Ann Arbor Environmental Commission Meeting 7/28/2022

001okay um so i call this meeting to order um welcome to the july 28 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 please call 877-853-5247 and enter meeting id 989-2851637 [Music] again uh the phone number to call is eight seven seven eight five three five two four seven and the meeting id is nine eight nine two eight five one one six this information is also available on the published agenda in the public notices section of the city website

002and on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn channel 16 at t channel 99 and online at www.a2gov.org watch ctn one word okay let's see um galen do you want to read the land heritage statement i sure will land heritage statement i acknowledge that the land the city of ann arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the anishinabe including oduwa ojibwe and boldawadmi and widened out 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 of the ongoing consequences of this past can empower us in

003our work to create a future that supports human flourishing and justice for all individuals the land heritage state hey thank you galen um do you want to go to the world call sure all righty commissioner needham commissioner needham council member dish council member desh commissioner graham councilmember griswold here commissioner kylie ward here chairperson brown i'm president here in ann arbor commissioner marsky vice chair person mitchell hearing ann arbor commissioner vandenbroe mr vandenbrook commissioner oriole commissioner oriol commissioner morrison and the president okay commissioner gruber here in ann arbor commissioner nedrich all right we have a quorum all right thank you galen um so the next item on the agenda is the approval of the agenda um see uh do i have a motion to approve the agenda um okay uh shannon raise your hand um who

004had a second kathy um any suggestions for changes i don't hear any so um all who approve the agenda as submitted now raise your hands or say aye aye right okay looks like it's unanimous so um the next item on the agenda is approval of the minutes um might not interrupt real quick i miss uh commissioner gibb randall president yes um we got to fix that on legistar okay let's see how long that takes so um [Music] let's see so let's move on to the approval of the minutes on the last meeting do i have a second um bridget gruber seconds in me seconds um i'll who uh approve the minutes as written raise your hand or say hi any opposed i'm abstaining because i didn't attend the last meeting okay and uh john morsky

005okay thank you john so uh let's see the next uh item on the agenda is public commentary so this is uh the first of two opportunities for persons to speak for up to three minutes please call one eight eight seven eight five three five and enter meeting id 989-2851-1637 [Music] this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and the 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 and indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you will hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any television or background sounds so that we may

006hear 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 is established so again the meeting the uh the numbered call is eight 877 three five two four seven and the meeting id is nine eight nine two eight five one one six three seven so is there anybody on the line yet galen there's no one for a public commentary at this time okay let's wait another 10 seconds or so okay meanwhile let me um share my screen okay can everybody see this yep okay well then speaking i would like to uh i would like to transfer my duties as chair to the vice chair rita mitchell is that okay rita i'll do it thank you okay

007so um let's see is there anybody still on the line galen there's no one okay all right well thank you this ends the public comment period we will have another one at the end of the meeting oh thank you so um i thought it was high time like i i have been following contamination for several years um as a member of the sierra club and i thought it was time for me to maybe present some of the information to the commission and the general public here in ann arbor um so pfas uh what are they well they are a set of compounds and this this is an acronym for either and perfluorinated alkyl substances and polyfluoridated alkyl substances they used to be called pfcs which stood for perfluorochemicals but then nomenclature has been replaced by

008pfos pfas for the last 10 years but if you go back through the literature you can sometimes find references to pfcs but they're talking really about the same thing um now let's see first thing is let's um just get some basic definition definitions and key facts and figures straight um pfas is an umbrella term uh for some 10 000 synthetic chemicals uh they have multiple chemical flooring bonds there are several definitions worldwide right now the european union officially has the most stringent um definition uh the epa is one that's um almost as stringent it's very close to it um but uh the basic the basic uh problem with pfas compounds is their persistence in the environment and the body these are chemicals like pcbs pvds that can be absorbed uh they can enter into synthetic

009pathways by they can enter into biochemical pathways in mammals and implants and they are are not they're not able to be detoxified um some of them are not able to be excreted readily and all the ones that have been investigated so far do have health risks so however they've not been well studied um they've been these compounds have been made in large quantities since 1948 um they've been in their millions and millions of times have been released into the environment mostly through consumer products um for decades however nobody uh nobody chose to fund any um any health care consequences for chronic exposures the thing is that these compounds are not that toxic for acute exposures meaning a large exposure in a brief period of time but uh the chronic exposures of small amounts over a

010long period of time definitely perturb metabolism in people and various other organisms in the environment so the traditional pfas compounds were called pfos for pf octal sulfate and p and pfoa which is pf octal acid and these um these are what are called legacy ppos compounds because for example pfos pfloss will be used for uh firefighting phones since the 50s um especially in airports and by the military and uh for tank farm fires michigan recently the empire program here in michigan which was founded in 2018 by governor schneider empart is an interagency task group that was uh tasked with uh with uh looking for pfos contamination in michigan and uh and trying to mitigate whatever pollution uh sources are recognized so they went out for drinking water first and then for wastewater treatment plants and

011then for via solids uh they so the state investigated the majority of the drinking water supplies in michigan first of all and then the second of all they went to wastewater treatment plants that had industrial pre-treatment permits because um industries in the new michigan can apply uh for a permit to release their industrial wastes to a municipal wastewater treatment plant they're only they only need to report hazardous substances that are in those but uh pfas and pfoa were not listed as hazardous substances until last year even though their health effects were known in the industry as early as the 1960s but there was no requirement that they report on their health data to the government so um so this all became public when um a lawyer was visiting his mother in parkersburg west virginia and

012noticed and heard that a local farmer his cattle were getting black gums and dying um you can you can um there's a good documentary film that can be found online uh called the devil we know which is a quote from one of the dupont executives there was some manufacturing pfos pfoa at this plant in parkersburg west virginia on the on the banks of the ohio river so pfos and pfoa this was discovered and publicized um by this lawyer rob bollock which he lives in say he lives in cincinnati and that resulted in finally resulted in public and increased public awareness and and a consent decree that was agreed to by dupont because um you know they had contaminated some 60 000 people in that region uh for many decades and so um the results of

013those studies were published only a few years ago um it was called the committee of eight um which makes it very hard to find but there are online resources um just google a committee of eight and you will find their public report um however the epa was aware of these data back in 2010 i am aware of the problem and so they initiated conversations with industry and there was an agreement made that by um american companies in america could not produce either pfos or pfoa however they're still allowed to import it for making products um the epa has not acted on this until uh two years ago when uh joe when president biden appointed michael regan who had formerly been the director of the department of environmental equality in north carolina which has the other

014major which is another major contamination of the cape fear river in north carolina and some 12 counties surrounding this plant this premorse plant which was a spinoff of dupont um there are 12 local counties whose groundwater was contaminated with kethos with a different kind of pfas called gen x however there are many other compounds that were made in the least in that at that facility in fayetteville north carolina so um so michael regan i was aware of the problems of fifa and what north carolina had to do to deal with it these multiple widespread contaminations and so he has gotten he has put epa into gear and uh our local delegation here in michigan debbie dingle um and kildee and uh and uh fred upton and uh which are all uh congress persons from michigan

015have been uh principal actors in drafting and submitting bills to congress for the last four years about getting the congress to pass legislation that will make it much um which will fund the studies that are required and some of the remediation that's required but you'll see that there's no way there's enough money in the world to clean up the environment yeah after some so much of these compounds have been made and released for such a long time so um so in 2015 the epa public established public health advisory levels which are non-regulatory they're just advisory levels of 70 parts per trillion each for drinking water of pfos and pfla however uh michigan uh through its impart um activities enacted mcl's with maximum contaminant levels for seven pfos including these two in august 2020 and these

016values are about 10 fold lower so other states have acted since and um and they have all set limits at various levels but they're all in the single digit in the single digit of parts per trillion the part per trillion the 70 parts per trillion is basically a drop of water in um 20 olympic sized swimming pools so that's the level of contamination that's considered a a a health for chronic exposure um and so the epa just uh in june on june 15th announced new health values for ppos which are a thousand times lower there are 0.2 parts per trillion and pfoa is even lower at 4 parts per quadrillion and that's based on more comprehensive emerging health data epa is going to go through its review process and include public comment and there they

017plan to set mcls this year um for uh pfos and pfoa however the regulatory process you know is very slow and um it will take given that there are some ten thousand synthetic chemicals that are classified as ppos that all share the property persistence um most of whom have not really been studying for toxic effects and uh they are uh and so the regulation of those compounds uh will take quite some time uh many lifetimes um using the uh you know given the current system uh that's used for regulating synthetic chemicals so these two chemicals have been manufactured and sold since 1943 and they can be measured in blood worldwide including in arctic inuit populations um they're because they've migrated into the ocean they've been absorbed by fish the fish have been eaten by seals

018and they've been they're also uh deposited by uh aerosols you know and um through i've just been dispersed through the air as well as the water they are principally used in consumer products um so some of the major consumer products are that are used for fast food wrappers um the fda actually licenses and permits some 12 pipos compounds to be used in food packaging a major contamination in food packaging was recognized to be microwaved popcorn bags so you know these uh michael these popcorn bags that you can put in the microwave um those were contaminated with high levels of fifos which were taken off and those were changed i think i've heard that the pfas was taken out of out of those on products several years ago but they still exist in fast food wrappers

019mostly um wendy's has pledged that they will remove fifos in all their packaging um by the end of last year however um it's hard to tell if that's really happened or not mcdonald's for example wants to wait until 2025. um other other other businesses such as burger king don't recognize that it's a problem and have not pledged to do anything about it until they're forced to so um um so the other consumer products um that contain fifa cosmetics like lip gloss especially lip gloss mascara [Music] and other uh lotions some creams other uh other consumer products such as glide you know glide dental floss contains defos um you know it's basically teflon tape but there is residual pipots in that teflon tape the teflon itself is a polymer um but it will it will degrade

020into a microplastic and eventually become some kind of a fluorinated organic compound then they have toxic properties as well but there's no immediate risk to chronic exposure from from dental floss from the tape itself that there are additives that are in there that can be leached out now the key thing to understand about all these compounds is that they persist in body tissues and they're unlike other toxic chemicals that tend to accumulate in fat these compounds accumulate in blood and the liver muscle so foods such as liver and they contain blood could possibly attain and possibly have much higher levels of ethos than muscle meat and uh and the legacy compounds pfos and pfoa they also have the property of bioaccumulation that means that if the water has say one part per trillion pfos the

021fish will accumulate up to a thousand parts per trillion of pfos so the concentrated the biological concentration factors of pfos and pfoa and other larger compounds like of that same size which have eight carbons in them they um they will all bioaccumulate and they take many years they will take they take many years to be eliminated from the body um some on the order of uh uh five to ten years and they're very in these compounds all of these compounds are also very difficult to destroy um there is no industrial scale facility that demonstrates proper destruction of ethos it requires incineration temperatures of greater than 1100 degrees centigrade and plus some assisted oxidation properties there are a couple of um there are several technologies that are in development but only on the laboratory scale it's

022very difficult to uh to destroy these and most of the most of the uh so the the recommendation from environmental ngos from all of them is that incineration is not a proper means of disposal or treatment of ppos contaminated materials because there just is no process to considerably destroy them without releasing them widespread into the air and have them get deposited in the ground to contaminate groundwater so i'm happy to take questions as i go along um i should have said that earlier but anyway moving on here um so the industry responds to the uh revelation public revelation that pfoa and pfos with toxic um was to do what we call now regrettable substitutions because for example pfoa was replaced by gen x which is the compound that's contaminated in the cape fear river for

023decades as you see it's chemically very similar the only difference here is that there's uh an oxygen here but they uh they still have the common pcos properties of the polychlorinated carbons each of the nodes in the stick diagram is a carbon now i think most of you are familiar with seeing chemical structures but the o is oxygen the h is hydrogen f is fluorine and then these nodes here are all carbon atoms so when they say it's polychlorinated octal acid that's what you see here is eight carbons with an acid function here at the end and everything's fluorinated all the hydrogens have been replaced with chlorine and similarly with p or instead of an acid here um a carboxylic acid function that's called you have uh what's called a solid sulfate or a sulfur

024sulfonic acid um function so and um and so pfbs was created as an alternative to pfos so this compound is just as persistent it's also toxic the epa recently released toxicity data for pfbs so they're on the pathway to having a having a mcl regulations in place through the clean water for this compound as well as gen x and pfoy and pfos but right now these are the only four compounds that epa is considering for uh for regulatory action at this point so um as i mentioned before they've been circulating in food and water supplies for decades and they're found in blood um everywhere every every every person that's been looked at um where do they come from um they start from industrial and um aff point sources aff is a firefighting phone it's been

025used um as i mentioned by the military in the airports uh the impart program i thought they uh one of their first initiatives was to collect all of it because um most of it's of course been used in training exercises even in municipal airports even in small municipal airports and um and so impart sent a letter to all the fire marshals in the state asking for all their existing stocks of uh aff um to be uh to be declared and transported to a facility in detroit so uh the state thought it would collect maybe 30 000 gallons but they ended up collecting 60 000 gallons of affi and they chose to dispose of it by shipping it to a landfill in idaho so where it's claimed by u.s ecology that it's um it's um encapsulated

026in some form um like perhaps in concrete or something like that and then put into a hazardous waste landfall which is about a mile from the uh snake river you know upstream of the columbia river so um uh hopefully they're secure at least for my lifetime but we'll see what happens in the future because these are persistent these will not degrade not not for millennia so the other source is um and we don't have any manufacturing facilities that i know of that i've heard of for industrial sources here in michigan um but again these point sources contaminate both service and ground waters now the uh now in michigan um because the state regulates this not the federal government is several of uh industrial sites that don't manufacture but they use p faults are allowed to

027send their send their pre-treated supposedly waste to a municipal wastewater treatment plant wwt please are you know that's a that's just an acronym for a wastewater treatment plant by most of the republic there are some private ones especially around paper mills paper mills sometimes have their own privately owned wastewater treatment plants but there are some 70 wastewater treatment plants in michigan that had um industrial pre-treatment permits on file with the state department of eagle now um so the impart chess group tested the waste waters from these plants and discovered um the uh one of the things they discovered was a contamination coming from these uh chrome plating facilities in wixom they're owned by a company called tri-bar there's three of them in wixom they had a pre-treatment permit to send their waste to uh to

028the wixom wastewater treatment plant and so the pfas contamination that got into the huron river and into our drinking water came from these um industrial facilities they were using um they were using these pfos and other pfos compounds and uh releasing them into the uh both into the huron river and the river rouge by the way and uh for uh it's hard to tell how much time this has been going on but probably for decades um so that's how the contamination of the huron river was discovered uh but that was mostly discovered because the epa is part of its ongoing activities against pfos and pfoa included pfas compounds within their um uh unregulated contaminant monitoring role uh which was uh an update to the clean water act where um epa tests uh any epa every

029couple of years tests for unregulated compounds that they think may be contaminating waterways in the united states so this ecm r3 the third study that was done and it was initiated in 2012 and it ended and the data was reported in 2015. but this is when our wastewater facility became aware of the contamination and and began to initiate actions to uh to remediate it what you know as you know was done with the addition of some granular activated carbon heads um that are good at absorbing that pfos and the pfla they're not so they're not as effective in in some of these smaller pfos compounds um now another source of contamination is um commercial distribution um because uh scotchgard was a major uh product that contained pfos you know we all saw those ads in

030the 60s i think many of us were old enough to have seen these uh where you could buy a can and spray scotchgard in all of your furniture and the drapes so that um you know you wouldn't will be easier to clean from a grease spill or a wine spell so scotchgard was almost pure pfos this was a source of contamination another major site of contamination in michigan was by the former wolverine manufacturing site where they made hush puppies the such puppies being suede were sprayed with um scotch bark before they were sold to repel greece keep them looking good so there's been a major contamination of groundwater uh there in rockford and other other communities there in kent county near grand rapids so you can go look at the impart website which is full

031of data if you're if you're interested in more details about what fifa's contaminations have been found in michigan and what the state has done to remediate them and what it plans to do so because um because uh pfas has been in consumer products for so long especially fabrics this commercial distribution all these products end up in landfills and waste water so landfill leachate is a major source of contamination in the groundwater so you know the ann arbor legacy landfill is no um you know there's no abortion here um it's likely that this landfill is um reaching pfas and ps uh various ppos compounds um into the leachate and going into our wastewater treatment plant um there are many others um the major landfill that ann arbor's using arbor hills has been recognized as a source

032of default contamination by impart it is contaminating groundwater it has been for decades and so that is an official investigation site implies um the ann arbor legacy waste landfall because it's been retired a while back has not um has not come up as higher than the priority because it's not an active landfill but eventually we're going to get investigated um now the wastewater treatment plants as i mentioned before they will all all of them whether they have industrial pre-treatment plants or not will contaminate surface waters and biosolids just because there are so many consumer products that contain these there i don't know what you would recognize point sources as there are on the recognized manufacturers or major users of pfos products here in ann arbor but because um you know because of the uh consumer

033products um these end up in our water wastewater treatment plants um as well and get discharged to the human river and so the other thing is biosolids and compost so these are both these are there's widespread contamination of biosolids and compost um kathy griswold raised your hand yes i took a tour of the water treatment plant i don't know a few years ago and there was a discussion about how we used to sell or give our bio so solids uh to farmers they would come with trucks or tanks and haul it away and i'm wondering if that's still being done and they would they would get it to to put on their uh on their fields um it's still being done it's a common practice and as far as i can tell it's still being

034done oh okay as of last january um actually council approved the contract with um to the provider and i can provide that information to you uh if you like do we have to test to determine how much pfas is in the biosoil before they go out well um there are no there is no regulation as yet either at the federal or the state level however um impart has ration guidelines about what you should do with it if you measure pfos because you're not required to measure ppossible biosolids and you're not required um um and you're not required and there are no requirements legal requirements about what to do with them but there are guidelines just like there are these health advisory levels that the epa has issued for drinking water there are impart has done

035that and epa is working on that as well and they may have some um more detailed guidelines and some regulation later this year or early next year because they're moving quite fast as fast as i can but i have information about what ann arbor does with inspire solids who the contractor is in part the state of michigan has been really good compared to many states because this information is all publicly available if you go to mywaters.com the state has registered for many years which wastewater treatment plants go to which agricultural fields have yeah we have sent their biosolids to which agricultural fields um so in uh ann arbor did measure its compost its municipal compost from three years ago i've mentioned this before at the environmental commission but it does have compo it does have

036the thoughts contamination of other composts and both municipal and just uh yard waste have been tested by principally by a professor at purdue university uh named linda lee so she's she's published scientific studies uh of um of pfas levels and biosolids and compost so our compost ends up you know somewhere around the median of what's seen nationwide here so of course when these biosolids and composts are spread on agricultural fields plants will take up some of these pfas compounds they'll take up the shorter chain ones they're regrettable substitutes and you'll absorb them or the cattle that are feeding on them will absorb them and uh then they'll let they'll end up we'll all end up getting exposed through that way and um the longer chain legacy uh p costs tend to bind to soil more

037than water so the wastewaters are not as contaminated by the older comp uh they're in the soil but they don't get taken up by plants as readily and they don't get uh discharged into the wastewater into the ground water as readily as these newer smaller thousand compounds so rita you have your handout and then sharing i wonder if you know the source of contamination in the compost is there any way to determine that well um yard waste comes out much lower than food waste so because it's been contaminating the food supply for years there's a basal level there but the really egregious part is the fast food wrappers you know like contaminated pizza boxes contain you know fast food wrappers that have cheese stuck on them you know people will compost those you know instead

038of throwing them in the trash if they ended up in the trash they'd just end up in the landfill you got leached out eventually um so they end up in the compost that way mostly so that's why um i think the most important policy prescription right now to prevent um for well i'll get to this later i'll get to this later um does that answer your question yeah i guess one thing that i think of though is um there are some compostable containers that have some kind of lining and i just wonder if that is a pfas product the liner yeah there are ways of testing that that's very hard to find any information about that what i've done what i have done is i've um you know when the family goes out and gets

039takeout i uh i look at the uh i look at the label and i look up uh you know what's i google it and i look at the patent literature as well and see what's in there and many of these lining most of these paper products that are substitutes um are our copolymers for example polyethylene something like that that's been combined with some oxygenated um other polymers that none of which contain p flats so most of the ones that you can look at i mean the industries known about this problem for a decade now you know it's got word has gotten out that yeah the epa is going to do something eventually so uh most of the stuff i've seen in ann arbor here outside of the you know large fast food companies is relatively

040clean you know things you get at whole foods like amazon for example unless you go pfas free um five years four years ago five years ago so whole foods um supposedly has had no fuss in their packaging for five years four or five years um so shannon you have your hand up yeah two questions um one just following up on what you just said it would be great if it could because i'm sure you know it's been a long time since i've had chemistries stephen i'm sure many of us in the in the in the zoom room are feeling the same way um and so i'm really grateful that you have this expertise because i i i am so far from that um but i think what could be really practical for our city is

041to have somebody like you make recommendations of compostable takeout products that could be like a safe list that a a restaurant could like look up and say oh these three from you know these three manufacturers or whatever that they they don't have to have a degree in chemistry to understand what the issues are so that we can just have kind of a quick and dirty like we know these are relatively safe um and they're doing the right thing and you can order from these um outfits and you're gonna you know you're you're doing the best that you can within the confines of you know which i'm sure there's all kinds of like nothing nothing seems like is completely you know fine but um they're certainly less bad than than others so that would be like

042a fabulous thing i think for just our local restaurants um things like that to be able because you know i i certainly put the compostable stuff in the compost bin and i mean boy it would just kill me if i'm like putting fifa stuffed into the compost bin so i would just put it in the trash you know but it would be great to have some sort of easy resource um for for places to be able to to kind of order from so that's one thought the other thought is that um sometimes i've worked alongside phytoremediation which are plants that can break down complex chains of chemicals and break them into kind of their component parts and i'm wondering uh and and there's certain plants that work with certain kinds of um pollutants and i'm

043wondering if there's been any research done on that with any of the family of pfas chemicals um you mentioned you know some stick and soil more some sticking water more but um there's really been some exciting things that have been happening with some of that um on some projects that we've worked on and i'm just wondering if if any of the research or industry or there's been any kind of exploration of um of that field in relation to this issue yeah i'm aware of that kind of technology but um you know the the what do you have time what the the bottom line is that uh the carbon flooring bond is unnatural oh it does not exist in nature nothing has evolved no living creature has evolved any means of detoxifying it or changing it

044interesting these compounds i should have been clearer about that earlier yeah so you know you can do things like so you can um sure because plants will take it up you can do that but then what do you do with the trees no no obviously right right it's more like that they will break in some of the other fighter remediation projects that we've been kind of alongside of it breaks them down into component parts but what i hear you saying is that this doesn't exist in that world and so there's been nothing that's evolved to be able to make that strong of a disconnection between the fluorine and the carbon yeah there's no there's no natural means of destroying these compounds that's why they're so persistent the other the other useful uh thing that makes

045phyto remediation a useful tool sometimes is that you can bio concentrate concentrate on the toxin you know like that's not for arsenic i know and selenium and cadmium like that but uh again i mean these are things that will you know those are kind of metals that will show up in the ash but the fifas will uh get volatized in the smoke oh interesting and just get this first elsewhere wherever it's burning yeah so are you advocating then that biosolids should really just like go to a landfill is that like is that what you think should happen well that's what um that's what several states in new england have done already um it's what the environmental community advocates for it's going to present a substantial uh you know cost increase for the city to do

046so right because those landfills are not cheap to dump stuff in that's for sure and you know the shame is that it is very a very good soil amendment and now it's oil amendment so uh you know and the the companies that uh deal with this there's so much resistance in denial because they don't you know they don't want to lose their business but on the other hand um what are you going to do everybody has to if enough people protest um so that these synthetic chemicals are regulated more properly we just there's not much you can really do about the pfos this that's distributed at a basic level now but at least we can maybe pass legislation that will prevent it from happening again yeah that's what the european union is doing right now

047so kathy thank you um yes i hate to be this specific but my family used to have a hog farm and all of the manure and waste products would um fall down and then be uh taken away and spread on farms and so i'm wondering if is that a source of p bass as well as well um not nearly as high as the virus solids from wastewater treatment plants yeah it's been that's been looked at um oh okay yeah many cable operations i mean the maneuver that even comes out of cable operations they're not uh they're not significant um sources of fifa's contamination compared to wastewater treatment plant fire solids but they have other problems they have nutrient pollution problems from the phosphorus and the nitrogen john you have your hand up and then rita

048yes uh the problem with sending biosolids and compost to landfill is that it turns into methane and methane then is a greenhouse gas so you're sort of damned if you do and damned if you don't um i'm interested in the next part of steve's uh presentation about the comprehensive solutions and shannon to your comment um about you know conforming local businesses my hope is that we would um take any efforts um that were any resources that we have and apply them to efforts that are hopefully more broad-based and have an equitable impact not that we're just protecting ourselves and rich little ann arbor but we're protecting people also in you know other parts of the state that are probably not anywhere near as well informed about this as we are and i'm interested in hearing

049from from steve maybe at the very end of this what specifically the environmental commission and city council can do um as groups and as individuals to address and promote some of these comprehensive solutions that he's talking about so i'll wait for that anxious okay yeah i'll move faster yeah i hope i'm not putting anybody to sleep rita well this is a micro version of that question um is anyone working with dentists to um suggest that they move away from glide uh dental floss um yeah yeah of course so i'll get to this later there's a couple of you know of course because there are no disclosure requirements you know you need to test these products so there are several environmental ngos that have been spending money for years including like the ecology center here in

050ann arbor and the environmental working group so i have urls to those websites um at the end of my presentations so anybody can look at those and get the latest um information about what products have been tested um and so uh i'll talk more about that later so what are the comprehensive solutions here first of all you need to define defaults as any chemical having at least one carbon atom fully fluorinated so this targets the general ppas property persistence this is the definition that the european union has settled on and you know most of these chemical companies there's only some seven chemical companies that manufacture ppos worldwide but because they make products that they sell worldwide you know joining the european union will which is roughly a third of the world market is in the

051european union and roughly a third of it's in the united states where it used to be so um you know china is a different story entirely but um but uh we can at least um you know control uh what ends up in the environment in the in the united states and the european union so um and then the second thing to do is to eliminate all non-essential uses of phos so this turns off the whole spigot because because these compounds are cumulative they're you know they're because they're persistent they accumulate they don't maybe no don't concentrate in your body but they accumulate they accumulate and in fact when we the sierra club i was working with a sierra club group that issued a report called uh sludge in the garden a number of years ago

052about commercial uh soil amendments that you can buy at big box stores we tested nine uh products that you can buy in the big box store and they all have pfos so you can look at the sierra club report just google uh sludge in the garden sierra club sludge in the garden and download the pdf and look at it the thing is that um they all contain um and they uh and uh and you know uh and and we used this standard um epa approved assay for this but we also did something that i've been recommending is where you do a total organic fluorine analysis there's a point here is that um there are some ten thousand feedback compounds that are registered some 200 or 300 of them have been made in large quantities for

053a long time but it's hard to tell that data is not publicly available it's hard to tell which ones were made and where they ended up um in what quantities however we use this total organic flooring test which really measures anything that has a carbon fluorine bond in it so it's basically a comprehensive test because you have so many chemicals you cannot test for all of them in any given acid so however total organic fluorine assay which is available finally here in the united states um can give you an upper bound for how many pvas compounds are in a particular sample and uh we did that with these um nine you know uh soil amendments and we came up with part per million my parts per thousand or parts per billion the parts per million

054biosolids and composts tend to be in parts per billion range drinking water and waters tend to be in the parts per trillion range they can be in parts per billion ranges um the biosolids can be in the parts very generally in the low parts per billion range but if you look at total organic fluorine it's in the parts per million range now then the next question is what is this and probably a large amount of it are polymers near there like teflon that's degraded the microplastics that are in the virus so those won't be absorbed in themselves but they're already in the environment they will break down eventually over millennia and uh who knows what products they'll be creating you know just through say uh low-level natural processes so how bridget do you have your

055hand on yeah i'm just wondering if you can give examples of what essential uses of pfas might um the european union basically defines that and everybody there's general agreement outside of industry is what that means what that means is that you don't use it you only use it for medical devices and you may use it occasionally for in manufacturing processes not where it's deliberately added to a product but where it's a minor contaminant of things like uh teflon bushings and other things i mean these b peephouse compounds are used in almost any uh a plastic molding device so this is another problem to see the tfos any any plastic product that's made uses is sprayed with pea pots to help the product release from the mold so this will also mean it's also a generic

056problem with any plastic product on the market so um so you'll need to uh you'll need to get rid of that sort of thing in manufacturing and find some other way of releasing you know if you want to release if you want to do low molding and things like that you will need to find some other product besides p-files um and you have your handout yeah just curious what's the like it sounds like an industrial setting they they act as a lubricant kind of in that capacity but in consumer products in cosmetics in food wrappers what is it about the classes that make them use like what's their compelling feature well for example uh mascara it won't run um because it won't uh the fifa resistance repelled you got grease and water you know so

057if your eyes tear up or or you know if you get some kind of oil or the oils from your skin that will not cause the mascara it's a similar thing with uh lip gloss you know it won't get it'll repel water and grease um if you're eating or something you know or lipstick but it's in um you know it's in it's in it's hard to tell what else it's in but these are the products that uh are where they're usually found so non-essential uses means everything except a medical use where there are no substitutes sometimes some material is used for research purposes like there are some research equipment that needs to have plastic components that are basically a pfas polymer but they generally don't have anything that can reach out of them but if

058you you can look at the european union website to get their draft list they published their draft list a few months ago and so everybody can look at that and see what they've defined as non-essential the nordic countries in europe are are more strict than the european union as a whole but what the eu recommendations are are things that you know every member of the eu has approved but uh the nordic countries are generally stricter um and so um and the most important thing is that we need to reform tosca which is stands for the toxic substances control act uh to invoke what's called the precautionary principle mean that um you should not be allowed to make anything in time quantities until you've proven that it's safe both for acute and chronic exposures to people

059and you know and organisms in the environment as well so zebrafish for example are a good model for fifa's toxicity and fish this is also part of the eu reach program for regulating chemicals but in the united states you can still manufacture anything and sell it and i'll just say just declare that it's generally regarded as safe without disclosing any data or very minimal data so you know it's really an open spigot and so uh and so uh the executive branch only has the authority that's come through tosca through the toxic substances control act which was first passed in 1976 uh but it's been diluted you know since then um the last major revision were the frank lautenberg amendments that were completed in 2016 which um you know finally allowed uh which finally said well

060the original tosca did not um permit the government to regulate any legacy chemicals so for example one for dioxane was not regulated um you know which is another source of contamination locally here and that was not regulated it still is not regulated because uh yeah it was um it was grandfathered into tosca in 1976. but part of the frank lautenberg amendments were that the epa had to select 10 legacy chemicals to study for their toxicities and so they they selected one for dioxane back in 2018 or so and published a report so that's finally initiated some regulatory action 114 dioxane it's a meaningful more meaningful regulation so um so this is something that is best done at the federal level um but again there's very little appetite for it in congress so where are these

061pfas point sources found i've mentioned this before that they're found in industrial sites um you know fire training sites mostly airports uh department of defense is a major polluter um we have uh three sites we have actually more than three sites here in michigan there's a worksmith air force base in moscow there are many sites in northern michigan unless they run grayling and the up um there is another site let's see where is it it's in the middle of the state here for example the cherry capital capital airport in traverse city was a training site that used pitfalls so that groundwater is contaminated and it's traveling under traverse city into traverse bay so point sources are wherever sewage sludge which was relabeled by the industry as biosolids have been applied um and uh especially the

062especially toxic ones or paper mill sludges which are shut down basically many family-owned farms in maine um because of widespread contamination because you know maine is a uh a state where there are a lot of where there's a lot of people processing a lot of paper mills and then wastewater treatment sludges with itp permits some the first breach in the wall here in michigan was um a farm which had used the biosolids that came from the wickson wastewater treatment plant it contaminated the you know the water in the heron river also um that bioselection that same wastewater treatment plant was applied to a farm in heartland michigan among others and you can measure high levels of pfas you know in the beef that came off that farm and that's an unfortunate situation because that farmer

063has been a great community partner he's been a great and generous community partner and uh of course this came out of the blue and has put him out of business so um and as i mentioned before it's wherever food packaging is included in compost so pure yard waste have far less pfas contamination anything that has food scraps in it or free packaging um this is true for all composts and all all fire solids that have been tested so far um and things like car washes and commercial laundries are also point sources of pfas contamination because i think there are some products that are used in car washes you know if you pay for the extra service you know for keeping your tire shiny and stuff like that that's probably pcos but it's hard to tell

064uh what has been used because the disclosure laws are just so weak here in the united states so here for example here is just a screenshot from the environmental working group which is an environmental engineer that's done a lot of work on pfas on consumer products i i've given their their hyperlinks um down at the last slide but as you can see there's a couple of states here that have been active just because the state is negative for pdfos doesn't mean that it isn't there it just means that they haven't tested for it so as you see colorado is tested for it because they know because they've had it because the uh because the military installation's there and also because fifa's compounds are used in fracking so fracking fluids contain a lot of fleethouse and

065so um it was recognized the state of colorado recognized um four years ago uh five years ago that they're they have widespread defense contamination so their state initiated a testing effort these purple dots here are dod sites because the uh because the dod was required to test for pfos contamination with ground wires by the federal government a few years ago k-state of california state of alabama because there was a 3m plant located in decatur alabama on the tennessee river that was a major manufacturer of um you can see along the ohio river here in kentucky as well in the state of new jersey for obvious reasons and new england states have done a lot of pbas testing in north carolina because of the gen x pollution in the cape fear river has initiated all state

066action but most of these other states there has been no federal action until the last two years and there's been no except for drd sites and there's been no state action whatsoever either even though there is widespread contamination several ngos like the sierra club have been testing drinking water in florida and it's very very high in pesos but the state will not uh will not recognize it the state will know actually um so this is just an example here if you look at this at any of these dots you can expand this map and uh click on any of these dots and this is what you'll come up with what i did is you see this is ann arbor down here and so i clicked on wix and the wixom site here and so you'll

067get this kind of information here on the left this little pop-up window shows up and it will give you the details it's contamination it's kind of the location some of the data and the sources so this is a really good database that a lot of people are using these days that's been funded by the environmental working group so you can go look up stuff there um another good source of information is safer states safer sage is a uh environmental ngo that uh that catalogs data on policies on what uh regulations for pcos have been done at different state levels um so you can it's a great place to look at if you want to see um if you want to see representative legislation on how to ban keep us in food packaging there's uh jeff

068irwin and uh yusuf ravi have introduced legislation for the past four years and our state legislature that those bills have gone nowhere in our state legislature for example but you can find all this information at this sacred states website [Music] and what are the threats here the health and budgets well the health threats again are they're long-term chronic exposures and they come through food packaging is easiest to get rid of meat and fish and dairy less so in vegetables i sort of put them in an order so um you know eating less meat fish and dairy will help you reduce your exposure to food there's not much you can do about that at this point um this stuff has to work its way through the system um it's all going to end up in the

069ocean anyway and packaging is something you can get rid of immediately so in water pfas is difficult to remove and it persists in sediments so the city's done a good job at getting rid of it more drinking water but as i mentioned some the technology they're using isn't so good for some of these smaller molecular weight legacy pfos um air is a health fat um about five percent on average of p-class exposure comes from inhalation both of volatile pfas like pfda which is one of the smaller um pfas compounds that have been made in large quantities on household dusts right now a lot of drapes and carpets and the furniture comes with their furniture pre-treated with peoples you know they're no they're not it's not necessary to disclose that until recently so the carpet industry

070in georgia for example has about that they will get pfas out of there out of carpets manufactured in that state that time there's plenty of legacy carpet out there so on the budget threats the regulation is coming and remediation is difficult it's too expensive for most most municipalities too expensive for even the federal government um you know so it's it's a basic situation where a small number of people have made some money on it but um they have offloaded the costs to everybody and the the external costs are going to be tremendous it's going to be it's going to be when i say it's difficult it's difficult both technically and monetarily it's going to be very hard to come up with the funding required to do a true remediation for everything outside of drinking water

071for drinking water treatment you have two technologies really have granulated activated carbon which the city is using and then you have reverse osmosis there is a large water treatment plant for brunswick county in north carolina that's building a reverse osmosis treatment plant and it's scaled to the same size as in orders so um they have a budget um it's under construction right now it'll be a few years before before there's enough data to make most engineers comfortable about what to expect with that investment but they've taken this they've taken on this challenge because of the um brunswick county is at the mouth of the for the river so they they know they have highly toxic gen x compounds and many of them um that's the only way to remediate those uh you can't remediate them

072through granular activated carbon through gac filters wastewater treatment is a far bigger challenge and it's mostly because wastewater is it starts out a lot um dirtier a lot dirtier than drinking water the same with compost the same with fire solids and landfill leachates so the regulatory laws and actions are inadequate it's too little and too late for most sites so the comprehensive solutions as i've mentioned before this is just a reiteration now we've got to get the federal government to define pfos um using a strict using a strict definition that uh that really uh that really treats the common property of all feedbacks which which is its persistence in the environment and in the body and eliminating all non-essential uses of pfas and reforming tosca so the last slide i have here are these key

073information sources you know most regulations in the united states come from recognized health risks to people so um the the atsdr um branch of the cdc they're responsible for uh for establishing health risks for chemicals and they pass their data they collect data and they pass on they don't have themselves any regulatory powers but they pass on their information to other agencies nihs which is centered in north carolina does a lot of research they don't really have any regulatory action powers you can look at there's a lot of these data that's publicly available that you can find on the toxic net here at the national library of medicine at this url you can look at the epa website this is the root gi epa website for fifos you can look up the fda again allows

074people's compounds to be used in food packaging so you can find out on this website what they do and not so much about what they're doing about it a good source of information is the itrc this interstate technology regulatory council some of the states have recognized that there's no adequate enforcement at the federal level so they're all sharing data and recommendations on this website um i saw you i saw i gave you a slide from safer states this is where you can find this information on fifos regulation um in different state at the state level um then there's some i attended a pfas conference in north carolina june 15th 17th and you'll find um you'll find uh some information on this website which is the latest publicly site where a special meeting dedicated to fifa's

075toxicity and regulation and uh this is was discussed and i can provide a pdf of the uh of the agenda for anybody who asks me the pdf hasn't been posted on the website yet um this is the imparts website that will tell you what the pfos response has been in michigan part of that website is that they show you they give you a map of fifa sites in michigan and investigation sites so you can look into that and the environmental ngos that are providing the best information here is the environmental working group at this url the silent spring institute which is located in newton massachusetts has done a lot of good work um the sierra club here has done a sludge in the garden report that can be found at this url and then there's

076this this app which you can find there are some apps in progress where you can um you can load download it onto your phone and you can look up different food and cosmetics and household products so speaking to the general question was addressed now but um again you need you can um this information there's no central clearinghouse for this like for this information but i'll do my best to try to assemble it into a into a form that uh where you can see it as it's updated because this there's a lot of work moving here a lot of work has started moving quickly so information can get can expire pretty quickly we're becoming complete now i'm joined uh it seems to me and you've mentioned this that really everything that we do our band-aid solutions

077unless we can um shepherd costco not something to me reach like red legislation in in the us so that new chemicals are only approved after they've been shown to not be harmful um do we as individuals have any [Music] possible influence in uh pushing that kind of legislation advancing it um promoting it with our our elected officials or is that just an unrealistic lift well no well our local officials are very aware of it very active and trying to push legislation through congress debbie dingle is the leader so as dan kildee and so is fred upton in the western part of the state it's a bipartisan issue but um you know so it tends to get some support from republicans but uh you know the major pushback is by the uh american chemistry council which

078is the trade group for the chemical industry and also the chambers of commerce so what can we do or what do you recommend we do um you need to contact your elected officials ours are already ours here in ann arbor are already well aware of this problem and they're very active so i would ask them i would ask them you know for example this some fifa's bill was been in that yusuf ravi and jeff ruin introduced four years ago hasn't gone anywhere because the republican leadership and the current legislature will not move it and it will not move it out of committee it will not even allow a public discussion about it so you know there needs to be a public discussion you know i think personally i think you know because states have not

079acted and the epa has limited authority um that we i think testing if we can fund testing if we can get people nationwide to test their water supplies for fifa's they can do it at eighty dollars there's a company that will do it for 80 bucks and uh um and that will at least make public raise public awareness and uh you know i think there's um you know it's one thing to show up as a constituent and say um i'm i'm concerned about peoples in my drinking water and you know it's one thing to just show up and say that it's another thing to show up with a piece of paper to say my drinking water is contaminated it's then how long has it been contaminated and i want to know why and i want

080to know what you're going to do about it so i think that's the bottom line because the authority has to come through congress so now that the executive branch does what it can but when there's a leadership change in the executive branch you can swing from hot to cold overnight um so kathy you have your hand up and then anne morrison yes i've attended two community hearings regarding pfas in fact steven were you at the one at washington community college yeah that um erin river watershed council sponsored yes back yeah i was there i think it was in november of 29 2020 or 2019. probably 2019 before covid so there is a lot of community interest um willow has a you know a super superfund site because of pfas and general motors seems to be

081quite proactive uh and the last thing i want to say is if you have city water the city is already testing it for pfas on a regular basis and reporting it monthly yep yeah the city is doing fine um so um you know we spent some uh 1.4 million dollars of our own money so that's another that brings up another point that uh the polluter pay laws have totally been um made ineffectual so i think it's important that the taxpayer not pay for this but the you know the industry that's made these compounds should pay for it everybody else is relatively innocent but then the seven companies that manufacture this they need to pay the bill for everybody because everybody else is just going to pass it um and your hand is up yeah i

082know there's a lot of focus on pfas and drinking water but i am kind of curious about and every time construction happens on a piece of property does it raise the level of like uh pfas that might be in the air um and is it something that should be like like for instance um a few a couple years ago at one of the ann arbor city parks um at leslie science and nature center we started a an effort to build a playground and in the course of that we did some testing of the um soil where they were going to place the playground and discover that there were a lot of uh industrial contaminants and so remediation effort had to take place and so i'm curious like is pfas something that an environmental company would

083test for um prior to construction and is there anything one can do about it um would ask for prior to construction yeah no there is no requirement there in fact in fact i'm working with a group which we're trying to privately fund some air monitors around some of these wolverine toxic sites near grand rapids um uh the uh impart program in the state has been doing some work on air and him you know on your uh um you know uh on air contamination from ethos and air distribution of pfas but uh as far as i know there is no legal requirement to do it and this eagle is not requiring um people to do it you know the basic fact is that almost none of these are declared as hazardous substances so until they're declared

084hazardous substances the regulatory agencies are assigned you know so ann you know your hand is still up yeah this is is it is the issue that um we just don't have the studies that would convince authorities that they are hazardous substances is there still work to be done and showing the link between pfas and specific um health problems well you know i've been look i look at the peer-reviewed scientific literature so that's that's inhibited by the amount of funding that's allocated to those kind of studies but that's where this information first shows up then it takes generally like a couple years for it to migrate into the uh into the press you know there are several local reporters that are very good on this topic now but it takes a couple of years for the

085media the general media to take up um these topics and then it takes a couple years after that for the regulatory agencies to take it up and then it takes um another almost a decade for the epa to deal with it because they have to go through their their whole rule making process so there's a significant to that you know you see just for pfos and pfoa it's taken 12 years since the epa you know talked to the manufacturers and uh the contamination of the ohio river was recognized you know so uh it could be a good um it takes a long time it takes a long time for the rulemaking uh to happen shannon um i'm just curious this is really piggybacks on anne's comment and i'm gonna hazard a guess here and i'm

086just curious what you think about it just because i work with construction sites all the time it seems to me that it would be more with like a brownfield kind of situation that you would really think about having higher levels of fast in the soil and that i know leslie science center had a very uh enthusiastic chemist that used to live there that dump stuff all over the place and so that doesn't seem like a very typical example to me of like construction and and you know digging around and i'm just wondering stephen if you have an opinion about something like that i mean i i can just tell you there's no way with every construction project that you would you have to do a phase one or phase two environmental report which would alert

087you to the fact that there was some sort of chemical something happening there that would then make the soil more risk but that generally if it if you kind of pass through those that it seems like it would be less likely that with any construction project you could be volatilizing this into the era in a significant way does that seem reasonable to you or not really yeah that's reasonable okay you know i i was just outlining the general procedure yeah yeah it's it's not likely to unless the chemicals have been disposed in a concentrated form right but you know how common it is not to know that that's right when you're a buyer of a property and there's no disclosure requirements and uh and you know and there's also um you know because there's a

088list of what you need to test for correct but if a chemical is not listed as a hazard that's right no requirement to test for it that's right right and so it wouldn't show up on a phase two report um because it's not one of the ones that they would actively i mean yeah okay let's see here is an example of chemicals that were made for 70 years over 70 years distributed widely in large quantities and for which they're still not listed as hazardous substances yeah um i have one more question and i'd forgive me if i kind of missed this in the in the way that you were presenting things at the end it seems like what you're saying is that our compost could be dangerous we're spending all kinds of energy trying to

089figure out how to get more people to compost how to get restaurants to compost like just what is your sense of that because like that's a big shift in terms of what many people are working on to try to make happen and i'm just wondering what you think about that yeah i mean the unfortunate thing is it's been circulating for decades it's everywhere so um the costs of fixing it are high the current levels are probably it could be an issue for the most vulnerable population you know which tend to be kids young kids under the age of five you know from conception until the age of five um it's hard to tell because there is no heart health data um and they're very hard to avoid i mean they're still these compounds are still

090in consumer products so what i tell people is you know what you can do what we can do is just stop putting fast food wrappers into our compost the food is another thing i mean the food itself is probably okay well there's nothing you can do about that um and you know you really to get a good compost or a good soil in mind when you need the nitrogen right um but we can at least get rid of the food packaging so so that's kind of the big message really it seems to me is like the the the fast food wrappers some of the food packaging that may contain these not so much the food itself i mean there's probably some level like you're saying a background in many things in terms of our food

091but you're advocating more for the food uh food container and food wrapper piece of it rather than compost just made with food am i right about that or that's that's correct you know okay because it's gonna be impossible to get rid of it's going to be impossible to you know to reduce it until we can ensure that people have to test for it yeah and not matter intentionally okay there just are no loss to that thank you so john 15 seconds could you make a presentation in a future meeting contrasting u.s taska versus european reach um because i think there's probably very very few people that understand the difference and unless we implement something like reach in the u.s we're constantly going to be playing catch-up um you know there's just there's just going to

092be all these new chemical compounds that are introduced and there's going to be no requirement on chemical companies to indicate what their toxicity is or what their other environmental impacts are or human impacts and we're constantly being kept being having to catch up whereas in europe you know bypassing reach legislation they haven't been set back into the dark ages um they're still able to have a thriving economy and i think it would be really important for people here to understand the difference between the two two regulatory approaches yeah absolutely no it doesn't have to be long i just you know 15 minutes 10 minutes just so people understand the difference yeah i know i've taken up uh over an hour here so uh it's okay we'll do rita you have your hand up and then

093we should move on um it seems to me um relating this to um shannon's question or comment that this might be an opportunity to um do some communication about the solid waste and inform people to avoid trying to compost wrappers of any kind well it'll end up in the trash and then it'll end up leaching out of the landfill eventually yeah i know i know i'm struggling with that myself there there are no good solutions anymore okay well uh why don't we move on i think uh i think i'm happy to answer anybody's question if they want to email me anything meanwhile um we have these information sources folks can look at so i'm going to stop sharing the screen here and uh let's move on to the next uh item on the agenda then

094um there's no unfinished business we have no new business uh so we have reports from committees other commissions council and chair let's start with uh planning all righty um two things one is uh we just got a presentation on a proposal called the village um which is over off of is basically kind of tucked into a corner of pontiac trail and duvarn is if you think of the corner being out it sort of folds its way through there 561 units 65 acres and um it's still in the kind of rezoning phase um but it's probably my guess is the last big piece of land that ann arbor has um in terms of uh development of this size um it also it's a site that has been uh it was a dump site parts of it

095for a lot of years it's not pristine by any stretch of the imagination in terms of its environmental history um there are some nice trees on it for sure um there were a lot of questions that we had and it's it's going to be coming back for rezoning when there's rezoning involved we have a little bit more power to ask and so i think every commissioner and all their comments really tried to hit home the idea of electrification with this project and they are going to come back with some they did had done some homework but um i are going to do some more homework with that so uh this feels like an opportunity um with this many homes this much energy being locked into that for so long i think because of the rezoning

096we're gonna see what we can do as planning commission which ordinarily that is not what we have any control over we can we can ask nicely try not to completely alienate them um but uh we can't there's no teeth but with the rezoning we have a little bit again sort of a sideways power coming in there to be able to do that so that's one to watch um as it relates to our a20 plans um and then we also had a a couple of we had a a public um hearing input session on the newest transit corridor development area which is going to be on stadium that's what we're looking at right now we got a lot of public comment we have continued to get public comment through emails um it's it's people are kind

097of all over the place there's some people that really don't want it there's some people that love it um it's been all over i would just say with this that um for me this is one of the few areas where we can map more closely to the h20 plan because of where this is located the whole idea of this kind of zoning is to be able to get housing on our transit corridors to make it easier for people to take transit instead of their car and that we have absolute jurisdiction over his planning commission so it's nice to actually work on something where we feel like okay we actually can do something about this so um it's it's because it's really like a planning move to be able to do this uh the zoning in

098this area in this way so um it's still in rough form in some ways i have a feeling there's going to be more discussion around what it looks like it may be a little bit different flavor than what i already got passed out at staten eisenhower but um it's definitely on the agenda and we're hearing a lot about it and for me it's really important um because it allows people to number one not have to live in jackson or south lyon or somewhere else and actually be able to live in ann arbor and so that you're getting rid of you know those emissions um that are traveling into town and then that you could lead a more car fleet car or a less car-oriented lifestyle by living in one of these um in one of

099these developments in these corridors so those are the two big things for me with that and um we're gonna kind of keep marching through in terms of some of the other areas as well but uh because of washington and a plymouth on the agenda as well but stadium is where we are right now so i think that's that's the those are the big things or because i think it's been two months because i had to chair the last commission so i couldn't i couldn't attend you are muted stephen i am my dog was the neighbor's dog is barking so uh john you have your hand up and then rita uh shannon is there any consideration with this rezoning to a transit corner of including any sustainability requirements for example yeah certain emissions per square foot

100targets or any other kinds of things along those lines all electric whatever the case may be we really don't at least what i've been told um is that we really don't have the power to do that like as a planning commission that we can't legislate people being all electric and and that's why i was bringing it up with the other project is that we kind of have some you know foothold because they're asking for something extra um and even then we can't legislate it really it's just kind of putting the pressure on them and so we as far as as far as the commission knows at this point i know we had a speaker that came and said i'm not so sure about this but from what we understand right now we don't have the

101power to make them do that so we're doing what we can which is locating the development in a transit corridor um but otherwise i've been told that that we don't have the power to do that so i think there's also some concern about like the we're also trying it's just it's such a balancing act right in terms of kind of cost and um and environmental considerations and everything too and i think we're trying to it's not true affordable housing um but we're trying to make it it's like land costs are less there things like that it's not like living downtown uh with some of the high-rises downtown um so um again it's mostly about the that we just really don't have the jurisdiction to do that um but i think there's also some portion of

102it which is let's try to make these something that people can build um and not have it be crazy expensive and that people could live there and um and be able to use transit from there i'll address that topic a little bit later when i give an update on energy commission so great go ahead reader shannon this isn't um necessarily an environmental commission item but maybe um in some of the developments that we've had there have been mixed use plans that haven't played out um meaning that the retail and and whatever hasn't happened that was designed is there any way to allow that because i'm worried about the businesses in those areas that are established and are really the reason for having the transit corridor right like stadium hardware it's like we want to make

103sure that lives and is available to the people that are in the potential so are to be living there let me make sure from understanding your question are you saying is there a threat to other businesses because we would have a retail com we're asking for mixed use and there would be a commercial level to it on the first floor is that what you're i'm i'm concerned that the history that i see in some places is that that the retail hasn't played out you know i think it's because the square footage is too expensive for a business to stay in particularly a smaller local business that the expense as exemplified by the george that's now going to be housing not not the proposed retail that the community really wanted that immediate community yeah so how

104does that play out it's really hard because so much of that is market driven and we have no control over that and so like you know we've all seen these empty storefronts even downtown like the one you know on here on the quarter in division in huron was empty for like four years or something before so you can say like we want retail on the first floor but frankly right now it's pretty tough in the retail world given amazon and you know all these other forces i it is something that we've talked about but i don't know that it's um totally there yet i i should check it to kind of see as to what does it mean if it's just all residential which is i think it's like a very real person possibility i

105think that like we wanted to have that vibrant mix at the first level and who wants to live like at the first level on stadium looking at you know all those kinds of things but um uh i know that there's been some talk about that but i i have to confess i don't feel like i know the minutia of what we really allow and not if like if you could do pure residential if you wanted to um or whether it's it's set on mixed use um it's a tough thing like we've heard from developers like you know i'd like it to be mixed use but i just don't have any confidence in in being able to fill it which is hard so anyway i know there's go ahead yeah well it's just that and then

106people will need to travel to get those goods and services right that's right that's why we wanted them there in the first place so if we were that's right i don't know what to do but you got to make you got a like they have to be viable too right i mean that's the thing it's it's really it's really hard and i think the other tricky thing is that we're we're managing the parking with the two and keeping it on the low end and in the kind of interim while we're shifting over to fewer cars and things like that is there enough parking for a current business to move in there are they going to block at that and say that's not enough for me i mean those are just all really tough questions i

107think around sort of where we are where we want to be and kind of how you get there it's not straightforward in my mind at all [Music] okay um let's move on to energy so uh our last meeting was devoted to three topics um one was a presentation by missy stoltz uh on a20 and i encourage you go to go into legistar and look at her presentation it's mostly focused on actions um and not so much on outcomes and when i talk about outcomes i'm talking about greenhouse gas emissions um the last inventory that was done is for 2020 and we all know 2020 because the pandemic was an anomaly and so were to some degree driving while looking in the rearview mirror um we are still waiting for some data from our osi is

108waiting for data from dte to be able to update the inventory to reflect 2021 um and it's expected that um that'll be available sometime in august or september so hopefully both of our commissions will get a report on that or at least you'll be able to access it from the energy commission site we got an update on the climate millage and i believe also a presentation was given to the environmental commission on that and or if not that certainly could be done and then the other thing is we passed a resolution um regarding the development that shannon talked about encouraging the planning commission and city council to work with a development developer to make that an all-electric um development so i've read the statute um and in the case of a request like like this

109where someone's requesting rezoning you shannon's absolutely right you cannot make um in a case like this rezoning contingent on for example a sustainability um requirement or something like that um so that's why um we we ask that just be encouraged and um we don't really have a real strong lever in this case um we don't have an august meeting but in september um just in correspondence in the last couple days i can tell you that um we plan on taking on the topic of affordability of housing versus sustainability of housing um brett has agreed to present um at our meeting and we're talking about the possibility mrs gonna explore it with maybe you shannon and brett about possibly combining a portion of our meetings to talk about this uh i've arranged for an architect and

110developer out of uh headquartered in philadelphia that has done a lot of work mostly in that area in new england but in other parts of the country to make a presentation they've done a number of projects um that are um passive house certified um several of which are also net zero um and those um on average actually there's a study done by the state of pennsylvania of 268 projects that went through a state agency um comparing traditional construction to passive house construction and passive house construction which by the way is a very very tight envelope essentially high insulation very well sealed doesn't necessarily have to be net zero meaning all electric but could be um passive house projects came in on average one or two percent below conventional construction so he's going to come in

111and talk about uh their experience there and the design approach and uh working with the team to to achieve those kinds of results but we feel that other than the paradigm and the experience here in the midwest and there certainly is a lack of experience but other than than that paradigm that there is absolutely the possibility of having affordable sustainable housing in ann arbor and the other thing to remember affordability is not just what i pay for my mortgage or for my rent um as shannon pointed out before it's also transportation costs but it's also my utility costs so if my utility costs are held way way down and i can build a very uh sustainable structure for the same cost then you're winning on on both ends of the equation so our hope is

112is that um we can uh stage a meeting where we can get not only commissioners attending but also maybe also people from the community housing commission even maybe the townships of solani ypsilanti has two big projects that i think they just um approved that are going to be natural gas-fired appliances uh and um some of you may know ken garber he's a regular speaker at both planning and energy commission meetings and at city council he did calculations that showed i think in the last two years the city has approved uh projects that are going to be gas fired so to speak for heating and hot water and the emissions that are going to be emitted because of that are going to completely offset all of the solar from the solarized project of all of the

113solar that's going on city buildings and about one-third of the solar that's going to be going up on the landfill so these large projects that where natural gas is going in for heating air for cooking for heating water are really setting us back on a20 and shannon is right the building and energy codes really restrict us i don't know about a case like creating a transit corridor if there's anything we can do but that's something we definitely need to look in uh look into because if we do transit quarters sell state plymouth um stadium washington and we have no control over whether or not those are going to be all electric or not then we're going to really we'll get limited benefit put it that way because if if they're not developed here they're probably

114going to be done somewhere else and those could be gas-fired as well so it's not like there's there's no benefit but we're not certainly not getting the full benefit of what we'd like to achieve so um that's an update from the energy commission and i mentioned this before the meeting was called to order um um ed juno is moving to washington dc um she had been our liaison and um i was the only person that raised their hand or was nominated to be liaison so you have me back i was liaison for i think almost three years um in a couple of years ago so glad to be back with all of you yeah you have to put on my questions and comments okay thanks all right so let's move on to parks parks advisory

115council hey we had a meeting last week we had a presentation from the council of the commons about their progress towards the the park in the center of the city um they're at the they're in the process of fundraising in order to be able to do an rfp um you know to figure out what we're going to actually do you know how we're going to actually develop that park space um i think they're about halfway through they're trying to remember what the sum of money was that they're trying to raise but it was um [Music] around maybe 200 000 i think in that in that ballpark and then we had a presentation uh once again um a follow-up presentation on um the new uh fire station that's going to be built so that the replacement

116fire station was going to be built um adjacent to shuffler park and its impact on the park so um with some follow about our our own leader mitchell i asked some very good questions about that so um i think that's that's about it this is a a short meeting well thanks ann so let's move on to uh committees um pollinators i was going to share briefly i'm aware of the time so i'm going to share um my screen we did a survey of our registered noma may participants and i wanted to share what we found with you all how mo no mo may 2022 went we had 438 people register uh we know that there were more than 438 people that participated but that's the number that registered and this is a map of those

117people that were willing to share their address so this doesn't include all 438 but it's around a 200 something that is represented in this map and we asked these folks to share about how much area they left on mode and on average folks left about 9 338 square feet in their private space unmode either for part or all of may and we estimated based on you know having at least 438 registered registered participants that we had about 94 acres very likely more than that but approximately 94 acres at least unmowed in all of ann arbor and then we asked participants essentially you know how did you feel what did you know what was your experience like did you have any issues et cetera and we had 86 people out of those 438 respond to our

118survey so that's about a 29 response rate i'm sorry out of the 230 ish that shared their emails um so overall people had a positive experience at least those that responded in the survey they thought it was an easy way for them to be part of this uh support of local biodiversity and pollinators they said things like they felt good about it they connected with nature and they really enjoyed being part of this larger community effort lots of people requested signage so this is something we're thinking about for next year we did have a sign available for them to print on the city website but people were looking for something more substantial that we're thinking about as we think about next year and then some people did express concerns about the city not participating and

119i know that this is a conversation that we've had with parks and we have a good response that we share with these folks uh we did have a webinar as well where we invited parks to kind of explain what their thinking was and and where to go with that but that was still something that folks expressed in the survey as well uh we had 88 say that they would like to participate next year with 11 saying that they might so a very large number of our respondents want to be this next year and 96 of folks said they want to learn more about removing some lawn and perhaps incorporating native plants into their landscape so um so we are going to continue the communication and the education with these folks particularly those that have said

120that they want to learn more hey bridget were we able to actually go back to those people and provide them with something we haven't yet but we we just got these results uh rita did we end the survey on sunday i think sunday so we will we do plan to do that um and then we just ask them what sort of issues they might have had and about 46 percent of folks that they did have a little bit of a hard time mowing at the end because the grass was pretty long so we we did try to um foresee this and gave some advice as to how they should think about mowing and um we'll keep that in mind for next year as well uh and then there were some people that were worried about

121ticks about a third of our respondents were worried about ticks and that's something that we had heard outside of the survey as well so we've got some information we did some research doug talamy has some good information out right now in response to this because other folks outside of ann arbor are talking about so we will share that in addition to our respondents and then there were a smaller number of people i think i was personally surprised at this number i thought it would be higher but about 12 percent of people said they were worried about their neighbors complaining or that their neighbors didn't complain um so mean we think that the signage would also be helpful for this point as well um mo two-thirds of our respondents waited the whole month to mow and

122then about 28 waited three weeks um so most people waiting at least three weeks left their mo their lawn unload and 56 this is a you know we don't have some um real empirical evidence as to whether or not we saw more pollinators but we did ask folks what they observed and about 56 said that they did see more pollinators and 30 said they saw about the same and i just want to sort of round out by saying we will reach out to these folks again we're going to continue our education and outreach and we're thinking about ways that we can continue having this conversation with folks so that we can increase local biodiversity and pollinators and we are thinking about normal may 23 and the best way to to approach that that looks very

123successful that's a first pass yeah so um let's see how about um zero waste john sure yeah a couple of quick updates uh we're continuing on many fronts with the project uh the map has become a very popular tool that we're continuing to refine i actually had the interesting stats shared by city staff that it is the most popular map on the city website even more popular than the marijuana map so we'll take that as a measure of success we've got a video that will be released soon just kind of introducing the topic of the circular economy and we've got two more uh in the in in the works uh we're meeting with the a20 collaborators and august 16th that'll be a large group probably about 60 folks to kind of talk through what we're

124doing and get their feedback on it and we're continuing with our pilot project with recycle ann arbor the ann arbor thrift shop and the and our library to kind of better understand their operations and how their work aligns with the circular economy uh we're gearing up with our project with the state through the uh i2p3 the intergovernmental initiatives for public-private partnerships there will be a big showcase sometime in early october where we'll be presenting there about our work and our kind of wrap-up project as part of that collaboration will be uh having them work with us to this is kind of more of a consulting opportunity uh having them work with us to develop a kind of marketing strategy where we can really promote the circular economy and all the resources we've put together um

125i'm thinking of something similar to the storm water management campaign that's been going on for a while that caught my attention at least so something like that and then i just wanted to put it out there to the commission be great if we could present and talk a little bit more about our work at maybe a fall meeting maybe september or october we've got a group of c students who would like to present about what they're doing as a part of this initiative too so a nice opportunity for them to kind of get before the commission and go a little bit deeper into the work that we're doing so i think that's it hey thanks john let's see uh natural features isn't here um bridget do you have your hand up i was just gonna

126say i might be part of the reason your map is so popular i really like that map and i i teach a union on the circular economy and so i i have my students go in and and look at it too so they're getting coming soon we're going to collapse the number of categories so it's a little bit easier and then each category will have a different icon so right now it's just different color circle dots but it'll be a little bit more user friendly and each business will be then linked to google maps where people can do public transit planning of how to get from location to location um using public transit cool i love it thanks thanks john so uh let's see uh council kathy um the u of m workforce housing proposal

127uh is scheduled to go before the county for a vote in september i've been talking to union leaders uh another opportunity is that if we could get funding from uh from the state we might be able to go all electric as well as solar panels and i've spoken to senator jeff irwin and he's interested in looking for funding so that we can be more sustainable than a normal building would be so uh that's going well uh chapter 40 which this commission passed is being evaluated by the legal department right now i had a meeting with the city attorney and assistant city attorney uh kevin mcdonald i'm told had a meeting with uh 10 other staff members so they're taking this very seriously however it's it's taking a while and what i was told is that

128the main focus of staff was on safety but we know that we also need to focus on how we can educate the public so it's not just a lawn and i think that the pollinator group showed that there is interest in doing that people want to know how they can replace their lawns with with pollinator plantings that are going to still be safe there is also going to be a meeting that missy stultz is sharing between a2 0 and vision 0 looking at conflict points and how we could possibly optimize the application of the two the last thing is more personal i was the first person on the scene of a relatively serious car crash at the corner of ann and division tuesday night i got there before the before ems and police and a

129contributing factor to that crash was a large bush on the southwest corner of that intersection and i'm i'm not going to get upset tonight but it is half a block from city hall and it's inexcusable that we have um sight distance issues that close to city hall and so we're looking at how can we be more proactive because we can't rely on the public to report all those sight distance problems just like we wouldn't wait for the public to say hey my water smells can you check it for toxic chemicals i mean we we do have to be proactive so um i guess that's it i can't think of anything else that the environmental commission has referred to council but uh given the time if anyone's interested in more details just give me a call

130or send me an email so thanks yeah thanks kathy yeah real quick for kathy and maybe shannon's interest and the general everybody else too i'm the workforce housing nonprofit that i'm affiliated with met for almost an hour and a half with ufo um cfo jeff chattis yesterday and um we made a pitch um that um could do a lot in terms of workforce housing on its properties presented specific sites talk more in general but um it was very clear to us that um chattis is most focused on housing along plymouth road and i i knew that um transit or trans oriented development or a transit quarter was potentially in discussion for for on that area and it sounds like um that would be they'd be willing to do that in concert with the city or

131at least in consultation with and and somehow compatible with that um we talked about other sites um on fuller and around the hospital they less seem less interested in that um but um that that's something and by the way um chad has indicated that he had met with um administ administrator dahony and they had discussed the the housing uh but he didn't go on any details of what was in that preliminary discussion so um that's something that at some point it seems to me the city is going to want to talk with u of m um both are doing comprehensive um master planning um um calls it campus planning but plymouth road seems to be a real opportunity john was it uh workforce housing as well as student housing along plymouth road they were not

132committal they asked a bunch of questions about how they could do that um how they said that the university would definitely ever sell the property that would not um ever be something they would consider but they would consider it sounds like a lease and doing mixed income mixed um type of people and not just all u of m students or not just all potentially u of m employees they seemed open at least to that oh okay that's great news and we pointed to them to talk to some developers that have experienced in that type of work okay and and that would mean if they maintained ownership of the land that it would not go through the city for zoning or the city building department uh which would probably speed up the process correct i hate

133to say that about reality that there would be a 99 lease and that you know if the university wanted to it could get income from that um if they didn't want income then that would increase the affordability obviously of of those units so i mean we talked about both of those options you know maybe we can talk about those offline i just wanted to mention that we had that meeting oh okay thanks that's really great news yeah that's excellent news um so let's see so let's move on to the chairs report i only have two things to relate the first thing is just today i got a an email from chris vanmenbach he wants to resign from the commission as of now for personal reasons and so we i'd like to i think we could

134we need to recruit another uh adult member um we also have a youth commissioner that's open but we have a very good candidate uh unfortunately she doesn't turn 16 until october first so uh i need to discuss this with uh you know city uh um i gotta discuss this about um nominating her and um having maybe cedar before october 1st but without voting privileges until her october meeting but she's a student pioneer and she's very dedicated to environmental issues so um and then the other thing is that i'm a part of a group that's planning another trash talk tour you know we had one last year it's being scheduled for september 18th so i'm going to be leading the bicycle parade so we're going to recruit like up to maybe 30 people to go on

135the entire route to bicycles you know we're basically visiting different places uh like allen school the murph the landfill um you know the we care center some of the businesses along south industrial and then um we're going to rendezvous common cycle and do some sites downtown and that kiwanis exchange place out on jackson road but i'll uh i'll keep everybody informed of that um that's scheduled for september 18th which most importantly is not a football day not a home football game so let's see so uh next report from staff feeling um i have nothing to report at this time okay so any items suggested for next agenda i think we will have some solid waste stuff to discuss at the next agenda so if you have any please forward them to me um before we

136before we schedule in a week or two um so our next scheduled meeting is august 25th it's the fourth thursday of the month so this uh begins the second opportunity for public commentary so this is our second opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes please call 1-888-788-0099 [Music] and enter meeting id 989-2851-1637 [Music] this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and video feed city staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you will hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area and meet any television or

137background sounds 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 is established sorry is there anybody on the line now dylan there is no one on the line for public commentary okay we'll wait another 20 seconds or so meanwhile i want to apologize for taking up more time for my presentation when i thought i would but you know it's a complicated topic and uh so i will i will come up with some policy recommendations and some recommendations about safe products to buy [Music] but you know most of the most of the authority uh lies in congress and the state legislature as is correct for the constitution is there anybody on

138the line yet um uh there's no one on the line okay well thank you so this ends the second public commentary period and so i um i adjourn this meeting at 9 16 pm thanks everybody hi thank you you