Ann Arbor Environmental Commission Meeting 8/25/2022

001so welcome to the august 25th 2022 electronic meeting of the environmental commission this meeting is in accordance with executive orders from the governor to affect social distancing and mitigate the spread of the covet 19 virus we intend to conduct this meeting similarly to an in-person meeting however please be patient if there are technical issues public comment will be via telephone only to speak during any of the public comment opportunities of which there are two one at the beginning of the meeting and one at the end please call or 888-788-0099 and enter meeting id number 915-8343-9176 again um the phone numbers are 877-853-5247 and eight eight eight seven eight eight zero zero nine nine and the meeting id is number nine one five eight three four three nine one seven six this information is also available

002on the published agenda in the public notices section of the city website and on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn channel 16 at t channel 99 and online at a www.a2gov.org [Music] slash watch ctn all right so um galen would you read the land here at its statement sure i acknowledge that the land the city of ann arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the anishinabe including otawa ojibwe and border wide me and wind our peoples i further acknowledge that our city stands like almost all property in the united states on lands obtained generally in unconscionable ways from indigenous peoples the taking of this land was formalized by the treaty of detroit in 1807. knowing where we live work study and recreate does not change the past but a thorough understanding

003of on of the ongoing consequences of this past can empower us in our work to create a future that supports human flourishing and justice for all individuals and that's the land heritage statement uh thank you galen do you want to move on to the roll call sure okay okay commissioner needham commissioner needham council member dish present all right councilman uh commissioner graham commissioner graham councilmember griswold commissioner collywood here chairperson brown president in ann arbor commissioner president participating from my home in ann arbor okay uh vice chairperson mitchell here in ann arbor commissioner vandenbroe commissioner vandenbrook commissioner orio commissioner okay commissioner gibb randall you're in ann arbor commissioner martian commissioner martin commissioner gruber here in ann arbor all right uh commissioner nedrich here in ann arbor all right we have a quorum all right thank you

004galen so the next item on our agenda is the approval of the agenda so um is there a motion to approve the agenda as written um shannon seconded by john morsky is there any discussion raise your hand or speak up no suggested uh no suggested additions or modifications so um whoever approves the agenda as submitted uh raise your hand or say aye bye why it passes unanimously i believe um any news i don't i don't think i saw anything so no extensions either so the agenda has submitted um the next item on the agenda is the approval of the minutes from the july 28 meeting um is there a motion to consider the minutes i move the minutes be approved as submitted is there a second second shannon seconds um all who approve of the

005minutes of july 8th raise your hand to say aye hi mike um any opposed any uh okay they passed unanimously so moving right along here um this brings us to public commentary so uh this is an opportunity for persons to speak up for up to three minutes please call 1-888-788-0099 and enter meeting id 915-834 this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and video feed city staff will select callers that will raise their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you will then hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any television or background

006sound so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments and be patient there is a delay of up to 30 seconds before a connection might be established galen is there anybody on the line right now right now there is no one okay let's wait 30 seconds okay for anybody on the line yet caitlin there's no one on the line okay then this ends the first public comment period uh there's a second one later on in the meeting around 8 30. um so there's no special presentations uh there's no unfinished business so the next item on the agenda is new business so um this is going to be a bit different um as you all know there was a contamination of the huron river by chromium

0076 on july 29th i believe it was reported to igua on august 2nd i think and iglet started a testing program on the 2nd and the 4th and it's all uh it's all uh we've been lucky um i looked into it quite a bit um i asked city staff if they wanted to come and do a presentation about it but they declined and subsequently now you see that um um if you look at the uh here the best information i've seen is with the heroin river watershed council or with the uh county washington county health um you know health department uh because mdhhs and uh and iva are the primary government regulators um they're supposed to respond quickly to this sort of thing so as i'm sure you all know um there was instead of

008some eight thousand pounds of chromium-6 that released into the river uh we only got uh something like 40 pounds so a very lower a much lower number that's that's i'm sure that's just a rough estimate anyway and so uh um if anybody has any questions we can talk about that but i thought i've given that event that what i would do is uh just have an open discussion among all of us on various water quality issues um because as you know we uh we've been a little bit quiet since we did the storm on on water quality issues since we looked at the storm water you know special storm water management district overlay about a year ago and we have some new commissioners now that are forming a nucleus of the new water quality working

009group so i thought this would be a good opportunity to just have a have a discussion among ourselves about uh about what you know what the challenges and threats are uh overall for the city's water quality um both coming in and going out and um and see what we uh and see what how we all feel about uh about these various uh threats and what kind of prioritization we might wish to uh bring to all these issues so i think that'll help us get centered and oriented towards making a contribution to the community and city council on these sorts of topics so i just drew up you know the the small presentation that i drew up and posted on legistar and that uh kalyn distributed yesterday um is just basically a guide for discussion just

010to try to structure it a little bit now so we're not wandering all over the place so i'll i will try to moderate this discussion uh and so if you like to chip in now please raise your hand at any time um but before i do that i looked into into the chromium-6 issue and i um and i attended the rally that was held outdoors up in milford which was attended by yusuf ravi um the chairman of the oakland county commission kathy griswold was there a number of other people from the local uh from the statewide environmental community you know environmental ngos and you know it was uh as you all know um it was uh there was also some potential criminal liability because there was an alarm that went off uh and uh 460

011times and it was just turned off and this happened after hours by an employee that wasn't supposed to be there who resigned the next monday so i checked in with jeff irwin and lucifer avi about this and they both told me that in this circumstance um the investigative authority is with eva um and it's the attorney general that has the prosecutorial authority so i think over the next few months we'll see what transpires here that i think it just outlines you know since we're the major community downstream of wixom and this tribal plant um i think we we all need to pursue this as diligently as we can and make sure that this this just doesn't happen again because as you know obviously was the same um the same um you know corporation that contaminated

012the haram river with fifas for many years and uh you know this basically happened because they have an eye they have an existing um industrial pre-treatment permit to run all their waste that's pre-treated for hazardous substances supposedly before it goes into the uh waste whitson municipal wastewater treatment plant but um you know uh the p-fat pfos compounds and pfoa compounds have are still not listed as hazardous waste and so for that reason that they're not they they know they don't um necessarily declare that they're releasing them because i think these can only be uh my understanding of the law and please contradict me if i'm wrong is that uh they're only they're only required to list on what uh official um you know epa i uh identified and defined hazardous substances are um you know

013that's all they're required to report to the government what the government says is toxic and so this is a major of course um a loophole within our um the safe drinking water act and the clean water act so this kind of thing needs to need to be this is one of these things that needs to be addressed at the federal level because that's where the original authority comes from and uh you know my understanding is the michigan state has laws that michigan state is not allowed to regulate anything um any uh and re-regulate anything uh more more stringently than what the federal government regulates so the state of michigan was somewhat hampered there until uh and this provided them the authority the fact that just the fact that the epa wasn't regulating the most hazardous

014substances allowed michigan state government to do that so um so um here we are and i think this is going to be an ongoing discussion during the coming year but um um i will share my screen i think galen can i get permission to share my screen okay here we go um do you see the green box at the bottom yeah i do um hang on a second recording in progress well here we go so i got it okay i just still had it in my uh you know in my icon bar can everybody see this okay so yeah just raise your hand if you want to step in here and um i'll i'll work the slide deck so um in the general category of improving water quality in the antarctica region um uh the

015uh there's four separate categories you can think of there's a drinking water there's our storm water that's released into the huron river and the groundwater where we have several contamination plumes we have the uh you know the galman 1 4 dioxane plume and we also have various plumes of trichloroethylene for example coming from some legacy dry cleaning establishments here in the city um and then we also have of course we release compounds into the huron river through our wastewater treatment and our and waste the water is separated out from the solids and the solids are are they used to be called sewage sludge but a number of years ago uh you know various people wanted to have a prettier term for it so they call them biosolids now not sewage sludge um and so those

016biosolids are spread on fields and ann arbor's biosolids are and are receiving order contracts with various companies over the years to spread our the biosolids from our wastewater treatment plant onto agricultural fields nearby so that's a matter of public record um that's kept by the state so i have i have some of that data that i've collected so i'm happy to share that with anybody who's interested in a commission or principally through the uh you know through the water quality working group and um as we can just look over the data and the information and see what uh what uh what we might make of it and what we want to bring to the full commission in the near future you know during the coming year so um so let's just address drinking water first

017um so there uh as you know we've got 85 or so of our drinking water comes from the toronto river um the water intake is uh important pond you know upstream of the dam and uh we get about another 15 of our standard capacity from various wells you know that are around uh uh that are placed around western and or uh and insider township i believe so what are the different threats to this water quality uh first of all um there's industrial and commercial sources so these are what are normally called point sources and these are the ones that the government regulates uh point sources particularly um through the uh clean water act and the safe drinking water act so we have that tri-bar plant there are actually four um chrome plating plants owned by

018tribal that are up in uh up in wickson and so they again they released pfas in the liver and they released uh chromium-6 just recently they reported that but you know um it's it's always difficult to say what else they may have released which is not which is actually toxic that has never been defined as a toxic substance by the government so um so this is an ongoing problem that's going to happen until we can reform on some of the federal laws or perhaps if we can find the room in the state if the federal government is not stepping up and we can petition the state government and try to get to our elected representatives trying to get the state government to try to address some of these toxins as happened with peoples and uh

019just to for a rough overview you know the fifa's contamination was not discovered until it was um added by the epa to what's called the uh unregulated contaminant monitoring rule which is a modification of epa's authority so that epa can test for various substances that are not regulated currently that they think might be a might be released prominently and might be health hazards um throughout the united states and so part of the ucmr3 um the the samples were collected in 2014 and epa reported the data in 2015 and that's when and ann arbor's drinking water plant was one of the testing sites for ucmr food and that's when um the pfos contamination and other p-thousand compounds were discovered to exist in our drinking water so the city of ann arbor uh reacted as promptly as

020they could and initiated i believe initiated um actions to try to figure out what the source was way back in 2015 or 2016. and this was all before the empire the state impart program was started so um i i'm not sure exactly when the city uh began to install uh um you know granule or activated carbon uh beds charcoal beds basically to absorb the pfos that's coming in tonight i'm not exactly sure when uh tribar uh stopped uh releasing pfos to the river but again there's a fish advisory uh because pfos will bio accumulate up to a thousand times higher concentrations in body tissues a thousand times more concentrated than it is in the water that they're swimming in so even though the pfos concentrations in the water were roughly equivalent to what the epa

021existing epa health level advisory was those numbers dropped dramatically and uh they dropped dramatically since then on the epa last june i dropped them from drop them down to sub parts per trillion for pfos and pfoa these are the legacy launching pfos compounds that bioaccumulate and so uh so it may be another and eaglet continues to test the fish every year they collect the fish samples and store them and then they're analyzed by the michigan department of health and even services over the winter and usually around march first is when they update uh the fish advisors statewide and so that's when the community when you can see uh what the fishing what's changed in terms of the fish advisors from the year before around march first um so sarah you have your hand up yeah

022hi i'll just chime in um so i am involved so i worked for eagle actually and um i've been involved in pfas on the heron and i'm sorry that i missed the last meeting um steve where you talked about pboss um but yeah so like the pfos and surface water in the huron has dropped significantly since the remediation at wixom um but we're still finding concentrations you know above like what you should be eating and fish um so part of our ongoing studies is looking at pfos as a source to fish and sediment so we have ongoing research where we're actually looking i like food chain studies with sediments collected from um like around the huron river watershed um so i just wanted to provide a little update on that that the state's still working

023on that um and hopefully that study will help inform um if sediment remediation is needed within the watershed okay all right well thanks sarah um and uh it's our you know with the chromium six i'll just mention in this context the chromium-6 means that it's a high oxidation state of chromium um and so it's the high oxidation state of that of the chromium makes it a very strong oxidizing agent which is probably what makes it carcinogenic however various natural processes when it's in the environment even in water or soils or in your body will fairly rapidly it converts because it's so reactive it's oxidizing agent it will oxidize whatever a lot of a lot of compounds will come in contact with it and so it's pretty quickly reduced from chromium 6 to chromium 3 which

024is um not recognized as a as a toxic substance it's in fact an essential nutrient um that's involved in um a lot of central um metabolic processes and mammals at least and so um that chromium three the epa is recommending that recommends a surface water limit of 120 parts per billion and a drinking water limit of 100 parts per billion but those are that that's for total chromium because of this fact that the chromium sex reacts very quickly um it seems like the epa has not really established a you know a drinking water criteria for chromium sex they just specify one for total chromium because i think that the assumption is that whatever chromium sex might come in from the intake uh through the standard water treatment form processes gets reduced to chromium food and

025so you just want to measure you want to use an assay that measures all the chromium if this chromium 6 would be there for chromium so um you know the way these things are regulated is these npdes i've forgotten what that stands for but um if somebody has a permit to release uh any substance from an industrial or commercial enterprise so they're supposed to have an ndds i believe i'm sure sarah knows more about this than i do um but again there are uh and ann arbor and the city of ann arbor it has npgs permits as well um and the university of michigan for example has a permit on its waste through the ann arbor wastewater treatment plant and uh there are various other um enterprises within the city here that have their individual

026empty des moines of course the wastewater treatment plant itself has an fpdes permit so uh some of that data can be found on on the internet um and the question there is uh is where it's hard to tell what other non-mpdes sources may exist as for example uh it's come to the attention through various ngos nationally that have done some testing that uh that actually uh car washes use and so you know it's probably in the extra special deluxe you know detailing treatment that you get where you can make your tires look like new so they're probably spraying something like uh this is just a supposition speculation on my life but it's something like that like displaying some product on your car probably on the tires and uh it contains pfos that it's it's hard

027to tell what kind which pbos compounds there are um that are being used for that purpose but um i think a lot of car washes recycle um their waste water my understanding is that some of them do but i'm not exactly sure where all that goes whether now it goes into the sanitary sewer or whether it goes into the groundwater or maybe both depending on the location that this is going this is ultimately going to present an issue where car washes are going to have to stop using phosphorus they're going to have to probably acquire an mpd and yes permit if they choose to use ethos or other chemicals so um the testing programs are pretty minimal that's why i personally am a big fan of citizen testing because you know prices have come down

028quite a bit like for example you can get a reasonable uh pfas measurement of drinking water uh for eighty dollars by mail order and um so i've used it i've used it for my water coming out of my faucet both here and a few other homes and uh the results i get compared to what the city posts on its website so uh but um the the 80 test is not an epa approved as yet test so you know it's not legally defensible uh but it's a very simple test that anybody can use uh you can order it from a company called cyclopure that's in illinois so um so uh another major source of agricultural so of course pesticides and nutrients are the major pollution uh pollution sources so the haran river watershed council has had

029a great program um that our rick rick lawson over the heron river watershed council has done outreach to uh various agricultural enterprises upstream with us they're all upstreamless in the huron river uh they're mostly in the arms in boyden creek um and mill creek um which is around dexter and davis creek and portage creek so those percentage numbers on the slide just reflect the amount of land in these drainages that go into the caron river which uh which are devoted to agriculture and of course most of it is uh corn and soybeans because of the farm bill some subsidies and uh as commodities so uh you know a lot of farmers use quite a lot of pesticides for corn and for uh soybeans and uh i can uh there's some information that uh like we

030can look that anybody can look at on here under the watershed council website about that study and about what the results were uh so rita you have your hand up actually that's all i needed to know is uh the information on what's found in the testing so i'll look it up thank you yeah okay and pesticides you know of course because if they're growing corn and uh and soybeans uh both of those plants have been bred um uh over a decade ago to be resistant to glyphosate or roundup so they use it or um many farmers use enormous amounts of roundup you know to raise these crops these commodity crops corn and soybeans so and and so much roundup has been used uh of course that there are native plants that have taken up that

031gene and that have resistance to uh glyphosate some some some very uh very invasive ones as well so it looks like this practice may be ending soon uh just because there's a lot of invasive native plants that have glyphosate resistant so they'll move on to some other pesticide but of course some uh the classic ones like dialdrin and other things that were used on these commodity crops contaminate most drinking water nationwide and they do have accumulative health effects um so but the human river watershed council has been doing a pretty good job at testing for these things within the watershed and they've reached out to farmers to try to get them to manage the nutrient releases in the river which besides the pesticides of course the nutrient pollution becomes is uh we're mostly talking about

032phosphate here in nitrogen well the focus is usually on phosphate because phosphate uh encourages harmful algal blooms and in stagnant waters um so this is a contributing to the uh harmful algal blooms that appear in the summer uh downstream of us and they are over at uh ford lake and velvet lakes behind those dams the river the water is not flowing it gets amazing from the sun and you get uh and you get um harmful algal blooms uh which create toxins which in fact it's a big problem in western lake erie and the city of toledo had to shut down its water system drinking water system for uh a week a number of years ago and uh because of the global warming that we experienced through the climate crisis this is becoming a much more

033serious problem uh also because there are more of agricultural operations like capos especially that are spreading they're allowed to spread their manure now manure from animal farms is generally um pesticide free compared to uh composts and biosolids but the nutrients are are at a very high level phosphorus and nitrogen so those contribute to the pollution um within the state now especially when they're spread on frozen more snow-covered ground in winter as the state allows that and this has been a major point of contention most of the ngo community in the state here is trying to prevent farmers from spraying their manure on frozen agricultural land because there's not enough big enough buffer it's not a big enough natural barrier between the agricultural fields and the river to try to absorb some of these nutrients before

034they went off the surface and enter the river so another another thing to consider here is a lot of the agricultural lands are you know were reclaimed swamps so they have tiles uh there's a tile system that underweighs the soil flavor cultural um fields and those drains generally drained into a pipe that goes directly into a surface water stitch and so that does not help to matter at all either so um this is this just serves as a reminder that you know the city has signed the content judgment consent judgment that we discovered uh a year ago with the state of the state had seen the city of ann arbor and a few other permit holders for discharging too many nutrients in the river so we're under consent judgment to try to reduce uh the

035nutrient pollution that comes out of what wastewater treatment plant and that's going to be a topic for discussion that a uh uh that they can another environmental commission meeting sometime within the next year so um another source for drinking water is so sarah you raised your hand again yeah i just thought i'd circle back on the pesticides um so the state right now is uh working on recreating water quality standards for a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids so if you guys have heard of like the bee colony collapse disorder neonicotinoids are the type of pesticide that that led to that issue um and we're also finding that they're incredibly toxic to organisms living in rivers um so like mayflies like ept taxa if you're familiar with that term um so yeah the state's working

036on water quality standards for that class um so far they've passed uh for amid a club grid which is the one that's most toxic of the six um and then um yeah there's plans for other pesticide projects and in following years so we do have a small program to help address some pesticide issues and i have nothing to add for nutrients thanks steve okay and what about chlorophyrus uh oh um no no plans to study that is that more of a human health or an aquatic health issue yeah it's neurotoxic control uh really you have your hand out yeah i was just to ask sarah when you say um some actions to be taken could you describe this a little more pesticides right yeah so we um so for the neonicotinoids we conducted a um

037a sampling plan for the saginaw river watershed and that was just completed last month um so we did monthly samples for all six neonicotinoids comparing like monthly one-time sampling to a passive sampler so a problem with monitoring for pesticides is that they're really flashy right so you get a rain event you get this huge pulse you know if you sample at the wrong time you miss it so we were comparing different strategies for sampling for um for neonicotinoids then also trying to understand if concentrations refining the environment exceed you know what we know is toxic to aquatic life um so our results from that study showed that we were getting experiences of chronic values so that means long-term exposure for like 30 days to that concentration could cause you know a crash in the population

038of mayflies and chronomeds so it wasn't good news um and yeah there'll be more to come okay yeah thank you sarah yeah so the third category would be residential because uh you know and this mostly of course comes through consumer goods and what nutrients were sending down the drain so um you know like your garbage disposals you know not just toilets the garbage disposals sinks kitchen sinks um and so this is where a lot of the people's contamination comes from because you know it's been all the legacy pfos compounds like pfos and pfoa especially they've been circulating with food supply for decades so estimates are still that you know on average worldwide basically 70 percent of your exposure to ppos comes through food or cosmetics um five percent roughly comes through dust you know through

039household dust you know through carpets and uh draperies and other things clothing that's uh coated with pfas then of course there's pesticide residues as well so and the reason i started with drinking water is because of course um most of the regulation here in the united states of course is not focused on human threats to human health much more so than threats to ecological health so drinking water the regulations for drinking water tend to be stricter and and be taken more seriously than with other um with them with toxicities to the ecological community and wildlife so um the next category would be storm water so where do the threats from storm water they're um most of them come through impervious surfaces so the city has the city owns on a lot of impervious surface with

040their roads and sidewalks um every home owner has a roof every building has a roof every building people have driveways so um because the storm water is running off an impervious surface directly through the storm sewer into the hung river it washes a lot of um nutrients and pollutants into the river along with it uh because they don't have the opportunity to be absorbed in the uh uh you know in the uh [Music] you know through the soil through the natural uh soil and in fact i was shocked to hear this because i'd always assume that you know while lawns grass uh is is pervious but it turns out that compared to like a forest floor uh grass is about uh was only about fifty percent um impervious so you know even if you have

041a good lush lawn a lot of the rain that falls on your grass about half of it's going to run off onto the sidewalk into the stream you know no matter how how soft uh you know the soil is underneath uh you know compared to a a well mulched garden or native or you know native planting so um you know a major a major problem is road salt and it's mostly the chloride rather than the sodium or potassium so i'm sara did you mention something about this yeah sure um so yeah chloride really um became a huge issue with some pretty recent research showing that it can be quite toxic to fresh water mussels so in 2018 water quality standards for the state of michigan were established since then you know there's been a lot

042of work trying to understand well how do we actually implement these standards and get chloride levels down when road salt obviously is so necessary for our safety in the winter so there are some states that have these they're like smart salting programs to help you know municipalities and public works offices you know learn different strategies for using less salt with still the same safety standards and things like that so that's exciting and hopefully something like that can can happen in michigan um part of you know i guess some work that i'm working on is i've been collaborating with heroin river watershed council they provided me with a data set with chloride data for the entire watershed so i'll be analyzing that to understand where the sources are coming from and then with my work in

043the state of michigan i've been i actually proposed a project for next year to focus specifically on the huron river watershed to look at fluorides so that would include you know runoff from roads and collection by the adjacent river to see what the connection relationship is and another issue is um road brine so using um oil and mineral well brine to consolidate roads that aren't paved is a really common practice in michigan and those products not only have a lot of chloride but they also have high metals um and other contaminants in them so we're also looking at a project to understand uh runoff from those types of roads as well so that'll be coming in the next year and hopefully i'll have time to present to this group on the findings of those because

044uh yeah those research things okay thanks sarah one of the things i've heard is that these brines are often times they're like fracking waste water fluids from fracking yeah anything about that i'm not sure like the fry if we're allowed to use fracking um i know mineral well-brine as well as oil gas field brine is allowed with certain restrictions but yeah i'm not on the fracking theme so i can't speak to that okay well that's something that i think we ought to look into um you know what what priority what practices are allowed and which are are just not reported because i've heard i'm not sure about michigan but i've heard that that's a big problem in california for example um because um in some other states uh where fracking fluid you know has been

045used um it's contaminated groundwater but but i i heard that a lot of states are either not aware of it or uh or don't really care about it um about you know fracking fluid waste because you know it's it can be hazardous because of the chemicals that are used but also you know you leach out a lot of radium and things like that there are these substances called 10 worm uh ten and orm which are you know toxic uh metals plus like a radioactive radium and so uh you know the states that you know the states where fracking is more prevalent like ohio southeastern ohio pennsylvania they uh they're not allowing you to inject uh or to to uh you know to uh you know to bury these uh these fracking fluids and landfills hazardous

046waste landfills anymore so the state of michigan has been petitioned to uh to get these fracking fluids from other states have them you know disposed of here because they're no longer allowed in these states where it's become much more there's much more public awareness about it so that's something i think to look into as well um so then of course there's nutrients coming off the stormwater as well um and this is uh estimates i've seen i don't know what of course what the number is for ann arbor but i've seen various studies that estimate that maybe half of the nutrients uh that went off in municipalities are coming from stormwater and the other half come out of the wastewater treatment plant so we should look into this in more detail during a commission meeting over

047the next year um as we you know address uh you know the consent judgment for uh because the city has to come up with a plan for reducing um it's uh it's uh you know releases of phosphorus to the hunger within a year or two so um so what other threats are there there's of course petroleum products and coal tars i mean this is recognized so the city of ann arbor has banned full tar spreading coal tar in the driveway to sail your driveway uh coal tar has been banned here i'm not sure what the state's done about it because i think it's still done in the more rural areas in town here but the thing about coal tars is they don't you know they're carcinogens and uh but they don't they don't they're not

048very soluble in water usually so they do migrate but they'll migrate slowly off wherever they're applied so i don't know if anybody knows more about that you know please raise your hand okay then of course there's miscellaneous chemicals like window washing fluids yadda yadda um and then um one of the things that's uh a growing or recognizes a growing health threat worldwide are micro and nanoplastics while the iron river watershed council looked at microplastics and they found it's coming from everywhere you know there are no point sources of microplastics because academic studies on the west coast usually uh published by people on the west coast have indicated that you know half about half of all the microplastics come from a tire well or rubber tire wear and that gets airborne and so those microplastics are

049spread by the air and then that's how they get into the ground water and how they get into the diameter because um somebody measured microplastics in various rivers in ann arbor and in the state of michigan and it was discovered that the iron river had have the highest levels of microplastics statewide so and i i i'm sure a lot of that comes from my worn tires that have been spread around but of course there's plastic bags and other plastics that deteriorate and microplastics are defined as something less than i think five millimeters but basically it's defined as being sort of out of sight out of mind you know there it's plastic pollution that's macro and we see we pick up that litter but once it gets down to half a centimeter in size roughly it's

050nobody's going to pick it up anymore so it becomes a microplastic even though you know it's not so micro but all these compound all these uh plastics these polymers will eventually degrade down to nano sizes where um the size of the plastic particle is smaller than the cell and a cell in your body and so what happens of course is that uh there's two things first of all these plastics will absorb and concentrate various toxins from the environment you know the water the a lot of um a lot of pollutants who are more attracted to binding to the plastics and they are the water so as water passes around these plastic particles uh they will absorb and take up many pollutants such as pfoss and um pesticides endocrine disruptive chemicals things like that and so

051the major problem of course is you can drink them you can get exposed to them you know there's an estimate that's spread around or that we all have about a credit card size amount of plastic in our guts um it's still like a microplastic so it's not absorbed into your body but the pro the major problem is once they become nanoplastics they will get absorbed both through your guide and through your lungs so there's uh there's an estimate that uh you can definitely measure [Music] so you uh measure uh [Music] losses in lung function in people depending on how much nanoplastics they've been exposed to as you inhale these particles they stay in your lung you know just like smoke particles would if you're a smoker and uh they gradually leach out these toxins but

052they also in themselves they they interfere with proper lung function and so so they're out there they're getting smaller and smaller so uh it's even if we stopped you know making plastics and having them out in the environment it's going to become it's going to become an increasing problem worldwide as they exist plastic that's out there gets more into the smaller and smaller levels and becomes airborne so um you know this is a principal uh spur on people to try to to try to ban plastic to try to just stop especially creating disposable plastics and just try to stop um um you know getting it out of the environment personally i think it's hard to see where we're not going to be using plastic anymore because it is such a cheap malleable construction material you

053know it's in dashboards of cars it's uh in all of your household appliances you know we all know how widespread plastic is in consumer products you know our computers our cell phones so i don't think we're going to get real plastic but this is where the circular economy is going to be especially important if we can get plastics that are made that will degrade cancer molecular levels like uh you know the newer generation greener plastics like uh poly lactic acid pla and uh there's other there's other plastics that come from that are used from biological monomers which degrade down to non-toxic natural products so we can get plastics um made to those materials instead of petroleum or if we can um handle the waste the plastic waste more responsibly that's another thing that you know

054as i said before you know half of them half of these plastics come from more tire wear so in my mind this like uh speaks to the need for uh i mean and it also comes from brake pads you can definitely measure uh you know break that particles coming from on standard um you know disclaims um that are in the environment as a nanoplastic so um you know this is something that's a distinct threat it's a growing threat even if we stop making plastics now and throw them out and so we've got to really be pay attention to this so the third category was groundwater so the threats to groundwater come through pervious surfaces so it's the same same compounds but instead of washing down directly into the river through the storm water it'll get

055absorbed into the soil and into the ground water which as i mentioned before that's where a lot of the microplastics and however come from uh as far as what it's known so far so you know what do we have here we have the galamon white four dioxane plume we have of course there's plumes from uh light from legacy dry cleaners they're various uh chlorinated solvents that are used like uh um tetrachloroethylene and trichloroethylene and then there's uh of course uh pfast contaminations of compost and biosolids so um i'll expand on this a bit because as you know um because p-files have been circulating in the environment for a long time uh they are in the biosolids they're in their wastewaters and they're in the compost now the cities the city tested its compost in 2019

056i believe and we have measurable values of all the pfas compounds the sum 47 that are tested standard through the standard high level tests on 47 different pfos compounds that are located here that are existing part pavilion levels in our municipal compost um uh i think our biosolids were tested but i don't recall seeing that data um um also they probably tested the wastewater effluent to try to see what ethos compounds are coming out from there but those haven't been uh they've probably been tested by receiving the reports so i think that's something that the commission should look into as well because regulations are going to be coming in the future that are going to make an impact on the city's budget i mentioned this um last month when i talked more about so i

057won't i won't go over this in any detail but i think um this should be a focus for what we're doing that's trying to do our our community budget for pfas and see and see what our existing levels are and what remediation technologies might be available um but of course the ultimate the only real solution is to just turn off the spigot and get the uh debbie dingle submitted a bill in congress for the last four years called the pfas reduction act um and so of course um and it's in committee and she's been very resourceful and trying to get it attached to the national defense authorization act and other such bills that you know have to be passed by congress because their budget bills and the filibuster doesn't apply and so um so i

058think i'm hoping that within as soon as possible that that her intact fifa's you know product protection reduction act will get passed and so we'll stop getting these toxic compounds released into the environment and into our consumer products and food supply so uh just moving on to wastewater and biosolids um it's the same story i mentioned before that uh that uh generally um you know it's the uh from the point sources if they have industrial pre-treatment permits and go through a wastewater treatment plant um that's a potential problem uh for the city because it's getting a pass through just like the wastewater treatment plant in wixom a pass through from the tri-bar industries they contaminated both their biosolids and their wastewaters so their wastewaters ended up in the liver and contaminated their drinking water uh

059but the pfas compounds also ended up in their biosolids they were spread on agricultural fields they were spread on farms and there was a family-owned farm in heartland if you recall was contaminated the gentleman was raising beef cattle and he was donating the beef to various charity organizations and youth events and he feels terrible about this so i don't know what the state legislature is going to try to do about this but this is a very common problem all over the united states and so um i think it's where it's i think we should take on this responsibility of maybe looking at it in a disinterested manner and trying to collect information and evaluate it and try to see what um what remediation uh and you know update uh the residents here and uh city

060council about what um about what regulations are coming down the fight and what uh and what remediation technologies might be useful and do a cost benefit analysis follow them so and then of course those consumer goods i'm not sure what the city can do about this you know we the city did pass a law um when nutrient pollution was originally um discovered to be a problem back in the 70s and uh and uh because the soils in michigan are naturally fairly rich in phosphorous the thinking was well you shouldn't have phosphorus in your uh in your in your detergents you know because phosphorus is a common additive to dishwashing detergents and other consumer products and so on the state the city banned the use of phosphorus fertilizer and also the use of it in uh

061and selling here in the city in this community banned selling consumer products like dishwashing detergent that have added phosphorous to it and um and they were successful in getting a lot of the local businesses to not do it but my understanding is that anybody can walk into any of these box stores and if you ask a clerk for their fertilizer that has phosphorus in it now they will sell it to you they're just not allowed they're not allowed to put it on the shelves but anybody can walk up and ask somebody if they can buy it and they keep it they keep some in the back and so yeah yourself so so um so there's that as an example i'm not sure how far the city would go in trying to ban some of these

062other toxic substances like sunspoons endocrine disruptors because it's definitely going to damage the marketability of our municipal compost and our biosolids because the alternative to spreading our biosolids on agricultural fields is a way you could spread it in in forests or something like that and maybe get away with that um uh but um the alternative that's been um they've been done in new england is most many new england states have banned uh the spreading the land application of any biosolid because of pfas contamination so the cost of the city is going it generally costs about four times as much to put these sewage sludges into a hazardous waste landfill versus you know on one on natural land which is a tragedy because um you know because uh that soil amendments biosolids and composts are are

063about the best soil amendments you can have for growing anything so this is a this is definitely a threat to the city's bottom line and there's also regulatory job as well so um so i just um summarized at the end here i just listed some informational resources i mean i'd recommend anybody to go and explore the haran river watershed council for those of you who do not may not be aware of this um i think it was created in 1965 or so and includes representatives from local governments such as ann arbor uh jen lawson is a regular uh participant uh in the meetings he's a city staff member um they're represented out of the county train commissioner evan pratt attends these meetings as well um the dream that the state of michigan a lot of

064the regulations come through the county through the drain commissioner or the water resources manager i think they changed the title from drain commissioner the water resources manager but evan pratt is the current person who holds that office in washington and so a lot of the a lot of the basic regulations and monitoring is done through the county county water resources commissioner formerly called the drain commissioner and then there's a local organization of governments called semcog the southeast michigan council of governments and so if you look at this website you'll see what they uh what they have on water and then eagle of course has a couple of websites there's mi waters is where you can find a lot of data so i put here the site map explorer uh this is where you can find

065information about mpdes comments and wastewater treatment plant ipt permits so you see those are all under the water resources um file system structure and they're wet on the mi waters website so that's a good place to look for information and then of course uh for pfas only uh there's the impart website is um is very comprehensive they talk about where contamination has been found what their plans are or what sites are under investigation uh and what the regulations are that's where they talk about the uh uh pfas fish advisors as well and they point you to the uh dnr the department of natural resources webpage which has all which hosts all the fish advisories and then on a bigger lot a higher level i'm going from the local level up to the higher level so

066there's another entity called the great lakes commission of the study that spends a lot of money this is an international commission so it includes all the states which border the great lakes plus the uh provinces in canada the board of the great lakes so this is a larger regional organization that is tasked with um regulating water quality in the great lakes so and then then of course at the uh highest level we get the epa and so this is where you can find out information on the clean water act and the safe drinking water act you know which are the major authorizations of the congress has given epa to regulate on water quality so uh so then the question is well what um what initiatives um would we consider well just around water quality um

067so we can consider a resolution to support h.r 4314 which has been submitted every year by yusuf ravi our local uh state representative um it's uh it's a bill that's was drafted to re-empower michigan polluter payloads michigan used to have uh reasonable really uh good polluter pay laws but governor engler in 1995 neutered them completely so um so this is a bill that's been sitting in the legislature the current uh legislature does not um will not even let this come out of committee for or hold public hearings on it or anything so because of you know um because of lobbying and sense of lobbying they get from the account on chemistry council and the michigan chamber of commerce so these are the major powers that are prevented by political pay bill from getting passed by

068our state legislature then of course there's the for gelman plume cleanup that we got involved with just last year because in october because this was all under a consent order that was sealed to the public and so that seal was broken last october and so the environmental commission had four um four sessions public meetings on this and so we issued a resolution to council uh recommending that the epa consider it as a superfund site because uh you know this was this plume was discovered in 1984. and we can see how far the state's gotten in remediating and controlling the migration of this groundwater plume uh as it's advancing to the heroin liver and through our allen brain as well so um and then again i mentioned earlier about i don't know what we can do

069to ban peoples and consumer products but at the state level we can ban the ban on bands because washington county a number of years ago banned plastic bags or they didn't actually ban them they just put a five cent fee on them and uh and so uh within 24 hours or so the michigan chamber of commerce uh met the year of the state legislature and so the state legislature passed a law which would ban any local bans categorically so any local government entity is not allowed to ban anything with states not banning themselves so this is another law that could be uh if there is a change in the state legislature this is another thing that could uh uh that could happen on the state level so um and in terms of ordinance drafts i'm

070not sure what um what ordinances the city could put in a place to uh you know to help protect the residents of the city um you know absent any state action or federal action uh but of course we can always do exploration and public discussion so um one of the recent things that's happened is uh i had not been aware of this personally but the heroin river watershed council has bi-monthly meetings you know where they have where as i mentioned before there's a county drain commissioner uh various representatives from the governments uh that are within that river drainage uh there's a there's a representative from igloo there from the water quality working from the water quality group and so um i became aware of this bi-monthly meeting and so i had a number of people

071a number of commissioners that are on the water quality working group are invited to attend that so you should be on the email list i think i am i know kathy griswold is um sarah are you invited are you on the invitation list yes and bridget gruber should be as well so bridget are you on this list are you invited i think the next meeting uh the last meeting was held a few um last week and so the next meeting is in mid-october so uh bridgette are you there yeah i'm here yeah i am on that list okay good so these are the commissioners that are uh un invited to attend this meeting online uh it's also uh in person as well but you can also attend that one so we can begin we're we're

072we've started attending this year uh and so we can report back to our full commission um you know in a timely manner and so then of course there's the city responsible lawsuit so i'm not sure where the what role the commission should be playing here in terms of uh helping advise council and the uh and city staff on the consent judgment for nutrient pollution well this is coming up rather quickly because they're supposed to have come up with a plan in april of 2023 i'm sure they're very active on it but i think i'd like to invite them to come and talk about what their plans are and then hopefully we'll have i have some information of our road to uh to add to the discussion and then another thing that's of course would impact

073the community is the stormwater utility lawsuit uh which of it uh where if there's a judgment made in court uh would be about a 13 million dollar hit to the ann arbor's annual budget because this is basically um basically the city has been using um uh the stormwater millage in order to pay for green infrastructure and there's a lawyer in southfield or birmingham or somewhere that's uh uh you know that's more or less an ambulance chaser that's going around looking for communities where they can get residents to um you know to uh to add their names to the lawsuit and so this they approach the number of communities in southeast michigan because they think they have a case that the city should not allow this kind of thing so lisa you have your hand up

074uh you're i think that lawsuit is dead i it keeps coming back from the dead it has twice before so i'm not sure how dead it is last i heard yeah it's uh yeah this happened last year i think uh where you know the this law firm or this attorney found a resident in ann arbor who was willing uh to uh you know to join the lawsuit as a as a as an affected party you know because you can't sue if you're not if you if you're not uh you know if you're not uh a victim uh you know a victim of the practice so they had to find a city resident would sign on to the lawsuit so as far as i know that that kind of died again but i'm not sure um

075i'm not sure whether it's totally dead i guess the city attorney should know that but all a lot but i know the look i know the regional ngo communities are concerned about this so they're you know so i'll i'll go through my network and see what i can find out so um does anybody wish to add anything to this list or see what we might consider in terms of resolutions with drafting ordinances or topics that we could focus on over the coming year that would help the city both the residents and the council members and city staff i don't expect any answers right now but john you have your hand up i appreciate the perspective of council member dish in terms of what she and other council members think would be truly value add um

076you know we could write these three resolutions past them um and the question is would they change anything um so i i'd like to do something or there's a return on our time invested and so i'd like to hear the perspective of council member edition and others on the commission as to what really would have an impact you know i think we'd all like to feel we're all volunteers here except for uh our city council members but i would hope that uh you know we all so what's our uh you know what's our compensation it's feeling like we're making a contribution we're making an effective contribution to make life better here for everybody well for example i'm not sure that i'll just take the second bullet point under resolutions that the environmental commission writing a

077resolution spending a meeting debating it and passing a resolution is going to have any impact whatsoever on what happens with um calm and plume remediation and related activities i'm not sure that i'm taking action on the band the band is going to also be meaningful in terms of really having any impact outside of maybe getting an article in him live and until maybe there is a change in the composition of the legislature i'm not sure a resolution would be meaningful in terms of anything related to glute or pain laws so i i'm all i'm saying is let's let's not grant it our time is free um but i think there's things that potentially have a greater return on our time invested than passing resolutions that will have no impact on what happens um in terms

078of changing any of the dynamics on any three of these three these three topics for example i just appreciate other people's opinion on that yeah i mean i share that concern so um i don't know i think it's something worth considering i'm not sure you know what value what value can we have so lisa you have your hand up i mean i don't want to i think people should if people feel that these that this is something they want to invest their time in and these issues are important to them i don't want to quash that um i can say that the gelman plume cleanup is indeed ongoing and there's nothing that council can do at this point to speed it up it's not going on two tracks that are both out of our hands

079one is a court track locally and the other is the epa and there's really nothing that council can do to you know council has done everything to support both of those so there i don't know what role the environmental commission can play in terms of the other two um the other two issues i think those are on our legislative agenda council's legislative agenda so we have asked our lobbying firms to work on those at the state legislative level and certainly um every time uh uh representative robbie or senator irwin sponsor an environmental bill the council typically passes a resolution in support of it um i think as john mursky has just stated short of changing the composition of the state legislature those bills aren't going to go anywhere no matter what resolutions the city council

080passes so that would be the you know it i think these would be symbolic which is not necessarily bad um but you're talking about areas that are out of council's hands i believe okay i mean we can still provide a public forum for residents a lot of these issues you know i think that's valuable i mean i've spent a lot of time researching all this stuff that's why i've kind of monopolized the conversation i think but um you know because this is a personal interest of mine if you want to do something more like an educational forum i think that would be super interesting and probably more powerful than a resolution because i don't know that the public closely follows the resolutions that are passed by this commission but i think that my experience on

081the planning commission is that when there is a webinar hosted that addresses something that they're worried about they get really into it and so if we wanted to do some kind of a water webinar and talk about the activities that um you know that that our representatives are working on and our lobbyists are working on and explain to them the importance of these you know it might get some people out knocking on doors for the november election and we do have some close races and that would be an incredibly excellent incentive i think okay well thanks lisa yeah yeah we do uh we do have the power to schedule extraordinary public music public hearings okay john you have your hand up thank you uh one area that i suggest we take up again is um

082the water quality issue uh i had an email exchange with rita i don't know about a week ago on this topic um some of us not very many shannon for sure will remember back in maybe early 2019 we had a presentation from the watershed council about water quality in the ann arbor area so as steve mentioned the watershed council site is really great it evaluates the water quality of each creek shed and then major sections of the huron river um based on 13 different criteria one of which is contaminants so that ties directly to what we're talking about here and um what we did is we took the data or water the watershed council took the data at the time and evaluated the water quality in the city of ann arbor looking at the relative

083size of each creekshed and the water quality for each creekshed and then for the river and then did a weighted averaging and um rita remind me or steve somebody else might remember i think ann arbor ended up at 30 it was 30 or in the mid to low 30s and the concern that i have is that and maybe um bridget this is something you can address um but it's something also the city should address um to my knowledge that information is first of all not trend uncharted so you can't see um how it's changing over time there are no smart goals in terms of a target that is time-bound or a series of step-wise targets to improve that um you can't find anywhere um on the ann arbor website or the watershed council's website of

084anything other than snapshot values and they're not time based so you can look at allen creekshead or the lower middle huron river and see what the value is but you don't know if the data was taken within the last year or if it's still using data for certain quality or certain um parameters that may be three years old so i mean i think that's something that we should take up um i i looked up um prior to the meeting some some scores um so there is no calculation on the website for ann arbor um as i mentioned in 2019 or so it was um or it was probably based on 2018 data was in the 30s um the um as i had written down the upper chiron river is 61. um the lower middle is

08539 and the lower huron river is 51. so if ann arbor and its creek sheds is in the low 30s it's the worst of basically all those all those areas um and i think if if we're serious about uh improving water quality including a lot of the contamination issues that we talked about here then it really makes sense that we have a smart goal and metrics and we trend chart it and we define goals and we get entities like the city and the watershed council and industries to get together to work on actions to improve our water quality so that's something i think we could do and have an influence on that would be at least somewhat value-added compared to say writing resolutions on something that is either ongoing or is unlikely to get any

086action at the state level that's my three cents okay so are we saying john that we could get the data that iran regular watershed council has collected and try to do trend analyses and suggest some smart goals yeah and maybe even ask the watershed council to set goals and to trend chart and to to do a calculation um for this city i mean all it all it is is basically um an update of any time data changes um and i don't like i said i don't know how that is done um and then update that and trend chart it whether it's you know once a year or once every two years or once every x years but at least see you know is is what's the overall quality of the watershed what is the water

087quality of the creek sheds in ann arbor and around ann arbor and what can we do to act on that i mean just one little thing shannon will remember this shannon and i made a proposal to put signage um in ann arbor in various places along the iran river where people frequent somebody some other john's nodding his head i remember that too and uh just just to raise public awareness and to to indicate what the water quality is and motivate people to do something about it and that proposal also went nowhere so um hopefully um times have changed and composition of council has changed and things like that and that might be something that this group could do or at least influence yeah well thanks for bringing that up yeah it's um yes it turns

088out it was the county health department for example is responsible for putting up that fish advisory signage and so uh i in in my capacity in the sierra club we asked to help we said we can we can recommend places to put them because uh you know where we've seen people fishing and we volunteered to help put them out but we were just kind of put off we said yeah okay that's a good idea but nobody ever you know contacted us so okay so but it's worth following up on that's a good suggestion well anybody else here to add anything at this point [Music] yeah sarah you've got your hand up yeah i am i actually am sort of thinking in line with john um with the chloride project that i i talked about earlier

089um you know to understand different sources within the city and then you know with the idea that eventually you know we might have some outreach to parties that maybe are adding more chloride than they should to the watershed um so i kind of started with chloride because you know you got to start somewhere um but john like if you have um like the presentation that the huron water river watershed council gave um you could send that to me i would review all that data and you know you can prioritize based on what they said maybe a little better than just picking chloride so yeah i would be really interested in that that's all thanks i i'd be happy to do that it's still posted on legistar or i may i think i have a copy

090of it saved to on my hard drive so i'll get it to you one way or the other yeah that's great yeah even if you know the date i think a lot of these are posted on youtube or something like that so i can go back and watch it just just 30 more seconds on the topic um some of you have heard me say this before so i apologize um but um there's a cycle called the plan do check act cycle and planning means setting a goal and defining actions and then you do the actions and then you monitor the results and if the results are good then you keep on doing those kinds of things if they're not good um when you check them then you adjust um at what your actions are and

091then repeat that cycle and if you're not measuring and you're not trending then the whole continuous improvement cycle breaks down you're here rita you have your hand up an area i've been thinking about is um outside of pollution is flooding and risk for flooding that we might want to consider looking at um so i don't have anything prepared or thought through definitively but i think it's something we might want to consider yeah flooding um yeah i got a personal tour from evan pratt without the crap for a few hours last march i think it was where he showed me uh some of the basins of the cities you know the city has some major in terms of green infrastructure the city has built some rather large basins um you know there's one down by the

092uh bryant community center and malletts creek there was uh excavated uh big excavation with a um a number of years ago to contain wastewater and there's also another one upstream and now it's great upstream of that and uh you know if you if you ever drive by if you've been driving by sire church road near maple road lately you'll see this huge excavation project down in the latin neighborhood you know it's down south of sire church road so this is a huge uh you know uh excavation that's being made to create like a a retention pond for storm water uh to try to help uh alleviate flooding in the water neighborhood so the city has got projects going on and um i think we should have a meeting on that you know we'll talk about

093that and uh another thing i when i was um um traveling to new england i was spent a couple of nights in new haven and i was i was walking around the neighborhood and i discovered the city of new haven for example was putting in curb cuts uh with retention small retention ponds and natural plantings you know between the sidewalk and the street this is in an urban neighborhood where they're where they're putting in these curb cuts or maybe every other block and so this has been something that i was intrigued with for years that you know you could you could do this and um the city's tried this on miller avenue you know going northwest out of town because miller as you recall is a really long grade it's almost straight downhill you know

094straight down the gradient so they've they've put in a few curve cuts in there but you know they have it's harder for them to maintain these some disperse individual sights harder than you know having a big project where they put in a big hole in the ground and run in as much water as they can a few big projects um or more of their budget into their liking than a lot of small projects but this is something that uh we can see what other communities have been doing and what they're budgeting and how successful it's been and we try to help city staff and city council you know be updated about those efforts in other communities you know what the parameters look like um shannon you have your hand up yeah the city has actually

095done a lot of that work um i've worked on some of them um and so there's there's actually more than i think you realize that's gone on around town um there were also some uh there was one that the heron river watershed council tried to do um on the southeast side of town that was a total failure where they kind of started putting things in and the neighbors really rebelled against it so it's a tricky business in terms of what happens out in front of somebody's house people kind of think of it as their own um and there's a lot of utilities and things like that and there's the city actually has a green streets program or anything any new improvements that they do they have certain standards that they um use to try to

096make storm water um you know managed in those areas um more than they do you know because right now a lot of the streets that are out there don't have any controls on them so the city's actually done quite a bit in terms of infrastructure in the ways that they can um uh it's not you know not perfect but they they've actually been a pretty big leader in a lot of this too so i don't you know there's there's a lot of things around town as well it's we don't have great soils for some of this stuff too which makes it a little um harder as well um but um i i would like to support what john was saying about um being able to have some better data and for people to um yeah

097i'm kind of maybe hopeful some ideas that we said last time could possibly advance a little bit further but one thing that has steadily increased probably not even steadily but exponentially increased is the amount of um people getting in the water in the huron river my office is right above the cascades and all summer long we get to listen to people whooping and hollering and having a fantastic time going down the cascades people do it from ann arbor people come from all over the area going to it and additionally there are a number of spots along here in river just upstream of there where people are just hanging out in the river on docks and swimming and things like that and whether the city likes or not in terms of people putting their bodies in

098the water they kind of don't officially say that they're swimming areas people are using them as such and so at the very least in those areas even if we just want to sort of start small um to try to get some sense of you know water quality in those areas and and like john was saying we don't really know until it gets kind of tracked over time sarah i'm thrilled that you like are are excited about punching data that's like music my ears um because it feels like uh it's and i think it's tricky because you know the city doesn't want to sort of alarm people at the same time um uh so it's a balancing act i think of not sort of freaking people out about things as well but um i feel like

099like it's something that we can kind of do in our town it feels like it lets people know what's going on um and also speaks to kind of larger patterns and issues that are going on out there at the you know for many communities so um uh maybe this time around if we can get that strike and we'd have some better luck with it um and i know the composition of the water group has has uh really shifted and there's a lot of expertise on there too which is very exciting um so uh again the heron river watershed council i think has shifted quite a bit too in terms of who was involved uh at that point i don't know that was probably good four or five years ago john i'm trying to remember exactly

100when that was um but it feels like that just really that area um that is so intensely um interactive between people and the huron river feels like a zone that could be very rich or being able to have some sort of awareness and education um and you know could even extend into things like microplastics like you know i know there's things that you can put in your washing machine that that kind of help with that maybe they could sell them at the argo you know delivery you know i mean there may be ways to kind of extend out some of these other things on a smaller scale to be able to um use uh that that nexus of people in water interaction as a as a potential way for us to be able to have

101both education and raising awareness and things like that so well thanks shannon yeah um yeah does that um it sounds to me like it would be good to uh have a public hearing at least one public hearing on down the storm water topic you know i'm gonna invite people in like um as the dream commissioner who's kind of in charge of that sort of thing and uh people from the iran river watershed council and we should just talk about this because this this has been like a big goal for us for a year now at least um you know trying to make the river healthier healthy enough to go swimming you know so let's see what we can do about that oh yeah at least have public hearings and and talk about you know the

102benefits of the green infrastructure and you know because one of the things i heard from evidence you know the cities also did an experimental thing where they put a previous pavement down but unfortunately it was um it's where there's a bus turn around and so it only took it took like a year for it to all get broken up yeah and then they sanded it by accident too because it's very difficult to have one different place in the city in terms of all the processes and maintenance and things like that that they have so sure um they've done they but they have really done a lot too i just i don't want to give the impression that they've been negligent because they really have done a lot of things for that as well and it

103would be a way for them to kind of say what they they've done but also for us to be able to talk with them about you know identifying what our next steps and what are areas that they haven't taken on that we might be able to assist with because i think advocacy is something that we can do and frankly a big piece of it are people's own downspouts uh that are running under their driveways and running straight down into the into the storm sewer so um there's a lot that the city is doing but there's a lot that homeowners can do too and so um you know that's a whole other dimension to this as well yeah i mean i think we can we can develop an outreach activity as well you know to neighbors

104and friends family members here in town and try to see what we can if we can raise reach and we can raise awareness in the community try to see you know how much you know we can at least make people aware of you know what they're about rain barrels and things like that because i know the city has done quite a lot of outreach efforts with that but you know it's like everything else you need to develop a sustainable momentum that might go on for years before you really you know it's it's the kind of cultural change that takes sometimes takes generations right but um anything we can do to accelerate that i think both for this and for any of the other more progressive interests that a lot of residents support you know like

105uh like day two zero like the whole way to zero plan i think that's there's quite a lot of support here among the residents but there's there are gaps in knowledge and what people can do on their own so i think we can help we can help with those campaigns i think okay well i think uh we're running out of time here so um john you have your hand up and then if anybody else wants to make a comment please i'll put your hand up yeah i wanted to offer a few insights or observations about the tribar situation if i may um so for context for those that don't know me that well i worked in industry um my old career i work for the german conglomerate bosch among other things it's the largest automotive

106supplier in the world um so i have some insights in to the situation there um so first of all um tri-bar is clearly um responsible for what it did but the oems in other words the the companies that buy their products are also responsible tri-bar makes mostly trim kinds of materials and then they plate them and a lot of that goes into automotive products and the automotive companies obviously have a hand in approving the design of those products and those products um are designed with hexavalent probe with chromium sticks in the products and as steve pointed out um the hexavalent chrome was banned in europe he i put that i think in his email the other day and um i think it was banned in europe in 2017 so just to put that in broader

107context um or a specific context in the mid 90s bosch uh banned the any new products with hexavalent chrome in the mid-90s and uh bosch didn't go belly up the automotive industry in europe didn't dissolve because you couldn't use that that product so it's it's really um shared responsibility here in terms of regulation in terms of the oems and in terms of what tribar did um another thing that i wanted to share is um and steve knows this because i had steve look at a draft of the email that i sent um you can get on the tri-bar uh website and use their contact us form and i wrote an email to the ceo of tribar and admonished him for what the company did and said it's basically a failure of leadership and it's a

108failure of culture and it's an indication that they have systemic problems that they've had the kinds of issues that they've had with pfas and now this this this thing and it it doesn't take long for any one of us to get on their website and look up online and say dear mr so-and-so and write a three-liner and put pressure on the company um but we should also like i said we should also be putting pressure on the oems the customers and also on the feds to to do something about this and let's see i have something else written down i think um no that's it so that's just wanted to share those insights and um in that regard from the ecology center was circulating a petition to be sent to the major car companies asking

109them to you know please donate yep i've signed it and everybody else should too yeah okay well let's see i'm gonna stop the share here so let's move on to the next item on the agenda if that's okay all right report some committees um how about natural features from actual features here i know criticism here okay um i'm on the group um i think steve i told you nothing has changed in last month since you and i talked we have not had a meeting on um some of the ordinances that are being drafted um related to landmark and heritage trees in probably three months and we should really push chris and me and and and others to to really um get this in front of the environmental commission my concern is is that we're trying

110in this in this case perfection is the enemy of the good um and um having a perfect product doesn't really make sense anyhow because this commission is likely to change things in whatever the draft is and that's likely to be changed again when it goes to the attorney's office and the city council so this is really something we need to get across the finish line and i realize chris is you know we're depending on his expertise um and he's very busy at this time of year but we we really should as far as i know nothing has been done in the last since maybe may yeah i think we'll start a big fish in november okay because when um now that's when when everybody's uh when the natural world is folding up for the year

111of the season so let's let's go for november um all right uh uh zero waste um john um lisa sure i can get that started uh so a couple weeks ago i think several of you joined us for the a2 collaborators meeting where we gave an overview and kind of shared some thoughts and got some really good feedback from folks we also launched our first video in telling the stories of circularity that now is on the circular economy website for the city and along with uh an enhanced map that we continue to work with um we finally got the ten thousand dollar micros grant that we applied for over a year ago to advance some of our work uh we still kind of charged ahead with things so we're hoping we can kind of shift

112that to focus that on some very uh specific uh stakeholder engagement work we'd like to do particularly with the bipod community thinking about engagement around circularity defining it opportunities uh business development opportunities so we're hoping we might be able to use some of that plus or also working primarily city staff is working on a another grant proposal to the usdn the sustainability directors network um to kind of advance that work to i think what else oh and then in about six weeks we'll be presenting our work uh for the state support we've been given through i2p3 uh kind of talking with them almost a little bit like a competition we're going to be presenting against the other teams who have been involved in this there will be a judging panel so uh lisa's been drafting

113that up and then we're going to turn that over to some folks at the city to kind of put a final touches on that i think that's all i had lisa anything else you wanted to note well i think the only thing you could add is the work with the seas team and how that's yeah so we've also had a team from u of m from school for environmental sustainability working with us um been focused on a lot of things over the summer around community engagement and some of the videos and the map and the whole thing and then we're meeting with them tomorrow to kind of map out where we want to go with them for this academic year because we have them through april of 2023 so we're thinking about how to best

114position their efforts in light of where we're at with things like one of the things we hoped we do with them was create a map but the map was already created and it's already very popular and going gangbusters so we need to shift some of our work with them to current priorities i think that's it okay all right thanks so thanks for lisa um uh next up pollinators yeah while you're commuting thank you um we uh have just come through our first newsletter that um bridgette wrote thank you very much and um uh sent that out to the community of people who participated in noma may we've been talking about what our next steps will be and actually preparing some communications for fall that will support um uh the the pollinators for next year instead

115of sending them off to compost um working on leaving the leaves um so that's a project that that is kind of just starting um and that's mostly it i think that although i would say that what came to mind as we were just now discussing is that some of the things that we're working on including encouraging people to reduce their turf grass and increase their gardened space with native plants could assist with some of the stormwater things that we talked about and bridget i don't know if you want to add something to me this i guess the only thing i'll add is i have the same thought rita that there is a little crossover even with the you know we're having conversations about using less fewer pesticides and fertilizers so that outreach that might happen

116as we get more data and information about water quality could kind of work through this group as well yeah yeah okay thank you um next up is uh well water quality but uh we've discussed that quite a bit um so does anybody want to add anything to that sarah okay so um planning next up is uh other commissions planning commission update um i would say we're moving on to our next tc one zone in on stadium um and we had um we passed that on the city council i personally would like to see a few other tweaks to it um as as it continues to evolve um but that was a big effort um and let's see i'm trying there was one other thing that we had here um oh i know we had a

117um a pud come through um on on 721 forest and something that occurred to me while i was commenting on that which it's a site that has zero environmental resources on it it's totally paved and they're taking down a building and putting up another one um but they're right next to one of the only oak groves that are still within the city and um one of the things i brought up with them was the issue of oak wilt which i don't know if you all know about but is a really big issue that's starting to happen um in throughout the state and it's affected a couple of projects that i've worked on and um and and a new ordinance which might be actually helpful which i know some other communities around detroit have done where

118they actually have an op world ordinance that limits when you can take down oaks um it's pretty simple and straightforward so that might be something to put on our agenda um just to be able to have some and it's not it's not super strict but it brings awareness and it's something you can kind of hand to a contractor or hand to developer to say oh you really actually have to plan around this um so it's just a tragedy to see what's happening in other areas with oaks so and they're such an important um organism for so many other organisms pollinators included so um uh that's something that struck me as i was bringing that up is that that might be a kind of a crossover thing with the environmental commission um to think about okay

119great thank you shannon energy committee a few things we did not meet this month um but um next month we have a meeting on the 13th of september and as a sort of a pre-meeting for that uh shannon and i and brett and missy are meeting on the 30th to talk about um where there might be overlaps between energy commission and planning commission related to the issues of construction affordable housing and sustainable construction and what if anything we can do in that space and at least tentatively i've arranged for uh someone who is um the president and ceo of an architecture and development firm um that operates mostly in the northeast that um does a lot of net zero uh affordable housing that is also passive house certified um and there is now a substantial

120amount of data that indicates that good design practices combined with a collaborative approach you can actually build a highly sustainable multi-family affordable housing for the same or lower cost than for traditional construction and he's agreed to make a presentation at our meeting on the 13th with the possibility that brett might attend that meeting and possibly even that there's at least a partial joint meeting on that day and that's what we'll talk about on the 30th but i think that might be a topic of widespread interest in the community yeah thanks john uh i'm ian's not here today so we will get a report from the clarkson advisory so move on to council um lisa any reports on council activity yeah i'm trying to think if there's anything of particular interest to the environmental condition um

121i don't think so i was assuming kathy would be here so i wasn't even thinking about that um if you want to move on somebody else i'll look and see if there's anything in my notes okay so then there's the chair report i have a few things i want to mention the first thing is that we're going to have the second annual trash talk tour um on september 18th so the entire day of september 18th it's going to be divided to a trash talk tour i will personally be leading a bike tour to visit a lot of these sites but uh they're pretty open there's going to be a meet-up um and uh eventbrite um sites for uh for for logging in to visit at various sites you know they're going to include um so

122far we're going to go we're going to start at the bike tour is going to start at uh common cycle you know and uh downtown we're gonna go to viridian and then down to the uh you know to the complex down near the worth we care um the landfill the uh drop-off center and then come back up uh through um let's go by by the pound um on south industrial and then there's going to be an afternoon ride out to uh um how to bring your own container downtown um ibroad elementary and then along leg out west um to um you know to where the kiwanis recycle center is where youth center is and so they're going to be a couple of booths there that um let me talk about later but it's going to

123be before the next commission meeting so it's on september 18th so look google it i'll look at the website there'll be a website that will be up that you can google ann arbor trash talk tour and find most of the information before that so all these sites will be manned um outside of the bike tour they're going to be manned by people and so people can go visit there anytime during the day and uh check out check on what's going on at these different sites um steve you should mention that to participate in the tours or the tour of the murph you have to sign up uh and register on the website so you just can't show up at the murph or show up for the bike tours yeah that's correct uh the bike tour

124i want to restrict that to 25 people so there's a sign up for that but also the murph you know they need to continue they need to predict and control the number of people will show that they're up there at any time so the bike tour has the mark from like 12 15 to 12 30. but other than that there'll be slots and there's another there's uh an event right i think uh thing that uh that was set up by live zero waste you know by sam mcmullen of live zero waste and there's also a meet up um that man ezekiel and myself and sam are working on or signing up to join the bike tour so you can join either the morning or the afternoon tour and then in the morning outside the bike

125tour there's an event at the university of michigan stadium where we'll get to see people cleaning up after a football game it's quite an operation and it's all volunteer and there's entertainment and food so uh if you want to show up at the michigan uh stadium something like i think it's like eight o'clock in the morning uh it'll be it'll be a fun event uh it's not officially on the trash talk tour it's not on the bicycle tour of town um but i think that's available for the public to show up as well um and then the other thing is um i i think in october there's going to be another fall like uh uh an 820 uh fair like an outdoor fair on main street i think it's in october but i'm not sure

126exactly what the date is and whether um we want to have a table there you know um uh chris vanderbrock and lunia and myself um you know manned uh a table last year and it was in late september early october it was a main street fair it used to be called the mayor's green fair uh but now 820 is running and it's uh it's got us it's got a different name to it but it's basically the same thing it's friday october 7th okay and it's called the autumn green fair 6 to 9 p.m so i'm going to look into getting a table there so for the environmental commission so let's see what uh we had quite a few people show up last time and it's a great uh you know it's a great event for

127the commission to participate in i'll send out an email about uh asking for volunteers to the table and once i've talked to the organizer okay um and then the last thing is that you know chris vandenbrock has resigned from the commission so we're looking for another regular member so um i'd encourage people to apply to to be on the commission and we'll be going through the applications in the next week and uh trying to get somebody else on the commission to try to get crystal's replacement on the commission by september by our september okay that's all i have to say so the next item on the agenda is uh is a staff report from staff feeling yes um i just wanted to let everybody know that um the fourth cohort of our 820 ambassadors will

128be starting on november 2nd um and then also i wanted to open up the opportunity you know um you know uh brian weiner from recycle ann arbor isn't uh participating this year so we have jenny patowski hamill office and there's a another uh open slot and i wanted to you know open that up to maybe someone from zero waste or circular economy to teach that session the two-hour session with uh jenny and hannah loftus this year we're asking folks you know for those uh instructors that we do choose we ask them to record their presentations so that the participants can look at it the week ahead so when they come in it's not they're absorbing information they're you know it's more of like a give and take you know more feedback you know and uh

129more action oriented items so um if you're interested uh i can send you the syllabus that we've used but you know it's gonna change a bit you know because we're you know pushing the circular economy and whatnot so um and that's all and then one last thing next month will be my last meeting um i'm moving on to the michigan environmental council so uh uh october 23rd to be my last day with the city so well galen it's been it's been fun having you with us so you know best wishes and we gotta we're gonna have a party or something oh yeah definitely i'll let everybody know when it's gonna be okay congratulations and boohoo thank you thank you okay thanks kayla anything else no nothing okay um so items for next agenda does anybody

130want to suggest an item for discussion at the next agenda at our next meeting okay we'll all develop the agenda um in the next week or two or we'll areta and uh galen and i will um or a couple suggestions we talked about so you can consider those those may be true too short of notice but at least something to consider yeah okay i mean we haven't we haven't talked about solid waste so it would be good to have a um something on solid waste um on circular economy zero waste um sometime this fall like october um yeah and so uh okay and uh all right so uh let me know you know email me rita and gail and if you have any suggestions for topics for uh next week um within the week and

131uh so the next scheduled meeting is going to be october [Music] is anybody gonna hit their calendar first get to their calendar first and then write this down it's gonna be october september 22nd okay at 7 00 pm so uh the next item on our agenda is public commentary so this is uh the second opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes please call 1-888-788-0099 and enter meeting id um 915-8343-9176 this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and video feed city staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press start on on your phone you will hear an automated announcement that the host is

132allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area and need any television or background sound so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments and be patient there may be a delay of up to 30 seconds before a connection was established revealing is there anybody on the line right now there's no one on the line okay well let's wait uh let's wait 30 seconds okay okay is there anybody on the line yet um there's no one on the line okay well thanks kayla so uh this ends the public commentary period so um all right join this meeting at 9 10 p.m thank you thanks everybody good night good night bye for now you