Ann Arbor Environmental Commission 3/28/24

001e up on time this is great um and uh I would like to call the meeting to order this is the March 24th 2020 28th sorry 2024 um meeting of the environmental commission um and uh we'll kick it off whoops let's see uh here we go we'll be doing this as a remote meeting um as a continuation of the governor's order for social distancing related to the covid virus we intend to conduct the meeting similar to an in-person meeting and ask for your patience if there are technical issues public comment is welcome and will be via telephone only to speak at public comment call 888 78899 and enter meeting ID 962 6452 this information is available on the published agenda in the Public Notices section on the city website and on the broadcast of this

002meeting on CTN Channel 16 AT&T channel 99 and online at a2gov.org slatch CN um so there we have the start of the meeting and I will ask um Aon to start with the land Heritage statement thank you I acknowledge that the land the city of an arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the Anish aay including adawa oju Bame and W do peoples I further acknowledge that our city stands like almost all property in the United States on lands obtained generally in uncontable ways from indigenous peoples The Taking of this land was formalized by the Treaty of Detroit in 18 1907 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

003create a future that supports human flourishing and justice for all individuals thank you Aon and now would you call the r please yes council member Amman here Ann Arbor Vice chair Brown absent commissioner Cowart here commissioner Curtis here and harbor commissioner Dale absent council member dish here in Chicago commissioner Graham I'm here and arber commissioner guber in Austin Texas Spring break for a lot of people uh commissioner Marson absent commissioner Mery you're Arbor chairperson Mitchell here in an arbor commissioner nadrich here and Ann Arbor and commissioner weing absent and sounds like we yep that's I need thanks perfect thank you um I would ask for a motion to approve our agenda for today so moved okay commissioner mki seconded by commissioner Curtis all in favor of the agenda as as presented I raise your hand

004I looks like a unanimous thank you um I'd like a motion to approve the minutes from our February meeting commissioner NRI seconded by commissioner J Gruber um all in favor of approval of the minutes from 20 February raise your hand to say I right I see guesses thank you oh um our next item of business is um public comment and I'll read the statement uh this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to 3 minutes please call 78899 and and enter meeting ID 962 6543 City staff will select callers that have raised their hand by calling out the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand please press star9 on your phone you'll hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak press star

005six to unmute your phone when speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any television or background noises so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments and um Erin do we have any callers I'm gonna stop sharing for just a second because I'm in Portland also on Spring bre so I have a new setup I can't okay see no problem working um I do not set see any callers okay um and then let's move on to some what we're calling um unfinished business and this is a presentation that I appreciate staff coming for um Jen Lawson from the the water quality manager for the city of Ann Arbor and Jerry hanak the storm water and flood plane programs coordinator for us for Ann

006Arbor um they'll provide us an update on the storm water management guidelines for public Street construction and reconstruction it was formerly called the green streets policy and um we'll now hear the status and update and where we're going thank you for coming both of you thanks sa Erin is it okay if I share my screen yes come on there we go uh well thank you all environmental commission members um for inviting staff to your meeting I'm not sure how many of you have worked with myself or Jerry Hancock so I do want to take at least 30 seconds so we can just quick introduce ourselves so you're kind of familiar who you're working with um my name is Jennifer Lawson I am the water quality manager in the systems planning unit I've been with the

007city 13 years prior to that I worked for an Oakland County Community as their environmental coordinator prior to that I was a storm Watershed planner for a engineering firm my background is water policy and law and then my masters is in landscape architecture um no I don't really use the landscape architecture a whole lot but I can really Identify some trees um but we work in our systems planning unit kind of cross collaborative across the entire organization um around the idea of managing utilities and our assets so you'll hear us sometimes talk about asset management or underground infrastructure and that's really where our focus is is more on the broadscale holistic policies on how we manage our infrastructure and how we rehab improve replace our infrastructure um across the entire city and Jerry do you

008want to take a few minutes to introduce yourself as well okay uh Jerry Hancock I'm the city's storm water and flip plane programs coordinator I've been at the city almost 34 years and I am going to retire retire in July so this project we were trying to wrap up before I retire um I have a degree in forestry for Michigan Tech and a MERS in environmental planning from Eastern and that's really what I do environmental planning and like my title I mostly focus on storm water and flood plan management sorry I just got the dreaded your battery is low notice okay plugged in well we do have a few slides that we R want to run through with sort of you know where have we been um where are we going or and what have

009we learned and uh some of our staff recommendations around the um storm water infiltration policy for the public road right away so many of you recall about 10 years ago we came up with what we termed the green streets policy um and that specifically focused on road construction or reconstruction um to start thinking about walking the walk so the discussion from the water committee which was out of the environmental commission really focused on this idea that we require developers to manage storm water but the city wasn't M maintaining or managing storm water um that well ourselves especially when we start thinking about how much storm water the city has to manage and what we create so we decided to sort of think about what we've learned over those 10 years and how can we take

010what we've learned and do better and improve the policy to ensure that we can continue sort of expanding what our stormw water management policies are headed towards so just as a reminder green infrastructure which is really sort of the method or mechanism of how a lot of storm water can be managed is that non-traditional it's not a pipe we're not conveying water from point A to point B we're looking at either using natural systems or mimicking natural systems to enhance improve um infiltrate storm water so we can start thinking about um methods and and means to improve storm water sort of outside of building a big hole and filling it with concrete and making a big Vault um in some cities that's what we have to do but in our Community we do have a

011lot of opportunities where we can use more um sort of nature-based solutions or um engineered solutions that mimic those schal processes so one of the slides that many of you have probably seen over the years um is sort of the scale of where does storm water sort of come from for the city of Ann Arbor so we have all of this road surface um including the public right of way which includes driveway aprons and sidewalks that the city is responsible for owns manages operates maintains um when we started really looking at the numbers and the data we recognized that it's about 10% of the city area so that's you know sort of taking the I'll say concrete versus non-concrete but it also the number that's more important is that it's 25% of the total impervious

012area within the city which means the city and I'm using that with my hat on is that the city is creating a lot of runoff that needs to be managed and we require our developers to do it we require homeowners to do it if they're doing a home addition so we really decided again back 10 years ago that we needed to start walking the walk um so the original intention um and and again I have green streets in quote um was coming up with a new standard for how we design streets either rebuilding them or reconstructing them and again we we even put terminology in the uh resolution and I'll quote it it's an array of products Technologies and practices that use natural systems or Engineering Systems to mimic those natural processes and enhance overall

013Environmental Quality and provide Utility Services um but I I want to remind ourselves that it was really for reconstruct and new road construction which sounds fantastic because it seems like we're building a lot of New Roads right um it's not exactly the case and I'm going to walk through a few things that we've done since 2014 some of the projects that we've completed um so we do have one project in the city that was completed in 2022 that actually received a waver because when we did soil sampling it was found to be noninfiltrated of um the soils were entirely clay we did several soil samples along the entire stretch of the street Russell Street was a gravel road that was completely um built as a new construction um and we really looked at all opportunities

014and we could not find anything within the public right of way and so in the previous policy there was an option for a waiver um and this was Mr Hy was still Craig Hy was still with us at the time and we we really worked through a lot cuz he didn't want to sign the waiver easily um but you know we recognize it it's just kind of impossible conversely to that though we did have a lot of projects that that achieved what we called the green streets policy and that's the infiltration of the first inch um at minimum um over the entire project area of paved surface so several of the projects that you've probably driven down and didn't even realize they were um Environmental friendly and infiltrative Roads um some of them are downtown

015um for example hon to Liber I'm sorry forth a from here on to Liberty infiltrates the 100-year event which in in design speak that's phenomenal that means that we could have a massive massive flood uh or massive rain event and fourth a would be able to infiltrate a lot of that rain fall underneath um without any impact above several of the other projects are large bioses underground storage um sand filters that look like Turf on top but allow for a pretty extensive amount of infiltration underneath and then a few projects that we included infiltration what we're calling to the maximum extent practicable these were not road projects that were constructed or reconstructed and I'm going to again I want to kind of hone in on that um these were projects that were other utility projects

016or Road resurfacing projects where we looked and did an evaluation and staff saw opportunities so these five projects did not fall under the streets Capital reconstruction list but we felt as staff that it was important to start looking for opportunities outside of what the policy required because if we're opening up the road we might as well do something for storm water even if it wasn't the driver for the project so for example many of you if you're out walking your dog maybe through the water Hill Neighborhood when where we um disconnected Brooks from Sunset and built sort of an interesting l-shape we took that entire new RightWay that was created and we built a beautiful bio Swale um it's actually temporarily stabilized right now and it will be planted in the springtime that was a

017project that was not intended not planned for but when our Engineers got into the design they realized that there was an opportunity that um they you know we sort of didn't want to pass it up and we didn't want to just put a bunch of turf grass on top of it so I talked a little bit about what the projects were that we've done and I also have a few slides on those specific lessons that we learned and the biggest one by far which was sort of a gut punch to be very honest was about a year and a half after our policy was approved in 2014 the engineering department changed how they maintain streets and they started to do what's called Capital preventative maintenance which is in layman's terms Mill and fill they grind

018down the top layer and put more asphalt on top it's a good way of extending the road surface and especially if we have minimum dollars available for Road Improvement um it it definitely expands on the fix the blank bleep roads um because we were we've been able through capital capital preventative maintenance to improve the condition of our roads significantly but what that did mean is that we are not building New Roads and we are not reconstructing roads therefore the policy was sort of out the window because the previous policy the original policy only applied for road construction or reconstruction so it's sort of I'll say cut our legs off before we really even had an opportunity to start implementing the policy other Lessons Learned is that just because we have great soils in the area

019doesn't mean that there aren't other utilities that are underground where we cannot put infiltration Gardens within the public RightWay there's a lot of other pipes that maintenance is never easy and it never happens magically and this this picture actually tells us two stories this is the roundabout up on Nixon and I'm not sure how many of you re remember this area can you guys see my mouse just question okay there is supposed to be a rain Garden right here I mean you can zoom in you can drive by you can get on your hands and knees there is no rain Garden there it was built per plan it was constructed per plan it's gorgeous until the contractor that was hired by the local the neighborhood next door thought it was a bunch of weeds and

020mowed over it and continued to mow over it for an entire season um it's sort of it's sort of a little gut punch that we were really excited about those opportunities now mind you the soil base underneath here is still infiltrative and the rainfall that does get here does infiltrate so so we're still achieving the intent to manage storm water it just doesn't have that pretty flower aesthetic that we had designed the other sort of lesson learned and this is growing more and more and more we see is the pushing for additional interests within an already restricted right of way um the protected bike lanes are phenomenal for bike traffic but it reduces the amount of opportunity that we may have between sidewalk and curb for storm water infrastructure um that is visible above ground

021oftentimes we can move things underground still achieve that same storm water intent but we sort of lose that aesthetic um a perfect example of that are the bike Lanes along first um there is a sort of curbed buffered area that does have grasses in it but if you've ever ridden down it that curbed area where the grasses are is about a foot wide maybe at best 2 feet wide and it's not really collecting a lot of storm water and runoff that goes in there in fact that project is achieving infiltration but it's not achieving that full amount that we were looking for just because we had such a restricted amount within the public right of way so after about N9 years if you will so last summer Jerry and I and our Water Resources Group

022we were kind of we already knew that you know we've been doing this for a long time and we internally sort of had our own non-written policy of how we wanted to continue improving the green streets policy but we also recognize that we have a lot of external um stakeholders including design Engineers that the city works with often that have made comments about the green Street's policy really being an implementable document so we worked with uh Wade trim our one of our engineering consultants and had them do a thirdparty independent review of the policy in addition we had City staff from the engineering department we had City staff from the public works department and City staff from systems planning doing our own sort of individual um reviews of the policy as it stood and we

023came up with I don't want to call it a laundry list but it was a pretty detailed list of some things that we knew we could improve upon and it would make such a larger impact and a really a more implementable policy where we could actually start measuring change and measuring improvements um so we all got in a room and we hashed out our our comments and everyone was on board everyone was really moving towards the right direction I don't want to say hashed out but we all agreed that we could do a whole lot better um so again this is part of the laundry list um one of the biggest ones though was the nomenclature um this idea that the street had to be green um really was was difficult because often times as

024I've mentioned through our lessons learned we realize that it can't always be green um my my perfect example is State Street that was just completed last summer that infiltrate a 10-year 24hour event so that actually infiltrates 3.26 in um but it looks like a lot of concrete up top because they were competing interests there was the idea of removing the curves there was an idea of making it um you know the the public um meeting space area so while we're still achieving a lot of those wonderful goals and really overachieving those goals um we recognize that it can't always be green so looking at how we can change the policy just for a sort of um what people are thinking or what assumptions can be made um we decided to calculate the volume for the

025full right of way within the project limits as opposed to what we were looking at back of curb so that actually extends the area that we were designing for and enlarges it so now we're not only requiring those Engineers to take care of what's in the road but from sidewalk to sidewalk which in some areas is pretty significant um clarification of the policy does not apply to preventative maintenance and and resurfacing because if we're not going to open up the road we don't need to sort of jump down that that rabbit hole of making a project that could be a very uh beneficial Road resurfacing project for the neighborhood and making it a little bit more of a deep project um when the road service didn't really need that um the fourth bullet is really

026a a big shift in the policy and that's applying the policy not only to Road resurfacing projects but to all utility projects so water main jobs sanitary sewer jobs um Road jobs for example if we if the project will disturb at least half of the road width so if we're when we scope out projects and this happens many many years prior to you guys ever seeing the road opened up in construction um if we recognize that there's a water main job that's going to open up half of the road surface we put a Kaiba shot down and say nope that that requires storm water and um the project sort of gets res scoped including storm water so storm water sort of is a a second level or a second layer on so many of our

027CIP projects but that's really how we've been able to integrate um stormm water management across all of our utilties projects and and making sure that we can keep expanding storm water management um next bullet allowing multiple infiltration standards on one project because we recognize some of our road projects are long and expand over soil areas and in some projects we can achieve infiltration great on others we on the other end of the project we might not be able to um next bullet just following the county storm water rules uh next bullet describing the process for a waiver we really didn't have a process prior and when Craig walked through that first um waiver for Russell we were kind of making it up as we went along we have a process now but we wanted to

028actually document that and put that in writing um next to last bullet is a very important one that we hadn't really thought through for our previous policy was the maintenance plans and making sure that maintenance plans are reviewed cuz I'm not sure about you guys but for the past 20 years I know Ann Arbor has been a leader in implementing green infrastructure we were really good at putting something in and forgetting about it so we're really getting back to the the Grassroots of we also need to maintain these things and have a process in place and then making sure that these projects are not designed in a bubble that these projects all have to be designed with public works with systems planning and engineering and so it's a really a collaborative effort that we have

029um making sure that all of these proposed infiltration projects um will be successful um many of you recall the flow chart from the previous policy this hasn't changed this is Verbatim what it was previously depending on site conditions so if the project um depending on where the project is within the flood plane what the infiltration rate of the soils will be and what the slope will be um we want to make sure we're using the right BMP in the right place place and the Baseline for all of these is infiltrating the first inch of rainfall and then we can move sort of down the chain if you will um the the better soils that are underneath we ensure that we're infiltrating at least um what is possible so if it's the 50% annual chance or

030the 10% annual chance um so just as a reminder I throw this picture up here that we can solve or we can create storm water management features that look a lot of different ways um it could be a trench underground with with gravel for infiltration it can be a biosoil it could be porous paving brick it could be a lot of different things um we encourage our designers to come up with a design we don't want to be um very predictive or um sort of authoritarian on telling them they must design a biooil because if they're going to try to fit that square peg into a round hole it won't work but we encourage them to be a little more creative and use the storm water management um manual from the state which gives a

031myriad of opportunities and ideas to manage storm water um so um we're really making sure that we're sort of opening up our eyes and thinking outside the box so we can make sure that we're managing storm water to the best of our ability so with that um I know Aaron sent around a draft policy um that staff has created based on the comments heard um as well as a draft resolution that we prepared um just to get your brains thinking um but with that Erin I'm going to turn it back over to you Jerry is there anything that I forgot before I turn it back over I don't think so you com I have to say Jerry did a brunt load of the leg work on this project so kudos to Jerry um sort of

032hurting the cats and making sure that all voices were heard because this is this was a big undertaking but we're really excited to see it come to fruition um so Aaron do you want me to stop sharing sure yeah go ahead um and I am wondering I might have just sent around the resolution or I think I just have the resolution linked and I'm um checking if I I'm not sure if I set sent the updated policy it it was together with the resolution on the same document oh it was okay great on the next page oh okay all together in the same document okay um so I um we can go ahead and introduce the resolution um which uh Jerry do you want to walk through what you sent or created and sent um

033yes and what you're kind of thinking for next steps so 10 years ago the the water committee um was the driver for this project project and I was the staff person to it and so I um went back and found that resolution and have updated it because that's basically what this project is is simply updating the policy to uh you know apply the last 10 years of knowledge of working working on it um and within the policy I did bullet out the same things that Jen went over in the [Music] presentation then there's the policy that follows it's it's a clean clean version of it not not a marked up version of it okay great so um it's my understanding the environmental commission typically when resolutions are introduced that it's a we do follow a

034first and second reading so I think this would be considered kind of the first res reading of the resolution um and so folks have questions um we have Jerry and and Jen on the line um if there's any outstanding issues or questions that you saw pop up in the in the document Erin I not finding it where can you say again where when you sent it and where it's included yeah it's linked in the agenda um and I can go ahead and share my screen and I think it we may want to also have some questions addressed um based on the presentation correct so sorry I I'll hand it back over to you Rita if you want to kind of feeli questions sure okay looks like um misser grber has a question yeah thank you

035Jen and Jerry for that that was really helpful since I was not here 10 years ago and the history was really helpful for me to hear you describe Jen so I my question is I understand that Council has been talking about this trunk line transfer where perhaps the city would take over hon parts of hon parts of Maine maybe washt I can't remember the fourth one maybe and I don't know what happened at the last council meeting and perhaps council members dish and acman could add to this but so my question is do you what implications do you think think that this update would have to that potential which I think would be big projects that the city would be working on on those big um trunk lines in the in the in our city

036well I can sort of take a stab first of all uh we already have some storm water infiltration on those trunk lines um the DDA did a project on hon um and many of you will probably just look at them as the dark darker gray bricks in the sidewalk those are all infiltration privious papers um and the city maintains those already as part of our act 51 with roads um so I don't think it would be a pretty significant change for us we would just start applying these same policy standards to the roads that we now own and maintain one we did the infiltrative pavers along hiron it was sort of a partnership with DDA and with mot and the city um and it worked relatively well I think the the only issue that we

037had was more of a maintenance question because they were put in but nobody really asked our Public Works guys if they had the equipment to maintain it so we now have to rent um a little sort of power washer thing that has a lower PSI so it doesn't blast the sand out of the the um grout lines but no we've we've done it successfully and would anticipate that we would continue doing it successfully from a stormwater standpoint it would it would make an opportunity to do storm water that we might not otherwise have it would just an MD do project um Mr grber was there anything further I guess I'll guess no um commissioner Curtis I just want to say I just went and looked at the agenda on legistar and I don't see this

038file link there the presentation but not this file I thought I I know I got it yeah it's not there the uh resolution is there with a summary of changes but okay that's uh my mistake um so I will yeah this one is not okay okay I will go ahead and we can include this um in the next in our next meeting um so I apologize for that um all right Erin I see it in legistar if people go to lestar online it is linked as a separate agenda item yeah I think I see it too but it doesn't look like that if you if you look it doesn't look like that no it's it's jumbled and it's the actual text yeah it's it's the normal like title memo blah blah blah right and then

039whereas where as where as resolved yes I'm just gonna share I'm stealing this from you guys make it big though what's up there right now is I will make it big I won't make it big yeah H Okay so tell me can you guys see this oh aon's still sharing oh I'll stop share okay all right so if you go in to our fabulous L star go over to the agenda and then you click on I'll show you what I did when you click on the agenda it'll pull up the full thing let me go back so it'll pull up this friend and then it is the second one which is very jumbly but if you click for full text there it is um that looks like the resolution yeah I think so I think

040this is my fault because I didn't I didn't realize that there was the draft policy at the end which I don't think made it into that um so that was my fault um and we can um R and I can get and commissioner sorry commissioner Mitchell and I can touch B and see what makes sense um so we're able to have a appropriate first reading of this resolution because you will need to see this updated policy so apologies we'll try and send that out by tomorrow I guess let's try that that sounds good thank you thanks for raising that and the resolution's good um council member Amman I just wanted to respond quickly that the trunk line um study has not been a topic of discussion yet at city council um it was on our

041agenda as a report I think because it went to Transportation Commission for discussion and it's to be a work session item sometime this summer so um we're a bit of a ways from just considering it wanted to let you know and um I have a question oh sorry Mr Mercy go ahead you go ahead okay all right um I loved that there was in the diagram um an indication of geothermal underground um and I wondered so I don't believe that we have that yet um as like a shared geothermal within the city I know it's discussed for the Bryant commun Community um but it seems to me that that might be something that we would look forward to in the future right and that I assume that that would be in the roadway um so

042I don't know if that really um is a question for me right now but I I just want to say I want I think it would be a great thing to proceed and and my question I guess is how how can and Jen we've talked about this before how can we measure the performance Improvement or you know like I know that weather is changing right or the climate is changing so it's like every Everything is a little bit different each time um what makes a success well I'm gonna take a step back outside of just the public right of way um in systems planning this is a question that we ask ourselves a lot because we're behind the scenes you guys don't really see us we don't build things you guys maybe see us on

043special projects um but we are responsible for all of the storm water managements that are built across the city including private development including things that are outside the public right away including projects that we do with Washington County water resources Commissioner's Office that's a mouthful um we we are working through a dashboard and I don't want to put it public yet um I actually just got the rough draft of it last Thursday and it it's a it's an assumptive model that calculates the amount of rainfall that is infiltrated in either city-owned green infrastructure um or private residential rain Gardens um there's a few assumptions based on volume based on size but we're we're sort of trying to figure that out because it essentially R we're trying to measure mother nature and if there's an antecedent

044moisture conditions in the soil it's not going to infiltrate as well um but we still will be achieving infiltration it might not be in the first 24 hours maybe it's in the first 48 hours so there's a lot of overthought if you will and you know I work with a bunch of Engineers and we're they're really good and I include myself in that we're really good at overthinking things um but what we're hoping is that this dashboard that we've been looking at can get us to a number that makes sense based on the amount of investment we've had around green infrastructure um the previous projects that have been built um so the previous uh rain Gardens the ones that were listed in in my my slides many of those are included in that dashboard um

045so I think that there are methods and mechanisms but what we're struggling with is how can we sort of automate that so we don't have a little squirrel who has to do calculations every single time um that we have to start thinking about you know what's been developed what's changed how was our land use changed um I feel good about the numbers you know Jerry has been part of that team also in in putting together really a lot of the data behind um what has been built how is it maintained how is it being inspected is it is there an assumption that it's working as designed um so there are measures and really what we're what we're looking at is that that X Factor is going to be how many million gallons of storm water

046were infiltrated this year um and that's we're right and I don't want to burst anyone's surprise bubble but we're right like 60 million gallons of storm water infiltrated it's huge it's absolutely huge and that's not including the systems that mother nature already has on her own this is on man-made things that we've built um so we are measuring what we feel is achievable to measure um but as I said Mother Nature kind of doesn't think um that way Jerry what are your thoughts on that yeah so part of it is we have to make assumptions because we're not actually putting meters out and that that's terribly expensive to do and usually when someone does it it ends up being some sort of uh you know presentation at many conferences because not very many people do

047put a lot of meters out on these storm water features um so that so that's not we're not talking about putting meters out um we we have done some of that in the storm seur system on a large scale for our model um and if we do that in the future comp you know we might be able to compare like how have we done in the last 10 years you know versus the last time that we put meters out in the system if we have some rain events that happen to be similar you could compare but even that you have to make a lot of assumptions because no rain no two rain events are the same okay thank you Umi thank you I I had a number of quick questions well first of all I

048support um the effort to come up with some kind of outcome based metric to be able to see whether or not we're we're making progress and and use that as a feedback mechanism for making and driving improvements a couple of quick questions um well first a comment I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about this again in our next meeting um and it would be great if um either Jen or Jerry you could join us um because we're probably likely to have a more substantive discussion after you've been had a chance to read the policy um couple quick questions um how is U ofm property um taken into account here and um do any of the policies um relate to U ofm I assume um all their storm water feeds into the city's storm water

049system um and then I'll go ahead and um ask the second question that I had and that is is um I know airheart Road between Gettys and Glazer was a major project in 2023 and I'm wondering what kind of storm water management strategies were implemented there that wasn't mentioned on or shown on those timelines that's it thank you and thanks for the presentation you want to talk about um umm yeah so U ofm is not subject to city codes um and they're definitely not subject to our policies because this this is a policy this is outside of city code and they're not subject to any of it so um they have their own what's called npdes permit and their npds permit um requires a lot less storm water management than our policies and I mean

050our our codes and this policy that we're talking about here is above and beyond meeting code so the U ofm um is nowhere near uh the level of storm water management that we um expect for ourselves and for developers is is that something that could be addressed jointly given uh the two entities are updating their comprehensive in campus plans I mean it seems to me that you know the UN buers has um a number of sustainability metrics um I don't think they measure anything related to storm water I don't know as we discussed it may not be so easy to measure um but it seems like um If U ofm is interested in sustainability There's an opportunity there for let's call it uh improving or raising their game I think to do that you'd either

051have to change state law or at least change the regulations that are applied to the U ofm by um Eagle they're the department that oversees their npds permit and the university is not any different than any other university in the in the state they probably all have the same permit and so like we we require control of first flush Bank full 100-year and have this infiltration standard which ALS is also applied to private development um the university only has to do the first flush uh when they don't even call that they called water quality standard and then they um are required to deal with the Bank full event but not even not even for the whole site only for the difference between pre and post um it's it's really like if you just want to

052like look at it on a scale they only require to control maybe a quarter of the volume that we would [Music] require if if I can just say one more thing about that that's concerning to me I mean I I'll I'll raise it with some people that uh I know at the U ofm but if you just look at what umm is going to be doing down at elow field with the huge dormatory there plus the second phase which potentially is just as as large and we know that area is already prone to flooding and if they're only uh infiltrating you know at I think I heard you say a quarter of the what we're trying to achieve from the city side that that impacts a bunch of adjacent properties and that really seems like

053there should be discussions between the city and and uh University leadership on on trying to mitigate the negative impacts of of uh storm water and and lack of ability to to manage it properly and that's not the only place I mean University is still acquiring As We Know city other properties and that means a bigger and bigger portion of the city is being um governed by a policy that's apparently quite a bit weaker than the cities plus the city is going to be doing I mean the university going to be doing a ton of development on uh North Campus if if you look at the the campus plan 2050 scenarios Air Road anything about aut Road that's notable and then I'm so think actually was able to pull up the airart plans and remember how

054I um made that comment about Road reconstruction versus Capital preventative maintenance um it looks like there was not a lot that was done on airheart for storm water I can get a complete answer to you but nothing is jumping out in my memory for it other then uh they replaced some storm water catch basins and made them um they added sump to them sump them sumps to them which removes sediment um which is a sediment removing sediment is better than nothing that helps us meet our our phosphorus dials um but it doesn't look like there was any um large infiltrative bmps that were added to that project I do know the new roundabout that's proposed on Pontiac Trail is going to have infiltration it's Pontiac Trail and duvar because the road there was taken down

055to the road bed several roundabouts were installed I mean it was a it was a major project it was one of those projects that sort of fell into the it doesn't have to follow the policy because the policy hasn't been updated and I I don't know exactly off the top of my head what was included but we can definitely get an answer for you um so I'm gonna call us uh time on on this because we've got two more presentations and I'll I'll take um questions from commission NRI and then commissioner Curtis thanks um I have just like two kind of quick things um thanks Jennifer for the presentation that was really interesting um so like circling back to metrics um I know we mentioned and it's also in the resolution the tmdls um it

056looked like for total suspended solids eoli and phosphorus I guess as far as a metric like how are we doing on those is my first question um and how is the Green Street sort of feeding into that how important and relevant is it in Meeting those goals um and then I also so I live in um the Lakewood neighborhood um and I actually did some monitoring on uh first and second Sister Lakes uh last year and found that the amount of phosphorus they're holding is incredible um so I was wondering um in your green infrastructure plan do you look at sort of protecting these natural systems that are having such a huge benefit in managing storm water um like for instance Matt nod um facilitated putting in the biosil um which is capturing a lot

057of the water from our neighborhood um oh was that you yeah Matt was so you know he may have taken some credit but um so um I guess that's another question is um how are we looking at you know protecting these natural systems and using their natural ability to clean water in our in our plans as well I I'll call the Catalyst but he had to put his resident head on when he was in meetings so we were a good team for that project um well you asked kind of two questions first of all is how are we doing on our tindles and the answer to that is we've seen improvements on the ecoli we've seen improvements on the phosphorus um the TSS has been a little bit harder to sort of um pin down

058but what's interesting about the timle numbers is that they are calculated from the main stem at the hiron but we're seeing the improvements in the creeks so and we've pres we're actually working with Molly ripy trying to figure out and this is at Eagle how we can start delisting some of these Waters because we're seeing improvements in The Creeks but the improvements aren't being visualized if you will or determined at the at the main stem um we have a lot of this data that we haven't necessarily put out to the public only in that it's kind of confusing um but we definitely when we complete larger storm water projects there is a um sort of modeled assumption on how much TSS or how much phosphorus will be removed how much siment will be removed um

059so we have those numbers and that sort of gets along to the discussion of modeling versus actual measurement um the measurement is in the creek Downstream a year or two after the construction project is completed because you've got to sort of wait for great uh grow in and um vegetation for the project to actually function how it should but um how do we sort of incorporate it with the green streets it's a they're such small scale that it it really is the the two or three you know containers and I say like five gallon containers maybe of sediment that we're keeping out of the river but maybe if we start adding more of those it's sort of a a um a cumulative benefit for these smaller Street scale projects where we see a lot of

060improvements for and you mentioned specifically phosphorus and TSS is when we do stream beinging stabilization projects that's really where you get the murky Waters the muddy streams um we're not seeing that um obviously a a biosoil type of project is very different than a stream B stabilization kind of project um so we're not doing monitoring on each individual project a lot of it is model based and then there's an annual sort of annual calculation did I answer all your questions you did thank you okay good I was I was making notes Mr Curtis so hopefully this is an easier question um when you're doing road construction work like at the intersection of Sunset and Brooks there was a there is a very lowquality nature area that's adjacent to it and did you look into using

061the nature area or some of these storm water management and there's other lowquality nature areas there streets that might have the same opportunity to support storm water we did so the one at Brooks and sunset is interesting because that kind of landed in our laps um through the the scoping project which is cool because it always makes our designers think differently um we were looking at where the water was coming from where the water was going to recognizing that there already was a lot of water going down into that Brook Sunset nature area that was already erosive so our main goal for this project was to capture the water within the public RightWay before it got down into that Brook Sunset area so in essence sort of protecting it allowing it to um not receive

062as much Road runoff so it wasn't necessarily a protection for the the services that it provides it was more of a protection because we don't want to damage it anymore than we already have well it's better than it used to be we've done some work in the nature area and it's absolutely 10 years ago it was a lot worse for the storm water than it is now so but what you're doing will help quite a bit that's what we're that's what we're aiming for right well thanks everyone I hate to I hate to um cut this off but I'm aware of um our next presentation so um I think that um Erin we should work out our next steps because I think it would be worthwhile perhaps for the Commissioners to have the opportunity to

063send some additional questions to Jen and Jerry um that might be helpful in terms of the next um review at our next meeting does that sound okay absolutely y when is your next meeting April 25th it's NFL draft my friends what sports I live in Detroit draft day um okay well we'll have to work around something there um uh anyway um I want to say thank you thank you to both you Jen and Jerry for this presentation um I think you can see that the commission is very interested um and I think that the result of your work will be something that we'll really appreciate and uh so we'll go to that next step by the way if Jerry doesn't make it to our next meeting I think all of us on the environmental commission

064present and past want to thank him for all of the wonderful service that he's given the city and Jerry we're going to miss you thanks a lot thank you Jerry Jerry we worked together a lot of those 40 years you've been at the city and I will miss you greatly you've been a absolute Gem of a city employee and helpful to natural natural features committee and environment commission for decades thank you thank you I totally agree thank you well thank you environmental commission um if there are any further questions certainly shoot them to Aaron and she'll be in touch with us and um in the mean time I am going to get a response about what bmps were included on airheart for you commissioner mki um and we hope to continue the conversation and uh

065get the updated policy passed thank you all right look forward to it bye bye thanks um well thanks everyone that was a great discussion um I think we could have all kept on it for quite a while um I still have many questions but we'll go for it um our next um discussion um is one that I also appreciate greatly um uh we have Dr Missy staltz available to talk about the renewable energy options analysis and um she's here because we at the environmental commission are really concerned about climate change and the effect on our natural environment and um certainly this will have some effect at least we hope that that's our goal um so moving to a a um 100% renewable energy is a goal that we all share and so with that I

066would appreciate um Mrs stealths to um initiate her presentation that we have you have prepared great thank you very much chair Mitchell and everybody I know it is late and I know we are in storm water mode and we're going to Pivot for a second and what I'm going to do is not actually go through all of my slides I'm going to give you a high level because every single thing is actually on this website and in fact a much more entertaining presenter is going to go through these slides right here in this link so the actual Consultants themselves um I I do have slides and I'm going to go through some of them but I'm not going to go through all of the details so I want to make sure aon's going to send

067this out to all of you everything I'm talking about all of the resources and background material lives here so I'm going to go fast because I want to get to more discussion and just wanted you to know this exists it's coming your way so don't be upset if I go through what I'm going to show you very quickly because it's really easy to find so I just want to make sure we focus on dialogue because I think that's probably more interesting so as here Mitchell named we have the goal in an arbor of powering our electric rid with 100% renewable energy this is part of a20 and hopefully you all know what a20 is our community's plan strategy framework goals actions to be carbon neutral and adjust an equitable Way by 2030 and so what

068we ended up doing is commissioning a study to understand what were different Pathways that we could take to achieve that goal building on a lot of work that had been done through the community and through staff and so what this presentation actually goes over are four main things what it was that we commissioned and what we didn't commission so we can binded it what uh was found in a public survey what was found from a technical report and then what staff's recommend commendations are now I'm not the consultant that did the public survey or the consultant that did the technical options analysis so I'm going to give you the high Lev findings but I can talk about in Greater detail the scope of what we commissioned and the recommendations that are coming out from staff

069any technical questions a lot of them are going to be answered in the report there's also a technical app pendum uh app pendum I don't even know what that is appendix uh that you can dive into to get more information but let's take it on a quick a quick little overview here so here's what we did we hired uh a team to create an options analysis providing details about the various Pathways that the city could take to achieve its clean energy goals we also ask them to do two very specific analyses so that's the big analysis there are lots and lots of different procurement Pathways there are lots of different options available on the market uh to help us hit our clean energy goals we asked them to evaluate those and then we said we

070also want to make sure you study at least two of those Pathways in Greater detail one is traditional municipalization through condemnation or the buyout of our existing incumbent utilities assets this is known as traditional municipalization this was a phase one study and a phase two study for something called a sustainable energy utility which is an optional optionals key opt in supplemental utility that would only provide 100% renewable energy to those that subscribe through rooftop ground maned solar systems energy storage systems and network geothermal which I'm excited to say uh chair Mitchell mentioned this before we a lot of work actually on network geothermal right now in the office this was kind of a twinkle in our eye when we came up with the idea for the sustainable energy utility but we are well past twinkles

071uh and very much moving into uh practice here with network geothermal so this was the scope of analysis we also said you can't just tell us you could do all of these magical things because of course we've studied those magical things right we have a very capable competent staff uh who's done extensive analyses we have wonderful experts in our community who've leaned in uh that understand the energy system and all of its nuances and so we've done a lot of work and so what we really wanted is someone that is actively in Industry who is doing this looking and saying okay here are the pathways that look viable uh across the board and we wanted those to be evaluated on the goals that we've established things like a20 being carbon neutral by 2030 it doesn't

072really matter if we can achieve something in 2043 when that's not our goal right our goal is 2030 that's what's been adopted we need to to create Pathways to achieve that 100% renewable energy Target we needed to understand how the strategies aligned with our core principles of equity sustainability and transformation this body and the energy commission as well as city council also adopted a series of energy criteria and principles that help guide our decision making and so we wanted to understand how things aligned with those criteria and principles and of course it was really important to think about a just transition for workers in the fossil fuel industry now while this isn't part of the study I will tell you we're working really closely with our plumbers and tight Fitters Trade union because as we

073think about transitioning away from fossil gas those are jobs that we could lose but if we lean in to network geothermal plumbers plumbers and pipe fitters are the ones who work on that system and so it's a reskilling as opposed to a job loss so those are the kinds of things we wanted to have be evaluated as part of the study so the first thing we did we did this technical study right but we also wanted to understand public sentiment because it doesn't matter what's technically possible if the public does not want to see that happen and so here we commissioned American pulse to run a statistically valid representative uh survey this is just some background on and American pulse not going to belor any of this you're welcome to dive in again all these

074slides are public what we had them do is a random sample they ended up with a sample size of 412 95% confidence interval plus or minus 4.8% uh it was a multimodal hybrid study so they did phone online panels and text to web it was weighted with an over waiting to ensure we had racial and ethnic representation throughout the city um slightly higher than actually what is represented uh with a focus on low-income households we really wanted to make sure they were heard and seen in the study so here's kind of a big picture right um we wanted to understand if people knew about our 100% renewable energy goals and What mattered to them as we were looking to achieve that what were the key characteristics they wanted to see in their energy system now

075throughout American pulses slides again these are the consultant slides so I'm just doing my best to reiterate them here you can see the quotes from uh individuals these are actual quotes that came out of their particular Sur excuse me missy we do not see the slides you do not see these slides we see something that says Consultants findings and it's static you're Frozen I'm frozen okay hold on did you see anything at the beginning we we saw the website that you had up yeah all you saw okay there thank you you see it now yeah okay great now I don't no it's good I just went off to see you so now I'm putting it back on all right apologies for that okay so apologies you couldn't see anything I promise all the slides are

076public here's the backwards this is what it looks like it's so delightful yall okay so this is where I was this is the methodology that we talked about uh you'll see on these slides when you look at them these gray boxes these are quotes that came directly from people who took the survey I'm not going to read them except for for one that always makes me smile a little bit so here's their they had five strategic insights based on their samples and you can actually see on our website all of the responses so I mean verbatim responses if you'd like to dive into that the number one uh Insight is resilience reliability and cost are the three most important characteristics that people want to see in their energy system we deliberately asked questions and I

077I did help design the question methodology uh we asked questions in multiple different ways we asked open-ended questions so people could say whatever they wanted to say about What mattered to them in their energy system we did uh a rank a Force rank where they had to pick their top three and then we let them pick everything so if there were 10 items they could pick all 10 items so in that way we were able to look and kind of compare responses and no matter how you ask the question these are the three most important things with resilience being by far the number one thing that people want to see now I'm using the term resilience we didn't you can see in the question it's a description of resilience as defined um it's it's a

078definition right it's not saying do you want a resilient system because resilience is a pretty fuzzy term and so we used an industry definition of resilience so here is uh just continuation of that resilience ranked number one across all demographic groups 66% of all respondents said this was one of their top three priorities when forced to pick one of three priorities reliability was number two with 48.6% selecting it as a top top priority and pretty close behind you can see within a margin uh that that margin of error is cost uh being selected as a top priority it was also the number three verbatim answer right Insight number two there's this one I'm delighted by uh didn't realize we would have this high of a response rate but we have about 75% of respondant that

079that are aware of our goal to achieve 100% renewable energy CommunityWide now that level of awareness varies as you can see in the in the pie chart off to the side but this is great right this is a great Foundation to build from it means we have a lot more work to do to get out and really make sure that we move those just sums over to a lot uh but there aren't many people who know nothing at all about what it is we're trying to do in the community Insight three gener uh residents generally support the 2030 goal now this is a quote it always makes me chuckle because one of the things that we heard it wasn't that 40% don't support the goal some of them actually think it should be more aggressive

080uh than 2030 bless their hearts so uh this is one of the you can see as soon as possible 2030 feels aggressively achievable I appreciate that respondant very much but generally speaking we've got the community uh in support of the goal to achieve 100% renewable energy there's their fourth Insight is of all the criteria that we offered to people people want everything they can possibly have right and this makes sense you want an energy system that is the Cadillac or the Tesla maybe not the Tesla but like the gold standard of the the system and when you ask them to say but which of these are the most important to you you still get them focusing on resilience reliability and cost and you can see here uh and again these are all importance how many

081of them said it was very important being the most important characteristic uh to to them in this study and the fifth strategic Insight was um again this is from the Consultants that we would ignore cost and affordability at our own Peril that when you look especially across demographic groups you actually start to see cost not being the third most important variable even though that it showed as the third most important of the three but it rises to number two in very different demographic groups those making under 75,000 a year it's a very important characteristic our non-white population and those under 40 have high cost sensitivity and so that as they were reading the responses and coding things they identified a need for us to to never lose sight of affordability and cost I don't think

082anyone on this webinar would uh we all acknowledge we don't want to exacerbate energy burden as we think about what the future holds for all of us we want to make sure that we usher in a clean safe healthy future for all meaning it also has to be affordable and accessible to all so these are I'm not going to go through these slides there's just these are the general takeaways I just shared resilience great so that is framing we went into the technical report so we've got this in the back of our head saying okay we've got to think about resilience reliability and cost that's where the public is right now let's analyze the technical options available to us so this report is online again you can dive in uh to it it was created

083by these particular Consultants five lakes was the leading organization involved New Gen strategies and solutions who does the vast majority of M the country Atomic Law Group extremely experienced lawyers multiple different lawyers from our state uh that work in the energy system and sensor energy helping us with a lot of the energy storage analysis as part of the SE I'm going to quickly go through these because I want to get to the questions here part of the study as you look to the future is you have to understand both the present and where we're tracking under a business as usual scenario as well as where we're tracking with all of our at0 goals so this slide just talks about how electric generation and electric usage are going to vary over time so this particular one

084is on load on usage the next ones we'll talk about some other elements of the electricity system but here what we basically see is between now and 2030 there isn't really that much projected shifting in our amount of electrical usage however you start to see that change and this is because we're electrifying right vehicles are electrifying uh we're talking about making a transition to more sustainable sources of heating and cooling as we think about transitioning our water heaters over to heat pump water heaters well they're already electric but our dryers for example making that transition our cook tops if we're concerned about indoor air quality we're having conversations about what we cook on and so we're going to see greater electrification that means to get to 100% renewable we have to factor in that level

085of growth so I just share that we are planning for a future in which we have increased electricity demand now this is outdated let's just stop you can look at it right now uh this report was done before govern Whitmer signed the new renewable portfolio standard so that is true we know that we're analyzing all of this information the most important thing to note when you look at 2030 that green slice uh actually not the green slice the for you I think it's teal it's 35% that's 50% because the new renewable portfolio standard the governor's sign means we have to have 50% renewable electricity on the grid or clean electricity is the actual vernacular by 2030 if has to be 100% clean by 2040 so what that means is everything gets smooshed meaning that 41%

086we're trying to close is actually smaller our calculations are closer to gosh I think it's 28% when you factor in the different elements uh that we've got going so that's good news that means we have less of a gap that we're trying to to close with 100% Renewables but yes this is outdated slide please don't belor it I promise we're working on updating it okay so the Consultants analyze various different Pathways and early on WE ruled out some we did not have them chase down Solutions which were not legal in Michigan while they could become legal that's just not the moment we're in and so we said only things that we could reasonably do and so they reviewed the six things that are here behind the meter solar and storage Community solar power purchase agreements

087both virtual and traditional uh Rex uh virtual power reduction agreements and then the migraine power program if you have questions on what any of these are we can talk about them uh we had them of course analyze them based on these different procurement options based on our energy criteria and principles you can see how things rank across the board we had them look at costing and temporal uh like how early we could actually adopt these different strategies we and then we have them develop scenarios so how would they stack things spoiler there isn't one thing you can do we already know this uh no one action is going to get us to 100% renewable energy and if someone tells you it will they're absolutely feeding you a very happy go-lucky Story by 2030 uh we're

088going to need multiple different solutions to hit our 2030 goal which is why we're working on multiple different things at this moment so these are three scenarios that they ran they call them the DTE plus scenario which is basically stay the course uh and do a few additional things there's the seu plus DTE and then there's the DT seu and Community solar strategy they also R costs for these different strategies you can see the difference in what the outlay capital outlay costs are the recoverable costs and then the non-recoverable cost depending on what's included again I know I'm going fast this is all in the technical report this is just kind of a a quick the structure that they talked about so the DTE plus this is where we continue to take service from DTE

089but we take additional steps to achieve 100% renewable electricity credits right this could be a wreck P purchase this could be uh a virtual power reduction agreement this could be a virtual power purchase agreement there are certain things that we can do and there are certain things we cannot do if we take this path the second is we stay with DT and we launch a sustainable energy utility so this is that supplemental utility we take as much uh demand as we can in the community we generate local Renewables we provide that uh energy here in the community and whatever else we need comes from DTE and then we do a virtual power purchase agreement to close the rest of Gap the third option is takeover of all of DT's assets within the city and become

090the load serving entity meaning we have to provide 247 power provision every single day of the year this was not deemed to be possible by 2030 and because our goal is 2030 I'm not going to spend a lot more time talking about that particular pathway so they also did pricing around the sustainable energy utility the projections and rates what we assumed as we went into the analysis is that in order for the sustainable able energy utility to succeed it has to be cost competitive right it's got to be cost competitive with current rates and it's got to be cost competitive with private solar leases the good news is it can be and it is um we're actually doing thirdparty verification of all of these numbers because we're very excited by what we see here what

091we also know though is storage is not if you if you tie in solar and storage it is not going to be cheaper than your current rates in most situations however there is a value of resilience that you get and we heard from our residents that resilience was very very important we also know a lot of people are investing in things like generators and actually when you factor in storage solar and storage through the seu your rates can be cheaper than what it would be if you use traditional energy and got a generator so there are cases there's a rationale here for leaning into storage and of course we have financing options that are available uh to make that happen there's multiple different Pathways that we're exploring the meu study came out and showed a

092wide range of estimates and you're going to hear a lot of conversation around this uh the reality is no one knows what the truth is uh and the reason is because there are a few things that go into a municipalization process there's the value of the assets outside your door if you look out the window you're going to see pulls and you're going to see wires that's actually the easiest part of the system to do an appraisal on so we did kind of a random sample in a phase one study a phase two study is something that's being discussed that's an actual appraisal that's that's saying what we would offer for those assets that are at our door so that's one piece of the cost of buying the infrastructure another piece is the stranded asset

093costs this study looked at stranded asset costs in some cases we made a very strategic decision good or bad that we would minimize stranded assets so there are certain situations where equipment serves an arbor and it serves another Community a stranded asset means that we take that asset whatever it is let's say it's a Transformer we take that which means DT can't serve this other community that's a stranded cost courts will make you pay that cost you you can't take away someone else's right outside of your Municipal boundary to get power so what we decided was instead of saying okay we'll buy the old infrastructure we said nope they can keep it we'll build a new infrastructure to serve the community and so that's how we cost it out to minimize stranded asset costs but

094a phase two would also look at that and the phase one did as well the third piece is the most variable piece and the one that no one is going to be able to give us an answer to except for a court and that is what's the value of going concern that means um kind of simply put our franchise for electric has been ruled in perpetuity multiple times it's made it to the Supreme Court it has been rued the Michigan Supreme Court it is in perpetuity that has a very different value right of service and what the courts will decide the value of that franchise is has never been tested and so you see this range of estimates coming forward from very little value for the franchise to quite valuable for that franchise that is

095why we have this variability in cost estimates it also means excuse me that in year one we could have slight savings by launching an meu to extremely high increases in rates and we don't know where the truth will lie they also ran a 20 year analysis showing that we still in 20 years uh could we could have some savings or we could still be paying a premium by municipalization I want to be clear none of this counts the cost of investing in the system this is buying the exact thing that is outside your door right now it is not making improvements the cost of those improvements to that system it is not upgrading that system it is not assuming that system is being upgrade to handle the amount of electrification that we see coming down

096the pike that is not good or that is not bad I just want to be transparent the study was a snapshot in time and that's what it had to be because we can't see the future blah blah blah this is long you guys are probably so glossed over uh the study also looked at how it aligned those three options or utility structures aligned with the city's energy criteria and principles and ultimately we're at the end here the recommendations from the consultant excuse me you heard me say this a full a few times which is we'll we'll have to top off as they call it with probably renewable energy credits or something again these are Consultants recommendations regardless of which Str strategy we take we take they recommend that we pursue the seu to accelerate solar

097deployment and resilience within the city that we competitively procure recks through virtual power purchase agreements they also recommend that we competitively bid that out that's how we competitively procure excuse me and they recommend that we decouple consideration of municipalization from pursuit of 100% renewable electricity but if there's interest in pursuing municipalization we need to think about acquiring those Renewables those top off those virtual power purchase agreements through means that are transferable to a municipal utility the good news is vppa are so that's what the consultant said I'm going to end here by what staff have recommended so just a few weeks ago we recommended to the city administrator and city council that we put the formation of a sustainable energy utility do a vote of the people uh we are going to recommend that that

098go to a vote in November we want to do that for a few reasons we don't think that we have to do it but this is a really big policy decision and we want to ensure the public is supportive of this optional opt-in supplemental utility if the public is not supportive of an optional opt-in utility chances are they're not supportive of a fullon traditional municipalization effort and we want to understand what public support looks like second it gives us a chance to do education and engagement around the seu which means if it were to pass we also would understand what demand would look like which means we can roll out much more quickly and effectively we also recommend pursuing grant funding to launch uh the scu's second fease which focuses on micro grids I'll be

099working on a grant when I get off the phone with you all uh that's focused on that and then third we recommend initiating a request for proposals to generate new additional M Michigan renewable energy systems that we could acquire here in the city of an arbor through what's known as a virtual power purchase agreement so those are staffs recommendations in terms of moving things forward that was a lot I will end where I started which is all of this is on a website there is so much more information go thank you missy um I have the feeling that there will be a number of questions from this group um and I do want to um ask us to pay attention to time because we do have one more speaker um so um I have questions

100but if anyone has some queued up I'd be happy to call on you looks like I go first um I see I I think that one of the things that that would be of interest to me is to understand from the seu and I know that there are multiple options for it but how many people would be served and what's the Baseline number um in terms of like however you measure it is it residences is it is Does it include commercial um what are we talking about for a scope of users and maybe the one of the counts is number of meters yeah it's a great question so when there there's a model that is behind the seu uh that we're actually third party testing right now with a rate firm to make sure because

101this is this is really important your question is really really important what we know is the startup costs are the same you've got to have staff you got to have a maintenance grw right you have to have the same things so you need to have enough subscribers to cover those costs and have the cost be comparable uh to what we're currently paying or savings the good news is that's actually not a lot um I don't have the number in front of me but it's I don't have the number in front of me so I'm not going to speculate I can try to pull it up in the back end after that though those fixed costs are those fixed costs right installing a system the beautiful thing the thing that excites me about the seu in

102particular is for those of us on the line I think many of us do already have solar on our home we know that asset already has value I mean it's going to pay for itself over a certain period And so this just makes that this much more accessible to more people in the marketplace so you add people on and you just get better you get better economics effectively you get scale the way we modeled it though was residential and small commercial so we didn't look at really large commercial because they were on a different electric rate we can build that into the model but that's just not where we started and is that like do you have a I saw something like a range of like 6,000 to 12,000 some um oh in the good

103good question so what you can see in the technical report is we had them do three seu scenarios what would it look like in a low adoption to a medium adoption to a high adoption rate I think the slide I showed I'll pull it up here was it was just one of them one of those scenarios but they you can see the economics for all different scenarios and you can see what I mean about the more people that subscribe the better the rate is because those fixed costs get spread over more people but the rates actually work even in a low adoption scenario and but what's the denominator of that the cost of it's the fixed cost uh starting like staff no it's a different question if you've got 1,200 that would enroll how many

104are the total who could enroll if you magically you had 100% it would be every household yeah how many is that 55,000 okay yeah so 12,000 was modeled the 55 that's right okay thank you yeah we and we did it by 2030 to be clear right that's what we modeled so you would continue adding as you went but we picked that's the timeline we modeled okay good question right um anyone else oh John mki as might be expected uh so I have a number of points and I appreciate hearing Missy's response to them and um first of all Maybe I can start off by saying uh or giving the update on the energy Commission meeting which I don't have to give at the end of the meeting which is this is exactly the topic that

105we covered in the energy commission meeting along with a resolution of support for the seu um so first of all I think it's maybe appropriate for me to to state that um I'm on the record publicly supporting the seu so I think this is um something we should definitely do um but I I have a number of um let's say concerns or issues that I just like to raise first of all I think um the the situation is changing so dramatically with the energy transition and Technologies and I mean just look at preira and post Ira I mean huge differences and so I think this is something that we're going to Contin have to continually reassess um first of all I want to secondly I want to point out to everybody that when we talk

106about 100% renewable energy we're talking about electrical energy and even at 2030 we're not going to have 100% renewable gas and we're going to not mean natural gas or fossil fossil gas as some people like to say or 100% renewable gasoline or diesel and so um we need to be clear as when we're talking about scope and costs and timelines and everything this is talking about electricity um I I know that things have shifted um back and forth on CCA that we should all remember Community Choice aggregation was assumed as a pathway um and I know that some of our elected representatives feel that it's not uh a very good pathway on the other hand um you know districts have been redrawn we control the Democrats control I should say all all three branches of

107government and so I don't know that we should um forget CCA and I know Missy has also stated on the record that um CCA is a good thing because if it were to happen it would benefit every community in the state and would give them options that they don't have right now it's not just something specific to Ann Arbor um one concern that I have and this something that I provided back in October is that all of this analysis um stops with 2030 and that that's reasonable given it's pretty far out and as I said a lot is going to change but we have to be cognizant of the fact that costs for example are going to continue to um ACR and have to be paid for by taxpayers and one of the slide that

108Missy showed is a slide of costs and there's a line item on and they're called non-recoverable costs um and those are costs that at least the report says that taxpayers are going to have to bear and in the a20 plan um we have for strategy seven action for went back and looked um an assumption that we are going to pay $10 million in total costs for Rex now um the costs that are shown in the report as Missy pointed out are going to be changing because of the new state renewable portfolio standard but the costs that are that are in the report are substantial between 2023 and 2029 um it's you know this is it depends on the choice but it's roughly $10 million so that's equal to the whole amount that's in in the

109a20 plan and in 2030 alone it's going to be for the option shown DTE plus plus seu is going to be 12.5 million and those costs continue to uh have to be born by by residents and so I think we just have to be honest with ourselves and residents that these are substantial costs that are going to have to be recovered somehow they're going to be in the city budget um um another thing is is that we're assuming the port resumes that all a20 Targets are going to be met um you know I think that's a reasonable assumption and we want to we want to do that on the other hand I think if anybody goes through and looks at the a20 report and looks at uh indicators of success timelines and assumptions there are

110a number of things that we are not meeting the the timeline on so if we're not meeting the timeline costs will be higher um and then just the last um comment um well two more comments um GTE CEO has said publicly in an arbor at the end of January that he wants to partner with the city to meet our 100% renewable energy goals I have no idea what that means um it would be really wonderful if DTE would outline exactly what they mean by a partnership and meeting our goals because well I'll I'll leave I'll leave leave that as a blank and then people can fill in the blank um so but I think you know if we're if we're asking all these questions and what we should be doing and a a statement like

111that as being made and he there's an advisory committee being made for washingon County where he apparently personally is going to be leading these meetings and the two first two meetings have been set um then I think it's really important that all of us be asking DTE what do they mean by that and a partnership to me means win-win and it doesn't mean win lose or lose win it means win-win um and then finally I know there was a lot of email exchanges back and forth um with the commission that Aaron for Ed between uh anti- Republic power representatives and the city and um I would just encourage everybody you know there was there was some um criticisms of the report from A2 P2 there was a rebuttal from Five Lakes um and then there

112was a rebuttal to the rebuttal from a2p P2 and I would encourage energy Commissioners to look um at that and and judge for themselves my senses and I need to look at these more carefully is that there are um there were rebuttal from five lakes that really didn't address a number of points from A2 P2 and I'll go back to my very first point that's why I think we need to have an ongoing conversation about all of these issues so thank you for allowing me to ramble on there that's it that was great I just want to respond to a few short things here yes the landscape constantly is changing that goes both ways right certain things are more complicated some things are better battery technology is much cheaper it's much more advanced than where

113it was even when we started the analysis grid forming inverters are stronger and more marketable than they were before so just just think of vehicle to grid coming exactly yeah the the four four three to four Tesla power walls so absolutely absolutely um to the seu one thing I just wanted to note is we are going um SE are proposing that when we go to council we will not just ask for authorization to do electric uh we will ask for authorization to launch District geothermal Network geothermal systems as well so we don't close that door we get authorization so we can start tackling thermal which is what you brought with heating and cooling transition uh CCA we I've said this publicly and I'll keep saying it we will work with any regulator that's ready to

114introduce legislation we have drafts ready to go so uh I invite our legislators to step up to that challenge and and if not we'll work with anybody uh the I just did want to note that while the report stops IT 2030 it doesn't for the me it actually models out into the future for an meu with increasing cost uh escalating cost rates through DTE so just note that um Rex are always going to be a cost or virtual power purchase agreement but they are meant to be a stop Gap because we're never going to stop it's not like we stop working in 2030 they're just a bridge to continuing to close emissions so excellent point um timelines are slower in some areas and they are faster in other areas of a20 I'm delighted to share

115uh that we're this year we'll finish I think 10 a20 strategies so so that's great they're different we're finding some things we just going slower and you're right that's true uh and then the last thing to your last Point rational people often disagree on things that doesn't make one right and one wrong it just means there's there's room we're in Uncharted Territory with our kind of franchise that people are going to disagree doesn't mean anyone is less skilled than another people just disagree a lot of them are lawyers and they get paid to disagree it would be great if there was a forum where people could just disagree and and challenge each other I don't know if that's yeah we may have that um so I I want to just add that um I would

116appreciate the opportunity for um a discussion of of not a line between the meu and the seu but more the combination and so I haven't heard that really discussed and I think that would be useful um because I don't think it has to be one well I mean I think that's probably true but I would say Stafford are operating under one goal and that is what council's adopted and that's a20 and so our goal is 2030 and so we're going to continue sprinting at things that allow us to achieve the 2030 goal and so that's I think an seu could grow into something else uh for sure it doesn't preclude a formal municipalization effort but it doesn't have to be formal municipalization effort right it can just be a supplemental or it could be the

117foundation for something else but the reason you don't hear me talking about municipalization is I do not believe that that is a pathway to achieve our goal even though it could be within a short period after that date maybe potentially and maybe not you know I I don't know all right um thanks um all right I would welcome questions from anyone else and if there are none going going we'll move on to our next speaker and thank you see thank you thank you for bringing that information um and now we'll have some information from Greg Woodring who is the president of anber for Public Power we have um had Greg here as the speaker in the past um and he's here to talk about annab from Public Power and the potential of moving forward with

118a phase two um feasibility study for looking at how this could potentially play into an Arbor's future so um thank you Greg for being here thank you so much uh chair Mitchell and Commissioners and council members I really appreciate you having me here to speak to you as well and I will also try to be as brief as possible as I know that we're nearing the end of your scheduled time here um but and I'd also love to entertain any questions that all of you have so we in Arbor for Public Power as re mentioned uh we've been I've been here before to talk to you before but essentially we're a Grassroots organization um or 501c4 technically and we're working towards achieving uh what we believe is the spirit of the a20 plan which is

119true 100% Renewable Power uh and you know there's a lot of different ways to consider uh Renewable Power however we are considering it as it is actually the power that we are consuming that is coming 100% from Renewables uh and that's what we're working towards um and so the general problem that we have is DTE is not transitioning to Renewables fast enough as you all are aware this is dte's most recent energy fuel mix apologies I didn't update that Source there that should be updated with the most recent numbers because I just pulled this graph off of their website um however they're still at 54% coal 14.2% natural gas and yes uh there have been some great winds at the state level to make their goals more aggressive to make it clean however as I'm

120sure many of you are also aware uh they have considerable carve outs things for renewable natural gas for hydrogen generation for um nuclear that are not necessarily the renewable energy that we're looking to go towards right it's a clean energy standard rather than the renewable energy standard which is a different standard than what we're working towards in ant Arbor um and so as we see the solution is municipalization um and the reason for that and municipalization as I'm sure all of you are aware is essentially has taking over the electric utility as Dr stls already laid out uh it's worth noting that there's over 40 Municipal municipalities in Michigan that have some form of Public Power whether that's co-ops or communities like we're discussing creating there's more than 2,000 communities across the United States that

121have uh Public Power um and uh a big advantage of it is that it's legal in Michigan right that uh we have a clear legal Authority granted to us by the State Constitution and the Ann Arbor City Charter to municipalization is the right option for us is reliability affordability local control investing in our community and as I'm sure uh those on the commission today are uh most interested in the environmental aspects of it right so uh DTE is the slowest utility uh in Michigan to return power to customers after an outage right uh and the difference is rather staggering um dte's reliability as I'm sure I don't have to explain to you is abysmal and it's been getting worse over the years uh and when you compare it to other publicly owned Electric utilities uh

122it makes it clear that this is not an issue due to geography or anything related to Michigan's specific climate this is an issue due to the system of power that they are using right they they have underinvested in their infrastructure to an extent where they're not able to withstand the normal weather patterns of Michigan and uh it's also worth pointing out that well reliability isn't directly related to climate it is a climate issue right reliability is going to continue to get worse as weather becomes more and more erratic due to the effects of climate change and so we're in this situation now where DTE was a is and has been a major driver towards the climate crisis and they have underinvested in their infrastructure to an extent where they cannot stand up to the ravages

123of it um and we're seeing that play out in our uh backyards across the state um and we can see the uh what we believe is the obvious solution right next door to us in communities like uh Lancing Chelsea Holland Trevor City um and they do all of these these Public Power utilities do these things well charging considerably less for their power right so this is updated with last year's numbers um and the way that I pulled these numbers is that I averaged the different um rates that they charge so they charge different rates at different amounts of energy you use is is probably not actually accurate to the actual demand but it's is a relative ballpark right and I did this across all the utility so hopefully it's fairly even um however you can

124see that when you're looking specifically at residential rates right which there is a big difference especially after the state allow DTE to separate their residential and Industrial and Commercial rates um res Donal rates have been going up and up and up for investor owned utility customers and that has not been the case in publicly owned utilities across the state um we are paying under DTE um about double uh what many utilities or close to double slightly less than double a few cases um what public own utilities are paying for their power um and they're so we are paying a lot more for a lot worse power and I'm not pointing this out to say that this is ex ly what we're going to be seeing if we were to they're paying a lower cost of

125capital which means all of their projects are cheaper compared to investor owned utility projects due to cheaper debt financing versus uh much more expensive debt financing and Equity financing and also all of the other activities that DTE does like their uh lavish salaries and bonuses for their Executives the lobbying the marketing all these various different things that DTE does to maintain their position uh of power within our state additionally this gives us uh local control over our utility we would control our rates we would control our source of power we control when our infastructure is updated it is a form of democratic control that we are regaining over our daily lives by reclaiming uh Val uh and you know one of the most um valuable uh utility Commodities that we are being served electricity is

126absolutely a need and not a want in the 21st century um and furthermore it invest in our community right um there is an argument to be made here about the amount of uh money that is paid back towards the general fund um in Lancing uh in 2020 that was $23.3 Million I think that Trevor City was 1.6 uh Holland was 78 or so um you know it's a lot of money that is being paid back to the general fund is in addition to keeping the jobs in uh the area um allowing us to advance unionization um and various different things and also the just value of having resilient energy grid right we can begin to improve the um resilience of our energy uh and that is going to have a lot of different benefits right

127for one it's um a health and safety issue for many people but it's also uh it's a determining factor and for a lot of different economic activity if you don't have reliable electricity that is going to dissuade people who are looking to potentially invest in this community and there's also the fact that many developers are looking to be electrifying to be building larger developments um and they simply cannot build it due to a lack of capacity provided by DTE with an investor with a publicly owned utility instead we'd be able to work with these types of entities to make sure that they're able to um be provided the capacity they need to build these sorts of developments and finally um as I'm sure that all of you are the most interested in is the environmentally

128responsible choice I've already mentioned this is our only real path to 100% Renewable Power in terms of how we are actually consuming yes we could buy Rex we could buy vppa we could buy Rex from DTE um and there may be some uh potential to get some of our energy uh demand service by an seu which we absolutely endorse right as much as the seu possibly can we should be pursuing that aggressively however as the feasibility study uh uh showed that was just discussed it's only projected to be serving about 10% of our power Demand by 2030 um and well you can make arguments one way or another about the timeline of municipalization it may be reasonable to say that we're not going to get all the way there by 2030 this will get us

129there in a reasonable timeline it's not going to be quick it's not the easy path forward but is the path forward that actually gets the job done um and then there's also other things that we can talk about how um you know there's caps on community solar and distribut generation those caps have been raised which is great however 6% in my opinion still too low um and this is something that would be at the discretion of a public utility right we could remove those caps um we could um reinstate net metering we could do all these different things that would incentivize so rooftop solar a lot more than we currently can do under DTE um so how do we do it uh this is kind of I think the part that's valuable um that you

130haven't heard before um so we've completed a phase one feasibility study which is a huge win um and well uh I'd be happy to answer any questions that any of you have about um what you've been sent uh earlier today or tomorrow or yesterday um regarding uh some of our critiques of the feasibil study we do believe that the high-end valuation is unreasonable um however uh as I think that many people in the city have already concluded we believe that even if you take the study on face value there's enough reason there to believe that it is worth pursuing the second state uh stage of the feasibility study which is valuation study and as Dr stz already mentioned what that study would be doing is it would be looking at what price are we going

131to offer DTE for their assets right um now and that's essentially the next because after we uh um make an offer to DT for their assets and you know there's some kind of discussion you could set up governance that could be the seu board right if the city is looking to establish an seu um potentially whatever entity is servicing the seu could evolve into Municipal utility right and that could be a very uh viable path forward for Ann Arbor to pursue um however ultimately to um do the acquisition of the assets we're going to need to make an offer to DTE and DTE is is almost certainly going to say no it's worth more right that is DTE is a for-profit company right they're going to try to make an argument to get more money

132out of us than we are willing to pay um and what that valuation study does is it gives the city a strong argument to say this is what we believe your assets are actually worth it is exhibit a in the legal case that's going to come up because DTE as I already mentioned earlier is legally obligated to uh surrender their assets right the city has the right to force the sale to condemn dte's electrical infrastructure within the city boundaries um the only point that DTE can contest us on is the price of those assets right and the feasibility study provided a range of um potential costs that that could be valuation study should uh narrow the city in on a legally defensible strong and in my opinion advantageous to the city uh argument for what

133um the price of those assets should be um and so that's what we are hoping that the city council will um approve in their budget it was a um item included in the um budget proposal however April 15th we'll see if it made um the administrator's uh recommendation for the budget um and so we are hoping to see that um and we're hoping that we can pursue the phase two feasibility study uh in parallel with the buildout of the seu this seems like uh best potential path to aggressively pursue 100% um uh 100 100% of the an arbor being served by public electric utility while also not waiting for the whole thing to be finished before we get started on something um so we go through that legal battle eventually the court is like either

134we settle with DTE or a court makes a decision on what the cost of those assets will be and then that is put up to a vote of the people staff recommendations did recommend a vote prior to legal proceedings we're not sure um exactly what the justification is for that um and we'd love to hear some more information from the city on that um we're not certain if that's necessary at this point however one vote that absolutely is necessary is the vote to approve the funding so essentially um and apologies I I kind of um spoke over this already but this is our arguments for uh the phase two fusibility study but um essentially the way that uh municipalization acquisition is finance is we are going to take out revenue bonds right revenue bonds are

135essentially like a millage Bond except for instead of being backed by taxes they are now backed by the revenue generated from whatever you were invested in so that's why we were looking in uh Dr stl's previous um slide about what the change in cost of electrical rates would be is that the cost of acquisition would be paid through the electrical bills that we are already paying right which is why we're um it's uncertain whether the cost will go up or down if if it wasn't for the cost of the acquisition the cost would certainly go down right that is why these other Public Power utilities across the state are able to offer such lower prices compared to DTE however the cost of the acquisition does um play into what the ultimate cost will be but

136as uh uh commissioner mki um rightly pointed out earlier the cost of reaching 100% Renewable Power is going to be born somewhere whether that is in tax dollars paid out to Rex or vppa or if that's paid out through our electrical bills and municipalization actually provides a realistic pathway that would actually lower costs rather than increase cost and so for that reason we strongly believe that this is something that is at the very least worth aggressively pursuing looking into with a phase two feasibility study and putting up to the voters to decide if they want to uh ditch DTE and uh build our own Energy Future so that's uh our position on it I thank you for your time I'm sure that uh many of you are hoping to get out of here fairly soon

137but I would be happy to answer any amount of questions that you have thank you Greg um and so here we are an opportunity for questions and I know that we are at a close to an endpoint but I would really appreciate if we take advantage of this opportunity [Music] um to here okay missioner mki quick question and a comment um I've read somewhere recently that if there were to be a municipal utility that uh there would be an immediate 6% savings because uh we pay sales tax when we pay an investor own utility and the you don't pay sales tax when you pay Municipal utility is that correct that is correct yeah public entity is exempt from sales tax um and that is often uh the justification for What's called the city fee so

138the revenue paid back to the general fund from the utility and legally you do have to be careful that you're not um paying out too much to the city from the utility however on average it does turn out that Public Utilities tend to put back more into the general fund than uh the investor owned utilities do in taxes so the comment that I had was um I would like to speak out in favor of a fake two study um I know I think it's a million dollars that's the line item in the budget that's a rough estimate that is a lot of money without a deliverable at the end um but I'd like to remind everybody uh about what Boulder Colorado did Boulder Colorado was unsuccessful in its municipalization effort but um and it spent

139$25 million but it uh was a very very well publicized uh activ ity and in the end Excel Energy its utility energy um Excel Energy ended up making significant concessions um on uh what kind of goals it was going to have that affected not only Boulder but all of its customers in Colorado and in Minnesota and possibly in other states and I think we should really be keeping the pressure on DTE and I think this is one way in doing it and and I know that you council members are going to have to weigh a million dollars here versus a million dollars there but I think this is something that really would would push um and DTE as well as make us much better informed about what kind of decisions we should be making in

140the coming years so that's all I had to say thank you thanks commissioner mki um commissioner grber thank you Greg I just have a question about the timeline Dr staltz mentioned that she didn't think it was possible to have this it's not really one of her options because it didn't meet the 2030 goal and so on your slide road map to municipalization I you might not have an answer for this but is it possible to put that road map on a timeline um you said you think that it's possible to get it this by 2030 but I also question whether it's feasible so I I'd love to visualize the timeline that's possible yeah um I will say that I certainly cannot tell you authoritatively how long it's going to take and I think that it's

141entirely reasonable to say that it might take longer than 2030 I will say that I don't think it's well Justified to say that it can't happen by 2030 um there are many examples of uh cities that have done this quicker yes it is probably more complicated in Michigan because it hasn't happened in a 100 years um so 100% acknowledge that right the legal um case may be more drawn out um in Michigan I have I'm not seen from any of the legal work that we have done or anything published in the feasibility study an argument as to why our Perpetual franchise agreements would make this significantly more uh lengthy or costly other than the fact that we would not be able to cancel the franchise agreement which is a uh pathway that many communities pursue

142however there are uh options available to us that don't involve cancelling the franchise agreement and it's also worth remembering that we're not purchasing the franchise agreement right we are not on there we should not be um uh um we we can't P purchase the franchise agreement DT will still have a franchise for an arbor instead what we are getting is the infrastructure and we are using the right that we already have by the home rule City act to service that infrastructure right um so yes it may take some amount of time I would say that you know a lot of that time time is a little bit in the hands of the city um in terms of how quickly we pursue some of these next steps you know I hope that we will get started

143on an RFP for a phase 2 feasibility study soon I know that Dr St said in uh um energy commission meeting earlier this month that if city council funds it she would be looking to um be doing that in May um you know I hope that that will be aggressively pursued um and that we will select a contractor as fast as is responsible and that we will put some amount of pressure on the contractor to finish in a uh diligent but uh reasonable time frame because that will increase the amount of time that uh or decrease the amount of time that it takes um the legal case is um uncertain you know you can look at other examples across the country of how long their legal cases have taken no Jefferson County Washington took about

144a year Winter Park Florida took two and as um commissioner mury pointed out Boulder Colorado took 10 right now Boulder Colorado had other legal complications that came up around with that I'm very confident the city of an arbor can avoid those however yes it it is a question mark you can't say that um confidently one way or another um and then as far as uh the amount of time that it takes to interconnect and things like that um it's it's difficult to say it certainly probably will be longer if we um pursue the feasibility study 1's recommendation of building 10 new substations um I hope that the phase two feasibility study will um at least in investigate the option of acquiring some of those uh substations not saying one option is better or the other

145however it seems like both options should be considered thank you Greg other questions right um I think one of my concerns has to do with the um scope of coverage of people in the community um people in businesses and so could you comment on that um aspect for the municipal utility option yeah um and I think that that's a worthwhile thing to point out I mean the municipal utility has one advantage of if you know day one of its operation it's going to be servicing 100% of Ann Arbor because we were going to be acquiring all of those um connections through the acquisition process the unfortunate side is city of an arbor cannot service area outside of its City boundaries due to the foot act um and if desired I can go into more detail

146on the foot act but essentially that's what gives DTE its Perpetual franchise agreement um and we can also look at cases like poer Colorado where they were attempting to acquire infrastructure outside of the city boundaries and that is a large part of what led to that prolonged legal battle um so in our opinion despite the fact that we would love to serve as the county n I actually uh to confess something I live in ipolani um and I would love to serve as Iolani um but we don't think that that's probably the um most reasonable we don't think that that's an advisable path for the city to pursue um but hopefully if the city of an arbor is successful in municipalization this will reduce the barrier of entry for other communities across the state to

147pursue something like this um it will chart a clear legal pathway for communities to follow and other communities um maybe and surrounding areas might even be able to pursue this option themselves and then work together in some sort of joint agreements with an Han Arbor Municipal utility which we're not certain but think probably is legal thank you um all right um going once twice for additional questions um I will want to thank you very much Greg for um joining us tonight and um so was very informative for me and I um hope that we'll continue this discussion among ourselves and and um we'll also uh be able to send questions to through Aaron to you and to um Dr stz think that would be great absolutely really appreciate you having me and happy to answer

148any questions at any time thank you um all right y we are really at the bleeding edge of the end of our meeting and over it um so our next um order of this business is reports from committees so I'm going to um do something different which is just to ask if any of the Committees have a particular announcement that they would like to make um and I'll take those that are ready to speak otherwise I'll just tip through them biodiversity circular economy commissioner C go ahead biodiversity for biodiversity we've drafted up changes for the pollinator websites for the OSI and for nap and those are both review by the different city staffs and for the pollinator Corner that should be going out in the OSI newsletter and some of the parks newsletters later this

149month great thank you um circular economy water quality uh just quickly we're continuing with our work with uh looking at options for a construction and demolition uh ordinance uh this month we spoke with representatives from the city of Chicago about some of the trials and tribulations they've EXP experience there with their ordinance um common theme across all the places we've talked to is the problem with tracking trying to get accurate information to know what's going where and what impact is being made um we hope to speak with one more uh representative probably somebody from a recycling industry organization to give us some broader State and National perspective on it and then what we're doing is putting together a kind of presentation or power to kind of explain what do we find what do we think

150the opport are do we think the challenges are as a way to start uh discussing that with a variety of different groups both uh City staff and others in time great thank you uh let's see um city council would you like make any account either council member dish CC rman yes um yep I wanted to let you know that we have a reading of for an ordinance change related to the open space and Parkland preservation plan um it expands the boundaries includes uh this is also known as the Green Belt sorry it also uh includes an overlay for um looking at surface water so want to let you know about that and then we also in our last meeting passed a resolution in support of the rides proposal to look for other options on the

151us23 corridor project than adding a lane so trying to stay true to our sustainability plans and the rides long-term plans for utilizing Park and rides as a way of minimizing uh traffic and increasing accessibility that's it sound great good uh okay our next it group is energy and we heard from commissioner mki I think if you want to okay let me just leave it at that um um uh commissioner Maran is not here for pack um Planning Commission well Planning Commission is deeply working on the comprehensive plan you know the comprehensive update um I can't think of anything that we have passed recently that it is of direct interest to this Commission um but there was there were a series of public meetings held at the an arbor District Library focusing on downtown planning and

152there was a lot of work with maps and bike lane you know projections and what you know what do you think would work and um it was very exciting very well attended and the meeting that I went to had a real range in particular of Ages that was very Str of the people who participated so um yeah I can't think of you know anything specific right thank you thanks for that update it's great good to know things are moving um as the chair report I don't have anything specific to add so I'm gonna um pass it off to Ain who gave us a report Erin I don't know if you want to make any comments on the report that you provided us sure yeah I think um council member Dash covered one of that them

153and um there's a link on there to all the materials that were presented at those meetings at the library if anyone didn't get a chance to attend then I think commissioner msky covered um my other item um about what the energy commission's been up to um with regards to the resolution and then the only other thing I had on there was that the um the Gman site U the EPA has opened public comment for the npl list the national priorities list um under super fund so public common is open on that until May 6 great thank you um and so moving on from there thank you Erin um uh our next schedule meeting is April 25th and guess what one of the things we're going to talk about is the Gman plume and we'll also

154have some other water discussions um ideally if it if it works out we'll have a representative from um Michigan's Department of Environmental great great lakes and energy to talk about groundwater contamination in Ann Arbor some of the sites that are being treated um and with that I want to move on to our second public commentary session um and this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes please call 888 78899 and enter meeting ID 962 6453 City staff will select callers that have raised their hand by calling out the last three digits of the phone number in order to electronically raise your hand please press star n on your phone you'll hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak press star six to unmute your phone and

155when speaking please move to a quiet area and mute television or background sounds so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments and uh eron are there anyone is there anyone writing to speak to us yes uh caller 245 H go ahead see if I can figure out how to do this right there hello can you hear me yes yes um my name is Kathleen Murphy I live at 315 Lind vist Street in Ann Arbor and um I'm calling uh to let people know about a meeting that's coming up that I think would be very interesting to people given the topics that were discussed tonight and I'm speaking for um anab for Public Power the organization and we are having a meeting next Thursday April

1564th from 6: to 7:30 p.m. at maletz Creek Public Library and the name of the it's a town hall and the name of it is called Pathways power how a sustainable energy utility as Dr staltz described tonight and a municipal electric utility as Greg wooden spoke about tonight can work together and the speakers will be as tonight Dr Missy stals speaking for the office of sustainability and Innovations and Greg Woodring president of anabor for Public Power it will be moderated by Dr Mike shriberg professor of Engagement University of Michigan in Seas and um they will be discussing the municipal electric utility the sustainable energy utility and the future of energy energy in an Iber and they encourage people to bring their questions so we just like to have everybody there know and people listening in

157tonight that this will be a way to extend the discussion that was there tonight so people might be well informed about what these um possibilities are for our future of energy in an aror thank you very much thank you Aon is there anyone else um no one else that's complete that's it okay well great um so with that my closing I think we're we're at the end of our meeting I would like to ask for a motion to adjourn raise of hand commissioner guber and mki um and all in favor of adjourning I declare us adjourned thank you all this is a good discussion night it's been long I appreciate your attention and patience good night thank you