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i remember when they were very interesting items for our board and our township and our town and our school district to address i think it's great that they were forward thinking initiatives that we put together as a as a district uh and here they are with their being renewed i speak about the evans contract the use of that space the repurposing of that building for yet educational needs we took a school and we have we have students in there just a different configuration so kudos to the district for doing that and for it continuing number one number two also remember all of the history and just everything that went through with 9.13 so i think it's great that we're still talking about teddy bear academy and the uh benefit that it is to the district and the fact that we are talking about tuition rates but the fact that it's still ongoing in our district i remember i was on the group of people that went to tour mms when we were turning that area back there after we got rid of purple hall we repurposed it and made it the teddy bear academy as it is today so uh been here a long time and it's great to see that these initiatives are continuing so great job everyone that's it thanks thank you mrs everhart anyone else like mr fizzakero i want to comment um you know just reiterate and add on to what mr cantham said about the uh about 914 the sro shared service agreement i i think i i thought i think this is wonderful and what i think is most impressive about this is that this is something that's happening for multiple years uh this is going on until 2025.

um we proposed 116 so you divide it by 113. when marlene and i looked at where the distribution would be um because i can't take a third of a teacher from four different grades or three different grades i have to take a teacher from this grade a teacher from that grade in this building um because the teachers are obviously whole people and not fractions so uh the result of that calculation would be that we would recommend that if that were to occur they would be taken from sixth grade at doolittle which would bring their class size average to 23.3 at highland uh at 23 flat and at norton at 23.6 the existing class size is 21 and a half at chapman which means we have two sections 21 and a 22. these this number 23 to provide some context would be the highest sixth grade class size average in at least eight years i went back we went through marlene vin and i this afternoon we're looking through historical budget books and things you know we were easily able to get to eight years it would would have been time prohibitive to continue to dig uh to find further years but uh it gives you some context of what that reduction would mean uh you know as i i hope that we're at the end of the pandemic but we've just been through two years of it so it's certainly not my recommendation to reduce those positions but given that the question was asked i wanted to provide some data and context around the response so to quickly go through the budget recap i know we've spent a lot of time hashing through uh various line items and information as you know the um 21 22 budget was 77 million dollars the recommendation for the upcoming school year is 81 million dollars the medical benefit increase is 2.2 million dollars you know 2.9 of our increase again i want to reiterate that's not a mistake anybody made that's not that oh my god all of our staff got terribly ill over this year it's not any of that it was a calculated effort to you know how are we going to manage tax rates last year we have federal money let's take a million and a half out of the operating budget infuse a million and a half of federal money which it worked it did what it was intended to do the outcome is always a gamble with insurance you know i bought life insurance for the last 20 years thank god i didn't need it but i don't consider it a waste of money either so the the um plan was to infuse that 1.5 million dollars hopefully the claims come in super low because we were budgeting well under what the projection was and that and we knew that this could very well come to fruition and it did we have to fill that gap with operating budget recommendation in april the council could always decide to do something like this again infuse some federal money maybe it's kind of a step down maybe they you know do 750 000 this year something like that that's still on the table but it on the surface is a significant sum in this year's budget when you back the insurance benefits out of this understanding that we have rapidly growing enrollment our budget increase is only 2.44 which i think is is really very responsible but it also shackles us in some respects to really stretch beyond that knowing that i can't walk in here and request six percent you know so some of the key budget takeaways obviously the budget driven by climbing enrollment and medical benefits recommending funding benefits at the projected claim rate you know that's nothing new as we discussed uh with with tom from usi at great length the remaining 45 percent of our budget increase is aiming at preserving current services and when i say preserving current services i think some people may feel like you know we're leaving we're leaving kids short we're just preserving we're not advancing and talk a little bit about that our current service level we work to advance what we provide and i'm going to talk a little bit about that but i also want to reiterate that you know we continue to be an outstanding value with incredibly uh great success uh at a number that is significantly cheaper than our peers spending on a per pupil basis not total budget per pupil when you compare us against our peers we spend 5 million less a year than they do 5 million that's a huge number covet 19 obviously still the real factor so when i talk about the context of reducing you know elementary teaching positions i'm cognizant of the fact that we've been through two years of of covid so what are our budget priorities sustaining class size that's that's not jeff sollins necessarily that's our communities and it's come through loud and clear and various things we've done you know marlene will tell you when we did our um personalized learning task force what the the clamor for ensuring that we maintain class size was was very evident so the proposed elementary class size average is 18.9 which in itself is the highest in 10 years it's not dramatically higher but it is the highest it's been in in 10 years and you can see at least what uh the last eight or so years there in the chart where the highest we had previously been is 1718 at 18 8.

that is was to buy a lot of ppe if you needed to to buy some of the uh student chromebooks and things like that uh and then we got a a second rank uh you'll hear us calling them essergrants uh educational something something something um we got a 11 million dollar grant for that that's spread over uh two years and um much of that uh is used for those kind of things as well as uh some of the items that um the superintendent mentioned and then there's a third grant also called esser they call it sr3 and that can be used for those kind of things the the school operating budget isn't being used for those kind of things um but quite frankly we we don't need to because we're we're getting all this uh additional money for that as are uh other schools other cities and towns same thing right thank you for answering that so i'll give it one more round if anybody else has any other thoughts or questions no so i'd like to thank my team grace estella from our morris street frc and carmen for our parent educator at morris street frc for working so hard to get families here and to help put this together and the powerpoints and get everybody on board and i'll put in our addresses our email addresses where folks can contact us or send suggestions and kevin i'll turn it back over to you if you'd like to finish up the night and so i i would like to thank everyone um i'd like to start with the team the staff uh for for helping get us through these evenings uh and and trying to elicit feedback from our families i mean community members regarding uh what they feel are some priorities and how we should be prioritizing our budget um to to help improve outcomes for our kids um and then um and and and secondly um i just want to thank everyone for their participation these last few days i know we have a couple of families who were here previously i want to thank you and then i know we have some new family members here this evening and i want to thank you we will make every effort to make sure that your priorities are you'll be able to see your priorities in the budget that will be presented to the board in the community um grace and anne are recording um all of the comments and the team and i will be looking at looking at those recommendations by you and finding ways to incorporate them in the budget recommendations and so we will from from this meeting on we will be moving really fast we saw a timeline posted earlier we'll be looking to submit our budget to um to the city of danbury no later by no later than valentine's day and recording stopped and then we and then officially i believe it's in late march and when the city will approve or or not approve of our budget so we're looking forward to the process over the next couple of weeks and months we'll be looking forward to further educating the school community about the budget and and how you can help and so um your advocacy i believe is also important whether it's with our local board of ed or on city council as well um and and i i think it shows and i think again the gains that we've made the connections that we've made during the pandemic um i feel like we can continue to gain the support that we need um to get the budget um that that the city deserves uh so thanks again for everyone for joining and we will see you soon uh we will have a whole bunch of meetings next week um titled finance um on monday and tuesday the 31st and the first uh so thanks again for joining us tonight you

shall we start okay hello everyone um i'd like to welcome you to the environmental commission of ann arbor um and i'd like to first say that i'm sorry to tell you that steve brown our chair is not feeling well tonight and so i am sitting in as co-chair and rita mitchell and i want to welcome you all to the january 27th 2022 electronic meeting of the environmental commission the meeting is in accordance with the executive orders of the governor to affect social distancing and mitigate the spread of cloven 19. we intend to conduct this meeting similarly to an in-person meeting and i ask your patients if there are technical issues i'm new at doing this or not well-experienced and there may be technical problems who knows public comment will be via telephone only and to speak during public comment please call 788-0099 and enter meeting id 989-2851 and there will be some information on how to raise your hand and get the attention so that you can be called on to speak this information is available also on the published agenda in the public notices section of the city's website and on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn channel 16 a t channel 99 and online at www.a2gov.org watch ctn so um with that let's move forward with our agenda um galen would you give the land heritage statement all righty i acknowledge that the land the city of ann arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the anishinaabe including ottawa ojibway bodhi wadmie and wyandotte peoples i further acknowledge that our city stands like almost all property in the united states on lands obtained generally in unconscionable ways from indigenous peoples the taking of this land was formalized by the treaty of detroit in 1807.

similarly further downstream in chapin street you see the dioxane at 9.1 2.8 and 16 in those three years and if you go down to this southern reach you do see dioxane at 8th street at 2.5 and in the past at one and in the past at murray it was about 1.1 so there is a continued problem that we have here with the dioxane in the plume seeping into the if you wills fissures in the storm drain which is normal normally you'll have infiltration of clean groundwater but unfortunately because the ground is contaminated with dioxin you're having this dioxane seep infiltrate into the allen creek drain again the stormwater documents that there is a multi-year gilman violation of the allen creek ms4 permit and the dioxin plume into the drain is not going to be going away in any time in the near future now the ms4 permit is a federal clean water act permit that's been delegated to the state of michigan to be administered on behalf of the federal united states environmental protection agency the state of michigan issued the ms4 permit to the water resources commissioner which covers in part the allen creek drain however when we talk about a violation the ms4 permit violation is a totally separate federal law violation from what most of us know as the state of michigan part 201 contaminated site violations which you all are familiar with uh being intervening parties uh in the court order so the 2021 court order between the state government and their intervening parties is totally separate from this federal ms4 permit violation the ms4 permit and applicable guidance governing the drain require that gilman halt any dioxin above background concentrations from seeping into the storm water so for our government situation the appropriate option is to immediately stop the illicit violation by treating it to uncontaminated levels prior to entering the storm drain and the point of compliance officially is where the dioxin plume infiltrates into the drain as commissioner mitchell was talking about in january the water resources commissioner issued a notice of violation to gelman for this illegal discharge andy gilman replied with an april 2021 work plan unfortunately it was defective in the water resources commissioner in june twenty twenty one responded to their work plan compelling gilman to provide a revised work plan the revised work plan was due within three weeks from june third and was to address all the problems that were found by the water resources commissioner in eagle and they were also directed to complete storm water sampling of dioxane by october 9.

[Music] foreign [Music] do [Music] so [Music] so [Music] i would like to call this meeting of the eve shim township board of education to order pursuant to the open public meetings act adequate public notice has been given by the secretary of eastern township board of education in the following manner posting written notice on the official bulletin board at the board of education office emailing written notice to the burlington county times and the courier post filing written notice with the municipal clerk of eastern township may i have a roll call mrs cappello here mrs everhart here mr fizzakero here mr canton here mrs noll mr lanzalada here miss lay here mr megan here this is ryan yeah we have a quorum okay at this time i will ask for a motion to go into executive session and a motion to approve oh and sorry at this point i will ask to get a mission to go into executive session in a motion to approve items 2.1 through 2.4 whereas in njsa 10 412 allows for public body to go into closed session during a public meeting and whereas the board of education of eshim township has deemed it necessary to go into closed session to discuss certain matters which are exempted from the public and whereas the regular meeting of the board will reconvene following the end of the closed session at approximately 7 pm now therefore be it resolved that the board of education will go into session for the following reasons as outlined in njsa10412 items 2.2 through 2.4 do i have a motion miss cappella second mr fizzicaro any questions or comments all right roll call please this is capello yes this is ever hart yes mr fizzakero yes mr catherine yes mr lancelata yes miss lee yes mr megan yes this is ryan yes motion carries thank you we'll see you at seven o'clock [Music] so [Music] so [Music] do [Music] so [Music] my [Music] do [Music] um [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] um [Music] i'd like to resume this meeting of the eastern township board of education would you please rise for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all at this time we're going to have board member canton read the mission statement thank you uh the mission of the eveshame township school district is to promote excellence in an environment that engages students in meaningful learning experiences in partnership with students dedicated staff families and the community the district provides a strong educational foundation that will empower our students to do the following achieve their unique potential embrace self-directed lifelong learning develop the skills necessary for appropriate risk taking and responsible decision making respect themselves and others problem-solve individually and collaboratively and become contributing members of a diverse global society thank you at this point in time we're going to be moving into presentations dr smith the floor is yours all right there we go all right so of course i couldn't let the first meeting of our new president vice president go by without a presentation that would get them out of their seats to come on up so why don't you both come on up here mr cantha in particular is very excited about spotlight so the presentation's tonight and there's actually it just works out that the people that are that are being presented recognized um our our business administrator john michinti so if you come on up mr joe idell our custodial supervisor mr tom donahue who just was here and is probably doing what he does which is take care of many things and he's probably trying to move a car right now so here he comes not even sweating so mr donahue come on over mr donald he's our facilities manager so the reason i have the three of them up here is um our district belongs to the berlin county joint insurance fund it is 38 districts it's called burlington county but it's really three counties 38 districts across mercer burlington and camden counties and last year 2020 2021 school year which was if you recall some of us may have blocked that out but that was covet all year long right and how do we do in-person learning during a pandemic so on and so forth so our district earned the recognition of being the top district for safety of all 38 districts in the berlin county joint insurance fund so that's quite an accomplishment i just want to recognize the three of you for that um i don't have too many if you can oh yeah if you pop that out it's the trophy is actually not a cardboard box it has a trophy in there i just want to make sure we get that out the uh the and there's two other awards um so it's kind of like when you get best picture you're also win for best cinematography and some other things that make sense for that award so we also won outstanding performance in claims management maintaining a loss ratio below 50 for the 2020 2021 school year and maintaining a five-year average loss ratio below 50 percent that's a five-year average below 50 percent and outstanding performance in claims processing average days to report claims between one and three days also for the 2021 school year and the i actually kind of have like mr shinty's words in my head about how because even though the three of them are standing here i'm sure right now they're actually thinking about the 865 employees in our district because everyone has a role to play in safety you know and and you don't win awards like this unless everyone's playing their role every day um so you know because these are three very humble public servants who happen to lead you know departments and our district in terms of safety um but at the same time it truly is work on everyone's behalf so i actually want to give a if we can give a round of applause to every single person because everybody here really likes getting the picture taken do you mind taking a picture miss mcgoula okay cool so let's let's uh you guys come in the middle and then yeah thank you [Applause] uh thank you mr ryan now we are going to go into public comment just in case anyone is not aware we have two public comments first public comment is for what is on the agenda and the second public comment what happened which happens later in the evening is for anything you wish to discuss the meeting will now be open to the public referencing agenda items only however if your questions pertain to student or personnel items or negotiations we ask that you see the superintendent after the meeting since we do not discuss these matters in public we ask that you limit your comments to three minutes per person it is also crucial please for you to give us your name and address before you speak up and also limit your comments to one time per public comment period is there anyone who wishes to speak okay seeing none we are going to close public comment period portion of the meeting there will be another public comment section at the end so at this point we are going to move forward with the approval of the minutes i need a motion to approve items 6.1 and 6.2 do i have a motion mr canthan and mr lanzalata any questions or comments regarding the minutes from the board seeing none let's go to a roll call please mrs cappello yes mrs everhart yes mr frisicaro yes mr canton yes mrs noll yes mr lancelata yes miss lee abstain 6.1 yes 6.2 okay mr megan yes mrs ryan yes motion carries thank you at this point we're going to move to item 7 superintendent's report and administrative items do i have a motion to approve items 7.1 through 7.7 mr fizzakero seconded by mrs capela before we get into questions and comments i'm going to give the floor to dr smith for his superintendent comments thank you mrs ryan my comments are a little longer tonight i preface that but it's been a little bit of a longer month so it's still proportionate um and it seems hard to even remember that this is still january right um you know every month feels like multiple months during covid when this month opened at the beginning of the month our staff came back we were open all month it was tough covert activity in our region and community was higher than it was at this time last year which many of us never thought we would see that and despite staff shortages that were putting additional stress on our already stretched and hard-working staff and administrators we kept it going and didn't just keep it going but actually found capacity for uh the types of events that make the education deeper richer more whole right like this week great kindness week in full swing so hopefully your kids have been talking about it kindness corner making gifts cards kind of snowflakes messages and more across all our schools it's fun and earn an earnest effort in our school district not just this week but every week it starts small but can have big effects and we never know when kindness can lift spirits or even save a life in my update for families on january 20th last week i included a link to the video of our january 18th community conversation about hate if you didn't get to see the the conversation on the 18th or watch the video link yet i would encourage you to do that it's about an hour long definitely worth your time i'd like to express my gratitude again to the participants on that panel we had congressman andy kim our mayor jackie veezy rabbi jerry david from temple emmanuel missionary wakas kursheed from al-nazar mosque father joe wallace from christ the redeemer parish and priest studio from india temple association and also deep personal thanks to the jewish community relations council of southern new jersey and helen kirschbaum who's the director of their rob goodwin holocaust education center for all their work including in the background to make that conversation possible another piece so among the resources that i shared in that january 20th update there was a link to an online discussion that actually started at 7 p.m tonight it's going on right now i'm not suggesting you turn away from our board of education we need to watch that but maybe you can do split screen but so for you see today is actually international holocaust remembrance day and um so that conversation that's going on at this exact moment is between the jewish community relations council and a guy named pastor chris edmonds he's from tennessee and his father was a u.s soldier in world war ii who was a hero a rescuer a man of kindness and what he did it didn't become known until after his death in 1985 but it being great kindness week i did want to share the story it's extremely powerful and when we hear whenever i hear when we hear a story about adults they were all once children right and and children can be raised to be kind and noble and strong enough to stand up for others or not so this story the germans captured more than twenty thousand american gis during the battle of the bulge the men of the 422nd regiment who were captured were marched about 50 kilometers into germany spent seven days traveling to a place called bad orb germany and after seven several weeks in the pw camp they were divided into three groups officers ncos which are non-commissioned officers and enlisted men the ncos were taken to a different camp there were a thousand men in that group the highest ranking nco was master sergeant roddy edmonds who was the father of the man of the pastor who's speaking tonight from knoxville tennessee and after their arrival the commandant of that prisoner work camp came to uh master sergeant edmonds and ordered him to have all uh one thou ordered him to have all jewish pows present themselves the next morning so next morning comes and standing out there are not a any section of the pows but all one thousand american pows have been ordered by master sergeant edmunds to stand in formation in front of their barracks when the commandant sees that all 1000 gis are standing there he turns to edmonds and says they cannot all be jews and to this master sergeant edmund says we are all jews the commandant draws his pistol aims it at edmonds and sergeant edmund says according to the geneva convention we only have to give our name rank and serial number if you shoot me you will have to shoot all of us and after the war you will be tried for war crimes commandant turns around and leaves there were 200 jewish gis among those 1 000 american pows and that act by master sergeant evans saved 200 lives that story is not even in this book but i grabbed this on my way over from my office so this is a book called rescuers if you if you if stories like that inspire you i would encourage you to check this book out um and i'll leave it up here if you want to come and check it out later after the meeting but um it's full of stories like that so this week is great kindness week in the yuchim township school district i even got a thank you note today from young elementary school student i had in my pocket today um and it has an excellent it says thank you superintendent with an exclamation mark which is just i love that a little touch right um because it's probably the age of learning punctuation so it's really nice i'm a former english teacher so you know that's most important for that i just um seeing it in the pictures and in the hallways is to just thank our staff for their passion and dedication and creativity when it comes to this week like an event like great kindness week um to help our kids learn and show kindness it really is like it always boils back to those individual connections between teachers and kids and um so you know that's where the progress is is made and i just want to thank our staff for all that work it feels especially appropriate always too during the you know a time of um we're again feeling like we're in a time of loss things out of our control but we can control kindness we can control how we are all of us together kids staff families now yesterday tomorrow the choice to be kind and that mrs ryan concludes my superintendent's comments thank you thank you dr smith any questions or comments the superintendent's report ms noel i just wanted to comment i saw in clubs and activities i believe that's under let me refresh my screen that's under superintendent correct okay 7.2 yes um [Music] mr de blasio's not here but i saw the yoga club at van zant and i love that i was just thinking about this today um because i am the rep for the and i'll talk about it later the wrap room and you know mental health and this goes hand in hand physical education and mental health i love the yoga club let's bring it to every school thank you mrs knoll any other questions or comments okay seeing none let's go to a roll call please mrs cappella yes mrs everhart yes mr fizzycarrow yes mr catherine yes mrs noll yes mr lanzalada yes miss lay yes mr megan yes mrs ryan yes motion carries thank you moving to item eight curriculum and instruction i need a motion to approve items 8.1 through 8.6 do i have a motion miss everhart second miss noel thank you any um any questions or comments to curriculum and instruction okay i'm going to ask for a roll call please mrs cappello yes this is everhart yes mr fizzagaro yes mr canton yes mrs noll yes mr lancelata yes miss lay yes mr megan yes mrs ryan yes motion carries thank you moving to item nine finance and operations i need a motion to approve items 9.1 through 9.14 do i have a motion ms cappella thank you a second mr canthan thank you any questions or comments pertaining to finance and operations mr cantham thank you over the last year when we talk about the events that go on in our town right when we talk about juneteenth or national night out or cultural expo i i made comments about how i think that all of those events that the township holds are really wonderful because it shows the focus on kids and our township's priority that our children are the most important thing that a society does and i think today with the sro agreement it shows not just the focus on the safety of our children but i think the sro program is more than that i think it also shows an emphasis on the mental health and the social health of our kids too so i think it's great that we're able to maintain an sro in every building and that it's now a split partnership between us and the township so thanks to made of easy and the rest of council as well thank you mr campin miss everhart i'd like to just say how encouraging it is to see items 9.12 and 913.

it's not a every single year will we won't we will they won't they type a situation where it's hanging over i love the the idea and concept that this is something that is going to put many people's minds at ease for a very long time and i think you're absolutely 100 correct i think this goes as important as to protect children physically which should always be a priority it also is a big part of their mental and social growth i think a lot of people when we talk about sro services i think a lot of people miss that aspect of it and i think on um i think specifically between the k2 to eight and specifically six to eight i think that's incredibly vital so to know that this is this is gonna be around for three years before we even have to really start looking at this again i think this is wonderful and everyone that was involved in this i truly thank you i think this is fantastic so nice job thank you mr fizzicaro any more questions regarding finance and operations seeing none i'm going to ask for a roll call please mrs cappello yes mrs everhart yes mr fizzycarro yes mr canafen uh yes to everything except for where my name appears on 9.4 okay mrs noah yes mr lancelata yes everything but 9.4 as it pertains to me okay miss lay yes to everything except 9.4 as it pertains to me mr megan yes mrs ryan yes motion carries okay moving to item 10 personnel i need a motion to approve items 10.1 through 10.10.

all right thank you good evening everyone i uh called it meeting to order um mr oginski roll call please flag the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you everyone for coming tonight um well normally this is a time for audience comment um is there anyone from the audience who would like to comment on our budget discussions this evening seeing none um well maybe we'll revisit if some people come a little later on do you have a one from uh i i do mr chair just a a quick note from jack buster of 45 tress road who emailed the kobit 19 cps cobia 19 at cheshire.k12.ct.us in case anybody's watching and wants to send in a question or comment i want to express my support for the superintendent's budget request at a time when our students are under a great deal of stress related to all aspects of learning i feel that the district administrators and cheshire teachers with the support of the board of education have navigated the many challenges of the past year and a half extremely well although i have expressed my concerns about specific policy objectives the staff deserves the support of the community and should be rewarded with a budget that they feel addresses their needs moving forward that's it okay thank you well next in the agenda is the superintendent's summary of the recommended budget thank you [Music] all right i'm just gonna start by i know mr paragini's home watching uh under the weather so he's doing his civic duty in keeping us all healthy thankfully and i hope he's feeling better so um i'm just going to start by going through a few questions that have come up through the process that i you know thought we should address before i do a quick recap the whole presentation i think is 10 slides or less so this should be relatively brief but again i wanted to answer some questions that had been posed through the process one of the questions that was brought up at a recent meeting was the per pupil cost and what do we estimate that it might be in terms of a difference between uh general education peer pro per pupil costs excuse me and special education per pupil costs as you can see on the screen you know the state issues our data it tells us what every town in connecticut spent uh nce is net current expenditure and so for the 2021 school year our expenditure was 73 million 945 373 that's our budget when you back out transportation costs regular education general transportation costs the average daily membership last year was four thousand seven uh excuse me four thousand seventy seven point nine eight excuse me students and so you divide the number of students into the money expended to get a simple cost per student number for us that was eighteen thousand one thirty three as you can see bookended by two other communities that had a substantially almost outrageously higher per pupil expenditure rates but the so what we did was try and back out all of the lines that pertain to special education services divide that by the number of special education identified students students that are receiving special education support that number comes out to 33 and as a result lowers the average on the district for general education to 15 7 73 there's 15 7 73 yes so again this is not an exact dollar figure it is an estimate uh we feel it's you know responsibly close but again just an estimate there was also a question about extended school year costs so the extended school year costs for 2021 you can see the various line items that were considered in that calculation again this is an estimate it's it's pretty close it's it's in the very close vicinity it's not like an audited number though and so our considers our transportation staffing operational costs so you can get a ballpark of what that program uh costs uh four thou four hundred and six thousand dollars generally and we had a hundred and thirty two students participating roughly a per student cost of about three thousand dollars per student so that kind of gives you a sense of you know what the extended school year costs are please keep in mind that last year was a bit of an anomaly as it relates to extended school year costs i think it was ms rosenberg that brought up the point of you know how what sort of compensatory education is offered for you know people missing these days last year obviously uh was even uh more more impacted if you will than this year in terms of the covet impact and so we certainly had a substantially higher number than usual in the extended year services category bless you so some other questions how many students do we exit from special education in a given year you can see the last five years listed here ranging anywhere from 22 students to 33 students and i'm not including this year we have 19 to date but we're again we just crossed the midway point so you can kind of understand where we are in terms of a trajectory likely to land somewhere from you know 22 to 33 students uh you know perhaps higher this year a little bit but uh we're we're in the ballpark of past performance i would say finally the question was asked what would happen if we eliminate the three elementary positions that are you know proposed in the budget those positions were proposed as we as i i know you know beat mercilessly on night one enrollment and insurance those are the the big drivers we're seeing huge enrollment growth in order to sustain the services we currently have basically provide our ratios commensurate with our history given the enrollment growth we recommended that three positions be added at the elementary grades i don't want to miss the fact or you know gloss over the fact too that we are also offering a half adding a half time music position to be able to accommodate the music curriculum at that level as well with the addition of the three sections that's would be necessary and so you know when we consider the reduction of three positions i look at that from two different perspectives one is the simple mathematical computation to figure out what's the new ratio that's pretty straightforward i think the other one uh that also has to be considered is the contextual impact where you know we've been through two years of a pandemic i'm conscious of class size and how we meet the needs of students and not necessarily stretching beyond our historical ratios and so you know from the the clear and straightforward math computation we have 2190 elementary students projected next year for grades k through 12.

so it's in the ballpark it's responsible it's not insane reducing the staff at the sixth grade level would elevate that number to 19.3 just you know something to be conscious of the proposed seventh and eighth grade class sizes are the best of times worst of the time scenario where our 7th grade class size average at 26.3 is the highest it's ever been the 8th grade class size is the lowest it's ever been so um it's a little bit of a wrinkle in our enrollment to add sixth grade or seventh grade teachers it probably won an early ad but it would really really lower the class averages there uh down to significantly lower um it's it's at a high number but reasonable at the moment i mean that's not um outrageously above where we've been but it is certainly high in the seventh and eighth grade you know there there are limits these are at the limits of what we would consider appropriate you know the top end and the bottom end we wouldn't want to go really much lower than 22 in in the middle school we wouldn't want to go much higher than 26 but it's kind of where we are at the high school the ratio is 15.1 students to one teacher that makes us the 14th highest ratio in 21 dergby schools and i think you can think 15 per teacher it's not really you're considering all the certified staff in a building which is why it's not like we're way overstaffed we're you know two-thirds of the way up the chain for durgby high schools we're also in the second year if you'll recall of a phase-in we're reducing from six sections to five in line with pretty much all of connecticut i think we were one of the only high schools in connecticut if not the only that had six sections through our budget or through our negotiations process this was part of the consideration i really would not recommend reducing staff there which will certainly compromise the effort to go from six to five and maintain you know class sizes again within the context of a pandemic so continued priorities we do focus intently on at the building classroom level our central office leadership team is incredibly lean we have four positions roughly allocated to central office makes us 21st out of 21 durgby school systems in terms of students per central office administrator when we added the community coordinator position that ratio took us to 19th for some perspective that's how far out of whack it really was so you know we're we we focus intently at the classroom level i'm not complaining about the ratio at central office i think we're we're doing things we should be that's why it's my recommended budget the cps you know church for public schools ranks 12th to 21 derby students per mental health provider we were 20th when we focused on sel the board put its you know resources where its needs were where our goals were and we focused on that and we've you know dramatically improved in that respect we're second of 21 in dirt b instructional assistants per you know or students per instructional assistant ratio and that's in large part due to the programs that we've brought in house that are more need intensive same could be said when you look at that ppe per pupil expenditure ratio the the students that we've brought in have more intensive needs it's cheaper and more efficient and better for the child than outplacing them at a greater cost but it's certainly it's going to impact your your costs the discretionary spending history there were some kind of like some questions around the periphery of this and i thought it'd be interesting to share so it went back to 2003-4 our proposed budget is twelve thousand dollars higher for staff training today than it was in 2003 for so when we made that recommendation in it was it was higher it was only 12 000 hires the instructional supply line is 240 thousand less than it was in two thousand three four textbook supply budget is eight thousand less than it was about twenty years ago the library resource supplies about fifty thousand less than it was twenty years ago the curriculum material supply is roughly 7 000 less than it was 20 years ago now the overall instructional expense line represented 6.5 percent of our budget then it represents about five point six percent of our budget now so what does this really mean a lot of the discretionary spending lines are down because we had about a thousand more kids back then a lot of those lines are down because technology spending is significantly up and we've changed the way that we do business and when you look at our performance it's really objectively the best it has ever been ever and so you know the the questions about fluctuating and is this too low or is this too high i wanna i can share with you in confidence that our administrative team many of whom are here tonight vin marlene are support staff who play a role in the formulation of our budget we evaluate the the multiple spheres of which you know come together in the budget formulation process you know the educational needs of our kids the political and logistical issues like enrollment the contractual obviously with respect to our our you know various bargaining units and um how we navigate that as well as the social and health more than ever against our budget and we respectfully recommend this budget before you as a vehicle to advance our goals in a fiscally responsible manner in advancing our goals really is about student growth driven by the supports and resources that help that happen so this bounce forward you know the visual will look familiar to you because this is the what we put together last year when we talked about the infusion of federal support and we asked ourselves at that time geez you know there's a short window of this money we could spend a lot of money on just trying to plug holes for short periods of time or we could invest in our human capacity our our organizational capacity with this money to yes address learning needs but ensure that when you know this pandemic has run its course and our these resources may have run their course that we are organizationally undoubtedly better for the experience and that's what we did so this year you know an effort to close the achievement gap we added reading and math support folks at the elementary grades math support people at the middle and high school one position in each location importantly we increased our building-based administration incrementally at the elementary grades which i guarantee you that every administrator in this room would tell you has been incredibly beneficial not because oh there's just another person there to monitor the but because that time is focused on we call science scientifically based research interventions where we [Music] review student performance we develop plans we coach teachers around how to close gaps for students in reading writing and math in particular that you know we spend that time coaching teachers and supporting them in classrooms and so you know again it reaches that organizational goal of improving capacity that is certainly warranted and beneficial additionally we've been focused on coaching acceleration and so acceleration is the idea that you know kids had significant learning gaps as much as we tried as much as we i think did very well in terms of providing instruction over the course of the pandemic right from three days after the pandemic to having computers on and kids homes and doing the best we could there are gaps admittedly and so acceleration means you don't go back and try and reteach everything if you try and go back and re-teach all the time and things that were missed you will always perpetually be behind acceleration is an emphasis on we're going to move forward in the curriculum we're going to provide scaffolded supports for you to be able to understand these concepts that we're currently working on and provide real-time intervention that's connected to what we're doing now to make the learning easier for you and more relevant as opposed to teaching you a skill from a year and a half ago that you missed outside a context of anything else in the curriculum and trying to just hope it sticks to you we've spent a lot of time money and energy on acceleration um and coaching those skills and our teachers have been incredible in terms of the way that they've been able to pick that up and run with it we've also spent a lot of time on professional development around environments building constructive school environments particularly at the middle school how do we do a better job of engaging middle school learners giving them more choice and ownership of their learning goal setting and mike anderson is a national consultant probably somebody we could have afforded to be honest prior to the infusion of federal money and he's done an incredible job for us we're very very happy with how he supported our staff um again using you know professional development to build capacity this is where you know we've built that money in i talked about our professional development budget being 12 000 more than it was two decades ago this money supports that effort and we have that in it you know i just want to reiterate the budget that we have presented includes these supports and it we are moving forward a great speed and and i'm very proud of the effort that these guys put in our every teacher our our ias our support staff they've done a tremendous job navigating dare i say unprecedented challenges but uh you know i think this budget allows us with the support of federal assistance to really continue to grow evolve through the 22 23 year it allows us to address you know the the kind of obligatory insurance issue that we have and also meet the needs of vastly growing enrollment so that concludes my summary for you and i'd be certainly happy to take questions our administrative team is here to hopefully help me with any questions and add a different voice and perspective need be as well thanks adam jeff i don't know if you can speak to this but this is one of the concerns going through my mind right now is not simply this year's budget but where it leads us over the next few years so my understanding of what had happened back in the 90s it leads right up to 2005 so for the people who are watching our peak was around 2005 2006 right in terms of student enrollment and it's been declining for about 15 years what was going was going on before that i think it for a call correctly was probably about a 15-year increase in enrollment so this is something what we're facing right now over the next day 10 years is something we've faced before but one of the thoughts going through my mind i didn't pay that close attention to it in the 90s but my understanding was there was a lot more state funding coming in increasing every year do you know if that's the case and i say that looking at the next 10 years and wondering we've gotten you know we get about 10 million a year 9 million of it is ecs for the last 10 years basically with some other funding sources coming in but that was the lion's share of it of the 70 to 80 million dollar budget as it's grown in the last 10 years ecs has been stable so as ecs grow in the next 10 years as our student population is growing up is is increasing and that's not something specific to this budget but i just have that in mind as we're looking forward including this budget well i know it's one of vin's favorite slides but ecs funding has in essence been flat for the last what 20 years man plus i'm i'm excited to talk about the fact that i was in college in the 90s that i i wasn't following the cheshire budget then but um since 19 roughly 1990 the um state funding just in all the revenue but the bulk of it is ecs has been flat so as okay so what i was saying was not correct no okay i wasn't sure i was that's why i'm asking yeah it's basically so what's happened is our local taxpayer contribution has funded a greater total amount of our educational costs since 1990.

um thank you for your participation and being on time good evening everyone we're so happy recording in progress right so happy to see everyone um your suggestions and your thoughts about our budget is really really important to us as we put the budget together um and so we want to hear from all of you so what i'd like to first do is go ahead and introduce our superintendent of schools and our director of finance and then we'll come back to me and we'll talk about some group agreements and then we'll move into the listening part so i'd like to turn it over to kevin if you would good evening everyone i'm happy to see our families on the call tonight as we have part two of this community engagement session try to get feedback from our families to help inform some of the budget priorities for the 22-23 school year so we are eagerly anticipating a rich discussion this evening and i'm genuinely looking forward to your feedback as we continue to work on building building our budget priorities behind the scenes so again my name is kevin wilson i'm your superintendent and i will hand it over to our chief financial officer thank you kevin and um i think grace is going to help me with a few slides um i just wanted to take a a minute or two um just to try and bring us uh all up to the same place so we have the you know the kind of the same working knowledge of the budget so that we um we'll have a better discussion i think that way and and also um along with that uh show you uh where you can make a difference uh in the process at what points time so uh the first slide uh next grace okay so um here in connecticut uh school public schools are what's called fiscally dependent and what that means is we depend on our city or town governments uh for our money um and as you know uh here in danbury that's done through the local tax levy or the tax bills that we get that's how uh we pay for our schools and uh so the city council sets the tax rate and they really um have a two different kinds of authorities one is on operating budgets and why not is on capital budgets we're going to talk tonight about the operating budget but just so you know the capital budget is uh that's why i call it the bricks and mortar there on the slide it's the big things uh the career academies some other bigger projects they may be things that the cities can issue bonds on uh they have absolute uh veto authority on those things so they call the shots and on the operating budget so including the school budget they can they cannot make line item cuts on what we're doing unlike with the police department budget or the fire department budget they could cut money for conferences or uh the amount of sand we're buying for uh the winter they can do that with city departments but for us they can only set the overall level of our budget and then the board of ed decides how to allocate that so if we were to ask for a hundred and fifty million dollars they might say we're only going to give you and then it's the board that would decide how to spend that 149 so that's that's kind of the background and our our budget and all municipal budgets start on july 1 and go to the following june 30th so what we're we have in front of us and we're starting to prepare is the budget for next year we'll call it but school that begins uh in late august uh so next slide grace so when we build the budget there's really um i like to say five component parts and i'll just say briefly what those are now the upper right the salaries and wages employee benefits most of those come out of our collective bargaining agreements almost all of our employees are members of bargaining groups or unions that's not unique to us here in danbury it's across connecticut that's been that way for a long long time so we bargain with our employees uh if you look um over to the left we also have some amounts of money that we look to our principals and our program leaders to decide how to spend this year uh we're giving them a per pupil amount uh based on the enrollment we're expecting they'll have in september so if the schools are expecting uh 300 pupils and we're giving them 65 dollars a pupil you do the math and and that's uh what they can make decisions on uh of course all their plans come up uh through us and the board of ed first but that that's a part of the budget uh and then on the bottom there um some of our costs are are fixed in uh in the short run i'll say uh we have a contract for example with the school bus company sta uh that has uh four years to run on it so um we can change it up after that but for now um there's we're kind of like it's a good contract but it's not something we can change too much uh next year um in the middle there we'll we'll also have things that i'll call uh one-time needs that come up maybe we have to do some work on in one of our school buildings or maybe a copy machine has to be replaced or a kiln in an art room for example the the bigger things like that really can't come out of the per pupil amounts uh because it would take away all of our principal's money and uh they wouldn't be able to do that the things that they they usually do so there's some one-time uh things that occur and then um last but certainly not least are what we'll call improvements and um they may come from the board of education's goals or the superintendent's goals uh we may have uh be introducing a new curriculum of for example uh in one of the subject areas or um maybe where um want to do something different with um uh graduation requirements and things of that nature so those are really um things that make us a better uh school system and you know you don't want to become complacent uh with what you have you always you know want to keep moving forward so those are the the concepts uh that we build it with and then uh grace if you go to the next slide let me just tell you what it looks like um i so when we put together this is our current your budget and you can see there that um most of our uh budget and it's the same in other uh public schools is is uh for salaries and and the biggest um part of that is our teachers that's what most of our employees are um but also in that line our salaries for the custodians and the um secretaries in the school the uh safety advocates uh everybody you see uh is right in there and uh right beneath that are the employee benefits that go with those so those are also bargained uh at the bar opening table but they're things like the employer share of social security that everybody has to pay or some things for workers compensation health insurance is in there that's that's the biggest thing in there but um they're kind of hard to change in the short run too both of these first uh two items because when you bargain uh with your unions it's uh you might have a two or three year contract so if you're coming up to negotiations you can do some changes but once you have one in it's a little more difficult uh than that um some of the other lot things that we this uh this is the way we regroup it this is the way um schools uh the state of connecticut like schools to do it um but will professional services um most of that are the uh tutors which are uh work with our special education youngsters uh over four million dollars of the six is for that um underneath that purchased our property services it's we didn't come up with these names uh the state does but those are that's to keep our our buildings and facilities are running in in good shape we might have some maintenance contracts say on our boilers or the elevators uh things like that um if we have to make repairs that's where we put that money but that's really just to keep things uh going well uh other purchase services that's a big number 16 million uh but there's only a couple things in there mostly are our contract with the school bus company sta uh that's about 10 million dollars and it's uh for both public public uh and non-public school students we uh we have to provide the same service to non-public schools as as we do to our to our own students so that's there as well as um you know some of our special education youngsters uh their disabilities uh we uh send them to out of district schools uh and uh uh that's about four million dollars a year uh that's in that line too so the transportation uh the special intuitions takes that out and then as you get further down uh the supplies um those are the things your uh if your children are in elementary schools that's what they use uh every day in the classroom they're consumable uh for the most part but also uh textbooks are in there um things uh other supplies like electricity is considered a supply uh believe it or not um things that also for our athletic teams uniforms and all that all uh in supplies uh right now our our program improvement line is for technology um some of the computers that we want to have you in your children's hands that's where we put on more servers and things like that that we need in the schools work that's a improvement of a million one there and then finally we have some money for dues and fees and teacher training and those kind of things but so i i think that the point i'd like to leave you with is um a lot of this is uh hard to control it in the short run but there are areas uh where we can make changes uh fairly quickly and change priorities and and things like that so um if you want to go to the next slide grace there with those two uh concepts that um this is what we're trying to do we're trying to make our budget transparent um make it uh fair from school to school to school uh stable and and timely and number six there when i mentioned uh some of the improvements we try and line up uh what we're doing with the goals that are set down for the district the strategies and things of that nature so uh maybe the next slide gray sets uh there should be one on the timeline isn't there somewhere there it is okay that's better than looking at a picture of me right um so uh let i'll just walk through here but let me the important thing is where you you can um i think make a difference you see uh in the bottom left there uh that's what we're doing all day today uh trying to put the finishing touches on a preliminary budget um that the superintendent and his cabinet can look at uh get ready to send to the board that's right around the corner that'll start next week and then uh before the middle of february there in the upper left that spending plan will be presented to the board of education they'll take a look at it but that's a point where i think you can um make a difference if there's uh things in the superintendent's budget that you support um it's our board likes to hear uh from you as they make decisions um there if you have other ideas you can email uh the board they'll be read at the board meetings or you can speak uh to them and and that's a good time because what happens is the superintendent's budget becomes the board budget at a certain point um we have it down there um the middle of february uh it's their budget so if there's things that are important to you that's a good time uh to let everybody know and uh so we send it to the um the city council and as i uh mentioned they control they decide the level um and that's a good time to be heard if if uh we think that they're not gonna accept it uh as is and um you know city councils uh they like to tinker a little bit to put it mildly but that would be also a good time to be heard if if you support something or want a budget to go through as presented um you can be heard at those meetings too um so that's that's the um that's a summary of it i we could take some questions now or and whatever um whatever you think should come next okay great thank you so much john i think that was really informative for our families that are on um our meeting tonight and giving them an understanding of how this whole process plays out i'd like to welcome those new folks that have joined us in the last couple of minutes while that presentation took place and so we'd like to hear from you now um you know what's your hopes and dreams for your children and how might this budget um reflect some of those and so if you can all stay on zoom we won't have anybody that's um creating feedback and then um at the bottom of your screen you should have a raised hand feature that's part of the reactions and you can just press that and then we'll call on you and um if you can keep your suggestions under about 45 seconds that will be helpful in that way everyone that's here can um get in so go ahead i see our first family the ron rontos up there go ahead hello welcome welcome thank you so we wanted to chime in here for the budget because um we want to make sure that there are items in the budget that help all learners you know we understand that the achievement gap is one of the goal you know closing the achievement gap but we want to make sure it's closed in the right way not by letting um the kids who are at grade level just stagnate there and and um and bring and bring everybody else up we want to make sure that all the children um in their their programs to make sure that children of all levels excel and that the you know the funding is in that way equitable across all students in all uh you know student students who need support even if they are at grade level or above so one of the um you know danbury public schools our vision is to aspire to advance all learners to their highest potential so what we really want our district to look for like steven said is one of our priorities to be increasing the acceleration for all students um you know we need to make sure what we are doing for the students who already can access the curriculum to advance those students just as well as the students who are are not accessing the curriculum just yet because personally we have students in all three grades in all three schools elementary middle and high school and we found that that is sorely lacking across all three school levels and maybe that's a place where it fits into the program improvement category john that you were talking about which is only 0.8 i mean it's a minuscule fraction the bus company is 10 million out of district support for special ed 4 million i mean those dwarf anything that you know program improvement expenses uh that are in there so maybe a little more funding for those kind of things would be appropriate and by doing that hopefully we can get more um the budget can go directly to servicing students in our district thank you for your thoughts those are wonderful thank you another family got some new families on here don't be shy we can wait go ahead and i'm oh god i'm sorry that once is family i i'm just wondering if uh mom or dad any had any specific recommendations in terms of the type of supports you'd like to see in schools go ahead you can yeah go ahead and unmute there we go um we'll look i just put you on the spot no no it's um it's perfectly fine i guess specifically across all three um you know all three school types elementary middle and in high school having more um more enrichment activities when i say in richmond i meant an academic enrichment without looking for more sports or in another art class um we we want the kids to who can and want to be challenged to be able to be um and not have uh as teachers what teachers keep telling us is that they are spread too thin um and they they have to take care of you know their their attention and their um ability to handle um you know bringing everybody together um is spreading them too thin so support for the teachers to let them um support the kids who who need more of a challenge we understand you know in the middle school like there's the eighth grade advanced math and then in high school there are the honors and ap courses but you know even starting at the elementary level and middle school just more opportunities for these students who are excelling and who are meeting the standards already what are we doing for these kids to um further excel their education and not just you know doing the bare minimum because they get it and they get it easy and quickly we need to really strengthen and challenge those students okay thank thank you thank you for finding that additional clarification i appreciate it absolutely minnie you're up next where'd you go okay okay hi well good evening so um one of the questions i joined late i had technical issues i guess but um i did miss out um on the first part but my question was i we all know there was learning losses that did happen simply because we were in a pandemic i know there's monies put away for that um how um how are you addressing that kevin do you want to go ahead and take that one right so i i think i can start with how we've invested our monies um the from the american relief um [Music] fund monies so we invested considerably in student support specialists across our schools which was providing intervention throughout many of our schools across the district we we hired 15 14 or 15 additional elementary teachers across our schools to help reduce class size certainly it helped to reduce our numbers for social distancing but also you know helped improve class size across the schools as well [Music] the same for the the same is true of the high school we we hired 15 additional teachers actually 15 plus additional teachers at the high school we went from a seven period day to an eight period day um again this helped reduce class by class size by three or four students per class this is not by any means is this not to minimize the fact that our school is still overcrowded um but the investments uh were made nonetheless and then finally uh we had considerable counselors and pupil support staff um also we invested in uh with these monies to help us provide you know additional social promotional support across the system so the the investments were considerable and part of our effort over these next few years will be to make sure we don't lose this additional staff and investments that we made um and continue to advocate for a budget where we can keep those those staff because the the impact is going to be over several years it's not just going to be over one or two years thank you kevin thank you thank you thank you next up we have mr blanco if you'd like to unmute yourself and if you want to show your camera there you are yep you thank you uh well first um i want to just thank you for doing this uh you know one of the great things that i think about the uh pandemic has been this opening up of technology and making it so that more of the community can be um involved in in these processes um so that being said i just have a couple of concerns the first one actually kevin kind of already addressed which is you know i know we've uh received a lot of money because of the pandemic emergency funding that came through my concern is how do we sustain that going forward so you know great investments were made in you know support specialists like you said i think the idea of opening up the kindergarten building was a tremendous idea and a great one and one that hopefully you know carries forward but sustainability is you know partially going to be dependent on the funding and you know that funding was temporary and it's going to run out um relatively quickly um so my concern is one how are we planning to you know maintain these programs going forward um and then secondly just along the same lines as the initial comments about uh enrichment programs um gifted and talented programs and and things like that uh that can benefit our students in a general in in broad way but not just academically i mean uh the academic piece is great but i do think that you know arts programs and and things like that um to supplement what's already happening in the in the school buildings uh are great for for the students as well and i would like to see us find more ways to invest in in that thank you great thank you mr blanco those are wonderful thoughts and minnie will go back to you you had your hand up again no that's a mistake sorry okay okay who else would like to raise their hand and give us some thoughts about our budget a couple of new folks on here an educator we can wait you know that good old wait time that we do go ahead mr mrs rontos i i just thought we'd share since no one else was raising their hand um but what kevin was saying about the money for staffing that we got for emergency funding with the interventionists and the counselors i definitely agree that we do need to find a way to hold on to that staff as well as find some money in the budget to allocate more funds to get more of those step both staff members my understanding at the high school hundreds of students are allocated to each counselor so um especially now you know with the pandemic and going forward we need more guidance counselors thank you for that thank [Music] you all right and mr blanco go ahead it's going to be generating ideas no just thinking of one other program that i would love to see continue um is the fact that all the students uh got chromebooks that they were able to take home um and you know developing more professional development opportunities for the faculty to be able to leverage that tool in the classrooms but also at home and then you know connected to that as much as possible to do things for the families in the district so that we can learn better how to use those tools and how to support our students in using those tools wonderful thank you and and i appreciate those points um we we are exploring ways to figure out how to do just those very things particularly ways to use technology to connect our parents um in a more efficient way and effective way with our parents and for some fluid conversations we want to capitalize on those gains that we've made and building partnerships with our parents are in a pandemic um and i i just want to echo your sentiments because i i feel like this is an aha moment for us um you know i'm hoping we're on the the back end of the pandemic right now but you know we made significant gains during the pandemic i mean we're reaching we've reached families in ways we've never reached them before um we're going to build on those partnerships um and the one-to-one device initiative is john will tell you we i think and hope i think we've secured a grant to bring in um additional laptops and chromebooks into the school community um and this is an investment uh we are committed to um there are other investments that need to be made if we're going to get better um so i i appreciate that recommendation as well right so we have a question that's come in on our google forms and it says how can parents advocate for increasing the funding we receive per child put that out there to anyone that has any thoughts on that i'll read it again how can we how can parents advocate for increasing the funding that we receive per child john i think john i think john pointed out some ways on how families can do that earlier um i i my connection is unstable so i'll get out the way and let the experts speak to it okay go ahead john um and i i just a clarifying point are they speaking about the per pupil allocation that we've given to our schools to make uh site-based decisions or the um the per pupil amount we get as a district as a whole they'd be um i think different answers depending um oh i guess we don't know since it came in on email right yeah so let's let's address both i think it's the second one grace is giving me a uh it's number two or the agreeing that's addressable the the person didn't specify so i think that's a great idea sure so the uh per pupil allocation or base allocation um this is uh really the first year um we're we're trying to make um put the decisions uh closer to the students closer to the teachers having um really empowering our principals more than they have been before part of it is you know this central office has other things they really need to be thinking about you you heard about the uh how do we sustain these things going forward that's what we need to spend our time on here and what we've done is we've um we've looked pretty carefully at the amount and we think it um it provides not only for uh the existing program that we have next year but also uh gives the principals some flexibility uh if things change and you know we're still uh eight months away from when school starts so they'll be able to react and and assist their teachers um and it's a little more i th it is more than they've had before um particularly at the uh the high school level so i think i would ask for some uh patience this year um if we see it's it's not enough for not doing uh what its objective is uh we'd be the first ones to change it and i would say um to specifically answer the question um work through your principle at your school and um you know we need to hear from them too so uh together if you know there's an idea uh we'd like to hear it um the overall uh per pupil spending um that's what we need to um talk to the city of council about that's it's important that they hear what's on your minds too um for the same reason um this these new things that are that are really making a difference that we need to sustain they're funded with with federal dollars as the superintendent pointed out but they're not going to last so the idea would be to gradually increase the school budget not in a large amount one year but gradually over time so um maybe a little more than the inflationary increases that we'd be inclined to get to do better we need more so i think those would that's how i would answer that question great john can you elaborate a little bit more on um the uh what parents can do at a state level to advocate it might be a parent education piece that we need to think about bringing the connecticut finance project in um to speak at a higher level with our families here tonight um as to what they can do but can you think of some off-the-cuff things that um parents can do at a state level to help advocate to bring more money back into denver yeah so um the the state budget you know which includes uh money for education the money that we get um it's the way it works is the governor will propose something uh but then our our state representatives really have a can make a difference so whether it's our uh our state rep or the state senator here um just emailing them or calling them and saying they support something uh or you you think uh we'd like to get more money they they can be very very effective uh and lobby for our cause so i i think that's that's what i would do as a parent um let them hear from me i don't know uh kevin if you if you think there are other ways or that's there's a better way than that because it is uh state money the federal money is kind of a one-time deal uh that came with the uh because of the pandemic but uh on a regular basis um you know education is a state function um not a federal function or entirely a local function so i think i'd look in that direction kevin did you want to comment on that no no and i'm okay okay all right i'm having a hard time okay all right let's go back over to the rontos i think they have an idea or a thought on this go ahead but i wanted to respond to john's point about the funding being you know on a state level because my understanding that danbury gets either at the bottom or the lowest per student funding in the state of connecticut i mean you know again maybe that's not exactly right but i think you know we can't say that we receive um our share of the funding per student given the growth in danbury over the last few years and we need um whether it's the board of ed or john i'm not sure you know how you integrate into this whole thing but we need some guidance and leadership you guys you know send us stuff let's start let's start organizing so we can get you know to the state level and bring like you said bring more money home for our students so we can get these programs and support that we need whether like we said whether it's academic or artistic you know we need um funds here in danbury for our kids and uh we need some leadership so i don't know who needs to start that it's a board of ed thing or it's a um you know it's a another group but we need to do it the uh funding f um the the per pupil amount that you're speaking about it's called the uh net current expenditures per pupil that's the one uh we're all we all talk about all the time it's supposed to uh equalize uh and put every school district kind of on the same accounting basis so they can compare but what it does is it it tends um the smaller districts uh generally have a higher per pupil because there are certain things that you have to do no matter how big you are and you don't have as many uh pupils to spread that cost over so uh and on that on the inverse the larger districts like ourselves uh are spreading some of the you know for example there's um one business manager one athletic director one high school principal uh spread over uh in our case almost or 12 000 pupils so the amount per pupil um the the larger cities uh and towns are generally towards the bottom of that but you're you're absolutely right um we uh we need to bring that up and i think uh some of these ideas that we've talked about uh for example the improvements uh some of the new things um that's where we really need your help uh convincing um you know the budget makers the city council that it's important and it's time and uh it's money well spent so um i know i said it before uh but i think letting the city council also here helps us a lot great thank you john did we have somebody else that raised their hand nope i don't see anybody okay so we'll probably come back to that thought in a minute but um in the meantime we have another question that has come in um on our on the sheets that people were able to submit what exactly does the money per pupil pay for and does that change the way title one funds are allocated and spent um okay so i'll take that one um the chart the page that you saw with the line items i know it was kind of a boring slide um so with what the state will do is they'll say uh every city in town is a little different in terms of who pays for what um for example some schools may for pay for crossing guards in another city the uh their police department employees or um nurses and some places they're city employees some places are not so what the state will put out some guidelines and they'll say okay at the end of the year what did you spend and by the way if you had some things that your city did um we want you to add that or subtract it or if you got federal monies you should add or subtract it so in the end that per pupil is really the instructional cost um it takes out uh for example if we had bonds uh to pay for the uh the career academy that that wouldn't count it's really your your operating budget uh per pupil that that you have there um that does not affect um the amount of federal money that you get um those most of our our federal monies that we get year in and year out are entitlements that means that everybody is entitled uh to a certain amount of that federal money um there are formulas that are based on your demographics your size uh but uh i think many of you probably heard of the title one uh program that it helps teaching um mathematics science uh english in certain schools uh all the cities and towns get that whether you're bridgeport or darien or anywhere else but some get more than others but the point being that those formulas are not dependent on your your school budget and and almost all of our our grants are that way there's some for special education and other purposes however there also are um other grants competitive grants uh based on uh how how you're going to spend the money uh who you are that kind of things we uh we anytime there's a competitive grant that we think we can uh we have a chance for we're applying for it and we have a bunch of those it's it's not as much money but you know every penny uh helps so um i i think that answers it that's what the per pupil is it doesn't affect our entitlements right and and and i will i will just say that regarding title one uh specifically anyway um that allocation is determined by the the percentage of students who are eligible for free or reduced launch and to john's point that does not have an impact on the uh per pupil expenditure it's separate it's you know federal monies available made available by the federal government to our school district and the schools are eligible again based on the percentage of students eligible for free reduced lunch and comes to the districts as a supplement to those schools great so that's all the questions that we have that came in um from the general public i'd like to route it back to anyone here on tonight's meeting that would like to make a comment or share with something oh grace just sent me we have one on how much of the budget is put towards mask protective equipment and code related needs um okay i'll answer that one um so we we've gotten three really three um federal grants uh they're managed down through the states uh you probably most of you may have heard the name of the cares act that came around what came out really right after our first lockdown in march of 2020.

knowing where we live work study and recreate does not change the past but a thorough understanding of the ongoing consequences of this past can empower us in our work to create a future that supports human flourishing and justice for all individuals and that's the land you statement thank you um gail would you now call the role please sure uh commissioner needham commissioner needham okay uh councilmember dish president from evanston illinois okay uh commissioner graham commissioner graham president ann arbor okay uh commissioner gibb randall karen ann arbor councilmember griswold here ann arbor uh commissioner kylie ward here in ann arbor chairperson brown uh vice chairperson mitchell you're in ann arbor hi commissioner vandenbrot here uh commissioner oriol here in ann arbor commissioner zang here at a number commissioner marston here in ann arbor all right we have a quorum great thank you and um thanks everyone for for being here um i would like to now ask for approval of the agenda would anyone like to make a motion because graham and i see a second by um council member griswold great thank you very much um and now i would like to ask for approval of the minutes from december 2nd 2021 commissioner gibb randall and a second from commissioner martin thank you great um and now we will move on to public commentary and i'll read a statement about the public commentary um this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes please call i'll say the number again it's 1-888-788-0099 and the meeting id is one 989-2851 six three seven um [Music] no information is also on the agenda and on the video feed for this meeting uh city staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate that you wish to speak please press star 9 on your phone you'll hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak and when speaking please move to a quiet area you tell any television or background note sounds so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address at the time beginning at the beginning of your comments and to unmute yourself it is star six so um galen do we have anyone who's ready to talk with us there are no callers no callers okay then let's move on with our meeting um we are intending to have some special presentations although i don't see those additional speakers galen do you see um either anyone from the we care denali group or the werma theo aggramant uh i'll take responsibility for that one uh susan thoman should be signing in and i'm gonna just call her on my cell phone okay um on that see if we can't get her to sign in here all right she's coming in she's speaking from uh washington state um anderson the head or she's the executive director of the compost manufacturing alliance and they are in constant communication with the we care denali set up and also rod tyler who is the regional director of the regional manager over we care denali he was invited in uh also to speak so let me see if i can't get them okay thank you i don't know i'll check with theo he works in my office i didn't know he was on the agenda until i saw the agenda a few minutes ago whoops thank you let's give it just a couple of minutes and see if we can line these up hey rita yes while we're waiting i would just like to point out we have a really long agenda tonight um so if we're really having a hard time with some of these things i would suggest that we table something um so just wanted to put my vote in for that if we're struggling with getting people right yep that's fine um i think that's an easily doable and i know that there's one that's going to be tabled anyway it's the one on the potassium iodide um steve was going to lead on that and so that one is definitely off the agenda for tonight um i guess i should have mentioned that when we did the approval of the agenda my apologies so i wonder if we should move up could i move to rearrange the agenda so that um we have two speakers who are available evan pratt and vanvic now we could move forward with the um issue on the galman plume would that be acceptable to the group yes i see a yeses okay great and chris are you are you making it through with with um the other group she assured me this afternoon like at three o'clock even and that she was on for tonight so i don't know okay well let's let's just go ahead with with um the galman plume question and um then we'll we'll move back if we can do so right and so uh thanks so i want to just give a brief introduction and then um then we'll we'll have some further discussion um last year actually in january the um city council and followed by the environmental commission um supported the work of of the water resources commissioner who is evan pratt present tonight um to move forward with um giving a notice of violation to the gelman company because of an infiltration of one four dioxin into the allen creek drain that runs through that was identified specifically in the west park area moving toward chapin street and um since then there has been a presentation by gelman elder were planned to address that but the plan was considered insufficient or incorrect um and so it was we're waiting and waiting to hear more from gelman to move forward so this is an opportunity for us to talk over um the kind of the history of it see where we are going and then um uh i have also prepared a resolution for us to consider tonight for additional support so with that i would like to turn it over first to dan bicknell who is the president of global environmental services i'm sorry associates um and who has been following the galman plume issue for a very long time and he has prepared some information for us to discuss right so dan are you thank you thank you commissioner mitchell um galen is it possible for me to share my screen um is it visible now galen it is not yet okay thank you see that evan is co-host we need dan right now i don't know if evan if you want to present something we'll definitely set that up for you too yeah i don't see a screen share button either but i'm you know i'm fine with the verbal to the extent that it doesn't confuse people i i have a hard time visualizing stuff sometimes without maps but i know everybody's city residents but i'll still yield the florida dan for the moment yeah i thought maybe evan we could just quickly kind of go through um the uh status of the allen creek during storm water contamination and then quickly touch on you know the ms4 permit if that's okay um the allen creek drain which we all know goes through the city of ann arbor has been impacted um by the gilman dioxane plume contamination and the gelman sites probably about three miles away from the current uh west park area which is becoming contaminated and in 2019 20 and 21 there was sampling done through evans office water resources commissioner's office and the eagle great lakes environment and energy and the new allen creek stormwater data collected by eagle in 2021 shows the continued dioxane plume degradation of the allen creek storm water currently gilman is in non-compliance with the washington county water resources commissioner january 2021 notice a violation as rita was talking about the nov covers the gilman dioxin groundwater contamination seeping into the allen creek drain and that's a violation of the federal municipal separate separate storm sewer system permit in november 8th of last year eagle sampled the allen creek drain and found in three locations dioxane at one at 33 one at 16 and one at 2.5 and again this confirms what was generally found in 2019 and 2020 and as a consequence of this dioxane seeping into this ms4 permitted ellen creek drain above remedial criteria it's a violation of this municipal separate storm sewer system ms4 permit additionally in november or december of last year they sampled the west park pond and found one part per billion dioxane in the area officially to be in compliance with the ms4 permit no dioxane is allowed into the allen crate drain storm water here's a quick overview of the plume area different concentrations the yellow line is the 85 part per billion line the red line is above that 85 part per billion level the blue lines are the allen creek drains there's three main laterals of them and if you look upstream if you will the flow of the groundwater is from west to east as well as the drain flows from west to east you see that in this location here wildwood arby view there's not any dioxane noise there in maple ridge but as the run goes down towards west park you see that there is contamination here um of of 17.3 in 2019 49 and 2020 and 33 parts per billion in 2021.

unfortunately they've both missed the revised work plan submittal date uh as well as the october ninth storm water quality due date and therefore they're really in violation of the notice of violation in the ms4 permit and from my understanding evan um currently gilman has not provided a revised work plan and that's kind of where we are today on the concentrations of the storm water continuing to be impacted as well as uh not having gilman being able to be in compliance with the ms4 permit um so um dan before you remove your slides i think it might be worthwhile for us to um have the opportunity to hear from and unless you have some more comments do you do you want to um i don't know anything i was i was kind of my uh that was the seven mile high view that's good great um and i guess evan since right now we have an opportunity to use a map that dan has and i was thinking that that might be useful in in your discussion if you wish um yeah i guess we can we can have that up in case that's handy for for folks in picturing anything i go over so um yeah i agreed to come to provide an update of where we're at first off uh to kind of pick up where dan left off we have not received a work plan from gelman but the county's legal council has been working with them they did have a target of getting that to us this week i was told today that there was a there was a hitch at gelman's end with their final final review that the consultants done their work uh but uh whoever was supposed to say it's okay to send it over to uh my legal counsel was out sick i don't know if that's true or not we don't have it yet but basically what i'm told is we'll see it any minute so that's just one that's really the main update to know um secondly uh i came more for an update not necessarily to debate uh this that or the other there's a few things that you know i feel and i think i've said at uh card meetings before uh that dan provides in more or less an absolute and concrete state as far as what's required and what must be and this that and the other and i guess i'm going to just say my understanding from talking with our legal counsel the attorney general and eagle staff many times over time eagle called last week to say oh yeah sorry we haven't gotten you a little better clarification um it's not as cut and dry as you might have just heard if in fact people were really able to absorb all that i know there's a lot of terminology here so i'll just kind of keep it as high level as i can and say uh two things one the ms4 regulation regulating keeping contaminates out of storm sewer systems and making the operator of that system responsible for chasing down i'll say surprises um is has been around for a while uh it's been used on things such as pfas uh like with tribar up in the i'll say wixom area that was the responsibility of the sanitary sewer folks to take care of that surprise uh with local enforcement one of the areas where i would say both eagle and the superfund program do not see or haven't given us a clear understanding i guess all i can understand from those agencies about this ms4 thing when there is an active site remediation going on is the rules are different um i can't seem to get to the bottom of exactly what does that mean exactly what can we require and can't require uh but it's seems to me that what i get out of eagle and the ag's office as well as uh superfund is that the the contamination in the pipe if it's resulting from an active cleanup may or may not have certain requirements so uh i think dan in other documents has provided a copy of internal eagle guidance that describes four different options that are one of them is yes you've got to get everything out of the pipe uh that is a contaminant and you got to stop it from getting in there but there's actually three other options too one option is kind of related to hey make it all go away from the groundwater around the pipe that's put a hard liner inside the pipe there you go there's some documentation so these four things on the bottom eliminate the discharge is on the left hand side as i look at my screen there's also saying hey they could just get an npds permit that says up to a certain level uh npdes is national pollutant discharge elimination uh permit so that's something that uh agencies get from eagle in fact the city sewer plant has an npds permit and it says you can't discharge more than this on a daily basis or more than this on a monthly average so your monthly average has to be lower than your daily and in fact uh gelman has an npds permit for the discharge of the treated uh water uh over at wagner road that discharges into a very small creek that's under equal jurisdiction and there's limits to how much they can discharge after the cleanup process because they their their process doesn't get it 100 down to zero but the third option uh would be uh you know get total uncontaminated discharge uh but also you'll see this box in the bottom right here that says well if it's uh part of a contaminated site uh restoration uh you know they're coming up with additional options that might be a long-term plan but the bottom line is what i get out of eagle is they're not seeing anything that's more immediate and acute and i think one issue where i've been very clear to eagle to say look i i want contamination out of pipe we all want that i feel bad when i come and tell groups that's what i want but the pathway to getting there through the regulatory process uh seems a little unclear at best there is an eagle memo that i provided to rita that provided some clarification of where their head was at on that and i guess the only other thing i can say is it's probably not beneficial because danaher pays people to look for any information that's publicly available that might help them i'm a little uncomfortable with getting deep into legal strategy but we have an extremely weak hand and at the crux of that we can is you know just whether you put yourself in my shoes or just say any local agency it's a little baffling to me to say we've got what's effectively you know not to be dismissive but we've effectively got collateral damage from a cleanup program and if i'm gelman i'm sitting there saying i did everything that i'm required to do for the cleanup program um we did everything eagle said if there's a problem uh you know how are we to blame likewise as a local agency i really do say we've got absolutely nothing to do with this this isn't a surprise card is documented uh in writing two eagles since at least hey we're thinking that this dioxane is moving down to the west park area it's going to get into the river i can't recall if they've specifically said we think it'll get into allen creek but there's a a lot of documentation that says we're worried that this is going to happen it's happened so from my perspective i feel it would be unreasonable for eagle to expect a local agency to spend their money to undo something that got created by an enforcement action by eagle that doesn't mean we necessarily have to sit here and do nothing but if you take a step back and think about what's being asked of us here um it really doesn't seem to be that the local taxpayers should have to flip this bill if there's something more to chase so i'm hopeful that what gelman submits to us is acceptable i do have to say [Music] i might have caused part of the problem by although i did have legal counsel review the letter that i sent that said hey you you all need to do a better job with your work plan that letter did say get started on what you proposed because that needs to be done but i am told now that asking them to go ahead and start doing some groundwater sampling is definitely beyond what we could ask so i might have scared them away and i'll take responsibility for that by asking for more than what's required by law the law and the stuff that dan showed you basically says that the polluter has the opportunity to uh figure out what's going on they use the word characterize the site so they do have the opportunity to figure out where is this infiltration coming in and at what concentrations so they can get a better idea of where should we be exploring for heavy concentrations of groundwater so i'll i'll take the mia culpa for for maybe scaring them off and essentially losing nine months of investigation activity however if you look at the eagle memo that was provided with my correspondence gilman certainly needed to do more than say we're going to go look at where things are coming into the pipe and figure out where that is they didn't really say what are we going to do if we find it's really bad somewhere uh you know they didn't get into any of the potential follow-up activities and eagle identified uh you know three or four or five things that they really do need to address in a revised work plan all that's a roundabout way of saying we're gonna work get a work plan i believe you know they've committed to providing a work plan i believe it's gonna have less than what i asked for in my letter um it would be nice if they did a whole bunch more groundwater sampling but because of the sampling that my office did and uh i would say it was oh shoot you can't see my cursor on this thing because this is dan's screen but there was an area where i was absolutely convinced we were going to find high concentrations of dioxane in the ground water near shannon's house in what's called hannah nature area so that's at the end of mark hannah uh behind the salvation army uh near just east of urbana i was just certain so we had samples taken there and we didn't find high concentrations of dioxane in the near surface groundwater we found .44 parts per billion at that location and we found zero at west park when we tested it so i do feel it is appropriate for them to spend time and energy of figuring out where is the mass of dioxane getting into the allen creek pipe to be straightforward with everyone here having that contaminate you know in the pipe itself on the one hand i don't like it and i agree in general with dan's uh you know statements that say we want it out of there the law doesn't seem to support us real well there but quite honestly the dioxane in that pipe isn't directly hurting anyone i'm more concerned about that boxing zipping right down to the river are the concentrations going up or down we need long-term monitoring on all of this stuff and that's really where eagle's head was at too with uh feedback and comments of the prior work plan of they need to identify how are they going to do long-term monitoring for this because that is kind of one of the options that's open with long-term sites is well we're just going to eyeball it and if the levels are more than zero we'll just see how they're doing and and see if there's anything that should or shouldn't be done it's pretty fuzzy quite honestly it doesn't look like there's any case law out there that said you must do ms4 enforcement if it's resultant from 201 it's the gist of it so i i'm not sure all of those words really add up for people so i probably just need to shut up and see if uh any folks on the commission have any clarifying questions or what have you and i do have a couple comments after that but i need to just stop and take a breath here let's pray too long already thank you evan and dan um rita if i could just make one point is that you know the the ms4 is a federal clean water act permit and that's completely separate from what we have in front of us in court now which is a state of michigan part 201 contaminated site in other words the gilman site isn't regulated by the federal government at this time unless it becomes the u.s epa superfund site right now it's in state court it's a court action generally between gelman and the state of michigan and that's a totally separate process totally separate violation it's a violation of michigan regulations whereas the ms4 permit is a federal clean water act permit and when they violate that they're violating a federal clean water act so it's definitely apples and oranges and they don't mix together to make cranberry juice they're definitely different things and i can understand why gilman would try to put them together but really they're completely separate violations as i said i'm not here to debate it we've this this same conversation has come up many times dan i understand you're going to stick to your interpretation and i'm obligated to stick to what i'm hearing from the attorneys and the fact that the attorney general does not use the same words as dan does that doesn't mean anybody's right or wrong but it means i have to go with what folks with legal expertise in this area describe certainly it's a separate program but again the pertinent point here is uh those regulations as i understand it are applied quite differently ms4 regulations i mean are applied quite differently when there's an active site remediation uh causing the issue so questions from the commission though i see kathy's got her hand up but i'll let rita let rita direct traffic as the chair sure go ahead kathy please okay yeah as someone who has is responsible to my constituents and for some reason people in the second ward seem to be very concerned about the one for dioxane but it it seems like we've just gone round and round about what this definition is and uh whenever you ask a lawyer it seems like it adds two weeks to whatever process you're working on um so um i guess my question is for both of you dan and evan would um given that congresswoman debbie dingle has been very involved in this cleanup would it uh be helpful to have her office try to get clarification on this statement because she has the the resources to do that so that we're not getting two different interpretations and i don't know if dan or evan want to weigh in on that well i guess part of my main point is i'm not sure anyone can give a definitive interpretation that will definitely hold up in court what i've been trying to convey is part of the muddiness is uh this is not ground that has been tread often and there isn't case law where an agency took somebody to court and said you're you're also violating ms4 in addition to this cleanup we've got going on and uh you know again without getting into something that's too helpful to the other side that like lack of case law given the number of sites that have probably had this issue is one that does not uh warm the heart of of winning in court if you had to go to court and again i'd like to see their work plan and see them take a step forward but it doesn't seem very winnable if you wanted a suggestion one thing would be you could sit down with you or another council rep or an ec rep with the city attorney and whatever the ag or anybody else involved and have the conversation of what is how would the city attorney advise council on what's the odds of success if if uh if there was a desire to pursue this more vigorously um as either its own thing or as part of the existing consent judgment so that's one idea another idea is the attorney general's office has been very reluctant to put anything writing on this they consistently say they are working for the folks who do remediation eagle that's not the only group but eagle there's other attorney generals that support eagle there's also going directly to the attorney general and saying why can't this get sorted out why can't you just tell us this isn't going to happen or we can help you and make it happen it's got to be one or the other right either the ag is telling us this is something that you don't have any good legal standing which is what i'm interpreting but perhaps they could use a little more encouragement with more vigorously pursuing uh getting contamination out of a pipe i those are the two things and i don't know if uh representative dingle is the best one for that or uh somewhere from the city is best for that that's those are two thoughts oh okay why don't we talk about that offline because you know if you're proposing possibly having a meeting and i don't care what the path is so much as i just want to have the sense that we're moving forward and the other thing is political pressure is sometimes helpful this is a an election year and lastly on chapin street there is a black church that has a basement in at least part of its building and it looks like it's sort of in the path of of this dioxane movement i mean i'm not a professional at this but i i definitely want to uh get a better understanding of that because i don't want to have a public discussion about that or being having reporters ask me questions about it we need to be as proactive as possible yeah i i'm going to say i'm not um suggesting that that i'm calling a meeting that's something you could ask for what i think of responsibility to my constituents uh what i am seeing here quite frankly is putting a lot of time and energy into pushing on a rope and i'm not sure that's the best thing to do for constituents but my office you know the allen creek drain anyway is almost entirely funded by the city of ann arbor so i will if the city feels like we want to ramp the energy up i just want to be clear that you could put a lot of time and energy in and if if there's a feeling that there's some political reason to do that that's your choice that's the city's choice but i the what i see from the information i hear suggests that if we want to spend lots of time and energy on something we might focus on the core cleanup and ensuring that continues to go as well as possible you know in the circumstance and i gather that they've started implementing some of that consent judgment for uh stuff that is over and above what eagle and gelman were agreeing to that started i don't know if that fixes things or not but i do know that until things get better in the core you're not going to see this situation uh vary other than the you know ups and the downs just because the 2021 sampling showed the first reduction and a notable reduction in the amounts doesn't mean that that's really the trend it's just one day one snapshot so i'd really like to have these folks out here monitoring more so we've got more to play with right so okay well i i thank you for for everything you you've done i thank dan bicknell for everything that that he has been doing and i guess if it's okay i'll in addition to the resolution i will take an action item and i can work with um with council member dish if she's interested in talking to our city attorney and talking to our city administrator and and letting congresswoman debbie dingle's office know what the status is so that we can at least move this forward in some way and not just go in this continuous loop so thanks thank you thank you um kathy and evan and dan um and i i see i see you lisa um i but i saw chris graham's hand up first so i'd like to ask chris if he would like to make a comment i haven't maybe dan i'm not a person who ever wants to be in court i don't think a lot of things that happen in court end up very well i'm curious to know either one of you evan first please has an answer to this problem what well let me put to another way um [Music] the contamination by this chemical has proceeded inexorably without any constraint for 20 years um is there truly an answer is there a way to fix this i'm not suggesting who should fix it or what or you know who pays or what is there a practical way to solve the problem kevin and then then right so when you say the problem like are you just talking about the dioxin in the pipe itself right now about dioxane flowing inexorably toward the huron river somewhere near the out flow of allen creek or maybe elsewhere is there a way to to remove the contaminant from our from our groundwater is there a way to uh deal with this in fact or are we facing an issue that's insoluble and so maybe the ultimate result of court action is who pays but yeah they all are paying yeah okay thanks i just want to make sure i hit the right button yeah i mean of course anything's possible with the time and the resources i i have to go back to what you know a number of people have said over time the biggest problem here is the law the part 201 law the law that governs site remediation that was written by lobbyists for you know essentially polluters and doesn't require full cleanups all of that said i think i fall on the same side as as just about anybody in the community where i see the word prevent in the consent judgment and i i'm right with eucharist i i don't see a lot of preventing in the long term history i hope that some of this consent judgment for gives us better prevention i hope that the epa should they take this on gets better prevention and that i hope prevention means clean up a lot more mass a lot faster than it has been so it's possible i think the law leaves us with dioxane under the ground even if we get everything we want to at least you know the level of 7.2 parts per billion but it's feasible it's possible it's frustrating yeah chris this is dan and this is not a unique problem these solvent sites are all around the united states and the world and the solution is to do groundwater extraction now in the proposed fourth amended consent judgment they're not extracting enough groundwater with enough groundwater wells to have any meaningful impact and that's why the plume just continues to expand but if you put in the proper number of groundwater wells and extracted them then it would halt the plume and restore the aquifer that's what uscpa in the superfund program would ask for and as evan said in this eagle part 201 agreement i call it the new 2021 court order it doesn't require that it's totally deficient as a matter of fact the new court order pumps maybe 12 more gallons per minute than the current order so that's the solution though is to put in more groundwater extraction wells to halt the plume and capture this contaminated water don't let it expand and it's nothing new it's classical remediation but gellman has you know as in i think with this ms4 permit issue uh put up a legal defense and well i it's not being required i i think you're probably correct the number of groundwater extraction wells the impact on the community of those in all of the locations they would have to occur is it practical undertaking or is that pipe dreaming no it's a practical it could be it can be done it's not a problem it's done every day in other sites and the cost to doing that the um 50 million dollars it was estimated 50 million dollars in the gilman feasibility study and they said that it was practical this was probably more like where are we now relative to that we're completely different they went a completely different way now as seven indicates they're going for uh trying to just basically hold hold the line but what they have is groundwater uh monitoring wells and extraction rates isn't going to hold the line it's going to just let it go by if i was spending a handful of million as opposed to 50 million in order to to do what they're doing in the way of extraction exactly okay thank you yeah i mean if i could just just to quickly respond um to give you a visual um chris i gave this presentation to a number of um units including scio towns of ann river township and i think maybe a little bit in the city but these are the uh the yellow lines go to where the extraction wells are that are required in the proposed fourth amended consent judgment and in the current court order as you can see this is the plume and these are the extraction wells well down here is west park the plume is not going to be captured past these two points as it goes towards west park there's nothing that stops it and as a matter of fact these two wells 19 and 23 haven't stopped the plume from going from west to east so this is an example of how deficient the system is and as you can see beyond these extraction wells you have all this contamination flowing freely so that's that's that's the basic problem we have there's not enough work that is being done in the court order to stop the uh the plume from migrating i got it so how do we remedy this shortcoming without waiting for the courts to catch up well the basic thing is we've no petition for the united states environmental protection agency to make this into a superfund site and if the united states environmental protection agency did this did make this into a super fun site they would compel gilman to put in many many many more groundwater monitoring wells and halt the plume and restore the aquifer drinking water requirements which is what they do on most all superfund sites but that's different than what is being done underneath the current court order i got it thank you i'd like to let lisa ask her question thank you i want to just get clear on to make sure that i understand i absolutely want to work with you on this kathy this is really important and i just wanted to understand the suggestions that we that we got from mr pratt so what i have in my notes is that uh mr pratt advised us to uh to sit down with our city attorney and the ag's office and i agree with you um councilmember griswold that we should of course include the city administrator and ask them um [Music] how winnable a case would be if we tried to take them if we took them to court over the stormwater permit and i'm also thinking that i mean mr proud also raised the question whether their whether the regulatory framework gives us a remedy for this seepage into the allen creek drain and so i think that is another question that i would want to hear what the ag's office and our council says because if i understood everything that mr pratt said because the allen creek drain is largely in ann arbor if we want to pursue this through a litigation pathway um that would cost us and so and it is my understanding that our attorney's office likes to make sure they can win before we embark on litigation um so it'd be good it'd just be good to hear what they say that's not necessarily to say that we wouldn't pursue that option we just want to hear what they say um so am i did i follow all of that mr pratt did i get it right i think so i don't think i overtly said i mean i would presume that the county's legal counsel spent a lot of time and energy on this one specific issue would be helpful in that conversation i let him know that i i would at least put this out there as a choice i do not have a problem with the county being in front or or behind the city on this one i i just don't feel like it's my uh i don't feel it's my place to go start down that path without everybody's eyes wide open as far as you know what i've heard so far isn't encouraging and it is money of city taxpayers and you know i got constituents all over the county and i try to make sure that how i work with my constituent group considers the the funding of things all along because my office doesn't collect any general taxes it's all based on what happens on this piece of pipe or that ditch or what have you so just at our attorney is the only thing they had i think and i don't know if i don't want us to debate this at length because we have already a lengthy agenda but um you have emphasized that our best pathway forward may be aggressive implementation of the fourth consent judgment which does significantly increase the volume at which the cleanup will proceed from what has been true up to now um it is do we need more extraction wells farther east given the way the plume is moving as mr bucknell suggested i am not i don't have a good background in that hydro geology thing but just uh intuitively and having read a lot of information with maybe not comprehending 100 of it absolutely more extraction wells which would seem to be a no-brainer as a benefit to the to the setup i mean i you know i laugh at myself not at the subject matter here and obviously having them a little further east the catch is we're not seeing the groundwater uh in those areas with a lot of dioxin in it once you get past our banana like i said i swore that there was no way we were gonna have anything other than you know noticeable bit higher levels than what's in the pipe is what i expected to find out of the pipe because there's a fair amount of clean water getting in the pipe we didn't find that at all so we're really not i'm not concerned about the church i used to live on chapin i know simone from way back when and you know her dad running the church and everything i'm not concerned in the least about at this time about that but we need to be keeping track of this stuff on a constant basis uh because who you missed two years and all of a sudden the plume did you know whatever crest whatever was holding it back and it moved along now it's been six years since eagle did a fair amount of shallow groundwater monitoring all along seventh and there was no dioxane found in the groundwater all along seventh but that was six years ago and as dan points out uh now they did find something in the pond at west park after not finding it for quite some time so yeah more extraction was the better other than that i don't know the science or the legality behind all that kathy i just wanted to clarify my statement that i am not advocating for litigation and that would be my absolute last resort that you know more monitoring is is definitely i'm not an expert in this but again it seems like that would be money better spent than than a lengthy court battle i mean we've already seen what happens there so okay yeah and i just want to clarify i'm bringing up legal things because not because of go to court now or go to court later it's uh what rights do we have to put out there as i said i've learned after the fact that my letter overstepped uh you know the law and my attorney keeps reminding me let's just follow the law let's just follow the law i keep reminding him you took a look at that letter before i sent it again i'm not laughing at the subject matter i'm laughing at myself he wanted to be very sure that i was not in a position of having to walk back things that were in that letter and i feel like i'm in that position and i feel bad but i guess i feel better about uh pushing too hard then not pushing hard enough so i guess i in this case i'm okay with being over the line and i hope that doesn't offend anybody but we certainly need to know what our legal standing is as we continue down a path that probably includes more frustration than satisfaction but i echo chris's comments quite a while ago i know of very few people who ever went to court and walked out and did a joy dance and that includes people who absolutely had everything clearly on their side by the law and it just didn't work out they had a jury that didn't see it the same way or what have you were a judge that disagreed we've got a friendly judge you know in general so that's a good thing but that only goes so far so i only bring the legal stuff up and we want to make absolutely sure that everything we do puts us in the best position going forward i agreed i see another question from chris graham so lisa and kathy and the mayor and the council um if you went to gelman or whomever were dealing with actually and said okay we'll split the cost with you [Music] to install three or four times more extraction wells than you're doing now well you'll do it of course the city would have lots of conditions and no doubt gelman would have lots of conditions but what would that cost wouldn't it if an agreement could be made wouldn't that go a long way towards solving the problem long before the courts solve it rhetorical question you don't have to answer all right i see a hand up with uh dan bicknow and i think we should just try and wrap up soon yeah i i would just observe chris that the uh proposed fourth amendment consent judgment was as far a field for gilman as they're willing to go the eagle people interveners were not happy with the monitoring wells and the extraction rates as i understand them and a number of other things but that was the offer that gelman made so it's very unlikely that gilman is going to agree to install a bunch of extraction wells if half the cost is going to be on their side of the ledger that's why i keep going back to if you really want to change the dynamic here you need to get the federal government involved and have this become a u.s epa superfund site because they have the ability to enforce with the department of justice and the ag's office uh a a real result and if gilman at that point refuses to follow superfund remember that there is this excuse me if they refuse to have an administrative order and and do this compromise you have that super fund in the background that will pay for it and then we'll sue them in a cost recovery action so classically when you get into this situation where you're in in with people who like to litigate you go into the federal government you get the department of justice to help out in that way the city and the municipalities don't have to continue to fund what they're doing now through this state action so i guess the obvious question is where are we on the request of the super fund funding yeah well what where we are is back in 2016 we petitioned the us epa to go forward and look at making this into a superfund site uh in 2017 they did a preliminary assessment and they said yes the gilman site does qualify tentatively to become a uscpa superfund site and late last year the governor of the state sent a letter to uscpa saying we support making this into a u.s epa superfund site so currently right now u.s epa is moving forward to make this into a u.s epa federal superfund site they have people now that are taking additional samples federal people that are taking samples and ideally near the end of the year they will have collected that data and shortly thereafter we'll understand if the united states environmental protection agency is still uh looking uh at likely making this into a uscpa superfund site fingers are across thank you welcome thanks and um i guess i'd like to just make a statement that for my part um having lived in town since this has been discovered um so that's like over 30 years i personally feel a level of beyond impatience and amazement that we've gotten this far without some kind of better resolution and i'm hoping that that we have started some things that are actually going to be effective and i would like to encourage the continued efforts as they are ongoing um so with with that in mind um i did prepare a resolution that i included in the agenda packet that is basically a very much a restatement of what we did last year which is to support um the water resources commissioner evan pratt in his efforts at addressing the um the ongoing ms4 infiltration which is separate from the epa approach um and so just to to continue that and then knowing that you're going to get we hope uh a response from gelman very soon um i know that this feels probably redundant but i would like to um uh ask the group first off did you have a chance to look at that resolution do you want to look at it can we look at it right now if we need to and if if so um i'll just play it and we can talk through it everyone read it no okay i will need some screen sharing time [Music] and oh my gosh i think i found it can you see my screen so this is a proposal that we address the ms4 permit that is actually managed by the water resources commissioner to address the the work that has been started um read it yes i would recommend given the time that we just skipped down to the resolve clause because there's only that i just didn't want to okay here we are here's the result okay um this is very simple that the environmental commission advises city council which is our job to advise city council to pass a resolution in support of the water resources commissioner and enforcing the notice of violation in compliance with the ms4 permit that is issued to the water resources commission and i see two hands up ah chris you're up first where's that from before chris graham um i'm gonna skip chris for the moment and go to lisa your hand is up there you go sorry um yeah i'm just not sure um there's some language in the in the whereas clauses about how gelman's not in compliance and i'm not i'm not entirely sure if that's what commissioner pratt has told us um they're late but he indicated that he was expecting their revised work plans so i mean i think though that this is consistent with the kind of thing that you just have described in terms of working with um various members of our support on this kind of issue working with the city attorney with the aha with the administrator that that this resolution supports your moving forward in that way so it's just advising so we're just advising council to move forward um is there is something we would like to amend in this we could certainly do that i'm just not sure that it's necessary i think we're going to do this anyway and this commission has already you know provided this advice so i guess if we want to say it again i guess there's no harm done um does anyone else like to okay um chris graham are you i see your hand raised and i see john calvary chris i'm not hearing you oh okay so i guess i'm just asking for clarification it seems like what we did a year ago was to support um the issuing of the nov and now we're moving forward with enforcing right so it's taking the next step after what we did a year ago correct thank you i see now kathy as well um i'm open to um amending any of the whereas clauses if evan pratt feels anything is is out of line or inconsistent with with his observations but i i think that the resolve clause is really what's most important and that is enforcement i've not reviewed the document so i don't feel like i should step in and give a top of mind answer or anything like that i did not look at this i mean the agenda thing just came out recently to us so i've not had a chance to look at it i don't want to bind anything up you know or you you can table it and i'm happy to look at it between now and your next meeting with whatever works for you all okay um chris graham again i'm i'm not enthusiastic about more court i um [Music] it seems to me that something's got to give here and it's very difficult for a city and a corporation to negotiate once they've drawn lines in the sand so in this in this case though we're not asking the city to go to court we're asking our water resources commissioner to work on the enforcement and i do realize there's a redundancy to last year um so i i say this is as an expression of uh impatience with the situation um and support for real um for um moving forward because it has been a significant period of time so i'm open to suggestions and i would support that and if that if this is not requesting the city attorney to go to court on this basis then i'm supportive but i think another step is really required and that is to get to a practical solution inexpensively as possible and that does not include internees and it probably does include some city expense at helping to solve the problem and maybe the super fun thing works out but that's a ways away and it would be very helpful uh but an overture in the meanwhile might be worth doing my two cents okay um personally i would prefer not to put that kind of thing in this resolution um i feel pretty strongly that we've had a long time of working with this company that has created the problem and we are now living with it and i personally would like to see them be the responsible for resolving it um so that's my statement um but um i'm open to other questions and if we would like to vote on this i'm happy to do that um let's see two hands up again uh chris chris are you intending to ask i'm sorry i'm not i forgive you that's right hi john my personal feeling is that i'm not uh sufficiently kind of knowledgeable of a lot of the information in the whereas clauses so i'd like to take up mr pratt's offer to kind of review it and that we come back to this next meeting all right is that the wish of the group since i can't see everybody i guess i'll stop screen sharing every moment if i can figure it out stop here hi um all right well um would i'll just put out a motion would the group like to table this resolution for consideration over the next month and bring it back yeah i moved to postpone until the next environmental commission meeting okay um everyone in favor say a second thank you uh everyone in favor all right okay closed all right we will table and bring it back and i appreciate the discussion thank you very much um thanks evan thanks dan yeah good to hear the discussion i'll check in if there's any feedback on the resolution but if any members of the commission want to have additional conversation or something i'm certainly available i say i can't type my address in the chat but all our emails are the same at washington county it's last name first initial at washington.org so i'm pratt e washington.org if anybody wants to you know talk a little bit further or say i don't like this clause or whatever but i'll just take a look at it and follow up with the chair and the council members i apologize for the late submission or getting it to you um thank you all okay so uh we have had this extended discussion and thank you um let's move on to or back to our um first item and i will ask chris vandenbrook i guess to perhaps do an introduction is that acceptable to talk about and we're talking about the um compost perfect right um i've been curious about compost and the more i look into it i get more and more curious and it turns out there are several people agencies that are in the business of qualifying what can be composted and what can't be and what has become interesting to me is that the compost manufacturing alliance does field testing on compostable items and susan tolman is the executive director of the compost manufacturing alliance and she tells me that she's in frequent conversation with the managers of our local we care denali facility so i've invited her some time ago if she wouldn't please try and give us a little talk about how this whole operation works and i see you're still on the line susan so it's uh it's all yours i don't know the technology here maybe uh galen has to enter in but um it's all yours great well it's a privilege to be here um and part of the important work you clearly do um so i am the managing director for the compost manufacturing alliance and we just got back from the u.s composting council conference so unfortunately i don't have any of the wheat care facility folks here but i'm an extension of them and and really what i do is deal with compulsables all over the country for a whole network composters so if i can share my screen is that the plan and then i'll just go through a quick presentation for you so good deal here button okay oops sorry guys huh oh there we go i hit the wrong button can you see my screen now yes okay so we're in an interesting time now um where there's a lot of um epr legislation and plastic pollution reduction packs and all sorts of things to get plastics out of the environment to ensure that we're not you know polluting the environment so what we're seeing is a whole lot of companies and brands and and like whole foods saying 40 less plastics on the shelf um and what that's doing though it's moving a whole lot of interest into the compulsible space so this is a very critical time when compulsables become maybe a strategy to minimize plastic pollution to really be engaged in what compulsables are all about what they mean to successful programs and how we can actually bring in more food waste but also make sure that we're not taking the wrong things it would be a problem so the program just a little background on me i work here in seattle um and i worked on the pro food waste programs that started uh back in the late 2000s and really was part of building the program from the ground up literally um and and and we came to a point about 2009 where if you're aware here in seattle we have some big companies uh big campuses and everybody's rushing to do compulsibles and so we took the standards that were really um the historical standards that everybody took at the time which are lab standards we took all this packaging and lo and behold in a few months we found that a good uh over 50 percent of the items that we were taking in just didn't break down so there's a reason for that and that is that a lot of the lab standards that were developed in the 90s before a lot of the technologies that were built you know after that time were actually cited and permitted so you had standards for basic windrow facilities that might have been running for six months and now you had permitted technology that could process uh feedstock compost feedstock in 60 days so those compostables that were starting to come into these facilities that were newer technology and higher levels of technology uh didn't necessarily align well with the original lab standards which are still the lab standards used today so we thought that was a really sustainable as a company i worked for cedar grove so we had to come up with our own plan and we started field testing so compulsible do a lot like i said they minimize plastic pollution it's a great story to know that if you've got a kids you know you've got you know food being served at the local school in a compulsible we can take the food scraps and the package and send it back to the local composter and bring it back to put in the school garden you know it's there's more and more science coming out about composting either applying it or or diverting those organics from the landfill or a big mitigating factor to climate change and not to mention if you ever use compost or if you're a home composter we know it grows healthy plants and gardens and we can keep that material in our communities and we get jobs and we get just so many i just can go on and on but i know i gotta keep going so we are a third-party certifier of compulsibles from a solid waste perspective so what what happened over the years is all these folks were using the lab standards and they're good standards we need those lab standards to be met the lab standards tell us that they're safe they don't contain chemicals that they're not phytotoxic that they will biodegrade to biomass and water and not simply fragment in the soil and leave behind microplastics so those uh standards are still very important but we're sort of in 0.20 now in this compostable world and that is but it also has to work for the composter so if you think about it if you're a menis if you have a municipal contract with a hauler those organics are going to the composter um someone paid a premium to get a compostable version only to have it go all the way through the system and end up getting landfilled we're actually going the opposite direction environmentally on those materials so cma has really created a system sort of like our own epr system across a network of composters where we have our own bedding system that goes a step beyond the lab standards and that's what we care is adopted in all their facilities taking food scraps uh in their network across the country so like what i like to say is we're taking the supply chain that's making all these great products to reduce plastics um and we're taking the compost facility and the solid waste systems and i always like to remind the supply chain if your material ends up in the bin that goes to a municipal composting plant or a privately owned composting plant we have to be part of the same system we can't operate as two different systems so i spent a whole lot of time collaborating with the supply chain in our network to make sure we're co-creating good compost uh with the right compostables so what's really happening and and the reason we cares adopted this is the traditional model of the old standard for compostables one size fits all you make the product you pass the lab standards you put it on the shelf no one was thinking about the composter all these years so now we're really creating the space where we all come together and we talk about the lab standards what do the municipalities need for their education how about the haulers and what are we going to tell our consumers so cma is really trying to be the place where all those gaps get filled because we know i always like to say this to my staff people don't fail you systems fail you so if we don't have the right systems to make this optimal for everybody um you know we're going to continue to have problems and people may give up we don't want them to give up compostables have a strategic place out there and we just want to make sure we create the right systems the right applications um we are accomplished your own and operated i will tell you that and we put this together um about four years ago and so we have the largest composters uh you know some of the largest in the u.s most of them have multiple facilities we're doing hundreds and thousands of tons at their facilities um i think we're collectively just when our uh in our membership network including we care over three or four million tons just within our network but we also have affiliates uh that have joined us because they also want to take compostables but they want to take compulsibles that are vetted by the composter so this is the map of the affiliates that we have uh again we just came back from the u.s composting council and this whole program started when i worked with the city of seattle when let's say a school system wanted to know what can i what could what's what could i procure for my school what what works it you know in my school at your facility so we're really list makers at the end of the day so if you're to go on our website you'll see this map and you hover over the city and that city will give you a link to a list of of the products they're accepted at that facility so at ann arbor you would just we have to add that here but on the ann arbor facility you would just click you would click the link on the map and that list would um would show you all the things that have been vetted for their process which is a windrow process so i always like to tell people especially or or explain a little bit about the composting process because our goal is also to mutually educate you know we have all these systems going on and if you look at the recycling commodities over the years and where we ended up when a lot of things um you know no longer were being processed domestically and going overseas and some of the recycling challenges that we've had we don't want that to happen with composting we want to make sure that we're being thoughtful and that we're working with you and together and i always say sustainability is a team sport um it takes everybody to do it right but a lot of that is education so we really take our role as educators seriously so we like to show a little bit about the composting price process to help understand why this program's uh very important so there's many steps just like in any manufacturing process the composting you know the recovery the preparation the actual composting and the aging and so it's like a production line that's why we call ourselves compost manufacturers we also like to say that we encourage everyone to to say you know compost manufacturers because we want to put in people's minds we're not dumps we're not places to just throw something we're actual manufacturers of a product that we want to resell and have a market that will come back over and over again and also a market that will grow because if your food scrap program grows so does your market it needs to grow with it um so we really are trying to change you know the perspective in people's mind that we're yes we're part of the solid waste systems but we're not a place just to send empty packages just for the sake of empty packages so we also do a lot of outreach on you know you know what things you shouldn't make compostable like toothbrushes and cell phone covers and things like that it's really about a recipe that needs to be consistent yard waste food waste and compostable food wear that's really the lane we're in and that's the lane that we're willing to certify so when things come in you know they're tipped into a building this is a facility that we work with north of seattle and one of the things we're also working on and we've been successful in my state in passing legislation that actually employs color marking on compulsibles why is that well if you look at this picture um yes logos are good and how to compost logos are good but if you're 20 feet up on a loader and you have a thousand tons a day coming into your facility you don't know a compulsible from an on compostable so we're really pushing legislation in our state combustibles have to be easily identifiable and they ha and and if for instance in uh in the grocery stores um you can't have a uh you can't have a compulsible bag that is the compostable bags need to be brown or green but there can be no non-compostable bags that are brown or green for instance on the spool in the produce department and i i'm testimony of this um but we used to get a lot of green film it just started growing and growing well those organic bags are green you know polyethylene bags so we got an ordinance passed in the city of seattle we helped write the language for that and it was adopted statewide last year and this is now the model legislation uh for the country um that's solid waste based it needs to be a system that works for a high volume composting site so we encourage color marking and we're going to continue to push that type of legislation to keep compost clean oh this is i went the wrong way i'm sorry just a minute let me get back to where i was hit the wrong button my apologies and i'll just go through the rest of this pretty quick um yeah let's pick up here so at the end of a process uh what composters do is they screen out the inert materials and the non-compostable materials so that might be film plastic that's the number one contaminant in compost streams is film plastic again from produce bags and go to your grocery store now and i know when 30 years ago when i went to the grocery store there was no plastic on the english cucumbers there were not strawberries and tiny plastic containers there were not one inch pieces of cake and big domes there's so much plastic around food now and statistically if there's so much plastic around food you better believe it's going to get to the composter that's taking food scraps so we're really trying to make things that make more sense to be compulsible rather than end up with a whole lot of stuff at the end of the day that ends up going to the landfill and is very costly the composter and that pushes your contract rates way up pushes your residential rates way up so we got to arrest this now we gotta move the dial backward and have a better system um materials um after their screen they're aged and then that material goes out to market and again if there's flex of plastic or you know bright green thymes from spoons or anything like that that really affects the solubility of that compost so we're really protecting the aftermarket for compost by making sure we're taking compostables and putting them in a vetted system that makes sense for the composter what we do is we test to different technologies because not every compost facility is the same so at ann arbor you have a windrow system so we do field testing and windrow processes um and um and those are run with turners and large you know large rows uh out in the environment and you know and they're basically turned those materials go from usually 90 days to 180 days our test runs 90 days so we're being conservative on the the lowest time frame that it might go through in large municipal areas like in seattle and new york city is just finishing building a covered in vessel system that's the gore system that system runs like i said actually it's running now 49 to 60 days so it's a much shorter cycle but it's highly controlled it's much higher temperatures a lot quicker and it's covered with a fabric that's from the same family of fabric as gore-tex so it's sort of like a live skin and creates a biosphere over that um feedstock and then it automatically aerates uh it's all automated so it's super controlled very effective 98 voc and emission control so a lot of your large urban composters are going to this very high-tech system engineered in germany but you're going to see more and more of these facilities in larger facilities um out there and then finally aerated static pile often is the technology that a windrow will go to when they start taking food scraps because you need a higher level of control for instance for pathogens that are going to come in from food you want to make sure you can have that pathogen kill and you want to make sure that you have enough control to get that so a lot of the asp systems are replacing windrows once people go to food scraps in certain states depending on their regulations but they're shorter cycles as well so these are the modern technologies that are used and represent probably 90 of the capacity out there so we do tests and these three processes with packaging companies and they get certified for the different process once again our prerequisites are they have to meet the lab standards i won't go into great detail we have all this on our website but they have to meet the lab standards um and we also have a flooring policy so if you're aware of it i'm sure this group is there's a lot of uh activity going on in fact again washington state was the first to uh write regulation that bans any food service sales of products with pfos um they're um you clearly folks on on this uh commission know a lot about pfos in the work that you do but our policy is we only accept items shown to have less than 100 parts per million total flooring we've actually developed the lab standard with one of our advisors who works for astm and we will not accept anything into our program nor will uh nor will it be allowed in any of the weak care or uh cma facilities in our network so lab standards plus field disintegration test equals the cma certification um and i went over a little bit why there's differences between the two it's really time frame um what the media is and if you think about a lab test versus a wild woolly composting plant you're not going to have the controls you're going to have the temperature and the time frames and all that are going to be highly variable so we're really just trying to get in that sweet spot in all these facilities to help packaging companies design what's going to work best in the long run so this is what field testing looks like or these are just photos from some of our work across the country where we've gone out and done field testing and we put samples in the pile we're tracking the temperatures we're taking feedstock samples to an outside lab and looking at c to n ratios what was the ph and the moisture level so we're giving information back until cma existed packaging manufacturers never knew the science and compost piles believe it or not so we literally sit with packaging designers and say oh there i had a gentleman tell me yesterday if i knew the ph was five i wouldn't have designed my package that way and i'm not saying compost facilities run at five but sometimes we find discoveries about ph and moisture levels and how that affects the the the disintegration of those products we take those out of the piles after they're done and active composting we provide reports back on how they performed and again all we're doing is disintegration testing we're not a lab we're doing a visual operational disintegration test to ensure those materials aren't left over at the end of the process so this is just again some shots from our work at st louis composting in belleville illinois and we take uh the rod feed stock that comes in from the collection programs and we mix it 80 to 20 products and non-biodegradable mesh bags we immerse them in the center of the compost piles and then we pull them out and uh yeah so you can see here we have a tester putting them in the piles we put them in the middle of the piles we have the composters cover them and then we come back out extract them dry them and put the results together so well we'll literally have pieces of electrical tape which don't bow to grade so a good test means you just find the tape and a bad test means you got the whole thing and it didn't break down or you have you know you know you have a spoon and you know it's still eighty percent there so if you got eight a spoon that's eighty percent there and you take forty thousand you know and now let's say 120 000 spoons from a microsoft campus in one day that's a lot of green flecks and in in contamination that'll end up so we have to be very protective of our materials we have to be very protective of what we sent in this is a report this is a sample of a report that we might send out to a client so that you have the before picture of what's a pla ngo cup uh and all that's left after the test in our in-vessel system is the tape um i will tell you you might be surprised there's a lot of fiber products paper products with a lot of treatments um a lot of additives um and fiber and paper does not break down all the time so we're actually doing a big paper study with big mills we're going to be doing a fiber study with some top-notch people from some universities because we want to get to the bottom of the how do we get fiber products to you know what what are the ideal conditions for fiber products to work and again a lot of your fiber products now your clam shells and your takeout containers they will contain pfos so you'll also see that we don't have a lot in that category right now not because of lack of disintegration but because they have pfas because um the the industry hasn't caught up with having alternatives to that right now so keep that in mind that's a real problem right now so at the end of the day we do all that work to make these great lists and again it started as a list making sort of activity with the city of seattle um that list in seattle that cedar grove made that we did was started to get used all over the country the phone rang one day and and my boss said i just he said hey who are you talking do somebody in another state so i said you know i gotta i gotta do this thing national so we just started working with these other composters and now we have these lists all over the country so the risk of not field testing just to to summarize on proper improper breakdown in real word systems could lead to market limitations for composters so we have a lot of composters that don't know the difference in a pile between a pet cup and a pla cup that was made to be compostable and companies um that pass field testing um usually have a better market opportunity because they're actually connected to the local composter and we think that's the only way to do this um and if they uh if a manufacturer put a lot of money into a lab test and it didn't break down in a compost facility that wasn't really a good investment if they don't have a home for that and we're finding more and more composters are refusing to take compostables because they're very uncomfortable with them so um higher landfilling rates from compost contaminants um that adds more cost to the composter and ultimately your contracts and there's a growing it it just creates growing mistrust between manufacturers and composting facilities so our goal at the end of the day is to protect the investments of our you know composters and compost manufacturers and also the product manufacturers but to protect your investments in your cities your haulers your solid waste programs you know your education programs you know everybody everybody contributes a lot to make these programs successful so we're just trying to make sure that we protect everyone's investment in time and do this in a way that makes sense and like i s what i like to say is we're working from the pile backward to make a difference to make this a better system and we cares all in on this they've been a wonderful supporter of ours and um and and that is that that's what the cma program is and and that's um that's what we're doing and so it's your local program and we're here as a resource to you in any city we work with we work with a lot of universities a lot of cities i'm working a lot with counties down in uh california now with all their new regulations so we're on the phone a lot just being a resource a free resource to any municipality hauler you know government agency because we're funded we it's kind of like dpr we're funded by the packaging world to make a better system for everybody so that's what cma is about and that's what the program is and that's not my name because i got the wrong slide on the end but um but you have my name so um that's what i have to share tonight well thank you so much susan i really appreciate it and maybe there's some questions i got some but i'll leave it to other people first before i weigh in thanks yeah i'm just wondering uh either if our guest speaker or anybody else has updates on the pfas within ann arbor's compost stream because i know the community garden i was involved in stopped ordering from them two years ago out of fear of contamination so i don't know if we've got any more up-to-date information on that or not i do not does anyone uh know where we would go for the information uh speakers did susan have any information about the ann arbor testing and for i i am not representing the facilities tonight unfortunately i apologize um i would not but um rod tyler at week here could probably give you an update thank you go ahead chris i have a fundamental one and that is as a resident we just had some takeout food from a restaurant tonight and it came in a clam shell labeled world centric world centric apparently makes a lot of stuff and it says compostable on it but i don't see any special color or any special certification or anything anything on it and i'm wondering as a general rule what should a resident do when he gets a load of food from a local restaurant and the little straws and the plastic cups and all this stuff all say come possible on what should i do with that stuff should i throw it in our compostable bin or should i throw it out well certifications are important ours and bpi is the other certifier very well respected and recognized um and again our policy is cma only certified for the lab for the field test portion um but you know it takes a little work i i'd go to the manufacturer's site the product the world-centric site i'd make sure that's pfos free because that that paper-looking clam shell make sure it's p-floss free first um but compulsibility um it may not always have a logo or a certification on the item but but the websites usually tell you if they're certified so the and again that's where our system is now the goal is down the road we should have the right logos and the right color marking to really make this system you know legitimate in terms of what's compostable um but but our site you know and and you can also send us lists you know and items not that your homeowners are all going to be calling us but but our lists are great resources and i found in seattle it was really cool we went to the college and and we almost had compost police out there when we got started once we had the list like you're not using the right stuff but it was like they were like my police all the college kids so we they did a lot of that work for us but once you're educated the key is education any follow-up we're always happy to do a webinar for the community for or for you or record something to help your your your residents understand and and and understand what's compulsable what are the things you can look for and where you can go to find out i think that's a tall order for most people i have neighbors who don't really care and they're not going to make the phone call so my advice to them has been up until today anyway is if you don't really know throw it out and it seems to me the restaurant owners who peddle this stuff they ought to be making a phone call and making sure that if they if if the clam shell that they deliver their food in says compostable on it that it really is impossible in our wind roll seems like but well the other thing i want to add there's legislation in maryland washington state and california now that you cannot put compulsible on it unless it passes the lab standard unless it passes that astm so if they have compulsable on it and there's the size of world centric it at least meets the lab standard so i think you could use that as a baseline not that that's easy to explain to a resident but i would say compostable on an item probably means they don't want to get sued or be in trouble with any of those three states and that's you know california they sell a lot of compulsables so um and they're gonna harmonize to do that all across the country just because california does it doesn't mean they're just going to make it for california they're going to harmonize the production of those things so if it says compulsible you know it it has to be compliant but that doesn't mean it will be compliant i'm just saying that most companies won't put compulsible on it now because of that legislation unless they meet that standard okay thank you i have a question it seems like there are two things that um that you're describing so compostable really means the breaking down into like the smallest pieces right um and really break it down to biomass and water because oxal biodegradables are fragmenting yeah right those are not what you want sorry celeste no i said that's you don't want oxalbyter grails i always like to warn about oxels they fragment but but compulsable means that biodegradable bio biodegrades to biomass and water right okay um so biomass means that it's something that's other than pfas that's one of the components well interestingly enough pfos were not part of the astm standard so until pfas became a big issue in about they weren't considered that wasn't considered in in in what was termed certified compulsible but once that became apparent that it was an issue um now both the certifier bpi and cma has a pfos limit in certification it really is all about certification the two certifying bodies in the country us and bpi um that's our standard we're kind of like the gatekeepers on what's acceptable um i don't know if that addresses your your question or comment but but there are lawsuits now that that are addressing the fact that because there were pfos in items sold now lawyers are going after those companies that made those products with pfas and saying you misled the pug blood because pfas is not compostable so that is a development that's kind of i get your thinking but that people are also thinking that way and now there's lawsuits against those companies so i think it the question really is like how reliable for us in our city are the um indicators that say compostable and are we making things worse if we put some of those containers in our compost and it sounds like yes i would say fiber fiber plates and deli wraps the paper del are the two ones i'd worry about the rest are pretty good in fact i'd be happy to follow up with chris on articles the uh ceh down in california has a wonderful list of resources to help better better understand you know this whole area of pfas what is and isn't and they they do have tests that they did at berkeley i believe um on a lot of different products out there in the market and those are the main the main ones french fry bags deli wraps and the fiber containers and that's unfortunate because whole school programs need that tray so we're really scrambling right now for alternatives but at least you can you can you can take those categories those subcategories and say yeah i'd be wary of those subcategories i would agree that i would be wary of those uh those categories the the things that they wrap sandwiches in those papers thanks get your your yes yes sandwiches sub sandwiches yes when you go by ask them is that p fuss free yeah it feels to me like we really need to start at a very high level at the manufacturing level right so that that the restaurant owners even don't have to think about it so much that they they want to just get the food in a thing and then get it out to somebody who wants it but but they it would be easier if they didn't have to think about pfas um or or whatever else might be something that would be incorrect to use um okay thanks does anybody else have a question comment i really appreciate this presentation and chris thanks for making the effort to to reach out to susan and bring this information here um i think it gives us a lot to think about um chris are you are you raising your hand i am okay so thank you for the pfas thing it's one doesn't see that i elaine and i have a vegetable garden and i generally recharge it every year with uh leaf humus or what i call leafiness from ann arbor's compost center and it really works but i'm not happy if it has pfas the whole any of the zone of those chemicals in it and so i'm glad you're watching that um i also build gardens for living and one of the problems i face in doing so is when i need topsoil a large percentage of the suppliers of that are providing me with soil scraped our farm fuels before they get built upon [Music] and as many of you know most of those farm fields have been growing uh european weeds for decades the soil is full of weeds basically and so i've gotten around that by making my own soil and i do that by mixing the city's leaf humus from the compost center with sand or bark and end up with a soil mix that's probably not very good but way better than buying farm fuel soil with all the weeds in it and so i'm wondering how widespread your ph testing is in one of those acquisitions i went to a compost center up north west of detroit and bought compost that was very alkaline because they were predominantly composting leaves from streets um ann arbor has typically been ph neutral because they're taking a lot of wood that tends to even out the alkaline leaf inflow um [Music] is is ph testing really a significant part of your program and and if it's not can it be for those of us who depend upon compost for making soil in our gardens in our landscapes okay very very good question i appreciate it so there's two places composters good composters are testing unrelated to us so it's they have to get the recipe right to make good compost so they do what are called feedstock tests when when all the material comes in they do a composite sample and they send it to the lab to test all those things and there's a range that's promulgated by the us composting council that they want to be in and all the facilities we work in we pull a feedstock test for our test and i can tell you that most facilities we op that we operate in are in that range because if they weren't they wouldn't make good compost okay so from the standpoint of our network and what we're doing those are the best practices at the facilities there's also the sta program the u.s composting council has and that's a program that you have to certify your compost meets certain standards okay so those standards are also extensive lab tests tme ecc lab tests you go to u.s composting council site and look at the tests and the methods that they use but they also have to meet those standards so there are some qcs in place best management practices the composters use that doesn't mean you're not going to end up with a composter or a compost somewhere that might be out of range and that's really i don't represent one individual site tonight but that's really a facility by facility situation but i can tell you at least for with but to give you some assurances the composters that are doing it well are going to do that anyway because that's going to be important to making the good compost and selling it if that's helpful it is i just have to be careful about who i buy from that's it and i've been so thrilled about ann arbor's program because the product out there has typically been outstanding and ph neutral the other thing i find when i buy compost is a lot of small non-biodegradable plastic scrap i i i can put a three or four inch coat onto my vegetable garden and rototill it in and up comes dozens of little plastic non-biodegradable plastic i think a lot of it's vinyl but so are they um screening state-of-the-art screening equipment really getting down to that level yet or are we still struggling with that problem i think it's still an issue and usually to sell product that's going to actually be applied in you know their respects on product right screen size and all that i would say most facilities are screening to a quarter inch to 5 16 of an inch but again it's it's going to be inherent as long as there's contamination in the bin so i go upstream everything we got to get upstream we got to get better education can we use compulsibles to as a replacement i was just spoke last last week at a big conference said why don't we make salad bags compostables you know forget the hair brushes the salad bags you know can we use that to mit to actually reduce our contamination can we use compulsables as a contamination reduction strategy so but yes it's going to be there i was the sales director of compost for years at cedar grove it will always be they'll always be a percentage as long as we're taking it from the public i just if it was clean every day we wouldn't have that problem but i can tell you that there's a lot of people that see a lot of money to be made if we can really get those little tiny pieces out so we're hoping that technology will bring that but i'd rather see it never go there in the first place yeah well we have the same problem with the regular recycle bins with people putting all of their paper products and so on that are definitely recyclable in a plastic bag and putting it in the recycle bin right thank you thank you so we are um at nine o'clock and i just was um does anyone else have other questions um i really appreciate hearing from you susan it's really good to think about what's going on with compost and chris thanks this is really very um helpful and thought-provoking for me and how we move forward um so if if no other questions i'd like to move on to our next presenter and and um to say thank you to theater eggerman for for sticking around for this long and was we got our agenda um moved around quite a bit this time um and uh oh looks like shannon do you have a question i'm just wondering can we just think big picture about what we really have in front of us tonight because it just seems completely unrealistic to me that we're going to be able to cover everything in the agenda that we have so i can tell you that the next two are going to be super short after this presentation one is going to be deferred the ki discussion completely because steve was going to manage that and he's not available tonight and there's another super short on the deer call so um if we i believe this that if we can get through this presentation that we'll have a relatively short remainder of the meeting okay i just would like to consider i would just like to consider tabling some things it just feels like if we're really really that's really what i'm telling another 45 minutes of presentation plus two other i just don't want to do things that i feel like we are being cursory about because we just want to get through it fast because it's getting late so these okay these are things that that you wouldn't have known that happened and so they will be short okay subsequently i would love to wrap up by 9 30.

i remember when they were very interesting items for our board and our township and our town and our school district to address i think it's great that they were forward thinking initiatives that we put together as a as a district uh and here they are with their being renewed i speak about the evans contract the use of that space the repurposing of that building for yet educational needs we took a school and we have we have students in there just a different configuration so kudos to the district for doing that and for it continuing number one number two also remember all of the history and just everything that went through with 9.13 so i think it's great that we're still talking about teddy bear academy and the uh benefit that it is to the district and the fact that we are talking about tuition rates but the fact that it's still ongoing in our district i remember i was on the group of people that went to tour mms when we were turning that area back there after we got rid of purple hall we repurposed it and made it the teddy bear academy as it is today so uh been here a long time and it's great to see that these initiatives are continuing so great job everyone that's it thanks thank you mrs everhart anyone else like mr fizzakero i want to comment um you know just reiterate and add on to what mr cantham said about the uh about 914 the sro shared service agreement i i think i i thought i think this is wonderful and what i think is most impressive about this is that this is something that's happening for multiple years uh this is going on until 2025.

do i have a motion mr fizzicaro second mr lanzalada any questions or comments pertaining to personnel miss everhart sorry my chatty kathy tonight sorry uh so let's talk about these resignations great job and wish a lot of people luck that are moving on to new adventures i just wanted to give a shout out to two people uh that i've course past was over the years and that would be cindy wozdik who i have been i've seen do the music program through all the years so great job gonna be excuse me a great loss there but i wish her a lot of luck i hope she continues with her pursuit of music at the south jersey orchestra she takes some of the children and she herself plays so i think it's great good luck mrs wozdick also to maureen hannan or maureen heenan uh grant writer she also was an integral part of like day of service when we would go in as board members back in the day before kovid where we would go to experience stuff that the teachers would do with the students for service and she had some amazing ideas for the kids if i'm correct and correct me if i'm wrong but i think she did like taking plastic bags and putting them together to make things items that the homeless could lay on they were like shoprite bags and it was the yeah it's the coolest thing um so shout out to her and all that she has done for the district with her extracurricular activities with all the grant writing and all of those activities so best of luck to mrs heenan also want to give a shout out to nicole mandry who is moving on she is from my home school at rice so i know a little bit about her and i wish her a lot of luck moving forward again congratulations to everyone but just a special shout out to those people good luck thank you thank you mrs everhart any more questions regarding personnel okay seeing none i'm going to ask for a roll call please mrs cappello yes mrs everhart yes mr fizzagaro yes mr canton yes mrs noll yes mr lancelata yes miss lloyd yes mr megan yes mrs ryan yes mission carries moving to item 11 policy i need a motion to approve items 11.1 and 11.2 do i have a motion mr fizzakero second invite mr canton any questions or comments pertaining to personnel yes 11.1 and 11.2 policy any questions nope okay seeing none i'm going to ask for roll call please mrs cappello yes mr mrs everhart yes mr visacaro yes mr canton yes mrs noel yes mr lancelata yes miss lee yes mr megan yes mrs ryan yes motion carries okay moving on to committee reports does any committee chair have a report they wish to share at this time and if so could you just state the name of your committee mr lanzalata thank you mr ryan i appreciate it this is for the committee of community outreach public relations it's a little extensive so bear with me first we would like to thank robert luther and the marlton rotary club for meeting with dr smith in the community outreach committee on january 4th in the meeting we discussed fundraising ideas the state of our district the effects of covet on our schools and future plans moving forward together with the rotary club we appreciate their time and their our continued relationship that we have with the rory club and we look forward to meeting with them again with the mrc there's a couple fundraisers first deck hockey's having a 50 50 raffle they're being sold on the mrc website the winner will be announced on february 10th there's also valentine's day candy sale so buy yourself some gummy bears and some chocolates help the kids registration for spring football spring soccer spring softball are all are all open now and coaches and referees are needed to just reiterate with the panel discussion of hate that dr smith had already uh talked about you know dr smith was also the host there so we'd like to thank him for putting that all together as well as with the whole all the six panel members um you know if you haven't seen it we really recommend that you take a look at it it is in dr smith's january 20th update and it it's really just filled with discussions and you know and lessons and points of view you know that can foster understanding respect and the acceptance of others and that's really where we're going for um you know in this community um with the town council again reiterating how important is the the sros uh with uh um with our three-year agreement with this with with the town council you know thank you so much to mayor vizi and the rest of the town council for for um you know their great leadership on this you know with all the violence and the threats of violence going through social media on our staff and schools these days we're very lucky to have a leadership in our town who's willing to put our children safety first also congratulations to chief chu who's retiring after 25 years of service to the eastern police department issue is a better and much safer place because of his dedication to our and service to our community i hope he enjoys his retirement and finally the eevsham education foundation is having a huge fundraiser the event is on friday february 22 25th at the mansion in voorhees from 7 to 10 30.

um we proposed 116 so you divide it by 113. when marlene and i looked at where the distribution would be um because i can't take a third of a teacher from four different grades or three different grades i have to take a teacher from this grade a teacher from that grade in this building um because the teachers are obviously whole people and not fractions so uh the result of that calculation would be that we would recommend that if that were to occur they would be taken from sixth grade at doolittle which would bring their class size average to 23.3 at highland uh at 23 flat and at norton at 23.6 the existing class size is 21 and a half at chapman which means we have two sections 21 and a 22. these this number 23 to provide some context would be the highest sixth grade class size average in at least eight years i went back we went through marlene vin and i this afternoon we're looking through historical budget books and things you know we were easily able to get to eight years it would would have been time prohibitive to continue to dig uh to find further years but uh it gives you some context of what that reduction would mean uh you know as i i hope that we're at the end of the pandemic but we've just been through two years of it so it's certainly not my recommendation to reduce those positions but given that the question was asked i wanted to provide some data and context around the response so to quickly go through the budget recap i know we've spent a lot of time hashing through uh various line items and information as you know the um 21 22 budget was 77 million dollars the recommendation for the upcoming school year is 81 million dollars the medical benefit increase is 2.2 million dollars you know 2.9 of our increase again i want to reiterate that's not a mistake anybody made that's not that oh my god all of our staff got terribly ill over this year it's not any of that it was a calculated effort to you know how are we going to manage tax rates last year we have federal money let's take a million and a half out of the operating budget infuse a million and a half of federal money which it worked it did what it was intended to do the outcome is always a gamble with insurance you know i bought life insurance for the last 20 years thank god i didn't need it but i don't consider it a waste of money either so the the um plan was to infuse that 1.5 million dollars hopefully the claims come in super low because we were budgeting well under what the projection was and that and we knew that this could very well come to fruition and it did we have to fill that gap with operating budget recommendation in april the council could always decide to do something like this again infuse some federal money maybe it's kind of a step down maybe they you know do 750 000 this year something like that that's still on the table but it on the surface is a significant sum in this year's budget when you back the insurance benefits out of this understanding that we have rapidly growing enrollment our budget increase is only 2.44 which i think is is really very responsible but it also shackles us in some respects to really stretch beyond that knowing that i can't walk in here and request six percent you know so some of the key budget takeaways obviously the budget driven by climbing enrollment and medical benefits recommending funding benefits at the projected claim rate you know that's nothing new as we discussed uh with with tom from usi at great length the remaining 45 percent of our budget increase is aiming at preserving current services and when i say preserving current services i think some people may feel like you know we're leaving we're leaving kids short we're just preserving we're not advancing and talk a little bit about that our current service level we work to advance what we provide and i'm going to talk a little bit about that but i also want to reiterate that you know we continue to be an outstanding value with incredibly uh great success uh at a number that is significantly cheaper than our peers spending on a per pupil basis not total budget per pupil when you compare us against our peers we spend 5 million less a year than they do 5 million that's a huge number covet 19 obviously still the real factor so when i talk about the context of reducing you know elementary teaching positions i'm cognizant of the fact that we've been through two years of of covid so what are our budget priorities sustaining class size that's that's not jeff sollins necessarily that's our communities and it's come through loud and clear and various things we've done you know marlene will tell you when we did our um personalized learning task force what the the clamor for ensuring that we maintain class size was was very evident so the proposed elementary class size average is 18.9 which in itself is the highest in 10 years it's not dramatically higher but it is the highest it's been in in 10 years and you can see at least what uh the last eight or so years there in the chart where the highest we had previously been is 1718 at 18 8.

sure okay when i was a junior at west genesee high school in camillus new york so you've done so much to make me feel young today i really appreciate that when we're talking about context of when i was in high school that's i want to make that make me feel young thanks um so i have two questions the first one is if you could remind us what the um the increase the percentage increase of the budget over last year's budget what that percentage increase is if we take out the 1.5 million that was infused artificially into the if you want to just do the math on that then real quick it's one and a half million divided by the current budget well if the question is what was last year's budget increase it was one point excuse me it was two three percent and that did not include the 1.5 million no right because that didn't get funded into our budget yeah so it was that the questionnaire yeah so i just think it's it's erroneous to think that we're asking for a five point whatever three four four three four increase what we're really asking for is a 3.23 increase over last year's budget absolutely i you know i would consider that legitimate um you know postulate but again i think 3.2 percent is inherent in that is uh is also closing the gap between where we had underfunded the insurance the monthly insurance projection to go from 825 000 a month to what the current projection is we also had to close that gap so when you add that in as well now we're at three you know two point excuse me um yeah 2.9 percent and you know that's a substantial budget increase but again like you said i mean that's this is stuff that we knew would you know more than likely occur that's also um numbers that the town council will understand because they're the ones that infuse that 1.5 million yeah mr massiana and i had a meeting with the budget committee of the town council was that monday night event tuesday night and you know there's a clear understanding about this situation right this is nothing that's a a whopper surprise to them i just wanted to make that a little more clear because you know 3.23 sounds a lot better than 5.

similarly further downstream in chapin street you see the dioxane at 9.1 2.8 and 16 in those three years and if you go down to this southern reach you do see dioxane at 8th street at 2.5 and in the past at one and in the past at murray it was about 1.1 so there is a continued problem that we have here with the dioxane in the plume seeping into the if you wills fissures in the storm drain which is normal normally you'll have infiltration of clean groundwater but unfortunately because the ground is contaminated with dioxin you're having this dioxane seep infiltrate into the allen creek drain again the stormwater documents that there is a multi-year gilman violation of the allen creek ms4 permit and the dioxin plume into the drain is not going to be going away in any time in the near future now the ms4 permit is a federal clean water act permit that's been delegated to the state of michigan to be administered on behalf of the federal united states environmental protection agency the state of michigan issued the ms4 permit to the water resources commissioner which covers in part the allen creek drain however when we talk about a violation the ms4 permit violation is a totally separate federal law violation from what most of us know as the state of michigan part 201 contaminated site violations which you all are familiar with uh being intervening parties uh in the court order so the 2021 court order between the state government and their intervening parties is totally separate from this federal ms4 permit violation the ms4 permit and applicable guidance governing the drain require that gilman halt any dioxin above background concentrations from seeping into the storm water so for our government situation the appropriate option is to immediately stop the illicit violation by treating it to uncontaminated levels prior to entering the storm drain and the point of compliance officially is where the dioxin plume infiltrates into the drain as commissioner mitchell was talking about in january the water resources commissioner issued a notice of violation to gelman for this illegal discharge andy gilman replied with an april 2021 work plan unfortunately it was defective in the water resources commissioner in june twenty twenty one responded to their work plan compelling gilman to provide a revised work plan the revised work plan was due within three weeks from june third and was to address all the problems that were found by the water resources commissioner in eagle and they were also directed to complete storm water sampling of dioxane by october 9.

that's right just in terms of you know so we're supposed to be until nine so i just would like to think about our overall approach for how we think about agendas because this just feels like no matter how we slice it this just had too many things on it so um i know you suddenly got catapulted into the chair position so this is all because steven called in sick today but i just want to just be mindful about our our time in terms of evenings and things like that too so i just want to put that out there okay thank you um are we ready to proceed thank you i can uh share my screen if you're ready for me and i will be uh be short um let's see can you see my presentation we can thank you okay great slideshow here so i'm thi argemont i'm the washington county public works director um i'm also the the manager for warm-up and stephen just asked me to give you a quick overview of what warmer is some of the who house and what we're working on um so warmer formed in 2019 it's a solid waste authority and ann arbor was at the table as part of the the formation with staff members president who provided a lot of input and then ann arbor did not join at that time your city council decided to to hold off but they have decided to to join recently um we've been working over the last year to get all the approvals because it takes a long time to amend our articles of incorporation and we just had the notice published in mli on sunday and so we just have to file it with the secretary of state and the county clerk and then it's official so you will soon be a member of warmup um so just to give you an idea of who's involved um city of ann arbor dexter ipsilani in saline as well as the townships advance ann arbor pittsfield gypsillani and scio together when everyone's when ann arbor joins that'll make up about five sevenths of the county population uh the goal of the short-term goal that the warmer members have agreed on and this comes from our strategic plan we created a document that's a working document that outlines what our strategic plan goals are and how we're going to accomplish those so the the first one education based we're working on uh increasing the quantity of quality recycling through analyzing data standardizing our communications and media outreach and implementing a cohesive and comprehensive media campaign and we've done a lot of that accomplished a lot of that by applying for grants which is great because it's a very affordable way to do a lot of education but result we've also partnered with um nationwide organizations that have a lot of know-how in how to change behavior and improve the quality of the recycling stream so long-term goals looking at analyzing and pursuing collective contracting for recycling services as a group for member communities and also monitoring and supporting regional full-scale full-service drop-off stations to increase recycling access and i just want to note that we just at our most recent meeting on monday started looking at what would it take for us to have some kind of common contract together and that's an opt-in process so right now it's more of a thought experiment of what are the services that municipalities would like to contract for together and then how would we go about doing that and what would the savings be so just uh one thing that we've talked about since we have been working on increasing the quality and quantity of a recycling stream we could we all send our materials to the same murph and then get a long-term contract with that murph in order to get some kind of discount even if it's a couple percentage points so that's one idea of what we'd be looking at just to give you an idea of what we've been up to lately we through the grant that i've mentioned reduced the recycling contamination for warmer communities from just under 20 percent to just over 11 percent um so it's a 42 reduction uh we gathered a lot of data and so we're we know what each municipality's contamination rate is we know what material makeup they have for their recycling and we all have a lot of household data household level data of what kind of contamination we have so we we can do some very targeted outreach in the future um we also provide a lot of education to residents so through these campaigns we were working to get plastic uh films and bags out of the recycling stream and so we've we've made some grades a thousand dollars in your packet it says a 144 we had applied for 144 and got a 137 to continue to reduce contamination um and increase the crap the capture of recycling and i'll note that we applied for that grant with um the assumption that ann arbor would be a joining member of warma and so the majority of the grant funds are actually going to be targeted towards the ann arbor community and i'll go through what um just a little bit about what that looks like so um here's i'll start with what we're going to work on next or this year first we're going to learn more about collective contracting our attorney bob davis works for a different authority as well and has had some success there he works for sakura southeast southern oakland county um so look at common contracting and then we're going to prepare for the grant we're going to look at what materials we need for to do our education outreach campaign and get that underway may through june we're going to launch ann arbor your first up because we want to run you through the grant that the rest of warmer ran through last year i'll include more detail on that next and then warm up as a whole with ann arbor included is going to go through the app to action grant and what that does it takes all the data that we gathered during the grant and then uses that data to target our goals and the warm uh board will decide what those goals are most likely going to be related to either reducing contamination more or trying to get those people who are not putting their cart out to the curb to start recycling so last slide here um just summary of what the audit will look like or what the grant will look like for ann arbor the first part is we do an audit we look at what what does your recycling look like how much contamination is there um and they actually sort out you know they pull a couple i forget how many samples it'll be but it's probably like five or seven different trucks um from different parts of ann arbor and then they'll sort those or they'll take a sample from each truck and sort it into 30 different categories and say okay here's how much contamination you have here's how much cardboard you have here's much other materials different types of plastics and whatnot so once we have that data then we send out the information about here's what you can recycle here's what the program's going to look like let people know do a lot of education and outreach and then we actually send uh they've been called recycling detectives to stop by so they walk up and down the streets they just open the lid see what's on top if there's contamination that's visible they'll mark what it is in the particular category and they move on to the next place and then they uh well i guess they punch it into their phone of here's what contamination was found or no contamination and then they move on and then after that there's another audit to see what kind of outreach or what kind of impact the outreach and education had so that's the overview um and it's just for single family homes so there's something like 26 000 single family homes uh within the grant so with that i'll turn it over for questions chris um i that's great so one question i have comes from looking at the training video from the u of m for what can be recycled and the u of m has i don't know whose trucks but it all goes to your murph which i think is located north of chelsea right and there's little itty bitty differences and i hate to be picky but for example the u of m training video says you take very carefully take all the caps off your bottles because we don't want the caps mixed in and it's a contaminant and the ann arbor um which is we have our own murph they say well keep your caps on the bottles because that way they won't get mixed up and and lost so there's little differences and i'm wondering if part of your program you know you're gonna do outreach and get everybody on the on the right train but what's the chance of getting i mean because your murph is not that far removed from our murph are the resulting materials more or less the same and can we harmonize those so everybody's marching to the same drum you know we got the university island and then there's a mayan part of the university or who picks up my stuff and have i asked a question i'm rattling on um i can i could start with um warmer doesn't have a murph um i think you're referring to to western washington recycling authority which is a separate authority uh which includes like chelsea and others so just i'll start with that but they're also going to be running a similar program to reduce contamination but as far as getting the information out regarding differences we send a mailer to the residents that includes what is what is not recyclable it's not going to get into the level of specificity of things like putting the caps on or taking them off it's it's really focused on the the bulk of people who are trying to do better and are going to spend just a little bit of time looking at it but we're probably not we're not aiming to reach those folks who are the 20 super recyclers um that are you know looking for those kind of specific differences we we will end up hitting some of those things because we have a hotline uh people call in and then we can answer those questions so we can start to um try to reach that but we're really trying to get that bulk of material that people just don't they aren't quite paying attention and so we're trying to make that material more available but your to your question about um there are little differences so you know we ran through this program last year and city of ypsilanti did not take glass whereas the rest of the warmer communities did take glass and so we we had to specify that on our all of our outreach materials and part of the part of warmer's goal is to have a common collectible list of recyclables that works for all communities within the borders and one of the things that one of the ways that we can achieve that is by sending all of our materials to the same merv and so when i mentioned that kind of that common contracting that would be one of the major benefits is all of our educational materials can be the same no matter where you're at thank you you're back i'm not sure who had their hand up next let's go yes wondering um you mentioned collective or collaborative contracting is there any likelihood that you might use ann arbor smurf uh yeah so right now um one of the things i'm working out is where do all of our because a lot of things have switched in the last you know two or three months since the ann arbor came on board and so i'm i'm following up with haulers and with municipalities but i i get the notion that at least five of the seven current warm-up members um likely send their materials to the ann arbor move so some of this is gonna you know it might be an easier push than than we think john yeah just a quick thank you theo for this i'm just really pleased that we're at this point i think it was just two years ago the commission was kind of stuck of how to get ann arbor into warmer and here we are so thanks for your update and just very happy that our persistence has kind of moved us forward thanks yeah thanks for um those of you who are on the uh commission at that point for the multiple resolutions i believe you passed to help with that process kathy i wasn't on the commission then but i do remember that unionized labor was uh an issue and can you just give us an update on that where you use unionized labor and where you don't uh yeah so it's it's completely up to the municipality for what they put out for contracts or not so um warmer has no authority over who you would use for anything unless you grant warmer that authority and so the the way that the collaborative contracting process would work is that the city would contract with warma and then warmer would contract with some kind of larger some kind of hauler or or murph so for example if we were to do collective contracting we would start with asking the city of ann arbor what would you like to have for services to be put out to bid and most likely you would say well we have trash that's hauled with unionized labor within our organization within uh the city of ann arbor's public services so we're not even going to put that out to bid and then we'd say okay great so you're interested in recycling services to put out to bid um what are your requirements or particularities of you know we have you have a living wage ordinance um so you'd say okay we're gonna put us out to contract here's what the requirements are for that contract if you have to meet these standards and then you the benefit of it is if you have a neighbor that has a similar requirements as you you now have an economy of scale so by putting it out there you also um callers can transfer over borders more seamlessly and so they can optimize their routes and now you save greenhouse gas emissions because you have a very efficient route going back and forth so there's that's what we're trying to take advantage of here but it all starts with the city saying here's what we want here's what our requirements are okay and could a requirement be unionized labor absolutely oh okay thank you so i'm uh acutely aware that our time is moving on are there other questions on this particular topic with the warm-up i really appreciate you staying theo and um thank you for that presentation it's great to see that we're making this progress thank you um all right so with that i'm going to move on to just briefly say that we have on the agenda emergency ki distribution which is potassium iodide which was addressed by the environmental commission a couple of years ago um and apparently it has not moved forward and steve was going to lead that discussion tonight and had some additional information so i'm going to specifically say that we'll defer this to a future meeting um since he is not here um we have our next item on the agenda under new business um was a referral or as a deferral referral from the city council about discussions with the university of michigan for housing units for workforce housing specifically on u of m north campus i would appreciate some discussion from council member griswold who was um involved in initiating this and perhaps we can figure out a plan for moving forward with this particular item oh okay thank you i see this as a multi-month review i haven't had a chance to talk to missy stouts yet um and if there is anyone on the commission that is interested in this and would like to talk to me more about it before the next meeting uh i would welcome that discussion but i don't want to take a lot of time tonight because it is getting late and you know it's it's going to be a multi-month process in introducing my resolution though it was really uh very general with the idea that the commissions who were touched by it be the transportation commission the planning commission economic development energy commission that they would provide some data and metrics to support this coordination and in talking to derek dela court these types of discussions have been going on with university of michigan staff however we've never had any policy direction on this topic um and so that i don't know if that answers any questions but it's it's really uh just the beginning of a discussion and it's going to take i would say many months before we're able to have a city council and regents discussion about this we've we've tried to have meetings in the past with the regions and and with code that they just continually get i mean it's been years now they just get bumped down the road until we have a healthier condition and that hasn't happened um okay it looks like chris graham sorry i just see your hand um lisa this is this is suggesting that people who work for the university of staff have housing provided in some way i presume for rent but by the university um it it could be by the university it could be co-op housing because the part of north campus like there's some land along green road it could be sold to a private developer it could be a 99-year lease to a private developer there are many options and i'm not a housing expert so that's one of the reasons that i think it needs to go to staff and to the commissions to see what's what's feasible and what is going to be most effective in terms of our 820 goals it probably is true that most people who are staffed to the university are driving in from out of town some even from detroit or bay city or whatever that studies show the people coming more than an hour away to work here thank you um the university has uh home zip codes for all employees so again it's it's a very complex issue but i i think that we should at least start the discussion shannon um we talked about a little bit of planning commission and one of the comments from the planning manager was that i bet many commissions are going to want to meet with u of m and so there might be some if there's going to be maybe there's some sort of coordinating something that can happen with um meetings between some of the various commissions and um so they're not meeting with every commission so i just asked that if that is a next step in any part of this that we might think about how to make it a more streamlined company oh okay thanks yes and right now city staff um meet with university staff on a quarterly basis including the university planner sugat and others and i just received the minutes from that last meeting so i would expect that the city administrator would coordinate any such meetings and i'm i'm not sure who who else we might want to include are you thinking about like experts in sustainability at the u or i was just thinking that if um if each commission is interested in meeting with representatives of u of m that perhaps there could be some sort of collaborative setting where several of the commissions meet at the same time so that it's not them you know going to every commission i guess is what i was thinking if there's some way to do some sort of joint something um okay so it's just a good idea i'll i'll ask the city administrator to coordinate anything like that and so so that commission members aren't dealing directly with the university of michigan does that seem reasonable yeah and and i know that the planning director was going to be reaching out to them um brett leonard and so it just you might even talk with him or something like that to just so that it's a more coordinated response oh okay and i know that brett is part of those quarterly meetings already okay thank you for the idea is there uh well any other questions in particular i guess my question is how do we want to go for tonight in terms of closing do we want to suggest a work group or sending you questions kathy or what would be a best way for our commission to proceed to potentially contribute to moving forward on this issue um i guess if anyone has any suggestions for me or questions just send them to me and i will respond to everyone i don't want to create a lot of administrative overhead at this point but i want to make sure that anyone who's interested feels included so send your questions to kathy all right so our next item on the agenda has to do with the dear call resolution which we um passed last month um and it's back on the agenda um today and there i recall that um lisa sent me some information about the dear call as a potential instead of having us vote on it again that's not the intent for tonight but if i could ask you lisa to comment on some of the thoughts that you had had with moving forward with this so um this anything having to do with the deer call needs to needs discussion with city staff and so so that that has to happen um budget discussions with the city are starting really soon and if we want to get the deer call into consideration something's got to get to council fast those two statements are in tension with each other um so i don't know what's going to happen um i'm i've conte i'm trying to get a meeting with mr delcort who reached out to me and is willing to talk about it um and so i that's all i can say i really right now i don't know exactly what to say um the the deer call resolution that environmental commission passed is not going to go to council in the form that it was written um in part because of the form in which it was written it's just written in a way that we don't typically write them and it asks for city council to ask for the call to be resumed and funded and that is i don't think that's the best way to go because i'm afraid that's just going to get voted down i think what we want to ask for is that consideration of resuming funding for the call and the trade-offs of that about with other funding priorities gets into the budget discussions for this time around because you know this isn't the big budget year this is this this is the we're we're in the second year of a two-year budget and so it is difficult to change the budget um and last year council voted very deliberately to take the dear call funding out which neither council member griswold or i supported um so we will do our best but um there i think it is pretty unlikely that anything on the deer call will come back to ec to vote again on you voted a resolution we voted to approve a resolution that expresses the spirit of ec's support for not not making a big darn pause in dear management right and so whatever councilmember griswold and i are able to bring to council will be noted and in the spirit of what you all said but probably not to the letter of the ec resolution and i really hope that we can get some staff mobilized and supporting us so that we can get this into the budget discussion thank you um i think that does address the approach that we wanted which is well or our mandate which is to advise counsel and so um taking that forward is something that i very much appreciate it is uh one of the issues that i'd like to see us move on so uh looks like chris graham has a comment oh um is it both of your opinion that that there aren't the votes on the council to proceed with the request of the environmental commission at this time [Music] if you frame it as voting to agree to fund it to which is a kind of pre-commitment before we've seen all of the things that are on the table for this budget you know for this second year re-evaluation of the budget i think that would be very difficult to get the votes for because it's not the even the snow sidewalk thing that we voted on in the past meeting was worded in that way let us consider it in in our discussion of all the priorities that we have on the table for this budget and so i think that is the way people are feeling good about supporting things right now so should we or some of us who are on the component side of this um be meeting with city staff or with a council member no no just i will be meeting with mr delacourt if council member griswold wants to join me she will i don't even know when that's going to happen did i did i say did i say the wrong i'm i'm sorry i'm really tired did i say that i was going to meet with mr delacourt or did i say i was going to meet with councilmember griswold i don't know of course did i say the right thing okay yeah yeah so no it would not be uh there's no need for the commission to lobby at this point it's really um it is a better process to consult staff before voting on resolutions so that's we're kind of backing up the process it is great to have the ec support and to be able to claim that the ec is concerned about a longer positive deer management all of that is excellent and i'm really grateful for the work and thought and support that you all have and so now we'll um we'll hope that we can work with staff to produce something that can come to the table i'm kind of worried that it wasn't i mean in the last budget go around staff was fully supportive of continuing deer management and the council voted it down i where i i assume that i assume council is going to change next november but uh that doesn't get us very far in the in this coming fiscal year's budget discussions um is there any sign that any council members are amenable to discussion about this matter um [Music] we might be able to go another year before the deer population really begins to get ramping up fast again but we can't go two years more before before they really begin to bite quite literally um so i would suggest that we wait until uh we are in a budget discussion and at that point um your lobbying efforts would probably be most effective but not at this time so will you let us know um please when uh we can be of help uh we can yes we can i don't mean we the environmental commission there are other people interested there we can push um uh as constructively and as positively as we can okay i'd like to suggest that um chris's comment shows the urgency of concern as well as the unanimous passing of the resolution by the commission so i hope that's useful to you thank you thank you i'm sorry this is a tough problem it shouldn't be um so with that um we will leave the resolution in your hands your capable hands council members and thank you for moving it forward and supporting our our recommendations um all right i'm gonna try and do a speed round of um maybe i should just ask of any of the standing commissions committees the work groups are there any particular reports out that anyone would like to make of i'll just go through and quickly natural features well you'll be pleased to know that uh two or three sections of amendments of udc got discussed today with a couple of members of the committee that are working on that um you'll also be pleased to know that there was a michigan association of planning webinar a couple nights ago discussing um uh woodlands ordinances across the state and how not to do things and how to do things one of the court cases involved in that is in ann arbor township and there's a petitioner up there who does not want to comply with any aspect of the anne arbor township code that requires work on natural features as a part of the petition and the courts have resoundingly denied his claim hanover township's ordinance is substantially based upon ann arbor's that we wrote 20 years ago it um suggests that you should have a master plan that fully defends your point of view about protection of natural features you should have a code that does what ours does and theirs does which says as a part of your petitioning process you should minimize the effect or impact on natural features in a development proposal it does not say you shall not it says you'll minimize it the code says there and here that you will provide as part of the planning process alternative plans to show that you really truly have studied how to minimize the impact on natural features each part of the code describes very clearly why each natural feature is important in enough detail to say to a judge you've really thought through this you really know what you're doing you've really exacted a reasonable level of regulation on your petitioners and i'm very proud to say what we did 20 years ago is standing up where a lot of places are not um as you know we're trying to work on increasing protection for trees in ann arbor and um i'm hoping we finally get through this process to be able to do that and still have very great success in the courts if we ever have an issue thank you thanks chris lisa did you have something you wanted to okay thank you i'm going to do a quick one on pollinators um i'm working with the pollinator work group to provide some really interesting updates to the city's website and perhaps energy a connected one in the future i want to announce that you all are invited and i'll ask galen to send out a link to a 2030 district session that will be held next tuesday february 8th from noon it's a lunch and learn session on native landscapes and green infrastructure for which i recruited some really great speakers david mendel from plantwise katie whitachak from the city of the county rain garden program and brad smith who is a um professor who created a prairie in his backyard and they'll show the transformation our goal is to get and inspire larger landowners that ten or developers that attend these kinds of sessions to see if they will switch over or install native plantings in their space so that's that's something that i'm pretty excited about so the next group zero waste any reports on zero waste nothing nothing to report okay there are things to say but it is 9 41 and i i see a lot of really tired faces on this screen okay um construction develop demolition i know that chris or steve is not here anything from planning shannon just super briefly we haven't met a lot because the holidays but we did get reports on the um new um affordable housing projects on washington and on fifth so and both are targeting um eight to zero goals so let's just say that great uh anything from parks i'll defer to next month since it's so late and there's not that much to report all right thank you energy i think our energy rep is not here uh city council lisa and kathy okay staff feeling anything that you would like to say oh chris graham let's see your hand and um i've heard that there's a movement of foot in the planning apparatus in the city hall to greatly condense our master plans to some document that's a hundred pages long so it's not so complicated the master plan component that refers to natural features is itself 100 pages long or so it won't work in court for natural features in ann arbor to more or less do away with the natural features master plan component i i'm respectfully requesting that you check this out and stop this process at least insofar as natural features is concerned but i'm worried about lots of other details that disappear in such a condensation don't know if this happening i may be completely misinformed i don't you're not the one doing it i'm not just please uh called out in that court case in ann arbor township was the existence of a master plan supporting natural features in the township that was very well detailed doing away with it wouldn't be good thank you um galen is there any report from staff no staff report this evening all right um with that i have to move to um public comment general time i'll quickly read that statement which is that this is an opportunity for people to speak up to three minutes please call the phone number [Music] if you would like to make a comment and it is one it is 888 788 009 meeting id 989-2851-1637 and um if you would like to speak you'll be given a prompt to raise your hand and you'll be called on with the last three digits of your phone number so um galen ask if anyone is available to make public comment there's no one available for public comment all right thank you um and with that i will entertain you a motion to adjourn kathy second investigating thank you very much um so of everyone in favor of a journey say hi very good job rita hi thank you all right thanks so much thanks for sticking in i appreciate your watching me fumble through this and thank you for all your input tonight and first this extended meeting i'm sorry all right good night thank you all thanks you

it's not a every single year will we won't we will they won't they type a situation where it's hanging over i love the the idea and concept that this is something that is going to put many people's minds at ease for a very long time and i think you're absolutely 100 correct i think this goes as important as to protect children physically which should always be a priority it also is a big part of their mental and social growth i think a lot of people when we talk about sro services i think a lot of people miss that aspect of it and i think on um i think specifically between the k2 to eight and specifically six to eight i think that's incredibly vital so to know that this is this is gonna be around for three years before we even have to really start looking at this again i think this is wonderful and everyone that was involved in this i truly thank you i think this is fantastic so nice job thank you mr fizzicaro any more questions regarding finance and operations seeing none i'm going to ask for a roll call please mrs cappello yes mrs everhart yes mr fizzycarro yes mr canafen uh yes to everything except for where my name appears on 9.4 okay mrs noah yes mr lancelata yes everything but 9.4 as it pertains to me okay miss lay yes to everything except 9.4 as it pertains to me mr megan yes mrs ryan yes motion carries okay moving to item 10 personnel i need a motion to approve items 10.1 through 10.10.

the theme is casino night there will be cocktail parties food from local restaurants djs dancing auctions baskets i'm trying to make this sound good black dancing yeah blackjack craps roulette and an exclusive poker table um tickets are 100 bucks piece and the best part is that there will be no losers because it benefits the students of each we thank scott zielinski the president of the eastern education foundation for his hard work and everyone and for their benefiting our schools and our our students if you'd like to purchase tickets or at least to take a look at the flyer you can go to yves sham education or you can go to their each education foundation homepage on facebook and they are looking for volunteers so if anyone is interested please let me know okay thank you so much for that time wow amazing report mr lanzalata thank you very very much any other committee chairs would like to report on anything they've done this month miss everhart i'm afraid to follow that actually i will be brief so i am the new curriculum chair this this year for curriculum and i'd like to welcome committee members marianne capello and jamie lee we met this week and with miss mcgulick and with uh in the presence of president ryan um that sounds so funny doesn't it that's good job um we met for the first time to go over it was a great opportunity for us to you know uh indoctrinate miss lee to how the meetings will run in the future and to explain to her how curriculum runs in the district we showed her like accounting methods and we discussed those kinds of things in case she had questions when she looks at budget pages danny went to great length explaining categories and subgroups and all that kind of stuff so that was great review for us and a great way to get jamie hitting the ground running with with those kinds of things the other thing we talked about were some agenda items that we already voted on we talked about the calendar which we already voted on and we talked about some of the updates that are continually happening with the eastham township school district safe return return plan which is online under our website and you can look on there every time changes happen in the district miss mcgoulick and her team update those new additions to the safe return plan in italics so you can see what has changed or what's new to that document i think the last thing we did talk about briefly was some of the curriculum revisions that are going ongoing we will be looking at uh quite a lot of things and apparently the uh the board will be reviewing a lot of documents here through the year we're reviewing mathematics english and language arts we're looking about at the comprehensive health and pe we're looking at curriculum for visual and performing arts and we're looking at technology so those are ongoing with her and her staff and as board members we will be looking at those documents for review and for question we also talked uh briefly about the budget that is ongoing and that's a great opportunity for um to bring ms lee up to date on some of the things that curriculum does cover in the budget and we will be getting budget pages and we will be looking in greater detail those items that curriculum and technology will be addressing in the budget so we look forward to that over the next couple of months as we continue to develop the budget so thank you for your time that's it thank you mrs everhart that was fantastic any other board members have any reports annie mrs noah i just wanted to update the group on a liaison for what's called the wrap room and some of you may know what it is but for those of you who don't it is a wonderful organization they actually have physical space and [Music] it was started by three moms who lost their sons to i believe a drug overdose so i just want to read what's on on their website it's at wrap room.org just so you understand what they do so they're not licensed therapists or counselors they are advocates for those seeking treatment and offer support for their family members our goal is to empower families through shared experiences we strive to help our clients and their family members understand addiction its effect on the entire family unit and offer hope so i just wanted to preface that we had a meeting a few weeks ago of the board of directors and mr hoffman is on the board of directors as well as mr buchabello we are also going to be welcoming two principals from our elementary schools mr de blasi from van zandt and mrs schroeder from bieler so i'm very excited about that and they will be joining us at our next meeting in march the wrap room board of directors consists of a large number of individuals from different organizations representatives from the police department their community outreach unit somebody's always there and again you know having the sros so the police department is involved and marlton business association in helping families especially around the holidays to offer support financial support meals things like that and then of course representatives from the high school cherokee lenape regional school board and um something very exciting in the fall the cherokee peer leaders were able to go to the middle schools i think that was november and if i understand that did not happen last year so that was wonderful again that started up where the peer leaders went into the middle schools from cherokee and um [Music] i don't think i have much of anything else we'll meet again in march and our group will be getting larger as we welcome mrs schroeder and mr de blasi thank you mrs knoll and thank you to all your township staff for joining that committee and representing us thank you any other comments or committee reports okay right now i'm going to move into old business but we don't have any old business but we do have some new business based on the recommendation of the chief school administrator i need a motion to issue a new schedule of meetings beginning in february with executive session beginning at 6 30 pm and public meetings beginning at 7 30 pm can i have a motion please mrs knoll and mr canthan any questions okay um can we have a roll call please this is capello yes this is everhart yes mr fizzagaro yes mr canton yes mrs noll yes mr lanzalada yes miss lee yes mr megan yes mrs ryan yes motion carries okay that's everything for new business now we're going to move into open public comment the meeting will now be open to the public referencing any items of interest however if your questions or comments pertain to litigation student or personnel items or negotiations we ask that you seek the superintendent after the meeting since we do not discuss these matters in public we will ask that you limit your comments to three minutes per person and also this section is meant for one comment per person anyone from the public willing to speak come right up to the microphone if you could state your name and address clearly heather sponseller 34 bonaire drive first i'd like to say thank you so much for serving on our board of education i know it's often a thankless job i'm here to ask you to do a policy now that masks will be optional as soon as the public emergency is over february 10th so the governor declared another public emergency it is supposed to be over february 10th i think we should have a policy now that as soon as that is over we are mass optional in school the reason i'm saying this is because the school is the only place where my kids wear masks they go over a friend's house no mess they go to dance activity sports no mass they go to stores they go to restaurants no masks they're fine the covered rate has been going down and down the risk for children is so low children in the past two years in the state of new jersey since it started the pandemic started two children have died from covid four total with covid all having comorbidities it's horrible i don't i truly want zero children to die ever but in that same time period 42 children ages 5 to 17 have committed suicide that means that mental health is so much more important than and so much more dangerous for our children than covet is we need to focus on the mental health and having them wear masks all day is horrible they need the social emotional connection with their friends classmates and teachers making mass optional is great because if anyone is worried they can put an n95 mask on they are protected it doesn't matter what anyone else is wearing or not wearing they can deal with themselves and then for people that know the risk is extremely low they can not wear a mask parents are fully capable of making the correct decision for their own children and their families so that is why i'm asking again now to make the policy so that once the mandate is dropped we can go straight to mass optional i want us to stop treating children like they're diseased they're not every single student staff and teacher that wants the vaccine has had plenty of time to get as many shots as they want so if if they believe in that and they want that they're protected we need to put this back in the parent's decision and make mass optional thank you thank you very much [Applause] i think there's a good question address it yeah um yeah yeah i'll just respond the sponsor arms it's so nice to i just wanted to respond and say uh it's great to see you um in person i i've gotten your emails and i and i i really appreciate it like you've been a voice in my head uh through the journey as as all the parents are that reach out and i i just it's nice to put a name in the face so i just um thank you for your contributions along the way um tonight and uh you know i would and it kind of give me a nice opportunity actually to sort of speak a little bit to your question and um because we are you know i mean uh i want to say um you know that that masked mandate that's current in the state of new jersey mass required in old new jersey schools that's been in place for such a long time right going back to september 2020 when districts first reopened for in-person learning it got the the recent 30-day emergency extension by governor murphy but we know that'll expire in mid-february and with cases decreasing and public pressure building we can we can anticipate that there may not be another extension you know and at that point it would revert back to districts to determine their own path mass is optional or mass is required and etsd we are prepared and we are ready for that moment when it comes so we've discussed it we are ready i will share more details next week not tonight so that we can all be proactive for that day when the mandate ends all right thank you dr smith are there any other members of the audience that would like to have public comment please come on up if you could just clearly state your name and address thank you let's see if we can reach this anywhere can i get that sword first off justin it is lovely to meet you i would like to thank police chief chu and especially rice principal kelly cam for their continued support in our school um i'd like to begin by quoting that our president has claimed that we're no longer in a pandemic and we it's glaringly obvious that we cannot trust medical advice from the head of our country nor can my children trust their educators anymore as they have been informed since september to hurry up and get the adults vaccinated so we can stop wearing masks in school and that unvaccinated adults are dangerous if a president can claim this is not a pandemic anymore why is evsham township school district still claiming it is one murphy decided to reinstate the public health emergency for 30 days yet the rates of covet infection have dropped dramatically in the past few days directly related to the rise after winter break according to the state dashboard so there is no foreseeable reason why the child's mask mandate will not end on february 10th congresswoman stefanik has stood up for the children of a new york county striking down governor hocal's unconstitutional statewide school mass mandate rooted in politics and not science as she believes that violates state law she asserts that by forcing masks on children in our schools these mandates have impeded the development of our next generation studies published in pubmed highlight how missing educational opportunities impacts the child's neuro development compared to children from 2011 to 2019 pandemic children suffer significantly reduced verbal motor and overall cognitive performance even in the absence of direct infection and illness environmental changes associated with covet are significantly and negatively and affecting infant child development so what do we do about this the assembly advanced advances bills aimed to improve mental health services in k-12 schools admitting that students have experienced unprecedented stress during the pandemic spurring a mental health crisis of anxiety and depression caused by increased social isolation you know the mandatory quarantines that we continue to inflict on healthy children why would we spend millions of dollars slapping band-aids on the wounds that the government and the border vet are inflicting upon our children why don't we just stop abusing the children all together the brownstone institute provides over 400 studies to display how school closures and mass mandates have failed in curbing transmissions or reducing deaths instead the restrictive policies were ineffective and devastating failures causing immense harm and no government has been able to prove or even claim their policies to be successful since i can't show you my graph these policies harm children such as psychological harm depression anxiety suicide drug use crippling isolation domestic and child abuse sexual abuse of children largely affecting women and minorities and per heather's comment there's no justification for masking children who have a near zero risk of death two children in new jersey died from 2020 to 2021 which is of course seriously an issue however the risk of suicide and murder is much higher 42 suicides 59 homicides 16 drug-related deaths and deaths in the 5-17 category marlboro school district has taken a 9-0 stand to support giving parents the choice to mask their children or not upon the relief of the governor's directive our children in nevisham have to wear masks in schools but not at sport events restaurants or crowded shopping malls franklin township public school as well has taken a stand for their children voting to end in-school close contact quarantines and allow the children to remain in school saving the children from the depressing isolation issue that a state assembly wants to spend millions of dollars to band-aid the harm of force masking and quarantining of the children clearly outweighs any perceived benefits we've not been provided any statistical evidence to support the continuing mass policy including any safety data statistics on adverse incidents and never has masking my children kept them from being forced to quarantine we've patiently negotiated communicated and followed rules but we are no longer willing to be submissive to unconstitutional mandates that are causing physical mental and emotional harm especially to my own three children thank you for your time thank you mrs foley hi if you could clearly state your name and address my name is katie masterangelo and i am at 25 hardwood road we are here tonight to educate you on a few things that have been happening that we are now made aware of we are requesting for proper action to take place to resolve these issues immediately please take notice your oath to office affirms that your main purpose is to protect and maintain my individual rights by upholding the constitution this includes the rights of my heritage those in my care which are my children to date eve sham township school district board of education and superintendent have agreed to receive three million seven hundred thirty nine thousand one hundred and eight dollars from the sr1 sr2 and arp esser in order to receive these funds you are required to implement prevention and mitigation strategies also known as recommendations which includes using unapproved medical devices such as masks discriminating against and depriving healthy children of their in-person public educations by enforcing the by enforcing close contact quarantine am i pushing an experimental gene therapy drug on us to keep our children in school these are a few laws that we've come across title ix title vi of civil rights act 1964 is labor law legislation that outlawed discrimination based on color race religion sex and national origin section 504 of the rehabilitation act 1973.

so it's in the ballpark it's responsible it's not insane reducing the staff at the sixth grade level would elevate that number to 19.3 just you know something to be conscious of the proposed seventh and eighth grade class sizes are the best of times worst of the time scenario where our 7th grade class size average at 26.3 is the highest it's ever been the 8th grade class size is the lowest it's ever been so um it's a little bit of a wrinkle in our enrollment to add sixth grade or seventh grade teachers it probably won an early ad but it would really really lower the class averages there uh down to significantly lower um it's it's at a high number but reasonable at the moment i mean that's not um outrageously above where we've been but it is certainly high in the seventh and eighth grade you know there there are limits these are at the limits of what we would consider appropriate you know the top end and the bottom end we wouldn't want to go really much lower than 22 in in the middle school we wouldn't want to go much higher than 26 but it's kind of where we are at the high school the ratio is 15.1 students to one teacher that makes us the 14th highest ratio in 21 dergby schools and i think you can think 15 per teacher it's not really you're considering all the certified staff in a building which is why it's not like we're way overstaffed we're you know two-thirds of the way up the chain for durgby high schools we're also in the second year if you'll recall of a phase-in we're reducing from six sections to five in line with pretty much all of connecticut i think we were one of the only high schools in connecticut if not the only that had six sections through our budget or through our negotiations process this was part of the consideration i really would not recommend reducing staff there which will certainly compromise the effort to go from six to five and maintain you know class sizes again within the context of a pandemic so continued priorities we do focus intently on at the building classroom level our central office leadership team is incredibly lean we have four positions roughly allocated to central office makes us 21st out of 21 durgby school systems in terms of students per central office administrator when we added the community coordinator position that ratio took us to 19th for some perspective that's how far out of whack it really was so you know we're we we focus intently at the classroom level i'm not complaining about the ratio at central office i think we're we're doing things we should be that's why it's my recommended budget the cps you know church for public schools ranks 12th to 21 derby students per mental health provider we were 20th when we focused on sel the board put its you know resources where its needs were where our goals were and we focused on that and we've you know dramatically improved in that respect we're second of 21 in dirt b instructional assistants per you know or students per instructional assistant ratio and that's in large part due to the programs that we've brought in house that are more need intensive same could be said when you look at that ppe per pupil expenditure ratio the the students that we've brought in have more intensive needs it's cheaper and more efficient and better for the child than outplacing them at a greater cost but it's certainly it's going to impact your your costs the discretionary spending history there were some kind of like some questions around the periphery of this and i thought it'd be interesting to share so it went back to 2003-4 our proposed budget is twelve thousand dollars higher for staff training today than it was in 2003 for so when we made that recommendation in it was it was higher it was only 12 000 hires the instructional supply line is 240 thousand less than it was in two thousand three four textbook supply budget is eight thousand less than it was about twenty years ago the library resource supplies about fifty thousand less than it was twenty years ago the curriculum material supply is roughly 7 000 less than it was 20 years ago now the overall instructional expense line represented 6.5 percent of our budget then it represents about five point six percent of our budget now so what does this really mean a lot of the discretionary spending lines are down because we had about a thousand more kids back then a lot of those lines are down because technology spending is significantly up and we've changed the way that we do business and when you look at our performance it's really objectively the best it has ever been ever and so you know the the questions about fluctuating and is this too low or is this too high i wanna i can share with you in confidence that our administrative team many of whom are here tonight vin marlene are support staff who play a role in the formulation of our budget we evaluate the the multiple spheres of which you know come together in the budget formulation process you know the educational needs of our kids the political and logistical issues like enrollment the contractual obviously with respect to our our you know various bargaining units and um how we navigate that as well as the social and health more than ever against our budget and we respectfully recommend this budget before you as a vehicle to advance our goals in a fiscally responsible manner in advancing our goals really is about student growth driven by the supports and resources that help that happen so this bounce forward you know the visual will look familiar to you because this is the what we put together last year when we talked about the infusion of federal support and we asked ourselves at that time geez you know there's a short window of this money we could spend a lot of money on just trying to plug holes for short periods of time or we could invest in our human capacity our our organizational capacity with this money to yes address learning needs but ensure that when you know this pandemic has run its course and our these resources may have run their course that we are organizationally undoubtedly better for the experience and that's what we did so this year you know an effort to close the achievement gap we added reading and math support folks at the elementary grades math support people at the middle and high school one position in each location importantly we increased our building-based administration incrementally at the elementary grades which i guarantee you that every administrator in this room would tell you has been incredibly beneficial not because oh there's just another person there to monitor the but because that time is focused on we call science scientifically based research interventions where we [Music] review student performance we develop plans we coach teachers around how to close gaps for students in reading writing and math in particular that you know we spend that time coaching teachers and supporting them in classrooms and so you know again it reaches that organizational goal of improving capacity that is certainly warranted and beneficial additionally we've been focused on coaching acceleration and so acceleration is the idea that you know kids had significant learning gaps as much as we tried as much as we i think did very well in terms of providing instruction over the course of the pandemic right from three days after the pandemic to having computers on and kids homes and doing the best we could there are gaps admittedly and so acceleration means you don't go back and try and reteach everything if you try and go back and re-teach all the time and things that were missed you will always perpetually be behind acceleration is an emphasis on we're going to move forward in the curriculum we're going to provide scaffolded supports for you to be able to understand these concepts that we're currently working on and provide real-time intervention that's connected to what we're doing now to make the learning easier for you and more relevant as opposed to teaching you a skill from a year and a half ago that you missed outside a context of anything else in the curriculum and trying to just hope it sticks to you we've spent a lot of time money and energy on acceleration um and coaching those skills and our teachers have been incredible in terms of the way that they've been able to pick that up and run with it we've also spent a lot of time on professional development around environments building constructive school environments particularly at the middle school how do we do a better job of engaging middle school learners giving them more choice and ownership of their learning goal setting and mike anderson is a national consultant probably somebody we could have afforded to be honest prior to the infusion of federal money and he's done an incredible job for us we're very very happy with how he supported our staff um again using you know professional development to build capacity this is where you know we've built that money in i talked about our professional development budget being 12 000 more than it was two decades ago this money supports that effort and we have that in it you know i just want to reiterate the budget that we have presented includes these supports and it we are moving forward a great speed and and i'm very proud of the effort that these guys put in our every teacher our our ias our support staff they've done a tremendous job navigating dare i say unprecedented challenges but uh you know i think this budget allows us with the support of federal assistance to really continue to grow evolve through the 22 23 year it allows us to address you know the the kind of obligatory insurance issue that we have and also meet the needs of vastly growing enrollment so that concludes my summary for you and i'd be certainly happy to take questions our administrative team is here to hopefully help me with any questions and add a different voice and perspective need be as well thanks adam jeff i don't know if you can speak to this but this is one of the concerns going through my mind right now is not simply this year's budget but where it leads us over the next few years so my understanding of what had happened back in the 90s it leads right up to 2005 so for the people who are watching our peak was around 2005 2006 right in terms of student enrollment and it's been declining for about 15 years what was going was going on before that i think it for a call correctly was probably about a 15-year increase in enrollment so this is something what we're facing right now over the next day 10 years is something we've faced before but one of the thoughts going through my mind i didn't pay that close attention to it in the 90s but my understanding was there was a lot more state funding coming in increasing every year do you know if that's the case and i say that looking at the next 10 years and wondering we've gotten you know we get about 10 million a year 9 million of it is ecs for the last 10 years basically with some other funding sources coming in but that was the lion's share of it of the 70 to 80 million dollar budget as it's grown in the last 10 years ecs has been stable so as ecs grow in the next 10 years as our student population is growing up is is increasing and that's not something specific to this budget but i just have that in mind as we're looking forward including this budget well i know it's one of vin's favorite slides but ecs funding has in essence been flat for the last what 20 years man plus i'm i'm excited to talk about the fact that i was in college in the 90s that i i wasn't following the cheshire budget then but um since 19 roughly 1990 the um state funding just in all the revenue but the bulk of it is ecs has been flat so as okay so what i was saying was not correct no okay i wasn't sure i was that's why i'm asking yeah it's basically so what's happened is our local taxpayer contribution has funded a greater total amount of our educational costs since 1990.

and that's the point you know i mean we're obviously up front that this does represent a 5.34 increase in the operating budget over last year we're also considerate of the fact as i said earlier that there's still federal money available that if the council sought to it to do something similar to last year maybe a step down approach or something like that might be prudent the other thing that's a real variable here is that by the time we get to to april when we're having these conversations we'll have more accurate projections for what our insurance costs will be as well as multiple months of existing real data around january february march claims uh that may influence this decision too for better or worse because again i you know we can't predict i hope that everybody's healthy but you can't predict that and that's a beautiful segue into my second question which is because i heard secretary cardona speak this morning about the need for more school counselors because we are coming off of two years of covered great stressors that our students have been under for two years now and um he is urging [Music] congress to appropriate monies to the states for more school counselors um and then the states would you know send it to the schools so that may or may not be happening but it leads me to ask you um and i'm sure we've looked at because it was two years ago that we um that we brought in those three more school counselors about yeah about that maybe a little bit longer and i'm just wondering three years ago this budget should have any more positions sure so we evaluate that certainly and kind of going back to what i had said earlier about the bounce forward plan you know as a former mental health provider and the fact that you know ms solano and i were both former school counselors we have the utmost respect for the impact that those people make on our school communities but you know i could spend eighty thousand dollars and get one school counselor or i could spend eighty thousand dollars and provide incredible training for 400 staff members to be better at meeting the social emotional needs those are two different worlds but if we elevate our capacity to provide a solid emotional foundation for students and make them engaged and provide support it doesn't doesn't replace a counselor but now the counselors are focused more on students that haven't had the same success in those environments you know what i'm saying it's we've been investing in making everybody even that much better at their craft and i think we've been our staff has really bought in done a tremendous job of doing that and if somebody were to say hey i've got a school counselor for you tomorrow would you take it yeah of course i would because i know that those positions as i said have substantial positive impact on our school communities but you know when we balance all of this and we have to look at the whole big picture we didn't include that and we emphasized the training instead god bless you great thank you for the for that answer and it really goes along with the discussion that i've been hearing a lot of which is we just need to the school communities just need to be healthier socially and emotionally absolutely and we are doing um a lot of that and i recognize it because the reality is is kids can't learn they're not going to catch up if you know if they're not coming to school in a really good place if they don't feel safe if they don't feel they can belong i mean these are the foundations maslow's hierarchy very fundamental but you know we've as a community as a board started focusing on that six years ago this isn't a new thing for us where i think a lot of people a lot of other communities are like well we better do something about this now we did something about it six years ago which is why we don't have to knee jerk in fill holes now great thank you for that explanation sure do you have an idea when the elementary schools it's been a while they start to departmentalize is it fifth grade or sixth grade across our elementary schools in sixth grade but there are pockets where it happens in a fifth grade classroom and there are some instances where for some subjects in some parts of the year teachers will partner up to do some of that departmentalization in fourth grade but not the way they're doing it in sixth grade like a chapman to truly departmentalize but right i just didn't know how far down to the primary grade even if that's an option for a future that's all i'm just kind of thinking out loud right now in my head sure yeah i mean that's that's more of a philosophical delivery model conversation um that we haven't really you know considered we've had you know over the last several years really tremendous success uh in our all of our standardized assessments and we're not even you know we're not teaching the standardized assessment we're really focused on the learning standards and it's translated really well to academic achievement so right now we weren't really even considering any sort of departmentalization even if even if it was perhaps fiscally more cost effective i don't know that i'd be willing to jeopardize the growth that our students have shown to do that could it be more so but we're ranked fifth right now so it was hard to top that i don't know that i'd want to risk it um can you for the first time i really have no idea what you're talking about oh sorry so what is departmentalization so i'm sure you're familiar with like math science social studies departments at middle high school i think the question is at the at the sixth grade level when students will have students transition to different teachers who a teacher may exclusively teach english language arts uh or math uh that happens at the fifth grade yeah it's is marlene was saying in pockets at fifth grade yeah certainly uh you know it's more established in sixth and then certainly seventh and beyond it's pretty pretty commonplace it's the standard i just haven't have you really heard you use that term before so i wasn't yeah sure sure sorry thank you for clarifying for people okay yeah my next question is um so the 134 esy that average 134 students on a typical year they'd go through the esy well we have 132 last year okay i don't know what the annual average would be could you ballpark it robin it was just more that the needs were more intensive last year than typical some parents chosen to have a summer but i think the majority of those students are those intensified students and then you have um some students that are more of the resource so our threshold not ours but the threshold for extended year services is when you're evaluating at the end of the year will a student regress beyond peers and will it take that student significantly longer than peers to recoup what they've lost so if you consider that let's say i'm just throwing out an arbitrary factor here you're not grounded in anything but an average student leaves for the summer and loses 10 points and they can gain those 10 points back in in four weeks when we're looking at extended year services those are students who lose 20 points but gain eight back in those four weeks so it's regression recoupment is the way that you know educators look at who do we provide extended year services to and now um can you just clarify you're adding three more elementary teachers but we're not sure specifically what grade levels or we are certain no we're certain on you know where those uh positions would be um can you i don't have my budget book and i lost that off the top of my head vent do you do you have that marlene do you know those today i know it was sixth grade at highland right sixth at highland yep uh i believe it was six a doolittle and then we had another teacher added at norton we were focused there am i wrong you're talking about what you would do if you cut the three but if we just look at it grade by grade this year to next year so because some are up and some are down is the point it's those three so kindergarten stays the same grade one goes up by two grade three goes down one grade four goes down one grade five goes up one and grade six i can mess that up a little bit hold on kindergarten stays the same grade one goes up by two grade two goes down by one grade three goes down by one grade four goes up one grade five stays the same and then grade six goes up two and then that's just total and then obviously it's spread out in each of the schools right if you look in the enrollment section of the budget book and again like i i want to go back to something i think i touched upon uh in the initial budget presentation and that you know there's a reason we don't put these in stone tablet you know you know how much building is going on if we get a just it happens where you get a significant number moving into fifth grade randomly from another into one building it happens and it's like all right well we better shift this sometimes we have to add positions that that happens on a regular basis um over the last six years i'm sure it's happened multiple times where like all of a sudden you get an influx into this one grade and now we're beyond the threshold you know if we had 20 kids move into seventh grade we'd have to do something about it and when we do that it means we shift we take money from other places in the budget we have to hire those positions because again when we've had held that you know the the class size ratio is sacrosanct we don't mess with that we pull from someplace else we make it happen and so you know these these are the projections and again it's based on enrollment projections based on birth rates and people moving in and i don't know that it adequately captures the building that's occurring in the housing turnover and so we might have to be flexible come august but this is where we stand right now i don't think we've ever had a year where i'm as concerned about the projections as i am this year just you know given the environmental variables and we know the direction things are trending which is why i get anxious thinking about reducing those positions so um you know this has been an interesting session here and i know i want to go back to some of the comments i made the other night about my concerns with the um oh my god i'm having a senior moment um discretionary costs with regard to instructional expenses and i understand instruction is the whole package i mean it's the teachers it's the building it's the materials as well but jeff i found it interesting when you went back to 2003 2003 and are in our discretionary instructional expenses were 6.3 percent of budget 6.53 versus now which is 5.63 okay so we're on a percentage basis only you know one percent different which could be a you know a huge percentage in terms of dollars amounts but it makes me wonder is there a a formula that that schools use or or gauge their performance by that that says okay in the area of instruction you know ninety percent of it is the teacher to student contact and five percent of it is the materials and the equipment and the capital and then the you know another balance is the capital the building yeah yeah because to me that's an alarming it's such an alarming thing to see that such a small piece of this whole pie is dedicated to um discretionary instructional sure expensive yeah i mean that's a great question i think if if there were a formula for success it you know in terms of the percentage of allocation in these various places my job would be wildly easier if i could predict definitively you know that if i spent 80 percent on personnel 12 on instructional supply and you know and down the line that that would create success it it but the education is is very dynamic in the sense that things are changing all of the time nevertheless you know we've we've stayed in a pretty narrow bandwidth of change over the course of 20 years with respect to uh how much we spend on instructional spend expense technology which isn't included necessarily in that ex instructional expense line that's more of an equipment line i will guarantee you has gone up now this year it hasn't gone up substantially because vin and his team mike papa deserves a special shout out have secured an incredible amount of money to pay for chromebooks and everything else so you know that bandwidth is a pretty narrow over the course of 20 years to vacillate really within a percent is still pretty close over the course of 20 years and again i would turn to the outcomes where our outcomes still remain very high um so i don't know that you know that reduction from a 0.9 of a percent has really uh i don't think it's been detrimental for us i think the the mix of ingredients that we have right now has been successful and this budget aims to kind of sustain that mix yeah i'm an instructional supplies i'm curious has any of it been shifted in the last 20 years like an it line budget or anything i mean out of that out of that that collection no not to my knowledge vin uh i mean you have a deeper history than i do where you pay very close attention to those lines but and just just to be clear i'm not speaking like it's even a conscious thing i'm just thinking in terms of the internet you didn't have so yeah i mean i think you know if you want to consider a chromebook an instructional supply or something like a smart board an instructional supply then i guess you could argue that as i as i just more or less postulated that there has been a shift okay toward those you know toward those resources that we consider part of a contemporary educational experience so yes and no right nothing formal it's not a formal but but certainly um you know in practice it's been that way um i guess i'll [Music] take this opportunity to ask a question um or i'll make a comment first that this is one of the the most difficult budgets i've gone through since i've been on the board or even before the board um uh i'm having a hard time going through line by line to really distinguish you know what what's a need what's a want you know that that kind of thing um and sin you know since 2018 i've always felt like a lot of these budgets are very reactionary like it's always like there's a problem we have to solve the problem um and i'm sure you know there's obviously a lot of planning for the future in these budgets but i guess what you know kind of absorbing all the commentary that's going on tonight is that you know when you look at it it comes down to that most of our budget goes as we discussed many times it goes into you know personnel and budgets and we know that we're having a uh i'm sorry benefits and um you know we're going to be going into a i guess i guess a great problem to have as we're going into a period of expansion right where we were flatlining like literally like two years ago looked like this like this town was dying like people were like are we going to be here yeah how are we going to consolidate things right and now it's like exactly the opposite um so i guess my question to i guess for you know maybe it won't be as relevant for this year but you know now that we're in this expansion mode and you know we're looking at you know three teachers this year have you guys uh has your staff put together a plan as to what expansion is going to look like from a staffing standpoint for so that we can you know budget appropriately so that you know these increases aren't as much of a surprise that everyone knows you know going into it that um you know these expenses are going to be necessary and and what's it going to look like sure it's a great question adam and it is it would be obviously intelligent for us as a leadership team and you know board included in that process to kind of try and forecast what that would look like and you know it's really contingent on how how hard do we want to hold to the belief that we want to sustain current class size because that makes the exercise much easier if we believe that class sizes have to be dramatically lower then obviously that influences the math and vice versa the best way to forecast those projections is through great enrollment analysis what we historically have done has we've provided uh we've been provided that analysis through new england school development council i know you've heard nasdaq before that's grounded in birth rate which is helpful but what we're seeing in the community is an unprecedented level of housing turnover and construction like this boom that we're experiencing to better project enrollment it will be very helpful to have slam who coincidentally is doing that enrollment projection for us for school construction provide us that information the the town is soon to [Music] release the funding uh projected to next i think it's february 8th release funding for them to complete that study so we'll have a secondary benefit of not only you know the initial benefit of looking at school construction but a secondary benefit of having very closely studied enrollment numbers to help us project for future growth i wouldn't want to do that now exclusively based on birth rate right um so so that being said so the the three teachers that you um have in this budget are based on current enrollment or or project the projected number from the slr report a little of both actually adam so the the number that we use in our budget book is the nasdaq projection but i i know i illustrated that as we sit here today actually not today as of whenever i gave january 7th i think i gave the initial 13th whatever the budget presentation was we sit five students away from next year's enrollment already which was higher so you know when i plant the seed about come august we may have to make some adjustments again come april i may even have a better sense for where we stand when you know ben marlene and i start talking to the council about what the board budget looks like the enrollment may have changed by then because what we've seen throughout this year is a huge upswing of people moving in carol would we have two calls this week um and it's you know we just are seeing people move in at a high rate during the year that we don't see as typically as we have this year and so you know come april i may even have a better sense of where our enrollment will be relative to that nasdaq projection and then certainly you know we're anticipating that information from slam by then too which will even a clearer picture of what the projections are because they do consider all right you're building x number of houses x number of bedrooms in those houses you know what here's the ratio of kids per house like that and so it'll give us a much clearer picture of our projected enrollment but for right now we're using kind of the best information we have that's it actually to adam's point um you know today we had the news about chef versus o'neill i know it only right now impacts harford but it could potentially i mean we're our open choice is just to new haven right so that's another thought right there where we we need to look at the open choice being more expansive and and hopefully are we're competitive enough that we get uh even increase higher enrollment so what are we doing now that we have this news and to get ahead of the game what are we doing about that sure so we've as you know at the last board meeting increased our open choice allotment to new haven choice is the operative word in that you know phrase and we currently do not fill not we cheshire public schools we offer the seats the students in new haven don't necessarily make the choice we don't have enough applicants to fill all of those open seats and that you know when we talk to families the biggest reason is the way that the catchment areas are configured we are the farthest drive from new haven to come to an open choice school students i mean until this year had to get up i don't know remember the exact times mary but it was like the bus was at 5 30 in the morning or something for high school so we said that's absurd added like 10 more seats at the high school we had interest in those seats we added those seats that they could split the route into two runs which pushed it back literally 40 minutes and so we're trying to find ways to accommodate and support participation in that program um but at the end of the day if it's still open to choice it's you're asking a kid to make a big commitment i'm just thinking even waterbury next door right so they're not in our catchment area yeah um as the state defines it waterbury students you know tend to travel west obviously west and north uh is their catchment area might that change who knows um and certainly we'd welcome students from other communities under those circumstances but uh you know the chef decision is really well submitted today i'm sure you know may influence things down the road yeah to be seen but you're right to have that on the radar for right now i mean i think we overall are a victim of our own success in a way and we are because you have been successful and you've done more with so little um i i mean i'll be honest this budget does make me depressed because our kids and our staff are old i mean i feel like we've just been giving giving and they have the return on investment has been phenomenal and so i just can't find into ann's point that 2.44 should really be higher um so that's that's where i sit right now and i need to kind of process all this but overall we need to be a bit more proactive so um jeff to go back to the um enrollment so i'm looking at um just an overview from nasdaq um that shows the percent change now this is connecticut overall the percent change of on student population um from 2018 to 2029 at a negative 9.2 now that's connecticut overall so how i don't have the whole report obviously how does this i we have seen growth and i think it's a lot of it is coveted growth and yes there's a lot of development going on um but do we know that this is going to be sustained because sure this popular fair question is shrinking somewhere sure maybe we're the only ones growing but yeah it's a fair question faith and um you know we have to make these projections based on the best data that we have available i think to adam's point earlier and where we would look at things like people selling homes and moving in stuff like that is that's certainly a variable and i think we can project certain uh enrollment based on that but i think we use nasdaq because that's an anchor those are people who already live here birth rate and so when we look at the you know the last several years of birth rate there was a sustained period where we had 250 270 births a year things like that we have for i think it's next year's kindergarten class a birth rate that's over 300 and that is sustained for an extended period and what nesdek considers is that in throughout our history is a school system you know recent history as a school system there's a an enrollment rate of roughly one and a half per birth rate so you know that also does include that obviously is a way to try and calculate families who move in for the purpose of schooling you know i say people don't move here for the night life you know but they do they come here they are coming here oh i think they're coming for the nightlife soon they are coming soon you opening a club on rondo i don't know well this it's true that's true rebel level communications amongst others so it is exciting you know as is i i can't remember i think maybe it was you sam who said it's it's a great problem to have adam you mentioned it that you know we are growing we're vibrant community education though remains the anchor of that community and i think you know an investment in our school system is is certainly an investment in our children and their future but it's also an investment in this community and andrew's ability to re recruit people to this community and your ability to sell a home if you live here for for top dollar you know there may have been people raising concerns about taxes at different points and the point that you know school is the is the lion's share of where the tax dollars get spent but when they sold their house for top dollar you know that that that's why so yeah i mean it's definitely it's a system and we play an important role in that system and you know taking care of the anchor is really important need to state the obvious here and kind of echo what everyone else has said you know i've spent time going through this book we discussed it multiple evenings and we're looking at really a 1.8 million dollar increase when you take out the medical health benefit and like to me it's you know there's not a lot of there's nowhere i don't see where we could really cut um after hearing robin and carrie the other night i mean our responsibility for special education is increased we're going another few years out to provide services we have more state mandates we need to have this transition coordinator i think that position is you know i don't see how we get past that i'm a big supporter of keeping our class sizes where they are i know how hard these teachers all work i know how that benefits especially the younger so k through six by adding these three teachers i think it's 18 students if we're using the 2000 2190 students so i guess just my real my point here is is i think what we really need to be doing is petition town council to help to support the medical you know to get some of the federal money in here in order to offset that because a 1.8 million increase in a 77 million dollar budget is like is peanuts especially with the rising cost of everything else that we're looking at in the increase of enrollment any and that's that's a big yeah big driver in this budget obviously so i mean usually we have all these line items that we go through and we can kind of debate but there's not a lot of increases other than looking for additional teaching positions in order to as a reaction to the increase enrollment right it's it's and it's it's that and that's why i called it a sustained budget because we're not driving down class sizes as a matter of fact we're you know as i indicated at an all-time high really in a lot of places where we're sustaining the same high quality that we have in the same cost-effective manner we have in the in past but it is an increase obviously made more glaring by the medical benefit piece and i will say i really bristled today and then not to call out the herald but i guess i am in an article you know it wasn't wasn't the fact that vin made fun of the likeness of me in the editorial cartoon not having a lot of hair because i think this haircut makes me look like i'm losing my hair but i'm not and it wasn't that it was in the article when it indicated that the increase in our budget was driven by several factors and the first factor they indicate was teacher salary increases i wanted to freak the teacher salary line is is only going up i mean in terms of the teacher pay scale increase is only it's less than two percent the raise it's not driven by teacher raises getting you know exorbitant or anything like that that's that's really made me upset because those people are working too hard and i feel like you know almost getting blamed uh you know 5.3 is way out and that may not been how the article was intended and i know i'm just hypersensitive to that but i want to make that clear too that it's not this is as you stated a substantial increase grounded in again medical benefits and enrollment but it's doing the same stuff we've been doing which is cost effective in and has a high return on investment but i think what concerns me the most is that um there's just something not right structurally and this isn't going to you or to vin or to marlene or the staff it's just i look at that medical benefits number and something is happening that's just almost out of our control and um you know it is petitioning the the council is just it's a band-aid we i you know is it the consolidation of the health care industry is it you know the the changes in the way um health packages are now or you know that from experience rating to community rating that you know was imposed with obamacare with the uh you know in the pricing of plans something is just out of our control and i i don't know how to fix it i don't know where to go but we have got to do something because you know we lear really we're saying with the instructional expenses they're not that far off from the from where they were 20 years ago but they're going down they're taking these that big huge monster is taking more and more and more away from what we're supposed to do which is teach the kids and i i think you're expressing something faith that i will guarantee you is felt and heard in board meetings across america and i'm not talking about just board of education meetings you know professional or boards that govern businesses that the cost of health care is a substantial issue in all lines of work or for individuals who you know unfortunately may not be employed i mean health care costs are a real concern at the same time i know that you and everybody in this room has a deep commitment to taking care of our the health and welfare of our staff and so how do we navigate the increasing because i'll tell you our teachers our bargaining units they will say the same thing because every year their cost goes up too this isn't just something felt by the people in this room and the taxpayer this is something that our employees myself included have cost share increases every year as well so i mean it's definitely a significant issue i think if we continue to work with the town council on a local level of how do we best navigate it i mean vin showed you data about how the town of cheshire has navigated some of these challenges at a better clip than others but it's it's huge it's a massive number it's very expensive and you know vin i don't know if there's anything you want to add there but i think this year's 2.2 million dollar request i know we were talking about the 1.5 million that was infused if you take the 4 million that we're requesting and reduce it by the million and a half so in other words instead of funding it directly to the medical benefit reserve if it had been contributed to our operating budget this year's request would have looked more like 3.4 so we kind of created this cliff and it was a risk that everybody was on the same page it was the hope that claims would not go up as much as they did um so my point is part of what we're looking at is self-imposed and part of it is the reality of the cost of claims any in either case i think faith's concerns hold water though and that i mean even without the million and a half or whatever you just look at what is the cost of our insurance and what you're not seeing faith is the substantial amount that our employees pay into that all right so take whatever where you see in our budget in terms of the cost to us add a whole lot more because we pay into it and then and that's the cost and that's such a big number that's the concern that's the question yeah but as i said to adam the other day i mean we've always had cancer patients we've always had replacements why why are they suddenly so much more expensive it's not like we have a rush on them our numbers of cases are probably very similar why is that single case that much more that's and that's what scares me because that's what's going to come back to really erode what we can do here and just and i raise it as a concern i wouldn't mind seeing some of the mandates coming out of the state slowed down a bit and i hope that legislators are listening to that we've got to kind of um deal with what we've got and keep the piling on doesn't help help us either um i i don't know i just wish we as a district could have a little more autonomy so we can figure this out but anyway i those are my concerns and just not really sure how to deal with it well you know um and faith to your point i just remember you know my first year in 2018 i think the um the projected uh claims expenditure per month i think was like 725 000 a month made me a little lower than that um and now this budget is one million dollars for this right and next year right so i mean that's a massive exponential increase yeah 33 yeah thank you for that sure so it's a big number over the course of a short throw yeah i mean it's yeah it's a very short period of time to have it go up that quickly um so i mean and you know we've been talking about you know risk structure and you know and uh you know our our uh consultant on that um you know seems to think that maybe it will improve i i'm not as optimistic it's hard to be optimistic in the late of 33 yeah because we're at what plus one year from the i guess the five year average drop-off that we usually have yeah right right so um it's just that number is huge um so uh do we have any uh addition and you have an additional question okay sam i was just thinking of the um teaching contracts you know if you have these three positions um just competitively how confident are you in being able to fill them and you know and my other thought on this is where are we in developing um minority teachers and recruiting them so to answer the first question about um how do we feel about our confidence in filling elementary teaching positions i would consider that very high the the folks in this room can tell you that we get a lot of applicants um give me a fair number diane uh dianna amy you guys on it elementary teaching position for so you know today marlene and i interview if you couldn't hear that uh diana was saying a hundred positions um amy was saying 80 to 100 position uh applicants excuse me for a position i mean it's incredibly competitive marlene and i interviewed a person today um it was a final interview to replace a position that got vacated and this person was telling us you know i'm dying to work i'm so excited to have the opportunity the culture the support the you know this building is a great uh place i know somebody who took a position here in the last couple of years and you know said it was it was great and so you know i'm very confident that we will find talented people um and we won't necessarily have to pay we'll find talented people at a lower price point too when you have 100 applicants you can hire somebody who is really talented two three years in and you know will be a tremendous teacher as opposed to when you don't have that applicant pool and your choices are maybe somebody right out of school who's who's really green somebody who's got 15 years experience that will be a substantial budget impact and maybe isn't much better and you're trying to figure that out when we are doing well with recruitment with respect to teachers of color that's an area where we need to continue to improve on and have worked closely with southern um now central to try and recruit uh black latino hispanic asian teachers to diversify our workforce and you know the the work is proving to be more about planning the seed in high school students that matriculate through because you know particularly with southern what we've found is that they you know southern has a recruiting pool out of the new haven area and students will come to new to southern they'll do a great job they'll get their degree they want to go back to the community and make an impact where they grew up and unfortunately we don't have that sort of cyclical pool so we've been um advertising doing targeted advertising we um this year might you might remember that we're working to have a candidate in the aces program that will allow us to take somebody working in our community now uh we have a an individual that we would like to bring in they get trained as a teacher under our support we can use open choice money for that and we make a commitment to them that they'll be teaching here for two years at least and they can hopefully will stay with us um and the the nice thing is we can make a commitment to that program because we know we have growing enrollment we know we're going to have openings over the next several years so that's one way to just kind of bring people in train them and hopefully they stay here with us but we we're always trying to do more in that respect i only asked that because i thought the state did have some sort of grant that if we did um have that as a high priority that they'd be able to help fund that i don't know then if you've heard of anything but i yeah that's still uh in legislation in terms of they've funded programs through crack started it the cooperative regional education council in hartford greg florio runs that and they started that program and it's the funding has made it possible to stretch to aces and the other regional service centers we'd like to see more funding that you know we can use as a local district rather than the open choice resources we have not other districts may not have those resources but we want to be able to use that to engage in this program to to better diversify our our workforce thank you okay some questions about the results so um just going through state and federal grants started at the back we'll work my way forward um how how confident are we it said requested are we confident that we're gonna get these grants that are listed on page one under that tab everything that's there is um really been perpetual it's solid okay and then with regard to the open choice program i thought that you had said that we are gonna be be we just don't have space for all of the students that we we're going to be our numbers are reducing because we don't have the seats yeah we haven't added many more additional seats as you know over what we currently offer so are open choice grants here are they still going to be the same or are they going to fluctuate based on students actually you know based on what we have this year they're probably they're actually likely to increase okay because of the the way the formula works is there's three thousand dollars allotted per student right with additional allotments um when you have uh in excess of a certain number of students within a building based on the building's size so like at cheshire high school where we dramatically increased uh the number of open choice enrollment the number of open choice seats that will probably see a bonus that we don't have factored in yet we don't know what that number will be at this point okay so that's a bonus for this year and then if we have fewer students next year then we will just be but we didn't budget the bonus in because we don't know exactly what it is we thought that might be irresponsible okay see what you're saying um okay and so i it's the same question all the way through are we you know title one grants and title two grants we're confident that they're here so we don't have to worry about those okay all right um perkins grants too pretty much steady year to year except for that exception the year that we had applied for that extra sorry that's except for the year that we applied for that extra funding okay all right um and then i just curious going through vocational education we get grant money for voting no vocational i'm sorry i'm thinking never mind i'm going to take that question away yeah we pay for boag when we do okay but we also get grants for vocational i was right yeah sure perkins would be an example almost okay it's a federal grant okay uh all right and i just held me here why do we pay st bridgets and pressure account because of state law we're we're required to cover the nursing services and transportation for in-town students to both st bridges and cheshire academy and correct me if i'm wrong then we do pay saint bridges and we haven't um the money hasn't been requested from cheshire academy or how did that how's that work the money is part of their charter church the academy refuses grant money state federal grant money is part of their charter okay so they typically always respond no that they don't accept that money whereas places like st bridget do accept the money um keep in mind when you receive federal money or state money there are expectations tied to that money right and sometimes the amount of money isn't worth the expectations that come with it in you know some circumstances but you know they don't accept it so we either never receive it or do we get it and then have to return it or is it say we have x number of money and when the academy refuses it that gets factored into what we get and what st bridget gets okay um okay robin that includes social work services too right um whether a student might be impacted by disability and that we go through the valuation process they don't get an iep can get a service yep and these are just kind of random are we do have we anticipated how many retirements we're going to get this year um no no it's early yeah we're still really kind of early for that we would probably have a better sense in april or often times you know teachers it's in the contract that they should notify us but i think it's may 1st but you know if a teacher tells me on june 8th i'm you know i'm looking to retire i you know it's not i don't say no thank you you're held for the next 30 days of the next year so it's hard to hard to know okay do we offer like a retirement workshop early on just for those that are sure thinking about it yeah actually i would say the union does a lot of that okay and then you know it's it's not an easy decision so teacher retirement is usually 35 years for a quote normal retirement and when you've been doing it for 35 years some people have a real hard time making that decision and i understand it and so we deal with it okay that's that's all for now um can i make call you on some other questions that i have if that's okay okay are there any uh additional questions all right um seeing none our next agenda item is possible action for the finance committee um oh tim i don't know if there is anybody from the public just to make that official i can take it yes uh for the right for those who are not here with us in the cafetorium uh there is no one in the audience to make public comment at this time uh there is still our our meeting is still ongoing for for a little while so if you do if you're watching at home and you have comment um you can leave comment at cps budget at cheshire.k12.ct.us those emails will go i think went directly to uh your email jeff it's your inbox i was just checking my email yeah and we don't have any updated questions other than what uh mr besters shared okay so they're still you probably have maybe 15 minutes before we wrap up here um but um so for possible action uh for me i i i still haven't gone through everything yet to make a completely informed decision as to uh how i would like to vote right now um i don't know if uh either of you have any thoughts right now i think i said it earlier i think we need just a little more time to process this all i know fate's going to have some more questions for mr mattiano so i think yeah okay and traditionally what we've usually done we'll have a uh potentially on february 3rd we could have a finance meeting before uh the uh the main board meeting so that uh hopefully we'll be able to advance a motion to the full board uh and then we can uh hash it out further from there so uh so i guess for now um i'll speak to uh chairman peregini um and i'll let him know that perhaps our plan is to you know to have something ready for february third the evening of february third um okay um that being said that's our last agenda item so um i'll attend a entertaining motion to adjourn sam second all in favor thank you this meeting is adjourned

unfortunately they've both missed the revised work plan submittal date uh as well as the october ninth storm water quality due date and therefore they're really in violation of the notice of violation in the ms4 permit and from my understanding evan um currently gilman has not provided a revised work plan and that's kind of where we are today on the concentrations of the storm water continuing to be impacted as well as uh not having gilman being able to be in compliance with the ms4 permit um so um dan before you remove your slides i think it might be worthwhile for us to um have the opportunity to hear from and unless you have some more comments do you do you want to um i don't know anything i was i was kind of my uh that was the seven mile high view that's good great um and i guess evan since right now we have an opportunity to use a map that dan has and i was thinking that that might be useful in in your discussion if you wish um yeah i guess we can we can have that up in case that's handy for for folks in picturing anything i go over so um yeah i agreed to come to provide an update of where we're at first off uh to kind of pick up where dan left off we have not received a work plan from gelman but the county's legal council has been working with them they did have a target of getting that to us this week i was told today that there was a there was a hitch at gelman's end with their final final review that the consultants done their work uh but uh whoever was supposed to say it's okay to send it over to uh my legal counsel was out sick i don't know if that's true or not we don't have it yet but basically what i'm told is we'll see it any minute so that's just one that's really the main update to know um secondly uh i came more for an update not necessarily to debate uh this that or the other there's a few things that you know i feel and i think i've said at uh card meetings before uh that dan provides in more or less an absolute and concrete state as far as what's required and what must be and this that and the other and i guess i'm going to just say my understanding from talking with our legal counsel the attorney general and eagle staff many times over time eagle called last week to say oh yeah sorry we haven't gotten you a little better clarification um it's not as cut and dry as you might have just heard if in fact people were really able to absorb all that i know there's a lot of terminology here so i'll just kind of keep it as high level as i can and say uh two things one the ms4 regulation regulating keeping contaminates out of storm sewer systems and making the operator of that system responsible for chasing down i'll say surprises um is has been around for a while uh it's been used on things such as pfas uh like with tribar up in the i'll say wixom area that was the responsibility of the sanitary sewer folks to take care of that surprise uh with local enforcement one of the areas where i would say both eagle and the superfund program do not see or haven't given us a clear understanding i guess all i can understand from those agencies about this ms4 thing when there is an active site remediation going on is the rules are different um i can't seem to get to the bottom of exactly what does that mean exactly what can we require and can't require uh but it's seems to me that what i get out of eagle and the ag's office as well as uh superfund is that the the contamination in the pipe if it's resulting from an active cleanup may or may not have certain requirements so uh i think dan in other documents has provided a copy of internal eagle guidance that describes four different options that are one of them is yes you've got to get everything out of the pipe uh that is a contaminant and you got to stop it from getting in there but there's actually three other options too one option is kind of related to hey make it all go away from the groundwater around the pipe that's put a hard liner inside the pipe there you go there's some documentation so these four things on the bottom eliminate the discharge is on the left hand side as i look at my screen there's also saying hey they could just get an npds permit that says up to a certain level uh npdes is national pollutant discharge elimination uh permit so that's something that uh agencies get from eagle in fact the city sewer plant has an npds permit and it says you can't discharge more than this on a daily basis or more than this on a monthly average so your monthly average has to be lower than your daily and in fact uh gelman has an npds permit for the discharge of the treated uh water uh over at wagner road that discharges into a very small creek that's under equal jurisdiction and there's limits to how much they can discharge after the cleanup process because they their their process doesn't get it 100 down to zero but the third option uh would be uh you know get total uncontaminated discharge uh but also you'll see this box in the bottom right here that says well if it's uh part of a contaminated site uh restoration uh you know they're coming up with additional options that might be a long-term plan but the bottom line is what i get out of eagle is they're not seeing anything that's more immediate and acute and i think one issue where i've been very clear to eagle to say look i i want contamination out of pipe we all want that i feel bad when i come and tell groups that's what i want but the pathway to getting there through the regulatory process uh seems a little unclear at best there is an eagle memo that i provided to rita that provided some clarification of where their head was at on that and i guess the only other thing i can say is it's probably not beneficial because danaher pays people to look for any information that's publicly available that might help them i'm a little uncomfortable with getting deep into legal strategy but we have an extremely weak hand and at the crux of that we can is you know just whether you put yourself in my shoes or just say any local agency it's a little baffling to me to say we've got what's effectively you know not to be dismissive but we've effectively got collateral damage from a cleanup program and if i'm gelman i'm sitting there saying i did everything that i'm required to do for the cleanup program um we did everything eagle said if there's a problem uh you know how are we to blame likewise as a local agency i really do say we've got absolutely nothing to do with this this isn't a surprise card is documented uh in writing two eagles since at least hey we're thinking that this dioxane is moving down to the west park area it's going to get into the river i can't recall if they've specifically said we think it'll get into allen creek but there's a a lot of documentation that says we're worried that this is going to happen it's happened so from my perspective i feel it would be unreasonable for eagle to expect a local agency to spend their money to undo something that got created by an enforcement action by eagle that doesn't mean we necessarily have to sit here and do nothing but if you take a step back and think about what's being asked of us here um it really doesn't seem to be that the local taxpayers should have to flip this bill if there's something more to chase so i'm hopeful that what gelman submits to us is acceptable i do have to say [Music] i might have caused part of the problem by although i did have legal counsel review the letter that i sent that said hey you you all need to do a better job with your work plan that letter did say get started on what you proposed because that needs to be done but i am told now that asking them to go ahead and start doing some groundwater sampling is definitely beyond what we could ask so i might have scared them away and i'll take responsibility for that by asking for more than what's required by law the law and the stuff that dan showed you basically says that the polluter has the opportunity to uh figure out what's going on they use the word characterize the site so they do have the opportunity to figure out where is this infiltration coming in and at what concentrations so they can get a better idea of where should we be exploring for heavy concentrations of groundwater so i'll i'll take the mia culpa for for maybe scaring them off and essentially losing nine months of investigation activity however if you look at the eagle memo that was provided with my correspondence gilman certainly needed to do more than say we're going to go look at where things are coming into the pipe and figure out where that is they didn't really say what are we going to do if we find it's really bad somewhere uh you know they didn't get into any of the potential follow-up activities and eagle identified uh you know three or four or five things that they really do need to address in a revised work plan all that's a roundabout way of saying we're gonna work get a work plan i believe you know they've committed to providing a work plan i believe it's gonna have less than what i asked for in my letter um it would be nice if they did a whole bunch more groundwater sampling but because of the sampling that my office did and uh i would say it was oh shoot you can't see my cursor on this thing because this is dan's screen but there was an area where i was absolutely convinced we were going to find high concentrations of dioxane in the ground water near shannon's house in what's called hannah nature area so that's at the end of mark hannah uh behind the salvation army uh near just east of urbana i was just certain so we had samples taken there and we didn't find high concentrations of dioxane in the near surface groundwater we found .44 parts per billion at that location and we found zero at west park when we tested it so i do feel it is appropriate for them to spend time and energy of figuring out where is the mass of dioxane getting into the allen creek pipe to be straightforward with everyone here having that contaminate you know in the pipe itself on the one hand i don't like it and i agree in general with dan's uh you know statements that say we want it out of there the law doesn't seem to support us real well there but quite honestly the dioxane in that pipe isn't directly hurting anyone i'm more concerned about that boxing zipping right down to the river are the concentrations going up or down we need long-term monitoring on all of this stuff and that's really where eagle's head was at too with uh feedback and comments of the prior work plan of they need to identify how are they going to do long-term monitoring for this because that is kind of one of the options that's open with long-term sites is well we're just going to eyeball it and if the levels are more than zero we'll just see how they're doing and and see if there's anything that should or shouldn't be done it's pretty fuzzy quite honestly it doesn't look like there's any case law out there that said you must do ms4 enforcement if it's resultant from 201 it's the gist of it so i i'm not sure all of those words really add up for people so i probably just need to shut up and see if uh any folks on the commission have any clarifying questions or what have you and i do have a couple comments after that but i need to just stop and take a breath here let's pray too long already thank you evan and dan um rita if i could just make one point is that you know the the ms4 is a federal clean water act permit and that's completely separate from what we have in front of us in court now which is a state of michigan part 201 contaminated site in other words the gilman site isn't regulated by the federal government at this time unless it becomes the u.s epa superfund site right now it's in state court it's a court action generally between gelman and the state of michigan and that's a totally separate process totally separate violation it's a violation of michigan regulations whereas the ms4 permit is a federal clean water act permit and when they violate that they're violating a federal clean water act so it's definitely apples and oranges and they don't mix together to make cranberry juice they're definitely different things and i can understand why gilman would try to put them together but really they're completely separate violations as i said i'm not here to debate it we've this this same conversation has come up many times dan i understand you're going to stick to your interpretation and i'm obligated to stick to what i'm hearing from the attorneys and the fact that the attorney general does not use the same words as dan does that doesn't mean anybody's right or wrong but it means i have to go with what folks with legal expertise in this area describe certainly it's a separate program but again the pertinent point here is uh those regulations as i understand it are applied quite differently ms4 regulations i mean are applied quite differently when there's an active site remediation uh causing the issue so questions from the commission though i see kathy's got her hand up but i'll let rita let rita direct traffic as the chair sure go ahead kathy please okay yeah as someone who has is responsible to my constituents and for some reason people in the second ward seem to be very concerned about the one for dioxane but it it seems like we've just gone round and round about what this definition is and uh whenever you ask a lawyer it seems like it adds two weeks to whatever process you're working on um so um i guess my question is for both of you dan and evan would um given that congresswoman debbie dingle has been very involved in this cleanup would it uh be helpful to have her office try to get clarification on this statement because she has the the resources to do that so that we're not getting two different interpretations and i don't know if dan or evan want to weigh in on that well i guess part of my main point is i'm not sure anyone can give a definitive interpretation that will definitely hold up in court what i've been trying to convey is part of the muddiness is uh this is not ground that has been tread often and there isn't case law where an agency took somebody to court and said you're you're also violating ms4 in addition to this cleanup we've got going on and uh you know again without getting into something that's too helpful to the other side that like lack of case law given the number of sites that have probably had this issue is one that does not uh warm the heart of of winning in court if you had to go to court and again i'd like to see their work plan and see them take a step forward but it doesn't seem very winnable if you wanted a suggestion one thing would be you could sit down with you or another council rep or an ec rep with the city attorney and whatever the ag or anybody else involved and have the conversation of what is how would the city attorney advise council on what's the odds of success if if uh if there was a desire to pursue this more vigorously um as either its own thing or as part of the existing consent judgment so that's one idea another idea is the attorney general's office has been very reluctant to put anything writing on this they consistently say they are working for the folks who do remediation eagle that's not the only group but eagle there's other attorney generals that support eagle there's also going directly to the attorney general and saying why can't this get sorted out why can't you just tell us this isn't going to happen or we can help you and make it happen it's got to be one or the other right either the ag is telling us this is something that you don't have any good legal standing which is what i'm interpreting but perhaps they could use a little more encouragement with more vigorously pursuing uh getting contamination out of a pipe i those are the two things and i don't know if uh representative dingle is the best one for that or uh somewhere from the city is best for that that's those are two thoughts oh okay why don't we talk about that offline because you know if you're proposing possibly having a meeting and i don't care what the path is so much as i just want to have the sense that we're moving forward and the other thing is political pressure is sometimes helpful this is a an election year and lastly on chapin street there is a black church that has a basement in at least part of its building and it looks like it's sort of in the path of of this dioxane movement i mean i'm not a professional at this but i i definitely want to uh get a better understanding of that because i don't want to have a public discussion about that or being having reporters ask me questions about it we need to be as proactive as possible yeah i i'm going to say i'm not um suggesting that that i'm calling a meeting that's something you could ask for what i think of responsibility to my constituents uh what i am seeing here quite frankly is putting a lot of time and energy into pushing on a rope and i'm not sure that's the best thing to do for constituents but my office you know the allen creek drain anyway is almost entirely funded by the city of ann arbor so i will if the city feels like we want to ramp the energy up i just want to be clear that you could put a lot of time and energy in and if if there's a feeling that there's some political reason to do that that's your choice that's the city's choice but i the what i see from the information i hear suggests that if we want to spend lots of time and energy on something we might focus on the core cleanup and ensuring that continues to go as well as possible you know in the circumstance and i gather that they've started implementing some of that consent judgment for uh stuff that is over and above what eagle and gelman were agreeing to that started i don't know if that fixes things or not but i do know that until things get better in the core you're not going to see this situation uh vary other than the you know ups and the downs just because the 2021 sampling showed the first reduction and a notable reduction in the amounts doesn't mean that that's really the trend it's just one day one snapshot so i'd really like to have these folks out here monitoring more so we've got more to play with right so okay well i i thank you for for everything you you've done i thank dan bicknell for everything that that he has been doing and i guess if it's okay i'll in addition to the resolution i will take an action item and i can work with um with council member dish if she's interested in talking to our city attorney and talking to our city administrator and and letting congresswoman debbie dingle's office know what the status is so that we can at least move this forward in some way and not just go in this continuous loop so thanks thank you thank you um kathy and evan and dan um and i i see i see you lisa um i but i saw chris graham's hand up first so i'd like to ask chris if he would like to make a comment i haven't maybe dan i'm not a person who ever wants to be in court i don't think a lot of things that happen in court end up very well i'm curious to know either one of you evan first please has an answer to this problem what well let me put to another way um [Music] the contamination by this chemical has proceeded inexorably without any constraint for 20 years um is there truly an answer is there a way to fix this i'm not suggesting who should fix it or what or you know who pays or what is there a practical way to solve the problem kevin and then then right so when you say the problem like are you just talking about the dioxin in the pipe itself right now about dioxane flowing inexorably toward the huron river somewhere near the out flow of allen creek or maybe elsewhere is there a way to to remove the contaminant from our from our groundwater is there a way to uh deal with this in fact or are we facing an issue that's insoluble and so maybe the ultimate result of court action is who pays but yeah they all are paying yeah okay thanks i just want to make sure i hit the right button yeah i mean of course anything's possible with the time and the resources i i have to go back to what you know a number of people have said over time the biggest problem here is the law the part 201 law the law that governs site remediation that was written by lobbyists for you know essentially polluters and doesn't require full cleanups all of that said i think i fall on the same side as as just about anybody in the community where i see the word prevent in the consent judgment and i i'm right with eucharist i i don't see a lot of preventing in the long term history i hope that some of this consent judgment for gives us better prevention i hope that the epa should they take this on gets better prevention and that i hope prevention means clean up a lot more mass a lot faster than it has been so it's possible i think the law leaves us with dioxane under the ground even if we get everything we want to at least you know the level of 7.2 parts per billion but it's feasible it's possible it's frustrating yeah chris this is dan and this is not a unique problem these solvent sites are all around the united states and the world and the solution is to do groundwater extraction now in the proposed fourth amended consent judgment they're not extracting enough groundwater with enough groundwater wells to have any meaningful impact and that's why the plume just continues to expand but if you put in the proper number of groundwater wells and extracted them then it would halt the plume and restore the aquifer that's what uscpa in the superfund program would ask for and as evan said in this eagle part 201 agreement i call it the new 2021 court order it doesn't require that it's totally deficient as a matter of fact the new court order pumps maybe 12 more gallons per minute than the current order so that's the solution though is to put in more groundwater extraction wells to halt the plume and capture this contaminated water don't let it expand and it's nothing new it's classical remediation but gellman has you know as in i think with this ms4 permit issue uh put up a legal defense and well i it's not being required i i think you're probably correct the number of groundwater extraction wells the impact on the community of those in all of the locations they would have to occur is it practical undertaking or is that pipe dreaming no it's a practical it could be it can be done it's not a problem it's done every day in other sites and the cost to doing that the um 50 million dollars it was estimated 50 million dollars in the gilman feasibility study and they said that it was practical this was probably more like where are we now relative to that we're completely different they went a completely different way now as seven indicates they're going for uh trying to just basically hold hold the line but what they have is groundwater uh monitoring wells and extraction rates isn't going to hold the line it's going to just let it go by if i was spending a handful of million as opposed to 50 million in order to to do what they're doing in the way of extraction exactly okay thank you yeah i mean if i could just just to quickly respond um to give you a visual um chris i gave this presentation to a number of um units including scio towns of ann river township and i think maybe a little bit in the city but these are the uh the yellow lines go to where the extraction wells are that are required in the proposed fourth amended consent judgment and in the current court order as you can see this is the plume and these are the extraction wells well down here is west park the plume is not going to be captured past these two points as it goes towards west park there's nothing that stops it and as a matter of fact these two wells 19 and 23 haven't stopped the plume from going from west to east so this is an example of how deficient the system is and as you can see beyond these extraction wells you have all this contamination flowing freely so that's that's that's the basic problem we have there's not enough work that is being done in the court order to stop the uh the plume from migrating i got it so how do we remedy this shortcoming without waiting for the courts to catch up well the basic thing is we've no petition for the united states environmental protection agency to make this into a superfund site and if the united states environmental protection agency did this did make this into a super fun site they would compel gilman to put in many many many more groundwater monitoring wells and halt the plume and restore the aquifer drinking water requirements which is what they do on most all superfund sites but that's different than what is being done underneath the current court order i got it thank you i'd like to let lisa ask her question thank you i want to just get clear on to make sure that i understand i absolutely want to work with you on this kathy this is really important and i just wanted to understand the suggestions that we that we got from mr pratt so what i have in my notes is that uh mr pratt advised us to uh to sit down with our city attorney and the ag's office and i agree with you um councilmember griswold that we should of course include the city administrator and ask them um [Music] how winnable a case would be if we tried to take them if we took them to court over the stormwater permit and i'm also thinking that i mean mr proud also raised the question whether their whether the regulatory framework gives us a remedy for this seepage into the allen creek drain and so i think that is another question that i would want to hear what the ag's office and our council says because if i understood everything that mr pratt said because the allen creek drain is largely in ann arbor if we want to pursue this through a litigation pathway um that would cost us and so and it is my understanding that our attorney's office likes to make sure they can win before we embark on litigation um so it'd be good it'd just be good to hear what they say that's not necessarily to say that we wouldn't pursue that option we just want to hear what they say um so am i did i follow all of that mr pratt did i get it right i think so i don't think i overtly said i mean i would presume that the county's legal counsel spent a lot of time and energy on this one specific issue would be helpful in that conversation i let him know that i i would at least put this out there as a choice i do not have a problem with the county being in front or or behind the city on this one i i just don't feel like it's my uh i don't feel it's my place to go start down that path without everybody's eyes wide open as far as you know what i've heard so far isn't encouraging and it is money of city taxpayers and you know i got constituents all over the county and i try to make sure that how i work with my constituent group considers the the funding of things all along because my office doesn't collect any general taxes it's all based on what happens on this piece of pipe or that ditch or what have you so just at our attorney is the only thing they had i think and i don't know if i don't want us to debate this at length because we have already a lengthy agenda but um you have emphasized that our best pathway forward may be aggressive implementation of the fourth consent judgment which does significantly increase the volume at which the cleanup will proceed from what has been true up to now um it is do we need more extraction wells farther east given the way the plume is moving as mr bucknell suggested i am not i don't have a good background in that hydro geology thing but just uh intuitively and having read a lot of information with maybe not comprehending 100 of it absolutely more extraction wells which would seem to be a no-brainer as a benefit to the to the setup i mean i you know i laugh at myself not at the subject matter here and obviously having them a little further east the catch is we're not seeing the groundwater uh in those areas with a lot of dioxin in it once you get past our banana like i said i swore that there was no way we were gonna have anything other than you know noticeable bit higher levels than what's in the pipe is what i expected to find out of the pipe because there's a fair amount of clean water getting in the pipe we didn't find that at all so we're really not i'm not concerned about the church i used to live on chapin i know simone from way back when and you know her dad running the church and everything i'm not concerned in the least about at this time about that but we need to be keeping track of this stuff on a constant basis uh because who you missed two years and all of a sudden the plume did you know whatever crest whatever was holding it back and it moved along now it's been six years since eagle did a fair amount of shallow groundwater monitoring all along seventh and there was no dioxane found in the groundwater all along seventh but that was six years ago and as dan points out uh now they did find something in the pond at west park after not finding it for quite some time so yeah more extraction was the better other than that i don't know the science or the legality behind all that kathy i just wanted to clarify my statement that i am not advocating for litigation and that would be my absolute last resort that you know more monitoring is is definitely i'm not an expert in this but again it seems like that would be money better spent than than a lengthy court battle i mean we've already seen what happens there so okay yeah and i just want to clarify i'm bringing up legal things because not because of go to court now or go to court later it's uh what rights do we have to put out there as i said i've learned after the fact that my letter overstepped uh you know the law and my attorney keeps reminding me let's just follow the law let's just follow the law i keep reminding him you took a look at that letter before i sent it again i'm not laughing at the subject matter i'm laughing at myself he wanted to be very sure that i was not in a position of having to walk back things that were in that letter and i feel like i'm in that position and i feel bad but i guess i feel better about uh pushing too hard then not pushing hard enough so i guess i in this case i'm okay with being over the line and i hope that doesn't offend anybody but we certainly need to know what our legal standing is as we continue down a path that probably includes more frustration than satisfaction but i echo chris's comments quite a while ago i know of very few people who ever went to court and walked out and did a joy dance and that includes people who absolutely had everything clearly on their side by the law and it just didn't work out they had a jury that didn't see it the same way or what have you were a judge that disagreed we've got a friendly judge you know in general so that's a good thing but that only goes so far so i only bring the legal stuff up and we want to make absolutely sure that everything we do puts us in the best position going forward i agreed i see another question from chris graham so lisa and kathy and the mayor and the council um if you went to gelman or whomever were dealing with actually and said okay we'll split the cost with you [Music] to install three or four times more extraction wells than you're doing now well you'll do it of course the city would have lots of conditions and no doubt gelman would have lots of conditions but what would that cost wouldn't it if an agreement could be made wouldn't that go a long way towards solving the problem long before the courts solve it rhetorical question you don't have to answer all right i see a hand up with uh dan bicknow and i think we should just try and wrap up soon yeah i i would just observe chris that the uh proposed fourth amendment consent judgment was as far a field for gilman as they're willing to go the eagle people interveners were not happy with the monitoring wells and the extraction rates as i understand them and a number of other things but that was the offer that gelman made so it's very unlikely that gilman is going to agree to install a bunch of extraction wells if half the cost is going to be on their side of the ledger that's why i keep going back to if you really want to change the dynamic here you need to get the federal government involved and have this become a u.s epa superfund site because they have the ability to enforce with the department of justice and the ag's office uh a a real result and if gilman at that point refuses to follow superfund remember that there is this excuse me if they refuse to have an administrative order and and do this compromise you have that super fund in the background that will pay for it and then we'll sue them in a cost recovery action so classically when you get into this situation where you're in in with people who like to litigate you go into the federal government you get the department of justice to help out in that way the city and the municipalities don't have to continue to fund what they're doing now through this state action so i guess the obvious question is where are we on the request of the super fund funding yeah well what where we are is back in 2016 we petitioned the us epa to go forward and look at making this into a superfund site uh in 2017 they did a preliminary assessment and they said yes the gilman site does qualify tentatively to become a uscpa superfund site and late last year the governor of the state sent a letter to uscpa saying we support making this into a u.s epa superfund site so currently right now u.s epa is moving forward to make this into a u.s epa federal superfund site they have people now that are taking additional samples federal people that are taking samples and ideally near the end of the year they will have collected that data and shortly thereafter we'll understand if the united states environmental protection agency is still uh looking uh at likely making this into a uscpa superfund site fingers are across thank you welcome thanks and um i guess i'd like to just make a statement that for my part um having lived in town since this has been discovered um so that's like over 30 years i personally feel a level of beyond impatience and amazement that we've gotten this far without some kind of better resolution and i'm hoping that that we have started some things that are actually going to be effective and i would like to encourage the continued efforts as they are ongoing um so with with that in mind um i did prepare a resolution that i included in the agenda packet that is basically a very much a restatement of what we did last year which is to support um the water resources commissioner evan pratt in his efforts at addressing the um the ongoing ms4 infiltration which is separate from the epa approach um and so just to to continue that and then knowing that you're going to get we hope uh a response from gelman very soon um i know that this feels probably redundant but i would like to um uh ask the group first off did you have a chance to look at that resolution do you want to look at it can we look at it right now if we need to and if if so um i'll just play it and we can talk through it everyone read it no okay i will need some screen sharing time [Music] and oh my gosh i think i found it can you see my screen so this is a proposal that we address the ms4 permit that is actually managed by the water resources commissioner to address the the work that has been started um read it yes i would recommend given the time that we just skipped down to the resolve clause because there's only that i just didn't want to okay here we are here's the result okay um this is very simple that the environmental commission advises city council which is our job to advise city council to pass a resolution in support of the water resources commissioner and enforcing the notice of violation in compliance with the ms4 permit that is issued to the water resources commission and i see two hands up ah chris you're up first where's that from before chris graham um i'm gonna skip chris for the moment and go to lisa your hand is up there you go sorry um yeah i'm just not sure um there's some language in the in the whereas clauses about how gelman's not in compliance and i'm not i'm not entirely sure if that's what commissioner pratt has told us um they're late but he indicated that he was expecting their revised work plans so i mean i think though that this is consistent with the kind of thing that you just have described in terms of working with um various members of our support on this kind of issue working with the city attorney with the aha with the administrator that that this resolution supports your moving forward in that way so it's just advising so we're just advising council to move forward um is there is something we would like to amend in this we could certainly do that i'm just not sure that it's necessary i think we're going to do this anyway and this commission has already you know provided this advice so i guess if we want to say it again i guess there's no harm done um does anyone else like to okay um chris graham are you i see your hand raised and i see john calvary chris i'm not hearing you oh okay so i guess i'm just asking for clarification it seems like what we did a year ago was to support um the issuing of the nov and now we're moving forward with enforcing right so it's taking the next step after what we did a year ago correct thank you i see now kathy as well um i'm open to um amending any of the whereas clauses if evan pratt feels anything is is out of line or inconsistent with with his observations but i i think that the resolve clause is really what's most important and that is enforcement i've not reviewed the document so i don't feel like i should step in and give a top of mind answer or anything like that i did not look at this i mean the agenda thing just came out recently to us so i've not had a chance to look at it i don't want to bind anything up you know or you you can table it and i'm happy to look at it between now and your next meeting with whatever works for you all okay um chris graham again i'm i'm not enthusiastic about more court i um [Music] it seems to me that something's got to give here and it's very difficult for a city and a corporation to negotiate once they've drawn lines in the sand so in this in this case though we're not asking the city to go to court we're asking our water resources commissioner to work on the enforcement and i do realize there's a redundancy to last year um so i i say this is as an expression of uh impatience with the situation um and support for real um for um moving forward because it has been a significant period of time so i'm open to suggestions and i would support that and if that if this is not requesting the city attorney to go to court on this basis then i'm supportive but i think another step is really required and that is to get to a practical solution inexpensively as possible and that does not include internees and it probably does include some city expense at helping to solve the problem and maybe the super fun thing works out but that's a ways away and it would be very helpful uh but an overture in the meanwhile might be worth doing my two cents okay um personally i would prefer not to put that kind of thing in this resolution um i feel pretty strongly that we've had a long time of working with this company that has created the problem and we are now living with it and i personally would like to see them be the responsible for resolving it um so that's my statement um but um i'm open to other questions and if we would like to vote on this i'm happy to do that um let's see two hands up again uh chris chris are you intending to ask i'm sorry i'm not i forgive you that's right hi john my personal feeling is that i'm not uh sufficiently kind of knowledgeable of a lot of the information in the whereas clauses so i'd like to take up mr pratt's offer to kind of review it and that we come back to this next meeting all right is that the wish of the group since i can't see everybody i guess i'll stop screen sharing every moment if i can figure it out stop here hi um all right well um would i'll just put out a motion would the group like to table this resolution for consideration over the next month and bring it back yeah i moved to postpone until the next environmental commission meeting okay um everyone in favor say a second thank you uh everyone in favor all right okay closed all right we will table and bring it back and i appreciate the discussion thank you very much um thanks evan thanks dan yeah good to hear the discussion i'll check in if there's any feedback on the resolution but if any members of the commission want to have additional conversation or something i'm certainly available i say i can't type my address in the chat but all our emails are the same at washington county it's last name first initial at washington.org so i'm pratt e washington.org if anybody wants to you know talk a little bit further or say i don't like this clause or whatever but i'll just take a look at it and follow up with the chair and the council members i apologize for the late submission or getting it to you um thank you all okay so uh we have had this extended discussion and thank you um let's move on to or back to our um first item and i will ask chris vandenbrook i guess to perhaps do an introduction is that acceptable to talk about and we're talking about the um compost perfect right um i've been curious about compost and the more i look into it i get more and more curious and it turns out there are several people agencies that are in the business of qualifying what can be composted and what can't be and what has become interesting to me is that the compost manufacturing alliance does field testing on compostable items and susan tolman is the executive director of the compost manufacturing alliance and she tells me that she's in frequent conversation with the managers of our local we care denali facility so i've invited her some time ago if she wouldn't please try and give us a little talk about how this whole operation works and i see you're still on the line susan so it's uh it's all yours i don't know the technology here maybe uh galen has to enter in but um it's all yours great well it's a privilege to be here um and part of the important work you clearly do um so i am the managing director for the compost manufacturing alliance and we just got back from the u.s composting council conference so unfortunately i don't have any of the wheat care facility folks here but i'm an extension of them and and really what i do is deal with compulsables all over the country for a whole network composters so if i can share my screen is that the plan and then i'll just go through a quick presentation for you so good deal here button okay oops sorry guys huh oh there we go i hit the wrong button can you see my screen now yes okay so we're in an interesting time now um where there's a lot of um epr legislation and plastic pollution reduction packs and all sorts of things to get plastics out of the environment to ensure that we're not you know polluting the environment so what we're seeing is a whole lot of companies and brands and and like whole foods saying 40 less plastics on the shelf um and what that's doing though it's moving a whole lot of interest into the compulsible space so this is a very critical time when compulsables become maybe a strategy to minimize plastic pollution to really be engaged in what compulsables are all about what they mean to successful programs and how we can actually bring in more food waste but also make sure that we're not taking the wrong things it would be a problem so the program just a little background on me i work here in seattle um and i worked on the pro food waste programs that started uh back in the late 2000s and really was part of building the program from the ground up literally um and and and we came to a point about 2009 where if you're aware here in seattle we have some big companies uh big campuses and everybody's rushing to do compulsibles and so we took the standards that were really um the historical standards that everybody took at the time which are lab standards we took all this packaging and lo and behold in a few months we found that a good uh over 50 percent of the items that we were taking in just didn't break down so there's a reason for that and that is that a lot of the lab standards that were developed in the 90s before a lot of the technologies that were built you know after that time were actually cited and permitted so you had standards for basic windrow facilities that might have been running for six months and now you had permitted technology that could process uh feedstock compost feedstock in 60 days so those compostables that were starting to come into these facilities that were newer technology and higher levels of technology uh didn't necessarily align well with the original lab standards which are still the lab standards used today so we thought that was a really sustainable as a company i worked for cedar grove so we had to come up with our own plan and we started field testing so compulsible do a lot like i said they minimize plastic pollution it's a great story to know that if you've got a kids you know you've got you know food being served at the local school in a compulsible we can take the food scraps and the package and send it back to the local composter and bring it back to put in the school garden you know it's there's more and more science coming out about composting either applying it or or diverting those organics from the landfill or a big mitigating factor to climate change and not to mention if you ever use compost or if you're a home composter we know it grows healthy plants and gardens and we can keep that material in our communities and we get jobs and we get just so many i just can go on and on but i know i gotta keep going so we are a third-party certifier of compulsibles from a solid waste perspective so what what happened over the years is all these folks were using the lab standards and they're good standards we need those lab standards to be met the lab standards tell us that they're safe they don't contain chemicals that they're not phytotoxic that they will biodegrade to biomass and water and not simply fragment in the soil and leave behind microplastics so those uh standards are still very important but we're sort of in 0.20 now in this compostable world and that is but it also has to work for the composter so if you think about it if you're a menis if you have a municipal contract with a hauler those organics are going to the composter um someone paid a premium to get a compostable version only to have it go all the way through the system and end up getting landfilled we're actually going the opposite direction environmentally on those materials so cma has really created a system sort of like our own epr system across a network of composters where we have our own bedding system that goes a step beyond the lab standards and that's what we care is adopted in all their facilities taking food scraps uh in their network across the country so like what i like to say is we're taking the supply chain that's making all these great products to reduce plastics um and we're taking the compost facility and the solid waste systems and i always like to remind the supply chain if your material ends up in the bin that goes to a municipal composting plant or a privately owned composting plant we have to be part of the same system we can't operate as two different systems so i spent a whole lot of time collaborating with the supply chain in our network to make sure we're co-creating good compost uh with the right compostables so what's really happening and and the reason we cares adopted this is the traditional model of the old standard for compostables one size fits all you make the product you pass the lab standards you put it on the shelf no one was thinking about the composter all these years so now we're really creating the space where we all come together and we talk about the lab standards what do the municipalities need for their education how about the haulers and what are we going to tell our consumers so cma is really trying to be the place where all those gaps get filled because we know i always like to say this to my staff people don't fail you systems fail you so if we don't have the right systems to make this optimal for everybody um you know we're going to continue to have problems and people may give up we don't want them to give up compostables have a strategic place out there and we just want to make sure we create the right systems the right applications um we are accomplished your own and operated i will tell you that and we put this together um about four years ago and so we have the largest composters uh you know some of the largest in the u.s most of them have multiple facilities we're doing hundreds and thousands of tons at their facilities um i think we're collectively just when our uh in our membership network including we care over three or four million tons just within our network but we also have affiliates uh that have joined us because they also want to take compostables but they want to take compulsibles that are vetted by the composter so this is the map of the affiliates that we have uh again we just came back from the u.s composting council and this whole program started when i worked with the city of seattle when let's say a school system wanted to know what can i what could what's what could i procure for my school what what works it you know in my school at your facility so we're really list makers at the end of the day so if you're to go on our website you'll see this map and you hover over the city and that city will give you a link to a list of of the products they're accepted at that facility so at ann arbor you would just we have to add that here but on the ann arbor facility you would just click you would click the link on the map and that list would um would show you all the things that have been vetted for their process which is a windrow process so i always like to tell people especially or or explain a little bit about the composting process because our goal is also to mutually educate you know we have all these systems going on and if you look at the recycling commodities over the years and where we ended up when a lot of things um you know no longer were being processed domestically and going overseas and some of the recycling challenges that we've had we don't want that to happen with composting we want to make sure that we're being thoughtful and that we're working with you and together and i always say sustainability is a team sport um it takes everybody to do it right but a lot of that is education so we really take our role as educators seriously so we like to show a little bit about the composting price process to help understand why this program's uh very important so there's many steps just like in any manufacturing process the composting you know the recovery the preparation the actual composting and the aging and so it's like a production line that's why we call ourselves compost manufacturers we also like to say that we encourage everyone to to say you know compost manufacturers because we want to put in people's minds we're not dumps we're not places to just throw something we're actual manufacturers of a product that we want to resell and have a market that will come back over and over again and also a market that will grow because if your food scrap program grows so does your market it needs to grow with it um so we really are trying to change you know the perspective in people's mind that we're yes we're part of the solid waste systems but we're not a place just to send empty packages just for the sake of empty packages so we also do a lot of outreach on you know you know what things you shouldn't make compostable like toothbrushes and cell phone covers and things like that it's really about a recipe that needs to be consistent yard waste food waste and compostable food wear that's really the lane we're in and that's the lane that we're willing to certify so when things come in you know they're tipped into a building this is a facility that we work with north of seattle and one of the things we're also working on and we've been successful in my state in passing legislation that actually employs color marking on compulsibles why is that well if you look at this picture um yes logos are good and how to compost logos are good but if you're 20 feet up on a loader and you have a thousand tons a day coming into your facility you don't know a compulsible from an on compostable so we're really pushing legislation in our state combustibles have to be easily identifiable and they ha and and if for instance in uh in the grocery stores um you can't have a uh you can't have a compulsible bag that is the compostable bags need to be brown or green but there can be no non-compostable bags that are brown or green for instance on the spool in the produce department and i i'm testimony of this um but we used to get a lot of green film it just started growing and growing well those organic bags are green you know polyethylene bags so we got an ordinance passed in the city of seattle we helped write the language for that and it was adopted statewide last year and this is now the model legislation uh for the country um that's solid waste based it needs to be a system that works for a high volume composting site so we encourage color marking and we're going to continue to push that type of legislation to keep compost clean oh this is i went the wrong way i'm sorry just a minute let me get back to where i was hit the wrong button my apologies and i'll just go through the rest of this pretty quick um yeah let's pick up here so at the end of a process uh what composters do is they screen out the inert materials and the non-compostable materials so that might be film plastic that's the number one contaminant in compost streams is film plastic again from produce bags and go to your grocery store now and i know when 30 years ago when i went to the grocery store there was no plastic on the english cucumbers there were not strawberries and tiny plastic containers there were not one inch pieces of cake and big domes there's so much plastic around food now and statistically if there's so much plastic around food you better believe it's going to get to the composter that's taking food scraps so we're really trying to make things that make more sense to be compulsible rather than end up with a whole lot of stuff at the end of the day that ends up going to the landfill and is very costly the composter and that pushes your contract rates way up pushes your residential rates way up so we got to arrest this now we gotta move the dial backward and have a better system um materials um after their screen they're aged and then that material goes out to market and again if there's flex of plastic or you know bright green thymes from spoons or anything like that that really affects the solubility of that compost so we're really protecting the aftermarket for compost by making sure we're taking compostables and putting them in a vetted system that makes sense for the composter what we do is we test to different technologies because not every compost facility is the same so at ann arbor you have a windrow system so we do field testing and windrow processes um and um and those are run with turners and large you know large rows uh out in the environment and you know and they're basically turned those materials go from usually 90 days to 180 days our test runs 90 days so we're being conservative on the the lowest time frame that it might go through in large municipal areas like in seattle and new york city is just finishing building a covered in vessel system that's the gore system that system runs like i said actually it's running now 49 to 60 days so it's a much shorter cycle but it's highly controlled it's much higher temperatures a lot quicker and it's covered with a fabric that's from the same family of fabric as gore-tex so it's sort of like a live skin and creates a biosphere over that um feedstock and then it automatically aerates uh it's all automated so it's super controlled very effective 98 voc and emission control so a lot of your large urban composters are going to this very high-tech system engineered in germany but you're going to see more and more of these facilities in larger facilities um out there and then finally aerated static pile often is the technology that a windrow will go to when they start taking food scraps because you need a higher level of control for instance for pathogens that are going to come in from food you want to make sure you can have that pathogen kill and you want to make sure that you have enough control to get that so a lot of the asp systems are replacing windrows once people go to food scraps in certain states depending on their regulations but they're shorter cycles as well so these are the modern technologies that are used and represent probably 90 of the capacity out there so we do tests and these three processes with packaging companies and they get certified for the different process once again our prerequisites are they have to meet the lab standards i won't go into great detail we have all this on our website but they have to meet the lab standards um and we also have a flooring policy so if you're aware of it i'm sure this group is there's a lot of uh activity going on in fact again washington state was the first to uh write regulation that bans any food service sales of products with pfos um they're um you clearly folks on on this uh commission know a lot about pfos in the work that you do but our policy is we only accept items shown to have less than 100 parts per million total flooring we've actually developed the lab standard with one of our advisors who works for astm and we will not accept anything into our program nor will uh nor will it be allowed in any of the weak care or uh cma facilities in our network so lab standards plus field disintegration test equals the cma certification um and i went over a little bit why there's differences between the two it's really time frame um what the media is and if you think about a lab test versus a wild woolly composting plant you're not going to have the controls you're going to have the temperature and the time frames and all that are going to be highly variable so we're really just trying to get in that sweet spot in all these facilities to help packaging companies design what's going to work best in the long run so this is what field testing looks like or these are just photos from some of our work across the country where we've gone out and done field testing and we put samples in the pile we're tracking the temperatures we're taking feedstock samples to an outside lab and looking at c to n ratios what was the ph and the moisture level so we're giving information back until cma existed packaging manufacturers never knew the science and compost piles believe it or not so we literally sit with packaging designers and say oh there i had a gentleman tell me yesterday if i knew the ph was five i wouldn't have designed my package that way and i'm not saying compost facilities run at five but sometimes we find discoveries about ph and moisture levels and how that affects the the the disintegration of those products we take those out of the piles after they're done and active composting we provide reports back on how they performed and again all we're doing is disintegration testing we're not a lab we're doing a visual operational disintegration test to ensure those materials aren't left over at the end of the process so this is just again some shots from our work at st louis composting in belleville illinois and we take uh the rod feed stock that comes in from the collection programs and we mix it 80 to 20 products and non-biodegradable mesh bags we immerse them in the center of the compost piles and then we pull them out and uh yeah so you can see here we have a tester putting them in the piles we put them in the middle of the piles we have the composters cover them and then we come back out extract them dry them and put the results together so well we'll literally have pieces of electrical tape which don't bow to grade so a good test means you just find the tape and a bad test means you got the whole thing and it didn't break down or you have you know you know you have a spoon and you know it's still eighty percent there so if you got eight a spoon that's eighty percent there and you take forty thousand you know and now let's say 120 000 spoons from a microsoft campus in one day that's a lot of green flecks and in in contamination that'll end up so we have to be very protective of our materials we have to be very protective of what we sent in this is a report this is a sample of a report that we might send out to a client so that you have the before picture of what's a pla ngo cup uh and all that's left after the test in our in-vessel system is the tape um i will tell you you might be surprised there's a lot of fiber products paper products with a lot of treatments um a lot of additives um and fiber and paper does not break down all the time so we're actually doing a big paper study with big mills we're going to be doing a fiber study with some top-notch people from some universities because we want to get to the bottom of the how do we get fiber products to you know what what are the ideal conditions for fiber products to work and again a lot of your fiber products now your clam shells and your takeout containers they will contain pfos so you'll also see that we don't have a lot in that category right now not because of lack of disintegration but because they have pfas because um the the industry hasn't caught up with having alternatives to that right now so keep that in mind that's a real problem right now so at the end of the day we do all that work to make these great lists and again it started as a list making sort of activity with the city of seattle um that list in seattle that cedar grove made that we did was started to get used all over the country the phone rang one day and and my boss said i just he said hey who are you talking do somebody in another state so i said you know i gotta i gotta do this thing national so we just started working with these other composters and now we have these lists all over the country so the risk of not field testing just to to summarize on proper improper breakdown in real word systems could lead to market limitations for composters so we have a lot of composters that don't know the difference in a pile between a pet cup and a pla cup that was made to be compostable and companies um that pass field testing um usually have a better market opportunity because they're actually connected to the local composter and we think that's the only way to do this um and if they uh if a manufacturer put a lot of money into a lab test and it didn't break down in a compost facility that wasn't really a good investment if they don't have a home for that and we're finding more and more composters are refusing to take compostables because they're very uncomfortable with them so um higher landfilling rates from compost contaminants um that adds more cost to the composter and ultimately your contracts and there's a growing it it just creates growing mistrust between manufacturers and composting facilities so our goal at the end of the day is to protect the investments of our you know composters and compost manufacturers and also the product manufacturers but to protect your investments in your cities your haulers your solid waste programs you know your education programs you know everybody everybody contributes a lot to make these programs successful so we're just trying to make sure that we protect everyone's investment in time and do this in a way that makes sense and like i s what i like to say is we're working from the pile backward to make a difference to make this a better system and we cares all in on this they've been a wonderful supporter of ours and um and and that is that that's what the cma program is and and that's um that's what we're doing and so it's your local program and we're here as a resource to you in any city we work with we work with a lot of universities a lot of cities i'm working a lot with counties down in uh california now with all their new regulations so we're on the phone a lot just being a resource a free resource to any municipality hauler you know government agency because we're funded we it's kind of like dpr we're funded by the packaging world to make a better system for everybody so that's what cma is about and that's what the program is and that's not my name because i got the wrong slide on the end but um but you have my name so um that's what i have to share tonight well thank you so much susan i really appreciate it and maybe there's some questions i got some but i'll leave it to other people first before i weigh in thanks yeah i'm just wondering uh either if our guest speaker or anybody else has updates on the pfas within ann arbor's compost stream because i know the community garden i was involved in stopped ordering from them two years ago out of fear of contamination so i don't know if we've got any more up-to-date information on that or not i do not does anyone uh know where we would go for the information uh speakers did susan have any information about the ann arbor testing and for i i am not representing the facilities tonight unfortunately i apologize um i would not but um rod tyler at week here could probably give you an update thank you go ahead chris i have a fundamental one and that is as a resident we just had some takeout food from a restaurant tonight and it came in a clam shell labeled world centric world centric apparently makes a lot of stuff and it says compostable on it but i don't see any special color or any special certification or anything anything on it and i'm wondering as a general rule what should a resident do when he gets a load of food from a local restaurant and the little straws and the plastic cups and all this stuff all say come possible on what should i do with that stuff should i throw it in our compostable bin or should i throw it out well certifications are important ours and bpi is the other certifier very well respected and recognized um and again our policy is cma only certified for the lab for the field test portion um but you know it takes a little work i i'd go to the manufacturer's site the product the world-centric site i'd make sure that's pfos free because that that paper-looking clam shell make sure it's p-floss free first um but compulsibility um it may not always have a logo or a certification on the item but but the websites usually tell you if they're certified so the and again that's where our system is now the goal is down the road we should have the right logos and the right color marking to really make this system you know legitimate in terms of what's compostable um but but our site you know and and you can also send us lists you know and items not that your homeowners are all going to be calling us but but our lists are great resources and i found in seattle it was really cool we went to the college and and we almost had compost police out there when we got started once we had the list like you're not using the right stuff but it was like they were like my police all the college kids so we they did a lot of that work for us but once you're educated the key is education any follow-up we're always happy to do a webinar for the community for or for you or record something to help your your your residents understand and and and understand what's compulsable what are the things you can look for and where you can go to find out i think that's a tall order for most people i have neighbors who don't really care and they're not going to make the phone call so my advice to them has been up until today anyway is if you don't really know throw it out and it seems to me the restaurant owners who peddle this stuff they ought to be making a phone call and making sure that if they if if the clam shell that they deliver their food in says compostable on it that it really is impossible in our wind roll seems like but well the other thing i want to add there's legislation in maryland washington state and california now that you cannot put compulsible on it unless it passes the lab standard unless it passes that astm so if they have compulsable on it and there's the size of world centric it at least meets the lab standard so i think you could use that as a baseline not that that's easy to explain to a resident but i would say compostable on an item probably means they don't want to get sued or be in trouble with any of those three states and that's you know california they sell a lot of compulsables so um and they're gonna harmonize to do that all across the country just because california does it doesn't mean they're just going to make it for california they're going to harmonize the production of those things so if it says compulsible you know it it has to be compliant but that doesn't mean it will be compliant i'm just saying that most companies won't put compulsible on it now because of that legislation unless they meet that standard okay thank you i have a question it seems like there are two things that um that you're describing so compostable really means the breaking down into like the smallest pieces right um and really break it down to biomass and water because oxal biodegradables are fragmenting yeah right those are not what you want sorry celeste no i said that's you don't want oxalbyter grails i always like to warn about oxels they fragment but but compulsable means that biodegradable bio biodegrades to biomass and water right okay um so biomass means that it's something that's other than pfas that's one of the components well interestingly enough pfos were not part of the astm standard so until pfas became a big issue in about they weren't considered that wasn't considered in in in what was termed certified compulsible but once that became apparent that it was an issue um now both the certifier bpi and cma has a pfos limit in certification it really is all about certification the two certifying bodies in the country us and bpi um that's our standard we're kind of like the gatekeepers on what's acceptable um i don't know if that addresses your your question or comment but but there are lawsuits now that that are addressing the fact that because there were pfos in items sold now lawyers are going after those companies that made those products with pfas and saying you misled the pug blood because pfas is not compostable so that is a development that's kind of i get your thinking but that people are also thinking that way and now there's lawsuits against those companies so i think it the question really is like how reliable for us in our city are the um indicators that say compostable and are we making things worse if we put some of those containers in our compost and it sounds like yes i would say fiber fiber plates and deli wraps the paper del are the two ones i'd worry about the rest are pretty good in fact i'd be happy to follow up with chris on articles the uh ceh down in california has a wonderful list of resources to help better better understand you know this whole area of pfas what is and isn't and they they do have tests that they did at berkeley i believe um on a lot of different products out there in the market and those are the main the main ones french fry bags deli wraps and the fiber containers and that's unfortunate because whole school programs need that tray so we're really scrambling right now for alternatives but at least you can you can you can take those categories those subcategories and say yeah i'd be wary of those subcategories i would agree that i would be wary of those uh those categories the the things that they wrap sandwiches in those papers thanks get your your yes yes sandwiches sub sandwiches yes when you go by ask them is that p fuss free yeah it feels to me like we really need to start at a very high level at the manufacturing level right so that that the restaurant owners even don't have to think about it so much that they they want to just get the food in a thing and then get it out to somebody who wants it but but they it would be easier if they didn't have to think about pfas um or or whatever else might be something that would be incorrect to use um okay thanks does anybody else have a question comment i really appreciate this presentation and chris thanks for making the effort to to reach out to susan and bring this information here um i think it gives us a lot to think about um chris are you are you raising your hand i am okay so thank you for the pfas thing it's one doesn't see that i elaine and i have a vegetable garden and i generally recharge it every year with uh leaf humus or what i call leafiness from ann arbor's compost center and it really works but i'm not happy if it has pfas the whole any of the zone of those chemicals in it and so i'm glad you're watching that um i also build gardens for living and one of the problems i face in doing so is when i need topsoil a large percentage of the suppliers of that are providing me with soil scraped our farm fuels before they get built upon [Music] and as many of you know most of those farm fields have been growing uh european weeds for decades the soil is full of weeds basically and so i've gotten around that by making my own soil and i do that by mixing the city's leaf humus from the compost center with sand or bark and end up with a soil mix that's probably not very good but way better than buying farm fuel soil with all the weeds in it and so i'm wondering how widespread your ph testing is in one of those acquisitions i went to a compost center up north west of detroit and bought compost that was very alkaline because they were predominantly composting leaves from streets um ann arbor has typically been ph neutral because they're taking a lot of wood that tends to even out the alkaline leaf inflow um [Music] is is ph testing really a significant part of your program and and if it's not can it be for those of us who depend upon compost for making soil in our gardens in our landscapes okay very very good question i appreciate it so there's two places composters good composters are testing unrelated to us so it's they have to get the recipe right to make good compost so they do what are called feedstock tests when when all the material comes in they do a composite sample and they send it to the lab to test all those things and there's a range that's promulgated by the us composting council that they want to be in and all the facilities we work in we pull a feedstock test for our test and i can tell you that most facilities we op that we operate in are in that range because if they weren't they wouldn't make good compost okay so from the standpoint of our network and what we're doing those are the best practices at the facilities there's also the sta program the u.s composting council has and that's a program that you have to certify your compost meets certain standards okay so those standards are also extensive lab tests tme ecc lab tests you go to u.s composting council site and look at the tests and the methods that they use but they also have to meet those standards so there are some qcs in place best management practices the composters use that doesn't mean you're not going to end up with a composter or a compost somewhere that might be out of range and that's really i don't represent one individual site tonight but that's really a facility by facility situation but i can tell you at least for with but to give you some assurances the composters that are doing it well are going to do that anyway because that's going to be important to making the good compost and selling it if that's helpful it is i just have to be careful about who i buy from that's it and i've been so thrilled about ann arbor's program because the product out there has typically been outstanding and ph neutral the other thing i find when i buy compost is a lot of small non-biodegradable plastic scrap i i i can put a three or four inch coat onto my vegetable garden and rototill it in and up comes dozens of little plastic non-biodegradable plastic i think a lot of it's vinyl but so are they um screening state-of-the-art screening equipment really getting down to that level yet or are we still struggling with that problem i think it's still an issue and usually to sell product that's going to actually be applied in you know their respects on product right screen size and all that i would say most facilities are screening to a quarter inch to 5 16 of an inch but again it's it's going to be inherent as long as there's contamination in the bin so i go upstream everything we got to get upstream we got to get better education can we use compulsibles to as a replacement i was just spoke last last week at a big conference said why don't we make salad bags compostables you know forget the hair brushes the salad bags you know can we use that to mit to actually reduce our contamination can we use compulsables as a contamination reduction strategy so but yes it's going to be there i was the sales director of compost for years at cedar grove it will always be they'll always be a percentage as long as we're taking it from the public i just if it was clean every day we wouldn't have that problem but i can tell you that there's a lot of people that see a lot of money to be made if we can really get those little tiny pieces out so we're hoping that technology will bring that but i'd rather see it never go there in the first place yeah well we have the same problem with the regular recycle bins with people putting all of their paper products and so on that are definitely recyclable in a plastic bag and putting it in the recycle bin right thank you thank you so we are um at nine o'clock and i just was um does anyone else have other questions um i really appreciate hearing from you susan it's really good to think about what's going on with compost and chris thanks this is really very um helpful and thought-provoking for me and how we move forward um so if if no other questions i'd like to move on to our next presenter and and um to say thank you to theater eggerman for for sticking around for this long and was we got our agenda um moved around quite a bit this time um and uh oh looks like shannon do you have a question i'm just wondering can we just think big picture about what we really have in front of us tonight because it just seems completely unrealistic to me that we're going to be able to cover everything in the agenda that we have so i can tell you that the next two are going to be super short after this presentation one is going to be deferred the ki discussion completely because steve was going to manage that and he's not available tonight and there's another super short on the deer call so um if we i believe this that if we can get through this presentation that we'll have a relatively short remainder of the meeting okay i just would like to consider i would just like to consider tabling some things it just feels like if we're really really that's really what i'm telling another 45 minutes of presentation plus two other i just don't want to do things that i feel like we are being cursory about because we just want to get through it fast because it's getting late so these okay these are things that that you wouldn't have known that happened and so they will be short okay subsequently i would love to wrap up by 9 30.

do i have a motion mr fizzicaro second mr lanzalada any questions or comments pertaining to personnel miss everhart sorry my chatty kathy tonight sorry uh so let's talk about these resignations great job and wish a lot of people luck that are moving on to new adventures i just wanted to give a shout out to two people uh that i've course past was over the years and that would be cindy wozdik who i have been i've seen do the music program through all the years so great job gonna be excuse me a great loss there but i wish her a lot of luck i hope she continues with her pursuit of music at the south jersey orchestra she takes some of the children and she herself plays so i think it's great good luck mrs wozdick also to maureen hannan or maureen heenan uh grant writer she also was an integral part of like day of service when we would go in as board members back in the day before kovid where we would go to experience stuff that the teachers would do with the students for service and she had some amazing ideas for the kids if i'm correct and correct me if i'm wrong but i think she did like taking plastic bags and putting them together to make things items that the homeless could lay on they were like shoprite bags and it was the yeah it's the coolest thing um so shout out to her and all that she has done for the district with her extracurricular activities with all the grant writing and all of those activities so best of luck to mrs heenan also want to give a shout out to nicole mandry who is moving on she is from my home school at rice so i know a little bit about her and i wish her a lot of luck moving forward again congratulations to everyone but just a special shout out to those people good luck thank you thank you mrs everhart any more questions regarding personnel okay seeing none i'm going to ask for a roll call please mrs cappello yes mrs everhart yes mr fizzagaro yes mr canton yes mrs noll yes mr lancelata yes miss lloyd yes mr megan yes mrs ryan yes mission carries moving to item 11 policy i need a motion to approve items 11.1 and 11.2 do i have a motion mr fizzakero second invite mr canton any questions or comments pertaining to personnel yes 11.1 and 11.2 policy any questions nope okay seeing none i'm going to ask for roll call please mrs cappello yes mr mrs everhart yes mr visacaro yes mr canton yes mrs noel yes mr lancelata yes miss lee yes mr megan yes mrs ryan yes motion carries okay moving on to committee reports does any committee chair have a report they wish to share at this time and if so could you just state the name of your committee mr lanzalata thank you mr ryan i appreciate it this is for the committee of community outreach public relations it's a little extensive so bear with me first we would like to thank robert luther and the marlton rotary club for meeting with dr smith in the community outreach committee on january 4th in the meeting we discussed fundraising ideas the state of our district the effects of covet on our schools and future plans moving forward together with the rotary club we appreciate their time and their our continued relationship that we have with the rory club and we look forward to meeting with them again with the mrc there's a couple fundraisers first deck hockey's having a 50 50 raffle they're being sold on the mrc website the winner will be announced on february 10th there's also valentine's day candy sale so buy yourself some gummy bears and some chocolates help the kids registration for spring football spring soccer spring softball are all are all open now and coaches and referees are needed to just reiterate with the panel discussion of hate that dr smith had already uh talked about you know dr smith was also the host there so we'd like to thank him for putting that all together as well as with the whole all the six panel members um you know if you haven't seen it we really recommend that you take a look at it it is in dr smith's january 20th update and it it's really just filled with discussions and you know and lessons and points of view you know that can foster understanding respect and the acceptance of others and that's really where we're going for um you know in this community um with the town council again reiterating how important is the the sros uh with uh um with our three-year agreement with this with with the town council you know thank you so much to mayor vizi and the rest of the town council for for um you know their great leadership on this you know with all the violence and the threats of violence going through social media on our staff and schools these days we're very lucky to have a leadership in our town who's willing to put our children safety first also congratulations to chief chu who's retiring after 25 years of service to the eastern police department issue is a better and much safer place because of his dedication to our and service to our community i hope he enjoys his retirement and finally the eevsham education foundation is having a huge fundraiser the event is on friday february 22 25th at the mansion in voorhees from 7 to 10 30.

this this impairment or disability must substantially limit one or more major life activities these activities include such things as walking seeing hearing speaking breathing learning working caring for oneself performing manual tests such as eating sleeping standing lifting bending reading concentrating thinking and communicating title 2c 27-2a bribery in official and political matters a person is guilty of bribery if he directly or indirectly offers confers or agrees to confer upon another or solicit or solicit accepts or agrees to accept from another any benefit or consideration for a decision opinion recommendation vote or exercise of discretion of a public servant party official or voter on any public issue 18 u.s code 242 deprivation of rights under color of law whoever under color excuse me whoever under color of any law statute ordinance regulation or custom willfully subjects any person in any state territory commonwealth possession or district to the deprivation of any rights privileges or immunities such excuse me privileges or immunities secured by protected by the constitution or laws of the united states or to different punishments pains or penalties on account of such person being an alien or by reason of his color race then are prescribed for the punishment of citizens shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year or both and if bodily injury results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include the use attempted use or threatened use of dangerous weapons explosives or fire shall be fined under this title or imprisoned by more than 10 years or both and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include an attempt to kill shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years for life both or may be sentenced to death thank you if you could state your name and address please kim galliazzi 115 peabody lane in continuation of miss mr angelo 18 u.s code 241 conspiracy against rights if two or more persons conspire to injure a press threaten or intimidate any person in any state territory commonwealth possession or district in the free exercise of or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the constitution or laws of the united states or because of his having so exercised the same they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years or both and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such arts include an attempt to kill they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years for or life or both or may be sentenced to death federal law title 21 usc section 360 bbb 3e1a iii 1-3 of the federal food drug and cosmetic act individuals who individuals to whom the product is administered are informed have the option to accept or refuse administration of this product and under the number code 1947 the voluntary consent of human subject is absolutely essential this means that person is able to exercise free power of choice without the intervention of any element of coercion by federal law we are refusing any and all unlawful eua products or testing on all offspring but not limited to eua tests eua medical procedures eua facial mask coverings eua investigational products including facial masks eua testing centers eua health data tracking and surveillance platforms critical race theory diagnostic laboratories i.t health data platforms social distancing cova testing temperature taking and or experimental gene therapy injections also known as the covid19 vaccination i hope to believe that you have not intentionally broken these laws and therefore i am requesting that you immediately vote to update your guidance and the freedom of all of our children be restored guidelines should reflect personal and parental choice to opt out of the masking requirements and quarantine please make this guidance a parental choice personal responsibility and rule of law parents have the right to make the decisions about the health and education of their children we are their legal guardians we created them and you have no legal right to impose these damaging acts on them a few suggested common sense guidelines are encourage parents to keep their children home if they are sick encourage children to cover their mouths and noses when sneezing and or coughing encourage children to wash their hands please uphold your oath to protect our constitutional rights or step down from your positions thank you thank you ladies any more members of the public wishing to speak okay if you could just state your name and address clearly hi melissa lampman 13 old republic lien i was just asking for you to revisit the mandatory five day quarantining since some schools are taking that off and not requiring it anymore and also the masks too thank you thank you good evening state your name and address please okay can you guys hear me back there i knew we were having a hard time hearing everybody i think if you speak clearly like into the microphone like this then everyone the acoustic sir okay i'm no public speaker i know uh my name is rebecca depersia i'm at seven sandwood drive in morrilton so i'm here on behalf of the mass mandate but it sounds like you guys may be open to whatever having some options but i hope that you are all true to that so um i have two kids in the district uh every day without fail as we're waiting for the bus my kids say do i have to put these masks on and unfortunately i say yes you do and they always ask me why and they say mom i can't breathe in them i have a hard time understanding what my teacher is saying to me why do we have to wear these and i feel awful because i agree with them i think it's hard to breathe um it's hard to understand what what people are saying and honestly when you're doing your presentation tonight i had a really hard time understanding what you're saying because everything is so muffled with the masks on and um to be honest i have a hard time recognizing people if somebody if one of you all walked up to me in the street without a mask on i probably wouldn't know who you are because i've never seen your face so um so i agree with my kids so it's really hard for me to really you know hit home on why they need to wear a mask my kids love school but because of the masks they they don't want to go they just they really hate the masks but it doesn't have to be this way there are several districts in the area that have dropped their policies uh middletown montague millstone union and franklinville have all recently dropped their mass mandates the new jersey department of health is just guidance recommendation it's not a law the mass mandate is up to the districts whether or not to follow it we have the choice we have the freedom the choice to do what's right for our district for our kids i'm hoping that our district will adjust to that i'm hopeful that you'll consider adjusting the policy on the benefit of all of our children this is not a political thing this is strictly a health thing and if i have enough time i would love to share a little personal note my son that's in the district is a special needs he has multiple sensory issues and he will only wear one mask one kind of mask and i have two of these masks that's i got lucky and bought a two pack so my son wears the mask one day the next day i wash it in the laundry with the rest of the with the rest of the load a few weeks ago um i was doing laundry and i forgot to put his mask in so i had to wash still had to wash his one mask and i'm not going to use a whole uh you know washing machine for one mask so i decided to hand wash it so put in a bowl a little bit of laundry detergent hot water i couldn't get over how disgusting the water was and how many particles and just grossness that came up out of this water in this water from wearing for one day of my son wearing his mask for six eight hours in that day so imagine what that's doing to his lungs breathing that in every day and let's be honest not everybody's kids get a different mask every day they may wear the same mask multiple days and just imagine what that is doing to them breathing that in every day so i give you all a challenge when you get home tonight tomorrow the message you're wearing tonight or that you've worn for the last six to eight hours i challenge you to hand wash it see what that water looks like after you've washed it and see how you feel about breathing that in at all times so that's my challenge to you guys thank you thank you mr virgil [Applause] any other comments from the audience okay please state your name and address clearly hi my name is natasha melnichuk i'm from 134 windmir road thank you so much for letting me speak tonight i just want to ask you guys a question just keeping it as real i don't have any studies on me how many times have you guys been wearing those masks and you sneeze right like you sneeze and you're like oh my god what am i gonna do i just sneezed i have a mask on where do i take it off how do i get it off think about a child right think about a little kid that has that moment that they sneeze in class you know how upsetting that is for a child i too have a child that has special needs in the district he has extreme anxiety ocd on the spectrum so many different issues wearing these masks stress him out every day it stresses him out when he gets in trouble for putting it under his nose it gets him nervous if he's not wearing it right and someone tells him to put it up it stresses him out if he has to sit at a certain table there's certain things that we take advantage of because it comes natural to us right but for some children along with adults it's not that natural it's not that easy and i think that a masked mandate is very tough on somebody i'm a mom right and i choose to make every decision for my children i choose to do it and i do what's best for my family what someone else's does that's fine they want to put their kids in a mask i completely respect that but i think we have to really stop and think and think about we're parents we have the right to do this for our children it's so hard right like every day every day since the day i was pregnant i think to myself am i making the right decision should i let them eat that piece of candy should i let them play that sport should i let them do that reading i think about it every day but what i do i do what's best for my family i'm not judging anybody else and and i'm simply okay with what everyone decides to do i just think what's best for me is what i do for my own family and i just think that the masks like the other mom said it's just hard they're disgusting for kids you know you know when your breath smells right like you can you can look at it i understand it i've been very aware even more aware now that i do wear a mask but for kids they don't get that they don't understand that my kids when i get my two younger ones or in kindergarten first grade my two youngest when i get them from school they were afraid to take off the mask when they sneezed so sometimes it's like sticking to them it's like sticking to their face you look at there was a study done in florida it was moms made them do is i think in gainesville florida out of six of the mass five of them were contaminated and guess what when the study was done they were life-threatening they were life-threatening things pneumonia there was strep there was meningitis on these masks and you just have to think about that not every family washes them every night i do because i'm crazy like that but you have to really think about not everyone can not everyone can with jobs and everything else so just think about these masks what they're doing to these children thank you so much thank you miss needletech [Applause] any other okay come on hi you could state your name and address clearly for us my name is dorian carlton my address is 130 deerfield avenue i'm here to continue our argument for zero tuition full day kindergarten for all students in marlton we've been here for a few meetings and i just like to do a quick recap so at our first meeting we emphasized the social inequality of half day versus full day kindergarten half day kindergarteners don't get lunch they don't get recess they don't get guaranteed choice time like full day kindergarteners do and they miss out on some full school activities they're not involved in the school life until they're in first grade at our second meeting we discussed the academic inequality of full day versus half day full day kindergarteners get 80 more minutes each day of literacy instruction they get 15 more minutes each day of math instruction they get guaranteed choice time 41 minutes each day that's taken sometimes from the half day schedule for related arts we've covered um last meeting that marlton and one other school district in burlington county are the last two districts to charge for full day kindergarten i i did look since the last meeting and now not just the county but i'd like to comment on the fact that statewide best my best count there are 555 school districts in the state of new jersey it seems to be calculated every 10 years according to the census i read that there are 14 that charge for full day kindergarten we are one of the bottom three percent as far as our academic offerings for our young learners i'm not proud of that as a resident of marlton this is a money issue i think that's pretty clear that we need that that's what we need to figure out it's the hurdle we need to jump i'm requesting a cost analysis i would like it calculated how much it costs to run kindergarten as is right now how much does it cost to run half day and full day then i'd like a projection of what it would cost to run zero tuition full day for all there was talk earlier in the meaning of esther funds this money that was allocated to our district there are allowable uses for it it says it can be allowed to be used to provide principals and other school leaders with the resources necessary to address the needs of their individual schools are we deciding that it's a need to offer equal education to all of our young learners another allowable use to address the unique needs of low-income children or students children with disabilities english learners racial and ethnic minorities students experiencing homelessness foster care youth including how outreaches and services delivery will meet the needs of each population how many students don't get that it's not a choice that they're attending half day kindergarten they're not able to pay 5 500 a year for their education earlier in this meeting one of the board members commented applauding the forward thinking initiatives of the board and that's great i would love if a year from now we looked back and applauded ourselves for the forward-thinking initiative of instilling full-day kindergarten now to provide equal education to our young students thank you thank you mrs carlton [Applause] well you can move the microphone there you go state your name and address please danielle remus 39 old republic lane i'm here today in support of our movement for full day kindergarten for all students i just wanted to share this article with you all that came out this week in the marlton sun our our opposing viewers have said that half day kindergarteners receive an equal amount of overall education as those that receive full day i ask you then why are we advertising in our town paper for full day kindergarten by saying and i quote it extends early reading and math concepts language development fine and gross motor skills related arts and social skills into complete full day academic program thank you hi thank you for having me my name is jillian mink 13 kingswood road first of all i just want to say i'm a former educator i worked at northstar elementary which is a member of the uncommon schools i worked under julie jackson who is now the president of uncommon schools i've had doug lamov in my classroom the author of teach like a champion and i am very passionate about education and educational equality for all students that's why i'm here um to support full day kindergarten first i want to share my personal story i have a daughter in second grade and when it was time for her to go to kindergarten we decided on the half day program i figured with my experience in education i could fully support her academically with any deficit within the month it became clear that it wasn't the curriculum and it wasn't the academics it was the lack of social interaction with peers it was the lack of opportunity for outside play it was the lack of opportunity for choice and time to settle in and get to know her classroom because everything was rushed and rushed a transition to a special a transition to the bathroom a transition to math and before you knew it the two and a half hours were over she came home exhausted but also unfulfilled i can't give her peer to peer skills i can't give her small group instruction i can't do that if it's just me and her she needed that extra time so we made the choice to enroll her in the full day program however we didn't have five thousand five hundred dollars lying around i like to think of my family as pretty average like many families in marlton and we just don't have that money in our budget but it was a priority to us that she get into the full day program so we cancelled our vacation we reached out to family and we found the money we scraped it together and i know how lucky and privileged i am that we were able to do that and that we'll be able to do that for my other daughter and my son but i ask you how many families in this town aren't going to be able to scrape that five thousand and five hundred dollars to give their children an equitable education to every other marlton family i'm going to find my spot because i lost it so in 2022 i'm just finding it so hard to believe and wrap my head around that if you don't have a family does not have five thousand five hundred dollars laying around for their child's education that child cannot receive and this is a direct quote from the full day flyer opportunities for extended early reading and math concepts so if you don't have that money your child's not getting that extended learning they're not going to get extended time for fine and gross motor skills or more opportunities for related arts or developing social skills how is that fair how is that equitable this deficit as a teacher as a former first grade teacher who taught in a low-income district who has a passion for educational equality this deficit isn't going to stop in kindergarten it's going to continue it's going to follow them to first grade where you're going to have half the students from full day half the students from half day come together do you think they they have the same social behavioral skills academic skills what challenges does that now present to our first grade teachers our second grade teachers so this isn't a kindergarten problem this is a whole entire elementary school problem and i ask you is this the district we want to be where our youngest learners and their families if they don't have the money they don't have five thousand five hundred dollars they don't deserve to be on an even playing field is this who we want to be i struggle to wrap my head around the fact that we are one of two districts in burlington county and as dorian said 14 left in the state of new jersey that don't have full decay it makes me wonder where our priorities lie yes it's a financial thing but surely we can all agree that educational equity among our youngest learners our top financial priority right we can agree on that and i definitely say that taking any and all measures to avoid a socio-economic achievement gap is also a worthy financial endeavor right i think i think we can all get behind that so that's all that's my closing but thank you for your time and i hope you really seriously consider this because all of our young learners deserve an equal playing field thank you thank you [Applause] any more comments oh hello hi kristen nardello 94 kent ave hello again this is also my third meeting and i continue to be here until um let's say five kids so a lot of kids going through kindergarten um just following off of what um jill said what the board says we all talk about how the importance of our early education is many times we referenced it tonight and it seems like the most basic and important thing to do would be provide to provide a full day program for all of our learners we've been able to have a lot of conversations with people through our facebook page so just general conversation there's a lot of single parents who talk about how you know the struggle we have people that couldn't come here tonight because the struggle of being a single parent and a lot of people move into this district and are shocked when it comes to kindergarten time and they don't know that they have to pay for it so they just send their kids a half day and that's something a lot of times people i've had a lot of people say to me well then move to a different district move to cherry hill move to mount laurel move to one of the surrounding districts this is my home i came here for the education system i came here for the education um like i said i have five children i have my oldest is in special education we came here because it was important for us to be in this education system i grew up in marlton i love this town it's extremely disappointing that this is not a priority to the board to the district it's it's very it's very concerning and we are going to continue to be here and hope that we can make a positive change thank you thank you [Applause] appreciate it any more comments from the audience okay thank you for all who spoke um seeing no more public comments i'm going to close the portion of this that meeting um any comments or questions from the board mr campin yeah so there were no um formal board member announcements at the reorg so i just wanted to thank the the rest of the board for their confidence in the leadership team and as well to the to the outgoing leadership team um you guys served for more than a full term which the time commitment is tremendous right so i think on behalf of the entire community we wanted to thank you for for your leadership over the last couple of years as well as being available to mrs ryan and myself for questions as we navigate how to be leaders ourselves right i know i've called both of you on multiple occasions so so i appreciate you guys being available um and then also being a being a board member is a is a significant time commitment and being a chair of a committee is an even more significant time commitment so i just wanted to thank all our chairs i think there's a lot of great work that's done in the committees that doesn't really get talked about so for all the chairs given reports i think that's a great step in making sure we talk about all the good work we're doing so thank you this guy always tells my thunder i it's okay i agree i'm 100 with what uh mr canthan said and i just wanted to again thank the board for their support and um getting behind our new initiatives and new way that we're running the board meetings and everything we appreciate your support i did want to mention some fun things congratulations to macy for their the macy rocks flyer and newsletter there's great things taking place and so thank you to mr fox and the staff and just going back to the webinar about hate and thank you dr smith for for monitoring that and what i got out of it was that every single denomination they basically said the same thing but in a different way the students are the solution hate affects everyone hate touches everybody and it's true so if you haven't watched the webinar i strongly suggest you go back you'll get something out of it and if you want to watch it with your children they will definitely get something out of it also um so thank you to everyone i know it's been a long meeting so if there's no more board questions or comments okay i'd like to make a motion to adjourn mr fizzakero thank you mr lanzalata thank you all those in favor aye all right thank you [Music] you

sure okay when i was a junior at west genesee high school in camillus new york so you've done so much to make me feel young today i really appreciate that when we're talking about context of when i was in high school that's i want to make that make me feel young thanks um so i have two questions the first one is if you could remind us what the um the increase the percentage increase of the budget over last year's budget what that percentage increase is if we take out the 1.5 million that was infused artificially into the if you want to just do the math on that then real quick it's one and a half million divided by the current budget well if the question is what was last year's budget increase it was one point excuse me it was two three percent and that did not include the 1.5 million no right because that didn't get funded into our budget yeah so it was that the questionnaire yeah so i just think it's it's erroneous to think that we're asking for a five point whatever three four four three four increase what we're really asking for is a 3.23 increase over last year's budget absolutely i you know i would consider that legitimate um you know postulate but again i think 3.2 percent is inherent in that is uh is also closing the gap between where we had underfunded the insurance the monthly insurance projection to go from 825 000 a month to what the current projection is we also had to close that gap so when you add that in as well now we're at three you know two point excuse me um yeah 2.9 percent and you know that's a substantial budget increase but again like you said i mean that's this is stuff that we knew would you know more than likely occur that's also um numbers that the town council will understand because they're the ones that infuse that 1.5 million yeah mr massiana and i had a meeting with the budget committee of the town council was that monday night event tuesday night and you know there's a clear understanding about this situation right this is nothing that's a a whopper surprise to them i just wanted to make that a little more clear because you know 3.23 sounds a lot better than 5.

the theme is casino night there will be cocktail parties food from local restaurants djs dancing auctions baskets i'm trying to make this sound good black dancing yeah blackjack craps roulette and an exclusive poker table um tickets are 100 bucks piece and the best part is that there will be no losers because it benefits the students of each we thank scott zielinski the president of the eastern education foundation for his hard work and everyone and for their benefiting our schools and our our students if you'd like to purchase tickets or at least to take a look at the flyer you can go to yves sham education or you can go to their each education foundation homepage on facebook and they are looking for volunteers so if anyone is interested please let me know okay thank you so much for that time wow amazing report mr lanzalata thank you very very much any other committee chairs would like to report on anything they've done this month miss everhart i'm afraid to follow that actually i will be brief so i am the new curriculum chair this this year for curriculum and i'd like to welcome committee members marianne capello and jamie lee we met this week and with miss mcgulick and with uh in the presence of president ryan um that sounds so funny doesn't it that's good job um we met for the first time to go over it was a great opportunity for us to you know uh indoctrinate miss lee to how the meetings will run in the future and to explain to her how curriculum runs in the district we showed her like accounting methods and we discussed those kinds of things in case she had questions when she looks at budget pages danny went to great length explaining categories and subgroups and all that kind of stuff so that was great review for us and a great way to get jamie hitting the ground running with with those kinds of things the other thing we talked about were some agenda items that we already voted on we talked about the calendar which we already voted on and we talked about some of the updates that are continually happening with the eastham township school district safe return return plan which is online under our website and you can look on there every time changes happen in the district miss mcgoulick and her team update those new additions to the safe return plan in italics so you can see what has changed or what's new to that document i think the last thing we did talk about briefly was some of the curriculum revisions that are going ongoing we will be looking at uh quite a lot of things and apparently the uh the board will be reviewing a lot of documents here through the year we're reviewing mathematics english and language arts we're looking about at the comprehensive health and pe we're looking at curriculum for visual and performing arts and we're looking at technology so those are ongoing with her and her staff and as board members we will be looking at those documents for review and for question we also talked uh briefly about the budget that is ongoing and that's a great opportunity for um to bring ms lee up to date on some of the things that curriculum does cover in the budget and we will be getting budget pages and we will be looking in greater detail those items that curriculum and technology will be addressing in the budget so we look forward to that over the next couple of months as we continue to develop the budget so thank you for your time that's it thank you mrs everhart that was fantastic any other board members have any reports annie mrs noah i just wanted to update the group on a liaison for what's called the wrap room and some of you may know what it is but for those of you who don't it is a wonderful organization they actually have physical space and [Music] it was started by three moms who lost their sons to i believe a drug overdose so i just want to read what's on on their website it's at wrap room.org just so you understand what they do so they're not licensed therapists or counselors they are advocates for those seeking treatment and offer support for their family members our goal is to empower families through shared experiences we strive to help our clients and their family members understand addiction its effect on the entire family unit and offer hope so i just wanted to preface that we had a meeting a few weeks ago of the board of directors and mr hoffman is on the board of directors as well as mr buchabello we are also going to be welcoming two principals from our elementary schools mr de blasi from van zandt and mrs schroeder from bieler so i'm very excited about that and they will be joining us at our next meeting in march the wrap room board of directors consists of a large number of individuals from different organizations representatives from the police department their community outreach unit somebody's always there and again you know having the sros so the police department is involved and marlton business association in helping families especially around the holidays to offer support financial support meals things like that and then of course representatives from the high school cherokee lenape regional school board and um something very exciting in the fall the cherokee peer leaders were able to go to the middle schools i think that was november and if i understand that did not happen last year so that was wonderful again that started up where the peer leaders went into the middle schools from cherokee and um [Music] i don't think i have much of anything else we'll meet again in march and our group will be getting larger as we welcome mrs schroeder and mr de blasi thank you mrs knoll and thank you to all your township staff for joining that committee and representing us thank you any other comments or committee reports okay right now i'm going to move into old business but we don't have any old business but we do have some new business based on the recommendation of the chief school administrator i need a motion to issue a new schedule of meetings beginning in february with executive session beginning at 6 30 pm and public meetings beginning at 7 30 pm can i have a motion please mrs knoll and mr canthan any questions okay um can we have a roll call please this is capello yes this is everhart yes mr fizzagaro yes mr canton yes mrs noll yes mr lanzalada yes miss lee yes mr megan yes mrs ryan yes motion carries okay that's everything for new business now we're going to move into open public comment the meeting will now be open to the public referencing any items of interest however if your questions or comments pertain to litigation student or personnel items or negotiations we ask that you seek the superintendent after the meeting since we do not discuss these matters in public we will ask that you limit your comments to three minutes per person and also this section is meant for one comment per person anyone from the public willing to speak come right up to the microphone if you could state your name and address clearly heather sponseller 34 bonaire drive first i'd like to say thank you so much for serving on our board of education i know it's often a thankless job i'm here to ask you to do a policy now that masks will be optional as soon as the public emergency is over february 10th so the governor declared another public emergency it is supposed to be over february 10th i think we should have a policy now that as soon as that is over we are mass optional in school the reason i'm saying this is because the school is the only place where my kids wear masks they go over a friend's house no mess they go to dance activity sports no mass they go to stores they go to restaurants no masks they're fine the covered rate has been going down and down the risk for children is so low children in the past two years in the state of new jersey since it started the pandemic started two children have died from covid four total with covid all having comorbidities it's horrible i don't i truly want zero children to die ever but in that same time period 42 children ages 5 to 17 have committed suicide that means that mental health is so much more important than and so much more dangerous for our children than covet is we need to focus on the mental health and having them wear masks all day is horrible they need the social emotional connection with their friends classmates and teachers making mass optional is great because if anyone is worried they can put an n95 mask on they are protected it doesn't matter what anyone else is wearing or not wearing they can deal with themselves and then for people that know the risk is extremely low they can not wear a mask parents are fully capable of making the correct decision for their own children and their families so that is why i'm asking again now to make the policy so that once the mandate is dropped we can go straight to mass optional i want us to stop treating children like they're diseased they're not every single student staff and teacher that wants the vaccine has had plenty of time to get as many shots as they want so if if they believe in that and they want that they're protected we need to put this back in the parent's decision and make mass optional thank you thank you very much [Applause] i think there's a good question address it yeah um yeah yeah i'll just respond the sponsor arms it's so nice to i just wanted to respond and say uh it's great to see you um in person i i've gotten your emails and i and i i really appreciate it like you've been a voice in my head uh through the journey as as all the parents are that reach out and i i just it's nice to put a name in the face so i just um thank you for your contributions along the way um tonight and uh you know i would and it kind of give me a nice opportunity actually to sort of speak a little bit to your question and um because we are you know i mean uh i want to say um you know that that masked mandate that's current in the state of new jersey mass required in old new jersey schools that's been in place for such a long time right going back to september 2020 when districts first reopened for in-person learning it got the the recent 30-day emergency extension by governor murphy but we know that'll expire in mid-february and with cases decreasing and public pressure building we can we can anticipate that there may not be another extension you know and at that point it would revert back to districts to determine their own path mass is optional or mass is required and etsd we are prepared and we are ready for that moment when it comes so we've discussed it we are ready i will share more details next week not tonight so that we can all be proactive for that day when the mandate ends all right thank you dr smith are there any other members of the audience that would like to have public comment please come on up if you could just clearly state your name and address thank you let's see if we can reach this anywhere can i get that sword first off justin it is lovely to meet you i would like to thank police chief chu and especially rice principal kelly cam for their continued support in our school um i'd like to begin by quoting that our president has claimed that we're no longer in a pandemic and we it's glaringly obvious that we cannot trust medical advice from the head of our country nor can my children trust their educators anymore as they have been informed since september to hurry up and get the adults vaccinated so we can stop wearing masks in school and that unvaccinated adults are dangerous if a president can claim this is not a pandemic anymore why is evsham township school district still claiming it is one murphy decided to reinstate the public health emergency for 30 days yet the rates of covet infection have dropped dramatically in the past few days directly related to the rise after winter break according to the state dashboard so there is no foreseeable reason why the child's mask mandate will not end on february 10th congresswoman stefanik has stood up for the children of a new york county striking down governor hocal's unconstitutional statewide school mass mandate rooted in politics and not science as she believes that violates state law she asserts that by forcing masks on children in our schools these mandates have impeded the development of our next generation studies published in pubmed highlight how missing educational opportunities impacts the child's neuro development compared to children from 2011 to 2019 pandemic children suffer significantly reduced verbal motor and overall cognitive performance even in the absence of direct infection and illness environmental changes associated with covet are significantly and negatively and affecting infant child development so what do we do about this the assembly advanced advances bills aimed to improve mental health services in k-12 schools admitting that students have experienced unprecedented stress during the pandemic spurring a mental health crisis of anxiety and depression caused by increased social isolation you know the mandatory quarantines that we continue to inflict on healthy children why would we spend millions of dollars slapping band-aids on the wounds that the government and the border vet are inflicting upon our children why don't we just stop abusing the children all together the brownstone institute provides over 400 studies to display how school closures and mass mandates have failed in curbing transmissions or reducing deaths instead the restrictive policies were ineffective and devastating failures causing immense harm and no government has been able to prove or even claim their policies to be successful since i can't show you my graph these policies harm children such as psychological harm depression anxiety suicide drug use crippling isolation domestic and child abuse sexual abuse of children largely affecting women and minorities and per heather's comment there's no justification for masking children who have a near zero risk of death two children in new jersey died from 2020 to 2021 which is of course seriously an issue however the risk of suicide and murder is much higher 42 suicides 59 homicides 16 drug-related deaths and deaths in the 5-17 category marlboro school district has taken a 9-0 stand to support giving parents the choice to mask their children or not upon the relief of the governor's directive our children in nevisham have to wear masks in schools but not at sport events restaurants or crowded shopping malls franklin township public school as well has taken a stand for their children voting to end in-school close contact quarantines and allow the children to remain in school saving the children from the depressing isolation issue that a state assembly wants to spend millions of dollars to band-aid the harm of force masking and quarantining of the children clearly outweighs any perceived benefits we've not been provided any statistical evidence to support the continuing mass policy including any safety data statistics on adverse incidents and never has masking my children kept them from being forced to quarantine we've patiently negotiated communicated and followed rules but we are no longer willing to be submissive to unconstitutional mandates that are causing physical mental and emotional harm especially to my own three children thank you for your time thank you mrs foley hi if you could clearly state your name and address my name is katie masterangelo and i am at 25 hardwood road we are here tonight to educate you on a few things that have been happening that we are now made aware of we are requesting for proper action to take place to resolve these issues immediately please take notice your oath to office affirms that your main purpose is to protect and maintain my individual rights by upholding the constitution this includes the rights of my heritage those in my care which are my children to date eve sham township school district board of education and superintendent have agreed to receive three million seven hundred thirty nine thousand one hundred and eight dollars from the sr1 sr2 and arp esser in order to receive these funds you are required to implement prevention and mitigation strategies also known as recommendations which includes using unapproved medical devices such as masks discriminating against and depriving healthy children of their in-person public educations by enforcing the by enforcing close contact quarantine am i pushing an experimental gene therapy drug on us to keep our children in school these are a few laws that we've come across title ix title vi of civil rights act 1964 is labor law legislation that outlawed discrimination based on color race religion sex and national origin section 504 of the rehabilitation act 1973.

okay thank you we'll wait to that okay next to testify o satori tui president hsta aloha chair kidani and members of the committee on behalf of thousands of teachers mahalo for taking up this important bill which addresses whole swaths of teachers who have been denied longevity salary step increases over the years after years of this problem not being addressed many affected teachers have already are beginning to qualify for retirement and see little reason to stick around they love their students but that's just not enough to make up for years of sacrifice every experienced teacher we can retain is one less that we need to recruit passing this legislation will also address those with as little as two years of service under their belt teachers are actually taking home less pay this in next school year despite contractual verbiage that speaks to annual incremental step increases and that teachers not at the top would receive steps if they had an effective evaluation we do have a couple of requested amendments that are in our written testimony and once again mahalo for recognizing that this is a problem that needs to be resolved which will have direct and immediate benefits for hawai'i's keiki aloha thank you also next to testify is he a coalition director sherry nakamura aloha senator kidani senator mercado kim and members of the committee coalition stands on its written testimony in support of this measure thank you very much thank you sherry next to testify julie reyes oda is julie there julie hi i'm here but mine was on um 28 20 also okay we'll hold you for then thank you julie sorry next to testify elizabeth wiggins elizabeth wiggins tiffany edward hunt recess calling to order the committee um reconvening the committee on education sorry for the mix-up folks we are taking testimony on senate bill 2819 relating to teacher compensation um i don't have the correct list with me so if there is anyone on that wishes to give um public testimony can you make yourself known i had martha and i believe sinclair or susan rocca but they they are for another bill and that was uh and sherry nakamura was the last one that i had on here can you see the names i can't see it from here is there logan okita yes ma'am go ahead please proceed thank you aloha everyone i'm logan o'keefe a national board certified teacher at nimitz elementary and vice president of the hawaii state teachers association this is my 16th year as a teacher in hawaii i am in the middle of our salary schedule at step 11 along with 2568 of my colleagues many of whom have more experience than i do i have missed step increases a few times during my career and will hopefully reach the top of the salary schedule near my 25th year of teaching if we receive a step increase every other year going forward teachers who i admired as a high schooler 20 years ago still have more to give to hawaii's keiki but are ready to throw in the towel and retire because they can't imagine reaching the top of the salary schedule after all of these years please address our salary com compression so that we can keep qualified educators in our schools mahalo thank you logan next we have amanda langston amanda aloha hello can you hear me yes aloha cherokee donnie vice chair kim and committee members my name is amanda fong langston i am the president of the hawaii public charter school network um the network supports the intent of sb 2819 with strong recommendations for change to include support all teachers with cost of living increase in alignment with the current inflation rate of 6.9 percent and support all teachers with a step increase to the traditional collective bargaining process delete as negotiated between the state public charter school commission and the exclusive representation of collective bargaining unit in a memorandum of understanding to address compensation this section violates 302d under charter school law as the individual right of the governing board to have the right to negotiate with the unions thank you thank you amanda next aaron kubo yes hello committee my name is aaron kuble and i'm an 8th grade social studies educator heal intermediate school recognizing years of experience and service is important to demonstrate the worth of qualified teeth educators and keep them from retiring or quitting for other jobs having that recognition reflected in their salary with incremental step movements is one way to convince experienced educators to stay where we need them in classrooms teaching our keiki we need to pay educators better by decompressing the salary schedule and place them where they deserve to be reflecting the years of experience second you need to continue to move teachers consistently upwards on the salary scale otherwise they will end up in the situation again with thousands of educators compressed and underpaid such a move will almost be enough to keep up with hawaii's current inflation rates if nothing is done many educators are going to leave the profession either by retiring or because they can make more money for less work and stress elsewhere and the students we serve will suffer as a result please vote and support us senate bill 2819 thank you for your consideration thank you aaron and the last testifier is lisa morrison thank you aloha i'm a teacher at maui high school and after um after nine years at maui wanna actually the intermediate school i moved up so it's been a real joy to connect with students that i taught before and it's reminded me how important the consistency of relationships between teachers and students are to their full educational development there's a comfort and security for students when they return to the adults that they know and trust at school i can't provide quantitative data on the value of this but i can tell you that it's absolutely worth the money to pay teachers according to their years of service and expertise because the reward is priceless and the payoff is lifelong i had teachers i loved and learned a lot from when i was in fourth grade and at the time my mother was very active in events at our school and 20 years later when she passed away those same teachers sent me a lovely condolence card what struck me is that they wrote it together because they were still there in the classroom making a difference for kids all those years later please support proper compensation for teachers so students can continue to enjoy this thank you very much lisa that ends our uh the testimony but we do have over i think it's close to 150 written testimonies all in support so with that members let us go to the next bill which is senate bill 2820 relating also to teacher compensation let's see sorry yeah now i hope this is the correct list to testify superintendent kitayashi good afternoon check your dhani vice chairman kara kim and senators keith ayashi interim superintendent the department supports senate bill 2820 which funds various teacher differentials i strongly support efforts to recruit and retain qualified teachers for every classroom as they are critical component to ensuring student achievement the areas of special education hard to staff geographically located schools and hawaiian language immersion programs have typically been challenging to recruit and retain qualified teachers while also containing large percentages of the department's most at-risk vulnerable students addressing the multitude of issues related to covin for simultaneously employing effective recruitment and retention strategies will require require collaboration with hsta and all interested stakeholders including the legislature the department is committed to working with its partners to identify and execute solutions that positively impact all students securing qualified teachers for every classroom is vital to achieving optimal student achievement thank you for this opportunity to testify thank you superintendent next yvonne lao thank you chair kidani vice chair kim and members of the committee we stand in strong support of st 2820 and deeply appreciate this committee and the senate's recognition that our public charter school teachers also deserve to be compensated accordingly i stand on our testimony and support thank you thank you and next martha guinan and ivali sinclair special education advisory council uh chair kidani i'm susan rocco and i am testifying on their behalf from the special education advisory council thank you so much for this bill because seac is very much in support of pay differentials particularly for special education teachers over the last two years we've seen a tremendous increase in available qualified teachers in the classroom and our kids who are performing at the lowest point of all the subgroups really need that consistent support from teachers that know what they're doing so thank you for this thank you susan next to testify also tooie president hsta hello cherokee donnie vice chair kim and members of the committee thank you so much for taking up this important matter plainly put shortage differentials work and have benefited our students tremendously recent data from the department has confirmed this with increases in recruitment and fewer vacancies to fill addressing special education geographically hard to fill areas and one immersion takes care of some of our neediest and vulnerable populations of students who have time and again been neglected by the system through no fault of their own providing these shortage differentials technologies that these students are entitled to highly qualified educators just like their regular education peers their peers in urban areas and their peers in non-immersion settings doing the right thing takes investment and passing this bill would be a worthy investment indeed we do have one requested amendment that is contained within our written testimony mahalo thank you osa next to testify shari nakamura director haye coalition aloha kidani vice chair mercado kin and members of the committee again a coalition stands on his testimony in support of sb2820 thank you very much thank you sherry next to testify julie oda julie hi i'm julie ray izoda i come here today as a math teacher at nanakuli high and intermediate school i'm a classroom teacher and i've always been my whole career the bill listed issues teacher issues plaguing the teaching confe profession and identified some but not all of the issues that cause teacher vacancies i support this bill is this is the sped differential dollar amount left out for a reason if not can the bill be amended to include the amount if the legislature believes that the state should offer shortage differentials for sped immersion and hard to staff locations to address the high number of vacancies why for only one year is it possible to amend this to a five year plan vacancies don't happen in a vacuum we're not the only state to have this problem but due to our isolation we're different from the continental states i hope that all of these education bills aren't coming up due to elections that are happening in november teacher compensation is an important topic that needs to happen as we talk about recruitment retention and morale taking on these issues is the right thing to do regardless of elections thank you for putting teacher compensation up for discussion next to testify elizabeth wiggins hi chair the not present to testify tiffany edwards hunt also not present thank you i believe that is all the testifiers that we have but we do have 144 written testimonies with that um shortly says okay reconvening the committee on education we are now on senate bill 2819 and the recommendation of the committee is to pass with amendments and the amendments are to take the suggestions from hsta and insert an amendment to remove the current classifications from statute and making future classifications subject to collective bargaining we will also amend the charter school appropriation to require an mou to be negotiated between each charter school governing board rather than the charter commission also noting in the committee report for consideration in the next committee ways and means an appropriation as noted in hsca's testimony members any questions with that chair votes eye recommendation is to pass sb 2819 with amendments chair votes i vice chair vote side all members present recommendations adopted manager thank you and for senate bill 2820 recommendation of the chair is also to pass this with amendments the amendments would amend the charter school appropriation to require an mou to be negotiated between each charter school governing board rather than the charter commission also noting in the committee report for consideration in the next committee an appropriation as no testimony and as uh some technical and non-substantive amendments also members questions and before we take the vote i just wanted to note and thank uh superintendent hayashi for the discussion uh that he came to me with and having us take a look at this again and to take the suggestions from hsta as well as the of permission so thank you uh superintendent so members 2820 pass with amendments chair votes eye chair votes eye on senate bill 28 20 pass with amendments is there any member president voting with reservations any member voting in opposition hearing none all five members voting in affirmative recommendations adopted thank you vice chair meeting is adjourned you