again all that green is non-native buckthorn and honeysuckle next and there's the same area a few years later after lots of cutting and burning in there and you can start to see those pests those uh passage obstructed neither by bushes nor fallen trees the trees are not yet three to five foot diameter but the spacing is kind of right there and when you get more spacing you get more wildflowers more sunlight the more wildflowers on the ground next that work is done mostly by a combination of cutting and burning and i give long talks about prescribed fire we do a burn public meeting twice a year where i can talk more about this i'll just give you uh this one set of slides here we did a burn in first and bergen just for a comparison we we burned the left side but not the right side of this little patch next photo five weeks later you can see pretty definite line where that low fire was enough to kill those shrubs or at least to top kill them next three and a half years later that same photo point you can still see the left side is still less shady and the main issue with buckthorn and honeysuckle and those other shrubs is just that they completely shade out the forest floor remember all those photos and the descriptions we shared earlier the area on the left is closer to what was here historically than on the right and one last photo from here and now finally uh after taking out all those shrubs this uh places like firstenberg start to give us an idea of what the areas used to look like i think it's a much more attractive certainly more diverse ecosystem than those dense buckthorn tickets next so another way to say what nap does we identify the highest quality natural areas are our native forest fragments in the park system and we work to protect and prioritize protect and restore those areas first then we work on down to some of the lower quality sites so wrapping up here i will leave you i think with one more quote next another oop this is from mrs harriet noble who in 1824 said the next day we left for ann arbor we were delighted with the country before us it was beautiful in its natural state and i've sometimes thought the cultivation marred its loveliness this is an area of barton park we call foster out on the banks of barton pond the south banks of barton pond a nice oak example of oak savannah lots of sunlight coming in there supporting some some sun-loving plants still working on the big trees check back a couple hundred years and we'll have those for you and the last slide is simply my contact info and with that i'm happy to take some questions anybody yeah i have a question from you oh i'm kathy i can go after you i'm sorry okay um so dave this is all really wonderful work that you're doing on the city-owned properties on the parks um i wonder if um like this hunt for invasives also extends to all city properties or is it just the parks uh certainly it the you're right we have a lot of other non-city park property places like the wheeler service center parts of the airport um and so we do some work there as well we've we've inventoried all those sites and where the higher quality sites are we do some restoration work there we've had some great success with the wheeler service center staff for example just by altering the mowing uh the timing of the mowing that they do out there on the hay fields we've been able to create habitat and protect habitat for a lot of grassland birds out there so although we talk a lot about forest fragments and invasive species we also work to restore wildlife habitat where that's possible too well thank you kathy hi thanks for the presentation i have one question and two comments uh the question what's your position on poison ivy my position is uh usually uh scratching it i i'm a more sensitive to poison ivy than most people it's one of the job hazards i suppose for me i've had it every year my life for forever um it is a native plant however and there's over 100 species of birds that that like poison ivy so we are not actively going out and eradicating or controlling poison ivy in the woods in general but it uh we recognize that if it's if there's if it's growing right along a trail or near a playground or something that's not doesn't make sense there so we do control it and get rid of it from high high traffic areas like that oh okay thanks i saw a lot of it at parker mill and i was told with glo global warming that we're going to have more poison ivy i don't know if that's true but um yeah no one knows pregnant that's all speculation oh okay um i have two ques uh comments i want to thank kathleen goslin from your department she's going to be at a uh a nap workday out at narrow gauge uh natural area on saturday and it's not just invasive species but there's water that flows through the bottom of that area it it it needs to be able to flow with without being blocked by trees and shrubs etc and um just a reminder that corner sight distance is very important and napa has definitely improved trimming at those corners in recent years so thank you are you welcome and uh yeah you know we besides the work that we i talked about here we do a lot of trail work native seed collecting the sort of storm water control projects where it's possible so we do a lot of different sorts of things and regarding site clearance you know there's been sometimes people say oh you can't trim that road edge that's the natural area i'm first to say i don't want our natural areas to cause sight issues and safety issues so if there's a corner issue a site clearance we're happy to have those areas clear to make the areas safe oh okay thanks and i worry more about pedestrians sure than i do about vehicles but both are important so thank you um john you have your hand up thank you thanks dave um i really appreciated the presentation especially the old quotes and the photographs that was really great i'm wondering about what can be done and what maybe the environmental commission can do in terms of invasives on private property if i walk around my neighborhood i don't live too far from the arboretum basically any area that is not maintained has been completely taken over by invasives and no matter what you do i'm afraid in the natural areas if there are invasives in adjoining areas seeds are going to be dispersed by birds and other critters and it's just going to be an ongoing battle i met with steve yesterday and we were wondering could there be an ordinance that dictates removal or could could we do education and outreach what can we do to i mean these these these thickets are all over the city now and they're really i was in um uh what is it called mary beth doyle park um and it's also getting really really bad too yeah you know my answer now is maybe different than it would have been 25 years ago i i've been here long enough now i um that reinforces why we do the prioritizing that we do of those areas the truth is we're never going to get rid of buckthorn and honeysuckle from our landscape in ann arbor and you know we could spend lots and lots of time and energy and resources trying to remove those things from lower quality sites you've heard that nature pours a vacuum and if those plants aren't growing there something else is going to grow in and so unless you can get everybody even areas where we as professionals try hard to take out the things we don't want and to get things that we want in there it's a lot it's hard work especially in those really disturbed areas so i'm just not sure yet um i understand and appreciate the sentiment behind it but i'm not sure it makes sense to try to get rid of and to make that as a goal to try to get rid of some of those invasives in some of those lower quality sites you know the best defense is a good offense so in our natural areas we have the most luck where we can really really try to help the natives and get a lot of native biodiversity there to help keep some of those things out but you know we we're very it's hard to get rid of eradicated species like that another quick story we recently were um discovered that there was a the first populations of uh japanese stiltgrass known to michigan showed up on the west side of town and we and it was at some city an area we have a city conservation easement backing up to the county park banking up to a legacy land conservancy property we thought well this is a perfect opportunity we've caught this right away in the first couple years we can maybe eradicate this and then we start looking around and doing a more complete inventory and those weren't the only spots there's some over there and over here and over there and over there and pretty quickly realize even with that new population we're not going to get eradicated so all we can do is to pick the best quality spots draw a line in the leaf litter and say you're not going to get in here and try to protect those areas and in terms of what what can be done i still think it's it's great for people to to promote native landscaping and that's why years ago we had nap came up with a whole series of native landscaping brochures giving people some suggestions of what else they could plant besides some of those invasives that you might get happy to make those available um they're available on the website we sell paper copies which help us promote those if you want to give people something positive that they could do real quickly do you think it's possible to work with osi's 10 000 tree initiative so that when anybody gets a tree through that that they also get a brochure sure maybe you can touch base with missy stols and her yeah her group sure thank you good idea good idea a great idea john um okay rita you have your hand up and then chris and then kathy again thanks dave that was great presentation um and um and i've also enjoyed working with nap for quite a few years and appreciate what i've learned um i just have a question that's come to mind recently because there are so many uh pretty intense invasives some you know that we're not talking about just right now and i wonder if you or others that you know have tried any competitive plantings of a native species that's known to be pretty hardy and and intense in its own growth to work against something that we consider invasive as opposed to you know the the kind of of um efforts that that you've used so far yeah yeah um well thanks rita and thanks for all your work over the years you've been a pretty active volunteer with nap um sure we do that all the time you know that was an early lesson for me when i started with the city it's easy to get focused on killing the bad plants and getting rid of those things taking them out but nature pours a vacuum and if that's not growing there's something else will be growing there so lots of our activities if we don't think that there's a native seed bank that's going to come back we're often seeding in natives there and especially in some of our more open areas doing a lot of native prairie grasses and things that will that are pretty aggressive and that also that we can use fire as a good control effort with controlled method because those areas burn hot the native grasses burn hot and that fire is a good way to give that competitive advantage to the natives and help to discourage some of the exotics so yeah i think that to just remove the exotics and add nothing else in that there's no natives there is not going to be very successful and we haven't you know if you're that's what we've done in a lot of the natural areas in some of the areas you're dealing with in worcester park and things you know we could look at something like uh canada goldenrod which is a native however in parts of europe it's considered pretty invasive because it's really aggressive and it can be one of the aggressive natives here as well that might be something to consider planting in some other areas that uh would be even even if it's not as diverse as some areas you might like it's certainly uh better than some of the alternatives out there thank you sure hello chris and then kathy you're muted there you go so um dave greatly underestimates the naturalize program's impact on our community and uh the what i have frequently called sea change in the great majority of people's understanding about invasive species dave's job is to worry about managing our naturals my job is to go meet clients on their private property every day and when i first started in business in the early 1980s nobody understood buckthorn and honeysuckle as a problem the great majority understand it today and many of my clients say get them out of here and that that impact across the city has been extraordinary to me i am hoping that our effort to encourage people to not only do that but restore the native landscape in their own private property will grab equally a hold and we'll have great success especially where we have native force fragments on private land these are the brochures uh your landscape and our natural areas is it showing not very well yeah native grasses sedges and ferns these things are what 25 years old david they've had a great impact and have been distributed widely native shrubs there weren't so many here native trees oops sorry mr mr uh monet is getting in the way here and the last one native wildflowers so i have a question for today but i'll defer until a little later okay thanks um kathy just to follow up on john bursky's comment uh rita and i and christopher and maybe others have been looking at chapter 40 of the city ordinance excuse me and um one of the sections has to do with um vegetation on private property and i spoke to missy schultz stultz um a couple of weeks ago and she is very interested in doing something uh with her ambassadors from an educational standpoint so i i think that there's a lot of thought there and we just need to get it organized um and i did mention it to the mayor and also to the city administrator and and no one thought it was a bad idea it's more just getting the the resources and getting it organized so it sounds like there's there's a huge amount of expertise and will in the community to do something so this is good i know in my neighborhood in some areas we have buckthorn that's been trimmed into shrubbery designs it's pretty sad yeah hold on him growing i'm i'm all for you know getting people having you know encouraging people encouraging people to get rid of buckthorn and things uh i just don't have my hopes up that i mean you know if there were rule that you have to get rid of all the buckthorn we in the city uh we have a lot of parks that are nothing but thorns so it would be a hard challenge for us to do that but yeah where people can do it in their own backyards um more power to them we need more natives and you know besides just getting rid of those things there's a benefit of getting the natives and the native pollinators that come along with their so i think it's a great effort and i was involved with changing chapter 40 years and years ago um it's been changed a couple times and used to be when i started there was a rule against any rank vegetation whatever that was um that could grow there so a lot of people that were some of the early native landscapers around town were battling that ordinance and hopefully we've gotten the language changed so they can better grow those native things okay well we'll make sure we loop you in on uh on the draft version then thanks yeah please do thanks yeah well thank you dave for everything all the work that nap is doing um yeah i know uh commissioner mitchell has and others have been involved in door-to-door campaigns um about pollinators and uh native plants and i think it could be good to engage the public schools as well yeah you know educating the young is probably if if you're patient and persistent i think that's one of the best routes to getting improvements like this uh culturally and socially acceptable yeah well my background is in environmental education uh that was my previous life uh our offices for about 20 years were out at the leslie science and nature center we worked pretty closely with them and we all of our all of our work days involve a nature hike of some sort uh to help educate the public about the things we're trying to do we've also partnered with the public library to run some hikes that they've advertised as well so yeah certainly educating children and everyone else is an important part of what we do i didn't i didn't stress at the time but our mission i have two parts there to protect and restore ann arbor's natural areas and to foster an environmental ethic among its citizens uh and i i learned years ago that i realized years ago that even the budgets being what they are we're never going to be able to hire enough people to do all the work that needs to be done in the parks and even if we could that really wasn't the goal these are city parks they belong to the public and a big part of our goal is putting the giving the parks back to the people helping to get them in touch with um with the parks it's been said that what's broken is not just nature but humans connection to nature so we're trying to help heal that relationship as well yeah and i think steve jobs had it right when he said that most people don't know what they want until you show it to them example in the city parks is a great it's a great thing for private citizens to see what's possible yeah so let's see chris you have your hand up you need it chris you're muted chris we can't hear you you're muted muted i apologize so a topic i'd like to get to is the impact of deer on our natural areas particularly plants and oak trees and but i would like to hold that until we hear from dr dick christopher dick who's now the curator of the university of michigan herbarium so hang on there david don't go away okay okay great so um are there any other questions for uh my dave bournemouth okay i hear or see i don't hear or see any so uh let's move on to the next special presentation uh which is by uh professor jack i believe on on the d on the on the uh on deer management let's call it so thank you thank you for inviting me to talk um i'd like to actually share my screen because i made some changes to my talk um if that's okay i think i have could i get the uh sharing so i just turned into co-host and let me know if you can okay let me give it a try okay how are we doing there looks good um so i'm not a dear biologist but i am an ecologist and i teach ecology in bodney at michigan and i also was the director of the es george reserve and and that's where i basically learned a little bit more about deer management than i would have otherwise but i think it's a really important topic and it was worth my while even though it's not my specialty area to learn about it so i'm going to talk about deer over abundance ecological impacts societal impacts i'm going to be talking about the different kinds of carrying capacity of white-tailed deer and some lessons from the es george reserve i'm going to present a little overview of ann arbor's deer management program i wasn't sure what level of knowledge the audience would have so i'll just go there i'll try to move through it quickly and let you ask questions i want to address this question was the ann arbor dear cull a success and so i'm going to present some results from the deer cull and sterilization programs and i want to also present some select um results from jacqueline corteau's dear browsing studies and uh and then conclude with just some lessons from other communities we can't because ann arbor is not alone in dealing with deer over abundance um deer over abundance is an issue throughout the eastern united states and many communities are grappling with these very same issues so there's something we can learn from them so um a broad history of uh whitetail deer and in the early 1900s deer were basically extirpated in southeast michigan due to over hunting and using deer for for market um selling there was no regulated hunting in the in the 1920s um they are reintroduced selectively into areas in southeast michigan or they migrate from upper peninsula other places during this time hunting laws are enacted but they are not adequate in the 1940s in many areas in michigan there was a deer abundance to such an extent that deer reached their biological carrying capacity and starved in some areas and had population crashes um the 1990s saw historically high deer densities in the state and in the 2000s we see overabundance particularly in urban areas suburban and urban areas and numbers the whitetail deer now are believed to be higher than what was encountered at the time of initial european settlement in michigan and throughout the us so in general um why are dear more abundant now than they were say in 1491 um one improved forage from agriculture second and this is a big one is the loss of major predators including especially cougars and wolves from this area there's an increase in favorable edge habitat in suburban areas and because of fragmented forests we have warmer winters warmer winters are contributing factor to deer abundance fewer hunters in general in michigan and in urban suburban areas there's anti-hunting sediment sentiment that develops over time and reduced access to hunting locations so there's no hunting does not play a role in regulating deer populations in urban settings so i i said i would say something about the the george reserve um the us george reserves consists of about 300 acres and is located in livingston county about 25 miles from ann arbor and this was an estate of es george and it was land that was given to the university it consisted of about 12 farms that were bought and cobbled together and fenced in and it was intended as a hunting reserve at one point and so um in 1928 uh es george introduced four does and two bucks of white-tailed deer into the reserve into the fenced reserve and six years later there were 160 deer and people were just amazed by these numbers and by the reproductive potential of the white-tailed deer and this became a case study that was uh studied very broadly um the understory vegetation was really largely destroyed and at that time sort by by early 1940s there were other kinds of biologists that were interested in studying ecological processes and vegetation and they saw that that was not compatible with having this deer herd that was so dense and so the university implemented calls starting in the 1940s and um and that was just through hunting basically and that led to a return to diverse understory vegetation that botanists could study and appreciate like i said it was it was a case study um for aldo leopold and elder leopold wrote a lot about it although leopold was one of the founders of wildlife and natural resource management and he mapped out how he envisioned the carrying capacity to be you know when there are no predators in an area this shows the different years from when the herd was entered when the doze and buck were introduced to the es george reserve up to uh 1933 when it reached 160 deer you can see this growth trajectory of the population um before the call was implemented and the herb was brought down and so aldo leopold envisioned the population continuing to grow as long as there are resources for the deer to get until it hit this point where there are not enough resources for the herd and it would have crashed and when it crashed it would have left behind it a very degraded landscape so when the herd was able to recover it would recover at lower numbers lower maximum numbers because the landscape was permanently altered and that's this idea of the biological carrying capacity um yes george today uh this was last earlier this month i was at the at the reserve and i took this picture um dave bournemouth probably appreciate this there's a understory that stents with white oak seedlings hickory seedlings a variety of saplings of different stages it's a healthy understory and we have deer there and we don't call every year sometimes we we go several years without doing the deer call it's somewhat informal in how we assess the abundance but when the deer abundance does seem to be high then we have sharpshooters that take the deer out this brings up some different notions about carrying capacity i introduced the one the biological carrying capacity which is the maximum number of deer that an environment could sustain before the numbers dwindle due to starvation and that's from a very dear centric point of view of managing maximum numbers of deer but then there's this concept of the social carrying capacity and this is when you you talk about urban ecology and that's the number of deer that is acceptable to a community considering vehicle collisions potential for disease like lyme disease property damage and impacts the natural areas and then finally we have this third idea that i've just kind of modified from some other people who've written about it the biodiversity carrying capacity that would be the maximum number of deer that an ecosystem can sustain before they seriously degrade natural areas and that might be more of the ecological perspective so some ecological consequences of urban deer over abundance here you can see this browse line in minnesota when there are way too many deer and they've eaten all of the vegetation up to the maximum area that they can stand up and reach and so there's basically no leaves from this point down that's a browse line that's uh that's way over herbivored so the deer in urban areas they can inhibit forest regeneration they can increase invasive plant species especially ones that are not palatable to them like garlic mustard japanese barberry so there's a synergistic effect with them promoting invasive species over native species they can cause an increase in soil erosion and sediment runoff because of taking out this understory layer and they reduce the amount of habitat that could be used for understory birds especially ones that nest in the understory small mammals and insect pollinators and they can promote an increased incidence of diseases that affect the deer themselves like chronic wasting disease or ticks and tick-borne diseases that can affect animals and non-human animals and people so um in nineteen and sorry in 2015 um there was a lot of concern that uh probably the deer are reaching their social carrying capacity um there were concerns about the increase in deer vehicle collisions i don't know if we can see this if i um you see they're about 40 to 50 and then all of a sudden in 2015 we have 90 deer vehicle collisions that's quite quite a few there was a great concern for lyme disease potential and the potential of increasing the black legged tick abundance that could lead to lime or bringing lime into this area which uh in harvard didn't have lyme disease at that point in concern about the impact of parks and natural areas and damage to landscapes and gardens so as a consequence ann arbor and city council developed a deer management program that was approved in 2015.
you can see here out of all the deaths right here from the time from 2020 january 2020 to may 2021 three three died from covet 18. 80 died from accidental injuries 32 died from homicide and suicide is 37 children i have hidden here the rate beyond coven children die from homicide 11 times more than coven 19 within this time and yet we do not require children to wear kevlar vests to school for their protection three died from covid and we still require them to wear a medical intervention by definition of the fda that mask that you're wearing is a medical device if you go to the fda website it's under emergency authorized use it is for the prevention of disease okay so it is a medical device that you have on your face according to the fda this pie chart shows that there's no reason for medical intervention over half of the people have already had immunity probably up to 70 percent the amount of children that will die from cover 19 or even be hospitalized is shown by the the cdc to be only about uh 0.001 percent to be hospitalized is point zero zero two percent it's hardly anything your child's risk of dying in a car an accident is one in seventy five hundred and yet we still let them get in cars every day okay what you're doing is putting a medical device using a medical intervention which is a mask on children that they do not need a medical intervention and it is a medical device according to the fda and i know what a medical device is because part of my job is to do clinical trials and what i do is i take a medical device and put it on a population of people and do a study does that sound familiar to you i take a medical device like a mask and put it on a population of people that's what you're doing in the school you're conducting a clinical trial just like i do now i realize the governor told you to do that but it doesn't make it ethical and it doesn't make it right and it doesn't mean that you know what you're doing when you put this mask on the kids at school you're collecting adverse events where's your adverse event report from the mask where is that you have a nurse's log where is the reporting system that you do parents have adverse events their children are going to doctor's appointments who's liable for that you never had one parent sign a consent form for your clinical trial that you're doing in the school and you can tell me you're not doing a clinical trial but you're putting a medical device on their face as defined by the fda that's what you're doing and you have no incidence reports you take no responsibility for the mask you don't have trained people making sure it's worn properly not wet and taking all the safety precautions plus you just don't know what you're doing and i realize the governor told you to do that but it doesn't make it ethical and it doesn't make it right and now you know and somebody's going to be held accountable and it's not going to be governor murphy it's going to be the people who put the mask on the kids every day those doctors appointments and those adverse events and the timeless lost learning from masks is your responsibility it's yours and eventually it's going to come and you're going to figure it out and it's going to be very uncomfortable i'm glad i'm not in your position because if i was i would leave the board because i would lose my job because it is unethical to do what you're doing and i'm just letting you know that it's coming the law will eventually come up and it'll eventually meet up to where this is it's unprecedented but it's eventually going to catch up to you thank you thank you anybody else your name and address please don't i'd twist this or something thanks yeah um joey tug larry uh my address is uh for one for cedric lane and i go to i i'll be a sophomore this upcoming year for cherokee high school i've been in this school since through sixth and eighth grade and i just think this mask stuff needs to stop because it's like it's almost like these kids don't have a say and i don't think that's right and for example i have a brother who just graduated sixth grade and since probably 2020 of the fall me and him started playing sports and it's all like a same group of kids all the same kids at school who are doing much more than at like at the desk it's they have lower risk of even getting this virus than from playing soccer or any other sport and being with each other and even in those conditions no one has gotten the virus i've been doing wrestling for high school there was only one case of covet on my team and there's many kids in all these sports and i don't know the exact like numbers but i'm sure it's not a lot and with the masks too uh about in uh this year last year i went to school i have pretty bad allergies so i went to school and i started to sneeze and i snot would build up in my mask and it was basically just drenched when i came home my parents were shocked it's not coming down my chin it was just the most horrible thing like i ever experienced being in school and i think and i know i'm not the only kid who's gone through that i've had friends who've had stuff like that and i know there's so many more kids who've had so like it's just not right because it like what she said only three kids that's nothing compared to the amount of kids that are in schools so that's oh i can and that before i end i just want you to think what it felt like for me being in the school with a wet mask for like probably five hours a day and trying to get through that day so that's all i have to say thank you thank you [Applause] right anyone else how you doing name and address is that good doing a great job gary actually let you know [Laughter] thank you um good evening i'm sheldo tori woodlands development i'd like to acknowledge the traditional landowners throughout northern america and recognize their continuing connection to land waters and culture the land on which this board is meeting on is being held on part of the ancient homeland and territory of the lenie lenape people i pay my respects to people's continuing past present and emerging and i respect their continuing presence in the homeland and throughout the lenape diaspora i represent dion where a local community-led advocate group addressing diversity equity and inclusion that land acknowledgement that i just read i read it the last time that i was here last month as well it took me probably 25 seconds and i really encouraged the board to act on implementing that into your meetings i know that we have talked about it before and um it would be it would be a really great example to not just your students but to all of your staff and to everybody in the community to join the likes of eshim township council and eastern township human rights advisory committee to actually open your meetings doing a land acknowledgement in addition i'm also here to say thank you to dr justin smith mr anish kantham jeff lanzalotta irene ramanelli and mr nick de blasi for meeting with us on thursday last week we went through the dion proposal summary which we have talked about for several months now basically the goals and we talked about the goals and the importance of having an inclusive interdis disciplinary curriculum the urgency to increase in hiring diverse faculty providing faculty and staff with guidance from outside entities that are specifically trained to educate professionals on implicit bias and tactical dei and offering multicultural extracurricular activities to students so we hope that you guys found the proposal summary and that conversation helpful we did provide quite a lot of research and data and also resources on how these things can be addressed in eastern township school district we want um what dion is you know with the partnership that we have with the school district we want to be better than just the standards we want to be better than new jersey minimum standards we'd love to be an example to other districts who want to come to you as professionals and get your advice on how they can do these things in their school district so thank you for attending that meeting it was really um it was a really good conversation we had also um dion as mentioned earlier dion partnered with eastern township to hold the town's first juneteenth celebration this past saturday june 19th it was held at savage field which we know is an indigenous burial ground probably more important to add indeland acknowledgement given that we have the history right here um i along with nicole lucas we were not only hosted um the day we also had spent many weeks earlier to try and organize that liaison with the township the program was very robust and included um several local students and alumni of evsham township school district who sang danced and read poetry sorry commemorating on the richness of black culture and we also celebrated the end of the dion book drive which you guys have also been talking about throughout this meeting so we have entered it it was a really successful two months it started april 21st and ended on june 21st of the past monday i just wanted to let you all know that we collected over 350 books we raised 2 and one hundred dollars worth of cash and gift cards um for amazon so this far exceeded our original goal of collecting 250 books uh we'd like to also thank daniel and darwin walker from their foundation who donated um a thousand dollars towards the uh dion book drive and thank you mrs mcgulick for liaising with them on the purchase of those books it's really appreciated we also want to say thank you to rastelli's um food market who donated 300 worth of amazon gift cards to us so on the day we had the education chair for the southern burlington county branch naacp mr clinton law who um came and he commented on the book drive and he commented on the partnership with dion um he also you know just expressed here the importance of all students being represented in what they read and exposing non-minority children as well to children of diversity from a young age so he along with dion members attended and presented books to a group of students so current students within ysham township school district they came up on stage they were there with um dr smith and mr kantham and it was really good to see you guys attend and mrs mcgulick as well we really encourage that um all board members trying to attend these things too it really is important to students to be able to see these faces who make decisions in their education we also wish to extend the sincere thank you and generosity to the support shown throughout the community and we're excited to continue to work to work with um the board and to work with you dr smith and mrs mcgulick um for for you know in the future for a better curriculum in a more diverse friendly um schools thank you thank you very much name and address rick wells buckley lane marlton i've been paying property tax in this town for 30 years first thing i want to do is congratulate these people that had enough passion to come here and complain i'm very surprised that there wasn't 3 000 people here just like these people here the board of ed's throughout this country are being attacked viciously by parents because their voices are not being heard their children are suffering they're wearing masks i had i i dealt with a kindergarten grandson remote kindergarten i mean 180 days horrible horrible uh i'm not wearing a mask because i've been doubly vaccinated i'm assuming you're all wearing masks because you haven't been vaccinated that's what cdc told us i'm i'm surprised that you're wearing masks may i ask why you're wearing masks are you told to wear a mask or have you not been vaccinated no no one on the board is is going to talk about their medical history or what they've done i'm not i mean we're not doing that uh again i'll rearray i am surprised that there's hardly anybody here i was expecting not to be able to get into this room but it'll change every month that you're supposedly having meetings more and more people will be coming here because they are outraged you've seen it in loudoun county virginia in california people have had enough people had enough wake up see how these kids are suffering i assume you don't have kids that are in school obviously or you would do something about it i mean governor murphy he got it wrong from day one by not protecting the elderly okay so keep an open mind these kids are not getting sick in school thank you thank you all right seeing no other comment we are going to close that portion of the board and we are going to move into board member announcements are there any announcements i think we kind of covered everything yeah all right um mr lancelata very quick thank you mr pittskara you know i just wanted to reiterate one more time a huge thanks to all the staff uh for all throughout throughout the school district as a teacher and a parent i know how exhausting this school year was and i have to tell you that despite all the mandates despite the rules despite everything that we went through the teachers here really came through the whole staff really came through and it was an extremely effective school year despite all of the obstacles so i want to throw out just a huge thank you to everyone who participated this year and helped out you know with all of our students so thank you very much anybody else it's a daunting year exhaustion is all around and i would just close out by saying to everyone who's listening and those who i hope really aren't and are on vacation mode that uh every single one of you deserve your vacation um parents student and especially staff for everything everything you have done i know it is it's been i don't even i honestly and you know me i don't even have the words for it at this point i think i've exhausted my vocabulary this year uh but you all deserve a very restful and rejuvenated summer and i wish you all the best in health and happiness uh for the coming months and thank you for the best that you could give us which was amazing thank you at this point in time i'm looking for a motion to adjourn motion by miss ryan seconded by mr lanzalotta all in favor aye have a wonderful summer everyone [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you
Okay, so let's start from the beginning. As some of you may know, a couple of years ago, our district, with permission, closed two elementary schools: Clarkson Street and Mountain View. As you can imagine, they closed the schools. It's not easy, and although these two schools were closed, and although it helped where we are as a district, it wasn't enough. So the Board of Education, the governing board at that time, directed the superintendent at that time to create a five-year plan on how to... We were going to reorganize our schools before this plan could materialize or be created. Unfortunately, we were faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, and that put this five-year plan on hold. The reason this five-year plan was requested, and the reason Gras and Mount were closed, is that here in the San Gabriel Valley, we are experiencing a decline in student enrollment. That is, each year we have fewer and fewer students in our schools, and that is happening throughout the San Gabriel Valley.
thank you absolutely thank you miss lika our next question is from angela perellis you may i mute your mic to ask your question hi good evening um my question is why the thought of if we're keeping azusa high school why would it have to be a new school if the whole concept is to save money um azusa is in the city that it represents it would be to me it would be wasting so much money to change it because i'm sure it would be colors names uniforms i don't understand that concept um i think we need to learn from past practice that we've closed schools in the past where money was spent from playground equipment and what have you and then it was closed and then we moved sierra to gladstone street elementary and then that property still belongs to azusa so i just think that we need to learn from past mistakes because i really think that was a mistake again that's just my opinion but i don't i don't understand why it would have to be a new school azusa high represents the city that it's in gladstone is different gladstone is called gladstone but it's in the city of covina so i just hope that um before any drastic decisions are made people really take the time to hear the parents um and i'm just concerned about that and i'm really glad that i'm only going to have one child affected by all the changes because i don't i don't see a lot of good in some of the changes that are being brought up and it's very scary but i'm also talking for my neighborhood um you know my my nephews and nieces are married and have children here um i'm honestly i'm just glad i'm on the way out but my daughter on for right now when she goes to high school it would be you know azusa high school but i don't understand if the whole concept is to save money why would you create a new high school that that doesn't make sense thank you well thank you ms perales for that for that question um again i can share some insights um number one and number two just to your point uh right now um again these are ideas and possibilities and people might at the end of the day again i don't know what's going to happen we're going through this process but at the end of the day it might be what you said but the idea or the concept around a new high school is so that our students in our community of the in this case the the school that would be closed which in this case again as an idea uh would be glasson high school uh that gladiators wouldn't have to become aztecs or wouldn't feel as if they were the ones that something happened to them and now they have to go to the school where these other students nothing happened to them and the idea what what the the ideas that have been talked about is that uh this would give all students an opportunity to rally uh to show pride uh in something being born kind of together but again this is just an idea right now it is not uh it is not set in stone um i do want to one more time unfortunately we are out of time i do want to um urge you to if you have not done so and you have a question that was not answered to please put your question in the q a but once again on behalf of the board of education we want to thank you so much for joining us tonight we want to thank you so much for your thoughtful questions we want to thank you so much for your thoughtful comments uh we look forward to your responses uh in our survey that will be going out very very soon again that survey will include a link to our school reorganization web page and it will include a link to tonight's video as well i want to wish you all a very good evening thank you good night
in 2016 the city contracted usda sharpshooters that was controversial and and it didn't involve a research component in 2017 to 2020 the city worked with a private company called white buffalo which is a deer management company that in addition to doing calls they also do deer research and um and do sterilizations so white buffalo advocated an integrated approach consisting of lethal methods for removing deer which is the call the deer cull and non-lethal approaches which was female sterilization and the sterilization was to be done in areas where the lethal methods were not possible due to density of people and houses and so the goal was to address two main concerns of the city to restore ecological balance to the city's natural areas and to reduce deer vehicle collisions and in addition to contracting with white buffalo they contracted with an independent ecologist jacqueline corteau who had gotten her phd working at the es george reserve to monitor the impacts of the deer browsing the ecological impacts on plants so there are many other aspects of the program and they're described in the ann arbor cities uh web pages so the the call was very controversial um i have often regretted at times getting involved in it um i mentioned to my daughter this morning is 12 years old that i had to get back because we've been traveling i said i had to get back so i can give a talk about a deer call she said well what side are you on dad and i had to say i wasn't on the deer side and she said this is going to put a very big wedge between us [Laughter] and so i i'll have to explain to her all of my justifications and things but um but it turned out that there you know there was just a lot of opinion about the deer management program i counted from 2015 to 2016 53 headlines in m live um i have some of them here some of them are somewhat whimsical um but there were serious you know people expended a lot of political capital to get this call done and and i i have to commend the council members that did that um you can see that some of these um stories attracted huge numbers of comments it's back when m live had comments like up to a thousand comments to people from all over combat and giving an opinion um and so the uh and one one thing that i that i'll mention before is this um in other communities that have had this kind of polarization political polarization around deer management this is tend to abate over time and and i think maybe it's analogous to prescribed burning at first it just seems so counterintuitive for a city to kill deer but at some point when people are educated and understand that this is an important thing to do to preserve natural areas for safety reasons and other reasons um they begin to accept it and it becomes something that's more in the background of what the city does on a regular basis um so so i think that that's that's hopeful and i think that um i think that there has been less attention on the recent um discussion about the call than there was in previous years just in these past few months so i think i think we'll be moving that direction so a little survey of the white you know a little overview of the white buffalo um approach here this shows how they surveyed with helicopters um in 2020 a really intense survey and using infrared cameras this is the best way to survey deer and get good numbers there's always going to be some error associated with trying to count them from the air any other way the other way that they were trying to count them was with camera traps and using approaches where they can use that as a way to sample the deer population and identify unique males and with antlers and try to figure out what the density is so um so every year white buffalo got an estimate of the overall deer number in the city limits of ann arbor these are the sharp shooting locations these are you know highly trained professionals that mostly sat up in trees around baiting sites used rifles um when the deer came into a in a particular grouping um they would shoot them directly into the head so they just fall immediately there's no suffering this is considered a humane way to euthanize deer by american veterinary society um the meat from the the kill deer was harvested um by local groups and distributed to people with food insecurity needs which i thought was really great thing to do with that that meat so it really is a kind of hunting the sterilization program um i had i was very skeptical that this worked this would work at all but it turns out that it actually was very useful in these areas that could not be entered for sharp shoot shooting um but there are some limitations on female sterilization it it cos it costs quite a bit more than sharp shooting two to three times as much up to a thousand dollars per deer but like i said it can be the only option sometimes uh sterilized does can live longer than unsterilize those that are not getting pregnant they can live in cornell they've had those that were sterilized live up to 17 years so you're you're stuck with these deers for quite a long time um and you know when these deer were sterilized they were tagged and some were some had radio colors they could track their movement and see what you know how useful was it because if there's a lot of migration of deer into an area and out of an area it's not really helpful to sterilize but if there's just a lot of local what is called phylo patchery or a very small home range then it can be very useful to do sterilization and when these deer are monitored with you know radio tracking or whatever in different communities it turns out that almost all of them if they're going to die their death will be by a vehicle that that's the way that these urban deer die they don't have any other predators so they they will die from a vehicle 90 of the time um and these were the uh the three study areas where they did the sterilizations uh the south study area east and north study areas so to summarize the um the results after three years white buffalo estimated that a 53 population reduction from year one to year four um so they initially counted 289 deer with some air uncertainty and then year four 137 deer and they weren't able to reduce the population in the area with surgical sterilizations but they were able to stabilize those those numbers that they weren't growing so really it seemed pretty successful um and i just want to point out that when you look at these numbers these numbers they estimated for each year of the numbers of deer going down to 137 it's not just that they just took out these this number of deer but they also took the reproductive potential of those does that they had removed and so the population could have continued to grow throughout those four years with nothing to stop it so you're really talking about the difference between a much larger number of deer perhaps a thousand and the 137 that they ended up with in 220.
Depending on the particular city, this decline can vary. It could be because the cost of living is very high; it could be because we have low birth rates; it could be because there is migration to the east; it could be gentrification, depending on the city and also depending on the district. Some districts have already closed and have been closing schools for some time; some different ones have simply decided to close schools [Music] recently, and some districts are beginning the process of closing schools now. The reason the districts have done this, are doing this, or are going to do this is because of the effects on the programs and our schools, the facilities that are affected when we have schools We want to maximize and bring in programs and have schools that offer our students, parents, and staff the highest possible quality, and that's what has brought us here tonight.
so that's uh the potential growth of the population okay i mean chris uh-huh i have a question what's you you say on the previous slide that deer sterilization was banned in michigan until 20 oh yeah sorry um so i think that there are hunters that really uh disapprove of this whole idea of sterilizing beer and it it is kind of like a in some ways it is a concession to anti-hunting groups um to control deer by sterilization instead of by hunting so in the state legislator the legislation there has been a temporary ban on any kind of deer sterilization activities until the year 2022 so i'm not sure what's going to happen with it but at least now it's it's not an option maybe next year it will be an option to continue the sterilization again um in terms of the deer vehicle collisions this is where ann arbor was in in this peak point in 2015 uh there definitely seems to be a decline whether this was just an outlier um and statistically significant i don't know but uh considering that the main mortality of these deer is going to be by vehicles it makes sense that there is a relationship between the deer cull and a lower incidence of deer vehicle collisions in the city and so there's a 55 percent decrease in the deer vehicle collisions um okay i want to any any questions about the white buffalo work or you can hold on to that until the end so i want to talk a little bit about jacqueline corteau's oak study so jacqueline corteau did browsing studies of of trilliums and other wildflowers i was really i'm kind of a woody plants person i like trees and so i i focused a little bit more on her studies of red oaks and i think that these are kind of elegant experiments that she did in which she planted up to 400 red oaks each year in different natural areas where he had one oak seedling that was open and exposed and then another one that was protected with some kind of cage so it couldn't be browsed and she planted these and oaks red oaks are of intermediate preference to deer they don't really like them a lot yeah they don't like to browse them as much as they like trillium and other plants that have less lignin and less tannic acid so the idea if the deer are browsing the red oak that they're probably also going to browse all kinds of other plants those kind of good indicator species and there was a study by the cornell group particularly a guy named blossie in 2014 who estimated that if there's um if there's anything more than a 15 percent damage uh by herbivory or visitation to these seedlings per year if you add that over add that damage up over a few years that's basically going to indicate that these oaks and these forests are not going to be regenerating that forest regeneration is going to be severely inhibited there might be some woody plants that the deer don't like those will grow but for oaks which as dave bournemouth indicated are important in almost all of ann arbor's uh natural areas it's going to have a real big impact so um jacqueline found that over you know from 2015 to 2019-2020 there was a trend toward a decline in browsing intensity in these different planted oak red oaks and that's good and perhaps with more you know even lower deer density there would be even more of an impact that you could measure but you can see where these numbers are most of them they're still uh you know the lowest amount of braze grazing and browsing intensity is 40 and so for the forest to be healthy and regenerate for oaks to be regenerating in this forest it would have to be down to 15 percent so the forests are still not regenerating there does seem to be an impact of the call on you know perhaps reducing the amount of browsing damage on these on these seedlings but it's still not quite there um there's still a big impact on um forest regeneration and i don't haven't thought about this a lot but certainly this does affect carbon neutrality you know if you if you have forests and you're expecting the trees to take up a lot of carbon and some of the the trees the highest wood density and the most importance in the community are not growing um that definitely could affect carbon flux so surprisingly even with all the negative publicity the deer management program in ann arbor has broad support i think it's broad support over 70 percent of people surveyed in the different wards found that the deer management program was acceptable despite inconveniences of having parks closed despite the distasteful idea of having deer killed by the city um and i think that the the support like could increase could be increased through better communication i think i think there's a lot of misinformation about the deer call and deer management program that's still floating out there and uh and i think even though the city did a great job and look at their website they did a really good job of communicating and summarizing information um there could be some better better communication i think so some recommendations from the cornell group cornell i think as the premier deer management program and research and they say that you know they'd studied a bunch of different communities that implemented deer management programs would there have been controversy and you know what the first step is to develop a deer study committee that is comprised of people that are different stakeholders you know people interested in the environment people in safety people interested in public health other aspects um to study not these general patterns about deer upon over abundance but but how they affect different parts of the city in different ways and what are the particular issues in the local area i think that these could combine university and city resources and expertise and you know come up with local problems you know and solutions for them cornell recommends that their knee communities that are implementing deer management programs need to build trust um with the community through effective communication so the anti-calling community animal rights groups need to be heard they need to be listened to they need to be given honest information and you know one way of doing this is to have workshops where different speakers are invited have outreach activities also cornell says that you know you'll have to plan that lethal methods are going to be part of the toolkit that you're going to have to use because in most cases sterilization especially when there are open settings where there's lots of movement outside of an area and lots of migration into a community the sterilization methods are not going to work and like i mentioned previously you know prepare for the political controversy but in these different communities that were studied that controversy diminishes over time and it becomes something that's accepted part of natural resource management so on the uh on the handout i put some of the readings that i think are really good general readings especially this in the indiana urban deer technical guide really good information i have the different reports and then here's the cornell study as well in in our deer management program website so i'm happy to take any questions or about that or we can start a conversation about it all right well thank you very much professor jack that was very thorough um that's a very thorough information not packet you put together so um oh i just had one question and that is um you know you have these three targets um there's the biological you know carrying capacity target number of deer density and then there's the social one and then there's the ecological one so you just presented some information about i believe pertaining to the ecological one that that would be 15 of seedling you know um browsing per year but um how close would those other numbers be do you think to that ecological number roughly they're close to each other or are they far apart i think the um i think the biological carrying capacity is going to be way way uh different it's going to be a number that we're not ever going to see probably in ann arbor hopefully i mean there there's just so much food in people's yards and along parks and everywhere else in protective cover for deer but i think that the population could could grow very large and very quickly so i think that number is going to be very high um i i don't know what it could be i could speculate it could be triple what what there is now quadruple um and and that will you know potentially triple or quadruple their vehicle collisions you know so so we're already gonna you know have more intense uh social frictions and um and then in terms of the um in terms of the biodiversity carrying capacity or the ecological carrying capacity you know in in some areas i think we've already exceeded that and so we'd have to go lower than what we have now you know based on jack and jacqueline cortez studies and um in some areas that you won't find uh a lot of herbaceous plants that deer prefer like trillium and other um other plant resources okay yeah so it does sound like that's the target number that i think most of us would prefer yeah and i should mention just briefly that um the um the huron valley humane society was um offered um was given the opportunity to present during this meeting of the environmental commission but no one felt that they were prepared to give one so um they will be scheduled at our next meeting i believe on july 22nd um so they will be in a position then to offer a rebuttal or their own opinion um about the deer call at that meeting um so um i'm sorry to take up time here um lisa um lisa dish has her hand up first and then bob needham i just wanted to um thank you very much professor dick for we've spoken so i'm laughing um i i i wish that the city's website could do a better job of showing a link between the cull and and forest regeneration and its its clearest graph is the graph about reducing vehicle deer collisions but that is not persuasive to people who are um who feel that we should have an eco-centric not a human-centric perspective on this issue um and it's it's difficult to get through all of the various studies that i mean it's difficult for people who don't do that as a normal thing in their life her studies i think are are clear and very informative but most people aren't going to do that kind of research they're looking for a graphic or two and so um i don't know if it'd be helpful to for nap to help to feed in here to provide some evidence or pull pieces from the corto reports that help people make the connection between culling and forest regeneration but i just wanted to offer that because um right now the argument isn't the website's not making that argument very well in my opinion i think that's a really really good point and um i think that you know there's lots of information on the ann arbor city pages but it but it's not connected and it doesn't form a narrative and i think like a dear study group would be able to make those connections and linkages and um and go from the general like what i said what i presented as general consequences of deer to the particular of of how it's affecting ann arbor natural areas but i i agree that that is one way that could be communicated okay i just wanted to also uh thank professor dick for um making the time to do this for us very informative and just um fyi for for everyone i just heard back from the humane society uh today and they um are unavailable at both our july and august meetings but they were wondering if they could present at september so that's where that is in just an fyi i kind of organized this this talk in response to some of the emails that came out from the huron valley humane society um one statement they said is the call was not a success you know so here i present a perspective where i think it was a success another one is it's not it's never going to work you know nature abhors a vacuum if you take out deer they'll be replaced almost immediately um ideas about you know if you remove some deer then the reproductive potential of the remaining deer goes up these are ideas that are just not that just don't pan out you know and i didn't want to really get into that in particular but i do keep that in the back of my mind as this may be work what people are thinking about the deer call um in in trying to provide these explanations okay um john yeah uh i'll add thanks for the presentation uh question one if you can speak to the fact that we know the deer aren't residents of the city and what you can say about what surrounding communities are doing and you know to the point of the comments you just made about nature aboard the vacuum what anything can we say about deer that are coming in from surrounding townships following the cult or not yeah i think um i think one interesting finding from the white buffalo study of the sterilized dough is that they they really had a limited home range they were not moving out of that south study area they were staying in there and this was this is a finding that a professional named porter from from lansing from msu also found that the maternal lines in whitetail deer are very localized and do not move a lot um so in one study where deer were called even in a continuous forest the densities remained lower for quite a long period of a number of years even though the forest is continuous and could have easily been reoccupied by other deer the the deer that do move around a lot are the bucks so the male deer will move around a lot um the female deer not as much so that that gives some um some hope that if a call is implemented for a particular park it may take several years for those deer to to recover through migration and so that that does bring that if there is an attempt to manage deer within the city limits definitely um the city has to consider just outside the city limits what's happening those areas are a little bit easier to address with hunting um thank you i'm john mursky a comment and a question my comment is uh anecdotally i mentioned before i live about five blocks from the arboretum and i've noticed um in and around my property a significant decrease in the presence of deer when i first moved here they destroyed my vegetable garden um i planted nine fruit trees um they were also heavily damaged um and um also i lost saplings some um that were naturally regenerating and some that i planted to uh deer rubs um where they girdled the trees um things have not gone away but i've seen a significant improvement i mean they used to come into our vegetable garden which is about 10 feet from our side door and just mow things down multiple times and that's basically um cease so that's that's my at least personal observation and the question that i'd like to pose to my fellow commissioners is after we hear from the humane society and potentially other voices would we be willing to consider drafting an ordinance either in support of a deer call or other measures is that sort of where we're heading is that the case steve what's the thinking on this thank you um yeah i mean i would propose um that we consider a resolution to city council about funding the dear call because i know that was dropped from the budget uh for some reason um and i think it was only a hundred thousand dollars is what i recall so um it doesn't seem like that big an expenditure and i'm not sure why it was dropped but it has my impression as as well as most of the people i know um is that uh there was an effective program that deserved consideration for continuing and um um that's all i'll say about it at this point but i think um i already put that in the action items for um for example that i think i'd like the suggestion that we could form we could help facilitate um forming a dear study group you know with uh nap and whatever other um you know city staff might be indicated as well as um professor dick if he's willing to help and um also having maybe a representative from the humane society on that as well so you could have a study group that could also recommend different actions but i think even independent of that um i mean i feel like i've heard enough to um to consider a resolution to counsel even before we hear from the humane society but um i think in all fairness it would probably be good to wait until they've had their chance to make a case um you know i'm not sure how they would uh align with the city's budget process it's already been passed but of course it can be amended at any time during the year so um and i i believe any all the culling activity happens during the winter um well that's my impression so um in any case um any contract or any actual culling hunting work would not be done until the winter january february time frame so i think we have time you know it's not an urgent issue at this point um meaning that if we did a resolution then we'd have time um to maybe have the process the whole bureaucratic process to move forward to have a call happen this winter that's my impression um um so i see several hands up um commissioner zhang um you're muted at this time but yeah yeah i just have one question um about the sterilization program so why is only female theory sterilized it's like easier to do or it's a good question um and the main reason is that um male deer male white or there are polygamous and so um if you stay if you give a vasectomy to a nine out of ten deer the tenth deer will go and impregnate all the remaining does and so it's very difficult um to have an effective program like that because you can still end up with the same number of does reproducing i mean same number of fawns it's just that one buck will inseminate them instead of all of them and so for for uh for sterilization program involving vasectomy to work it really has to almost be like in an island uh where you don't have migration of bucks coming in from the outside and staten island has tried this and um i'm not sure what success they've had but they've invested several million dollars in sterilizing with vasectomy a deer herd that's about the same size as the herd in ann arbor and so um so it can be extremely expensive not likely to work unless you get all of the bucks and and it won't reduce the population it'll just stabilize it very good question now okay yeah um okay chris you have your hand on your screen i'm not muted so i'd like to follow up on john mursky a bit about the northern half of the anne over hills neighborhood i'm sorry um we benefited from the boundary of the river on the north we benefited from the university being willing to let us call on that property we benefited from the city lands to the east which involved here in hills golf course and a couple of very nice native forest fragment parks [Music] we uh we benefited from a location where sterilization that is to say darting and then carrying deer to a surgery center was easily possible and that result in the north half of anne arbor hills was when we had 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 deer marauding in the neighborhood we went down to four very nice ladies with white gear tags the change in damage to the arb to a local park owned privately adjacent to the arb was extraordinarily dramatic [Music] however one of those four deer got into my backyard and left a deer tick i've lived on this property since 1960 i have never had a tick get on me and i work outdoors all day anywhere in this neighborhood much less on my property but she left me one i came inside and was working in my studio and she was crawling down my arm folks some of you have friends in long island or connecticut or rhode island or wisconsin where lyme disease is epidemic some of you probably know people who have never recovered from being infected by that virus i guess it's a bacterium um and there are other diseases these ticks are carrying and when you get more than one of them the problem is way worse this is a public health hazard if we allow the deer population in ann arbor to get out of control we're going to have this problem here in serious levels the deer vehicle collisions are not troubling anyone that hasn't hit a deer but if you hit a deer you're spending five thousand dollars and a lot of time to get your vehicle repaired if you don't swerve and hit a tree or an oncoming vehicle david bourneman i'm sure you can confirm jacqueline crutoes studies on your natural areas about the impacts on the ecosystems and herbaceous flora and the regeneration of trees please confirm this for me it's a problem yeah professor dick gave a great presentation i've got no uh no disagreement with anything that he said and dr cortez studies have been very convincing um towards earlier comment about those being hard to hard to see on the website or on the city's website i think that's somewhat intentional the city um is trying to present all the facts and let the public make their own decisions about things and so dr corteau does have some two-page handouts that kind of summarize some of that information that that ought to be a little bit clearer for people but we're trying to lay everything out and say here's here's what we're finding and make your own decisions about things rather than trying to there are people that that as we know are opposed to the call it's been a very controversial issue but yeah in terms of impacts on natural areas no doubt about that so a couple other things um a lot of people say oh god we can't have firearms in the parks and of course we can't have firearms in the parks generally or any place else generally the guys who are trained as sharpshooters are are specially licensed by the state the particular company that ann arbor hired is the best in the country they use handmade very low velocity ammunition [Music] when it hits a leaf it breaks apart they work at extremely close range with night optics they do not miss they do not have any question whatsoever about what they're shooting at this is a completely safe operation that they undertake the idea that we have wild men running around our parks shooting everything and everybody is just completely false and ridiculous even though people try to say so and i would recommend that we don't hire general hunters and do things in any sort of way like that and i don't think we ever will lastly i build gardens for a living my clients have paid me tens of thousands of dollars over the last well 20 years 40 years ago we didn't have deer in ann arbor over the last 20 years to protect their old evergreens their gardens from being factually destroyed when you have a 75 or 80 year old very large u which is a really wonderful evergreen shrub and within three or four years it's it's eaten to pieces you have lost a very valuable component in your landscape that's irreplaceable a few years ago and had a really bad winter the deer in in barton hills and the bad parts of ann arbor were eating juniper evergreens the last existing ones unprotected by people in the winter they came away with bloody mouths because junipers are very prickly as some of you know but they were on their way to destroying them i have fenced my back garden it was a pathway for deer in my neighborhood i went ballistic i have tens of thousands of dollars of deer friendly vegetables in my garden and many people do and many people don't have the resources that i have to defend against them i don't want think we want a city full of fences i don't want a neighborhood full of fences mine are very inconspicuous they're made of black polyethylene they work but gosh uh it's very expensive very difficult we cannot fence our natural areas there's what 3 500 acres deer can jump 10 feet um i'm soap boxing i've been so boxing on this issue since trillium disappeared from barton hills village about 20 years ago there were great wraths of them there there were great rafts of trillium and bird hills and there's not a single one today and it's not just trillium there are dozens of native wildflowers that we don't have anymore including orchids i um i wrote you i think but especially the council back when they were making the decision that the city developed the naturalized program and has spent a quarter million dollars in tens of thousands of hard labor volunteer man hours trying to recover our naturalis from invasive species and and to make them really rich in diverse habitats again well thank you chris i think most of us share that sentiment so um several plants have been up for i think lisa was first and then kathy and then rita i'll be quick i just wanted to not in a contentious way appreciate mr bornman what you said about the city's desire to present information in an objective way or in a balanced way i think is a better word than objective um people respond sorry about that noise um people respond to graphics and the there's a really crisp graphic case being made for reduction in vehicle deer crashes the slide that professor dick had with the projected deer population would be great to have some somewhere on the city's website i don't know if the city would put it there but for people to be able to appreciate what the cull can be argued to have achieved by way of reduction and just some kind of graphic that treated this the the ecological balance picture would be great because my feeling is that the information on the site isn't really balanced because it isn't addressing all of the objectives that the city said the um the cull was meant to achieve and mr delacourt won't won't buy it so he'll say oh yeah we already talked about that but i'm still and i don't know if it's a study group that's needed because there seemed to be a lot of information that's gathered i think there's education i think the council needs to be educated we didn't have a work session on the call so when people were looking for money they could use for stuff they wanted to do they picked an unpopular project because we had to find the money before we could spend it so they picked an unpopular thing that they didn't want to have to vote yes for and they took its budget line and you know i it was hard this year and it's going to be hard again next year and hard again the year after that because we've got a structural above budget deficit so we need to get a commitment or at least an appreciation for that we are undoing with one hand what we've done with another when we when we don't when we aren't consistent about calling okay lisa um are you are you finished and then um kathy i agree with everything that lisa just said and also i lived through the deer call drama for many years in fact i was tracking deer vehicle collisions probably since 2010 on michigan traffic crash backs and and was tracking the fact that they were increasing um if we're going to have the huron valley humane society in and i wouldn't oppose it but i think we need some ground rules for their presentation in terms of providing data driven statements to us and we need to make it clear that we do not want the national organization to be sending hundreds of emails to members of this commission um it it needs to be a very professional process because there is so much emotion involved and there are some members of council who do not support a call for for emotional not factual reasons and and that is fine that is the right but we don't want um the community or the country to be exploiting that and there were vicious personal attacks on some council members as as a result of what happened and i i don't want a repeat of that so i i think we need to be very clear before we have this presentation exactly what it is and what our expectations are thanks okay thanks um thanks kathy that's duly noted um let's see rita has her hand up this is gonna seem really obvious i think but um it's not just the plants we want to save the plants provide the food for the pollinators that i work with and other people and the pollinators provide food for people uh for birds or other things and so it is the balance that i think we're looking for um and it's it's it's huge um and um woven together and i think that that's the emphasis that i'd like to see is that it's it's not just about plants i love plants but you know it's all those things that that require plants and especially native plants when those are gone there are certain fauna that really can't live um okay chris you have your hand up and then we should uh close out this topic so i'd like to thank both dave and dr dick for coming here tonight um [Music] i think both guys are as general principals very smart people who are reticent to get in the middle of politics and unfortunately this issue has a lot of that as lisa just said and i chris dick has been quite outspoken and that's not normal for a university professor of high rank and dave ornament has also been quite reticent to get in the middle of any kind of politics and he's had a struggle all the way along to teach people that gosh why are you cutting all those plants down in our natural areas and then why are you burning them for heaven's sakes and so the controversy has followed him for 30 years and thank you both gentlemen for coming here and thank you environmental commissioners for dealing with this yep yeah thank you um thank you um both of the presenters so um let's move on to the next item on the agenda which is um anthony's business which uh the first item is the gilman plume update uh rita do you want to let us know thank you sorry um yes thanks thank you um i just wanted to bring this back as a continuing item for our um consideration and just to keep us in touch with with what's going on um and um i'm hoping that councilmember criswell will chime in but we want to i think that what we want to do is to show that the city is moving toward a path of superfund cleanup we hope the governor has received a letter of support and it was supported by our commission here and i want to thank everybody who worked on it and supported it and i think it is just the right way to go um there have been some some actions that have taken place recently and i guess i'm going to ask kathy if you wouldn't mind stepping in to um comment because kathy has her hand up so the floor is yours oh okay i've i've been uh all of the hearings not that i know all of the legal jargon that's being used uh but the main theme is gellman is doing everything possible to stall the cleanup through the courts so we're very fortunate to have the epa involved a couple of examples there was a hearing on june 17th and fortunately judge connors denied gelman's uh motion for partial stay of the court's original response activity order that was to implement uh the fourth cj and it uh the court also denied that bellman's request to add uh the 20 2017 document to the court record i i don't understand all of the details of that but the 2017 document included some agreements between eagle and gelman and the court denied that also i don't have any documentation on this but there was a second hearing and uh gelman filed an appeal to the appeals court either um today or yesterday and again they're they're asking for a stay so they don't have to start the cleanup that was um specified outline in consent judgment four and for anyone concerned about the first sister lake there there's agreement by gelman eagle and um and everyone involved that we do not want discharge into the first sister lake so there that will be worked out but there's none of the parties are advocating for that um there is also work regarding the ms4 permit that was mentioned before with the allen creek drain and um i can say that the city is continuing to be supportive of the process that's underway and there's been a number of communications between eagle and the county and eagle has changed some of their criteria but i don't have that in writing yet either and when i do get it i can share it with the commissioners if there's interest in that and and one thing that that might be helpful would be to have a a water working group because there are so many water-related issues so maybe we could consider that at our next meeting no thanks kathy i'm certainly supportive of that myself um so let's think of what uh please suggest any agenda items for our next meeting that would be appropriate and um i wouldn't be shy about emailing all the commissioners about any actions as soon as they occur if you have any significant information if you can just email us oh okay i i will definitely do that including any court documents i receive thanks okay yep thank you and thanks rita too so um so are there any other comments about the gelman plume i'm hearing and seeing none so let's move on to the chapter 40 update uh who wants to take that um i'll start um so kathy and i have worked on some revisions we we talked quite a bit at our last meeting and got some great comments from you all about some of the specifications that we can change and i started putting those into the chapter 40 document and once i started doing that i realized that it would be a lot more make a lot more sense for the draft version of it to go to people like chris graham and shannon gibb randle with their particular backgrounds to give some additional advice on this because there were some questions that came up that that i thought would be easier to address before bringing to the whole group because i think there's some professional issues on some things that came up tonight you know should we consider um uh asking the public to i'm sorry the private property owners to manage some of the the vegetation on their property so since i was looking at this chapter 40 you know that kind of thing came up and so i would just like some some advice um and so i did send that to you chris and also to shannon gibrando um and i'm hoping that that it will work out that you'll have some time to give it a glance and and have a discussion i apologize i haven't i know shannon's away so that's okay um that's why i didn't bring the you know i didn't want to bring it to this meeting um and uh anyway that's that is my proposal kathy do you wanna oh there there is go ahead um there are a couple of things and um dave mentioned how many years this has been amended and we really need to ask staff to probably rewrite and and consolidate the ordinance because private property is mentioned in at least three different places so if you're a property owner and you look at the ordinance to find out what you should do you might look at one of the areas but not the others so it needs to be at least referenced so the information is easy to find and i believe our biggest challenge right now is enforcement and we need to come into compliance not through having uh community standards knock on someone's door but we really need to educate the public and as i mentioned before um we're gonna meet with with missy stouts i always mispronounce her name uh there's interest there because it is aligned with sustainability and she has um a team of ambassadors who she believes uh might be interested in this and so um i'm i'm optimistic at this point that that there's community interest in that that we can get something done and start educating the public and use the school district um and in many the park system we can probably brainstorm at a later date to talk about all the partners that we want to include in this so thanks well thank you yeah that sounds great i mean it's time for a more comprehensive look at this especially with all of our initiatives with pollinators natural features you know and i i'm just to recap um last communication i had from the transportation and the disability commissions were that they were happy with the way you know with a higher height limit oh okay good and i guess i'd like to encourage the new commissioners if they have some opinions on this take a look at chapter 40 and let us know if you want to be involved in any way we definitely welcome more partners okay so are there any other comments um rita you have your hand up yeah i did that was intentional um i just wanted to be sure that um we know if if this is going to have to go back to the transportation commission as well um for their review of of it's the site distance and the the visual kinds of things yeah i think that's probably necessary um after you know after the next uh the next iteration okay you know you know with chris and shannon okay so um so let's see um are there any other comments on chapter 40 at this time hearing and seeing none uh let's move on to new business and uh the only new business i uh i have is that we have three new commissioners so i would like an opportunity give them an opportunity to introduce themselves um let's start off with the youth commissioners um how about uh lunia and then um young when and then chris vandenbrock so lunia you have the floor would you want to spend a few minutes and let us know something about your background and interest certainly i um my name is luna i am a senior at the university of michigan majoring in climate meteorology i moved to ann arbor about a a year ago and i wanted to become as involved in in my city as possible so i went through the 8-0 ambassadors program and the ann arbor community academy and i was inspired by these experiences and and and meeting other other like-minded residents as well as meeting some of the city staff to apply uh to serve on the environmental commission so i feel very fortunate to be here and um i'm very much looking forward to working with all of you so thank you for this opportunity to speak thank you um um youngwen you have the floor hi everyone i'm your i just graduated from pioneer high school this year and i'll be entering the university of michigan and college of engineering to study environmental engineering also physics and over the past few years in high school i was involved in the sustainability club and the freeman environmental education news council and also helped organize the a2 0 8-0 youth ambassador last year um those were the main environmental work i've done but i'm really excited to serve on the environmental commission to see what i can contribute to the city okay thank you i'm chris vandenbroeck uh well i'm a tony lifelong resident of ann arbor in fact i lived within half a mile where i was where i grew up and at that time pauline was a gravel road so i've been here a while um i kept going to the university of michigan until i ran out of degrees i got a phd in mechanical engineering and then followed up with a relatively long happy career in automotive automotive parts and i also have some experience in the meatpacking industry in iowa uh now i'm retired and i've got a lot of interest in environmental issues climate change all the stuff you all are talking about and i'm i'm thrilled to be here so it's a little bit of a learning curve for me because i'm still getting familiar with all the issues but boy this is great and thanks well yeah thank you chris um so i want to point out that a lot of the basic scud work that we do is done within committees and working groups so um i would encourage all all of you to look into what the working groups are and see if you might attend a few that are around the topics of particular interest to you and um and we hope you will join these working groups as well and help contribute to to advancing you know the business of the entire commission and uh i would um i might read and i thought it might be a good idea for all the present commissioners to also introduce themselves to talk about their background but i think you know given the late hour that we have here i'm trying to keep these meetings to at least 9 30 at the most so um i think that um if you participate in the working groups you will get to know us uh better over the next few months so um let's uh let's get that for now and proceed uh to the reports from committees other commissions council and chair so um chris do you want to update the commission on the national features um we're getting very close to having a good draft of amendments to the udc about woodlands and trees and grading permits and some site planning requirements um maybe perhaps even two weeks away from beginning to spread it further and wider at least to the initial groups and to you um that's our main job to get that done okay would you like this to be in the main agenda item for the july 22nd meeting i well you don't have to decide now you know yes i'll let you know chris or steve um this has taken and been way harder than i expected um than any of us expected it um [Music] it's there are many sections of the udc that are coming into play and it's complicated no apologies necessary chris so it's a great task that you've taken on and we're all looking forward to the results uh you know because i know you'll do a great job um okay uh but just let us know when you when you'd like to just give us plenty of notice when you'd like to have it in there because i think this is probably because of the complications and everything i think we could devote a whole um commission meeting um you know to reviewing what the what this work has done regardless of how it turns out in the end that meaning passage by council of these changes um it will be extremely educational and exciting i'm looking forward to it so um okay so the next uh it's a pollinators work group um rita yes um thanks i have to say that i had to take a a pause on um meeting with our group we have a meeting scheduled for next tuesday uh if anyone um new to this group or who's been on the in the on the commission wants to join the pollinator work group please be in touch with me we are talking about educational types of things that have to do with helping to reduce turfgrass encouraging people to use less pesticides and just generally um supporting a a beneficial environment for pollinators um and it occurs to me in our discussion tonight that are i believe that our next steps may be very educational oriented things and i wonder if there's something that we as a commission should talk about in terms of working with city staff on developing educational materials how they get expressed to the community how in in various ways um it just seems like there's kind of like a baseline way that maybe we can all learn to develop materials or work with staff to get things out effectively so i'm just raising that as something that that is a concern of mine because i think we all have things that we want to be put out to the community for that for understanding um so that's that's all that's my pitch i'll give more information on the pollinators next time okay well thanks rita um yes and um so solid waste working group um let's see uh lisa do you want to talk about the zero waste working group sure we're a little satellite of the solid waste working group and um john callaward and i have been working with jenny patosky john were you going to update us about our grant we're happy to do that lisa that is excellent yep um so we are preparing to submit a grant to nexcycle under the micros opportunity uh six month ten thousand dollar grant with the focus on identifying and developing and testing uh some metrics around circular economy so working with uh city and several community organizations or non-profits or businesses about what does that mean circular economy what metrics might be appropriate for things like reuse recycling um trying to get a better handle down that to advance some of the city's objectives and also there's a ghd reduction component of that an equity component so it's in pretty good shape uh i think it's due july 21st so we're running it through a couple more channels in the city it would actually be submitted by the city um and the main focus is to hire an intern for that first six months to really work and dive into that literature and material but then there are subsequent faces of you know more implementation and then education around it so the grant we're working on now is just for the first six months but we've got some ideas about how to fund the work kind of moving beyond that um yeah i think that that's pretty much it unless you have anything else lisa i think that's yeah that's it well thanks john yeah that's great progress um in this respect i'll mention that i'm working on a uh construction and demolition ordinance potentially for the city uh but you know one thing i've learned over the last several months is that um you know for this program to be economical we really need to make it a county-wide program so this is a political um political thing i'm juggling with now is the city could have an ordinance but on the other hand it would have to be coordinated through the county as well in order to get the kind of volumes of scale to make it more economical less costly so i'm working on that right now and i think some pilot projects are a good idea the ann arbor public schools is doing a lot of renovations of its schools so i plan on doing some data collection studies there so and the city and city staff particularly jenny potoski has been engaging much more with me so um i think you know i'm building and trying to build up uh uh build up the work group until we get to a point where we're gonna have a meeting soon of the of a work group uh including stakeholders from the community including builders i know contractors things like that um to move forward on this issue but i think politically this is a major item that i appreciate advice from anybody about um and it's fortunate that we're now officially i think part of warm-up you know the regionalization agreement with the county so um that's going to greatly facilitate this sort of work so um theo eggerman is part of the core work group that i've i've developed so um we'll see how that goes but i'm not quite sure how uh to make this politically happen between the city and the county and the townships so i'm looking for any advice and uh and uh suggestions that anybody may have about that um so i think if there's no comments um or questions i think uh i think we'll move on to the other commissions and i don't hear anything so um how about john murski how about an energy commission update sure uh in our last meeting we had an uh update on downtown solar installations commercial solar installations and educational opportunities um we're seeing more and more downtown solar that are visible from parking structure rooftops so um we might end up putting some signage to point those out uh also it was mentioned that the solarize program has been wildly successful last year we had almost one megawatt installed that's probably four times what we had three or four years ago and year to date so far we have installed almost the same amount as we did in all of last year and that's also in spite of the fact that net metering was eliminated so yeah that's really really great progress and shows a high level of awareness in addition we had an update on a benchmarking energy benchmarking and disclosure ordinance that's been proposed that's being worked on quite some time now for the commercial and multi-family sector um we reviewed um a resolution on that and we will probably vote on that resolution of support in our july meeting so that will hopefully be headed to council soon in our next meeting uh there is going to be a review of a sister ordinance that is directed at the single-family residence sector so that we have a balance not only just for commercial and multi-family but also single-family that will be a little bit different but it will require a home energy audit that is done according to department of energy process and standards and the idea is that that would have to be disclosed at the time of sale and hopefully even we can't mandate it but um at the time of marketing so not buyers have a sense of how energy efficient a home is just like you buy a vehicle you know the fuel efficiency of that vehicle the intent is to do the same thing so we're going to have a review of that in our next meeting with a resolution to follow and that will then also go on to city council and i think that's it thanks very much thanks sean um any questions for john no caring and seeing none um i'm shannon's off in the red rock desert so um we will not have an update from the planning commission uh today and also we don't have a representative from the parks commission as yet assigned to us so um we will not have an update on the parks and parks commission um so then um then moves on to the report from council who wants to go first i'm kathy or um wait joe sorry china the only i i forgot to give one quick update and that is um and this is sort of a heads up also for our council members um we're we've been working on um actually i have with some other people outside of the commission on a resolution that would promote the use of low embodied carbon materials in construction in ann arbor there was a first review of that resolution and that will likely be voted on the idea is not to mandate anything but to encourage the use of those materials by the city and by construction companies and architects and so on and so forth so i just wanted to mention that i'd forgotten to mention that thanks go ahead kathy um the only thing i can think of and and lisa really knows more about this than i do is that city council passed a a resolution to approve a legal settlement to limit our phosphorus output and that was a settlement with with eagle and it's it's something that we've been we the city of ann arbor has been negotiating for over 10 years so i don't know lisa if you want to add to that add tiny things so some of you may know much you must may have a longer history with this but apparently it's been since 1999 that we've been battling over this and um the the what wasn't then called eagle imposed on ann arbor um and one i think one or two other municipalities much stricter restrictions on on how much phosphorus can be discharged from the wastewater plant but the targets that they imposed were not well crafted and also somewhat unclear and so the advantage that we're getting out of this settlement for now is that the restrictions are tiered and so there's a time limit in which you have to meet one one threshold level time limit to meet another and then the strictest is farther out and the reason why that's important is that the scientific research that's been done into this suggests that the phosphorus that's in the um these are not it's not in our water but it's downstream from us that phosphorus phosphorus is not probably not getting there from our wastewater treatment plant it is getting there because these are static bodies of water and they they um they get into a state of low oxygenation where when there is a shift in temperature or a storm event then the blue-green algae bloom because that shocks them gives them you know gives them an influx and so what you need to do is aerate the water better which is not a wastewater treatment plant issue and so the the better thing to do seems to be to use water to aerate water which is one way of talking about mixing um and so that's i think that what the the tier structure that we've just agreed to hopefully will give us is a chance to fully make the case that there's a better way of achieving the ends that we want and also it's there's clarity around what we need to do which is also very helpful and so i'm not saying that oh we don't need to get more phosphorus out of our water but but the thing is is that the problem in the solution aren't very well linked still in what eagle's asking for okay um so let's see kathy you have your hand up and then chris i just want to mention that the two bodies of water that are of concern it's a belleville lake in ford lake and i was actually at a zoom meet and greet probably six weeks ago for when dana nessel the attorney general mentioned that she was surprised about this and ann arbor's response i guess and and mentioned uh lg overgrowth and and i had no idea what she was talking about at the time but the important thing is that it's it's got the attention of people at the highest level so hopefully we'll be able to work on a solution that's that's scientific rather than based on 20 years of negotiations [Music] indeed um thanks kathy chris so is it true that the city water treatment plant is adding [Music] phosphate to our water supply and and most cities do um flint didn't when they switched to river water to coat the inside of our water lines so there are not [Music] so the water pipes don't disintegrate and contaminate especially if you have lead pipes our water when we drink it is that true i don't know i've heard it's true and i've heard the largest single source of phosphorus in our whole community comes from our own water treatment plant that's not that's not what the study that was shared with us shows and this is right it's downstream and well not just that but it's an epa funded study and um so it's it's both this issue around storms that produce the algae blooms but it's also um uh it's also runoff and so when ann arbor enacted a its runoff legislation which was recent phosphorus levels went down yes there's no doubt we have a lot of phosphorus in our soils and and i'm i get that i i i'm i just i i'm questioning this because i need to understand not what happens to fort lake and belleville lake or the or that issue but what we are actually doing to protect our pipes and whether there's another way to do that and what really i mean if we're releasing phosphorus at all we are sort of violating the spirit if not the letter of our ordinance not to allow any phosphate in our fertilizers or in other words we 15 years ago went through quite a deal to eliminate the ability for vendors to sell phosphate turf grass fertilizers in our city and and yet are i believe i think maybe i'm totally misinformed and i'd like to be better informed which is why i'm asking the question i will ask mr steglitt thank you um you know um i mean among all the commissioners i'm probably the person who's most kind of familiar with the uh state and federal regulations um about things like this and so um why don't i why don't i talk to brian steglitz about this um and i'll review the data i mean you know um the the city has in what's called an npdes permit and it's you know and then the relevant the relevant number is the tmdl or the total maximum daily load of phosphorus that's coming up in the water and it relates both to you know the sanitary sewer and the stormwater and there are technologies to use to reduce it and um the only thing i can say about adding the phosphorus is that yes this is the most common technique for preventing lead bleaching from lead pipes yeah but if the city has replaced almost all of its lead pipes it's not clearly any pipes yeah sorry the steel pipe's out there too which is yeah and a lot of lead solder and a lot of houses so yeah so um you know it's the the legacy stuff i'm not sure which reservoirs or blood might be residing you know in the drinking water system that might be re-released if the city stopped adding phosphoric acid you know at the water treatment plant so i'll investigate that further i have that written down as an action point for me and i can report to the commission at the next meeting not doing that was the main problem in flint when they switched correct that's correct that's correct because um that's commonly necessary to prevent the lead from reaching for lead pipes but as i s as i said i'm not sure how much um how many reservoirs might be existing um that that might contain lead that had leached already from lead pipes that might still be there that might that might be mobilized by or you know by by preventing um by not adding you know the phosphoric acid in the future so i'll look into that i'll look into all those issues and i'll send an email update before our next meeting and we can have a discussion then about it okay but yeah it would surprise me when i first heard of it too that the city's been wrangling for what 30 years 32 years about this i mean you know yeah because what the issue is that they cause harmful algal blooms or hags both in forward-like and velvet lake which are you know are potential threats to human health because these microcystins can be airborne you know through aerosols and it can cause significant health problems um okay um well thank you for pointing that out um kathy about the phosphorus you know the phosphorus agreement with the city so um so are there any other um reports from council okay so uh move on to the chair um i got a um i want to say two things first uh you know they will take up the uh uh the uh minutes from um may 23rd at our next meeting and then the other thing is that um i got an email from from the mayor's office about the green fair there the city is scheduling a green fair it used to be called the mayor's green fair and i think it was held in june most years and previously but now uh they're scheduling it for the first friday of october which is october 1st so i propose what i'm thinking is i would like i would like to con the ann arbor environmental commission to consider having a table at this event i'm not sure about the hours you know it's going to be downtown i believe um on main street so i would um i would like to have a brief discussion about that and whether we'd have enough volunteers from the commission to table such a meeting for the hours at which we're open i'm happy to provide the table on the chairs and maybe we can develop get a banner um so that you know we can drape over the table or we can say well we're the ann arbor environmental commission so and i'm happy to finance that or find some whatever means unnecessary to make that happen so um i think it would increase our public outreach and our public's knowledge of our existence and so i'm um i'm waiting to hear if there's any kind of agreement or uh discussion about this and then if anybody would like to make a motion did you do that yeah kathy um kathy raised her hand kathy what would you yeah i'll i'll move that we participate in the green fair in october and also volunteer okay great great um any other comments about this okay do i have a motion to uh accept this as a it's not a resolution or anything at this point but uh is there a do i have enough uh enough positive votes here from the membership not volunteers at this point but just ascend to doing this tabling event rita you have your hand up so rita i have a first motion is there a second anybody cathy and rita okay let's have a vote on this that the city that the commission will have a table at the green fair on october 1st and that people will volunteer as they're available always say aye raise your hands or say aye hi hi any news any abstentions hearing none i'll assume it passed unanimously and i look forward to more volunteers uh for this tabling event i'll keep people updated as it goes along but i the cities i'll fill out the survey that was requested and uh and we'll see what develops um okay so let's see a report from staff josh yeah so i don't really have a report from staff in part because this is actually my last week at the city uh i did want to thank many of you i've worked with many of you over the years and i just want to say a quick opportunity to say that uh i feel very fortunate to have worked in a community that has always kind of pushed the envelope with sustainability and i know i've learned a lot uh you know just being in this job and working with many of you and i hope to take that on to my next position so thank you all well thanks for all you've helped the city accomplish josh thanks jess and um and uh galen is on vacation which is why josh has stepped in so caleb will be back next month um so the next item on the agenda is the action item so i have several listed here so the first is that um the nap brochures um would be considered as being part of the osi 10k tree program events um so do i have a commissioner that would take that on to to to see to see if that could be how if that could happen and report back to us john john is volunteering for that action item second one i have noted here is um how we need to facilitate communication with citizens about the deer call uh is there a commissioner that would they would try to try to work with city staff and council to try to see what might be possible that might lead to a resolution or a judgment by the commission [Music] in terms of setting up some sort of a um improved improved communication with the citizens um i've heard um the focusing on the city website would be a good idea and maybe a deer study group is not really worthwhile at this point given the history so is there a commissioner who would want to take on that work and report back next month anybody [Laughter] okay i'll do it i'll do it okay even i'll join you i i just need to stick with the [Music] udc stuff no i understand chris that's right so um i'll take care of that um and then um in terms of and then some and then the chapter 40 the current you know title three chapter 40.
So, to begin, what we did was form a team of parents and staff to start studying this issue and ultimately to make a recommendation or recommendations to our board. The team that was formed contains 12 parents. Half of those 12 parents are parents of students in our elementary schools, and half are parents of students in our high schools. The other part of our team is 12 members of our staff. One- third of those 12 are members of our teachers' union, one-third are members of our classified employees' union, and one-third are principals of our schools. This team began meeting in November 2020. When we started meeting, the district staff presented this committee, this team, with four potential models that we wanted the team to consider as a starting point for this work. We communicated to the team that these were not the only models we could have, but rather something to begin with.
um language and the city's code somebody should forward that to the new commissioners how does anybody want to do that my hands up reader will do that and then the last one i have here as an action point is uh uh is my uh my investigation into the phosphorus issue and the history of that and i will i'll update the commission on what i've learned at the next meeting on july 22nd so are there any action items i might have missed john has his hand up kathy i'm going to run first and then kathy steve um the energy commission uh has done new commissioner orientation outside of meetings um about an hour long um going over the structure of the city and the bylaws and things like that i think i shared those materials with you i could do that again um and i would encourage you to do that potentially with galen's support and rita's support that's the way we did it and we'll be doing again obviously we're going to be getting new commissioners so that's i'm just want to throw that out there is something to potentially think about you know thanks for bringing that up john my understanding is that galen already accomplished that but i'd like to hear back uh directly from the new commissioners about this um and then we'll go to kathy yeah chris uh could we have a email list full name list of of all commissioners sent to us so that we can update our list there's one in legistar that i'll make sure that uh robert mulsahy i think is responsible for that but i'll make sure that uh that's all updated my understanding is that that happened but i need to verify that okay so legistar gives us it does it gives us commission members right yep gives us the commission names and my understanding is that everybody's been added already to the environmental commission distribution email list thank you okay so kathy sorry kathy oh that's okay uh we we still have one opening and i thought it might be helpful to create an inventory of our skill set who's on the environmental commission to determine if there is an area of need and i don't know if that's ever been done before no and uh like steve you just mentioned your water expertise and and i wasn't aware of that so that's great but it and i don't know what is lacking but i think it would be helpful and would possibly improve our performance sure i think um yeah that's good to do an inventory but also let's also have everybody identify a need that they think is is missing so i think maybe i should i'll add this as another action point for myself where um let me just send an email among our list here and um with a set of questions and i hope everybody can respond in a timely way and then um and then actually you know what i've learned over the last couple of years came through my pfos work i mean i'm working with the national sierra club about pfas and uh i've had quite a lot of interaction with empire staff you know um in the state government and i've also had conversations with brian steglitz over over the years so um i've learned quite a bit about you know how these things are regulated and so um that's something um that i was well aware of and i'm sorry i haven't really you know made other commissioners aware of that but i think that's a great idea kathy so i will do that i'll get that started okay okay so i think are there any other action points that people would like to suggest okay i'm hearing or seeing none so um it's the items for the next agenda i think uh i heard chapter 40 uh might be kathy and rita might be ready to have a discussion [Music] you know possibly have a draft resolution to submit um with uh shannon's and chris's input and then um and this is the july sec 22nd meeting and then with the uh the deer call we should probably wait until after we've heard from hvh from the heron valley humane society until then and i um and i will i will actually that's a sixth action point so i will make sure that um so that chris doesn't have to do this all the time i will let me contact the huron valley chris could you give me the contact information for the huron valley humane society and i'll try to set some ground rules for their september presentation i've i've been in contact with you i can send you there okay bob thanks that would be for the september meeting is what they suggested that's correct yep that's correct um and so um let's see so um so bob do you want to take care of that directly or if you've been in contact with them why don't we discuss it offline because i'm not entirely sure how to set ground rules i mean i've already invited them to come and present well yeah yeah i'm not thinking about anything greatly restrictive you know just like i do think that things need to be data-driven as much as possible okay so let's have a discussion on that offline um so if there's no other items any other proposals for items for our next agenda hearing and seeing none so um our next scheduled meeting is july 22nd at 7 00 p.m the fourth tuesday of the month fourth thursday of the month july 22nd so this uh the last item on the agenda tonight is the public second public commentary uh this is the second opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes please call eight 1-888-7888 zero zero nine nine or eight eight eight seven eight eight zero zero nine nine and enter meeting id nine three five two nine seven zero this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and video feed city staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you will hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any television or background sounds so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments and be patient there may be a delay of up to 30 seconds before a connection is established so meanwhile i see john's hand is still up yeah two quick questions about meetings are we we have an august meeting and secondly is a work session planned and if so when yeah um i have not uh thought about that yet um i think we will definitely have an august meeting um i'm intending that and that's generally been a working session historically so um so the energy commission is having a normal meeting in august so we will meet um also in in august oh um are there any um so let's move let's see if there's any public comment at this point and now uh josh is anybody on the line i am not seeing anybody okay well i think um all right so um i tell you what um if there's uh if there are no objections i would propose that we schedule the august meeting as a work session uh provided we can get a quorum you know or a significant number of commissioners present okay all right everybody um thank you um if there's no other business um no other nothing anybody else wants to discuss i declare this meeting adjourned at um 9 50 p.m thanks everybody see you next month if not sooner thank you steven you
The team analyzed these models and had many good and interesting questions, and finally, after several meetings and discussions... The team arrived at their first recommendation, their first decision, and these were the recommendations the team made. The first thing they decided was that they would focus only on Model 3 and Model 4, starting from that point forward. In other words, they were no longer going to investigate or focus on Model 1 or Model 2. For Model 3, the team had several questions they still wanted to resolve and discuss, and these are the things they were considering. In Model 3, the team was thinking about whether this model would have schools from preschool to fifth grade or if it would have schools from preschool to sixth grade. After much discussion, the team decided that Model 3 would have schools from preschool to sixth grade. The second thing they wanted to discuss and resolve was whether Model 3 would have a school from preschool to eighth grade or not.
The team decided that Model 3 would have a school from preschool to eighth grade. The next thing the team considered was They discussed whether this model would have one school, or a high school, or if it would have two. Ultimately, it was decided that it would only have one school for grades 7 and 8. Finally, for model number 3, they were discussing and researching whether this model would have one high school or two. The team ultimately decided that it would have one high school. So, model 3 was born, and according to the team, model 3 would have one high school, one school for girls up to grade 8, and the rest of the schools would be for girls up to grade 6. For model 4, when the district presented model 4, model 4 had middle schools from grades 6 to 12. The team decided that the schools shouldn't be from grades 6 to 12, but rather from grades 7 to 12.
So, other things that were considered were that we had informed the team today about an idea of how we were going to support the schools with staff. The team liked what we had presented, but they asked us to improve it. What we had done, and we did modify that plan. When the district presented our idea, it was going to take five years to implement because we were going to gradually start moving students to other schools, and that was going to take five years. He and the team wanted a faster, more accelerated implementation, and so that was also changed. Instead of doing this in a five-year phase, it became a three-year phase. And finally, they were considering whether this was going to start in the 2021-2022 school year or if we were going to start in the 2022-2023 school year. Before the team could decide this, the board gave the order because we were already too far into the year.
They said that, to be fair to our students, their parents, and our community, starting in 2021-2022 wasn't a good idea. So the board asked that this start in 2022-2023. So, once everything was clear, the district staff, took these models and started [Music] with the The schools we thought should stay open and the schools that, through a three-year process, would be closed— we explained to the committee, to the team, that we had selected the school sites solely based on their capacity; that is, the larger schools would remain open and the smaller schools would eventually close. We explained to the team that this wasn't the only way this could be analyzed. Perhaps some team members felt that the capacity and size of the school wasn't as important as its location within the city. Maybe they thought it was more important to have schools in the south, the north, or the far west.
Perhaps for some, the schools on our borders were the most important schools that should stay open, and maybe for others there were other reasons. So we wanted to communicate that our idea wasn't the only way this could happen. Then the team members were given the opportunity to create their own ideas based on their thoughts and opinions. They had the opportunity to say, "Look, for model 3, these are the schools I think should stay open, and these are the schools I think should be closed." To close, and that's the reason why I think this. So, those ideas were presented to the team by each member who created an idea. Each member was able to present it, and the other members had the opportunity to listen and ask questions to understand the ideas. The idea comes after listening to all the ideas that were presented. Each member had the opportunity to go back to their idea and perhaps review it.
If they heard something they liked, they might keep it. Maybe after hearing everything, they thought their idea was still the best idea, or they might eliminate it. Maybe they thought the other ideas were better, so they wanted to eliminate their idea. The members who hadn't created an idea were also given the opportunity to create one. If they were inspired by these meetings, then they took that opportunity, and the members of this team returned and began to present these new ideas to the rest of the team. After all this process, in the end, there were ten ideas for how model 3 could be made, and there were five ideas for how model 4 could be made. And by ideas, again, we are saying that each idea had different aspects that were going to remain open and different aspects that were going to be closed. So we started a process in the team of We wanted to reduce the number of ideas we had because we had 10 ideas for model 3 and 5 ideas for model 4.
So we wanted to reduce that number [Music]. So what happened is that after several meetings, several conversations, several questions, the team members had the opportunity to rank the ideas in order of their preference. That is, of the ten ideas for model number three, this is my best idea, and then you go down to the idea I like the least. So which was number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6? They did the same for the idea for model number 4. After this process, after the conversation, after seeing the data, the team reduced the number of ideas for model 3. So there were four ideas left, and for model four there were two ideas. The team then asked us to give them additional information about programs, support staff, and the budget that was possible for this model 3 and this model 4 for the programs. We offered them two different options for thinking about how we could do programs.
Again, they were just ideas. So, for example, the first idea was that we could possibly build specific academies for each site, for example, The best school was a school of this year, meaning it had a focus on science, technology, and mathematics. Perhaps a school was an arts academy, perhaps a school was an academy of our dual-language program, perhaps a school was a Javier academy. These are some examples; they are not all the examples, but the idea here is that schools would become academies that had a focus. Another option was to create programs that all sites would have, and these programs would be the foundation, so that no matter which school a student went to, they would find this foundation of programs there. For support staff, the committee members made suggestions that we please increase support staff, for example, health aides, our technicians in our schools, educational support, and social-emotional learning support.
Again, these are some examples. For the budget, we reviewed some possible ramifications. This is possible; again, these are just ideas and things that may be possible. For model 3a, an estimate of two and a half million dollars was given. It is an estimate, and it is something possible. For model 4, a possible estimate of 11 was given. Millions of dollars. These costs include items like a possible rebranding, name change, mascot change, colors change, a new curriculum, modernization of kitchens, new flooring in gyms, athletic equipment upgrades, improvements to our team locker rooms. These are possibilities that could impact the cost of one of these models. In addition to this, there may be other considerations as well, such as the academies. Yes, that's how we might go about it. Some of these academies might have a cost depending on the programs or the academies. We might need additional classrooms, or we might need newer classrooms, or we might need to expand our parking lots.
So those are other considerations that could take a toll on our bond funds that were allocated to our schools. Depending on the model, those funds that were allocated to those schools could be closed. It's possible that they could be reallocated to cover these costs, but again, this is only a possibility; it's not certain. So after listening to This is about the programs, the support staff, and the budgets. So the team took the four 3D models and decided on one, like the two 3D models and decided on one. So right now, at this moment, there is only one 3D model and one 4D model that the team is considering. So let's look at those models. Let's start with model number 3. This is model number 3. Again, I want to take this opportunity to remind you that, and now, at this moment, this is just an idea because this is not final.
This does not mean that what you are seeing right now is what is going to happen; it is just an idea. So here in model 3, we see that the team has this idea that is currently in place. This idea turns video into a school, a girls' school, up to eighth grade. On the right, and you see that David has a maximum capacity of 724 students. Here you can see that my girlfriend Mary, brother, and Paula. Those schools would remain as girls' schools, down to sixth grade. They stay in those grades, and there to the right of each, the maximum capacity for those schools. Here you see that the girls' school would eventually be closed. Here you see that If we take the school in the video, those schools combined have a maximum capacity of 4,519 students, but in 2022-2023 we are projecting that we will have 3,715 students.