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sixty 60 that's far too high of a number and you know as i said i'm a student at u of m i studied abroad last year in germany in germany um that percentage of coal is much lower and the percentage of renewables they use in those communities is very very high it's over thirty percent in some areas dte uses only seven percent renewables so once again we are lagging very far behind other countries that are comparable to our own this is why i strongly support the idea of municipalization and i think that the energy commission should fully explore explore going about this legal process which is uh outlined in the michigan constitution um the idea of cca is very exciting to me as well however uh i i throughout my entire lifespan um there has just been very little movement in lansing and i think that uh relying on movement there would be a very foolhardy plan because if we're not able to get cca passed an entire section of the 8-0 plan will just fail so at least exploring other options and having a backup plan for if cca is not passed i think is a terrific idea it's a very prudent strategy as we continue forward in accomplishing the eight to zero plan after all the age of zero plan is a living breathing document so even though municipalization isn't part of that right now it can be thank you and thank you thank you for your comments missy yes uh we have yep uh we have phone number ending at 8 2 0.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
maybe we just have to say and the same thing is happening it's not just air aluminum in mexico it's in makes out from arizona california arizona new mexico it's not about citizenship it's about residency and that's residency in arizona residents united states is students for a privacy there's a discussion of personal items it's just a resignation and that's not all the teachers that are on there it's just the ones who have given notice that they will be returned right and one of the things um we had two board meetings back we had introduced the budget about 500 and it's a community we will be we'll make it through the year because we had too large carol on last year burdens and i are extremely nervous about what comes up for next year and we haven't had not had to have a reduction in force for some time but that may be happening we may have to for a year uh eliminate programs that we think about work for kids i received an email from someone today in the coke and foster money from the federal government would bail us out well the first one we had for example we don't know the details yet about how much it's going to be allocated how much the government is going to go to schools one of the only recipients of that money we received 112 000 in the first total economy passed big price spent here nine thousand dollars and none of that money was not budgeted when we did the budget 2020 it was really your fiscal year sorry we had not anticipated so in fact this uh burns and i are meeting a week from tomorrow spend some time working on the closure but the fight is a long ways away the we gotta have a bike hearing in june and about your adoption in july and there we've got to talk about i think we need to save money and uh he's gonna get us himself we've been told some of our staff will come back so we're going to look at ways and maybe my philosophy uh i've heard informally from a few not a lot of done has read a little survey or passed out a letter from chance uh it's not it's not minding i was talking to a person today i was looking for a certain teacher in a certain area that's hard to feel and i thought this person i knew from previous life it's one of the things to recognize i am i feel fortunate that we have as good of quality of philippine international teachers i don't know how we would catch the voters the last two years school started 2000 vacancies in the state of arizona with no teachers december last year this year last year we mitigated the laws of teaching because of coving there was a shutdown of the philippines so people on the j-1 visa instead of stopping five years after three years they needed a waiver to go to the fourth and fifth year with several people running fifth year last year and so extended sixth year talking directly about immigration attorney i said when you wait again i thought it happened in seventh year and uh he does not think so i also talked to another district today about recruiting and they had hired they brought in a teacher just this last month from philippines and they're pretty pleased with the person they had so we don't know for sure we're going to act like we're going to be able to it's not a guarantee without that i've yet to hire in my time in office a teacher vote from asu or from usa at london unfortunately many students from large universities unless they've grown up in a small town and grown up here they want to live in the city with opportunities more chance for graduates this year thank you i think so too i'm back revising the teaching contract making sure it meets all the bells and whistles of the law and as soon as that gets back with the board so teachers not on this list are not coming back or some of them might be we're not sure yet the water the ladder and the next is uh the business items from the february regular bonus meeting which is did you want to discuss them i i didn't realize we were looking at the whole thing together there is a paraprofessional that we're going to put forth to hire night we are doing an extended week um and march is coming very soon all right we go through the business then and the first item is the school [Music] mr calendar is the expert on this uh i mean one morning we had our monday morning meeting and had it that afternoon the next day um i mean looking at it casually it's extremely close to what we have this year uh i hope you'll have kids more of this counter we've got this year no it's it's basically identical to what the one that's there this year it's just the dates have changed to match the holidays schedules but everything else everything else matches and we have the 490 days we had a mistake years ago i took the principal's word for it it wasn't mr ed's the long word and the principal couldn't count on it and so uh we had to change the way they had a couple days of school [Music] the number of hours per because especially in our k-3 they we changed that about 10 years ago using this message 215.
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i thought that was a a very good sign i mean for us it's a hundred thousand dollars it's not a lot it's one percent increase so you know it's not keeping up with any other increase in the world um but it's something it's not a cut um so i guess we've got to be somewhat pleased with that the overall increase to the town you see there is just under 320 000 so uh you know there's been i i thought it would be worse so now to to actually act upon that the legislature is really going to have to commit to using um you know to using i would assume reserve resources on their end that's what they did to stem the gap in you know in 2021 in the 21 budget uh i just don't know how willing they're going to be to do that so i mean it's good good news that the governor did that i don't know where that's going so i have one other question that's going to sort of both of these slides so far um typically our budget is based on previous year enrollment right so our budget next year is based on this year enrollment um has the state held districts harmless for the declines enrollment associated with covid i mean we know that's happening statewide um the state is is the state not factoring it into their calculations wouldn't that make sense right yeah it that is not what they did okay and i will say since we are a community that the state perceives uh is is getting more money in chapter 70 than we would be entitled to based on the formula so basically what i'm saying there is they think that we are wealthy um since they think that we are wealthy the decline in enrollment doesn't really hurt as much so it's four thousand dollars that it hurt us uh now usually we're the ones who get hurt with just about everything but in this particular case them deciding to you know use new enrollment numbers when obviously it's a major issue and it will there will be a change to the positive of enrollment numbers next fall um it really hurt other communities much more than us uh and they're funding i i know that they are going to be vocal in trying to advocate for that for you know some reversal and the legislature certainly has it within their authority to do that so uh we'll see what happens but i mean you know it could mean a little more for us but but if it's only four thousand dollars then right you know i i would also say i'm not sure the legislature would consider us wealthy um but i think they might say we're not fully utilizing our taxing capacity given the levels of wealth in this community um and i would not maybe necessarily disagree with them looking at our tax rate compared to other communities in the commonwealth but that that is what it is yeah well the community you know and i don't want to talk too much about chapter 70 formula because uh it's early a little early for a nap for everybody but um but you know the the community the the state rather looks at income in the communities and property value and and we've probably had this conversation before but the property value in dartmouth is high there's there we're on the coast and there are a lot and it's a very large town um one of the largest and as a result they think that uh we're entitled to less money than other communities that you might think are kind of similar to us so that is what it is and then that part of the formula there's no chance to ever you know we're never changing that until probably never so we're stuck with that but um but yeah so so that is a factor but it the enrollment piece but it didn't have a uh you know a major um major effect on our overall projected increase at this point so let's see here okay so i just i wanted to get here to sort of the meat of the numbers of the presentation and there's a there's a few key things on the top two lines um there's the fy 21 budget which is that's our current budget that's the current budget that we're operating with and was appropriated at town meeting last june um 45 million 586 thousand dollars then based on the work that i explained previously when we were talking about the budget process we came up with an fy22 draft budget before considering all of the additional requests from the departments and principals so basically talking about salary increases talking about um some special ed increases talking about that transportation increase some other minor increases that we have to absorb we were at 3.58 budget increase so 47 million 217 000 and then we began to look at you know we had already looked at all of these other things that you know are really valid requests from from our principals um and when we when we looked at those we knew starting at 3.58 percent that we would have limited that was the first page this is the second page of these uh that we would have limited ability to fund these i mean we are some we are realistic and understand that this isn't going to be a great year and to now have to face this is going to be really challenging but the things that we really did feel uh you know were absolutely critical that we um that we need to build into the operating budget were let's see one the a half outreach social workers for the district so i mean if there's ever been a time that we need these people we need them and now and um you know they're the the are presenting with um you know a lot of needs through this through this pandemic they had a lot of needs before the pandemic if you look back at last year's presentation there were requests for for this type of help in the district um and we weren't able always able to fund it uh but you know we really feel that it's important to move forward with this proposal so we have currently a half-time social worker at the cushman school or proposed to make that position full-time and then as you'll see as you see through this list that there's several schools that did ask for social work help and we've proposed hiring a district social worker who would then be allocated to multiple schools so that we could provide some assistance um you know you know to them the only other thing with that we built in from all these requests and and to be honest we really didn't have a choice in this one uh is a specialized reading program to support um students with dyslexia so it was basically the department of ed has indicated that we have to do this and we will do it so um we had to we had to come up with some money to do that so in total those three items are about 120 about a quarter of a percent and then bring our overall budget increase to three point eight four percent so that's where we are right now with with our uh with our budget and that's that's what we're presenting to you today any questions on these two slides okay so yes dr jenkins all right i was gonna let kathleen go but i couldn't see her if she had a question or not so um i will just say that i strongly support the prior prioritization of um social workers here um there's so much data coming out that the kids are not okay they're not doing well um and i think people really need to understand how important this is um my other sort of question and concern is related to learning gaps and i know that our teachers and all of our staff are doing the best that they can to provide kids with the best education they can get this year but we just we know right that that kids are going to have gaps whether they're not enrolling in kindergarten or you know they're not engaging even though we're doing our best to get them engaged or just the fact that but being in school there's a reason why kids are in school five days a week right because it's good for them and so i guess one of the questions i had in looking at this was whether we considered it all whether we have any cares money or whether there's any consideration of doing some stuff in august for kids before school start to sort of get them up to speed to deal with some of these learning gaps or whether we considered some extended learning time um again to address those kiddos that are falling behind i just think that next it's a difficult year financially but it's going to be a really needy year for all of our kids and i would really like to see us within whatever confines we have even if it's one time only money in part because right fingers crossed we don't have a global pandemic next year so if we can do a little bit extra like in after school stuff or in august and july whatever to kind of get these kids back on track it strikes me as money that would be well invested i think so and uh dr gifford chime in but i i think that you know what we've talked about is we have school choice here to support things that we might otherwise not be able to do and we are hopeful that we'll have cares act funds um there is cares act 2 coming and then hopefully there will be more coming uh you know from the federal government um we we do think i mean there will be something coming so i mean obviously that is going to have to yeah it's going to have to support those needs we recognize that those are real okay thank you so this this slide really breaks down um you know i guess i'll start with the overall for next year we'd be down four positions from where we are now um you know we've given it a lot of thought and and tried to um you know try try to be each each time that we had an opening or um you know a transfer there were a lot of there were a lot of moving parts this year um in personnel and and we hope that you know you recognize that we're trying to do more than we ever have and uh in this case we're proposing that we're gonna continue to do that with less so it's a challenge for sure um so the first two lines on here speak to the outreach social worker positions that i that i mentioned on the previous slide so those would be increases for fy 22.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
and so you know with these numbers uh you know these are i think all three of these positions weren't all three of these schools weren't an assistant principal um i believe kara spoke to it um articulated the fact that you know we need we need support for classroom teachers and to help lead instruction um and so you know it's as big as as big as these numbers get and we can think about this this in a similar way we think about class size in our classrooms uh you know we have guidelines where we would like no more than 22 in a classroom in k one two and three um and and frankly you get up get up to 450 students in the building your staff gets bigger obviously there's more needs greater needs and your school-wide um and so to have one principle to meet the needs of all of the students and staff in that building and parents is becoming to be a little unwildly and so you know with that that's why the request for three assistant principals at these three schools with more than shelter rock and statley um you know almost 500 respectively at each building and then um and so i i just think it's important to really reiterate those things and those requests um you know when speaking about when speaking about the social emotional support and just the overall growth of those two areas so i'll if there's more you'd like me to speak to i'll be happy to but certainly i just wanted to highlight those two areas to start with i have one question is what's the of the school counselor the function of a counselor when i think of a counselor is is like a guidance counselor how does that differ from the psychologists of the social worker in terms of the role or what they perform yeah so kelly the best person to answer but mr genelli if i can just open with this and kelly if i could just open with this because in the last meeting we had you know i had talked about you know my experience as a sister principal decades ago it feels like um in norwalk but you know we had two assistant principals in each in each house office so we had assistant principals in the building of sixteen hundred um and and i just wanna reiterate we are under staff in terms of counselors ratio again i believe the standard is 225 to 250 and i believe kelly in our last meeting um shared with the board in the community that were over 300 per counselor and so as we talked about our goals around college and career-ready students um counselors play a critical role in this planning process you know whether it's meetings with families meeting with students and when we when when our counselors are understaffed we can't have the same expectations in one of the biggest high schools in the district i'm in in the state of connecticut and continue to operate um and dan is leading the school that continues to be on demand um and so i know that we were um noted by knee ask as you know this being an area of improvement for us um and quite frankly i think it's a critical need for us to help to continue to meet the ongoing needs of our students in student population thank you very much if i could just piggyback on that um it's important to remember in our district that our school counselors that we have school counselors uh sixth grade six through twelve um and as mr walleston indicated primarily their role is on college and career readiness um you know making sure that students understand their pathways what they need to do to get on track uh teaming with parents students community agencies um you name it to track grades attendance all of those interventions um partner with classroom teachers at the secondary level our school psychologists and social workers a majority of their role is working with our students that are already identified as needing supports um so our special education students are 504 students that's not to say they don't work with other students but again due to the large caseloads that they each have they tend to play a bigger part in those mandated services that are provided at the elementary level we do not have school counselors currently so our school social workers and psychologists partner to meet any of the social emotional needs for both our general ed students as well as our um legally mandated services through special ed and 504.
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hi can you hear me yes we can thank you hi my name is phil bianco i am a resident of ann arbor in ward 1. i've lived here and worked here for about eight years now and i'm calling also to speak in favor of energy municipalization or public ownership of the energy utility in ann arbor i think the people who spoke before me made some very good points about why it makes sense financially and in terms of ecology as well and sustainability i think it makes sense to do this both to advance affordability and reliability of our energy here in ann arbor and also to make sure that voters and citizens and people in this city have control over energy utility and i think it's one of the best things that we could do to invest in our community and potentially create a lot of good well-paying union jobs as well i think that yeah so i just wanted to speak in favor of energy municipalization i think ann arbor is very well positioned to lead on this issue in a way that a lot of municipalities and a lot of larger entities as well are not able to do and i think perhaps more importantly if we are going to solve the climate crisis and really make a dent in that locally i think we have to take power away from polluters like dte which have a financial interest in uh doing the opposite of the things that we need to do to solve the climate crisis so that's pretty much all i wanted to say i really hope that the commission uh seriously considers and does recommend a feasibility study um for municipalization in ann arbor thanks thank you for calling in and thanks for your input you see do we have some more people we do we have a handful more and i i believe that someone i accidentally lowered their hand for them so if i did that please no it was not advertising please raise your hand again and we'll put you back in the queue uh so caller ending in 283 you should now be unneeded hello can you all hear me yes we can wonderful hi everyone my name is katie cooley i'm an ann arbor resident i live on 731 packard and i have been an ann arbor renter for two years now i am here like previous speakers to express my opinion regarding the municipalization of ann arbor and its diversion from dte energy for nearly a year now we all have been forced to reconsider the role that the air plays in all of our lives the air which most of us take for granted we now realize has the possibility to spread things like cover 19 in our communities of course we've all generally realized this before but now these days we are really forced to pay direct attention to the air in which we breathe this is quite a new thing for most of us however for people like me i've been thinking about the air for a little bit longer a few years ago we realized that i had asthma and since then i've known what it feels like to live for days and days on end feeling like i was breathing my last gasp of air at every moment it's honestly a really terrible feeling and i wouldn't wish it on anyone else your chest constricts and you're really unable to focus on the most basic things in your day-to-day life it's an awful experience i know what it's like to live in polluted air i know what that feels like i also know that if we don't commit to cutting ties with corporations like gte that care more about shareholder profits than my lungs the error will get worse as previous speakers have stated around 60 percent of dte's power is sourced from coal as opposed to just seven percent from wind and wind and solar cte will never be motivated to care about our community's health or the quality of the air we breathe as a corporate entity ann arbor needs to cut dte out of the picture so that our future and our air doesn't feel like my present reality i ask you to commit to cleaner air and healthier communities thank you thank you for sharing your thoughts this sounds like we have a few more we do uh caller ending in nine two zero 9-2-0 can you guys hear me i'm so sorry about that that's all right yes we hear you fine thanks beautiful well thank you all for the opportunity to speak this evening um my name is sam limerick i live in ward 3 near packard and hill and i'm a graduate student at the university of michigan i'm like everyone else i'm speaking in support of the city taking steps to critically reevaluate the living carbon neutrality plan as embodied in a 2-0 this the 8-0 plan as it currently stands relies wholly upon community choice aggregation as as we've already heard as a way to decarbonizing our local electrical grid by 2030 i i think that a comp a continuing partnership with ete whose timeline for carbon neutrality is 2050 singular replies upon cca which faces significant uh hurdles in lansing the decarbonizer grid is fundamentally at odds with our our stated goals as a community and i think that a publicly owned electric facility and consequently local control of our energy mix is in our reach today unlike cca um municipalization has a strong legal uh footing in the state and in ann arbor uh city code and i think that um we should uh join join the crew more than pretty michigan communities like like lansing actually and our next door neighbors in chelsea already enjoy the benefits of municipal utility um i'm going to use my home sound of austin as an illustrative example to describe what i think would be some of the benefits of a new utility um i'll highlight three tangible benefits renewables mix cost and resiliency and community health that often has seen and then try to connect them to our situation so i mean as of june 2019 uh austin energy's generation mix was at 43 renewable energy and this is deep in the heart of texas where uh things are like texas and austin energy invested heavily in this renewables mix in direct response to climate protection resolutions passed by the city in 2007 and 2014 and that to me that's what local control is all about it's about listening to constituents and appearing that they want a renewable energy mix which i know we all want in this room um and then let's let's move to cost um pt's residential electric rate is 17.5 cents uh 17.51 cents per kilowatt hour and that's 32 higher than the u.s average and it's actually 42 percent more than what our uh our neighbors and chelsea are paying through their municipality who they paid 10.7 cents per kilowatt hour like what's the deal with that where is that where's that extra money going and in taking back to austin i mean they beat the texas state average on cost and they did this while soundly beating us up here in ann arbor with respect to the degree of local control of a renewables mix um we'll hear some more stories from other communities that have used have seen uh tremendous cost savings from industrialization and presentation you'll see later on and i'll just take it back to community health and resiliency now in a year where utility bills have become particularly burdensome a public utility will allow us to live our values and not shut off people's power in a warming but you know still in some parts of the year sometimes very cold world like today um empathetic moves like this are a great example of the way a public utility could grow our communities resiliency our collective ability to weather the storm of climate change and a global pandemic and i posed a question to the commission in all listening does resiliency or regard for community health drive dte's operations today would they'd invest in company time or energy in this space are they keen on facilitating the transformative change we know our introduced and must undergo their uh stated carbon neutrality goal of 2050 contributes this um so let's step into the leadership role we all know ann arbor can step into on the issues of sustainability and think about creating a mutual utility thank you all for your time and thank you for your insights you see caller ending in five three three we should hear you now 533 hi can you hear me yes great uh my name is roshan i am a graduate student at the university of michigan and an ann arbor resident uh right here on dewey avenue and i would like to echo everyone who has spoken before me um there's obviously a strong case to be made for a municipal utility purely on climate grounds we've heard plenty about that but i also want to emphasize how impactful a municipal utility could be for energy justice so energy affordability has always been a justice issue we know that lower income people pay extremely high proportions of their income on utility bills but the pandemic has sort of thrown this into extremely stark relief last year i worked for several months with a mutual aid collective serving washington county we were mostly just focused on redistributing cash money to help people meet their basic needs i worked their finances so i saw every transaction over a period of several months and it was dpe bill after dce bill after dte bill um it was frankly a little bit shocking and i'm someone who's worked in energy energy justice for for a minute now people are struggling we're currently on the brink of a utility ratepayer debt crisis the national energy assistance directors association estimates that there could be as much as 40 billion with a b in utility debt owed nationwide by march by pursuing a municipal utility not only will we achieve lower electric rates which will relieve some of that immediate burden on people in the first place but we can democratize solutions to debt relief and shut off moratoria for example in lansing the public utility there has declared a shutoff moratorium that extends past the moratoria that have been declared by the investor on utilities in terms of duration but also in terms of reach the moratorium declared by the industrial utilities such as dce is very limited it's limited in terms of agent income whereas these utility moratoriums declared or shut off moratoria declared by the public utilities are universal municipal utilities can also efficiently deliver state and federal funding in order to help rate fares as we've seen in lansing and in los angeles which have delivered cares act aid directly to ratepayers to help pay their bills energy is a human right we need it to survive municipalization is a step towards realizing that right for everyone thank you and thank you next up we have caller at last three digits 772.
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we keep them because of siblings that help them get home safely a lot of class runs you know plus your people get tired have one question um of the blue squares days that the children do not go to school those are wednesdays or those are half days those all right teachers conference then wrong those three days are only here half days correct because any more questions and the next is the declaration of solo source provider and that's for uh it is right yes air conditioning the firm is almighty air max the gentleman in town in the relations to terry henley we have had refrigeration units a number of them go out thank goodness to a cool weather um one staff we are worried about in an office is the refrigeration system is also the heating system and so we have one of the approval through our school facilities board and we talked about attached we'll see the units we have one three and a half ton units which is not that expensive another three ton unit which is not that expensive but then we have several from gymnasium we have uh five uh four or five fifteen ton units and uh a seven and a half ten units those are quite expensive and so we're above we're almost at the mid questions but it's difficult to find people you know when construction is prospering the line drives off within refrigeration we've had one company for quite a while and they were operating here based on a residential license only they did they tried to charge us twice for one bill and i had to deal with the arizona registrar contractors suddenly they changed mine and often and they have a new computerized system that's driven early that's engineers it's about masterpiece but what mrs burns recommended you have a contractor in town that go for sole source because the distance and credit the readiness of that person to repair or replace and because students if it's august or may refrigeration system goes out a classroom we've handled our coding problems together for a long time in school but it's not safe to understand work for our students so we're asking where to do our solutions and that's legal for procurement and organizations um his son works under his license is construction people want to have specs i i can tell you what we need but just because my father was a constructionist and i understand how the respect and some things i might not have but i'm going to trust myself um [Music] um it's the um angelina's area i don't see it distributed just take office okay mr campus at least 40 years maybe 50 years in this district with both very strong personalities we didn't know he's a great but it was always a professional solution or conversation i think 24 hours on an agenda is enough uh it may be that people have other ideas um and i don't i don't see i don't see the need to rush it honestly in a month it could be put it in the paper it said we're seeing you can put on these two ideas but in the paper maybe we get some ideas some comments and we can vote on it next month uh we talked about this about where being policy does not require a committee i have talked to people in the community about those candidates and um i don't think there's a lot of risk i don't know but um it seems we don't have to we don't have to ask our community what they think but it seems like something that we should do just as a matter of good faith let's say this is this is your community buildings we want to know what you think it just seems like it seems like crazy everybody just last month on this video um but mr governor stated last month we're elected by the community and we represent the community um i'm sure i spoke to the same people about really knowing if we already have overwhelming support for this let's keep the agenda open for art for something else that we could do to run the agenda instead of doing this after a month of asking questions doing things like that i understand community involvement is very important but i think we have overwhelming communities according to us regardless of other and they think it's issues and so i don't think it's a brush it's just we've been talking about yeah i think it's also a nice gesture to just put something simple you'll have a chance to vote on that tomorrow night i mean i don't think we can make a decision tonight whether we would name or not so that tomorrow if you feel that way you wouldn't know it and then if we had the majority we would carry it over and say now that it's on the intelligence [Music] um demonstrating demonstrating our efforts thank you do the last one is the board requested items for future meetings uh this is not going to be a holding item and legal meeting but this is just a discussion and there's several recommendations i thought this was what the board was i hate some people some workers but here for 18 19 years if any of the board members may have something left to then they can bring it up and that way we have another picture of it and then we can be looked at and say okay let's treat us what we need to put on this next month which of these and then we kind of all stand the same page it's not like just surprise for some of us you know i i i i'm okay with that i mean we're all here to make discussions and discuss things and solve problems before it didn't happen i'm all for mitigating emergency before it happens so the other thing i was thinking about was you know we do this i almost feel like the part of the board is my responsibility to compile these things and then get what the president and the superintendent say hey these are what we have let me know what we're going to do so i give back to those individuals personally that way it takes a little less work off marsha dr dooley you know i'm a perk of the board i got you know i need to assume some more responsibilities here i guess i feel compelled to and i don't know how the rest of you and so everything falls smoothly i'm um i'm not up for 7.50 [Music] oh okay is
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we've proposed a we as you know we had a retirement with our assistant superintendent uh and we are proposing that we eliminate the director of teaching and learning position um and that ms oliveira would become uh the assistant superintendent uh we i had a resignation to make a long story short it affected a couple of positions but i had a resignation as a secretarial position and we shifted things around and these next two lines are the net result of that with a decrease of 0.7 positions in our administrative office we had some other pluses and minuses of teachers and teacher assistants again through the throughout the year each time there was a retirement or a resignation these are not not layoffs these are all through attrition just just so you know um we so we addressed that at each school as they came up uh maintenance i've not filled the plumber position i've not built it into the budget i think long term we have to go back to that but um but at this point there's just not the money and i i didn't do it um and then uh there's a couple of other district-wide positions there in addition to the uh to the social worker and the administrative positions that um that were also necessary throughout this process for an slpa which is a teacher assistant position and then a part-time addition to a occupational therapist that currently works for us so the uh let's see the net there down the bottom you have the admit you know reduction in administration and instruction and then other for a total of four so any questions on on this dr jenkins i'm full of questions today that's okay that's what this is about how are we gonna fill our plumbing needs i mean i assume the plumber wasn't sitting around doing nothing all day no he was busy yeah yeah it's it's it's difficult you know he went to a he went to another district sort of a promotion job um for him and um it's been interesting working without the plumber in the end i i think you know when we sort of get past this and we have a more normal year um i think i'd be better able to then judge how much if we're hiring a plumber to do licensed plumbing work now our maintenance guys are really talented guys they are you know at their house they're not calling a plumber to fix something let's face it they're you know they're fixing it themselves there are some things where we need you know a licensed plumber and we have spent money on that this year and i i just want to get a little bit more of an idea of where that's going long term um so i i you know i'm willing to we'll struggle with it a little but you know i'm willing to struggle with it for a year and sort of determine how we're gonna you know manage that moving forward any other questions on this so there's a lot to do uh and there's a lot left um ahead for this budget so you know we we've presented you a draft obviously ultimately it's not a final document but you know someday hopefully fairly soon it will be a more final document we are presenting today to the budget subcommittee we then will present to the school committee on the 22nd um the day after february vacation so you will have um your your budget books and mr silva i'll forward you the information as well thanks for joining us today i'm sorry you were you were cut off at the bottom of my screen there i didn't see you for a while um but we'll provide mr silva as well as who's representing the finance committee with all that information then uh you know the the what i didn't put in here which i should have the school committee will have multiple meetings in which they can deliberate and discuss and you know make sure that you're comfortable with supporting this budget before it moves forward to the finance committee and the select board and seeking recommendations from them so you'll have opportunity to have your say then uh we our hope and we're flexible with this would be that a public hearing uh you know would be on or about march 22nd and and then followed by a school committee approval on april 5th we we have a little bit of flexibility but the town does need to move forward and and so we need to get our budget incorporated into the town budget and so we have to stick within a meeting i would say of those timelines for sure um and then tao meeting will be june 1st so that'll be our opportunity to ask me to cut that off well opportunity to ask for uh everyone's support in town and uh you know hopefully hopefully we can get it so in the midst of all that there'll be a lot of work that i need to do with the town side of government to you know iron out some of the missing items that i have on this list like i don't really have a financial projection we don't know what health insurance is we i mean we'll hear more from the state and the feds on grants and support and um and then we'll uh you know so we'll keep you informed throughout that process as circumstances change we as dr gifford has always been saying fluid and flexible we got to be in this too so and that is the presentation are there any questions dr jenkins i will channel my inner mr nunes looking at this slide and i will say i am deeply concerned i understand our need to meet town deadlines and i you know know that the town has the capacity to do this i am worried about the levels above us right um the state and the federal government i have zero confidence that we're going to get good numbers from them by our timeline um you know this is a disadvantage of being a town meeting is that we have to you know have such advanced preparation because we don't have a council right that can simply vote changes to the budget um but i'm really concerned about given all the uncertainties that we're going to have good information to make good budget requests uh by this timeline um but i know we'll do our part and we'll we'll do what you will do our best with what we have but um i just don't think the state's gonna gonna make anywhere near here i agree i don't think there's any chance of that i mean look i mean i know that this was a catastrophic event but look at this past year what happened um i understand i i don't know how they i i don't know i don't know how they do it um you know they're gonna have to make a decision to use a major portion of their reserves to fund this 22 budget so and the town of dartmouth is going to have to consider you know their their tax revenue is not going to be what it was so um you know there's going to be a lot of considerations on on this end and and they can't really make all those decisions until they hear from the state too so it's going to be a bit of a mess for sure would anyone else like to like to comment the only thing i'll say is just even though the positions that we've seen that we're not going to be able to fund or whatever it might be i have to give the principals were obviously very cognizant of the stressful situation wherein they went bare bones with their requests and normally you know they're trying to put things in that really can take our district from a to z and have it fly but they so this was just very bare bones like like we said they they understood the situation so um in collaboration just deciding the social emotional piece we really needed to push and advocate for that that's important while trying to maintain the other positions that we've had this year and not replace some that we didn't replace this whole year as well and get by so that's my comment anyone else like to comment i have more questions comments i'm sorry um so i mean i do think that those those social emotional needs are going to be really great um would we consider funding that out of cares dollars if things look really bad at the state and local level i mean i just really don't think we can do without it i look around and it's it's really bad it's really bad i think we would i'm sorry to interrupt i i think we would consider that the the difficulty with you know funding things that way is we really should really only look at hiring for a one-year position if we're going to consider that because um you know there's there's no guarantee that we'd ever be able to build it in in the future um i know this year is not a good time to build it in but i'm sure next year won't be and the year after that probably won't be and you know so um so yes we could do that but but i think your your candidate pool is somewhat um you know is a different pool if you are a one-year only position with the understanding that it end at the end of the year um so that's something to consider too yeah i mean i would 100 prefer to fund it from recurring revenues and not from one-time revenues um but for me i would rather fund it with one-time revenues than do without because i think the needs are so great i you know having served on the finance committee the idea between recurring revenues and non-recurring revenues has been drilled into my head but i mean desperate times call for desperate measures we have to get support for our kids next year and so i feel very strongly about trying to make this recurring but making this happen um regardless of what our you know if we any way we possibly can yeah i'm sure we we would agree as a group i i think the other important thing to note know and we didn't talk about this directly is that right now for instance we have a lot of kids uh being schooled virtually full-time right now both at the elementary level with staff with six staff members that are not built into this budget so if um if we were to you know have to in the fall offer that level of service which is pretty unclear as to whether we will or not at this point um you know that six six teaching positions just at the elementary level we then would also want to look at the middle school level in which we've we've at this point because we we really didn't know how long this was going to go and what this was going to entail we uh you know purchased a software package essentially for the middle school and the high school you know to educate kids fully virtually and and um you know we'd want to look at that and and see what that looks like so that hopefully uh if we do have to do that there'll be grant funding to support that otherwise i yeah i don't know how we're going to do that that's going to be quite a few positions obviously so does anyone else have any questions comments mr silva i know you're new as our representative of the finance committee um you know miss ham has been doing this for a while with us uh we we always uh although this is an official school committee budget subcommittee we'd you know certainly uh entertain any comments you might have oh thank you yeah this is so it's my first time obviously i'm kind of getting my way to land and feel for what's going on um i i'm just listening to you guys this time i i don't have uh you know more questions and answers as usual it's like everyone else in town and in the world right now so great yeah no will and uh you know if you think of anything or as you start to bring information back to the finance committee please feel free to reach out to myself and dr gifford and and you know and certainly school committee members and and uh you know we'll keep you in the loop as we as we move forward through this process all right great well if there's no other no other questions or comments from anyone then i'd really just like to thank you all it's it's going to be a long process we know it's going to be a difficult process and we just you know appreciate your thoughtful comments and um and your consideration thank you everybody have a great day thanks thank you you
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
so it does vary a little bit on level um of course the overarching goal for all of those departments is to meet students needs to partner with families so they all build um up to that ultimate goal of having a student to be successful in school but there are um definite differences based on our numbers based on our needs of the students and it does vary a little bit based on the level that we're talking about at the high school the current request of the two additional school counselors i i didn't hear um kevin's request how much would that bring our ratio up to in terms of the the ratio of counselors to the students at the high school if we added the two to two more this year you would need to add two more each year over the next three to four years to get closer to the ratio of about 250.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
hello can you hear me we can okay great hi my name is rowan tucker meyer i'm a high school student i live on stanford road and i strongly urge the wall to support public power and make a plan to municipalize ann arbor's energy i completely agree with everyone who's spoken before me i think the energy commission is serious about bringing ann arbor into the 21st century and fulfilling the goals which were set out by the a20 plan and you have to start working towards energy municipalization it's hard to see how we could possibly transition off of fossil fuels when we are basically at the mercy of whatever dte chooses to invest in which is to say whatever will deliver the most profit to their shareholders rather than what is actually best for our community and our planet now a public power utility on the other hand would be accountable to the citizens of ann arbor who would have more input regarding where our energy comes from and i think major structural changes like this would be immensely important in our fight against catastrophic climate change so i'm so glad to see that the energy commission is looking into it so i hope you do everything that you can to make an arbors power public thank you and thank you how are we doing missy we have a few more okay good all right uh let's see next up we have caller ending in zero five five caller zero five five you have the floor hello can you hear me we do hi everyone uh my name is evan redmond i'm a ward 3 resident and a former candidate for ann arbor city council and i am also calling in on behalf of the exploration of creating a municipal energy utility the number one reason for municipalization is that it's the fastest legal way to renewable energy dte lag behind and to be carbon neutral by 2035 and very far behind ann arbor's plan to be carbon neutral by 2030.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
so it is a it is a small um kind of drop in the bucket but ultimately my fear is if we don't make um if we don't start moving in that direction um our numbers are going to continue to build and we're even going to be further and further behind the april 8 ball so for those of you that have been on the board in the past i'm going to relate it to what we have done with our speech and language pathologist for the last four school years we have brought in um about two a year into the district because they had the same problem their caseloads were well in excess of the caseload that was recommended for it for them and so doing you know the first year we brought in two made a small um you know den and then the next year a little bit bigger and now we're at a point where while we do continue to grow and we still need you know we've requested one in this budget um we are feeling the effects over the last handful of years where we've made a supportive model for these positions so i would correlate it very very similarly with what we've done in the speech with the speech and language pathologist which has been very successful more of a leading question kelly because i think it's very important that people understand the high ratio currently of counselor to it particularly in a high school counselor to the the student as to how basically incomprehensible it would be for that person physically to handle that many students and and therefore the student not getting the proper services that that's necessary so i mean that's what i was trying to bring out and i also assumed that the behavioral specialist would eventually lead us to better academic outcomes um i suspect that would be it i think the important thing mr genelli is that our school counselors our administrative team our other pupil services staff do a phenomenal job in meeting these needs um but you are right the individualized attention when they are tasked with a number of students in excess of what is recommended the ability for us to provide individualized interventions particularly to our most needy students becomes compromised and so we want to provide the best for all students and some students need more from these staff members so that is why it's critical that we add these positions thank you kelly did you want to stick to the slide on special education to elaborate more on it thank you um so the first i'll speak through is the speech and language pathologist as i had referenced just a few moments ago um we have done a nice job in adding positions and while we do still continue to grow in this need particularly with our youngest learners our preschool um and this is no surprise to the board continues to grow in numbers and so we do have a need um for additional speech and language services at that level um so we are requesting one additional position to support our early childhood center with speech and language services um in addition our ot and pt services again at the preschool level our young our youngest learners typically require more of these related services as they have a multiple multitude of needs coming in um and so we have a need for additional ot and pt support um what i can speak to with many of these services is providing intervention early to our pre-k kindergarten early you know our early learners and early students um ultimately our goal with some of them is to no longer need the service and to support them to mainstream more into the general ed curriculum which we are able to do with success um so the hope is is adding this additional support for our youngest students will help to make improved outcomes for them over time additionally the assistant director is something that we have brought before the board on two previous occasions our department is is very large there's nearly 1700 identified special education students um it is myself and the five supervisors which are spread across the different levels and so one of the areas that is in need of additional support is certainly working with families on creating additional programs within district to support our variety of special education students we also need to have additional support for some of our related services uh staff members to go to to provide professional development and um continuous learning for them in this position would assist with that the nursing position i do feel the need to speak to it a little bit but i think particularly in these times speaks to itself the high school is under staffed and that was noted in the niask report um so that would be where one of the positions would go and as the board knows we are legally obligated to provide services um nursing services as well as special education services to our non-public students um and so we do have a need in that area for some additional support as well as um that that additional nursing position could also be used um frequently cathy o'dowd will become the nurse when we are down a nurse in a school um and as the supervisor um she does have the need to to be able to oversee um and support staff and so that that additional pers person split between the non-public as well as an assistant to kathy would allow her to be able to put a certified nurse that knows our kids and students in the building in the event that we have a need somewhere which comes up on a very regular basis and lastly the preschool secretary as you know we've opened an additional site and there is not currently a building-based secretary there so this person is needed not only for the general operations of the building but at the preschool level there is a heavy emphasis on scheduling uh ppt meetings um coordinating you know subs interpreters and so forth um there are extensive legal mandates that we are obligated um to have our secretary assist with as far as special education policy and procedure and this person would be trained in assisting the supervisor there in doing so thank you dr casamayor i'd like to talk to the 1.8 millionaire curriculum would you prefer this slide camera is this better for you or would you prefer the one with the budget the budget one yeah numbers in there no pressure no problem okay um so uh just going line by line so as you know i think it's no secret we had a tremendous amount of technology in the district as a result of our shift to remote learning um in some ways it's been a little bit of a silver lining in the way that we've been able to get a tremendous amount of of laptops in the district for our students and we're continuing to work on increasing that and hopefully we'll maintain a cycle over time now that we've gotten everybody to one to one so that's exciting um but with all those machines and chromebooks we now have a need for tremendous tech support and so we've had to increase our part time to 14 full time our media text to with an increase of 4.2 and so these folks can do it everything from setup to troubleshooting to repairs and particularly now that we're back in in person um you know they are very much needed to support teachers in the buildings um and our tech department um is is fairly still quite small but mighty and these folks will help to support that um and it'll be very very valuable as we continue to round out our technology supports for students and staff one area that was noted in the ask actually i'm not sure who on the board remembers this but we did have a k-12 curriculum administrator for fine and applied arts and at one point in time and we did lose that in one of the budget cycles we're trying to restore that in this budget cycle you know over the years we've had you know have not been able to keep up with curriculum development in this area we now have new knees knees did make some mention of this and we also have um some new graduation requirements that require increased health credits um and so we need curricular revisions there and there's just there's a lot of classes and courses in areas that fall under uh this umbrella we've got media art music pe health science so you can imagine the span of that k-12 and so we we are desperate for some additional leadership to concentrate in those areas so that we can um really start to produce high quality curricula particularly as we go forward with um academy development and rounding these things out we'll need someone who's an expert with to help with integration and to support teaching and learning in these very critical areas last year you remember one of the big asks in the budget was the student support specialist which are certified staff members this is a huge component to us delivering in a systemic way intervention services for srbi and to support student learning at different tiers of need and so we with that those student support specialists joined some interventionists that we already had in place from previous budget cycles and so we were able to create somewhat of a nice little team in each building to start to service students in a more systemic and equitable fashion but as i mentioned last year that was really the beginning of rounding out the services and so this would be sort of a 2.0 layer to continue in this area it was critical last year that we got those student support specialists in um at a time just as this pandemic hit because they were able to quickly jump in and run small group instruction they have continued to run small group instruction in this environment meeting with students and checking in to make sure that we are continuing our our support services the student interventionists um if i can add a student support specialist in every single building a second one i would but we know we're trying to be reasonable um having a student interventionist which is a 10 month part-time employee you could almost equate the student interventionist at this level to the climate position that we spoke about earlier right so it's not a certified staff member um per se but somebody that we can train to do very specific things that fills a need in the buildings and so the 13 would supply us with enough for additional coverage at the elementary level and expand on our intervention support structures that we're really trying to build um and will be critical as we move forward you'll see that there's some other asks in the budget related to intervention is so that we can help to mitigate some of the learning loss that may be occurring right now the humanities literacy coach we have had this position before in our budget this is while it's new for this budget um this is just um us trying to get this back into place again critical um to support intervention to help coach teachers on on implementing targeted small group instruction in the classroom and to help coordinate that effort across the three buildings this is a very much needed position the support for summer school and training again we anticipate many different programs running to whether it be boot camp summer school additional intervention experiences this summer for our students to try to extend their learning um and with that as you know many of our administrators are not year-round administrators we have um they stop off at different points in the year 10-month 11-month 12-month and so we anticipate needing to extend some of their work into the summer school and so that is an approximate amount that would be needed to do that um curricular development we are continuing to work on curriculum um there's a little bit of a pause this year in the pandemic with certain areas but we need to pick back up on that again some of those areas include english language arts stem of course as you know we're continuing to roll up our stem curriculum for elementary so in grades four and five and we have some graduation requirements that were mentioned earlier that will need uh refinement and curriculum um there's about 190 000 worth of training again this is related to many of the programs that we're implementing um there's some text and kits and uh that belong in there as well the curricular resources um this is a large number a a good portion of that if you remember um we had that has been in the budget are around the library materials our libraries at the k5 level are sorely lacking in many buildings um you know we've had title one schools for a long time and non-title one we've recently have made all title one but many of those years of um being a title one school and not a title one school we've developed different levels of resources across those 13 buildings and so in some places the grade level libraries are not what they need to be um our expectation is that kids are going to be chomping through books and they're going to have lots of choice those books will be diverse they'll be at different levels and they'll be um you know they'll be enough to support the programs that we have and so we are desperate for these library books and so um you know last year that kind of got set aside with the budget with that can't happen this year we really need to push forward to get these books um we've also had a lot of books that we've um sent home with students during the pandemic to give kids books to read physical books to read that we know will not come back so so in addition to having a low supply of techs in many of the schools we will have lost even more um because of uh because of coving so we're hoping to to shore that up um that in that curricular resources there is also a large ask 165 000 or so something called decodable texts and if you remember last year we we implemented a new phonics program at k5 so there's a lot of resources around phonics and intervention and so we're going to continue to round out those resources and intervention get more intervention kits in the hands of teachers in the classroom not just with the interventionists so that our teachers can start to deliver some of these targeted supports and fill in some of the gaps that may have occurred this year the decodable texts support the phonics program and that we're providing students with uh texts across k1 and 2 um that are kind of that are progressive and so they're called controlled texts um or to quotable text some people call them um either way and so it allows students to practice um very explicitly a phonetic sequence have skill with a phonetic sequence um that they've been exposed to rather than haphazard haphazardly encountering these in the text that are on the the book the shelves in the in the classroom so um very important for structured phonics very important to improve our um students ability to read by third grade which is our ultimate goal okay and hardware software there's these are a lot of these are just now now that we have made this shift there are document cameras and all kinds of things that will go along with utilizing digital instruction in the classroom a little bit more um so that incorporates some of that the digital tech tech book is a digital resource for the science curriculum k5 so last year we did the year prior we did grade three we held off this year on rolling up grades four um but this year moving into 2021 20 20 20 20 21 we have to do grade four and five so the discovery uh textbook is is a quote for digital digital software to support that curriculum thank you you're welcome i'm going to ask courtney if he can on the slides if it's possible to identify somehow with an asterisk or some sort of a footnote what are these of the dollar amounts indicated if they can indicate what's uh restorative and what's basically compliance the other thing in the curriculum resource over here we have 901 000 i think we should indicate maybe in brackets or separate line numbers as to how much we plan for the library and how much we plan for the text it's a big number that's just a you know a global number and i think we are we're obligated to if we specify a little bit more detail on what we're looking to spend it on sure yeah of course yeah because even if you break up it's 500 000 cara mentioned for the library but even then it's 441 is a lot um complement the numbers okay i know a vessel is not here but i recalled his conversation the other day and dr sal filled in and courtney you had went through the the the uh the the make fun of the hardware type of situation uh if you want to do that or again sure yeah the hardware oh yeah um agusto has joined us just so oh yeah so should we go to the um english learner section and the esl yeah exactly they wouldn't mind just addressing the importance of this and again pretty much reiterating [Music] did you hear uh mr genoa's question okay can you repeat please sure i guess so what i'd like you to do is again pretty much repeat the conversation of of the other the other day and support the actual needs of why you feel when you have a thousand dollars in your program and the benefit that it gives to the district and the problems that you have now because you don't have some of this stuff sure sure so as i as i have the uh the opportunity to um share with you the last uh last time um in in a in a brief description of the what's driving the uh the request for esl bilingual i would say i would start by saying that it's definitely connecticut bilingual law and initially identification requirements um if you remember i mentioned that every school in danbury um is is required has been required for a few years now by state law to offer bilingual education programs in spanish and portuguese in addition to providing the standard esl services and at the same time we we must follow the required home language survey guidelines uh that are in place for initial identification um another component that contributes to the requests is what i would call a realistic teacher to english learner student ratio we are targeting 1 to 65 again as i as i explained before other school districts comparable to our size norwalk being one of them new haven another one they they target much lower teacher to english learner student ratios around 1 to 50.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
and there are lots of other callers that have already talked about why it is a good moral position to meet the supplies but it's also in the city's long-term economic interest to acquire a municipal energy utility if you'll indulge me in economics there are two main types of costs there's fixed costs which are costs that are constant regardless of how much is produced and there are marginal costs which are the cost per unit produced so for example the cost of building an auto parts factory is a fixed cost and the cost of materials and labor that go into each part is the marginal cost so say hypothetically that dte camaro uh massively shifts and does a 180 and promises 100 renewable energy by 2030 instead of its current goal for some time after 2050. in this case the fixed cost would be the creation of windmills hydroelectric dams and because these resources are renewable only the only marginal cost would be the occasional labor of maintenance so once the fixed cost is paid off it's free electricity for everybody right uh no of course not dte is a for-profit publicly traded company who has a responsibility to generate value for its shareholders and that money comes out of our community members pockets if we let dpe continue down this path they'll essentially be selling ann arbor something that is free for them to produce the upfront investment needed to form a municipal utility would pay off in the long run by both doing our part to avoid the worst effects of climate catastrophe but also ensuring our community has very low cost renewable energy that they control for generations to come thank you very much thank you next we have caller 947 hello can you hear me yes we do great um hello and good evening my name is eric eric williams and i'm an ann arbor resident and a student at the university of michigan i'm also calling in today to voice my support for the immune municipalization of the ann arbor electric electricity utility over the years as i've continued to expand my understanding of climate science and the climate crisis we currently face i found that it's it's pretty easy to become kind of disheartened and overwhelmed by the many obstacles that we as kind of a nation and global community must overcome to ensure a brighter future for our world um especially true when thinking about kind of politics at the state and national level where i often feel there's very little as an i as an individual can do to help guide the united states to a more sustainable future but i think municipalization would help to change that entirely giving ann arbor residents such as myself the ability to choose green and sustainable energy sources an option we really lack with dte and the very reason behind this kind of overwhelming climate crisis is uh in very large part due to the actions of energy companies especially those who utilize best quantities of fossil fuels dte is easily one of the worst offenders in this regard with 59 of their energy coming from burning coal well above the national average of 23 consequently it's evident that dte does not truly care for the future of ann arbor residents or the long-term health and well-being of our planet as a whole else they surely would have already begun a more meaningful transition to renewables municipalization of the ann arbor electricity grid would give ordinary residents like myself the power to choose what kind of future we want for ourselves our grand our children our grandchildren and every future generation to come and i think it's uh this idea it's especially telling that so many young folks have called in today we are we are very concerned about our future um my dte energy bill was due just today and i absolutely hated having to fund the destruction of our planet through the burning of coal and fossil fuels especially as gte continues to use its money to invest in natural gas and oil pipelines right here in michigan this is especially frustrating even more so considering how much more we are paying for this dirty energy blend from dte than we could be paying for a public utility this climate crisis is urgent and we absolutely cannot wait for dte to change as it really exclusively serves the interest of its shareholders not the people of ann arbor as a passionate and concerned resident of ann arbor i i implore you all to consider municipalization and in doing so help to ensure a better future for our community thank you for your time and we thank you next up we have caller last number or digits 340.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
so we are still um being very conservative but again if this is approved we believe that we are moving in the right direction um we are implementing a new um english language development program eld program called al achieve um okay and this initiative is aligned to the the department's theory of action which is based on what i call a blueprint for serving english learners throughout the school day it's a it's a two uh two-way approach on one side we provide what we call systematic eld instruction esl instruction this is a dedicated time that provides explicit language instruction organized by level of english proficiency and at the same time we look at what we call language instruction for content learning uh in our case we um you know that by psyop which is explicit instruction to support english learners in understanding and using language necessary for good level work and this is done in the regular education class so the need to sustain a strong psyop coaching component this is definitely important the psyop coaches play a crucial and essential role by providing stability consistency to the initiatives from the esl department um their encouragement and support definitely are being very useful and help teachers develop and maintain fidelity of implementation and fidelity to the model throughout the school year um i i would like to refresh your memories again to what i mentioned the last time which is we are not requesting new positions the requested psyop coach coaches and the assessment data english learner l specialist are not new we are just restarting what we had before if you remember we used to have three psyop coaches at the middle school one for each school two positions were eliminated in during difficult times in terms of because of budget budgetary constraints and we are currently down to one uh one coach for the three middle schools um and and and the restart l specialist we'll make sure that the district follows all the steps that we must follow in order to comply with federal law ensuring that students in need of english language services are appropriately identified and offered those services so i would say for example at the high school which is not even a part of this budget request but we used to have two coaches we're down to one so again i think it's important to reiterate the fact that we're not asking for uh new coaching positions these are positions that are being restored the other ftes have to do primarily with um legal compliance uh from connecticut bilingual law and also trying to come to a student to teacher ratio of 65 to one and again that's shy from what uh the districts are currently targeting but it's much better than what we had two three years ago in uh particularly at the elementary level where we had schools that had one to 100 and over 100 students so uh that's basically where we are and why we are asking for these additional ftes and positions you know the board i know you're listening and you're hearing these numbers so you keep saying to me what happens when we don't get the money well this is what happens you keep going going then you get to the critical mass and you get to where we're going so you got to keep trying to rebuild um and that's what we're doing so we start fighting for this budget and they you know bring us down to two and three percent uh you could see how over time you know that critical mass just starts it's a house of cards we can't afford to do it because you're bilingual kids your ears so that they are our student population in more ways than one so uh we got to be able to come up and and shore up this department uh gusto's been working very hard at this and um i do thank him for his diligence and doing what he's doing with uh with the staff that he has so that's really important thank you thank you investor dr south your point what i'm trying to get out here is these numbers that are critical and if we don't get them have serious consequences and the more that the board understands we could do more community outreach in explaining what the impact here or the the impact let me say with that word or the this document supports our formal budget then to a reader if we have commentaries on here they can go through and see what the the effect and what the need is for the numbers not just saying you know one psyops coach or two science coaches 150 000 um we've got to make more of an inroad so that there is a complete understanding as to the need of what we're asking for and and then as to the consequence if we don't if we don't get it and that's why i'm asking each of the individuals that are i call it responsible for the areas to make the presentation because i would hope that if they spoke with courtney we could have narratives so that anybody who gets this presentation can read it you know i i would like that when you present it to the common council they have a binder in addition to this and they understand you know the the backup to this rather than just looking at numbers and then us going through making a presentation uh i'm hoping it has more of an effect than what we've historically done uh and uh with that being said i'll ask courtney to move ahead with her face oh sure yeah and and dr sal took your suggestion too and we started to reach out to build um sort of video vignette since we're still in a virtual world um so whether it's invited guests to talk specifically about their experience for example the site coaches or the investment in decodable you know uh workbooks and things like that um dr cells already started to reach out to individuals to get that video so um yeah my piece is really straightforward oops i'm sorry i'm not trying to make you dizzy i apologize okay here yeah it's it's um the bus that i mentioned you know we need a bus i think everybody knows how crowded our buses are um especially during covert times so put in for a bus um again the administrative offices minor amount of furniture and supplies you know we never we don't usually add that when we add enrollment growth so we are doing that now because you know we saw kevin and i really specifically um how bad the furniture was in some of the buildings when we had to go in and and distance the desks with with the rulers and sit in them ourselves um we you know we're gonna have to do a recycle replace refresh refresh we do reach out to other districts when they give up their goods and and sales always get enriched to get a truck to go to some other district to pick up some nice equipment that they're getting rid of but we do want to put in a ask to buy some additional furniture for those kindergarten classrooms and then i mentioned the network maintenance i i can't stress enough how critical that is not just to um the office functioning because um you know we need to pay people we need to have our network up to be able to run reports and do the things we need to do but critically because we need the infrastructure or support for our classrooms where they're more technologically advanced now and um we have wi-fi we have chromebooks we have um software that we're using and so in order to really utilize that investment um i think jane has put together a really prudent ask with a partner um to do up um just basically not even upgrade our network but bring us to the 21st century within our network and so yeah that's that's the operations piece the bulk being that network maintenance um and the contracts actually expiring so we do have to do something at some point i think after we get funding but we had talked about i think mentioned during the course of the conversation about uh putting together a three-year budget because i think that a multi-year budget but i think that's very important considering the the new academy coming down uh down the fight and what we're building now in order to support some of the elements that have to go into the new academy whether it be curriculum or whether it be staffing etc and i'm sure over the next year or two we're going to be implementing more of those though so those costs are those factors any of the board members have any other questions uh to the cabinet or to the courtney uh on the budget um thanks rich um this is just a general question i'm not sure who can best answer it but obviously we got a laundry list of items from me ask about you know different things that need to be improved and i'm just wondering if this budget covers all of the necessary improvements or if there's anything that hasn't been you know considered in this you know what it was hard for me to hear that i'm sorry i'm sorry let me try that again is that any better now it is go ahead okay i'm just i i know we got like a list from niask about things that had to be addressed and i'm just wondering if this budget um covers all of those improvements oh geez no i mean there okay when you put together a knee ass visit there are many things that go into it um that that they recommend and and it's hard to achieve all of them but the essence of what we're doing you have a large high school of you know 33 3400 and they they um spoke about the the need for more hands more time for classroom visits i think some of the things that we've done here with the dean some of the things with the behavior climate people will help um probably the biggest one would be the council ratio that they would they would endorse in terms of adding more um and that's i think kelly probably could speak better to that one than i can but that that's um something that would they would feel that would be important kelly or cara any other comments about the knee ask itself it would be helpful for for the board to hear i was just going to comment on the counselor piece then carol certainly uh turn it over to you because i know there's other curricular elements um for the counselors i think it's important to understand that they're recommending that we get to the ratio of 250 students so um this budget attempts to move the needle a little bit closer to where we need to be um but at the end of next year we will not be there um so i think it's important to keep in line that we're you know adding on things in the appropriate direction um but it doesn't fully eliminate the needs in the report um the other piece that they certainly cited in in the report particularly to my area was also the nursing support services so an additional nurse at the high school um will remedy that need um there there are some infrastructure needs as far as expanding the health services office um that is not fully spelled out in this budget but that's something you know courtney and i have spoken at length about along with kathy and cabinet um to look at some other funding sources to do that so those are just a few things um that i can speak to thanks for [Music] of watching the specials and carrie you can do that sure yeah um you know i think it i think this is a start um i think this is a minimum i think we can't go backwards from here you know it's it's hard to continue year over year every year to ask for the same things and not get them and as we continue to grow you know what happens with staffing and supports and leadership you know you stretch it to the max and you move from high quality to just compliance driven right so what do we need to do to just you know meet the basic minimum requirements and that's not where we want to be we you know we've spent a lot of time in portrait of the graduate you know talking about what we want teaching and learning to look like in danbury what we want our students to what those outcomes are going to look like and the type of students we're going to produce and if we're going to if we're going to make serious moves in this area we need to be able to rely on a budget that continues to support that and you know we we we have a lot of plans um this academy you know again it's not just a building there's a vision behind this and we could do something really great but if we don't start digging out of this hole and start to make uh incremental growth in these areas to support the growth that our school system has experienced we're not going to be able to to realize those those dreams for our kids so um you know establishing a budget cycle for curriculum has been very difficult over the last 10 years it has been uh randomized because of the budget so we don't get xyz okay um here's an extra ten thousand dollars that left over from a credit in june and what do you want to spend it on you know so it's you're just which child do you feed do you feed the special areas do you feed the social studies the ela the intervention and and it's it's been difficult so you know i i think that um you know to kelly's point you know with the with the counselors we have to get going right we can't we you know we've reached a critical point now where um we'll start to fall behind we have tremendous staff we have amazing teachers but we push everything to the brink because we're always on edge and and we need to start working on um you know deepening the work that we're doing we have to start building the budget to a place where um we can rely on it year to year so we so we have a sense of our programming going forward um that's sustainable and kate just in addition to the curriculum upgrades um and i'm channeling my my my dan dan donovan right now because they were we were also cited for insufficient science labs at the school um and i think there are some other issues that are being resolved as a result of the pandemic but you know that there were official complaints about any uneven heating ventilation plumbing and bathroom issues i think the ventilation and heating may have improved a little bit during the pandemic in terms of the services and our concerns about ventilation they were also concerned into courtney's points about upgrades needed for furniture et cetera they were you know we were also cited for insufficient funding overall for instructional supplies to derive deliver instruction um but you know they also said that we had outdated and corrosive and toxic chemicals in our science areas and throughout our facility um insufficient technology and support for staff and technology which again i think i'd like to think that's been satisfied now as a result of the pandemic um and so in an ada ada compliance for elevators furniture and fixtures and so you know there's still some other work to be done outside of what's been presented in this budget and this is just specific to the you know to the knee as complaints you know this is outside of all the other things we're presenting just to keep just to keep the ship moving forward thank you i really appreciate that feedback um and and i think it kind of highlights some of the um concerns that that you know um i've heard expressed and that i share which is that uh you know the budgets that we're putting forward um although they will certainly help move us in the direction we need to be moving they're just not even what we're asking for is not going to meet the needs that we have in our community so thank you guys the uh stuff too kate is in the uh maintenance budget and from the city um you know which which blindly comes in um but i think you're would be accurate to say answer your question directly no it doesn't meet all the expectations in the ask and it's going to take some time to get a lot of those things done thanks dr i have a question are several um i i really want to support the budget um i want to be an advocate for you know all of these items um you know my two kids are in the school system i have an incoming freshman you know next year um i i understand the need for counselors um and especially assistant principals i'm i'm so appreciative of these workshops um and hearing you know the more you hear about you know the this what are they called now student behavior specialists um you know it it makes sense but um with the numbers changing it makes me very uncomfortable even from the documents that we received last week you know just to point out um like the six four nine four in the um you know the breakdown the categorized breakdown doesn't match you know to the to the detail it's a six four eight four you know so and then for the numbers the the bottom line numbers to change you know just when i was feeling like okay i got it i rewatched our last workshop in you know slow motion and like took the time with like printed out the you know your presentations um it's just it's frustrating and we have not had a lot of time to really digest so you know i don't i can see where you re-categorize things and i see a you know a few things where things were changed like with the bus um you know in the operations i can see where some things change there um but it just you know it's not really would it help would it help rachel if we give um just a side by side with what changed so for example we asked for six teachers in the elementary school but when we really looked at it we only needed three plus the three specials that was one change the bus was a second change and there was a ten thousand dollar change to the um to the um interventionists because i had miscategorized them and i i missed ten thousand dollars so as we went through you know iterations of the budget we kind of refined them as we continued to talk talks that we would have normally have had them you know a month ago but there i can assure you that it's it's minor and i can even tonight get you that that same detail doc i sent as a draft on friday i can send that tonight that ties out to the whole budget doc up to the whole presentation um tonight so it's in the same format and i can just explain those changes we also had something called humanities and um it was my misunderstanding it really didn't belong in its own category um and so really it was part of just to simplify things to consolidate we moved up the uh humanities and special areas into the curricular subtotal so net the new needs went from 6.4 to 6.1 mainly because of those adjustments we lost three teachers we said we didn't need them when we really thought through it and more carefully you know we really had to consider a lot of things like that the climate you know of the city uh the new 10.1 million dollars that we got and what what where what we have in terms of enrollment projections for next year so you know ideally that would have been done two weeks ago and you would have had the materials well in advance but those are the changes um really nothing more substantive than that and i understand your concern about not seeing a solid document my hope was to get you that detail knowing that we were still workshopping you know a few of the items so i do apologize and also you know since we we are expecting you know 10.1 million and for um through the cares and sr um you know are some of these items in there knowing [Music] you know expecting you know that to cover those items you know i would i would have to say that these are the true needs these are the true operational needs if we didn't have any other funding right the fact that we braided funding this year was just i think i would say an act of desperation and and need to do so but i these these funds are not intended to supplant operations that's not the intention um and that's not the that's not the hope because you would build the really big big cliff in your budget if you did that right it's not sustainable to budget that way um that's right yeah and so in some of this um is it building toward the new career academy well somewhat and i think you need a three-year budget um to really lay that out some of this some of this base work will assist it um rachel we got very we're very fortunate to to get some some other funding that has been um uh able to guide us through the this process with advisors but soon for staffing and others will will be for future budgets this budget there's not much i'll let kara who's worked intimately i don't think there's really a lot there is there cara no there's some there's a little bit of money in there for training for staff right so we need to start to build capacity in-house to do this work additionally you know we're bringing in consultants um and actually we've used a little bit of grant money that we've had dedicated towards this to bring in consultants who worked with the nashville academies to guide us in some of the process and we're engaging in that now and i could speak to that a little bit more tomorrow night when we talk about kind of the update um but you know with the opening of the of the building being 2024 you know it changed things a little bit we thought it'd be a little bit sooner so i think we would have put some some more in there so for example we you know we will we will likely purchase a course um at the end of next year to start to work with and to train students uh teachers on and our administrators around this college and clear exploration um net i think you're going to see a lot more uh in the budget next year in terms of deeper levels of training right now you have you know kind of cor core folks uh myself dan donovan meg martin sarah roy melissa nate do who are really kind of around the table with some of these consultants and that's kind of what we're spending a little bit of money on right now um but you know one of the things that i'm concerned about is that you know if we don't create the staircase that leads to this new building opening up in this new vision um i don't know how we're going to make that leap when that when that building opens up i don't know how we're going to resource it staff it fund it so you know we we have to continue like the counselors counselors will be an integral role in helping helping with this process um you know our our assistant principals at the high school now be you know probably each taking an academy becoming leaders of a specific academy and really really driving a lot of the thematic approach that's going to happen in those areas and we need hands on deck to make this happen this is going to be a game changer for danbury it's going to be very exciting but we have to shore up our core programs that we have now to get there we have to build science pathways and math uh change uh you know and train teachers in in conceptual mathematics across a k-12 continuum in order to be able to have students access the kind of learning that we're talking about by the time they exit our our program so um we have to just we really have to dig in and keep going and and we can't take our foot off the gas now on this we have to we have to dig in and i know we're over time and i i've uh you know i mentioned this to courtney but um if there if there's any plans for you know more permanent solutions through the cares lesser money um you know like the the science labs and things like that but you know water refill stations instead of the fountains and automatic you know whatever is more permanent than temporary um and then all just one last thing the the the proposed um i'm sorry the school budget history i don't think the last few years are correct and the percentage increases okay i think la i thought last year was not considered part of the appropriation the one two seven three it was a mid-year it was it was it was a mid-year ad so when you do the budget you do it based on um the actual appropriation at the start of the year that the council votes on and that enrollment ad they didn't consider it part of our budget so the percentage increase would have to have been based on the prior like the actual voted on approved council amount the one two seven three was considered just a special appropriation but they did include it in the next year's budget amount the the consecutive the following year's budget amount okay i was just looking at last year's binder it was you know it looked off well that's why there was a confusion last year of a 9 million dollar increase versus an 11 million dollar increase you know whether we include the additional mid-year appropriation that we had yeah we've kind of changed the way we talked about it because we we wanted to like not put forward to the city the city that we we really wanted them to give us both the 1.2 and our ask on top of that because if they didn't then we would just be further behind because we already you know invested that those funds and teachers and buses and things that we needed for the enrollment growth yeah and i think it's very important that we again focus on and dwell on the comments that karen and dr sal and throughout the conversation today is that we've got to continue to advocate that number one we take care of the compliances but number two is that we continue and start to support and build our foundation because of what's down the price we can ill afford now to to further go back and and to create new new concepts such as the academy and put that on the backs of our existing staff without the proper funding it would just be an inappropriate foundation and and so it's very important that that we understand this convey this to to to others so that we can advocate as to why we need the money and what we're doing with and what's down the pike and i think the multi-year budget once we get the appropriation would show essentially our thoughts as to what the increases will be in the next couple of years to support uh support the funding and for the reasons for it so it's not a shock to anybody when they look at our budgets in the subsequent years uh and they could feel assured that we do do some proactive thinking and planning and just don't go year to year you know flying from the seat of our pants so that we have some strategic plan and mr rich i would add we spoke about that and and looking at um keeping it simple focusing on the current year but as we plan in the next month or two when we advocate for the within the community and present the budget to the city and have the feedback for what we're doing with the 10.1 million cares funding as well as the next alliance increment you know that's going to be an opportunity for us to really robustly build out a multi-year plan because there's you know a consider different consideration for how we'll use the care spending like you said facilities supports and things like that there you know there's a different consideration for how we'll be utilizing the alliance and then depending on the city's response to our need and what we'll be doing with this operational budget in addition while we continue to develop the academy programming and all the elements that are needed building towards that so we're looking towards that in the spring being the multi-year multi-fund you know roll up your sleeves and really kind of start doing that good work you are there any other board member questions that being said we are going to leave this meeting and in the same meeting we're not going to come out and go in i'm going to then have a finance committee meeting which will be open just to the committee members in that meeting i'm going to ask for a vote that we recommend that to the full board that we adopt the superintendent's budget as presented other is there any objections to that statement okay that's great gives me the confidence that i can go ahead and and do it uh with that being said i thank everybody for their participation and input um for those that are part of the committee which would be kate al russo um katherine kathy and myself uh we'll just take a few minutes to adopt the the uh the motion and then we're going to adjourn for the evening so if you want to stay for that fine if you don't i won't be offended so i'll see you all tomorrow night rich uh cara sent out a second link for the finance committee meeting um are we supposed to be moving into that second meeting uh she said we didn't have to just to save time we can just continue okay it's it's just a you know it's just a statement so there's no sense in logging in and logging out and stuff like that just want to make sure it's clear for anybody who might be trying to track down the information from the video vault yeah it's it's fine it would it's all being on the same link okay fine yes great thank you karen you're welcome all right so what i'm going to do at this point here i'm at um kathy molinaro would you be just take the minutes for the meeting and kathy should give you a hit a thumbs up rich he helped me see it uh so at 7 55 i'm going to call the finance meeting to order and just to take attendance um kate president uh alvaruso catherine president okay and myself and kathy molinero yep i'm here okay um can i entertain a motion or the acceptance of the budget to the full board still moved all right so what we'll do is a motion b that we will recommend that the full board accept the superintendent's budget of 149 million 10 and dollars for a 9.82 increase over the prior year uh to be adopted we get a second second okay all in favor aye aye okay thank you very much so we'll see you all tomorrow night we'll just summarize this stuff again thank you all i appreciate it good night guys tonight good night okay thank you red good night good night thanks mr j thanks for all your help pal too good job courtney thank you yeah thank you courtney thank you
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uh good evening members of the energy commission and my fellow ann anarborites my name is dr lauren sargent i have been an ann arbor resident for close to 40 years and i'm speaking tonight in very strong support of a municipal utility way back when i was in college i was a member of the clamshell alliance and in 1978 our call was energy democracy and public power democratically controlled and decentralized renewable energy does that sound familiar i cannot believe that in 2021 my um college kids are staring down catastrophic climate change and we still don't have it public power that is but here in ann arbor we do have the power to make it happen we can form a municipal utility the michigan constitution and our own city charter provide for it while theoretically compatible with options like community choice aggregation for sourcing renewables cca requires the support of the michigan michigan legislature have you met the michigan legislature recently we don't have two years or four years or six years to hope for a legislature that will come around to our point of view and we don't we simply don't have time we do have a commitment here in ann arbor to the a20 plan with goals of a hundred percent renewable energy we also have a proud tradition of taking on long-term responsibilities to improve our own community and contribute to the greater good even when other entities with more power and more money refuse to do so that is exactly the position that we're in right now earth day ecology center recycle ann arbor green belt affordable housing millages aaps sustainability bond and most recently the a20 plan we cannot put all our eggs in baskets that we do not control but fortunately we can own our own basket a municipal utility run by us in line with our climate goals accountable to the citizens and not shareholder value as dt is a dte is and must be if not us who if not now when right now dte is laying gas pipe in our city under our streets they're not putting down geothermal they're also installing a gas plant on u of m's campus not geothermal not solar not wind the writing is on the wall it's very clear we have a choice to make we have the power to do it let's do it thank you next up we have caller ending in 661.
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hello can you hear me yes we do hi everyone my name is gus teschke i'm a resident ward 5 for over 20 years i live at 313 montgomery um i'm a member of ann arbor indivisible we're a local chapter of the nation national indivisible organization and we're focused on helping to counter threats to our future you know that's like donald trump and climate breakdown and we voted recently to support exploring municipal solar and wind power because we see that as the best route to zero carbon emission for ann arbor's power generation we don't see community choice aggregation as likely to deliver clean power that we need by 2030 you know as part of the 8-2-0 plan uh we know cca is currently illegal we know we have to overcome opposition from at least epe consumers power and the republicans and maybe more but i want to focus on biden administration's goal of carbon free electricity by 2035.
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i suspect everyone is aware of that and of course dte wants to burn coal until 2040 and which is a huge problem for all of us and who knows how long dte might burn gas and so what if biden shuts down dte's plants in 2035 their their fossil fuel burning plants are rates ann arbor ratepayers like me going to have to pay for these plants or will dte go into bankruptcy i'm a little concerned about this um and other individual supports exploring municipal power now and we will act to support that we will follow the energy commission's progress um we urge the energy commission to explore municipal power and do a feasibility study quickly we don't think we have to go along with such obviously bad decisions and bad planning and the high degree of uncertainty that bte is showing us transitioning municipal solar and wind is what we need to do we hope you will take serious steps thank you very much and thank you a caller with last digits one five two and apologies if they already went that is totally possible at this point uh about 152.
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can the commission hear me yes we can i'm sorry one five two now yes we hear you uh hello commissioners um my name is jeff irwin i am coming to you from my zoom bunker at 2542 bellwood on the southeast side and um i just want to thank you for volunteering tonight and being a part of this commission i i especially having to you know go through these long meetings it's a it's a it's an important service so i want to thank you for that and i also want to let you know that as your employee in lansing as your state senator i'm always happy to come back and talk more about some of these issues i work a lot on energy issues and i love what um you guys are pushing from the energy commission i'd love to come back and talk to you about cca industry distributed generation and everything else uh but i did want to come tonight to let you know that i'm really excited about this conversation around municipalization when i look around the state of michigan at the communities that have municipalized i see two consistent themes one is that their power is cheaper and two is that their power is greener and i know that i want cheaper and greener power and i believe that people in ann arbor want cheaper and greener power we probably all want that and so i just want to encourage you to support a thorough feasibility study because this idea of municipalizing our power here in ann arbor is a big huge and expensive endeavor but the only thing that's more expensive than doing this is not doing it and so i encourage you to um walk this path to characterize this opportunity because i think that if we do the hard work to characterize the opportunity we'll find that we can have cheaper greener power and serve our goals better so thank you for your service and thanks for the opportunity thank you very much next we have caller 134.
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okay thank you dr stultz and chair mursky ken garber 28 haverhill court i agree with the previous callers and they're tough acts to follow and my guess is that several commissioners would also seriously consider a muni for ann arbor but one place is on everyone's mind boulder colorado that city spent 27 million over 10 years on its muni effort with little to show for it no we don't want to repeat that experience but what happened in boulder is not what will happen here first let's look at boulder in 2011 it amended its city charter to authorize immunity the charter language required that muni electric rates be no higher than those of excel the local private utility at the time of transfer and those rates had to cover costs plus 125 percent of debt service in 2014 when boulder formed its muni xl sued on the grounds that boulder could not meet those charter conditions five years of litigation later the city settled with xcel dissolving the muni that's boulder okay what about ann arbor our charter already authorizes immunity and without boulder's rate limit or revenue mandate dte certainly will sue but not based on that rather it will claim a local franchise under the foot act a 1905 michigan law that grants private utilities a perpetual franchise if they had one at that time dte has claimed that an 1895 city contract with michigan electric company to power 161 ann arbor street lights is that franchise agreement so under the foot act dte will argue we cannot take its assets that'll be its lawsuit completely different than the boulder case now i'm not a lawyer but i see an opportunity here yes 20th century courts have upheld footage franchises repeatedly but the 1963 michigan constitution says that no franchise can be longer than 30 years dte so-called franchise here is almost 130 years old to my knowledge the foot act has never been tested in court against the 30-year franchise limit which became effective in 1993.
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if dte invokes the foot act which it will and we win which we could we not only get our muni but we nullify all of dte's footage franchises there are dozens of these probably only dte knows how many suddenly all these cities and townships are open to competition and dte will have to negotiate franchise agreements with all of them or lose these markets cities can get franchise fees from dte and can also negotiate for clean power so as i see it our ann arbor muni could unlock competition for electric power through much of the state thanks and we thank you and we have our last caller representative robbie everybody can you hear me yes we can awesome hi everyone thanks for having me on today i'm coming to you from the state capitol actually thanks for all the work that you do this has been a fantastic conversation and i'm just calling in to agree with all the previous callers and our state senator i have uh for many years been a very strong supporter of municipalization uh and i do believe that it is uh the most cost-effective and uh also one thing that hasn't really been mentioned is it is the most reliable form of ownership for power if you look at utilities across the state and uh the speed at which they get uh blackouts recovered um it is much better in municipal municipal utilities uh public ownership matters it matters for uh cost of power again i'm in lancing right now the lights that are on today for me are provided by public power and one of the comments that i just made is around the issue of home solar dte is fighting home solar tooth and nail they have a one percent cap they want to kill home solar in the state of michigan in contrast the lansing board of power and light is providing incentives they're telling their their citizens we will give you five hundred dollars a kilowatt hour up to two thousand dollars if you install solar on your homes the contrast it could not be clearer between what we can achieve when we work together through a public utility versus what dte has created in terms of its investor owned monopoly and its for-profit driven business model which will not place uh clean energy at the forefront it will not place social justice and equity at the forefront we the people can stand up and own our own power and place all of those things at a much higher level thank you for your consideration of this issue and for hearing me today we have one more uh caller ending in 519.
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hi this is rita mitchell and i am a long-term resident of ann arbor i live at 621 5th street i support community-based municipal power because it will allow local control of the types of energy sources it will provide local jobs local accountability and transparency as an additional benefit we can make it support our goals to spare trees of radical trimming which is an additional environmental benefit we can integrate the services with current city utilities and work for efficiency we can set the rates in situations like those presented by the closer 19 pandemic we as members of the community can make positions that help assure that all have access to the energy services that they need lastly our power decisions can be made in a way that support environmental justice that is our due diligence with the implementation can assure us as owners and users that our energy production will not have unintended negative consequences of polluting the air water and earth locally and for others in our region and state i urge you to proceed as you've heard from so many speakers that have wonderful information and wonderful goals please let's look at it if this is the time thank you caller ending in 519 that was 519 right yeah five one nine actually uh miss mitchell jumped the q which is delightful five one nine caller 519.
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hi can you hear me yes we do hi my name is ian mark um i'm a resident of ann arbor my address is 1811 independence boulevard calling in also in support basically full support of energy utility municipalization i think it's awesome that the conversation is happening hard for me to follow up on all the previous callers i agree with all of them um i think they've done an exceptional job of covering why it is important um in terms of addressing the climate crisis i think this could be an incredible step for not only ann arbor but also a tipping point for the state and similar efforts across the country in aggressively and rapidly decarbonizing our energy network i think the time has passed for any half measures or wasted time on addressing this crisis the planet itself is at sake and ann arbor could play a key role in taking local action on climate change but another point i wanted to bring up was um reliability which i appreciate uh an earlier comment on but i very vividly remember a little over two years ago when dte contacted all their customers telling them to please set their thermostats no higher than 65 in the middle of january when we were getting record temperatures of i believe negative 26 in detroit um which personally i found infuriating people could have died if their grid had gone down and people have lost power um i mean what exactly are we paying a premium for if we can't count on our power when we need it most and if it's going towards um you know someone said previously 59 of their power going to burning coal and polluting our environment i personally find that very very frustrating um and i think it really underscores the importance of taking democratic control over energy grid so i really appreciate you giving me the time to speak and hearing my two cents on that thank you thanks how's our cue looking to see it is cleared so i want to thank all of the callers um for your engagement and for sharing your views with us um i don't know if we um what i'm gonna do is um just move on to the next gen item and allow commissioners then to comment on the presentation as well as on caller's comments um all at the same time at the end of the presentation if that's okay with everybody very good i see some knotting heads i also want to call everyone's attention to the fact that council member um briggs joined us um several minutes ago and um she informed me the text that she was listening in much earlier than which she appeared on our screen so we thank her for joining us as well so next on the agenda um is um the energy report uh i'll go really fast for folks uh as kind of an update we are moving forward beautifully with the aging and place efficiently program we've brought on our two part-time contractors that are phenomenal so uh you will be seeing some material very soon also our 10 000 trees initiative we met with nurseries recently and we'll be unveiling our first bulk buy program which mirrors the solarize program here shortly we're using local nurseries obviously uh climate smart trees and the co-benefits are are perfusive in that space so really excited for that last week we uh formally kicked off the public comment period on the energy benchmarking and transparency work for commercial and multi-family uh infrastructure so if you would like you can uh read that it's on our website there's a short video that gives you an overview of the draft ordinance which was formed with the task force and then there's also a link to insert public comment so please do take a look we also uh re-energize the time of marketing work so there's a small group of us who are that that was pretty close to the finish line we're just bringing it back and the intent is to bring the benchmarking with time of marketing forward which for those who may not know and are listening that is about energy use disclosure for single-family homes so we would have pretty much the majority of the built infrastructure disclosing energy use transparently at the same time uh we had our first solarize event now i think we might have had our first two solarize events i think we had our last one uh this following weekend but those are going swimmingly well just like last year uh gung-ho in terms of distributed generation rooftop if you're interested or you know people are interested please have them go to our website and sign up for events we are also starting to look at organizations that want to host a solarize event so normally it's been neighbor to neighbor but if your organization for example the sierra club uh is interested we're exploring possibly doing something with them for their membership so let us know if you're interested in that on tuesday night council will receive the energy criteria and principles that the commission adopted for formal consideration uh so we'll see that would be for for formal adoption we continue to move aggressively forward on the city's energy strategy which mirrors a20 and goes really deep into the actions that we'll be taking as well as contingencies i know a few public speakers talked about that i assure you your staff are planning many many contingencies for the strategies in a20 so that is moving forward and then i did want to share we're launching an equitable engagement process with others throughout the city to really work with frontline and fenceline communities to understand how they define equity and what equitable engagement means to them as opposed to what we might think that it means from uh candidly my place of privilege so we'll be working with them and then using that input to inform a lot of the decision making that osi does last night we kicked off the budget here we go it'll be a great ride uh you can catch us in that budget presentations in the last six minutes of the budget and our council members did a fabulous job bearing a lot of information and the last thing i'll put forward is uh we're standing up some earth day activities they will be virtual this year there's a lot of coordination that's happening but again if if you or any of your partner organizations or home organizations are interested in joining us we'd really like to have a strong stance with heavy youth leadership uh around earth day this year rapid fire uh yes um news from commissioners amber i saw you raise your hand well i just had a quick question for missy i was wondering if um for the energy market at the time of ordinance if that's still planning to come forward with um the rental and the commercial piece or if we're just moving forward with a single family home one they're all gonna come but they might stagger a little bit uh in terms of process so getting them to legal for example will stagger just so one can move before the other but the intent is actually though to bring them to council as a full suite great thank you yeah other commissioners news from commissioners mark do you want to give a quick plug on the glrea series that you've initiated which is on i think policy issues too which fits with a lot of the comments tonight yeah the great lakes renewable energy association is launching a new seminar series that will happen once a month um there are we're lining up speakers chuck is going to be speaker in in march thank goodness and we present a version of the presentation he did the energy commission last week or last time we met um we're kicking off the session this thursday and uh if we're going to be have a policy uh uh presentation that's basically talking about how um what happens in the intervention process so the the organizations that uh are involved in rate cases against utilities it seems like it's sort of a black hole um but utilities have to get permission from our the public service commission supported by the legislature and the governor of course which covers the rate cases and organizations can intervene against them ann arbor has intervened uh great lakes renewable energy association is a regular intervener et cetera so we're going to try and unpack that onion and explain it in easy terms so people in the solar community can understand what's involved in going going against the utilities on rate cases and those kinds of things we'll also be having these going to happen once a month they're booked right now almost through the year um missy's going to give a presentation on community choice aggregation later this year and uh we're going to be showcasing ann arbor's uh solar program with julie um as an example for other communities and uh i don't know if any other people know that and i was preparing a handbook so this the solarize ann arbor program could be replicated in other communities and i think that's an outstanding model um we'll be doing one on municipalization um and um working with a number of municipals that are doing green power um and uh how they do it and how those that don't self-generate like chelsea um how do they do green power here's the the inside story they they don't they send a big check to dte every year and buy green power from dte but um so yes so if anybody's interested if you're a part of glrea you're already getting the notices um anyone who hasn't got the notice has sent me uh i guess i can send them to josh and you can release it out to the energy commission for anybody who's interested in participating and joining in on those sessions again it'll be seven o'clock this coming thursday and then it'll be the second uh thursday of the month going forward thank you john for the opportunity yeah i'm sure and i think um if you go to the glrea great lakes renewable energy association site then you can find more information there too um other commissioners very good silence is golden so we will move on to our first um main point on the agenda which is a presentation um from the group ann arbor public power and i think um we have a caller that's going to step in and make that presentation correct busy uh commissioners can we actually rejiggered the agenda which is fine we can go to the presentation but i think it's really important to kind of set the stage for the work that's coming forward please um we'll get to that i guess after we'll we'll keep it but what we want to express is that thanks to the hard work of all of you and the chair and the vice chair we've identified a year of learning around different energy options that we're going to go through and so we'll talk about that later on the agenda we've identified lots of topics we kind of listened to previous meetings where people were talking about different techniques different technologies different policy frameworks and so we want to start today and the conversation with h2p2 will start that conversation we will go through a year though of exploration and next month we've already locked in the city's energy attorney to come and talk about the legal landscape you heard some references to the foot act she's going to come and talk about that and what's actually been legislated and what's possible and not more factual as opposed to advocating for one approach or another so this year worth of learning is also going to inform the energy educational series that we're trying to create for our residents and so we're excited to go on this journey with you from staff's perspective tonight's presentation is the kickoff of that journey about learning about different approaches to the energy system so with that uh give me a second to move over the folks that we'll be presenting question for you go on missy um does does that mean that that's um things that could move faster for example um there is legislation on community choice segregation stuff going on so we don't have to wait for a year to engage with that i hope no we're gonna try we'll talk about that in the session how to sequence the content there are some things where i think they're more learning there are some things where staff very clearly need and want uh support from the commission on and so we'll try to sequence things in a way that sorry i'm looking to move people over don't think i'm ignoring you in any way uh to looking to sequence things appropriately so that we can get the feedback in a timely manner and then for things that aren't as clear move forward so again we view this as a learning opportunity and staff will not be presenting any resolutions to you unless it's something that we need support on okay so i think i have everyone moved over except for maybe zach and i don't see him on the line i think he's not gonna be able to join so it should be whoever you have great do you need me to advance your slides or do you have them okay i will need you to enable me to share screen i'm not confident i can do that right hold on okay i'm not going to be able to do that this is not my zoom account so i can't but let me download your slides from what we got earlier so why don't you introduce yourself how i do that yeah thanks first of all i just want to thank everybody who already gave comment um for the amazing breadth and depth of knowledge that was brought forward in their commitment to a just future um the people calling into this meeting to make public comment demonstrate why public power is an amazing opportunity for our community um and we're also very excited that this is apparently the kickoff in an ongoing educational series and we are all really looking forward i think to sharing and learning together um with the osi and with the rest of this community so thank you um and right on time we're doing this in a pdf very nice i am but i'm not skilled enough so view how do we get it in slideshow page display uh you guys are watching the ignorance here nope you i'm gonna go ahead and download it again because clearly i have it in the powerpoint because that's super easy wow well i'm tagwin john hi i'm greg woodring um and we are here from ann arbor for public power as you saw uh our logo on that little screen there i guess let's start without the slides let's uh let's just wait i think oh yeah that looks awesome fantastic thank you so um what is ann arbor for public power uh anna for public power is a coalition uh with members from many local organizations including dsa sunrise movement indivisible the climate action movement at u of m washington 350 ann arbor beyond bernie and many others and we are united by our belief in a green and publicly owned future and furthermore we believe that these are inextricably linked we don't think that we can build a sustainable future while building private profits for shareholders our goal is to democratize decommodify decarbonize and decolonize our energy sources thank you the problem is that dte our local energy provider is not transitioning to renewables fast enough to meet global or local emissions targets dte uses dirty power most of their power comes from fossil fuels and most of that is from coal they're still actively investing in fossil fuel infrastructure and according to a 2019 report dte is the third dirtiest major utility in the united states and dt in anagar and ann arbor have incompatible goals looking forward um the a20 if you hit the little next sign something will pop up the a20 carbon neutrality target date is set for 2030 that is in nine years from now um president joe biden has set a target date for carbon free electricity nationwide in 2035 however dde's target date for net zero emissions is in 2050 and down to the next slide we'll see that they don't even have a possible plan for achieving this goal um they're planning for at least two of their coal generators to remain in operation until 2040 they are currently constructing a one billion dollar brand new fracked gas power plant in sinclair county um haven't ruled out building another one and frat gas is often advertised as a cleaner option or some sort of a transition fuel however depending on the amount of gas that is leaked during the production process the amount which scientists who spend their lives studying this believe is often underestimated um frat gas can be just as dirty as coal so to meet that 2050 emissions reduction target they are relying in part on technological wishful thinking um and inventions that don't exist yet they wrote that in order to achieve their 2040 target retention date they will rely on uh co2 reduction with new innovations but the 2030 plan um the 2030 date for the ann arbor 820 plan is much more finite um our plan states that we have to power a grid by renewable energy 100 um by 2030 and this simply can't be achieved under dt's current plan so that brings us to why we're here tonight we believe that the answer to this problem lies in a process called municipalization next slide please so what is municipalization well in essence it would mean transitioning from our current system of having a private energy utility to a public city owned municipal energy utility now municipal utilities are nothing new most people get their water or sewage through a municipal utility in fact municipal energy utilities are not particularly rare in the united states more than 2 000 communities across the us get their energy from a missile energy utility and over 40 of those municipalities are in michigan next slide please and that is no mistake municipal energy municipalization is a process explicitly protected both by the michigan state constitution and conveniently by the ann arbor city charter next slide please so why do we think that a municipal energy utility is the best option for ann arbor well we know that it is both reliable and affordable but further it allows us local control and to invest in our community and it allows us to be environmentally responsible and meet those goals that we know we have next slide please so what do we mean by reliability well in essence a public power utility loses power just about half as often as a private energy utility nationwide a public power utility is a loses power for an average about 74 minutes per year in comparison a private energy utility loses power for about 136 minutes per year however just looking at the nationwide data does not quite tell the whole story for michigan if you look at this graph we have dte on average loses over a thousand minutes of power per year meanwhile the city of lansing a municipal energy utility loses just a bit over 250.
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