online as well great and on the trees a couple things on the trees these this subcommittee of the of the Environmental Council the natural features committee we met and are interested in tree inventories and mapping and I'm reading from minutes here from Commissioner Graham about how we what we're interested in native forest fragments tree canopy cover turf grass areas wetlands waterways flooding drainage all of that are you how current is your inventory Orion do you have any plans this year to enhance that not this year but next year we are actually updating archery inventory that's that's proposed as a new it's not a capital project per se but it is in our capital budget to update our tree inventory yes that's addressing all the trees in the city stormwater pays for the street trees we do have an inventory of park trees but I'm not going to call it a complete inventory the recreation area parts of parks not to naturalize yes as for an inventory of park trees I can't address that I'm not sure the valuable stuffs already done by NAB this is addressing the great great swath of non city-owned non public property across the city did an eye tree evaluation which is a citywide assessment of our urban forests as a whole in 2011 it is online one of the other projects that I didn't list is the update of our urban community forestry management plan we just hired a brand new forester and that's one of the things on her plate for next year well one of the ideas that they'd come out would be is would we have some sort of app phone app where it would signify when you're walking past a special heritage tree or even just beep and identify you know to your right is a 200 year old tree on your phone as part of the interface with the tree inventory have you heard of any things like that not here at the city but the update of our tree inventory and the management plan I can certainly pass it along well then that sort of under your education outreach and awareness and my last question I was just on that that I know dr.
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Missy Stoltz and Lisa wand rash and people at the county we have a whole bunch of different folks working on communications do you guys coordinate any of your communications with those other yes all of our communications go through our communications office so we have a campaign that many of you may have seen on Twitter or on Facebook about the infrastructure system but that's run through our communications office our entire outreach strategy is run through our communications office all of the water matters publications waste Watchers publications there's always water storm water education in those and that again is run through our communications office thank you so most these guys have a pipe that goes down very few of them have some main line so you catch basins that the vector cleans that means somewhere in the lines there are pits I presume that where the line comes through and and Reed drops into them is that what you mean in most areas yes how many of those are there I've never actually calculated but I can get it back to you thousands hundreds thousands really so that's very helpful to keep a lot of it is our sumps in our Inlet structures do keep a lot of your larger debris it's not gonna keep a lot of your fine sediments out but it does provide an opportunity for a lot of those larger sediments to fall out or drop out into the sump is there a design of those things that keeps them from being scoured on the High Flow events no not in the traditional design ones no and that's why we have a lot of this green infrastructure in place to capture it before it even gets into the system drinking water and sanitary systems I will pass that along to staff lucky any other questions thinking about is the MRO facility in the composting system and things like that and I'm just wondering what your opinion is about not having curbside pickup for leaves and the leaf impact on our waterways in terms of stormwater and the chemistry that it then you know how it affects our waterways in that way so special spot in my heart Shannon there is a an enormous detriment to stormwater quality if you think about the amount of biological oxygen demand that comes from a rotting leaf so all of those leaves that could be in bags or containers brought to a compost facility instead they they would be sitting in our curb lines and rotting and sucking oxygen out of the water that eventually is ending up in the here on river not to mention the actual solid so that leaf debris and litter those floats they don't think and so that all is going to go out to the Huron River there are I I have memo upon memo that I've drafted annually on the detriment to storm water quality and stormwater management if we went back to a leaf pickup system if you're interested in that memo we can certainly share it with the environmental Commission I think it would give a lot of good insight and information about what a leaf pickup would mean for water quality and again it's focused water quality there's a lot of other issues at hand but we're we're looking at storm water quality and stormwater management there are some big issues around that yeah that's I think really important for us to think about those intersections like that because I'm sure a lot of you remember you know every fall the city used to come through and clean out everything the street you were responsible for your your your own home and your yard but not for the street and I think what's really happened at this point is that people do their own yard but all the stuff in the street many people don't take care of and so the net result is that it's it's all flowing down so I just would like us to kind of think about that as we're thinking about our the potential changes that we are considering for the composting that happens for the city and how that has an impact on stormwater and water quality thanks very much really appreciate your time thank you so the next item on the agenda is considering a draft work plan for the Commission for the coming year and as you recall the the way we've done that is our three work groups natural features water quality we're just calling the water water working group and solid waste working group really really thank you to the chairs of the groups in particular as well as everyone who participated in coming up with these ideas so quickly I think this is really great and we do have before us then the combined proposed goals for each group which I brought together into a proposed work plan for the Commission for the year just wanted to say a couple things about this and I'll ask each work group chair person to just briefly go through this but the idea here we're required to submit a work plan to the City Council by the the bylaws we recently adopted so that's what's spurring this but the way I look at it is it is a plan it's not an ordinance it's not an ironclad commitment these are the things that we intend to do and if we don't get to some you know it's not ideal but we're not we're not necessarily committing to this this is this is what we hope to accomplish and by the same token this is not meant to be comprehensive we can add things I'm sure we will add things as the year goes on we can add things that don't naturally fall to one of our working groups any Commissioner is of course still very welcome and encouraged to bring individual topics forward but this hopefully will give us some direction for things that we want to tackle so with that as an introduction I will just ask each workgroup chairperson to briefly go through the work that their group has done so far so I guess we'll just go in order Commissioner Brown okay yeah I was chairing the solid waste working group and so we met three times once a week before this meeting and we agreed on two smart goals and then three other goals which aren't so related to our our mission but that we think we can play a positive role in working with the city staff and with the council to try to make these happen the first was smart goal was to define comprehensive reliable metrics and data collection processes for solid waste operations citywide by June 1st in partnership with city staff the city has a sustainability framework that's been posted for many years and however it's come to the attention of the Commission and others that there has not been a very systematic effort to capture the metrics that we would need to rightfully measure quantities such as diversion rates consistently over the years so that we could track progress in the areas as we might want to go to a zero waste solid waste future the second goal was to draft a zero waste vision for the city incorporating elements of the Optim solid waste resource management planning it's in progress right now and the Washington our regional materials something a agency the WR Mme this is a proposal it's put forth by Washtenaw County where solid waste contracts percent perhaps or solid waste management across the county might be coordinated through an association of or an authority of local governments the city is posted a zero waste declaration in 2016 but it doesn't really have any meter action to so and the current planning process managed by the consultant group app to the best W RMP process as pretty much as made it clear that it's that a zero-waste vision is outside the scope of their current contract so so we feel that working on these two issues would provide a benefit to the community over the over the year so there are other opportunities that are also equally important but it's just more difficult for the you know for the Commission to generate a smart goal to help council and staff make these things happen one of them is restarting and we getting and revitalizing a functional local Murph the Murph has been closed really for three and a half years now and so I think it's very important to to get our functional local Murph so that we're not trucking our recyclables all the way to Cincinnati every month which is costing the city I think an extra twenty thousand dollars a month there might be better invested in a local facility so and then the fourth item would be Sunday organics and recycling collections downtown over the last five years there's been an increasing there's been the balance of businesses in the downtown area has shifted more towards restaurants so they've generated more especially organic material and and the activity downtown which we all treasure has created more recyclables so you know a lot of that activities on the weekends so this stuff piles up so through conversations and the community it seems like a Sunday collection both for recycling and organics would improve solid waste program in the downtown area especially so we'd like to focus on that but we don't exactly know what role would be in making that happen the the last thing is year-round residential composting where I for example have been putting all my kitchen waste into my yard container all winter and it's no problem it's in the garage it's frozen so and then it's picked up in the spring so I don't think it's well known citywide that you can actually put most of your your food waste you can put all of it you can put the meat and bones and everything into your composting card here which is labeled yard waste but you can add all of your organic material that would be compostable into those containers and it could be also done year-round so I think there's a role for the Commission to play especially in communication and outreach to the residents and it's some of the businesses to make that happen but it's not yet clear what exactly we might do any questions for with the State Street area businesses and the Main Street area businesses and their the whole downtown restaurant business organizations and they have us a slide presentation they've been shopping it around to council members because they as you said one seven-day-a-week pickup of trash and and recycling and they're exploring a special assessment district where they would pay extra and pay for it themselves and so I'd be happy to share with you that slideshow and the specific contact people that requested to meet with me rolls em Planning Commission has also be a partner with the the DDA partners committee the DDA has done a tremendous amount of work on this already like a whole lot and they're like brokering things between people and they really understand a lot of the issues that are going on and I highly suggest you get in touch with them so that you're not reinventing the wheel in terms of how to assess a lot of this because they've done a lot of great thinking on it so I would get in touch with them because I think they're gonna get you going and then to figure out what role the environmental Commission could play in order to be able to move that forward because they've they've just taken on a big chunk of this and it may make sense also for environmental commission to be able to be a partner in that in a more active way yeah so I would suggest you watch out to them because I think they're really going to get you up to speed fast on a lot of work that they've already done over the last couple of years oh absolutely we've we've had conversations with the DDA and some of the business street associations in this respect over the last year and they do have a plan that's fairly far along and I believe them at Shaffer onus is the main spokesman for the DDA and this in this regard so we're going to continue to speak with them and we'll just see what kind of roles made emerge for the for the Commission to help facilitate a solution there any other questions Commissioner Graham would you take us through the natural features groups the underlying assumption I think that and that's a futures group has been working under very increasingly since last fall and the understanding of how much carbon is sequestered in a hardwood tree as it ages is that if we all if we the city can do a better job at engaging with our citizens in every corner and in every endeavor private and public property to do a better job at stewarding their property planting trees diminishing the amount of turf grass that's out there doing a better job at containing runoff on our properties we will have over the long run a significant impact in diminishing the effects of climate change at least in our own backyards the big questions about dealing with carbon emissions are really questions that our state and federal at the scale that we really need to have much more action than we're getting but what we can do here is it is what's beginning to be suggested in from your natural features committee and there are really two parts to the the first part is is a team within the city of staff members who who's a part of whose work would be to go out and begin to engage neighborhoods and individual property owners big and small public and private with recipe for and for better stewardship and that recipe goes from a team member already existing and Jennifer's program for and in the county's program on rain gardens to work on collecting more water runoff I think there probably are team members for energy I'm not exactly sure who but one piece of this is to engage people about doing more about conserving energy and perhaps solar panels and the third is of course how the landscape in general is dealt with we have a cliche here and across the United States well the eastern United States where its moist enough of turf grass everywhere the environmental cost carbon emissions cost the pollutant cost the negative impact on the climate from maintaining so much or turf grasses even in just a place like Ann Arbor quite gigantic and if we could encourage people to convert to oak trees and short grass prairie or anything but turf grass it would completely change the chemistry of water and filtration it would bring back pollinators if you're using native plants or even non-native ones they are attractive to pollinators you bring back native shrubs that are especially attractive to caterpillars you really sponsor our bird population there are just so many things that so many people don't know about that they could do would be excited to do if we engage them and teach them and encourage them and and facilitate so those are the recommendations to try to get that horse going at the city and a key part of it is measuring what we do I know the counties measuring their ring garden program very well Jennifer said she's measuring everything that they're doing we we really do need to measure this so that we can maybe sell carbon offsets as a function of the results we get so that we really can you know grow about the kind of stewardship that happens in fact what the change might be if you look at aerial imagery of Ann Arbor where the slopes were steep you have a lot of native forest fragments because it was difficult to farm them farm steep slopes didn't work very well to cut the trees in the 1860s but they didn't turn the soil and so then a facsimile of the native ecosystems have come back south of the river south of about Burns Park almost all farmland great deal more turfgrass many fewer trees lots of opportunity to plant a lot of trees we have to measure and know what the results are and so part of the process here over the next few months is to try to design what those things might be it'll take the team sitting down and really beginning to do things before I really have good ways of documenting and keeping those measurements but at least we can begin to talk about them I'm really excited it's been a long time since I've been excited as excited as I am now about natural features in the city and hooking it to results that benefit us in our goal to adapt to a changing climate really makes a difference thank you questions for as we do go through the budget and are making budget decisions now and and finally in mid May that we should also be thinking of what we would need from this document that we're looking at what we might want to like for example Jennifer Lawson said she was doing the tree inventory in 2020 possibly we would suggest we and expanded inventory this year and move some money into this year instead things like that it's what I'm thinking yes again the inventory that she's that the stormwater fund pays for is that of street trees and some dark trees this larger picture is addressing all property in the city no matter the ownership and which is a great deal many more trees and a great deal larger amount of land and there is a lot of existing imagery that much more than I last knew a year ago that can be interpreted reasonably cost very cost-effectively to help in this process without new imagery it might be at some point we like some new imagery but I think we can go a long way if the pilot areas of the city that we looked at in this way work at producing maps and educational materials and graphics and things that we can take out lay out and show people in neighborhoods what their natural features are what their runoff is where it's going encourage stewardship and all the various channels that it can happen and respond the citizen requests for help and attention like idea of the graphics in the inventory is first of all really know very well what we're talking about and ain't given part of the city at least recently well and to get people excited it's you know I can sit up here and talk about trees but when you look at the pattern of your neighborhood and see it in person when you have at least some inventory when I begin to work on a pilot project we'll send people in the field so they can really have an understanding of what that neighborhoods doing and how it might be different from others and and try to get people to be genuinely proud of the resource they have it's a matter of engaging it's a matter of being really positive with people it's a matter of encouraging them to not be in denial climate change and and and by encouraging in the active part of that is courage to make changes to turf grass in the front yard for example that's radical but it's not radical if you're thinking about the climate impact of maintaining that I would be really interested in in terms of something I see a lot of um Planning Commission is we we really protect our Woodlands all pretty much the same whether it's a buckthorn wasteland or whether it's absolutely glorious gorgeous old forest fragments and I think it's really important for us to start to have some and and I don't mean go out to every single site and assess it but I think there are some tools that we have just with old aerial photographs that we can get from the county that can start to look at smaller areas then to be able to go out and check those areas and something that I use all the time to be able to get a general assessment of quality is going back to the photographs in the 1940s that the city has and you can see all those kind of like old hedgerows and the big trees you can see them and you can also see which things were just being actively farmed and most of those areas that we're being actively farmed the forests are pretty poor quality now and the areas that weren't actively farmed that's where your good stuff is and so if there's some way to kind of filter maybe so that you're not looking at like all everywhere because that's just too much time but you could start to filter it down to look at like that 1940s imagery to see where some of those hotspots maybe are and then maybe deploy people to have some sense of quality assessment I think would be really helpful so that people can start to get the story you know in many of our neighborhoods in my neighborhood there's old hedgerows of these folks that are huge they're huge and well they were once you know whatever their property lines and they're just these regular intervals that go every three or four blocks and when I talk to people about them like Oh I mean they're fascinated and so I think that that encouragement is there but those old photographs can really help to start to tell that story too and so it would be there are some tools that are available that I think can make this a whole lot easier what you're what you're doing and sending out to do which i think is wonderful another thing I would just toss out there that might be interesting is to maybe as part of the city stormwater program because native areas are so much better at absorbing water than lawns that perhaps you can get a small credit on turf transition from turf to something else and even though it's not a water concentration area water is still flowing over the top of it and lawns are pretty bad at absorbing it so maybe there's a way to be able to have that be part of the stormwater I credit program if you convert a turf to something else that you might be able to get so there is a defined natural feature in the city called native forest fragments and it was and that came about because we did go back and look at the earlier air photos and really began to understand that we had this unusual resource in the city where farming didn't happen and when farming happens as you know the soil gets and that destroyed the seed stock in the soil where it didn't happen there was enough seed stock in the soil to bring back a lot of the species that were here prior to the arrival of Europeans not all of them unfortunately in a lot of those areas were grazed by cattle which again ruined some degree so we have already built a lot of that in and it really is important here but so is the city that was farmed in my view that's the opportunity to really restore maybe native forests maybe others but in any case but many more trees and so our we're thinking of doing to pilot areas one is an area Lakewood subdivision out Ivanoff Lakes where there's a really nice native forest fragment intact in whole and that stretches out to the neighborhood over houses and then to the south east of that along Maple Road which is farmland where there aren't so many trees and those two would be sort of I think will be the pilot areas to work on both sides of this coin the really valuable inherent neighborhoods and the park parts of the city where we really need to go to work in 2004 whenever it was the natural his program began it began because of a lot of push from the Sierra Club to do something about the dawning realization of how extraordinary the impact of invasive shrubs had become in Ann Arbor when I was a boy you'd rarely see a honeysuckle and almost never see a buckthorn by the time I got into business in 1980 the great majority of untended spaces across the city were completely full of these plants to the extent they were shade they were casting eliminated most ground cover wildflowers certainly eliminated the regeneration of trees that were above them and were radically changing the fundamental ecology of the city Sierra Club and a lot of other people got together and said well okay at least on our parks we need to deal with this and in that process the people of city of Ann Arbor were converted almost everyone at this table I think knows what buckthorn and honeysuckle are that wasn't true twenty years ago and I'm sure your eyeballing one in your back yard if you have one of these things and thinking about whether what you'll do with it the downside of those plants is they are a really great screen early in the spring and late in the fall and if you take those big things out what do you do look at the neighbors it's it's something to work out with people so the see changes can happen and they have happened here on this general area and I think the sea change can really happen about doing a better job at stewarding our landscapes across the city and I just say put a little wish list and price tag on that and we could move any other questions I definitely will we are probably a little bit farther behind the other working groups because we only have the chance to meet one time so we have some broad outlines for what we're thinking about and intend to refine them and bring them back to the Commission at our next meeting but where we are right now is we are considering two that we will propose a mechanism by which that we can recommend the city measure improvement in controlling runoff and then draft a resolution to achieve this and some of our thoughts include working with city staff and some of the city interns that will be working over the summer so we can capitalize on that work and perhaps propose a percentage reduction of runoff perhaps proposed places where green infrastructure would be particularly effective and then possibly also work in coordination with the Planning Commission to see we could make such a recommendation jointly to City Council we're also hoping to review and propose revisions to the Green Streets policy which Jen had referenced earlier the city has changed the way we approach road repair and now we raid a road in in terms of its its quality and make improvements in that way rather than completely rebuilding it and one of the intermittent things that has happened through this approach is that we have taken out the Green Streets work that required that green infrastructure was built into the road repair and so we're hoping to look at the policy and see if there's a way we can redraft it so that that unintentional loophole is eliminated and our third goal is as staff and time permits to review and recommend changes to the floodplain ordinance yeah make questions so I'm not understanding what the loophole is in the Green Streets path I don't know exactly what it is yet either I just know there is one so I think I think what's going on is and I couldn't attend the meeting and I really wish I could have been there forgiven but my understanding of it is that for Road reconstruction there and this is where you really go down and and redesign the road and you're looking at all the utilities and everything like that that's when the the Green Streets policy kicks in yeah if you're resurfacing if you're just doing kind of the surface layer stuff then you don't have to and so there's a whole lot of road projects that are happening that could be doing some green infrastructure component that aren't because of that so that's my understanding innocence is that the the big wholesale things they're doing but it's just not very often that we actually take on those and we do them mm-hmm you know but there's a lot more road resurfacing and it seems like well this is what we can get into right well apparently in the years after the policy was initially adopted there was a lot more green infrastructure that was included in these projects and now it just isn't for exactly the reason for you a lot of that I said we're so far behind on surface issues on roads difficult finance and fund and go as fast as we need to go to catch up on roads well there must be a way that we can refine that so we mean clearly there are some opportunities in some places some of the time so okay I have a quick comment I I serve on two of these committees so I'd like to hold myself and work working groups to the same standard that I hold others to and that is one of the things that we should do is we should these really should be a smart goal with T meaning time bound and there's in looking at all these in I buyers that I was involved in some of the drafting of these there's only one that he it has a time bound target on them so I really recommend that we define what that is is it the end of this year is it a year from today is it 2025 or when is it what when do we want to deliver these things we should be held responsible and accountable and the other only other thing is at least for the two committees or working groups that I served on the solid waste and natural features I really want to say Steve and Chris did a great job and I really want to thank them for their leadership I think we can praise each other's occasionally and they really deserve it yeah I think everyone has done a great job you as far as the time questions I'm not sure that's true with you too I didn't I wasn't its first the time so are we bound by these work plans just until December and then we're going to revisit them well we will come back with the key with our cool any other discussion on this are we generally comfortable with this approach and moving forward here okay I would entertain a motion to approve the document in front of us as our 2019 work plan with the one slight correction that I my intro paragraph does references and subcommittees those need to be groups so with that change I would entertain a motion to approve this is our work plan all in favor I have one comment it's fine it's consistent with what I said before the first line says proposes to address the following topics to me that's just far too general okay so I'd really like us to say that you know we want to these goals during calendar year 19 as you said so that was in the first line which I didn't catch and we're not going to you know get punished if we don't but I really do think we should try to hold ourselves accountable for that makes sense great all in favor all right great thanks everyone I think we can consider that our committee reports so we'll have reports from other Commission's Commissioner murski Energy the Commission is working on a resolution in support of transparency from contributions from electric investor-owned utilities called io u--'s in Michigan which would prohibit them and their parent companies from making dark money contributions to 501 C Force since they have essentially near protected monopoly status and we know that in several cases consumers for example has been reached an agreement with the MDS C that they couldn't make any for the next 18 months because resolution to do that in addition to the ordinances that were working on which I mentioned in past meetings lighting et readiness home energy score at time of market we're also now going to be working on a solar access ordinance so that would define if someone puts up solar and someone puts up a structure or a tree that then shades that solar what if any compensation or adjustment would be made in that kind of situation and then lastly and this goes a little bit hand-in-hand with what commissioner Graham talked about we are conducting 3a - energy power outer hours we've done those in the past we're promoting primarily energy efficiency and renewable energy measures oh thank you and we're doing those this month and next month and we're trying to fit those in because the MPSC is going to be making a decision on a DTE rate case submission which is likely to replace net metering with inflow outflow rates which will if anything close to the DTE recommendations are adopted would make solar much less financially attractive so we're trying to get these in under that under that date so to speak but one of the things that we're doing Christopher is we added a slide at the beginning of that to talk not just about the smart energy home but the smart sustainable residence where we talk about native trees and replacing turf grass and putting in rain gardens and reducing perme impervious surfaces and things like that and I think when we get out of this phase right now what we're talking a lot about the specific time frame that we have and we do these power hours maybe we should look more holistically about these not just being energy focused but sustainability focused and how all this fits together not everybody that would be sitting in the audience can put solar on but almost everybody can do something with a tree or vice versa if they don't have a tree then they can put solar or whatever so - we need to get and make the Bret message broad enough that we cover all these sustainability issues that's it the presentation that we had I don't know a little over a year ago about the new lighting potential lighting standards that is now in draft form as a new lighting ordinance so that came through here and went through to Planning Commission and it looks like it's gonna happen it's not all the way there yet we had a working session on it and there's changes coming but it looks like it's all gonna happen so it's it's working people [Laughter] so we're getting good progress yeah great yeah so that's exciting to see that the other thing is that um we are considering some changes to the office district and how you might be able to have a percentage perhaps or something of it that could be towards retail and in that discussion one of the things that came up was actually partly through our public input so thank you Dave for that is really starting to look at changes to our unified development code through a sustainability lens when we're doing ordinance changes and so I talked to the Planning Commission about the sustainability framework and about the metrics and all that sort of things so I feel like there really could start to be some interesting integration that's happening between some of the things we're discussing here and how changes to our code happen so that's exciting too that there's some kind of potential changes afoot in terms of the connections I think between some of these bodies so that we can have good influences on each other and be able to take good public input and really integrate all those things together thanks to our council members have any news for us as some of you probably noticed mr.
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Smith and I nominated Dean Jonathan overpack to be on the commission and I believe he says accepted so probably by the next meeting if we confirmed in join us that's really great exciting to see that council will be having our caucus again on Sunday nights every Sunday before a council meeting so this this Sunday at 7 o'clock in this room and it's a great informal opportunity for residents and council members to talk about Monday night's agenda and there's also usually light refreshments of some kind and I'm gonna reach out to a dr. Kathy Tyson the veterinarian who was active in the chimney Swifts because the chimney Swifts will be coming back here soon and and yeah and and I I don't think any sustaining he and I were together grants have been pulled but I don't know if the Audubon Society hasn't been doing something and so I've got to get back on that and so we're working hard on the budget and looking at the city org chart and how much FTE and how much revenue and expenses are from all these different departments and getting updated figures from dr.
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Stoltz on her budgets and work plans so all of that is being dissected in great detail and one of the things that came up tonight that was interesting I think it was Shannon who mentioned it in a question with Jennifer that if we wanted to fix the roads that first time assessment if it's the first time that has to be assessed to the resident which is possibly an obstacle and that theme has come up again when we talk about filling sidewalk gaps that if it's your first time sidewalk then some big portion thousands is usually assessed to the homeowner and so I'm met this week with Craig goopy and Howard Lazarus and people from the legal department and a couple council members and all and so we were looking at redoing those ordinances and rules that require that first time assessments have to go to the individual because that might help with our climate action goals if it's if we can show in the data that it's a community benefit then we can get it done if it's just because the resident and themself can't afford it person so they used if yours if your assessed and you pay overtime and sell your house the next owner is responsible for the unpaid balance as time goes on in other words you don't get the bill your property gets the bill for those things that's true and that's something that's much easier to amend the length of time that the homeowner has to spread out those payments not more than the life of the asset itself yep and but I'm still interested in exploring the high priority sidewalk gaps or high priority gaps that you mentioned to see if we could fund those together rather than on the individual thank you don't remember Smith anything else I mean to follow up on that last point you know the sidewalks are completely different than the stormwater infrastructure because stormwater is a utility and the sidewalks are you know that is falls under the city's general fund you know right now we fund that through a millage and you know I think the broader philosophical point is you know can we broaden that millage to use that to pay for sidewalk gap completion which right now is not a city policy you know but as far as the stormwater goes you know that is a utility issue and and we can't modify that with a city policy that way at least that's the takeaway I got from what what Jen told us I think the only thing that I would want to add this evening is presentations are really great I do this was very informative but I don't know what we're supposed to do with it and I would encourage us to only have presentations that are tied to things that we are working on or things that we should be working on and things that we can be doing I think we all like to talk and we all like to we all care very deeply about these things but I think we need to prioritize our time on we've got a pretty ambitious work plan and to have working sessions where we actually accomplish something to take to Council and to provide the recommendations that we have so you know and that's true of all the boards and commissions that I sit on is we had a lot of presentations and it's a lot of really great information but it's just information and if it's not actionable it's taking up a lot of the time we could be working on something thank you good thoughts mr.
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